In the Old Testament, few gods other than YHWH (the name of the Israelite God) warrant mention.  The Old Testament witness is univocal in its condemnation of idolatry but usually these alt-deities are lumped into categories, “gods” or “idols.”  However, there are a few pagan objects of worship that warrant mention by name because of their particular allure to the covenant people.  Among those specifically referenced are Baal, the chief god of Canaanite cult, Asherah, the mother goddess of Canaanite and Babylonian origin, and Molech, a Canaanite god notorious for commanding human sacrifice.^[1]Mentioned by name in Lev. 18:21; 20:2-5; 1 Kings 11:7; 2 Kings 23:10; Isa. 57:9; Jer. 32:35   The nation of Israel was not like our own consumerist culture looking for the flashiest spiritual fads or the latest most “relevant” message to allow a person to be their best self.  Rather, these deities were much like the political parties of the ancient world.  The idols named in the Old Testament came with promises attached to them.  Deities promised fertility, harvests, victory in battle, all it required was the devotion of the worshipper.  For the most part, these idols were a part of a pantheon of divinity and thus did not require the sole devotion of its members.  YHWH seems to be unique in this regard.  The OT writers go to great lengths to display differences between the way of YHWH, the way of holiness, justice, and mercy with the way of the idols, who seek to divert Israel’s gaze away from YHWH and are powerless to bring about blessing of provision they promise. The psalmist in Ps. 106 reflects:

35 but they mingled with the nations and learned to do as they did. 36 They served their idols, which became a snare to them. 37 They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; 38 they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood. 39 Thus they became unclean by their acts, and prostituted themselves in their doings.

The psalmist describes his own heritage of faith, a history of idolaters.   Often in the course of its idolatry, the nation of Israel does not explicitly give up on faith in YHWH.   They simply try to mix it with faith in idols.  While YHWH forbids any image trying to capture the essence of who he is, the pagan cults allowed for gods that you can see.  There is something alluring about an idol, about a god you can hold in your hand, a god that promises to get things done for you no matter the cost.  YHWH demanded unflinching, singular devotion but the pagan idols let you have your religion a la carte—a little YHWH, a little fertility goddess.  It’s all very pragmatic.

We live in a bleeding world.  On the whole, America in 2018 is violent, hostile, embittered, and divided.  Schools, concerts, and churches have all become shooting galleries of horror and devastation.^[2]I write this in wake of the horrible devastation in Parkland but unfortunately, I know this content will be evergreen, not needing one event as its referent  I am not sure if a world in the throes of sin and idolatry can evince itself as anything other.  But here’s my fear.  When I survey the world that is hostile to God—the world that in John 3:16, God loves so much that he gives his Son for them— and the world of the white evangelical church in America.^[3]I think it is important, in this instance, to distinguish this particular segment of the larger evangelical church as the majority of our Black, Latino-American, Asian-American and Native American … Continue reading, I do not see the kind of difference I would expect. What I see, instead, is a church that is trying to combine a small understanding of devotion to God with fervent devotion to political entities and thus both literally and figuratively is sacrificing its sons and daughters at the altar of the idols.  The church, in not modeling the peaceful way of Jesus is aiding and abetting the proliferation of weapons of indiscriminate murder in America.  In large part, the white evangelical church has blindly supported a political agenda that, in the face of heinous acts of mass murder, essentially shrugs and says, “the blood that was shed is the price of upholding the 2nd Amendment.”  Sounds a lot like sacrifice, does it not?

The loss of life is unspeakable, but as horrible as that result it, it is not the only consequence. Not only do the lives of the innocent suffer but future generations face the consequences of our lack of faithfulness.  The white evangelical church in America is shrinking^[4]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/08/15/white-christian-america-is-dying/?utm_term=.9aa7d1395c5f because it has forsaken its witness in the face of political pragmatism.  It remains to be seen what effect that this will have on the wider church in America.  I tend to think a new kind of evangelicalism will rise from the ashes, led by minority leaders and female voices that are already emerging, but that hope does not stopping me from  lamenting over the church of my own cultural heritage, weeping because we do not know the things that make for peace.

