The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): You're probably familiar with the age-old question, why do bad things happen to good people? Well today on the Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we're studying Psalm 44, which opens with the psalmist pleading with God to help him. He knows that God has rescued his people in the past, and he knows that God is faithful. So what's the problem? What is God waiting for?

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. What do you do when things go wrong in your life? Psalm 44 is a cry for help. The psalmist is in desperate need of God's rescue. He's distraught and wants to know why God seems to be asleep at the wheel. If you have your Bible handy, turn to Psalm 44 and follow along.

Dr. James Boice: Let me comment on something that one of the commentators says. I'm always interested in the way they approach the psalms. One of them, in his opening remarks, says God never sleeps. That may be, but sometimes he seems to. He seems to be asleep when his people are having trouble, they call out to him, and they don't seem to get an answer.

The reason I begin that way is because of a verse that occurs in the psalm, verse 23. The psalmist is crying out to God and what he's asking God to do is wake up. "Awake, O Lord, why do you sleep? Rouse yourself, do not reject us forever." It's easy to dismiss the idea of God being asleep because we know God does not sleep. That's an axiom when we're dealing with the Almighty One who is omniscient and knows everything.

And yet, lest we disengage ourselves from the idea too easily, we have to remember that in the New Testament, there is a story much along these lines. The disciples were crossing the lake of Galilee with Jesus Christ in a boat after a long day's work and they were exhausted. Jesus especially was tired. He was in the back of the boat and he fell asleep. A great storm came up. It was an unusually fierce storm and the disciples were afraid for their lives. They were experienced fishermen, but nevertheless, they knew they were in danger of drowning and they turned to Jesus and they wanted to wake him up.

And so they did. They said, "Lord, don't you care that we drown?" Jesus woke up and he quieted the storm. He rebuked them for their lack of faith, and all of that had a good ending. But nevertheless, from their point of view at least, Jesus was asleep for a time. It is just out of that kind of experience that this psalm is written. It was a frightening experience. We don't know exactly when it was, we don't even know who the author was.

Remember last time we were talking about the sons of Korah. We know who they were as a group but not individually. This is the third of the psalms by the sons of Korah, maybe the second one if Psalms 42 and 43 are to be taken together as I said last time. But as far as the individual is concerned, we don't know who he is and we don't know what period of Israel's history he lived in. Therefore, we don't know what he was writing about.

But here he's talking about a great military defeat for Israel. It might have been as early as the time of David, some of the scholars think that. It might have been as late as the Persian period or even later than that in the time of the Maccabees. We just simply don't know. All we do know is that the people had suffered a defeat, God is apparently asleep, the psalmist calls out on God to deliver them, and he can't understand why God hasn't done it, done it the way he did in past days.

As far as these psalms go, they fall into various classifications that I mentioned it before. This one is a lament. Something bad has happened and a lament is a poetic response to it. There are other kinds of psalms of course, there are hymns and thanksgiving psalms, and psalms of confidence and psalms of remembrance and wisdom psalms and kingship psalms, some of those are messianic. But this is a lament. It has three parts and that will help us follow our way through it and learn what it's saying.

The first part is verses one through eight and it refers to the past. The second part, verses nine through 22, refers to the present. And then the last part, verses 23 through 26, refer to the future. Now the past section deals with God's past acts of deliverance of the people. The longer central section deals with the present puzzling problem. Although he's delivered them in the past, he's not delivering them in the present. And then the final section is a prayer in which the psalmist looks ahead to God's deliverance in future days.

Now when you start in with this first section, you would never expect it to be a lament. It's positive and it's repeating all of the good things that God has done on behalf of the people. You would say well this is a thanksgiving psalm or a praise psalm. It's not only that, it's a very mature reflection on the past because the psalmist is not merely saying in these first eight verses that we had nice days in the past and I wish we had them now. He's saying all those victories we had in the past were won by God's mighty power and by the strength of his arm.

Look at that verse three. "It was not by their sword that they won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory; it was your right hand, your arm and the light of your face, for you loved them." That was a lesson of Israel's history. When they were brought out of Egypt and they became a nation and were established in their own land, it was God who did it. That nation of slaves could never have gotten out of Egypt by themselves. They were opposed by the mightiest monarch of the day, he had all the armies on his side.

If God hadn't intervened in the plagues to change the heart of Pharaoh and allow him to let the people go, and then when he pursued them, actually defeated him in a miraculous way, well the people would never have broken free from their bondage. So they well knew that and that's what the psalmist is saying. This first part, verses one through eight, falls into two sections. Verses one through three concern the distant past.

