Psalm 44
To the Chief Musician for the Sons of Korah.
Maschil
We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old.
How thou didst drive out the heathen with thy hand, and plantedst them: how thou didst afflict the people, and cast them out.
For they got not the land in possession by their own sword, neither did their own arm save them: but thy right hand and thine arm, and the light of thy countenance, because thou hadst a favour unto them.
Thou art my King, O God: command deliverances for Jacob.
Through thee will we push down our enemies: through thy name will we tread them under that rise up against us.
For I will not trust in my bow, neither shall my sword save me.
But thou hast saved us from our enemies, and hast put them to shame that hated us.
In God we boast all the day long and praise thy name for ever. Selah.
But thou hast cast off, and put us to shame; and goest not forth with our armies. Thou makest us to turn back from the enemy: and they which hate us spoil for themselves.
Thou hast given us like sheep appointed for meat; and hast scattered us among the heathen.
Thou sellest thy people for nought, and dost not increase thy wealth by their price.
Thou makest us a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and a derision to them that are round about us.
Thou makest us a byword among the heathen, a shaking of the head among the people.
My confusion is continually before me and the shame of my face hath covered me.
For the voice of him that reproacheth and blasphemeth; by reason of the enemy and avenger.
All this is come upon us; yet have we not forgotten thee, neither have we dealt falsely in thy covenant.
Our heart is not turned back, neither have our steps declined from thy way;
Though thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death.
If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our hands to a strange god;
Shall not God search this out? For he knoweth the secrets of the heart.
Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.
Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? Arise, cast us not all for ever.
Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and forgettest our affliction and our oppression?
For our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly cleaveth unto the earth.
Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies’ sake.
The Sons of Korah – Korah was not their dad (he was a distant ancestor) but they were named for him because he was famous – notorious. He was the cousin of Moses and Aaron – Exodus 6 verses 18 – 24 which made his rebellion against their God-given authority all the worse. In Numbers 16 he demanded an equal share in the leadership of God’s people and he was judged by God with decisive speed. The Lord caused the ground to open and Korah and all his family went down to their graves alive.
In Numbers 26 verse 11 Moses wrote simply “The line of Korah, however, did not die out.” Whether they were spared or brought back from the grave by the Lord we are not told, but they are the ones who lived when they should have died. They were redeemed from death. They are like us Christians, who should have died and yet live through the wonder and power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Their history, their title as sons of Korah was a mark of shame and suffering and of the forgiveness and love of the Lord. They knew the suffering of God’s judgment and they knew the wonder of his grace.
They also knew the heights, the glory days of Israel. They were chosen by David, the great king of Israel, the slayer of the giant Goliath, and a man after God’s own heart. They were appointed to be the singers – 1 Chronicles 25 verse 1 – 8. Herman was a descendent of Korah, as we see from the title of Psalm 88 and gatekeepers – 1 Chronicles 26 verse 1 in the temple of God. If you are a Christian, you share their privilege. Chosen by God to follow his Son, to be filled with his Spirit and to herald his good news, you know, or have known the glory days
The sons of Korah knew God and they knew suffering; both ran through their family history like threads. But suffering was not only a family trait, it was a present reality for them. The suffering they will go on, to describe in Psalm 44 is terrible. They are ashamed, scared, scattered and faced death. There are no super-spiritual saints, they are people who know the grinding and crushing confusion and pain of ongoing suffering. If life is hard for you, they get that, and sing, their song alongside you.
Christ is Lord and so when terrible suffering comes we cannot pretend it has nothing to do with him. We must either run from him – shaking our fist in bitter agony and hating the Jesus who brought such evil and hurt into our lives, homes, families and hearts – or we must run to him in hope, trust, faith and love. Psalm 44 shows us how we can do this, why we must do this and how Christ himself will hedge us in like a scrum of bodyguards as we flee to refuge in him.
In their confusion and agony of suffering the sons of Korah caught each other’s eye, clutched their instruments, struck a chord and sang. They sang with tears, but they sang to God. And the Holy Spirit gave them words to lead our heavy hearts back to Jesus along with theirs. They raise this most sickening of questions – how can God allow our suffering? – and they answer it.
The title of Psalm 44 tells us that they answer it in a song. “To the chief Musician for the Sons of Korah, Maschi.” Jesus our great worship leader, our director of music leads us in singing it too. It is a psalm that does not shy away from the reality, confusion, shame and terror of suffering. And it is a psalm that takes us to Jesus. Because of the love of Christ for us, we can learn to turn to him, to sing to him and to pray to him, whatever may come. That is why the Holy Spirit wrote Psalm 44.
Psalm 44 starts with blessing. It is a psalm that wants to set our pain squarely in the context of God’s faithfulness.
In verse 1 the temple singers look back to their childhood. Their nation has a long history of God coming to their aid. As they write this they take in the sweep of history from God freeing his people from slavery and oppression in Egypt to him giving them the Promised Land, driving out the wicked nations who lived there and leading his people in.
