The Heart's Cry: Psalm 74

Psalm 74

This is an interesting Psalm if you think about it, essentially the Psalmist is saying 'look what you've done God, you've created the world, you've separated the day and night, but you don't seem capable of saving us in our humiliation'. It brings to mind the book of Job where Job is tested in various ways and after so many call him to renounce God he finally calls God to the mat to have God explain God to him. What God does instead is explain to Job what God has done throughout creation, throughout time and points out how could Job begin to understand the ways of God. In essence the Psalmist could be Job finally at, if not his breaking point, at the point of exasperation.

I have written about the song The Silence of God by Andrew Peterson before and it comes to mind again in this moment. It is a song that reckons with those times when we pray and plead and get seemingly no answer in reply. Andrew finally takes comfort that even Jesus encountered that silence and can speak into our lives because of it. Those times that we receive silence is often heartbreaking. Those times when the illness seems to win, when the money doesn't come, when the relationship is not mended, when the job is not secured, when our preferred future doesn't come to pass. It is in those moments when it may become difficult to hold to our faith, but it is in those moments that our faith is actually made for. Faith in the sunshine is easy to have, but faith in the storm takes a little more, it needs to be a little more.

God doesn't seem to show up in the Psalm, and sometimes God doesn't seem to show up in the moment, but that is not to say that God is not there, it is merely to say that we don't see God. There is a quote from Soren Kierkegaard that goes "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward," in the same way we can often only see God by looking back at our lives, but faith requires us to always look forward, expecting God, even when we can not see.

+ How have you been able to cling to faith when you are faced with the silence of God?