As we read it, we're aware of what he's thinking of there. It's not the exodus from Egypt per se, but it's actually the conquest of the land. He said we heard from our fathers, those who lived in days long ago before us, how you drove out the nations from Canaan under Joshua, and how you established or planted our people in the land. You crushed all their enemies. If you read the book of Joshua, you find exactly how God did that. He did it in a splendid way. Now that's what he's saying. He's saying look, we listen to the history of our people and as our fathers tell us about these things, passed down from generation to generation, we're aware of how strongly you intervened on behalf of your people in the past.

Now we have the equivalent of that. We're not thinking nationally here when we take a psalm like this and apply it to ourselves. We're thinking spiritually, but we have been told of things that have happened in the past that are part of our heritage for which we are thankful and for which we praise God. Our spiritual equivalent might be, for example, the Protestant Reformation by which the Gospel was rediscovered and then passed down to us. Many of us belong to denominations that are the fruit of that reformation.

Or the Wesleyan revivals or the period of the Great Awakening in this country. Those are all things that are part of our tradition and we say rightly as the psalmist does here. All these victories, these great spiritual victories were not achieved because Martin Luther was such a smart man or John Calvin was so perceptive or Jonathan Edwards was a powerful speaker. These were victories that were achieved by the hand of God, and we rightly acknowledge that. So that's the distant past.

And then the second part of this first section, verses four through eight, deals with the more immediate past. You'll notice as you read that the subjects of the sentence become singular rather than plural. Up to this point, it's been we, us and our, and now it becomes me and I. Now this doesn't mean as some of the commentators suggest that it's a liturgical psalm. If you study the psalms at all you know that that's the current rage among the commentators, it must have come from a liturgical tradition and when pronouns change it means that the first part was said by the people and then the second part was said by the priest and so on.

It doesn't mean that at all. This is a device, a literary device by which the psalmist intensifies what he's saying. You see, it's as if he is saying we know what God did long ago, but I want to say here right at the beginning of my psalm that it's not just a memory of things long ago that I praise God for. The things that God did for our fathers he's also done for us. As a matter of fact, he's done them for me. You see how the change in the pronouns accomplishes that.

"I do not trust in my bow, my sword does not bring me victory," any more than it did with our fathers. You see what he's saying. "But you gave us victory over our enemies and you put our adversaries to shame." Now if we put that in terms of our own experience, the way we would express it is this. We would say those spiritual victories which are part of our heritage that go back perhaps to the Reformation or to the Great Awakenings or whatever it may be, those are not just distant things. Those are things we have experienced as well, maybe not to the same degree.

We haven't lived through a time of rapid social change that's the product of a reformation or revival, but the same power that was at work in the Gospel of the reformers has been at work in our lives. It's the same message, justification by faith in Christ, the work of Christ in our behalf. That transforms people today as much as it did then. And that's my testimony too. It's nothing that I did, but it's what God has done. You see how it's moving.

Now if the psalm had stopped at that point with verse eight, we would have said well it's a victory hymn or it's a psalm of thanksgiving because here the psalmist is saying as he looks over the past, we have nothing to blame God for. On the contrary, he's intervened for us and he's helped us all along the way. And yet, as we read on to the next section, we discover that that has not been the psalmist's experience in the present. As a matter of fact, it's been the opposite in the present. God seems to be asleep and they've suffered a defeat.

And so with that in view, you have to go back and read these first verses in a puzzled tone of voice. He's reiterating what God has done and that's a fact of history, but it's puzzling because what's happening in the present doesn't conform with what he'd experienced in the past. Now notice that this section, verse nine and following, begins with the words "but now." That's a very common combination of words in scripture. More than one preacher has done a whole series of sermons on it, and I've done that myself a number of years ago.

Going through the Bible for the significant times in which that phrase "but now" occurs. And in all of these sermons, it has to do with our sad past and the intervention of God and the things that are different now because of it. One great example of that is in the third chapter of Romans after Paul has gone through his rehearsal of the wrath of God for the sins of the race and all are involved under that and he wraps it up, every mouth is stopped. He says as he begins to talk about the Gospel, "but now." But now a righteousness from God is revealed from heaven and that's what he talks about for the rest of the letter.

But now this magnificent change. Now in this psalm, the contrast is exactly the opposite. Instead of moving from a sad past to a glorious present, this psalm moves from a glorious past to a tragic present. He's talking about the victories in the past and he is now bringing up the defeat of the present. Look at the contrast. Back in verse seven, "you gave us victory over our enemies," but then verses nine and ten, "but now you have rejected and humbled us; you no longer go out with our armies. You made us retreat before the enemy and all our adversaries have plundered us."

