There are times when life falls to pieces that can’t be put back together. It’s happened to me and I’ve watched it happen to others who are close to me.
The doctor believes the cancer you didn’t know about last week has already spread to your brain.
You pick up your husband’s phone and see a text message from some unknown woman who can’t wait to be with him again.
You’re excited about the opportunities your company’s merger will afford, only to receive a lay-off notice the day the merger takes place. And now you realize you’re too old to get hired in that industry.
You get another call from the vice principal. The fighting, the drugs, the plagiarism have added up to expulsion. And your son used to be such a happy little boy ….
Life is hell sometimes. It is one grief and hurt and anguish after another without any let up.
Psalm 74 is written from the bottom. But unlike the real personal sorrows listen above, Asaph the psalmist writes from a national and theological grief.
He starts with a double-barreled question. Two shots of stinging salt.
O God, why have you rejected us forever?
Why does your anger smolder against the sheep of your pasture? (Ps. 74:1)
Not only are we rejected, we’re rejected forever. At least, that’s how it feels. And Asaph will get to why he feels this way pretty quickly.
But we the rejected aren’t just anyone. We’re the “sheep of your pasture.” The term draws from Israel’s great king, David the shepherd, and his powerful Psalm 23, where David imagines God as the shepherd and himself as one of God’s flock. There’s an intimacy here — we belong to God. And there’s a dependency here — we’re sheep who need to be shepherded.
Why would God reject forever out of a smoldering anger the sheep he loves and who are dependent on him? It doesn’t make sense.
So, Asaph recalls the Exodus, the story of God’s redemption of the Hebrew people from Egyptian slavery.
Remember the nation you purchased long ago,
the people of your inheritance, whom you redeemed —
Mount Zion, where you dwelt.
Turn your steps toward these everlasting ruins,
all this destruction the enemy has brought on the sanctuary (Ps. 74:2-3).
But not only is the Exodus remembered (and the word “remember” is the key word in the language of covenant, drawing past commitments into present realities), but Mount Zion is highlighted.
Zion is the hill Jerusalem is built on, Jerusalem being the city David made the capital of Israel. At its summit was the temple David’s son Solomon built. In a single word, the name Zion represents the relationship God has with his people. It’s the location of worship and the manifest presence of God. It’s also the seat of government of God’s people.
But something has happened. Jerusalem is a pile of rubble. In poetic hyperbole, Asaph calls Mount Zion “everlasting ruins.” It’s been shattered into so many pieces, they’ll never be put back together again. It’s worse off than Humpty Dumpty.
But not only is the city a shambles, the temple has been decimated. God’s home has been leveled by a wrecking ball.
And Asaph wants to lead God on a tour of the devastation, like the mayor of a coastal city that’s been flattened by a hurricane wanting to show the President the extent of the damage. “Turn your steps toward these everlasting ruins” and see for yourself how terrible things are.
These are good words for us when we find ourselves in hellish circumstances. Calling on God and asking him to walk through the rubble of our lives is essential if we’re to regain any trust in him in the years to come. For it’s not just our lives that need reconstruction, our trust in God can use a renovation as well.
Your foes roared in the place where you met with us;
they set up their standards as signs.
They behaved like men wielding axes
to cut through a thicket of trees.
They smashed all the carved paneling
with their axes and hatchets.
They burned your sanctuary to the ground;
they defiled the dwelling place of your Name.
They said in their hearts, “We will crush them completely!”
They burned every place where God was worshiped in the land (Ps. 74:4-8).
And so Asaph begins the tour of the destruction.
Instead of there being shouts of praise in the temple, there were roars of victory as the invaders marched into the holy place. Immediately, we can tell things are topsy turvy.
But not only are the shouts wrong, the decorations are wrong. Instead of the decor Solomon and his successors put in the temple, there are flags. Conquerors have planted their flags in the heart of God’s country.
And then Asaph echoes the book of Lamentations with his description of the razing of the temple, with wild men shattering it to splinters with their axes and hatchets. God’s sanctuary turned into kindling for a bonfire.
And not only that, they rooted out every holy place in the land and burned them to the ground, attempting to erase Yahweh completely from the land, doing what they could to make his name forgettable.
It was absolutely devastating. There is nothing like it in American history, though the show Man in the High Castle offers something like it in its alternate history where the Nazis and Japanese take over the United States.
But to make things worse, it felt like God had abandoned his people. He was silent and he was inactive. And the Babylonians mocked, saying, “Your god is dead, for ours has eaten him.”
We are given no signs from God;
no prophets are left,
and none of us knows how long this will be.
How long will the enemy mock you, God?
Will the foe revile your name forever?
Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?
Take it from the folds of your garment and destroy them! (Ps. 74:9-11)
So, Asaph goes back to creation. He starts his theology from the beginning and sees what happens from there. (Be warned: It’s not the creation story you’re used to.)
But God is my King from long ago;
he brings salvation on the earth.
It was you who split open the sea by your power;
you broke the heads of the monster in the waters.
