I love teenagers and love spending time with them. There is a passion and immediacy about them absent in other ages. But my own teenage years are far behind me and I’m glad about that, since those were some of the most insecure of my life.
In junior high and high school, I was terribly insecure. I enjoyed my friends, but I was uncertain about how they felt about me. At one point in high school, I lost my sense of humor for months, being afraid the laughter of my friends wasn’t at my jokes, but at me.
What pushed me to stop telling jokes was the response of my friends to a series of made-up stories I’d told about the “lightbulb family,” a family too poor to replace the burned out lightbulb inside their car. You know, the one that turns on when you open the door. After a dozen of these stories, I started wondering if my friends were turning my jokes against me, if they were referring to my family as the “lightbulb family” behind my back, if I was making jokes at my own expense.
Friendships are essential. I’d even say my favorite word of all is “befriended.”
There is a warmth and embrace and love encapsulated in the word “befriended” which promises all of the best of our relational needs. This is why the betrayal of friendship is such a tragedy. We need and rely on our friendships so much that when our friends turn against us, it’s worse than the emptiness of aloneness.
There are people who make my day when I get an unexpected text or phone call from them. And there are people who have crushed me by turning and walking away from me, proving the friendships I’d thought we’d shared were walk-away-able to them.
Psalm 55 enters into this pain, praying it to God, narrating the betrayal the psalmist has experienced as part of the prayer.
Listen to my prayer, O God,
do not ignore my plea;
hear me and answer me (Ps. 55:1-2a).
The prayer begins with a plea for God to listen. When we are ignored, unheard, and unanswered, we need God to be the one safe place, the one safe person who will take us seriously. And so David, our named psalmist here, begs to be heard. The request seems unnecessary, but when others aren’t listening, it’s not uncommon for us to wonder if God will join them in ignoring us.
This need to be heard and its accompanying fear of being unheard has David tangled up inside.
My thoughts trouble me and I am distraught
because of what my enemy is saying,
because of the threats of the wicked;
for they bring down suffering on me
and assail me in their anger.
My heart is in anguish within me;
the terrors of death have fallen on me.
Fear and trembling have beset me;
horror has overwhelmed me (Ps. 55:2b-5).
That interior tangle arising from a fear of not being heard is worsened by hearing what others are saying. Angry threats from haters on the outside and silence from God on the inside leave the psalmist in turmoil.
What we have here is a full-on panic attack.
The silence within and the threats without leave him wanting to run away.
I said, “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest.
I would flee far away
and stay in the desert;
I would hurry to my place of shelter,
far from the tempest and storm” (Ps. 55:6-8).
“If I could grow wings and fly away, I’d find some faraway place to hide out in. Nothing would hurt me there.”
I know that feeling all too well. And there are times I’ve given in to it. It rarely comes through in its promise of safety, but it’s quite understandable in its allure.
When we feel this way, it’s good to articulate it in our praying. The act of articulation in prayer helps us sort through things with God. Feelings are acknowledged and dealt with.
In this case, the desire to run away is held up, looked at, and rejected. It won’t appear again in the rest of the psalm. In fact, David turns away from his inner turmoil and looks around him, seeing that it’s not just his life that’s a mess. His personal turmoil is a microcosm of what’s going on around him. The city is in disarray.
Lord, confuse the wicked, confound their words,
for I see violence and strife in the city.
Day and night they prowl about on its walls;
malice and abuse are within it.
Destructive forces are at work in the city;
threats and lies never leave its streets (Ps. 55:9-11).
The words that have David tangled up inside have tangled up the city, the community. So he asks God to tangle up the words of violence and strife that are like monsters on the prowl for blood.
The city David would have had in mind here is the capitol city of Jerusalem. As king, personal attacks against him would have had wide-ranging implications. Dragging him down would drag down the city, the nation.
I may not experience the cutting words of others in the same way as a king like David, but there is a multiplying effect to all slander and destructive language. They never take place in isolation. Communities are dragged in and dragged down.
But then comes the cruelest cut.
If an enemy were insulting me,
I could endure it;
if a foe were rising against me,
I could hide.
But it is you, a man like myself,
my companion, my close friend,
with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship
at the house of God,
as we walked about
among the worshipers (Ps. 55:12-14).
Haters are one thing. To have a known enemy attack me is expected and therefore easier to defend myself against. It’s not painless, but it won’t bring me to my knees.
But a close friend? The unexpected knife in the back or even face-to-face knife to the gut, these are wounds that feel unrecoverable. And in many regards we never do recover from them.
The weakness of love is its ability to be rejected and to be abused. It’s why so many of us armor ourselves even in our closest relationships; once bit, twice shy.
At the same time, that weakness of love is its greatest joy, for only those who are open and vulnerable ever experience the beauty of love given and love returned. But here, after the giving and receiving of the love of close friendship, comes the abuse of love, the knife in the gut.
Can that hurt be even deeper? Why, yes it can.
The closeness of friendship is strengthened by a shared experience of worship. Things done together strengthen all relationships. But when that thing is intense and mystical, something which ties the natural and supernatural together, the bond is galvanized.
