L.D. 10, Psalm 42 "Present in Absence" Scott Hoezee

With slight variations, the Apostles' Creed is embraced by the majority of Christians worldwide. This creed, the articles of which are being explained in this part of the Catechism, is always a key topic of review whenever anyone makes profession of faith here. As I always say to profession candidates, Christian people of all denominations agree about far more than they disagree about. But even within that broader unity of beliefs, it is amazing how many sub-points of disagreement you can nevertheless find.

The providence of God is one such point of contention. Whether or not it happens to be your favorite song, most believers would not have difficulty with the theology behind the old spiritual "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." In history there have been people in the Deist camp of thought--Deists claim that God is an absentee landlord. If the universe is like a giant clock, God is the one who gave it a hefty winding up at the dawn of time but since then has been content to let the clock tick down on its own without God's further interference. That's Deism.

But Christian people have always embraced a far more involved God. As we said two weeks ago, the God who created the entire cosmos is the same God we name as our Father. God is not just a little involved in our lives and in the wider world, he is somehow very involved and very invested as any good father inevitably is.

So far so good in terms of a Christian belief that you could flag as being pretty close to universal. But going on from there, it doesn't take long before lots of disagreements arise. All it takes is for some cataclysm to occur, and the differences of opinion among Christians rise to the surface with meteoric speed. Whether it is the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11 or a hurricane that devastates Florida, no sooner does the dust settle and you can hear at least two distinct theological voices talking about God's role in it all.

There are always those who say boldly and confidently that the Lord directly sent this disaster to punish us for sin, to teach us a lesson, to foster greater dependence on God, or to accomplish some goal that we cannot as yet see but that God for sure is actively pursuing. Then there are those who say that this bad or evil thing has nothing to do with the plan of God. Disasters of all kinds are the opposite of God's desire for this world and he no sooner could actively send such a thing our way than any good father would willingly infect his child with the measles. God is not absent from us in the midst of carnage but rather than being the director with the bullhorn orchestrating the whole thing, God is the one who sits in the rubble, weeping with us and strengthening us to go on in faith.

Of course, there is a small chorus of other voices in all this, too. There are those Christians (and some non-Christians, too) who say that they don't want to believe in any God who would send cruel suffering our way. At the same time, there are those who say that they cannot tolerate the thought of a universe in which God is not the active agent of all things because otherwise life seems altogether too chaotic and uncertain--better to have a God who causes accidents to happen than live in a world where accidents happen that even God can but lament.

As we will see, even biblically there are cross-currents that provide challenges to all sides. Biblically speaking we cannot deny that bad things happen that God despises--God even promises to take vengeance on those who perpetrate evil deeds. But if that is so, it's a little hard to claim that God is the cause behind the very deeds he vows to avenge. If I shove you into the path of a moving car, it doesn't make sense for me later to say I will punish the driver for not stopping sooner. Then again, biblically speaking, we also cannot deny any number of passages in which God is said to have had a hand in a specific event that involved disasters of one kind or another.

Something of this very conundrum is on display when we bring together Psalm 42 and Lord's Day 10 of the Catechism. John Calvin was one of history's strongest advocates for a huge doctrine of divine sovereignty. That is to say, Calvin presented a God who was involved in everything that happened: the good, the bad, the ugly, the indifferent, the in-between. Seldom is Calvin's influence on the Catechism more obviously on display than in Questions and Answers 27 & 28. The world sketched for us here is one without chance, without randomness. There are no caveats, no hesitations, no wiggle room for doubt. Instead we have very absolute language: all things (including very negative ones like disease and disaster) come to us directly from the hand of God. Similarly, all creatures are completely vulnerable to the will and the whim of God such that nobody moves, and nobody can be moved by anyone else, unless God is right there doing all the pushing and pulling.

Lord's Day 10 is Calvinist sovereignty doctrine to a T. Psalm 42, however, (and its twin of Psalm 43) presents a rather different picture. Here bad things have happened and continue to happen to the psalmist but the only conclusion to be drawn from all this unhappiness is not that God is right there causing this all to happen but rather the answer is that such evil things happen only because God has withdrawn himself. It is God's absence, not his providential presence, that explains life's hard knocks. Wicked men are the perpetrators, God is the longed-for rescuer from those wicked men.