The church, in not modeling the peaceful way of Jesus, is aiding and abetting the proliferation of weapons of indiscriminate murder in America.

It is possible to be love America and to love Jesus.  But we can only learn to love America rightly by loving Jesus fully.   Anything less than the God revealed in Jesus is an idol.  Both God and the idols demand sacrifice.  There will be blood. Will we continue to sacrifice the blood of the innocent to our idols of political relevance or will we cling to the blood of Jesus shed on behalf of the world to make peace?  Will we give up our American rights and embrace our God-given mission of peace and mercy?   Either we will sacrifice the blood of the innocent and our witness along with it or we will offer our bodies as living sacrifices, burning with the love and beauty of our God.

The 23rd psalm is so simple in its beauty, so evocative in its imagery. For generations, it has inspired artists and comforted mourners. I want to connect this psalm with my reflections on Psalm 21 and Psalm 22. Psalm 21 is triumphant, God will demonstrate his power. Psalm 22 is apoplectic, “My God why have you forsaken me?” Psalm 22 screams the questions that Psalm 21 should rightfully raise, “Is God’s victory and hope certain even in the darkest moments of life?” In Psalm 23, the psalmist no longer has a voice to shout his objections in the assembly, rather he whispers them in sobs all alone in the dark. Psalm 23 takes the question, “How?”, to its fullest extent and in doing so gives us a glimpse into the heart of the Gospel of Jesus: “How does God keep his promises in the valley of the shadow of death?”

You see, the promises of God always run the risk of disintegrating into platitudes. Quasi-spiritual assurances like, “everything happens for a reason” or “God works everything for the good of those who love him” are nice and all but don’t do us a lot of good when we are lost in the abyss, traversing treacherous terrain, surrounded by predators, exhausted from walking and fear. Ideas are nice, they are content of faith, but in the face of certain death, I need more.

Enter Psalm 23. The psalmist proclaims, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” He proclaims the tender care of the Lord in sustaining and guiding him. David expresses the innocent bliss of trusting in God to provide. But then, almost on a dime, he turns from the sunlight to the shadow. “Even though I walk through the darkest valley ^[1]I still like the feel of the  traditional translation “valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

Did you catch that? The question of God-forsakenness in Psalm 22 is given its free expression to deconstruct any notions of simplistic faith. What about the valley of the shadow death? Am I forsaken there? How are you going to keep your promises there? According to Psalm 23, God will not merely decree his will from far off in Heaven, he will not leave us to rest on cliches while we wallow in the darkness, he won’t even miraculously light up that darkness in a demonstration of sheer power. No, none of this will do. How will God keep his promises? He himself will come to us. He is right there, walking in he valley of the shadow of death as he walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening.

Psalm 23 doesn’t just tell us we are not abandoned, that we will not be forgotten or forsaken. It shows us. The Lord is our shepherd, we don’t have to be afraid not simply because he is powerful, good, full of justice and mercy. He of course is all of those things and more. We don’t have to be afraid because he is here. His rod, his staff, his table. Even in the darkest hour, he comes to us.

What is in me that needs to die before I die?   Lent, for all its caricatures of giving up chocolate or not drinking so much red wine, is the seasonal embodiment of Jesus’ promise that those who wish to find their life must lose it.  Lent is a journey away from petty idolatries and distractions towards a life focused on the Jesus way—the way of sacrifice and meekness, the way that , incidentally, happens to lead to truth and life.  As Christians around the world receive the ashes tomorrow and we hear the sobering words, “Remember from dust you have come and to dust you shall return,” we are not engaging in an exercise of cynical fatalism or morbid asceticism.  Nor are we merely wallowing in self-righteous self-pity.  Rather, we are taking the first step, with Jesus, towards Jerusalem:  towards the upper room, towards Gethsemane and Golgotha, and ultimately, the empty tomb.