So here we have human friendship and spiritual companionship combined then shattered. With a doubled bond, the betrayal is that much more pronounced. And so the response is that much more vehement.
Let death take my enemies by surprise;
let them go down alive to the realm of the dead,
for evil finds lodging among them (Ps. 55:15).
“Kill them all! Launch a surprise attack and wipe them out. Since evil has found a home with them, let them find a home among the dead.”
The bitterness is understandable, coming from such a betrayal. But for those unfamiliar with the Psalms, it can be unsettling. However, for those schooled in the praying of the Psalms, this isn’t new territory. Such bitter bile is scattered throughout the Psalter.
To refuse to voice the pain of betrayal in knee-jerk prayers of retribution is patently dishonest. Such sanitized praying pretends at a spirituality that doesn’t exist.
When I refuse to pray my hurt for the hurt it is, with all of the emotional freight that comes with being hurt, who is it that I offer to God? Not my true self. I offer an imaginary self to God. I offer someone I think I ought to be to God, not the me I really am.
And who is this God that I think wants sanitized prayers? It’s not the passionate God of the Scriptures. It’s an imaginary God I’ve concocted from the wish-dreams of my idealized self.
So I end up with a false me praying to a false “God.” And just how useful are those kinds of prayers?
But having spat out this vicious prayer of retribution, David turns away from his enemies and turns his face toward God. And for the first time in this prayer, he uses the divine name (the name Yahweh which represented in most translations as “the LORD”). As we have noted before, the name Yahweh is the name our Lord gave to his people when he established his covenant with them. Whenever it is used, it emphasizes the relational bond between God and his people. We are know and named. Yahweh and David. Jesus and Pete.
As for me, I call to God,
and the LORD saves me.
Evening, morning and noon
I cry out in distress,
and he hears my voice.
He rescues me unharmed
from the battle waged against me,
even though many oppose me.
God, who is enthroned from of old,
who does not change —
he will hear them and humble them,
because they have no fear of God (Ps. 55:16-19).
Where there was a question of whether or not God hears him when David began his prayer, that question has disappeared in the praying.
In the praying, I come to know the God I pray to. In the praying, I discover him to be the God who hears, the God who saves.
Real theology is a prayed theology. What we believe shapes how we pray. How we pray shapes what we believe. It’s a chicken-and-egg relationship, but praying and believing are essential to one another. In many ways, we pray ourselves into belief or “unpray” ourselves out of belief.
And it’s precisely the lack of belief in David’s adversaries which will lead to their downfall. They have no “fear of God” in them. Scholar Bruce Waltke has shown that the fear of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible doesn’t have to do with being afraid of God. Rather, the term is used to refer to considering God in any and every situation. It’s a basic life orientation toward God, a posture of one who is attentive to God all the time.
A self-willed person bends his life toward himself and his desires. A person who fears God bends his life toward God and God’s desires.
As the one who fears God, David knows God is concerned with David since David is concerned with God. Meanwhile those who have no concern for God will find themselves marginalized by God.
And this includes the back-stabbing friend, the covenant-breaking fake friend.
My companion attacks his friends;
he violates his covenant.
His talk is smooth as butter,
yet war is in his heart;
his words are more soothing than oil,
yet they are drawn swords (Ps. 55:20-21).
When I became a pastor, another pastor took me aside and said, “Watch out for the person who is too nice, too quickly. That’s the one who will turn on you.”
It’s advice I chose to ignore. I preferred to trust and be hurt than to be wary and safe. And because of that, I was able to befriend and pastor those I might have been cautious about. It also meant I was unprotected when betrayed. Despite the pain, it was the right choice.
Again, the weakness of love is its ability to be rejected and abused. And taking the buttery, manipulative words of the unscrupulous pseudo-friend on face value has its consequences. One consequence is pain. But the other consequence is a heart that refuses to become hardened.
One of the reasons I ignored the other pastor’s warning is I could see what his own advice had done to him. He had become distant and “professional.”
Is that the choice then? To be foolishly friendly and easy pickings for manipulating flatterers or to be cautious and hardened, nobody’s friend and nobody’s fool?
There’s another option: Offering ourselves and our circumstances to God, trusting him to work things out.
Cast your cares on the LORD
and he will sustain you;
he will never let
the righteous be shaken.
But you, God, will bring down the wicked
into the pit of decay;
the bloodthirsty and deceitful
will not live out half their days.
But as for me, I trust in you (Ps. 55:22-23).
Yahweh is our covenant-making, covenant-sustaining God. That’s why we can trust him to sustain us. That’s why though the ground shakes beneath us, we ourselves are not shaken.
Those who stand against God or those he loves, however, stand on the shakiest of grounds. They live reduced lives and reduce the days of their lives as a result.
Knowing this to be the settled future for the righteous and the wicked, David ends his prayer in a far different place than he started it. Knowing himself to be heard and cared for, he makes a final statement of trust.
His belief has led him to pray. And his praying has led him to believe.
(If it doesn’t offend you, the t-shirt used as the main image for this post can be bought at Threadless.)