They are reminding themselves – and us – that the love of God for his people was never just a nice idea, or merely a deep affection of God’s heart, but was also worked out in practice. God loved his people and so he freed them, protected them, led them and provided for them. God’s love is the care of a husband and the compassion of a father, not the fickle feeling of a romantic teenager. This is how God loves us.
In verse 3 the sons of Korah emphasis that the history of their people is one of complete dependence. They owed everything to God. They were not partners with him, shouldering the burden and fighting the battles as equals. No, they were children; rescued, carried, loved and cared for by their God.
The love that God had for them was shown in action – he did for them what they could not do for themselves. But it was also shown in relationship. He delighted in them and so showed them the light of his face. This recalls the long hours Moses would sit face to face with the Lord until his face shone in reflection of the light in God’s face – Exodus 33 verses 7 – 11, 34 verses 29 – 35.
2 reasons why Psalm 44 starts with blessing: when its goal is to confront suffering. The first is that the writers’ knowledge of the history of God’s love for his people makes the present misery of Israel all the more painful and confusing for them. The second is that it draws them to bring their suffering to God and to search for his love in the pits of life as well as on the heights.
We have even more reason to recourse the love of God than these people – the love of Christ for us was displayed as he died our death on the cross. The price of our freedom from death, sin, judgment, guilt and shame was the blood of Christ poured out as he hung cursed on the cross, cut off from his Father in our place and going through the hell we deserved to free us from God’s judgment and wrath. This is the love that our God has for us.
We know everything we have is the gift of God. We brought no goodness or righteousness to him so that he would forgive us. No we sinned and he suffered. We did evil and he died. Yet through Jesus we are forgiven, free, loved and adopted as children of God. The history of God with his people is wonderful, glorious and true. It is the history of a God who loves and loves, who pours himself out for our sake. It is the story of Jesus who went through hell to find out and bring you back to himself.
The sons of Korah want us to plumb the depths with them so that we will find, with them, that there is no depth where God will not find us, no darkness where his light cannot shine. There is no distance Jesus will not travel to take us in his arms, lift us onto his shoulders and bring us home into pleasant pastures beside still waters.
In verses 4 – 8 they sing to God their conclusions from their knowledge of the scriptures – they sing their trust and their hope.
They likely have in mind victories like the one the Lord won over Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea that decisively freed his people from slavery in Egypt. In this verse they express the fact and nature of the rule of our God.
Our God is a king – Jesus is the Christ, the one anointed by the Spirit to be the eternal king over God’s people. His rule is not only based on the fact that he created all things (although that would be enough reason) but also on his Father appointing him as the firstborn from the dead so that he might be supreme over all things – Colossians 1 verse 15 – 18.
Our God is a king, a warrior king and a servant king and the nature of his kingship is to rescue, save and serve his people. He is not a king seeking to lord it over those he rules, as other kings might. He is a king who sweeps into battle to save his people. He sweeps into battle to save you. His victories are not won to merely prove his might; they are won as an outworking of his love for those he rules. When Christ rode into battle against sin and death on the cross, he wept for you and he was willing to die for he loves you.
The sons of Korah were happy to enter into battle against their enemies, following such a king. They were confident that he would lead them into victory – verse 5. Like them we are right to have confidence in Christ that we can fight alongside him against even the most terrible enemies.
Having affirmed that we do indeed fight alongside our heavenly king with the weapons he supplies, they hammer home their point that this does not make victory or defeat reliant on us - verses 6 and 7.
We fight because the battle has already been won. We can trample Satan underfoot because Jesus has already triumphed over him by the cross. By the grace of God we fight with the promise that Jesus will bring all his soldiers home safe to his Father’s side, for we are “more than conquerors through Christ.”
It is this confidence in God that brings the sons of Korah to the end of the first part of their psalm with the confession that “In God we make our boast all day long and we will praise your name for ever.” Verse 8. They do make their boast in God and they will continue to praise him. This is an expression of their current faith in God and their expectation that they will continue to have this faith. God is their boast and they are right to make him so. Nothing has changed since they first sang this song
The sons of Korah have spent eight verses affirming their trust in God, expressing their complete dependence on God and declaring their praise of God. God is the rock we run to in suffering and they have given us good reason to do so.
The sons of Korah have begun with faith, praise and deep dependence on their God both because this is truly how they feel and also because this is what makes the “But ..” at the start of verse 9 so horrific. Psalm 44 captures the bizarre confusion of suffering that goes alongside the horror and pain of it so powerfully because it sets suffering in the context of faith. We can see why murderous Egypt suffered the judgment of God but why would faithful Israel? Why would God bring such suffering on them? Why would God bring such suffering on you – “In God we boast all the day long and praise thy name for ever. Selah. But ...”