The ashen cross smudged on the foreheads of faithful children, women, and men declares with the psalmist that we are but a breath, a flower cut from the bush that dies as soon as it flourishes (Ps. 103).  Furthermore, we wear the dark marks of our humanity and our failure to live in proper relationship with God, one another, and creation.  We have sinned and sin leaving mangled relationships in every part of its scorched-earth wake needs more than just a simple, “sorry.”   Ash Wednesday, as the gateway to the lenten season, is a funeral for our idolatrous lives, the clear-eyed acknowledgment that we have sinned and we will die.  We clothe ourselves in ashes and sackcloth mourning our own shortcomings, repenting of our sins.  And yet underlying even this judgment is an indescribable current of hope that looks to a day when God himself will clothe our feeble mortal bodies with the imperishable garments of eternity (1 Cor. 15).

When I, as a pastor, impose the ashes, I look into the face of people I love and walk with everyday and tell them one of the two or three truest things I am capable of saying to them:  “You are going to die.”  When Christ talked to his disciples of his impending sacrifice he followed up with an equally cryptic statement:  “But in three days I will rise again” (Mark 8:31).  The Messiah, according to Peter and many of his contemporaries, was supposed to restore the Kingdom.  He couldn’t exactly manage those affairs from the grave.  But the disciples, as a microcosm for the world at large, fail to understand what Jesus is telling them.   When Jesus is telling his disciples, “I am going to die,” he is in the same breath saying, “I am going to live and you are too!”  We would have God form a bureaucracy and give us a cushy job.   Instead he offers us himself and his eternal kingdom.  God’s life offered to us is always better than the one we would dream up for ourselves.  Even our imaginations need resurrecting.

But first, the dying.  There is no get-rich-quick scheme in the kingdom of God, no life-hacks for eternity.  There is no way to resurrection except through death.  Jesus, as the incarnate Son of God, died everyday to his own wants and desires and submitted to the will of the Father.  Lent is a 40-day period where we practice the art of dying well—the art of dying like Jesus.   But just as Jesus’ death is not ultimately about death, we don’t die merely for the sake of dying.  We die so that we may live.  We fast so that we may feast.  We deny ourselves so that we might share.  We allow the Spirit to do meticulous surgery on our hearts so that those renewed hearts might beat for God and for others.  So the question of lent remains what needs to die in us before we die?  What needs to die in us so that we may live?  “The world is not conclusion,” Emily Dickinson wrote.  Death is not the end.  But the only way to resurrection is to come and die.

The juxtaposition between Psalm 21 and Psalm 22 could not be more striking. Look at the end of Ps. 21:

Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength! We will sing and praise your power.

Now read the beginning of Ps. 22:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? In many ways the bookends of these two psalms frame the Christian life.

Psalm 22 tests the integrity of the promises of Ps 21. It’s one thing to declare in the sanctuary that “your hand will find out all your enemies; your right hand will find out those who hate you” and another to be tortured mercilessly at the hands of those very same enemies. And the question the two psalms ask together, “Do these promises hold up in the darkest nights of the soul?” Psalm 22 moves us from the comfort of the congregation to the bloodthirsty chaos of a lynch mob. You can hear the thuggish mocking of the strong bulls ^[1]Psalm 22v12 and the ravenous lions ^[2]Psalm 22v13 surround our psalmist.

As the people who follow the crucified Jesus, we walk the line of trust and hope, resting in the promises of God and being literally God-abandoned, stretched to our breaking and pierced by this life.  If the promises of God are true, promises for life from barrenness, life from exile, life from death, then they have to be true in our moments of God-forsakenness.

This psalm contains such stunning poetry that finds its fullest manifestation in Jesus. As he is poured out like water, as his bones are jolted from their joints, and his heart melts like a candle that has been forgotten about, ultimately to be laid in the dust of death.^[3]Ps. 22vv14-18 is so hauntingly beautiful and bears witness to so much of the pain of life; Jesus holds on to the promise. He holds on to the promises of God that God will hear and save^[4]Ps. 22vv19-21, that the poor shall have their share ^[5]Ps. 22vv26, that the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the Lord like waters cover the seas ^[6]Ps. 22vv27-28, and that his arm is long enough to reach even to the grave ^[7]Ps. 22vv29-30.