It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan
and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert.
It was you who opened up springs and streams;
you dried up the ever-flowing rivers.
The day is yours, and yours also the night;
you established the sun and moon.
It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth;
you made both summer and winter (Ps. 74:12-17).
The creation story as Asaph tells it is almost unrecognizable to us who think either in terms of Genesis 1 or evolution. We may recognize the rhythms of day and night from Genesis 1. And the establishing of the sun and moon from the fourth day of creation. And we can see how that relates to establishing seasons (there are only two seasons in Israel — dry and rainy — hence only two in the psalm). But what’s up with the waters and this many-headed Leviathan?
If we ever tried to turn Leviathan into a whale (as Melville did in Moby Dick) or some other sea dinosaur, Psalm 74 ends that right here. Leviathan is a many-headed monstrosity. It’s a mythical, anti-creation demon. It’s actually a beast featured in the creation stories of other peoples that is fought and defeated in the creation of the world. But since Genesis 1 centers on the almost effortless creation by speech, not by battle, Leviathan almost completely disappears from it, alluded to only briefly and cryptically in “so God created the great sea creatures” (Gen. 1:21).
But here we’ve got Asaph pulling from non-biblical creation stories his readers would have been familiar with and putting Yahweh at the center of the battle. The splitting of the seas sounds a bit like days two and three in Genesis 1, but it too pulls from surrounding creation stories, possibly the Babylonian story of the defeat of the she-demon sea monster Tiamat, who is slain by the god Marduk, cut in half, and becomes the waters of sea and sky (there was a belief that the clouds hid the cisterns of the sky from which rain came).
This seems crazy and dangerous to modern minds striving to be biblical. How can these pagan stories work their way into a hymn to Yahweh? Couldn’t that be a slippery slope to letting other pagan beliefs in?
Asaph is doing several things at once.
First, these pagan stories are bent to serve the Yahweh story. By erasing Marduk or Baal from his telling and making Yahweh the central character, Asaph is subtly suggesting that those other gods are no-gods. This is significant if the majority culture around you worships those gods.
Taking over someone else’s story and altering it to make it your own is an act of defiance. Those other people may have beaten you on the battlefield, but they have lost the theological and cultural battle.
As God’s people, we are free to steal the stories of the surrounding culture and bend them to our Lord’s purposes. Our culture may call it “appropriation,” but we’ll just call it winning.
Second, Yahweh is shown to be the King of history. By going back to the beginning and telling a story of Yahweh laying waste to the gods of the surrounding peoples, he is shown as a warrior who will again defeat the gods.
We need to know that God wins, despite the setback we see in front of us.
Third, struggle is normalized. A battle doesn’t threaten Yahweh’s kingdom. He’s used to battling and beating these gods and their people. More battles will come and Yahweh, who was victorious in the first place, will be victorious in the end.
The normalizing of struggle is essential. Without it, we fall into despair.
Remember how the enemy has mocked you, LORD,
how foolish people have reviled your name.
Do not hand over the life of your dove to wild beasts;
do not forget the lives of your afflicted people forever.
Have regard for your covenant,
because haunts of violence fill the dark places of the land.
Do not let the oppressed retreat in disgrace;
may the poor and needy praise your name.
Rise up, O God, and defend your cause;
remember how fools mock you all day long.
Do not ignore the clamor of your adversaries,
the uproar of your enemies, which rises continually (Ps. 74:18-23).
Asaph ends his psalm with three sets of DOs and DON’Ts, all of them aimed at God.
DO remember the mocking and reviling of your enemies. But DON’T forget us or hand us over like a dove to wild beasts.
DO have regard for your covenant, because the violence in the land makes it seem like you’re not maintaining it. And DON’T give up on the oppressed. The poor and needy need you. Give them cause to worship you.
DO get up and get busy — not for our sake, but for your own sake! Keep in mind all that mockery. And DON’T ignore the noise of your enemies.
There are two ways things can go from here, Asaph is saying. One of those ways continues the violence and mockery of God. The other way protects the vulnerable as God gets busy and acts out of loyalty to his covenant.
In this world, things often look like the violent and the mockers are winning, that God has fallen asleep and isn’t maintaining his covenant. And so, in this upside-down world, we pray upside-down prayers. We tell God what to do (when he’s the one who should be telling us what to do). But we don’t tell God to do anything other than what he’s already promised to do.
It may seem bossy and impertinent for us to command God. But Psalm 74 isn’t alone in this kind of language. It’s angry. But it’s not angry at people on Twitter about their politics as we often are. Rather, it uses its anger about the upside-down world as a trigger to pray, urging God to action, urging him to be faithful to the covenant he is known for being faithful to.
Psalm 74 is a prayer from the bottom, from the thick of the mess. As such, it’s a great companion to us when we find ourselves in similar situations.
Psalm 74 doesn’t promise that things will get better. But it has hope, because it knows the one it’s praying to. And that makes all the difference in the world.