“But thou hast cast off and put us to shame ,,,” God is everything to the sons of Korah; their boast and the object of their praise; their kin and the source of their salvation However their God, in whom they have placed all their trust and hope, has humbled and rejected them. The nature of their suffering is hard enough as we will see – defeat, exile and scorn – but worse than all this is their rejection by God.
To put your trust in God, fall into suffering and be met with the silence of heaven crushes our soul and breaks your heart. The suffering the sons of Korah face is serious. They are seeing defeat in battle - verse 10. This is hard enough to bear, but it is no minor skirmish or distant campaign. This is a battle for the very survival of God’s people that they have lost – verses 11 and 12.
The people are not merely defeated; they are devoured. They are dead or destroyed. They are dead or destroyed, and all the survivors are exiled from their land. We are not told which exile this refers to but that is not the point, the point is that this is a national catastrophe. There would have been untold misery rolled into these lines from the song. Soldiers lying dead on the battlefield was just the start, soon followed by the tears of wives and mothers. We cannot imagine how these became screams as the victorious enemy began to take the young off to the slave caravans. Families were surely left grieving, split apart, plundered and starving.
The language evokes the scale of this tragedy. God has sold his people into slavery. They are destroyed. And then insult is added to injury: “You have made us a reproach to our neighbours, the scorn and derision of those around us. You have made us a byword among the nations: the peoples shake their heads at us” – verses 13 and 14. As well as being destroyed, they are laughed at. The nations around are glad to see the shame of Israel. This people claimed such love and protection from their God but “Where is he now?” they no doubt laugh. Every vile sin and callous misery is inflicted on God’s chosen people and he does nothing. So the sons of Korah bring the conclusive evidence to back up their chilling accusation: “you have rejected us.”
This is a national disaster and also a deeply shocking attack on the faith of the sons of Korah. To face rejection by God would be terrible for any nation, but for Israel it seems like God is rejecting his own promises along with them; it seems that he is rejecting humanity and leaving us without hope.
Israel faces a national disaster that strikes at the core of God’s faithfulness and love. This is also a personal agony for our psalm writers. In verses 15 and 16 they move from referring to “we” or “us” to “I” or “me”.
They are not writing this psalm at a distance. They are not safe in some hidden fortress feeling the disgrace of their people second hand. No this is personal pain “the shame of my face hath covered me.” They hear the taunts and they wipe the spit from their faces. They cry themselves sick and hurt more deeply than they knew they could.
And the terrible truth is that the Lord is behind this. Their praise and trust, their love and faith in God is what makes the suffering so very hard. In the depths of the night, when we lose hold of all else, we cry out, “Why do you allow this Lord?” And then perhaps we whisper “Why do you do this Lord?”
In asking these questions we open up a terrible possibility that our faith is misplaced but we and the sons of Korah echo the cry of God himself. At the bottom depths of the darkest pit of suffering the cosmos will ever know, the Son of God cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The suffering of the Sons of Korah is a picture, an echo of the suffering of the Son of God.
Psalm 44 throws us on the cross of Christ. It prises open the sufferings he faced there. It begins to unlock our hearts to what he suffered in our place, what he endured for us. As you suffer, you begin to feel something of what Christ felt; your heart begins to beat along with his. This is where we begin to see why the Lord might give such suffering to his people, to you his child. It is a door to seeing his love for us. This is where the sons of Korah are taking us. They will frame our suffering, along with theirs, with the rough wood of a Roman cross. In that frame, the picture will begin to make sense. But we must not rush ahead, because the cross of Christ raises questions as well as answering them.
If Christ is rejected for us, if he suffers in our place, if he is indeed our sacrifice and substitute - bringing us forgiveness, love, adoption, life, grace, joy and hope at the cost of his blood – then why do we suffer? If he suffered in our place, then surely we need not suffer at all. And more pointedly if he was rejected by God so that we (though we well deserve it) will never be rejected, then why does God reject the sons of Korah in their suffering? Why does he reject you and me?
God had brought suffering on them and they did not deserve it. They have clearly been considering whether they could deserve it for their sins and we should too. “Our heart is not turned back.” Verse 18 And we know this confusion. We run to any distraction from the pain – food, drink, constant busyness, spending money or earning praise. We run, or we sink, consumed by the darkness. We run or we sink because we feel we cannot run to God, since he is behind the pain and he should be the one behind the joy.
The impulse to run is right but we so often run the wrong way. We should run to the Rock, to our Refuge and Shield: Jesus. He is the one who helps us in our time of need. When we are confused by suffering because we know it is both undeserved and from God then we stand in good company.
When we suffer but have not sinned, we know that the one who sits on the throne of heaven alongside his Father knows exactly what we feel in all its agony and perplexity. And that is where this psalm, and all our suffering will come to a climax.
