Hope
in Times of Distress
By
John
Orlando
Voice
of the Gospel Mission Church, Middletown NY
12
March 2006
Text: Psalm 42
I just don’t feel like I can make it anymore. I struggle and struggle, and the more I struggle, the more I feel like I am spiraling down into the depths of despair. I love God, and I know that as a Christian, people tell me that I am not supposed to have these feelings and thoughts of discouragement and depression, yet…I just can’t seem to snap out of it!
I don’t know how many of you today have ever felt like this. I suspect that every one of us has, at one time or another, been in a state of distress as circumstances in life have piled up, one upon another, and as they have you have felt overwhelmed with pain, grief, anguish, discouragement, depression, or even despair. You need immediate relief, but you just don’t know where to turn! You turn to friends, and they can’t help you. You turn to the church, and they can’t relate! You turn to God, and it seems as though He has abandoned you completely!
But what adds to our feelings of distress is that there are those that would tell us that Christians should never be distressed, and if we’re not walking around with a big smile on your face every second of every day, then something is wrong with you…you must be engrossed in some heinous sin, or maybe you’re not just as “spiritual” as you ought to be.
Thankfully, the Scriptures present us with a real people who struggle with real problems, and a real God that provides real solutions to our real problems. In other words, it’s not that we should never have times in our lives when we are distressed. Rather, we should be prepared for the fact that at some point in our lives we will almost certainly have to deal with distress. The reason is simple: even though we are Christians, we nevertheless still live in a fallen world. And though we are being renewed day by day, we nevertheless still struggle and battle against the flesh. And though we have the victory over the devil, he nevertheless launches all of his fiery darts, seeking to devour us. But we have hope in the God of our salvation.
In our text this morning, we find a real person who struggles with real problems, and who turned to a real God who provides real hope in the midst of our struggles. And as we turn our attention to the text, lets look first at the:
I.
The Reality of Distress
A. Why was the Psalmist Distressed?
Ultimately, it is because the
psalmist longs desperately for God, but can’t have that longing satisfied.
The psalmist tells us in VV 1-2 (read): "1 As the deer pants for the water brooks,
So pants my soul for You, O God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?"
The deer, like man, might be able to endure an extended time of not having food, but it simply cannot live very long without water. Think of the deer that is running for his life from hunters. He runs and runs in the heat of the day, and as he does, he becomes more and more dehydrated and desperately needs a drink of water, and begins to weaken and pant. We have all probably seen a dog that is panting in the heat of the day, and is in dire need of water. Or, think of the times in your own life when you were so thirsty that you thought you would die if you didn’t get at least a sip of water. When you are in that state, your entire focus is on one thing: your thirst, and getting that thirst quenched. This is what the psalmist was experiencing, only it wasn’t a need for physical water; rather, he was thirsting for the living God. His soul; that is, every fiber of his being screamed and ached and yearned for God. He desperately needed God, and if he didn’t have that thirst for God quenched, he would shrivel up and die! The psalmist goes on to describe the various circumstances that conspired to prevent him from having his thirst for God quenched:
1. He was unable to get to the Temple to worship God. v 4 (read): "4 When I remember these things, I pour out my soul within me. For I used to go with the multitude; I went with them to the house of God, With the voice of joy and praise, With a multitude that kept a pilgrim feast."
He’s thinks about all of the wonderful times of worship he had when he would got to the Temple, where the Ark of the Covenant was, and with its priests and sacrifices and offerings, and offer praise to God, and experience a sense of fellowship with God as he participated in all of these things. For the Jew of this time, to be deprived of going to the Temple meant that he would in essence be deprived of fellowship with God.
2. He was surrounded by enemies, and his enemies mock him. V. 3;10 (read). V3: "My tears have been my food day and night, While they continually say to me, "Where is your God?" V 10: "As with a breaking of my bones, My enemies reproach me, While they say to me all day long, "Where is your God?"
He says that his tears have been his food day and night, and that it’s as if his bones have been broken. Both of these expressions convey the deep anguish of soul that the psalmist is experiencing; the agony he is experiencing is so intense that his tears have been his food day and night, and it is like his bones have been shattered! If you ever broken a bone, or if you’ve ever mistakenly hit your thumb when hammering something, you know how painful that can be. For the psalmist, the idea is that all of his bones have shattered. Can you imagine, beloved, being so overwhelmed by the circumstances of life that all it feels as if your bones have shattered? Or, can you imagine being so distraught and overwhelmed with grief that your tears are your food day and night; and all you do is sob and sob and sob? He desperately wants to experience the presence of God, but, he is in a place where not only can he not get his thirst for God quenched, but, people mock him and challenge him saying: “Where is your God?” And no doubt he feels the weight of that question: “Yeah, that’s right…where is my God!” and:
3.
