Prayer and the PsalmsНамуна

Psalm 73 – God is my Strength

When we read something like ‘God is our strength’ we can be sure that nothing else is.  For us it is often the case that everything else is, or everything vies for that position.  

This Psalm raises that old chestnut - doing right isn’t always rewarded and doing wrong often seems to be.  Or those that do wrong often seem to prosper.  What’s with that? we complain. 

The beginning of this Psalm chronicles the despair and anger at the fact that the commonly accepted wisdom of doing right and expecting to see right was being subverted.  This is the story of Job.  His friends believed his terrible condition was the result of extreme wrongdoing – which simply wasn’t true.  Job was righteous, yet he faced the loss of everything except his last pain-wracked breath – the very thing he would have been happy to lose. 

Something else is at play – and it seems neither right nor fair.  And it is true - there are people that love money, fame, unrighteousness, and all things sensual who do very well all their lives.  They don’t miss a beat.  Until!

Until we enter God’s presence, and see their future, and everything starts to look different.  You will never be able to figure this out yourself; it is God’s presence that brings a new perspective – the most important perspective.  His justice does have the last voice.  The psalmist admits to their own ignorance in light of what they see in the sanctuary.  God’s presence quells our complaints and humbles our ignorance, and might we add, our arrogance.  Those that enter the sanctuary realise that it is only God that lasts and truly satisfies, and all that others thought fulfilling is dust in the wind.  Not only that - their lives are very precarious, even ephemeral.

The person/being of God is always and only the answer to the restless vacancy in the human soul. 

“But for me it is good to be near God; for I have made the Lord my refuge,” concludes Asaph, the Psalmist.