“Yea” verse 22 is like a handbrake turn that dramatically changes the direction of the psalm. This terrible suffering of the sons of Korah which feels like death and slaughter is for God’s sake.
The resolution does not come from seeing how the suffering is from God – that is, by debating to what extent he causes it, or whether he simply allows the suffering of a fallen world and sinful humanity to strike us. The resolution does not come from seeing whether our sin has played a part in our suffering. The resolution does not come from seeing how our suffering might be a means to discipline us and refine us to greater holiness. These are all important questions, worth exploring. But they cannot be the first questions. We can only begin to ask and answer them once we have seen something more important than the origins or ends of our suffering.
The scope of this psalm is to set up the horrendous pain of suffering and then to give us one answer which cuts to the heart of our confusion and fear. It is simply this: God has sent our suffering for his sake. We do not suffer primarily because we may have sinned; we suffer because we are his. Suffering is not a mark of God’s indifference towards us, or his hatred of us. Suffering is a mark of his love for us. It shows that we are his.
After they have so eloquently and agonisingly laid their suffering bare and so simply declared their innocence in the face of it, the sons of Korah tell us that the suffering is for God’s sake. They are not suffering for the sake of their God. Their suffering shows they are God’s people. It shows the world that they are loved by the Lord of lords and King of kings.
This seems utterly perverse, crooked and wrong to us. Surely wealth, comfort, good health and peace are the marks of those loved by God? If such a mighty God loves you, won’t he hedge you in and protect you from anything that could harm you? That is the logic of our world and it makes such clear sense to us. It is why suffering is so confusing.
Psalm 44 verse 22 is teaching us that when we are suffering at the hand of the Lord, our Father is treating us like Jesus, his Son. Suffering is a mark of God’s love. If you are a Christian and you suffer it is because God loves you.
There are different ways that the Father uses suffering to bring us to share in Christ’s glory. He uses it to discipline us, to refine us and to show us how precious his love is – more precious than whatever we lose through the suffering. He may bring suffering to grow us in our dependence on his love or our compassion towards others. He wounds us to draw us back to himself and he sometimes does this as we only just begin to wander.
We do not suffer aimlessly or at the hands of an indifferent deity. We suffer for the Lord’s sake.
If suffering is a mark of God’s love for us, if it is where our Father meets us, sustains us, defines us and draws us to a deeper understand that we are his children, then should we embrace it? Should we see our pain as a good thing? Wonderfully, we should not. We should revel in the good that the Lord brings out of our hurts and struggles. We should stand in awe of a Father who brings us into the glory of his Son by the same path of suffering that Christ walked. But we do not need to call the suffering itself good.
Suffering cannot overcome us, because we suffer for God’s sake. Suffering cannot overcome us because God shows us his love in it. Suffering cannot overcome us and so we pray for it to end.
Verses 23 – 26 finishes the psalm with a prayer. This prayer still expresses the consistent faith of the sons of Korah as they ask the Lord to redeem them “for thy mercies sake”. They are still asking for an end to the suffering. Suffering is an expression of the love of God because the table of glorious feasting lies at the end of the way through the valley of the shadow of death. The suffering is a mark of his love but it is a temporary one.
As we suffer, we need to look to see and grasp how our Father is loving us through the suffering itself. This will undo the confusion and bitterness of suffering, even if it does not undo the pain. But as we see that suffering means our Father is close to us and not that he is distant from us, then we do not lean further into suffering. Rather we lean further into God. Suffering is a blessing to us because it drives us into the arms of the God whose kind embrace is felt in the pain and whose love is stronger than death. In his arms we pray for his Spirit to fill us, and we pray to know Christ and enjoy him.
And we pray for the suffering to end. Our Father will use suffering but he will do so to bring us through it into Christ’s glory. Suffering is a means not an end; it’s a path, not a destination, it is always temporary. There was no greater agony – physically, emotionally, spiritually and in every other way – than the cross of Christ.
Psalm 44 ends without an answer to the final prayer of the sons of Korah. The answer comes in the next psalm. Psalm 45 is a wedding song, it is the beautiful ballad of the marriage of a king and his bride.
The answer to the prayer that ends Psalm 44 is that Christ will rise up. As suffering surrounds us like wolves in the darkness, we hear a crashing through the trees as our king rides to save us, his torch held high and his sword raised to destroy our foes and fears.
The final point of your suffering is that Christ will come to you as a husband who loves you with a burning desire. And there are 3 ways that he will come to you:
We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old.
How thou didst drive out the heathen with thy hand, and plantedst them: how thou didst afflict the people, and cast them out.
For they got not the land in possession by their own sword, neither did their own arm save them: but thy right hand and thine arm, and the light of thy countenance, because thou hadst a favour unto them.
Thou art my King, O God: command deliverances for Jacob.
Through thee will we push down our enemies: through thy name will we tread them under that rise up against us.
For I will not trust in my bow, neither shall my sword save me.
