(Skip the rant and scroll down two paragraphs)
The Bible has so much to teach us. Each time I read it my modern sensibilities and conventions are challenged. We saw yesterday and today a Psalm by Asaph that ends with God shepherding His people. But we also see a rather macabre depiction of death, dying and vengeance. What is suitable for general audiences? Well God thinks that everyone who reads and even children should be learning His word--and His word, like today in Psalm 79, is graphic, bloody, full of war and grisly judgement and labels and categorisations. It is full of deeply disturbed emotional descriptions and outbursts of disbelief. One of the notable differences is between children who grow up agrarian or children who grow up urban. Because often the child who has grown up in a rural, agrarian life has lived with raising and slaughtering animals for food, and had to deal with loss, blood and death on the scale of a small farmstead. In smaller, poorer households there is not the money for veterinarians, doctors, firemen or police so all such matters are cared for by the family. And so blood, death and the ways of wild animals are everyday occurrences for these children and thus they are prepared better for the language of the Bible. Other children, many even today in fact, are surrounded by urban deprivation, street violence and the crude speech of a survivalist and often neglected and abused childhood “upbringing” and for these too the Bible is not shocking in some of the ways it might be to a small minority of the world insulated from the sight of death, blood and pain.
What all the children would have seen growing up in the time of Asaph or the time of Jesus was shocking to us. If Asaph was an exilic representative of Israel living in Babylon contemporary to Daniel, he would have seen empires trying to subdue the masses with fear. And Jesus grew up hearing of why His family fled from Herod or looking away from roadside crucifixion. We are fools if we think our society is really any different with film, news, internet and video games showing us every conceivable form of cruelty and death as an unending form of entertainment. And especially this time of the year as many have adopted the dark practices of trivialising such pain and calling it a night-before-holy-day (halloween) as a way to celebrate evil, death, and darkness. Strange that we can out of hand reject and dismiss the Bible and its descriptions of what God will do and what His people are facing but glamorise, trivialise and caricaturize cruelty and death while seeing it as a harmless children’s holiday. People, where do you get your wisdom, morals and sensibilities? Not from God, the Bible or Jesus. Because if you did you would read these passages very differently. Can you hear the current news in Gaza and further afield and not think of these passages? And I even run the risk of being censored by making such comparisons. And yet the Bible is replete with these depictions, prayers, requests and sentiments. We have hardly seen anything else but that for the past 79 chapters and the Psalms are thought by many to be the peaceful, poetic, calming restful passages in the Bible. From Genesis to Revelation I read an entirely different book than people caricaturize it to be. So everytime I face this dilemma I have to first say to myself, I am the one at fault. My society is the one at fault. The norms and conventions of my world and education are at fault. The Bible is not at fault. I do not need to cringe or shrink back from the Bible as if it is something to be embarrassed of. The Bible doesn’t need to be made somehow more holy or acceptable. My thinking needs to be made more holy and acceptable. The problem does not rest with the Bible or the archaic culture. I am not more advanced, certainly not more civilised and no less macabre. I and you would be lying to ourselves if we thought that the Bible is somehow depicting a world other than ours today. Things have NOT changed. We as a human society around the globe are just as barbaric as ever. Our bloodlust is no less than the days of the ancient Roman gladiator games. Don’t fool yourself. Populations around the world are easily whipped up into rampaging, raping, pillaging, destruction mobs all over the globe. In my short life I have seen first hand the ugliness of this world and I recognize the words of this Psalm in the news. So we all came to find Jesus and I just went off on a rant.
Looking for Jesus in the Psalms I can see that in the midst of cruel and unspeakably inhumane death Asaph still believes that God is a God of compassion, forgiveness and salvation. Asaph longs for a God who will shepherd His people. Jesus is that shepherd Asaph longs for and that God provides, then and now.
Main Point: Call out to God for a compassionate and forgiving justice because it is the only place we have to turn for forgiveness, salvation and justice. Jesus is the compassionate, forgiving, justice-giving Saviour who answers our prayers for help in unfair times.
I was in my early 20s after Bible school when an old retired missionary taught me the word ‘reciprocity’ in terms of expectations of justice and fairness. Maybe the way it was described to me was a divinely superintended karma or sow and reap cycle.
So why does the Bible seem to sometimes require a blind justice and other times it seeks an extraordinary compassion for the perpetrator as well as the victim? I think you will not like the answer and the answer will rub against your pride. God is better than humans. God is right. God is just. God is all knowing. God has all the facts. God does not make mistakes concerning justice or fairness or innocence. Humans are selfish, unjust, and prone to unfair bias. They are limited in knowledge, wisdom and understanding and hold to “rules”, conventions, and social mores that are entirely inconsistent and even ridiculous. Again the fault lies with me not with God.
That same missionary used a bible story to teach me about a God of reciprocity. A God that deserves better from us but surprisingly gives us better than we deserve. God sent Jermiah to speak to the Rechabites. And then God made a point about how people held to family rules and honoured their own ideas more than they honour God.
The Recabites do not drink wine to this day because their ancestor Jehonadab told them not to. But I have spoken to you again and again, and you refuse to obey me.
Time after time I sent you prophets, who told you, "Turn from your wicked ways, and start doing things right. Stop worshiping other gods so that you might live in peace here in the land I have given to you and your ancestors." But you would not listen to me or obey me.
God can be angry against sin. v.5
The God of the Old Testament is the same God of the New Testament and He has not changed.
“Since we are receiving a Kingdom that is unshakable, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe.
For our God is a devouring fire.”
“Dear friends, if we deliberately continue sinning after we have received knowledge of the truth, there is no longer any sacrifice that will cover these sins.
There is only the terrible expectation of God's judgment and the raging fire that will consume his enemies.
For anyone who refused to obey the law of Moses was put to death without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
Just think how much worse the punishment will be for those who have trampled on the Son of God, and have treated the blood of the covenant, which made us holy, as if it were common and unholy, and have insulted and disdained the Holy Spirit who brings God's mercy to us.”
I invite you to compare the expectations of Asaph with those of Paul. I’d suggest that the Christian suffering persecution today has essentially the same hope as the Jewish exile under the Babylonian cruelty.
“May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace. ...
In his justice he will pay back those who persecute you.
And God will provide rest for you who are being persecuted and also for us when the Lord Jesus appears from heaven. He will come with his mighty angels,
in flaming fire, bringing judgment on those who don't know God and on those who refuse to obey the Good News of our Lord Jesus.
They will be punished with eternal destruction, forever separated from the Lord and from his glorious power.”
2 Thessalonians 1:2, 6-9 NLT
So in this cry for justice, where is the shepherding care and compassion? The mother bear can be unbelievably ferocious to the enemy but also patient and caring to the naughty cubs.
Aspah still saw help in God’s character.
God is a God of compassion.
“Let your compassion quickly meet our needs”
God is a God of salvation.
“Help us, O God of our salvation!”
God is a God of forgiveness.
“Save us and forgive our sins”
God is a God who listens.
“Listen to the moaning of the prisoners.”
God is a God who shepherds us
“Then we your people, the sheep of your pasture,.”
Conclusion:
Jesus is the compassionate Shepherd who is listening out for your cry for help and justice.
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