Restore us, O LORD God of hosts!
Let your face shine, that we may be saved!
I love this.
While perhaps the context doesn’t translate directly, it reminds us that God’s grace, God’s grace in revealing himself to us in Jesus Christ on the cross, is where we find our salvation.
Seeing God, as he is, is the only way we see our need for him and so receive his total blessing.
That is beautiful.
The past couple weeks I’ve really been dwelling on the idea of remembering Jesus—remembering the Gospel. As I read today, this passage in the beginning of Psalm 77 stuck out to me.
You hold my eyelids open;
I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old,
the years long ago.
I said, "Let me remember my song in the night;
let me meditate in my heart."
Then my spirit made a diligent search:
”Will the Lord spurn forever,
and never again be favorable?
Has his steadfast love forever ceased?
Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
Has he in anger shut up his compassion?"
SelahThen I said, "I will appeal to this,
to the years of the right hand of the Most High."I will remember the deeds of the LORD;
yes, I will remember your wonders of old.
Asaph describes his turmoil and mental anguish over his circumstances. Then shifts immediately. He says that he will remember God’s works and ‘wonders’ of old.
Every Christian can attest to God’s power to provide strength and comfort. Yet, we all quickly forget that he has done so for us in the past, when our present seems to fall apart. Like Asaph, we should make a careful point to remember what God has done for us in the past, in his Gospel in general and our lives in specific, to give us confidence for the future.
Toward the end of Deuteronomy before Israel crosses over into the promised land, God gives a song to Moses which is intended to be a sharp reminder in the people’s ear of their wickedness and proneness to sin. But more importantly, it’s stark contrast to God’s mercy and grace on his people.
"Now therefore write this song and teach it to the people of Israel. Put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the people of Israel. For when I have brought them into the land flowing with milk and honey, which I swore to give to their fathers, and they have eaten and are full and grown fat, they will turn to other gods and serve them, and despise me and break my covenant. And when many evils and troubles have come upon them, this song shall confront them as a witness (for it will live unforgotten in the mouths of their offspring). For I know what they are inclined to do even today, before I have brought them into the land that I swore to give."
The song, which comes in the following chapter, is delivered to be a reminder and to deliver conviction to the wandering soul. God has been merciful, yet is a God of wrath.
This, of course, reminds me of my own inclination to please myself and my own constant need to remember the Gospel of Jesus, which is given for similar reasons yet from a very different direction.
The Gospel reminds us not only that we are sinful beings, and that God is a God of wrath, but also that he is gracious and patient. It is not his wrath that will lead us to repentance, but his grace! Remembering this can give us the confidence and strength to stand and trust God to sanctify us and conform us to his own image.
About a year ago I posted a review of a book by Milton Vincent called A Gospel Primer for Christians.
The book’s aim is this very thing. To help Christians remember the basic, strength giving, tenets of the Gospel. It begins with an explanation of the Gospel and concludes with a simple rehearsal of those truths for Christians to remember on a regular basis.
For me, this book has been a great blessing toward this end. It’s usually less than $10 and worth every penny.
Much like Moses’ song delivered to Israel to remind them, we can use similar tools to remember Jesus’ Gospel and find strength to move foreword even in the face of our own opposition.
Jesus teaches that our sins are our own, and the guilt belongs to no one else. It’s hard to accept. Even after Eve ate the apple in the Garden, she told God that the serpent had tricked her into doing it. And perhaps that was a unique event in history, but it didn’t exonerate her guilt.
…out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.
When a man and woman who are courting each other fall into sexual sin together, it was not the situation that created the sin, it only afforded the opportunity for the sinful nature to exercise itself. The things and situations around us are not to blame for our sinful failures, those failures reside in the heart already.
Matthew-Henry puts it this way:
It is the heart that is desperately wicked, Jer 17:9, for there is no sin in word or deed, which was not first in the heart. They all come out of the man, and are fruits of that wickedness which is in the heart, and is wrought there.
A mere disciplining of our situations is a dire insufficiency in our fight against sin. To block our chances to sin does very little but paste a pleasing veneer over the surface. The only real solution is to appeal to the grace of God in Jesus Christ to actually change our hearts, so that we might desire different things completely.
One of my favorite Puritan authors, Ralph Venning (author of the classic The Sinfulness of Sin) shares a little saying with gigantic meaning.
“To this we must say that He who promised forgiveness to them that repent has not promised repentance to them that sin.”
I had to read it a couple times to get what he was saying.
In our sinful nature, we’re wont to take God’s grace for granted. To even try and use it to give ourselves permission to venture (however temporarily) into some sin.
Yet, while we may lean on God’s grace as free and unconditional, the conscious choice to venture into sin on the back of that grace may be evidence that we’re not the recipients of the grace we dare to use licentiously. God has promised forgiveness to everyone who repents. But, to those who see it as an opportunity to sin, perhaps God has not promised repentance.
Sin is a dangerous, dangerous thing.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in your sight,
O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.
I love this prayer from the tail end of Psalm 19. I often forget that what my mind does secretly can be as important as what my hands do openly. Every time I read this psalm, I’m reminded that the Lord is not only interested in what we do but also very interested in what we think and feel.
Not only in our actions, but in all of these things we should seek to please the Lord. And not out of compulsion, but out of gratitude for the salvation we’ve been freely given by our rock and redeemer.
Before God destroyed Sodom, he got Lot out of there. But just read how that actually went down:
As morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, "Up! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be swept away in the punishment of the city." But he lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the LORD being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city.
Lot was given ample warning to get out of the city. But he lingered. He didn’t move quickly enough on his own. So, the angels God sent to do the deed ‘seized’ Lot and they brought them out of harms immediate way.
That is a beautiful picture of God’s grace and patience with his people.