It's not as though God cannot act in the face of this world's evil. In fact, the only reason to ask for God to rescue you from dire straits is if you believe God can intervene in the first place. But that is still different from the Catechism's claim that God causes the mayhem to begin with. This world's cynics are asking the psalmist "Where is your God?" and the most bitter part of Psalm 42 is that the psalmist himself doesn't know the answer. But one thing is clear: this psalmist would never answer by saying, "Where is my God? He's right here, sending me the very evil of which you wicked men are just God's agents!"

So there, in short compass, is the dilemma we face when parsing providence in the face of real life and its often harsh realities. But before we go one step further I want to acknowledge that this subject is never a dry, academic discussion. After just over a decade standing up here in front of you, all I need to do is pause long enough to scan the pews and in so doing I begin to sense a flood of unhappy things.

Some of you have lost children and grandchildren. You bear griefs that defy description. Others of you are weighed down with regrets and are haunted by the memory of this or that failure from years ago. Some of you suffer daily--after a lifetime of doing your best to stay healthy and fit and avoid high-risk behaviors, even still you have been afflicted with a disease that will never let you go until it has killed you. Still others of you suffer the daily torment of a rocky marriage, of a rebellious child, of a dead-end job. In other words, few of us spend the bulk of our time pondering the place, purpose, and role of God over against some anonymous suffering that happens way out there in the wider world. Our questions are more personal, and just so more acute. So please don't think this sermon is meant to be some arid or cavalier attempt to talk about something as though it has only a cerebral, passing application to the people in this room today. I know that this can be one of the most painful of all topics for many of us to approach: where is God when it hurts?

But it is precisely for that reason that I suspect Psalm 42 may speak to some of us with a voice more credible than the Catechism's tone. In the end, both the psalm and the Lord's Day are conveying the same bottom line, but how we get to that bottom line can have a shaping effect on our larger view of what it means to serve a God of providence. Because the Catechism cuts short our attempt to ask questions even as Psalm 42 is loaded with a battery of deeply wrenching questions. The Catechism tells us that whatever happens, we had best just accept it because, like that bad-tasting medicine your mother gave you, it's good for you. The psalmist doesn't believe that, however. He is convinced that much of what he is experiencing is bad. He doesn't think God is giving him this strong medicine. In fact, he as much as says that when God returns, he'll know because that will be when good things return and bad things stop.

It is that core conviction that creates the atmosphere in which lament is possible. Who among us would dare to lament something that we were convinced had come directly from God? Lament directed toward God is possible only when we believe that God himself must in some way be unhappy about the same state of affairs that is making us unhappy.

By way of analogy, let's say something hurtful or disappointing happens to one of my kids--someone at school was terribly mean to my child or the child did not win a contest he or she had entered and worked so hard to win. If I am a good father, I likewise will feel very, very bad about this. So if my child cries to me about it or asks "Why, Daddy?" then I will receive this lament in a compassionate way. The situation is very different, however, if we are talking about some very sensible household rules that I as a parent have established. If my child doesn't like those rules, or if he or she gets punished for having violated those rules, then any negative feedback I get about this will come to me not as a lament but as a complaint borne of an unwillingness to accept my wisdom in such matters. And that will not garner much compassion from me!

Lament such as we find all over the place in the Bible is possible only if and when we are sure we are not being deservedly punished, we are not receiving a gift in disguise, or we are convinced that this present tragedy is not the way things are supposed to be (including from God's own perspective). Because if it is a punishment, a disguised gift, or the direct will of God, then lamenting it would be wrong. But does that mean there is no such thing as providence? If things happen to us that even God wishes were not so, is the world out of control? Is life random and motored along by dumb luck? The answer to that is no. The proof comes from the fact that this entire psalm is addressed to God! That is the irony of the psalms of lament: the psalmist talk to God about the absence of God! And that represents one very gritty, very plucky form of faith!