But thou hast saved us from our enemies, and hast put them to shame that hated us.
In God we boast all the day long and praise thy name for ever. Selah.
But thou hast cast off, and put us to shame; and goest not forth with our armies. Thou makest us to turn back from the enemy: and they which hate us spoil for themselves.
Thou hast given us like sheep appointed for meat; and hast scattered us among the heathen.
Thou sellest thy people for nought, and dost not increase thy wealth by their price.
Thou makest us a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and a derision to them that are round about us.
Thou makest us a byword among the heathen, a shaking of the head among the people.
My confusion is continually before me and the shame of my face hath covered me.
For the voice of him that reproacheth and blasphemeth; by reason of the enemy and avenger.
All this is come upon us; yet have we not forgotten thee, neither have we dealt falsely in thy covenant.
Our heart is not turned back, neither have our steps declined from thy way;
Though thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death.
If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our hands to a strange god;
Shall not God search this out? For he knoweth the secrets of the heart.
Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.
Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? Arise, cast us not all for ever.
Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and forgettest our affliction and our oppression?
For our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly cleaveth unto the earth.
Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies’ sake.
The Sons of Korah – Korah was not their dad (he was a distant ancestor) but they were named for him because he was famous – notorious. He was the cousin of Moses and Aaron – Exodus 6 verses 18 – 24 which made his rebellion against their God-given authority all the worse. In Numbers 16 he demanded an equal share in the leadership of God’s people and he was judged by God with decisive speed. The Lord caused the ground to open and Korah and all his family went down to their graves alive.
In Numbers 26 verse 11 Moses wrote simply “The line of Korah, however, did not die out.” Whether they were spared or brought back from the grave by the Lord we are not told, but they are the ones who lived when they should have died. They were redeemed from death. They are like us Christians, who should have died and yet live through the wonder and power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Their history, their title as sons of Korah was a mark of shame and suffering and of the forgiveness and love of the Lord. They knew the suffering of God’s judgment and they knew the wonder of his grace.
They also knew the heights, the glory days of Israel. They were chosen by David, the great king of Israel, the slayer of the giant Goliath, and a man after God’s own heart. They were appointed to be the singers – 1 Chronicles 25 verse 1 – 8. Herman was a descendent of Korah, as we see from the title of Psalm 88 and gatekeepers – 1 Chronicles 26 verse 1 in the temple of God. If you are a Christian, you share their privilege. Chosen by God to follow his Son, to be filled with his Spirit and to herald his good news, you know, or have known the glory days
The sons of Korah knew God and they knew suffering; both ran through their family history like threads. But suffering was not only a family trait, it was a present reality for them. The suffering they will go on, to describe in Psalm 44 is terrible. They are ashamed, scared, scattered and faced death. There are no super-spiritual saints, they are people who know the grinding and crushing confusion and pain of ongoing suffering. If life is hard for you, they get that, and sing, their song alongside you.
Christ is Lord and so when terrible suffering comes we cannot pretend it has nothing to do with him. We must either run from him – shaking our fist in bitter agony and hating the Jesus who brought such evil and hurt into our lives, homes, families and hearts – or we must run to him in hope, trust, faith and love. Psalm 44 shows us how we can do this, why we must do this and how Christ himself will hedge us in like a scrum of bodyguards as we flee to refuge in him.
In their confusion and agony of suffering the sons of Korah caught each other’s eye, clutched their instruments, struck a chord and sang. They sang with tears, but they sang to God. And the Holy Spirit gave them words to lead our heavy hearts back to Jesus along with theirs. They raise this most sickening of questions – how can God allow our suffering? – and they answer it.
The title of Psalm 44 tells us that they answer it in a song. “To the chief Musician for the Sons of Korah, Maschi.” Jesus our great worship leader, our director of music leads us in singing it too. It is a psalm that does not shy away from the reality, confusion, shame and terror of suffering. And it is a psalm that takes us to Jesus. Because of the love of Christ for us, we can learn to turn to him, to sing to him and to pray to him, whatever may come. That is why the Holy Spirit wrote Psalm 44.
Psalm 44 starts with blessing. It is a psalm that wants to set our pain squarely in the context of God’s faithfulness.
In verse 1 the temple singers look back to their childhood. Their nation has a long history of God coming to their aid. As they write this they take in the sweep of history from God freeing his people from slavery and oppression in Egypt to him giving them the Promised Land, driving out the wicked nations who lived there and leading his people in.
They are reminding themselves – and us – that the love of God for his people was never just a nice idea, or merely a deep affection of God’s heart, but was also worked out in practice. God loved his people and so he freed them, protected them, led them and provided for them. God’s love is the care of a husband and the compassion of a father, not the fickle feeling of a romantic teenager. This is how God loves us.