The line between victory and utter defeat is  tear-soaked, blood-stained, anguish-ridden faith. Are the promises of God true? Ps. 21 says they are true in the congregation in the songs of the people of God. Ps. 22 says, yes, they are even true in the blackest night, in the curses of the enemies of God. The cross is simultaneously the place where all hope is lost and the only place that hope is possible. Jesus, holds onto the promises of God with nail-pierced hands, this is faith that proves God’s word true.

Strength, power, might. These are words that focus on assertion, establishing one’s dominion through rigorous training, subduing enemies, superior strategy, or just having bigger guns. The king in Israel was the tangible manifestation of the nation’s vitality. The king not only set the defense budget but led the troops into battle. It would be completely understandable and appropriate for the king to pray for specific things that the nation needed to be successful:  Dear Lord, please bring us faster horses, stronger armor, sharper arrows, favorable weather, and smarter soldiers. But his prayer here is not an itemized list of things you need to win at war. In fact there is no anxiety here about scarcity or uncertainty. In v. 8, the king shifts into the future tense, declaring—prophesying, really—what the Lord will do to the enemies of Israel.

Where does this confidence come from?

Simple. The king knows where his strength comes from and he knows the promises that the Lord has made to Israel. He proclaims to the congregation, “In your strength, the king rejoices, O Lord, and in your help how greatly he exults!”^[1]Psalm 21v1 If anyone in the nation of Israel could convince himself that the success or failure of the kingdom was all on his shoulders, it was certainly the king. When the nation first demanded for a king to lead them, Samuel warned them that the biggest danger is that the king would not put his trust in the Lord first. Here, we see the king, as proxy for the nation as a whole, placing his trust in the strength of the Lord. But it’s not just that the king trusts in the Lord, he knows the Lord and thus knows his mission in the world.

For the king trusts in the Lord, and through the steadfast love of the Most High he shall not be moved.^[2]Psalm 21v7

The monarch attributes everything that he has, his life, his strength, his glory to the Lord. And in that trust, he is secure knowing that the task that is before him is not his alone. God, in his hesed, his steadfast love to the people of Israel, will go before them. For us, this raises the obvious question, where does our trust reside? This is an important question and is foundational to a life with God. But beyond that, this psalm asks the question, what task are you undertaking that requires the kind of holy confidence on display in the words of the king. For the king, trust was a matter of life or death not just for him but for his entire kingdom. Accordingly, perhaps our faithfulness is not simply about us, but is a question of life or death for our families, our neighbors, and our cities.

When you think about it, the claims of the covenant people of the Old Testament are not even slightly absurd. At no time in its history was Israel the dominant power in its region.  Rarely did the nation enjoy peace and autonomy.  Mostly, the nation was being squeezed like a vice by forces from Egypt (the south) and forces from Assyria, Babylon, or Persia (the north). And yet there is insistence that the children of Abraham lie at the center of the story of the world and that Zion, the City of David, is the geographic center of the world. The promise to Abraham was always a universal one, weaving the disparate strands of the tribes and nations of the world into one unified cord. If the God of Israel, YHWH, was trying distinguish the nation of Israel among the nations of the world he certainly had an interesting way of doing it. Surely, Israel, constantly fighting for its life, might suggest an alternative plan.

And yet the Lord will not short-circuit the process. He has called a people, a people to be a nation of priests, a people to be witnesses to his salvation and loving kindness, a people to be formed and shaped by his passion and words, a people which would form the very tabernacle of his presence. He knows this people will only be able to fulfill these tasks in fits and starts. He knows that there will be pain, confusion, betrayal, and injustice. If he wanted to accomplish a certain task, he should be fired for his severe lapse in judgment and inefficiency to execute his vision but the way the Lord goes about things suggest he may have something entirely different in mind.