You want to ask the question, is this what the people of God are to expect from the God who has been their champion in past days? You don't understand that that's a puzzling situation, you haven't understood the psalm so far. How can that be that the unchanging God who has been with them in the past seemingly has abandoned them in the present? So puzzling that the psalmist is toying with possible explanations. Now he doesn't lay them out on the surface, but they're behind the kind of things he says.

What we have in this middle portion of the psalm are not the proposed solutions which are inadequate, but the reasons why the proposed solutions are inadequate. So you have to go back behind the reasons that he's given, the things he says to the kind of solutions that might be offered by somebody as they try to work through this dilemma. Let me review what three of them would be. First explanation would be this. Maybe God was looking the other way. And because God was looking the other way and not paying attention to what was happening among the people at the time, after all it's a big world, a lot of things going on, the people simply were taken advantage of by their enemies.

Maybe that's the way you should handle it. Well that might work for the pagans because they have limited gods. It can hardly work for the Jews. Jehovah is the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful one. Nothing ever escapes Jehovah. You can't give that kind of an explanation when you're dealing with the Bible's God. That is made very clear here in an interesting way stylistically. You'll notice that at this point, beginning with verse nine, you have a repetition of the word "you" again and again and again. It's in every verse, verses nine through 14, and then it skips a bit and you find it again in verse 19.

And every time it says that God's behind this, God's behind it, God's behind it. "You have rejected and humbled us; you made us retreat before the enemy; you gave us up to be devoured like sheep; you sold your people for a pittance; you made us a reproach to our neighbors; you made us a byword among the nations; you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals and covered us with shame" and so on. Now it's exactly that that makes the situation so puzzling.

You see, if God wasn't paying attention and you had an accident, well an accident might be bad but there's nothing puzzling about an accident. You'd say well accidents happen. The only reason a situation like this is puzzling is if you believe that there is an all-powerful God for whom accidents don't happen, who is also a benevolent God and who cares for his people. But in that situation, things nevertheless happen that are bad. You see, that's what the psalmist is saying.

Now it's what makes it puzzling, but at the same time, it's the only situation that actually gives us hope. Do you understand what I mean by that? If you're a secularist and you don't have an omnipotent, all-knowing God and bad things happen, well there's just nowhere to turn, it's a bad thing, that's all. Accept your misery, nothing you can do about it, it has no meaning. No hope for that. That's why the existentialists despair and why they say the only real question in all of life is the question of suicide, do you go on living?

There's no meaning, so do you commit suicide or do you go on living? That's the existentialist approach. Now that is a formula for despair. If you're a secularist, that's the only place you come out. Now if you're a believer in an Almighty God, you don't always have the answers, but at least there's hope of an answer. Because if you believe in a God who is all-powerful, who knows what he's doing, doesn't make mistakes, you might not understand what the answer is, but it means there's an answer there somewhere.

You may not even get the answer in life, but nevertheless, you see you can approach what you're going through in an entirely different frame of mind and you can believe you're going to have an answer eventually. That's what it is for the believer. You see, as we go through life, lots of things come into our lives for which we don't have answers. But we do have a God and we know that God has the answers and that gives an entirely different approach to the Christian as the Christian goes through tough times. So that's the first possible answer, and that's what the author is dealing with when he says again and again, "you have done it, you have done it, you have done it."

That's what makes it puzzling and on the other hand, he knows that that's the only way he's ever going to get an answer is to reaffirm what he knows about God. Now the second possible suggestion is this. Not that God wasn't paying attention and the thing just happened, but that maybe the defeat wasn't as bad as it appears. You see, people say that when other people go through trouble, it's the Pollyanna approach. Every cloud has a silver lining, it's not really so bad.

That is not what the psalmist says. One thing I like about these psalmists, whoever they are, is that they really know how to call a tragedy a tragedy. They don't pretend it isn't a tragedy if it's a tragedy. It's bad, they want God to explain why this bad thing has happened. What he says here is look, we are just like sheep before our enemies. It's not a question that the battle was almost evenly matched and they just overpowered us a little bit for a time and we lost a few soldiers. No, we were like sheep before them and they just slaughtered us like animals. We were scattered all over the hillsides. You made us a reproach to our neighbors. Don't go around telling me that the battle wasn't bad, take your Pollyanna theology somewhere else. I'm an Old Testament Jew and I tell it the way it really is. So that's the second answer, and that's the psalmist's response.