In verse 3 the sons of Korah emphasis that the history of their people is one of complete dependence. They owed everything to God. They were not partners with him, shouldering the burden and fighting the battles as equals. No, they were children; rescued, carried, loved and cared for by their God.
The love that God had for them was shown in action – he did for them what they could not do for themselves. But it was also shown in relationship. He delighted in them and so showed them the light of his face. This recalls the long hours Moses would sit face to face with the Lord until his face shone in reflection of the light in God’s face – Exodus 33 verses 7 – 11, 34 verses 29 – 35.
2 reasons why Psalm 44 starts with blessing: when its goal is to confront suffering. The first is that the writers’ knowledge of the history of God’s love for his people makes the present misery of Israel all the more painful and confusing for them. The second is that it draws them to bring their suffering to God and to search for his love in the pits of life as well as on the heights.
We have even more reason to recourse the love of God than these people – the love of Christ for us was displayed as he died our death on the cross. The price of our freedom from death, sin, judgment, guilt and shame was the blood of Christ poured out as he hung cursed on the cross, cut off from his Father in our place and going through the hell we deserved to free us from God’s judgment and wrath. This is the love that our God has for us.
We know everything we have is the gift of God. We brought no goodness or righteousness to him so that he would forgive us. No we sinned and he suffered. We did evil and he died. Yet through Jesus we are forgiven, free, loved and adopted as children of God. The history of God with his people is wonderful, glorious and true. It is the history of a God who loves and loves, who pours himself out for our sake. It is the story of Jesus who went through hell to find out and bring you back to himself.
The sons of Korah want us to plumb the depths with them so that we will find, with them, that there is no depth where God will not find us, no darkness where his light cannot shine. There is no distance Jesus will not travel to take us in his arms, lift us onto his shoulders and bring us home into pleasant pastures beside still waters.
In verses 4 – 8 they sing to God their conclusions from their knowledge of the scriptures – they sing their trust and their hope.
They likely have in mind victories like the one the Lord won over Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea that decisively freed his people from slavery in Egypt. In this verse they express the fact and nature of the rule of our God.
Our God is a king – Jesus is the Christ, the one anointed by the Spirit to be the eternal king over God’s people. His rule is not only based on the fact that he created all things (although that would be enough reason) but also on his Father appointing him as the firstborn from the dead so that he might be supreme over all things – Colossians 1 verse 15 – 18.
Our God is a king, a warrior king and a servant king and the nature of his kingship is to rescue, save and serve his people. He is not a king seeking to lord it over those he rules, as other kings might. He is a king who sweeps into battle to save his people. He sweeps into battle to save you. His victories are not won to merely prove his might; they are won as an outworking of his love for those he rules. When Christ rode into battle against sin and death on the cross, he wept for you and he was willing to die for he loves you.
The sons of Korah were happy to enter into battle against their enemies, following such a king. They were confident that he would lead them into victory – verse 5. Like them we are right to have confidence in Christ that we can fight alongside him against even the most terrible enemies.
Having affirmed that we do indeed fight alongside our heavenly king with the weapons he supplies, they hammer home their point that this does not make victory or defeat reliant on us - verses 6 and 7.
We fight because the battle has already been won. We can trample Satan underfoot because Jesus has already triumphed over him by the cross. By the grace of God we fight with the promise that Jesus will bring all his soldiers home safe to his Father’s side, for we are “more than conquerors through Christ.”
It is this confidence in God that brings the sons of Korah to the end of the first part of their psalm with the confession that “In God we make our boast all day long and we will praise your name for ever.” Verse 8. They do make their boast in God and they will continue to praise him. This is an expression of their current faith in God and their expectation that they will continue to have this faith. God is their boast and they are right to make him so. Nothing has changed since they first sang this song
The sons of Korah have spent eight verses affirming their trust in God, expressing their complete dependence on God and declaring their praise of God. God is the rock we run to in suffering and they have given us good reason to do so.
The sons of Korah have begun with faith, praise and deep dependence on their God both because this is truly how they feel and also because this is what makes the “But ..” at the start of verse 9 so horrific. Psalm 44 captures the bizarre confusion of suffering that goes alongside the horror and pain of it so powerfully because it sets suffering in the context of faith. We can see why murderous Egypt suffered the judgment of God but why would faithful Israel? Why would God bring such suffering on them? Why would God bring such suffering on you – “In God we boast all the day long and praise thy name for ever. Selah. But ...”
“But thou hast cast off and put us to shame ,,,” God is everything to the sons of Korah; their boast and the object of their praise; their kin and the source of their salvation However their God, in whom they have placed all their trust and hope, has humbled and rejected them. The nature of their suffering is hard enough as we will see – defeat, exile and scorn – but worse than all this is their rejection by God.
To put your trust in God, fall into suffering and be met with the silence of heaven crushes our soul and breaks your heart. The suffering the sons of Korah face is serious. They are seeing defeat in battle - verse 10. This is hard enough to bear, but it is no minor skirmish or distant campaign. This is a battle for the very survival of God’s people that they have lost – verses 11 and 12.
