Times of crisis can shift us into new and better places and God will often allow us to suffer all sorts of misfortune to move us forwards. Psalm 39 is a psalm of crisis. It echoes the book of Job in some ways although here, the psalmist is not innocent. Rather he seems to be struggling with serious illness and serious guilt. The psalmist’s grief is so bitter that he hesitates from saying anything lest he profane God’s name in the presence of the faithless. But he can’t hold it in. His situation has made him all too conscious of the frailty of life and he is struggling to come to terms with this. This is no neat reflection. It is a pain-filled existential crisis of one who feels both his guilt and his frailty. At the end he even asks God to look away from him because he feels so defiled. There is no happy ending to this psalm, although Psalm 40 seems to be the postscript to this, just as Psalm 38 seems to be the prelude. Life is not neat and comprehensible. Christians are prone to want to find simple pat-answers for everything. We should take some wisdom from this ancient Hebrew perspective. Hebrew wisdom did not involve understanding things as Greek wisdom did. Our intellectual tradition is shaped more by a Greek philosophical endeavour to make everything as logical as possible. But life is truly full of chaos. The good news is that God will bring his perfect purpose through this chaos and that is our consolation. If we hold onto him, we won’t just survive through crisis, we will THRIVE.
Ask God to fulfil his purpose in your most difficult situation.
Read Psalm 39