Now the third possible explanation of the situation is a better one. And this is the idea that maybe it was due to the sin of the people. In other words, the people themselves were at fault. Now the reason that's a better explanation is that there were many times in their history when they were at fault. You read the Old Testament history of the Jewish people and you find that the story is this: again and again they departed from the Lord, judgment came upon them, God was merciful in the judgment to bring them back, they got reestablished, then they sinned again, judgment came again. The whole period of the Judges is one long history of that, and it's even true of the period of the Kings that follows as well.

So you would say, well maybe that's it. Maybe that's the explanation. People have sinned. After all, when they sinned at Jericho and Achan took the forbidden things from the tent, God judged the people and it was explained afterwards that that's why he did it. Maybe that's what's going on here. The problem with that is that the psalmist says that wasn't the case. Now that's why I say he's answering these questions. They're in the back of people's minds and what he says is this, verse 17. He's described everything that's happened and then he says, "All this has happened to us, even though we had not forgotten you or been false to your covenant. Our hearts had not turned back; our feet had not strayed from your path." And yet you crushed us.

So he's arguing that they were obeying God and yet they were defeated. Well we say at that point, can that really be? It would be rare for a Christian to insist in the face of God that he or she was innocent and had been obeying God all along, and therefore God shouldn't have allowed what happened to come into the Christian's life. We say look isn't that self-righteousness, isn't that a sin in itself? Well that would be a valid explanation except for two things.

One thing is what the psalmist himself says. Verse 20 says, "If we had forgotten the name of our God or spread out our hands to a foreign god, would not God have discovered it, since he knows the secrets of the heart?" Now what does that mean? Well it does not mean, wouldn't God know about it because God knows everything. The reason it doesn't mean that is that the conclusion that would follow from that kind of an argument is exactly the opposite of what the psalmist is saying.

If you're saying look God knows the heart and therefore he knows everything, the argument would be well he knows our hearts, he must know that we've sinned somehow even though we're not aware of it, and it's because of that unknown sin which is nevertheless known to God that the judgment has come. And yet he's saying the exact opposite of that. So what does it mean when it says would not God have discovered it? It means, would not God have discovered it to us? See, wouldn't he have made it known to us if we're disobeying? And God has not done that.

So what the psalmist is saying is look, we are aware that we are sinful human beings and we have deceitful hearts. "The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." The psalmist well knew that. But he said if that is it, if the heart of the people had gone astray, God would have told us that and God has not said anything along those lines. Therefore, the puzzle remains. We're not blatantly disobeying God in any area.

There a second reason why we have to understand that to be an adequate explanation and that's because of the way the apostle Paul uses verse 22 in Romans 8. You know I'm sure as you read this that it occurs toward the end of that chapter in that great declaration of the love of God in spite of the fact that the people of God suffer for him. Verse 22, "Yet for your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." Well Paul is arguing there that he and the other preachers of the Gospel and Christians in times of persecution suffer for their profession of faith, even though they're standing for their profession of faith. They're doing what they ought to be doing and yet they suffer.

So if Paul pulls the verse out of the psalm and uses it that way in Romans 8, we're to understand that that's the meaning that the verse has in Psalm 44. The psalmist is not saying that there's some hidden sin for which God is judging us. He's saying no, in this case, there have been many times in the past when that's been the explanation, but in this case, that is not it and yet we are judged.

So you see, as easy as it would be to turn to one of the explanations and say well that explains it, none of them really work. Now we come to the point then where we say well what is the explanation? And I hope you won't be impatient with me when I say that in this psalm at least, there is no explanation. Now there are some suggestions of an explanation, starters for our thought. I'm going to come back to those in a moment, but that's not what the psalmist dwells on.

What the psalmist has here is not an explanation, but an answer which has to do with praying to God anyway. And that's where that verse "Awake, O Lord, why do you sleep?" comes in. You see he deals with the past in its distant aspects and its more immediate aspects, and he talks in the middle section, the greatest section in length, about the problems of the present, he has no real answers for it. But when he gets to the end he turns to God because God is the only place he has to turn and he says wake up God and help us because we sure need your help. You see that's the way that goes.

One of the commentators said the movement of the psalm goes like this: You helped us in the past, you must help us now, you're not helping us now even though we've done nothing to prohibit your helping us now, so help us now. The psalm is really as simple as that. And yet I said I was going to return to the suggestions of a deeper answer, starters for our thinking, and there are two of them and let me call them to your attention. Verse 22 first of all, that phrase "for your sake." "Yet for your sake we face death all day long."