Psalm 20 is a corporate psalm offered on behalf of the king of Israel. As we hinted at above, the king of Israel often entered battle with a smaller military budget, technological disadvantages, and troop shortages. And still the psalmist insists, “May we shout for joy over your victory, and in the name of our God set up our banners.” Is this just glib optimism from a self-deluded startup—on the modern geopolitical spectrum, this would be like Uzbekistan saying, “Hey Russia, hey China, let’s do this.” Or perhaps this confidence, this triumphalism is not vain nationalism but pointing us towards something larger.

“Now I know that the Lord will help his anointed; he will answer from his holy heaven with mighty victories by his right hand. Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is i the name of the Lord our God. They will collapse and fall, but we shall rise and stand upright.”^[1]Ps. 20vv6-8

The people of Israel were a people who never washed the sand from the shore of the Red Sea off their feet. Everywhere they went that story followed them, defined them. On that day, outside of Egypt, the question of victory had nothing to do with the inventory of their weaponry or their strategic acumen. In fact, on that day they stood helplessly with their backs against the sea, waiting to be slaughtered by the Egyptians. But the Lord, “answered in the day of trouble.^[2]Ps. 20v1” He split the seas, he made a way. The people, in Psalm 20, sing the past into the present and the future because they know that the question of victory is not what’s in their hands but whose hands they are in. Over the long arc of the history of Israel, we are not simply receiving information about what happened to a certain people long ago. Rather, we are being formed as a people of promise witnessing what happens when we recognize that the story was never about us to begin with. The story is about God, God dwelling near, God promising, God saving, God sustaining. God is not undertaking a project, he is forming a people.

The following is a mixture of good biblical theology, tongue in cheek sarcasm with sports hate unrelated to any other area of Tom Brady’s life, and a petition to God to finally let the Eagles win the Super Bowl. As much my better judgment says I should not assume readers of the internet at large in 2018 cannot distinguish between these things, I know my readers are much more sophisticated than the average Twitter-egg or fake news sharing Facebook user and so will leave it to you to distinguish between that which is fun and that which is true. God doesn’t care about football, he cares about every person he has made in his image, he cares about widows, orphans, the poor. He cares about justice and beauty, goodness and truth.

Dear Lord:

Throughout the Scriptures, humans—let’s be honest, it’s mostly men—have often convinced themselves that they, in fact, were god. The thing that makes that forbidden fruit so alluring is that the serpent promises Adam and Eve that eating it will make them “like god” (Gen. 3). In Gen. 11, humanity is united in its attempt to sit on the throne of God, building a siege tower to assail the heavens. Pharaoh’s heart is not hardened to show that every act of human will is merely an expression of the fiat of God, or as some theologies argue that God “hardens whom he will harden” suggests that there is an in-group and out-group when it comes to grace. No, Pharoah’s heart is hardened because he claims to be a deity on earth, the god of Egypt in the flesh, and YHWH, the God of Israel, is showing how me makes other so-called gods his playthings. Nebuchadnezzar, in Daniel’s account, becomes a raving lunatic, eating grass like some sort of bovine creature with hair growing all over his body (Daniel 4) because he did not grasp that the Lord is the world’s only sovereign. In the New Testament, Herod Agrippa is hailed by his subjects as speaking with “‘the voice of a god, and not of a mortal” (Acts 4v22) and is immediately struck down by God and given to the worms for food (Acts 12vv22-23).

The lesson is simple. Don’t pretend to be god, be humble, know your place.

And then there’s Tom Brady. Tom Brady with his Disney-prince chin, his puppy dog eyes, his 7 PM bedtime, his avocado ice cream, his ability to manipulate the players from the other teams—John Kasay mysteriously kicking out of bounds, Russell Wilson throwing the ball at the one yard line, Matt Ryan taking a ten yard sack when a field goal would have sealed the game, the referees—what the h is the tuck rule?!— not to mention his ability to manipulate the air pressure in footballs and to work a video camera. Couple those things with his five Super Bowl Rings, his super model wife, and his millions of dollars and we can conclude two things. First, Tom Brady, by all worldly standards, is winning at life. Second, Tom Brady needs a reckoning.

