Psalm 13 - Far More Questions than Answers

Time to "break it down" again.

Verses 1-2
How long...

• Will God forget me?
• Will he hide his face from me?
• Must I wrestle with my thoughts?
• Must I have sorrow in my heart?
• Will my enemy triumph?

Verse 3a

A demand for God to answer

Verses 3b-4

Why God needs to answer

Verses 5-6

Statement of trust and praise


This psalm really does summarize my feelings.  I'm no longer angry at God (except every now and then), but I definitely understand questioning him.  I still feel like he is far off.  Really, I could echo most of the first two verses, claiming them as my own.  Then even put into words things I've had trouble explaining adequately.

For example, "Will [God] forget me forever?"  Are things ever going to get better, meaning am I ever going to get to the point where I no longer feel abandoned or distant?  "How long will [He] hide his face from me?"  And, why does it feel as if God is hiding his face from me?  Finally, "How long must I wrestle with my thoughts?"  Really, how long do I need to wrestle through the Psalms before God feels near to me again?  I really do feel like wrestling is the most apt description as I am battling for each and every minuscule amount of progress.

I wonder if David's demands for an answer were, in fact, answered.  He tells God to look on him and answer him, two very bold commands.  It encourages me to know that I can be equally as bold in asking God to answer me.  But, I also wonder, have I not been bold enough yet?  Or, have I been too bold?  Or, maybe it's just going to be awhile.  Did David get answered quickly?

David also had reasons to back up his demands.  What reasons do I have?  It's not killing me, as David alludes to in his own psalm.  I don't think the distance I'm feeling is making any enemies triumph over me.  What reasons could I possibly claim?

Finally, as I've noted repeatedly, David ends the psalm with praise and a promise of trust, even though no answer had been given.  It seems odd to me that he chooses to say he trusts in God because of his unfailing love, though.  After all, he was just complaining that God had basically turned away from him.  How could that possibly make him trust in God's unfailing love?  Could he perhaps have been only restating a long-ago accepted truth about God to reassure himself that God was, in fact, trustworthy?

Then, to end it all, David says he will sing praises because God has been good to him.  Again, it doesn't mesh with the previous verses.  Is David intentionally reminding himself of his blessings?

This, to me, is very frustrating.  I know I went into reading the psalms ready and willing to ask the tough questions and I said that I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up with even more questions.  However, I did not fully estimate the frustration that could come from 1) ending up with more questions than answers, and 2) not feeling any closer to God - at all.  I'm committed to keep working at it, but it's quite possibly even harder than I expected.  

Psalm 3

If you read my last blog entry, you would know that it took me literally two weeks to get to any application of Psalm 3 to my life because I spent that much time looking at the history of David's life.  I've decided not to go into any sort of detail here because my purpose is to keep my focus on the personal rather than the intellectual.  However, if you haven't read the accounts about David found in 1 and 2 Samuel, read it.  Even if you weren't trying to discern any spiritual lessons from those books, you could still read it just for entertainment.  It has all the elements of a current television, movie, or book drama or suspense.

I see three major parts to the Psalm:

1. I have so many enemies.
2. God shields me from those enemies and answers my cries for help.
3. Therefore, I am not afraid because my victory comes from God.

Even though my purpose isn't really to add to my store of biblical knowledge, the context of David's situation is helpful to me in making this psalm more personal.  David really did have so many enemies and when he writes this psalm, he is specifically referring to Absalom, his own son, who had started a revolution against him.  So, not only is David dealing with being physically in danger, fleeing, and fighting, he is also dealing with the betrayal of his own son turning against him.

Still, somehow David is able to say confidently that God is protecting him.  Beyond that, he says that God is his glory and is helping him to hold his head high.  He has 100 percent confidence in God when everything around him that could be construed as a sign is pointing toward being deserted by God.  

When I think in those terms, the parallel to my own life is unmistakeable and a psalm that seemed to be relatively irrelevant comes to life.  But, there is a huge difference between David and I.  There have been many times recently where I have felt desperate and deserted.  From years of biblical upbringing, I can say that I believe in my head that God is watching over me, but in reality my faith has been shaken.  I did not have that supreme confidence in God as David did and I certainly did not feel victorious.  Even now, removed from the situations that caused such acute stress, I feel relief, but not victory.  It's like the pressure has been removed, but I'm still wondering, "What was the point?"

Again, I have more questions than answers.  Why has God let me feel deserted?  Why have I had to deal with all the things that have led me to being so distant from God?  Why can't I be like other people (or like I used to be) and feel close to God through struggle?  How can I get close to God if I have a hard time trusting that He won't desert me?  How can my faith be renewed when I feel let down that all my knowledge of God didn't mesh with my real life experiences?  

And, perhaps most importantly, how can I come out of these last several years feeling victorious?  

Psalm 2

This Psalm was a little bit hard to get into at first.  At first glance, all I saw was largely irrelevant talk about plotting against God and being a wise ruler.  Then, all the sudden, I get to the last line: "Blessed are all who take refuge in him."  I was taken back immediately by seeing the word refuge following the rest of the Psalm that didn't seem to apply to me at all.  After all, the reason I started reading the Psalms is because I felt like I was lacking refuge.

