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Remembering God

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The Scripture reading for this Sunday is Psalm 85.

We don’t usually spend a lot of time remembering how good God used to be when things are going pretty well. We don’t wonder why God can seem so distant when we are in the middle of a time that God seems to be so close. We don’t wonder why God’s promises seem so far off when everything seems to be falling into place.

We wonder those things when the opposite is true. We remember how good God used to be when, at the moment, God doesn’t seem so nice. We wonder where in the world God is when He seems so far away. We wonder about God’s promises when it feels like He isn’t keeping them (or even when we feel like He can’t keep them).

We’ve all been there.

For the first two-and-a-half weeks of July 2010 I didn’t think much about how good God used to be, or wonder where He was, or worry about Him keeping His promises. Our oldest daughter had just been born and we were proud parents (and tired ones, too). I was in the middle of my first internship in seminary and I was excited about the summer.

But then I woke up on July 19th. Somehow, in between 5:30am and 7:30am I had missed five or six phone calls from my parents - they never, ever, call that early. I knew something bad had happened. I remember my hands shaking uncontrollably as I hit redial and waited for them to pick up. When they picked up all I could ask was, “What happened?”

My uncle, a 43-year-old father of four, had died in a collision with a moose while driving home from a farming event in Quebec.

All the sudden I began asking the questions, I began wondering, I began to sound a lot like the psalmist in Psalm 85 calling upon God to make things better, to keep His promises. I began remembering, as the psalmist does in the first three verses, how God had been good but in that moment it all seemed like a distant memory.

In Psalm 85, it’s obvious that things aren’t going so well for God’s people. The psalmist remembers how God had been good to His people, but at present things aren’t that way. In verses 4-7 the psalmist calls upon God to restore, to relent, to revive, to forgive, to draw near, and to bring salvation. The psalmist longs for God to return to His ways described in the first three verses because in that moment God doesn’t seem like that.

We’ve all been there.

Maybe you’re even there right now.

However, the psalmist reminds us of something in the rest of the Psalm. Even when things aren’t going well and God doesn’t seem nice or safe, we have more to go on than just a memory of days gone by. We have God’s promises. While the language of verses 8-13 is purposefully vague in terms of time, the psalmist reminds us that we have hope when we view our present reality through faith.

Things might be really tough right now, but our hope extends beyond our present circumstances. We have eternal hope through Jesus Christ. In Him we have seen, “Steadfast love and faithfulness meet, righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs up from the ground and righteousness looks down from the sky.” Through Him, we know that the Lord will give what is good.

We might not see it today. We might not even feel it. But we see Jesus. We hear that Word of peace from God (and so, as the psalmist warns, let us not turn back to folly).

Surely His salvation is near to those who fear Him. Amen.

 

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