And for our New Testament reading, which we’ll start with, we’ll go to the letter to the Romans, chapter eight. where once again, in our New Testament reading, we’ll find a little bit of a spoiler alert. But it’s a good one. The fifth verse of that psalm that we just sang did end on something of a down note. But that’s helpful as we prepare to read and consider that psalm together, because in a sense, that’s where the psalmist sits. He’s looking to the Lord, trusting in the Lord, still calling upon the Lord, but still in that place of perplexity and suffering. But we see light by faith, light at the end of the tunnel in our own sufferings in this reading from Romans. So we’ll read Romans chapter eight, verses 31 through 39. Listen to this. This is the very word of God. What then shall we say to these things?
If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died. More than that, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, for your sake we are being killed all the day long. We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. for I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Then please turn with me to the book of Psalms, where our reading and our text is Psalm 44. To the choir master, a mask of the sons of Korah. Oh God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old.
You, with your own hand, drove out the nations, but them you planted. You afflicted the peoples, but them you set free. For not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm save them, but your right hand and your arm and the light of your face, for you delighted in them. You are my king, O God. Ordain salvation for Jacob.
Through you, we push down our foes. Through your name, we tread down those who rise up against us. For not in my bow do I trust, nor can my sword save me. But you have saved us from our foes and have put to shame those who hate us. In God, we have boasted continually, and we will give thanks to your name forever. But you have rejected us and disgraced us and have not gone out with our armies. You have made us turn back from the foe and those who hate us have gotten spoil.
You have made us like sheep for slaughter and have scattered us among the nations. You have sold your people for a trifle, demanding no high price for them. You have made us the taunt of our neighbors, the derision and scorn of those around us. You have made us a byword among the nations, a laughingstock among the peoples. All day long, my disgrace is before me, and shame has covered my face at the sound of the taunter and reviler at the sight of the enemy and the avenger.
All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you, we have not been false to your covenant, our heart has not turned back, nor of our steps departed from your way. Yet you have broken us in the place of jackals and covered us with the shadow of death. If we had forgotten the name of our God or spread out our hands to a foreign God, would not God discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart.
Yet for your sake, we are killed all the day long. We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. Awake. Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself. Do not reject us forever. Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust. Our belly clings to the ground. Rise up.
Come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love. Thus far, the reading of God’s word. Let’s pray for his blessing upon it now. Father, please minister to us. We have gathered here to minister to you, to serve you in worship. Thank you that in your providence, as we turn our attention to your word, you feed our hungry souls. Please do that. Please encourage our hearts And may Your Holy Spirit be our teacher. And may He magnify Christ our Savior, even through the consideration of this psalm. For we pray in Christ’s name. Amen. We believe, and we know that scripture teaches that the Lord is sovereign over all things and His providence, He governs all of His creatures and all their actions.
But knowing that creates some some, shall we say, cognitive dissonance sometimes, because we have difficulty reconciling what we’re experiencing and the challenges and the difficulties and the hardships of life with the sovereign control of a God who we know loves us.
And In the process of trying to make sense of God’s providential dealings, when we don’t understand them, when we’re perplexed, even when we’re suffering, There’s an illustration that’s been used, which you’ve heard, I’m sure, many times. It’s that illustration of a tapestry, and how God in his providence is weaving this beautiful, glorious tapestry, but we don’t stand on the side to see the tapestry. We stand in back where it looks just like a garbled bunch of threads. You’ve heard that illustration before. And it’s helpful. Because if we could see as God sees, we’d see the beautiful tapestry. But in this present life, and in our finiteness, and in our creatureliness, we see the backside of that tapestry. reflecting on and studying this psalm this week, I thought of another illustration similar to it, especially as I reflected on the theme of the darkness that seems to overcome the psalmist here in Psalm 44.
And it’s the illustration of being backstage during a drama performance. A number of you maybe have participated in some capacity or other in a play, maybe just a school play, or maybe something more elaborate, maybe a community theater, or even some kind of a Broadway musical. But if you’ve ever done that, and you’ve been backstage during a performance, there are a couple of things about being back there. that are similar to this tapestry illustration. When you’re backstage during a drama production, first of all, it’s usually dark.
Can’t necessarily see everything going on around you. And you certainly don’t see the action on stage. You don’t see the big picture. You don’t see the real drama that’s going on. You don’t see what’s really going on. That’s not visible to you because you’re backstage.
