My First Bible #7: Psalm 39:1

 

…"I will be careful what I do and will not let my tongue make me sin." (Psalm 39:1, GNB)

I remember writing this one down.  I remember the frustration of, having found my voice as a teenager, not feeling like I was in control of it.  Quarrels with my parents, or careless or selfish words - these may have been fresh in my mind as I wrote out this verse, underlining the bit about the tongue.  It's sobering to think that I still face the same issues.  Words are the way I operate - the way I process, the way I feel called to minister to others, and yet the way I so often fall into sin through a harsh word to my family.  

It's so easy to want to resolve to exert total control over oneself - like the Psalmist here.  So many times I have thought: 'right, I'm going to do this and this, and I will not to do this, and I will avoid all these things so that I don't get a chance to do anything wrong.'   But, as David realises in verses 2-3, when all is not right in the heart, no amount of external control can put it right.  I think I knew this as I wrote this verse down - expressing a somewhat futile wish.  In fact, the more we put on a face, sometimes the worse things become underneath.  Did you know a (treated) open wound is often safer than a closed one when there's risk of infection - in the former, any infection can just flow out, whereas in the latter, it has nowhere to go  (I've had surgeons leave a little open wound on me for just that reason).  Like David's heart, the infection gets hotter and hotter (you can usually feel the heat on the skin).  It's futile closing something up when there is anger underneath.

However, when David speaks, it is to God.  We are not faced with only two options - to either keep quiet or to be oozing infectious anger over everyone else.  There is another option - prayer.

David's prayer is sobering and real.  At first it looks like there is very little heartfelt praise or asserting Biblical truth.  It's not the sort of prayer that would spring to mind to quote when leading intercessions or on which to base a study on 'how to pray'.  So what do we see in it?

1)  Honesty about his doubts and feelings

David is feeling as though God is punishing him.  He says: '...for you are the one who has done this.  Remove your scourge from me; I am overcome by the blow of your hand' v9-10).  He feels like God is a foreigner (v12), even expresses the wish for God to just 'go away' (v13)!  He's having an existential crisis too - reflecting on the fact that his life is just a mere whisper.  I don't know whether we are to take from this that if we are suffering that it might be God's discipline (balance against other parts of Scripture - the book of Job, for instance - warns us against always drawing this conclusion.  What I do know is that this is what David felt like, and the Holy Spirit has included this Psalm in the Word of God so that we can know what it is to be honest too.

2) Acknowledgement of his own weakness and sin

Doubts are not the same as rebellion, but both fall in the wider category of brokenness and weakness.  In times like this we become aware that we are destitute; when we realise, as David did, that there is nothing left but to cry out to God.  David's cry is one of a man who can't find anything with himself to fight with.  There is no attempt to justify himself - he pleads with God to give him a break not because he thinks he deserves it, but because he has no strength left.  It is one who is not wrestling but drowning and crying out in help.  

3) Hope within the anguish

One thing we must learn to do as Christians in times of doubt and anguish is to hold what we feel and what we know to be true together, and make a decision to trust the latter, despite the waves that crash around us.  This is what David does in verse 7: 'But now Lord, what do I look for?  My hope is in you.'  Even as we come to God in anger about our situations, or perplexed and confused and full of doubt, the very fact that we can bring these things to him is an act of trust - an act of putting our trust in him.  It feels counter-intuitive, but it has been in times of some of the biggest challenges to my faith that I have not been able to stop just looking at God, clinging to hope, and never letting go.  

The summer I was 17 years old I read my Bible cover to cover for the first time.  I was captivated and completed the whole thing in 4 months.  Although I clearly read it at quite a pace, I still jotted down passages that sprang out to me in my still relatively new faith.  I still have that Bible, and the scraps of paper are still there, bookmarking each verse.  So I decided to go through, 18 years later, and visit each of them.  They are from the Good News Bible.