Your imagination is the most important part of who you are. Imagination and soul are deeply integrated, giving you personality and making you unique among all humans throughout history.
Without imagination, there is no “you,” there is just a bunch of reactions to internal and external stimuli.
Imagination enables you to see things that otherwise can’t be seen. Some of those things exist but can’t be seen yet. Others don’t yet exist but can be conceived up beforehand as vague concepts or even as full realities.
Without imagination, no human invention would even have been dreamed up and no novel ever written.
Without imagination, there could be no concept of God and no relationship with the unseen divine.
Prayer is many things and one of those things is a means of rebooting the imagination. A prayerless imagination quickly leaks itself empty of God. But a prayed imagination reinvigorates the God-depleted soul.
Psalm 10 is one of our exercises in restoring a feeble imagination through prayer. And it starts out just as God-depleted as possible. But like all of us whose imaginations have grown empty of God by our prayerlessness, the unnamed psalmist blames it on God.
The problem isn’t with me! It’s God who’s gone off and hid himself somewhere.
Why, Lord, do you stand far off?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? (Ps. 10:1)
This set of why questions will be matched by a second set in verse 13. But we’ll get to those later. This first of why questions arise from a slumbering soul which has just woken up and wonders where God has gotten to.
Has God wandered off? Well, no. But that’s OK. This is as good of a starting place for prayer as any.
There is no best condition to start praying. The only formula for prayer is: Just start now.
Why questions start with assumptions that certain things are true. And these why questions assume God is far away and hiding and wonder why he’s distant and inaccessible. But just because these assumptions are false doesn’t mean this is a bad place for prayer to start.
An impoverished imagination, in fact, is a perfectly good place to start. Honest prayer will deal with that God-poverty as the person in prayer is soaked in God-reality.
So, what has depleted our unnamed psalmist so much he thinks God has ditched him? His imagination has become filled with The Wicked Man. Four times, the phrase The Wicked Man appears in Psalm 10 (vs. 2, 4, 13, 15) and for ten straight verses (vs. 2-11), the psalmist is so focused in talking about The Wicked Man he forgets to talk to or about God.
As a former news junkie, I know what it’s like to have my imagination so inundated by the latest political or social issue or personality that it causes me significant anxiety. It’s amazing how much less of this unnecessary stress I have since I reduced my news consumption to a single brief review of headlines once a week, basically removing consumer news from my imagination-shaping diet.
But it’s not just the news that pushes God from our imaginations or else we wouldn’t have this ancient psalm struggling with the same problem. Personal relationships and struggles of all sorts have always provided plenty of fodder for imagination-sapping anxiety.
The David and Goliath story is as much about imagination as anything. The hulking figure of Goliath so fills the imagination of Israel that God has no place. The Israelite army is so impressed by the giant, they know all his facts and figures like the stats on the back of a baseball card.
His height was six cubits and a span. He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels; on his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze javelin was slung on his back.His spear shaft was like a weaver’s rod, and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels (1 Sam. 17:4-7).
David is the first person to mention God in the story (1 Sam. 17:26). By doing so, he starts to restore God to the army’s imagination. In fact, his God words become so infectious, King Saul joins him in them.
“The LORD who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.”
Saul said to David, “Go, and the LORD be with you” (1 Sam. 17:37).
And just before engaging with the giant, David even states that imagination building is his goal in fighting Goliath.
“You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. … and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel” (1 Sam. 17:45-46).
Psalm 10:2-11 is similar to 1 Sam. 17:4-7. Instead of taking stock of Goliath’s stature and weaponry, it takes stock of The Wicked Man’s misdeeds.
Ironically, it’s the Wicked Man whose mocking words finally get the psalmist talking about God. For it’s in quoting The Wicked Man, as he mocks God for being like a scared child who covers his eyes and possibly is complicit in the evil deeds by ignoring them, that God is mentioned. This leads the psalmist to return to prayer.
Arise, LORD! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless (Ps. 10:12).
This leads to a second set of why questions. This time, they include both The Wicked Man and God, as the psalmist’s imagination starts to include God and ceases to be wholly consumed by The Wicked Man.
Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself,
“He won’t call me to account”? (Ps. 10:13)
Once the God-depleted imagination has been cracked open, the person in prayer finds his imagination increasingly filled with God. Prayer has begun its work. The soul is being restored.
But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted;
you consider their grief and take it in hand.
The victims commit themselves to you;
you are the helper of the fatherless (Ps. 10:14).
It’s amazing! After a ten-verse rant about The Wicked Man, the psalmist is now soaking in a different reality: God. God sees. God considers. God helps. This is a long ways from God standing far off and hiding himself from us during our times of trouble.
(Is there anything so sad and so hopeful as the words “you are the helper of the fatherless”? They combine our painful human predicament with God’s active presence in our lives.)
He returns briefly to The Wicked Man before finishing his prayer solely with God.
Break the arm of the wicked man;
call the evildoer to account for his wickedness
that would not otherwise be found out (Ps. 10:15).
He finishes with God.
The LORD is King for ever and ever;
the nations will perish from his land.
You, LORD, hear the desire of the afflicted;
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
so that mere earthly mortals
will never again strike terror (Ps. 10:16-18).
There are two sides to deliverance: dealing with the wicked and dealing with their victims.
Regarding the Wicked Man, the psalmist asks for two things: Call him to account and break his arm (so that he can’t harm anyone else).
Regarding the victims: Hear them, listen to them, encourage them, and defend them.
As his praying imagination is reengaged, the psalmist remembers who God is: He is the Protector King. In his prayer, he lands on two statements of faith about God:
You are the helper of the fatherless.
The LORD is King for ever and ever.
When these two statements are combined, they express the active love and the mighty authority of our God. He has the might, the right, and the heart to do something. This causes the psalmist to both ask why God hasn’t done anything, to expect him to do something, and to audaciously demand he do something.
The person in prayer doesn’t become meek. Rather, the person in prayer whose imagination has become filled with God becomes bold with God, because the praying person remembers who this God is: He is the righteous King who is actively engaged with the world he loves.
Evil isn’t swept under the carpet in prayer. It doesn’t become invisible in the glow of God’s great glory. Rather, the shadows that obscure God in our imaginations before we begin to pray are dealt with as we begin to deal with God.
Prayer does more than just change us and our imaginations. But it always does that. And that just might be the most important thing in the world, as far as we’re concerned.