And you kind of have to watch yourself. Backstages can be kind of cluttered too. Stuff lying around that you could trip over if you’re not careful. It’s like the backside of that tapestry. And our lives, and our experiences, and our perceptions of all those things are backstage of what God is actually doing. And the author of this psalm has that backstage sense. He’s filled with perplexity. He asks questions that have no answer. He’s in the dark. He’s looking at the back of the tapestry.
And this psalm gives us an example of how faith should function in response to perplexity. It gives us an example of what faith looks like, and what it looks like to walk by faith when you’re spiritually in darkness. That’s why I titled the sermon Faith in the Dark. We’ve got an example here of faith functioning in darkness. And as far as the structure of the psalm, there have been a number of occasions recently for me to reflect on a perspective of past, present, future.
I’ve been with you long enough for you to know that oftentimes in the Lord’s Supper, I’ll speak of how the Lord’s Supper causes us to reflect on the past and the present and the future, because Jesus instituted it for us to remember Him and to remember His death and to show forth His death.
So, we’re looking back to His suffering and His death on our behalf. But we also, in the present, We are communing with Him, and we’re communing with one another, and with all the other saints. And we’re benefiting from Him through the ordinance. We’re being nourished in the present.
But then, of course, there’s that forward-looking aspect that has an eye to the future, when He will come back to take us to Himself. That same past, present, and future perspective I tried to incorporate into my devotional yesterday at the Fourth of July picnic. And I encouraged the folks that were there to, first of all, remember what God has done and give thanks to him for the establishment of our nation and his faithfulness to us throughout these 250 years and his goodness. But then, in the present, to pray for God’s blessing upon our land, to pray for the prosperity of our nation. And then, looking ahead, to remember that our ultimate citizenship isn’t in any nation of this world, but it’s in heaven, and we look forward to that.
Well, there’s a very clear and pronounced past, present, future structure or perspective in this psalm. You have the psalmist thinking back to what God has done for his people in the past. And then as he looks at the present, he’s perplexed because God seems to have withdrawn, and yet he’s still oriented towards the future because he continues to cry out to God. and seek his mercies for the future. And so that’s really what this psalm is about.
It teaches us that God’s people recall his past blessings and trust in his future help while in the midst of present inexplicable hardships. God’s people recall his past blessings, trust in his future help while in the midst of inexplicable hardships.
Here’s my outline then, three points. First of all, God has shown his faithfulness. God has shown his faithfulness. Secondly, we sometimes suffer without explanation. And then finally, we can be confident in God’s steadfast love. But first of all, God has shown his faithfulness.
Faithfulness is woven throughout this Psalm, and we sing that hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness. It’s a beloved hymn of our faith and of the Church of Jesus Christ. And the reason that hymn is so beloved is because it speaks of a treasured truth. And in fact, it speaks of a theme that’s woven throughout Scripture, that our God is faithful. Psalm 36, 5. refers to the fact that His steadfast love extends to the heavens, His faithfulness extends to the clouds. That’s how great it is. This canopy above us can’t even contain the great faithfulness of God. Psalm 119 verse 90 says, Your faithfulness endures to all generations. And it was woven into the culture of the nation of Israel that they should remember God’s past mercies and kindnesses.
In fact, their festivals kind of revolved all around that. When you think of the major festivals in the Jewish calendar in the Old Testament days, that first festival of every year was Passover. And of course, the whole purpose of the Passover was to remember the fact that God was the Lord, their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. They were looking back and remembering his faithfulness to them by delivering them. And then the final feast of the calendar, of the Jewish calendar, that feast had different names because there were different aspects of the feast.
But one of its names, and maybe the central feature of it, was that it was the Feast of Booths. and they would build shelters. They’d all come together in God’s chosen place, which was, of course, Mount Zion, Jerusalem, and they would live in tents, basically, for a while. Why? To remember that they dwelt in tents during those years that God led them through the wilderness, before he brought them into the land.
So their festivals themselves were geared towards recalling the faithfulness of God. And for all those in Israel who were godly, all that faithful remnant throughout history, for all of them, that was the resolution of their hearts. That was their determination, as it’s expressed in Psalm 78, verse 4. This is the mind, this is the heart of the faithful in Israel.
We will not hide them. That’s God’s great works. We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done. And so that’s what we see in the very first verse. We have heard, it says, with our ears, our fathers have told us what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old.