Consider, Lord, your servants Carson and Nick. Two homely looking guys from different parts of the heartland, who just want to love Jesus, love their families, visit sick kids in the hospital, and win football games. Carson, who quotes Hillsong (your fourth favorite artist behind U2, Chance, and Bob Dylan) lyrics on his Twitter feed and who has been a part of sparking a good old fashioned revival right in the Eagles locker room. Now he is injured, walking with a limp (like Jacob no less), forced to humbly and courageously support his backup, and brother in Christ, Nick. Nick, looking like a slightly more athletic Napoleon Dynamite, who was left for dead as a viable NFL starter (for longer than three days), jettisoned to the Rams—the St. Louis version, not the LA version, I mean come on Lord, you’ve met Cardinals fans before—brought back as an afterthought to hold a clipboard suddenly elevated into the spotlight again after Tom Brady put out a hit on Carson Wentz’s knee. The first thing he said after having a better performance than Tom Brady in the championship round?  You guessed it, “Glory to God!”

And despite all odds we are here. Good vs. Evil. Eagles vs. Patriots. Tom Brady, a black magic, cool beanie-wearing vampire who wants to live forever vs. Nick Foles, a humble disciple of Jesus who wants to help this sweet old man depart in peace because his ” eyes have seen thy salvation.” Will not the Lord of all the earth do right? Will not we finally see Tom Brady reduced to this again?

Liberate us from the iron clutches of his dimples and perfect teeth. May the Eagles win, so that the world will know there is justice and goodness still. Fly Eagles Fly.

Even youths will faint and be weary;  and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

C. S. Lewis said of Psalm 19, “I take this to be the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world.”  Psalm 19 begins as a meditation on the beauty of the world crafted by the hands of God. David images the sun as a bridegroom emerging from the bridal chamber after a night of amorous activity, glowing and parading across the heavens. The light of the sun nourishes the whole earth with warmth and testifies to the tender care of the God who made it. Nature is often so stunning in its splendor, so awesome in its sheer magnitude, so radiantly beautiful that many throughout the ages have concluded that in and of itself is divine. They have bowed down to worship the sun, the moon, and the stars. And who can blame them?

But David in this psalm, like Paul on Mars Hill, is inviting them to look behind the curtain. He proclaims to anyone who would listen that the author of all of this glory, is not anonymous, he has a name. We may be surprised to observe how exactly he does this. Look at vv. 7-11:

The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple; 8 the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is clear, enlightening the eyes; 9 the fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever; the ordinances of the LORD are true and righteous altogether. 10 More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb.

David moves from exalting in the glories of the heavens and the earth to basking in the glory of the…Law? This is an interesting juxtaposition to say the least. The natural world is breathtaking and commanding, an untamed spirit ever invoking its divine right to freedom. The law, it would seem, is the opposite of that. Obeying the law is routine, repressive. Or is it? David certainly would disagree with that sentiment. David moves from describing the wonders of the created world to valuing the law as worth more than the most precious metals because he thinks that in the law of the Lord, we find the freedom and holiness that the sun expresses with each step across the cloud-dotted sky. Nature is almost frivolous in its spontaneity, and nearly arbitrary in its cruelty. The law brings congruence, revealing the ways of God to humanity and inviting daughters and sons to know their maker and to live like him.

Henry David Thoreau, the apostle of Walden Pond, preached the gospel of romantic rapture in the natural world. He thought by embracing the created world as an end unto itself, he was freeing himself from the shackles of order and relationships. He said, “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” But King David, in Psalm 19, is telling us that the cosmos without the care of a creator is mere chaos. The law of the Lord compels us to the congruence that is thread through all things. We think that freedom is being able to do whatever we want. But freedom is not infinite choice, freedom is choosing the ways of the infinite. The law of the Lord, because it reveals the character of the divine, the beauty that is behind all the beauty beckons us to holiness. Holiness is the heart of beauty, the heart of freedom.