The people are not merely defeated; they are devoured. They are dead or destroyed. They are dead or destroyed, and all the survivors are exiled from their land. We are not told which exile this refers to but that is not the point, the point is that this is a national catastrophe. There would have been untold misery rolled into these lines from the song. Soldiers lying dead on the battlefield was just the start, soon followed by the tears of wives and mothers. We cannot imagine how these became screams as the victorious enemy began to take the young off to the slave caravans. Families were surely left grieving, split apart, plundered and starving.
The language evokes the scale of this tragedy. God has sold his people into slavery. They are destroyed. And then insult is added to injury: “You have made us a reproach to our neighbours, the scorn and derision of those around us. You have made us a byword among the nations: the peoples shake their heads at us” – verses 13 and 14. As well as being destroyed, they are laughed at. The nations around are glad to see the shame of Israel. This people claimed such love and protection from their God but “Where is he now?” they no doubt laugh. Every vile sin and callous misery is inflicted on God’s chosen people and he does nothing. So the sons of Korah bring the conclusive evidence to back up their chilling accusation: “you have rejected us.”
This is a national disaster and also a deeply shocking attack on the faith of the sons of Korah. To face rejection by God would be terrible for any nation, but for Israel it seems like God is rejecting his own promises along with them; it seems that he is rejecting humanity and leaving us without hope.
Israel faces a national disaster that strikes at the core of God’s faithfulness and love. This is also a personal agony for our psalm writers. In verses 15 and 16 they move from referring to “we” or “us” to “I” or “me”.
They are not writing this psalm at a distance. They are not safe in some hidden fortress feeling the disgrace of their people second hand. No this is personal pain “the shame of my face hath covered me.” They hear the taunts and they wipe the spit from their faces. They cry themselves sick and hurt more deeply than they knew they could.
And the terrible truth is that the Lord is behind this. Their praise and trust, their love and faith in God is what makes the suffering so very hard. In the depths of the night, when we lose hold of all else, we cry out, “Why do you allow this Lord?” And then perhaps we whisper “Why do you do this Lord?”
In asking these questions we open up a terrible possibility that our faith is misplaced but we and the sons of Korah echo the cry of God himself. At the bottom depths of the darkest pit of suffering the cosmos will ever know, the Son of God cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The suffering of the Sons of Korah is a picture, an echo of the suffering of the Son of God.
Psalm 44 throws us on the cross of Christ. It prises open the sufferings he faced there. It begins to unlock our hearts to what he suffered in our place, what he endured for us. As you suffer, you begin to feel something of what Christ felt; your heart begins to beat along with his. This is where we begin to see why the Lord might give such suffering to his people, to you his child. It is a door to seeing his love for us. This is where the sons of Korah are taking us. They will frame our suffering, along with theirs, with the rough wood of a Roman cross. In that frame, the picture will begin to make sense. But we must not rush ahead, because the cross of Christ raises questions as well as answering them.
If Christ is rejected for us, if he suffers in our place, if he is indeed our sacrifice and substitute - bringing us forgiveness, love, adoption, life, grace, joy and hope at the cost of his blood – then why do we suffer? If he suffered in our place, then surely we need not suffer at all. And more pointedly if he was rejected by God so that we (though we well deserve it) will never be rejected, then why does God reject the sons of Korah in their suffering? Why does he reject you and me?
God had brought suffering on them and they did not deserve it. They have clearly been considering whether they could deserve it for their sins and we should too. “Our heart is not turned back.” Verse 18 And we know this confusion. We run to any distraction from the pain – food, drink, constant busyness, spending money or earning praise. We run, or we sink, consumed by the darkness. We run or we sink because we feel we cannot run to God, since he is behind the pain and he should be the one behind the joy.
The impulse to run is right but we so often run the wrong way. We should run to the Rock, to our Refuge and Shield: Jesus. He is the one who helps us in our time of need. When we are confused by suffering because we know it is both undeserved and from God then we stand in good company.
When we suffer but have not sinned, we know that the one who sits on the throne of heaven alongside his Father knows exactly what we feel in all its agony and perplexity. And that is where this psalm, and all our suffering will come to a climax.
“Yea” verse 22 is like a handbrake turn that dramatically changes the direction of the psalm. This terrible suffering of the sons of Korah which feels like death and slaughter is for God’s sake.
The resolution does not come from seeing how the suffering is from God – that is, by debating to what extent he causes it, or whether he simply allows the suffering of a fallen world and sinful humanity to strike us. The resolution does not come from seeing whether our sin has played a part in our suffering. The resolution does not come from seeing how our suffering might be a means to discipline us and refine us to greater holiness. These are all important questions, worth exploring. But they cannot be the first questions. We can only begin to ask and answer them once we have seen something more important than the origins or ends of our suffering.
