How does this garden make you feel? I like it. It is structured, ordered and symmetrical. There is balance and everything has its place. Now I am not a very well organised person and so I think that is why this garden and gardens like it appeal. It reflects what I am not and often wish I was.
How about this garden? This is the sort of garden Wendy likes – it flows as it grows and things intermingle. I like this one as well because it makes you relaxed and you don’t have to worry about putting a foot wrong. However, behind the apparent relaxed atmosphere there is an order and the random planting is probably not quite as random as we think. There is a gardener looking over this garden.
How about this one? Here there is abandonment and desolation. The gardener has deserted and left it in ruins.
This last picture could be an illustration for the background to this psalm – complete desertion. The first picture illustrates when everything was in apparent order and there was structure with king and temple and everyone knew their place and life was ordered and going well. The second could be an illustration of the fact that life was good for those who had money, position and authority. It flowed and blossomed and they enjoyed it. The last is the position Israel and found itself at the time of this psalm: order had been replaced by chaos; plenty has been replaced by devastation; prosperity had been overtaken by judgement. Everything was now abandoned and the leading citizens of the nation had been transported.
I have never had the bottom drop out of my world. I have had some challenging experiences, but never had my world totally turned upside down. Some of you will have. Suddenly the security you knew, what you thought was certain and would last, has totally crumbled. In those circumstances, trite Christian responses just don’t cut it. To have someone say to you that ‘we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, but you just can’t see that yet’ not only misuses the words of Paul from Romans 8, but probably also deserves a punch on the nose. It doesn’t help to be told catch all responses when our world has dissolved and we hurt beyond belief.
It is interesting how different cultures respond when someone has died. White British either make a cup of tea, talk in hushed tones or avoid the people affected, because they don’t know what to say. Other cultures make a lot of fuss and noise with outpouring of grief; other cultures come and sit with the grieving person. They are just there. They don’t have to say anything or do anything – their presence is all that is required. I experienced this kind of response when I was a headteacher in Swanley…
Why all this long pre-amble? Because the psalm we have read this morning is one of desolation. It is one of disorientation. The bottom has dropped out of the world for the people of Judah. This is the time of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Lamentations. This is the time when the Babylonians came and destroyed everything and deported the people to a far off land. The prophets interpret this as judgment on the nation for its unfaithfulness to the covenant with YHWH; and the psalm doesn’t deny this as we shall see. But if you were to tell the people that everything works for good for those who love the Lord, they would probably have strung you up, because they were experiencing total devastation and disorientation.
They were the chosen people, so why had this happened to them? They had God’s dwelling place in their capital city, so why had they not been protected and the pagan nation utterly defeated? Perhaps their feelings are expressed in the despair and violence of Psalm 137: PP
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
2 There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
I said last week that these songs were written from the experience of real life and living faith in the real world experienced by the people of God. Let’s look more closely at psalm 74.
The opening verses begin with the question, ‘Have you forgotten us God?’ Actually it is worse than that: ‘Have you rejected us forever?’ You see in that question there is an acceptance that the people have experienced rejection – they can’t really say otherwise. Perhaps implicit in that was a realisation as to the reason why they had experienced that rejection. But was it going to be for good? Why do they say that? Because devastation and deportation have taken place and whether this is three years or thirty years after the event, they still feel that sense of rejection. There has been no return; no retribution for the invader – in fact he just seems to go from strength to strength. To the writer of this psalm the anger of God was still smouldering, smoking, burning against his people – and it is time God was reminded who they were. Look at what was said:
Sheep of his pasture – the people he cared for, blessed and tended.
The purchased and redeemed – the ones brought out of Egypt into the
Promised Land.
The dwelling place of YHWH on Mount Zion was in their city.
As the writer begins to warm to his theme, expressing the feelings of his community, you can see how they are struggling with their faith in YHWH who was supposed to be their deliverer, their protector and their provider. You can experience the reality of their crying out to God with no holds barred, as they express their despair.
In the next few verses there is a vivid description of the destruction of the temple and all places of worship. This invader was seeking to eradicate all indications of YWHW; he was seeking to eradicate the religion of the Jews completely. Here we see the root of the devastation they feel. The focus of religion and nationhood; the focus of worship and national life were the object of systematic destruction and eradication.