In Psalm 18, we have a collision between a seemingly other-worldly mysticism and the decidedly this-worldly arena of despair. From the outset, David is exuberant in praise, like a preacher listing off different names for God: rock, fortress, deliverer, refuge, shield, salvation, fortress. David recounts his own experience, standing on death’s door, in the grasp of the reaper. He had no recourse but to call upon the name of the Lord, and so in his despair he cried out. Yahweh, is then depicted in the heavenly sanctuary filled with the billows and smoke of God’s holiness. For the first time in the psalter, we are given a detailed theophany—that is a story of God appearing^[1]vv.7-15. Here the language is consequent with God’s ineffable qualities. Darkness, thunder, brightness, and fire highlight the scattered depiction of the throne room of God. But in the midst of all of these images that would seem to make God unapproachable and distant, there is a key point that is first foreshadowed in v. 6 and then brought to full fruition in v. 16. The Lord hears David’s cry for help: “From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears.”^[2]v. 6 But he not only hears David, he does something about it:

 Ps. 18v16-He reached down from on high, he took me; he drew me out of mighty waters.

It is understandable when our presuppositions about God make him seem removed from our present realities. But Psalm 18 maintains that God is immanent even in his indescribable otherness. David’s plight leads him to a prayer of last resort. But God in all his thunderous glory is not above the cry of a dying man. He is near. He reaches down to save. God’s actions are not confined to the heavenly temple but heaven and earth overlap because God is both transcendent above and immediately present to all people and all things.

Psalm 18 is creating a dialectic that is crucial to our work in the world. God acts within the world to rescue us, to provide for us, and to sustain us. Because we are finite and imperfect (i.e. not God) there will always be this otherness to God that we cannot contain in our minds or our language. But God’s otherness does not remove him from the realities of our world, God’s otherness makes him sovereign over that world. And God overcomes his otherness through revelation. He reveals his heart, his nature, his will in concrete ways that we can understand. He reveals himself as rock, redeemer, shield, fortress. Salvation then is not some abstract concept but holistic, bodily rescue.

If you are drowning in this life in oceans of sin, in addiction, in brokenness, God will not throw you a water bottle, he will drive the lifeboat to where you are and scoop you out of the waves. If you are dying of thirst, God will not send a lifeboat, he will carry you to cool springs where he will satisfy your thirst and restore your strength. Rescue is real.

In Psalm 17, David is like a wounded animal. Predators have tracked him down and are now circling to finish him off. And as the inevitable seems to draw near, as the ravenous beasts close in for the kill, we don’t find him pleading for his life. You would think that now would be the time for frantic cries for help but what we find instead is that David is at peace. The moment where the pitiless predators are about to strike the deathblow is the moment for God to bring his deliverance. At the height of tension in the psalm, David says, almost resolutely:

Rise up, O LORD, confront them, overthrow them! By your sword deliver my life from the wicked^[1]Ps. 17v13

How can David be so serene in the face of such dire circumstances? He knows the Lord. He invites the Lord to test him, to see that there is no wickedness in him, to see that he has held fast to the ways and commandments of the Lord. David is not declaring that he has earned the right to have God rule in his favor, far from it. What he is demonstrating by reading off his own resume is rather that he knows that God is a refuge for those who seek him and he is just to the weak and needy. He is saying, here, he knows God to be a God who wondrously shows his steadfast love^[2]Ps. 17v6 by rescuing those at the brink of the grave. His recalling his own life with the Lord shows that he has been walking with the Lord in such a way that he knows the Lord deeply and has a deep-seated understanding of his commandments.

David, with his wounds bared to the unforgiving beasts, can display confidence because he has walked with the Lord through many seasons. He stands in the face of his tormenters, confident that the Lord will never fail him. And in this moment, theology takes on its truest form, not Cartesian knowledge, something you know with your head.  But rather, a truth where head, heart, body, and soul collide.  This is what it really means to know God.