And so there were these key redemptive events. these key mighty works of God that the people of Israel would again and again reflect on. And of course, the first was the Exodus. But here in verses two and three of Psalm 44, the focus is on the fact that God helped them to conquer the land. It’s the conquest of Canaan that’s in view. And God’s powerful help in that mighty event.
And you see how in this psalm, victory is ascribed entirely to God, over and over in different ways in this psalm, even. The people deflect any credit or any glory from themselves, and they give all the glory to God. Look at verse 3. For not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm save them, but your right hand and your arm and the light of your face. for you delighted them.” The use of that imagery of God’s hand or of His arm, that’s to reflect power, His strength.
But then there’s that phrase, the light of your face. Did you catch that? The light of your face. That, I think, is a deliberate reference back to that blessing that the Lord commanded Aaron to pronounce over His people. May the light of the countenance of God be upon His people. That’s what we have here. They experience that blessing, that Aaronic blessing, benediction. The idea of God’s face speaks of his presence, and the light of his face means his favor with that presence.
But the psalmist here doesn’t merely reflect on accounts he’s received from his forefathers about God’s faithfulness. He has personal experience of God’s faithfulness and of God’s power and his mighty works. The psalm writer himself and his contemporaries had that.
So in verse four, it all becomes then first person. You are my king, O God. Through you, we push down our foes, verse five. What he’s doing there is he’s acknowledging God as God and as his God, to borrow the language of our catechism. And in verses five through seven, we see a declaration of God’s powerful help that they had known, the contemporaries of the psalm writer himself. They had experienced God’s faithfulness. So he says, through you, we push down our foes.
And then look at verse seven. But you have saved us from our foes and have put to shame those who hate us. This further suggests a firsthand knowledge of God’s deliverance. Not just the accounts received from the fathers, but the experiences. So the psalmist recalls God’s past goodness. which is what we ought to do, too.
He acknowledges God’s faithfulness. And this is the testimony of God’s people in every generation. It’s the testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ throughout the ages. First Corinthians 1.9 says, God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, said, The Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one. God’s faithfulness. He’s shown it to us. God doesn’t have to prove himself, does he? He’s under no obligation to prove himself to us, and yet he does, over and over. He’s shown his faithfulness.
But there’s a sharp change in tone in the psalm, starting in verse nine, and it brings us to our second point. God has shown his faithfulness, but at the same time, we sometimes suffer without explanation. When we get to verse nine, all of a sudden it seems God’s blessing has been withdrawn. There’s a sudden and very stark change of mood in the psalm. Sort of exultant up until that point. But now, after reflecting on past mercies, the psalmist turns his attention to the present, which one writer described as the disastrous present. He’s experiencing perplexity in the face of what seems to be rejection by God. And he’s perplexed by this disgrace that he now suffers. And that right hand of God, that arm of God that he spoke of earlier, now it’s been withheld.
They’re not receiving help. Or so it would seem. And he gives them in the verses that follow this litany of the disastrous results of the fact that God seems to have backed out of the picture. They’re defeated, evidently in battle. The circumstances that inspired that brought about or gave rise to this psalm, who the author is, in what context was he writing? It’s a matter of debate among scholars. We don’t really know.
But whoever the writer is, they’ve experienced some kind of military defeat. They had turned back before the face of their enemies, and their forces had been scattered. So they’d suffered defeat. They’d also suffered loss. If you scan through those verses, it makes reference to them being plundered. Many had been slain, hence the reference to sheep to be slaughtered. They’d even been sold into slavery, some of them, it seems, and sold cheaply at that. Part of his lament is, God sold us, and he didn’t even demand a high price for us. So there’s defeat, there’s loss, and then there’s shame. And that seems to be the primary focus, doesn’t it?
Because verses 13 through 16 are all dedicated to that. just a verse or two about defeat and loss. But then when it comes to this sense of shame that the psalmist is expressing, we got four verses speaking of the fact that this people who were God’s once treasured possession have now just been humiliated. And I want you to look at how the psalmist makes reference to God and acknowledges him as what we could call the prime mover in all of this, the first cause of everything that’s going on. Because from verse 9 to verse 14, the words addressing God here, the words you have occur in every verse God is the one who’s done all this, is what the psalmist is saying.
It’s his work. And so when we see that, sometimes our natural inclination is to somehow come to God’s defense. to justify. I mean, we believe, as we talked about at the very beginning, we believe in the sovereignty of God. That’s why we have that tapestry illustration. That’s why I made my illustration about being backstage.