Stop and think of the response of France and the world – surprising as it was – to the devastating fire in Notre Dame. Think how we would feel if Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament were totally obliterated. This would be striking at the very heart of national life. This would be someone seeking the destruction of the nation. For the people of Israel, what had happened was beyond belief and threatened their very existence. It was as if the heart had been cut out of the nation. This seemed to have been reinforced by the fact that they were still in exile and Jerusalem and the temple still lay in ruins. There are no signs of hope:
9 We are given no miraculous signs; no prophets are left, and none of us
knows how long this will be.
You can hear the resignation in the writer’s voice. However, they are concerned for the honour of YHWH. They cannot understand how he could allow himself to be mocked and reviled. It is almost as if God is sitting back with his arms folded and wrapped in his robes: hence the demand:
11 Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?
Take it from the folds of your garment and destroy them!
As a Christian does this remind you of the Pharisees mocking Jesus on the cross?
‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he can’t save himself! He’s the king of
Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in
him.’ Matt 27:42
The cross is a stumbling block and foolishness. Could we really believe that Jesus abandoned on the cross was achieving victory? This is where the agony of the psalm and the agony of the cross come together: God is involved in the real world that he brought into being and which has gone astray. God suffers with the suffering world, demonstrated ultimately on the cross. God knows the devastation and the isolation of rejection and somehow through it he brings redemption and reconciliation.
That is why our faith and trust can sustain and bring us through these times of challenge or devastation. It is not denial or trying to live in a bubble because ‘everything will be alright in the end; and if it’s not alright it’s not the end’. It is putting our faith and trust in the one who has been through the devastation, been through the exile and won through.
Returning to the psalm, the writer now moves into reflection and remembering. Remember I said not to skip the bits where it goes back over the history of Israel, because that is where their foundation was and their reminder of what God had done before. This is exactly what the psalmist is doing here. He is reminding himself and the people in the midst of their desperation, of the mighty acts of YHWH before. More than that: it is YHWH who is Lord of all creation because he is the one who brought it all into being in the first place. It is on this basis that the people can continue to hold fast to their faith in God their deliverer. But they are only just hanging on.
The next few verses plead with God for rescue and vindication. They plead with God not to let the powers of darkness have the final say. And the tone changes again as the writer raises his voice, asking God to get up and get active and overcome the clamour of the enemy who mocks God all day long. As the psalm ends the situation is not resolved and we are left hanging. There is no neat ending here, because the suffering of exile has still to run its course. There is no glib affirmation of faith and no cover up. Now you may find that uncomfortable, but it is the testimony of many that whilst they still hold fast to their faith in God through Jesus Christ, there is no tidy ending in their circumstances.
These sort of psalms insist that as people of faith we face the world as it is and as we experience it; that we take these things to God our Father and we raise them with him. They lead us away from the comfortable solutions and cause us to ask what we really mean when we say that all things are subject to God.
However, if you are feeling that this message has not cheered you up much for the coming week, there is hope. The psalmist may not have experienced it, but we have the benefit of history and hindsight. The people of God have survived – more than survived but thrived through the centuries. Their experience and our experience has not been different from that of the psalmist in many ways, but the enemy has not been able to eradicate our faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and will never be able to.
For the Christian church just consider the attempts by the establishment to eradicate it – from the Roman Empire, through the pagan hoards, to authoritarian regimes and now rampant secularism. Christians in India may be fearful because of the re-election of the Hindu nationalist Mr. Modi who wants to eradicate Christian faith from his country, but he will not succeed. None of those who have sought to eliminate faith in God have succeeded. And the claim of secularism that it will succeed will prove unfounded. In history and today the foes of God have behaved like ‘men wielding axes in the forest’ cutting down, smashing, burning and crushing. However, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians about his experience:
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not
in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not
destroyed. 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so
that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.
2 Corinthians 4:8-10
This puts a different perspective on walking in faith and victory. The confidence we can draw from these psalms is that those saints who have gone before us have experienced what we have experienced and proved the trustworthiness of God in the most difficult of situations. We can have the confidence to cry out to God in our despair and desperation. And even though our situation may not be completely resolved, we still choose to follow Jesus Christ: where else will we turn?