Now the psalmist doesn't develop that at all. There's no explanation of what that means there in the psalm, but we do find it developed in the New Testament with the Lord Jesus Christ when he was talking to his disciples even in the Sermon on the Mount, was talking about those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake and those who are persecuted because of me. That's an explanation you see. It's a way of saying if in the midst of an ungodly world you stand up for righteousness, those who love sin will hate you.

And in our secular world, anyone who will demonstrate an honest faith in God is going to be persecuted for it in some way, subtle ways perhaps, but nevertheless in some ways. I heard this morning that a number of people were angry with Reggie White on the Eagles because following the game against the Steelers as he does in every game, he gets the players together at the end and they kneel down on the sidelines and thank God for keeping them from injury during the game and for having the game go a good way. And he is a marvelous witness among the pro football players in doing that.

But there was objection to it because although you don't always catch it on the TV cameras, in this last game they actually photographed that, all the players kneeling together, the Christians on the team to pray. And he was on one of the news stories and these objections were being raised. And someone said, I think he said look you put everything else on TV, why can't somebody kneel and pray and what's wrong with that being on TV? You see if some drunken lout at the football game gets in a tussle in the stands and throws a beer bottle at somebody else, all the cameras turn in on that, no question about that, that's news right?

But if a Christian in a quiet way thanking God at the end of a game kneels on the sidelines, well people begin to apply the persecution. Now that's part of the answer, you see. Moreover, that's the way Paul deals with it in Romans. When he picks that verse up and uses it toward the end of Romans 8, he's saying that's why we suffer. If we went along with the world we ministers of the Gospel, if we geared our message to what the world wants to hear we wouldn't be persecuted. The world would love us, they'd say oh yeah, come on Paul stand up here and speak, we like to be entertained by that sort of thing. My what a good speaker you are and we laugh so hard, why we haven't had such a good time since we listened to Demosthenes.

But you see when Paul comes with the message of the Gospel, people hated that and they persecuted him for it and they do that in different ways throughout history. So that's part of the explanation. And then there's a second. And that comes at the very end, verse 26. "Rise up and help us; redeem us because of your unfailing love." Now that's a very important ending. Again I say the psalmist doesn't develop that at all, but that's something he knows and understands, God's unfailing love.

What that really means is this and it's to be taken at face value: the love of God is of such a quality that even the terrible defeats of the present moment are not without a purpose and they will not, even in the worst extremity, sever the believing one from God. And I'm sure you recognize that that's exactly the way Paul handles it in Romans 8 as well. It occurs there at the very end of the chapter where he says I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be in us.

And I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God, the unfailing love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Now you see with a faith like that, based on the demonstrable love of God in sending Jesus Christ to die for us on the cross, those who are scattered like sheep can actually conquer. We conquer not because we're strong, sheep are weak.

We don't conquer because we are wise, sheep are foolish. But we conquer because the love of God, utterly undeserved, has been fixed upon us through Christ, and we're brought into a fellowship that neither heaven nor hell, height nor depth, things present nor things to come nor anything else in all creation is ever going to sever. So even though we suffer now, God in the end is going to provide a victory that brings glory to his name. I don't know about you, but I would rather have it that way than any other way.

Suppose we were able to answer it in secular terms? We were able to say well this is why it happened, but without reference to God. What kind of comfort would that be? So it happens and this is why, what difference does it make? Still the bad thing happened. But you see if you're a person upon whom God has fixed his eternal and unfailing love, then the end result of that is good however bad it is now. And moreover, even in the bad times, we have an opportunity to glorify him.

And when all of this earth has passed away and all of these things which seem so important and so weighty to us now are gone and gone forever, the saints will still be in glory and what we call billions of years from now and they'll be praising this God, the God who works in their lives to bring the victory. I'm going to be there. I trust you're going to be there too. Let's pray.

Father, do bless this hymn to our hearts. Sometimes we come to these psalms and we don't know them very well and perhaps we even haven't studied them or used them or even memorized parts of them though we should. But as we get into them we find that they deal not with problems of a distant far-off age but the very kind of things we face, and do it in a way that directs our minds and our hearts upward to yourself.

So do that as we study this, as we meditate upon it as we go, and grant that in the week to come or the month to come or even years from now as troubling, puzzling things come into our lives as they surely will, that we might be drawn back to these statements from long ago in which people who suffered as we do directed their thoughts to God and found comfort there in order that we might find comfort and victory too. For Jesus' sake, Amen.

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