The more I think about why that line is at the end of this Psalm, the more uncomfortable I feel.  As I've mentioned in the previous posts, I have felt distant and sometimes ignored by God off and on for the past several years.  So, when I see something referring to God as a place of refuge, I wonder why that hasn't been true for me?  Maybe it would help to walk through my thinking when I read the second-to-last line with the last.  That line says, "For his wrath can flare up in a moment."  It doesn't seem to mesh with the next verse about God being a refuge.  Combine that with the growing feeling of disconnect between myself and God and I end up being more than a little uncomfortable.

When I read the whole Psalm, there are certain words that stick out, some of them deal with people who "plot" against God and some of them deal with those who are sons of God.  Here are some that deal with people who plot against God and some of the things that immediately came to mind:

• conspire
• plot
• vain - All my efforts to renew my relationship with God have seemed to be in vain.
• chains - I feel like I'm chained, like I'm being weighed down by something I can't quite put my finger on.
• fetters
• scoff
• rebuke - Could God be rebuking me for some reason?  Is that why there is this distant?
• anger - I don't mind admitting that I have been angry with God.  It took me a long time to be able to admit it even to myself, though, so admitting it to anyone who reads this is a bit of a stretch.
• terrifies
• wrath
• destroyed - I feel like my confidence in my faith is being destroyed, maybe not by an active force, but possibly by passivity.

Then, I read the Psalm again and notice all the words that are about the sons of God, the ones who find refuge in God:

• ask - I have grown tired by the lack of the response, so I have stopped asking.
• inheritance
• rule
• wise - I feel anything but wise.
• warned
• serve with fear
• rejoice with trembling - I don't do much rejoicing about my faith.
• blessed
• refuge - Again, I definitely feel as if I have been lacking refuge during some of the biggest struggles I've ever dealt with.

When I look at these words and their connotations, I feel more connected to the first list than the second one.  Those words seem more in line with what I've been feeling about my faith. I'm still not sure what this says about me or about God.  Like I've mentioned before, there are more questions than answers.  And the more I process everything, the more I don't understand.

Psalm 1

To start, I'm going to go back through all the Psalms again, starting with Psalm 1.  Some of the things I mention will be things that stuck out to me the first time I read through it, way back in January.  To give some perspective, in January we had four kids, two were ours and two were foster children so close in age to our own they might as well have been two sets of twins.  Needless to say, during this time I was not looking at anything through a lens of peace, but through one of chaos and struggle a lot of times.


I looked at Psalm 1 with two translations, NIV and The Message, the NIV because it's what I'm used to and The Message because it's different.  One thing stands out in the NIV that doesn't in The Message and that is the first two verses.  Psalm 1:1 says,  


¹ Blessed is the one 
   who does not walk in step with the wicked 
or stand in the way that sinners take 
   or sit in the company of mockers...

To me, this verse represents a progression.  First comes walking in step with the wicked.  When walking, it's easy to alter your course to avoid sin, but it's also easy to keep your momentum going and not even notice that you're following sin.  If you take the analogy one step further, you get standing in sin.  This is a choice: recognizing that you are in sin and choosing to stay there.  One step more and you are sitting in sin: a decision not only to stay in sin, but also to make yourself comfortable in in.  

My purpose in reading the Psalms, though, is not simply to understand things intellectually and come away with more knowledge to store away.  I'm at a point in my faith where intellectual knowledge alone is not enough.  So, when I read that verse more carefully, I see myself in it.  It's hard at first to classify myself as "wicked," but I see the truth in it when I consider the progression of the past five or so years of my life. 

First, I started wandering from God, a little bit here and there, but always coming back to Him.  This isn't the type of wandering you may be thinking.  On the outside, my life didn't change.  Anyone looking at me from a worldly perspective wouldn't have seen me doing anything wrong.  But, because of the circumstances of my life, I began closing my heart off to God, one little piece at a time.  Over time, when I would turn back to Him, I would keep more and more of those closed-off sections to myself.  

Eventually, my wanderings became longer.  It would be months before I would actually turn my heart back toward God again and when I did, I was holding back.  It's not so much that I made a choice to stand away from God, but I did make choices to not turn back to Him.  There were many specific times when I felt God tugging at my heart a little, but instead of turning back, I would choose to stand my ground, keeping myself separated from Him.  There are too many reasons for why I did this to go into detail, but at the core of all my reasons was that I was wounded and blamed God for much of it.  

After a while, I became comfortable with my life the way it was and noticed God even less than before.  I still don't know if it's because I wasn't ready to hear or if God really was leaving me to my own devices, but suffice it to say that God felt more distant than He ever had - at a time when I needed Him the most.  

Looking back, I can see that I caused the great chasm between myself and my Lord, but I still experience anger and bitterness.  I made a series of decisions that put an increasing amount of space between myself and God.  Of course, the space crescendoed to a point where, when I finally felt the need to call out to God because of my circumstances, all I felt was a resounding, deafening silence.  After all my time avoiding God, it felt like he was intentionally avoiding me.

To be perfectly honest, I still feel that way about God much of the time.  I grew up in church, so I know all the verses about how God won't abandon us and how He won't give us more than we can handle.  While intellectually I know the truth in those verses, right now, sometimes hearing those verses almost make me want to physically cringe.  I'm not trying to offend anyone and I definitely am not headed down the path to renouncing my faith.  Quite the opposite, I think I'm finally starting the journey towards real faith rather than a superficially easy faith: a transition from the theoretical the the deeply meaningful.  And I don't think God intends that transition to be easy.