The scope of this psalm is to set up the horrendous pain of suffering and then to give us one answer which cuts to the heart of our confusion and fear. It is simply this: God has sent our suffering for his sake. We do not suffer primarily because we may have sinned; we suffer because we are his. Suffering is not a mark of God’s indifference towards us, or his hatred of us. Suffering is a mark of his love for us. It shows that we are his.
After they have so eloquently and agonisingly laid their suffering bare and so simply declared their innocence in the face of it, the sons of Korah tell us that the suffering is for God’s sake. They are not suffering for the sake of their God. Their suffering shows they are God’s people. It shows the world that they are loved by the Lord of lords and King of kings.
This seems utterly perverse, crooked and wrong to us. Surely wealth, comfort, good health and peace are the marks of those loved by God? If such a mighty God loves you, won’t he hedge you in and protect you from anything that could harm you? That is the logic of our world and it makes such clear sense to us. It is why suffering is so confusing.
Psalm 44 verse 22 is teaching us that when we are suffering at the hand of the Lord, our Father is treating us like Jesus, his Son. Suffering is a mark of God’s love. If you are a Christian and you suffer it is because God loves you.
There are different ways that the Father uses suffering to bring us to share in Christ’s glory. He uses it to discipline us, to refine us and to show us how precious his love is – more precious than whatever we lose through the suffering. He may bring suffering to grow us in our dependence on his love or our compassion towards others. He wounds us to draw us back to himself and he sometimes does this as we only just begin to wander.
We do not suffer aimlessly or at the hands of an indifferent deity. We suffer for the Lord’s sake.
If suffering is a mark of God’s love for us, if it is where our Father meets us, sustains us, defines us and draws us to a deeper understand that we are his children, then should we embrace it? Should we see our pain as a good thing? Wonderfully, we should not. We should revel in the good that the Lord brings out of our hurts and struggles. We should stand in awe of a Father who brings us into the glory of his Son by the same path of suffering that Christ walked. But we do not need to call the suffering itself good.
Suffering cannot overcome us, because we suffer for God’s sake. Suffering cannot overcome us because God shows us his love in it. Suffering cannot overcome us and so we pray for it to end.
Verses 23 – 26 finishes the psalm with a prayer. This prayer still expresses the consistent faith of the sons of Korah as they ask the Lord to redeem them “for thy mercies sake”. They are still asking for an end to the suffering. Suffering is an expression of the love of God because the table of glorious feasting lies at the end of the way through the valley of the shadow of death. The suffering is a mark of his love but it is a temporary one.
As we suffer, we need to look to see and grasp how our Father is loving us through the suffering itself. This will undo the confusion and bitterness of suffering, even if it does not undo the pain. But as we see that suffering means our Father is close to us and not that he is distant from us, then we do not lean further into suffering. Rather we lean further into God. Suffering is a blessing to us because it drives us into the arms of the God whose kind embrace is felt in the pain and whose love is stronger than death. In his arms we pray for his Spirit to fill us, and we pray to know Christ and enjoy him.
And we pray for the suffering to end. Our Father will use suffering but he will do so to bring us through it into Christ’s glory. Suffering is a means not an end; it’s a path, not a destination, it is always temporary. There was no greater agony – physically, emotionally, spiritually and in every other way – than the cross of Christ.
Psalm 44 ends without an answer to the final prayer of the sons of Korah. The answer comes in the next psalm. Psalm 45 is a wedding song, it is the beautiful ballad of the marriage of a king and his bride.
The answer to the prayer that ends Psalm 44 is that Christ will rise up. As suffering surrounds us like wolves in the darkness, we hear a crashing through the trees as our king rides to save us, his torch held high and his sword raised to destroy our foes and fears.
The final point of your suffering is that Christ will come to you as a husband who loves you with a burning desire. And there are 3 ways that he will come to you:
1. Christ comes to you decisively.
2. Christ comes to you repeatedly.
3. Christ comes to you finally.
Our suffering is terrible, but it is also where our Father shows that we are his children. He shows us, and he shows the world, that he loves us like he loves Jesus as he treats us as he treated Jesus. He will draw us to himself to feel the warmth of that love even as we feel the cold grip of pain and bitter confusion. He will draw us to himself and make us more like his Son.
Our suffering is terrible but our suffering will not end in a funeral. It will end in a wedding.
2. Christ comes to you repeatedly.
3. Christ comes to you finally.
Our suffering is terrible, but it is also where our Father shows that we are his children. He shows us, and he shows the world, that he loves us like he loves Jesus as he treats us as he treated Jesus. He will draw us to himself to feel the warmth of that love even as we feel the cold grip of pain and bitter confusion. He will draw us to himself and make us more like his Son.
Our suffering is terrible but our suffering will not end in a funeral. It will end in a wedding.
No comments:
Post a Comment