But Psalm 42 contains another wonder--an act of faith that is as profound as it is practical as it is comforting. When this man is taunted by those who ask, "Where is your God?" he does not come up with an answer. Most of us have long known this poem's opening line about the deer panting for streams of water. What we may forget, though, is that this image is telling us that for this psalmist, God's absence is every bit as real as is the lack of a stream for a dehydrated deer in the desert. It's not just that his man's desire for God is as intense as a thirsty deer's desire for water. More significantly is that the target of that longing just cannot be located for the moment.

So what can be done? As we have seen in other sermons on this lyric psalm, the turning point comes in verse 6 with the "therefore" statement: "Therefore, I will remember you." The psalmist then goes on to list several times, key moments from his past, when the blessing of God was undeniable. And somehow, by this faith-filled act of remembering God's love in the past, the reality of God's love in this Godforsaken present moment comes back even as the future brightens up, too. There is here no answer to the why questions of suffering. From first to last Psalm 42 contends that it is exactly the absence of God--or at least God's lack of intervention--that has brought about this bad situation. But a ray of hope is shed when glimmers of God's past goodness illumine the present moment.

It is on this same point that Lord's Day 10 is also very strong in reminding us that whatever the ins and outs of life may be, nothing can separate us from God's love. There are those times when things go against us, and those are the moments when the brighter promises of the gospel seem the most dim and faint. There are those seasons when the tears in our eyes make it difficult to see God's love and when the sobs that choke our throats make it tough for us to hear even the most well-meant expressions of pious hope. Those are the times when we need something to grab onto, and sometimes it is the past, and our memory of God's love to us back then, that somehow helps.

Above all what we collectively hold in our sacred memory bank is that the worst thing that could ever happen already did happen to Jesus on the cross. Jesus experienced abandonment by his Father exactly so that this would never happen to us. No matter how abandoned we sometimes feel, we will never know what Jesus felt in those final, hellish moments before his death. As I have suggested before, even the most hardened atheist alive cannot and does not know the terror of living in a Godless world. No one alive this day knows what it is like to be so cut off from access to God as to lead to a darkness and an existential meaninglessness so total as to suffocate. But Jesus did experience that.

What we remember is that the providence of God somehow is able to abide with us even when this world does its level worst to us. The reason we can believe that is because God's own Son not only went to hell for us, he came back from there as the cosmic victor. If God our Father could bring Jesus his Son back from that point that is lower than any point to which any one of us will ever sink again, then the memory of that grand rescue is what bolsters our hope that we, too, will never slip through God's fingers of providence. It won't happen because it can't happen.

I cannot prove that to you, and I refuse to compensate for that by washing out your suffering with some tidy explanation that claims it's finally not a bad a thing at all but really a positive thing that you dare not even lament. No, there are any number of genuinely lamentable situations we are right to cry about, even before God's face. And if it is true that God himself cringes to see his children suffer, then lament--which is different than some whiny and self-serving complaint--lament is an appropriate moral posture to assume. What we cling to in a bold, gritty faith is the memory of the cross and the resurrection.

"Therefore, I will remember you," Psalm 42 says at its turning point. We may not know precisely what past blessings the land of the Jordan, Mount Hermon, and Mount Mizar summoned up for this psalmist. Those had been locales of God's past goodness, and the summoning to memory of those things helped. What we do know is what the remembrance of Golgotha means now for us. What we do know is that on a night long ago, Jesus took bread, blessed it, and said, "Take, eat, remember."

Jesus knew that in a world that crucifies the God in its midst, life would not always be fair or easy for his followers, either. In that upper room on that night in which he was betrayed, Jesus was not saying, "Don't forget me!" Instead he was saying, remember how God was somehow present even when he was undeniably absent. Remember that Jesus is proof that you can never slip down so far as to be out of God's reach. Answers to the whys of life may not always come. But answers are not what we need. What we need is to say of our Lord in this Lenten Season and always, "Therefore, I will remember you, abandoned, alone, and finally dead on that old rugged cross." Because when we remember that, we too can say that no matter how awful it gets--and God knows it gets really awful at times--even so, we too will yet praise him, our Savior and our God. This is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God! Amen.