But when God is the one who’s made his people turn back from the foe, when God is the one who’s made them like sheep for slaughter and scattered them among the nations, we feel like maybe we need to to justify that or defend God. And so, one of the ways people do it is they’ll speak of God’s will in a couple of different senses.
They’ll say, well, God ordains some things, but then there are other things that He just permits. But I want to discourage you from going down that path. Let me read to you something that Alec Mateer wrote about that. He said, some find it helpful to distinguish between the directive will of God and the permissive will of God, but the Old Testament does not encourage this.
Since God directs all things, our course of life, our course in life is to trust him when we do not understand and to run to him for help when we are overwhelmed. That’s maybe one way we could describe and define the difference between a sort of a Greek mindset and a Hebrew mindset. A Greek way of thinking would feel a need to explain and justify that God ordained such things. The Hebrew mindset doesn’t have that problem. God’s sovereignty, man’s responsibility, two sides of the same coin, no problem, let’s drive on. That’s the Hebrew mindset. The Greek mindset is, well, how can God be sovereign and we be responsible?
I appreciate the fact that Dr. Mateer said, the Old Testament doesn’t do that. The Old Testament just embraces the apparent tension between those things. But I digress a little bit. all the catastrophes, catastrophes enumerated in this psalm are attributed to God’s providence.
And that’s hard. It can be hard. But there’s something that makes it even worse for the psalmist here. And that’s the fact that they have no clue why it’s happening. Sometimes there’s a pretty evident cause-effect relationship. Sometimes it’s crystal clear. We might be suffering something, but we know exactly why, or we’ve got a pretty good idea.
Oftentimes, especially in Scripture, God made it clear through prophetic oracles to his people. You’re about to suffer this, and this is why. Or God sends his prophet and says, because you, O house of Israel, have done this, this, and this, therefore, the Lord is going to bring these judgments upon you. He’s going to chastise you by doing this.
But in other cases, many, in fact, no explanation is provided. And maybe the quintessential example would be, well, I guess the quintessential example might be Christ himself. But think of Job. Job suffered so, so terribly. And even after the Lord restored him, restored him to health, restored all of his wealth, restored his family, to our knowledge, he never received an explanation as to why it all happened. He had to embrace the perplexity. He had to just deal with it and live through it and not have answers.
And to the psalmist and his contemporaries, to their knowledge, they had not broken faith with God, the text says. Look with me again at verses 17 and 18. All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you. I mean, we have not been false to your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way.
And then when we get to verse 19, there’s these two very poignant word pictures that the psalmist uses to capture the tragic condition that the people of God found themselves in. that God had broken them in the place of jackals. Jackals dwell in places of ruins. So this psalmist is expressing that they sort of feel like they’re in a place of ruin, the haunt of jackals, a desolate place. There’s one other place where jackals are pretty prolific, and that’s out on a battlefield after the battle, where they scavenge and feed on corpses.
So you’ve got that picture there. But then there’s the picture of the shadow of death. Did you see that? You’ve broken us in the place of jackals and covered us with the shadow of death. And that is set over against what we saw back in verse three, speaking of the light of God’s face. So you see those two things in opposition, the help and the blessing and the joy of being under the light of the face of God. in contrast with where the psalmist actually feels that he is, which is in the shadow of death.
So sometimes the faithful suffer with no explanation as to why. Think of Joseph, when he was going through what he did. And for many years after, What he suffered, he never understood why. It wasn’t for a long time that those answers came. And then we’ve got Job, of course. And yet it’s a frequent cry of people of God throughout Scripture, throughout the Psalms, isn’t it? When they pray to him and they just cry out, why?
And as we move into the New Testament, New Testament theology recognizes this also. And the New Testament teaches us to trust in Christ for the future and for future help, even when we sit in darkness. And so, Peter could write, therefore, let those who suffer according to God’s will, Entrust their souls to a faithful creator while doing good. God has shown his faithfulness. And of course, his sovereignty is acknowledged there. We might suffer according to God’s will, but if you’re suffering according to God’s will, entrust your soul to a faithful creator while doing good.
Now that brings us to our final point. It doesn’t shine brightly in this Psalm, and yet it’s there. We can be confident of God’s steadfast love. We can be confident of God’s steadfast love. That’s our third and final point. We see faith in the midst of the darkness of Psalm 44.
