The Challenges of a Life of Faith
Some time ago, I ran into a friend of a friend who thought he would ask me a question that showed his interest in the Bible. He said, “What is the book of Job about?” I knew he worked in a grocery store nearby and was on his lunch break, so I probably only had a minute or so to give him an answer, not an easy thing to do, as I am used to talking extensively for hours on the topic. I said, “Well, it poses two questions to us as human beings. When we know we cannot know everything and that we will soon die, what do we do?” This is still in my opinion, a straightforward yet very simple summary, which I have remembered ever since. It’s usually a painful experience to realize that we are limited beings forced to make some tough decisions in order to adapt to this very sobering realization. In the end however, we must face life as it is, and change.
In Psalm 74, we hear the voice of a troubled mind with pressing questions left unanswered. The psalmist cries aloud to God and seeks him to no avail finding no comfort. “I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints.” (v.3) The old ways do not work anymore, the usual way to comfort and peace of mind is closed, and the psalmist remains troubled. All attempts to contemplate a way out of the existing predicament seems to have only increased distress leaving the psalmist in agony.
So what is the problem? He cannot any longer accommodate what he knows of the past with the present. “Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable?” (v. 7) The gracious God he remembers or has been brought up believing in does not seem realistic in his time. But, he cannot go back to the old days, as if that is what he is used to do in his meditation, focusing on what used to be. Yet he has come to an end, and the present does not appear as filled with God’s grace as the memories of the past does. He even goes so far as to ask, “has God forgotten to be gracious?” (v. 9). The peak of his distressing talk comes in v. 10, “It is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.” There are two things in this verse which are important to note, first, that the grief is his and his alone, and he is squarely centered on himself and his inability to come to terms with his present situation. Second, the use of the word “changed” in relation to God. To the psalmist, the notion that God changes seem to be a devastating blow to his faith. His trust in God seems to rely on the fact that God will always appear as before.
If we take a step back for a moment we can note that we are in the middle of the book of Psalms, and this is no accident. The book of Psalms opens with a very simple, even simplistic theological stance in Ps. 1. Here everything is clear and ordered and we recall the wisdom tradition in this psalm. This is how the rules are formulated, but we do not meet any conflict between the rules and how they apply to the practice of living. Here we seem to be at the beginning of the life of the believer, a self-confident faith that has not yet conflicted with life. For this we have to move forward in the book of Psalms. At the other end we meet songs of praise, as in Ps. 150. Here there is no focus on rules, and also no interest in the conflict between the rules and how they apply to life itself. We seem to have moved beyond the strife of life itself, and all that is left is the will to praise God. Here, we seem to be at the end of life and its struggles as we meet them in Ps. 74. So, it is no accident that Ps. 74 is placed in the middle between these two, as if the overconfident faith in Psalm 1 have suddenly come into conflict with the hard reality of life, but there is still some way to go before we can salute God in the exhortations of Psalm 150. This gives us an example of how the book of Psalms is constructed as a handbook for life as a believer, and in the middle, we are squarely faced with the struggling mind that can no longer find rescue in what was so simple in Ps. 1.
Ps. 74 then makes a sudden turn, as it attempts to show us a way out of the distress that we have met so far. A simple way to observe this change is the change in emphasis on pronoun. So far the main pronoun has been “I”, as the focus of the psalmist has been on his own failure to understand. Now this changes to the pronoun “you”, as the focus shifts to God and what God has done in the past, “I will remember your wonders of old.” (v. 11) We are not presented with a rational counter argument to the first part of the psalm, no answer to the pressing questions that have been posed. Instead, we face a remembrance of how God has acted in the past, who this God actually is and what it has meant before. As the psalmist continues in this way he is taken out of his distress and end up in a praise of God that takes him back to creation itself.
The contrast between the two parts of the psalm recalls the book of Job, as the laments of Job are followed by the speeches of God. As in our psalm, God does not actually provide Job with a rational answer to his urgent problem. Instead, God speaks of his work in the creation of the world, and this puts Job in his place as part of the creation with a limited ability to understand. He is challenged to have faith in the God who has created heaven and earth, and who chooses to reveal himself to Job. And, in the same way our psalmist recalls God as creator, and this apparently is enough to take him out of his troubles. Not that he has received a rational answer, but he has realized that the God he questions is the creator himself, and that puts his own situation in another perspective. He is human with all the limitations that come with being human. The answer he needs, and the answer we need, is the realization that having faith in God does not mean having all the answers to the problems life gives us. But it does put us in relationship with the creator of heaven and earth, who chooses to reveal himself to us.
So we are challenged by this psalm to live our lives in faith, limited as we are as humans, not having all the answer and certainly not knowing everything. That is the life of the faithful, on the path of true wisdom.