It’s not necessarily a faith that’s bubbling over with joy. It’s not necessarily a faith that’s triumphant in its tone, but it’s faith nonetheless. Because faith keeps calling upon the Lord. And you see the psalmist doing that in those final several verses, where he prays things like, awake, rouse yourself, Rise up. And I want to assure you that asking why isn’t contrary to faith. Asking God why is not contrary to faith. It can even be an act of faith. Look at the whys in this psalm. Why are you sleeping? Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and our oppression?
Even these petitions are acts of faith. They acknowledge God as God. And one the most important reason or the most important basis upon which we can confidently say that crying out to God and asking why is not contrary to faith is because the Lord Jesus did it. In His unimaginable suffering in soul and body on the cross, which culminated with God forsaking Him, Christ, for the first and only time in his brief life, not having a sense of the presence of the Father. What did he pray? What did he cry? Why?
That’s the ultimate example and fulfillment of this psalm, in fact. But the psalm ends with an earnest and believing prayer for deliverance. Look with me at verse 26. He prays, rise up, come to our help, redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love. Faith hopes for that light at the end of the tunnel, even if it can’t see it just yet. That’s what faith hopes for. Do not reject us forever, he says here. And he appeals to what? He appeals to the Lord’s steadfast love.
The ESV is pretty consistent in using the phrase or the term steadfast love to translate a very, very important Hebrew word. It’s the word chesed. That’s the word that occurs in the second half of every verse of Psalm 136. For his chesed endures forever. His faithfulness, his steadfast love endures forever. God has shown his faithfulness. Chesed is his faithful love. It’s that covenantal love that cannot change and never changes. That love that he has for you in Christ Jesus. And through Christ, you and I can trust in that very same steadfast love.
We have in the Old Testament a manual, an instruction manual for suffering when there’s no explanation for our suffering. And I commend it to you. It’s in Micah chapter 7. It’s an instruction manual for exercising faith when you’re in darkness. Micah 7. Verses 7 through 9. I’ll read it to you.
The prophet writes, But as for me, I will look to the Lord. I will wait for the God of my salvation. My God will hear me. Rejoice not over me, my enemy. When I fall, I shall rise. When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me. I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me. He will bring me out to the light. I shall look upon his vindication.”
And in the New Testament, we also receive comfort and encouragement for our suffering. Once again, this is from 1 Peter. The Apostle writes, after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. So Romans 8, as we read in our New Testament reading, Romans 8 draws from this psalm, it draws from verse 14, verse 22, and appropriates that theme of sheep to be slaughtered for the New Testament church. Why does it do that? Why that theme? Why that concept? Because Christians often suffer for no apparent reason. Christians often suffer with no explanation.
Paul’s implying that by drawing on Psalm 44 there. We’re considered a sheep to be slaughtered. We, like the psalmist, which his readers would have recognized and remembered, we suffer and we don’t know why. But more importantly, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Paul uses these words from Psalm 44 in Romans 8 to assure us that even when we sit in darkness, Even when we have no answers, even when our hearts cry out, why, God, in all those things, we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. We can be confident in God’s steadfast love. I just want to close by making the observation that When you and I are kind of living in the context of Psalm 44 verses one through eight, or when we’re in that verses one through eight zone, and things are pretty good, and we’re reflecting mostly on God’s faithfulness and enjoying and reveling in his goodness to us and his faithfulness. Even then, even when things are good, we’re still not seeing the front of the tapestry. we’re still not seeing what’s going on on stage. Whether we’re in sunshine or whether we’re in darkness, whether we’re in times of gladness or times of adversity, we don’t see all that God is doing. We’re always walking by faith.
When things are good, we’re not inclined to ask why, Lord, are we? Is it because we think we deserve good things? Maybe sometimes that creeps in. There are skeptics who ask, if there is a God, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Well, the better question might be, the better question definitely is, if there’s a God, and if he’s just, and if we’re sinners, which is all true, why is there so much pleasure in the world?
We deserve none of it. And in that sense, if you think about it, our sufferings are no more inexplicable than our blessings. But through Christ, we can trust in God’s future help while in the midst of inexplicable hardships. Let’s continue to encourage one another and remind one another of that. Let’s pray. Lord, you give us many, many good things. And we testify to you and to one another that you are faithful. Help us to come alongside and encourage one another in our sufferings. Thank you that you promise that we are more than conquerors through you, through our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Help us with confidence to look to you in faith for help in the future. Help us, Lord, when we sit in darkness. when we can’t see the action on stage, when we don’t see the beautiful side of the tapestry. Strengthen our faith, enable us to press on, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.