He feels abandoned by God: V 9 (read):
"I will say to God my Rock, "Why have You forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?"
First,
he calls God his Rock. The Judean countryside is described as a rocky place, and
rocks were used both as shelter, as in the case of a cave, and as a means of
defense. Thus, the psalmist states
that God is his Rock, but he is truly mystified even more at the current state
of his affairs: God is Rock…his
shelter and strong defense, yet, he finds himself in a wasteland and utterly
exposed to the attacks of the enemy, and his God, his “rock,” is nowhere to
be found! Have you ever felt like this? Day
after day you are confronted with the same hardships, and the same trials, and
day after day after day you cry out to God…and…nothing!
God, where are you! God, why
won’t you help me?!” Nothing.
No change, no peace, no resolution…just silence; and maybe…just maybe
things get even worse! That is what the psalmist experiences here.
But that’s not all. As he
reflects on all of this:
4. He believes that God has brought all of this upon him: V.
7 (read):
In light of all that the psalmist goes through, one cannot help but see:
B. Parallels to What Christ Himself Endured:
1. Just as the psalmist was mocked, so Christ was mocked by His enemies: The Sanhedrin, The Roman Guard, onlookers at His crucifixion, the 2 criminals crucified with Him...(elaborate on each example).
2. Just as the psalmist felt cut off from the presence of God, so Christ felt the same thing. But note, not only did Christ feel cut off by God; He actually was cut off from the blessed presence of God while on the cross, as He willingly laid down His life as our substitute and bore the full penalty of sin.
3. Just as the psalmist remembered and even thirsted for the times of intimate fellowship he had with God in the past, so Christ, in the final hours of His life reflected on the fellowship He had with the Father from all eternity. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus, the Bible tells us, was so distressed in His spirit that He was “exceedingly sorrowful, even to death,” and He prayed, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me.” The thing that was causing such distress to Jesus; the cup that Jesus did not want to drink from, was the fact that for the first from all eternity the sweet communion that He had experienced with the Father would cease for a time as Jesus, the perfect, spotless, Lamb without blemish, would go to the cross, and He who knew no sin would become sin for us. The thought of not experiencing the blessed communion of the Father for even 1 second caused Jesus such distress, that as He prayed He sweated drops of blood. You see beloved:
C. Our High Priest sympathizes with our weaknesses – We do not worship a God that has no idea what it’s like to be human, and who cannot relate to the pain, discouragement, and despair that we experience. He knows those things at a deeply personal level because in the Person of Christ, the infinite God-Man, He experienced those things. He knows what it’s like to feel abandoned by those He loves. He knows what it is to be betrayed by those closest to Him. He knows what it’s like to be mocked. He knows what it’s like to be rejected. And more than that, He knows what it’s like to be cut-off from the blessed presence of God; to truly experience the full depths of verse 7; as He was engulfed and overwhelmed by the immense waves and billows of God’s righteous wrath; all for the sake of sinners.
And so we have seen in this psalm that distress is a reality of life. We will endure many things that will cause us to become discouraged, depressed, or even feel overwhelmed with despair. But that is not the end of the story! We now turn our attention to:
II.
The Response to Distress
A. The Refrain of the Song: A refrain is the line or lines that are repeated in a song; it is the "chorus" of a song; the central idea that needs to be repeated. Throughout the psalm (or song) the psalmist speaks of his distress, and then offers the refrain that serves as the answer to his distress. And what is the refrain or the chorus of this song; the central idea that he wishes to proclaim and meditate upon? Look at v. 5 and 11…(read).
Verse 5 - "Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him For the help of His countenance.
Verse 11 - "Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; For I shall yet praise Him, The help of my countenance and my God."
The psalmist says that he will:
B. Hope In God: God is his only source of hope. Spurgeon tell us that “hope denotes that expectation which is founded on faith in God, and which leads the soul to wait upon him.” In other words, hope is directly related to the future…it is a confident expectation; a looking forward to a future that holds the promise of something better.
In light of all that has transpired though, why would the psalmist persist in hoping in God? Hasn’t he cried out to God already, and heard nothing but silence, and hasn’t he asked God why it is that He has abandoned him? Yes, but also through all of that, the psalmist nevertheless realizes that:
1. The Lord is his salvation: In verse 5 the psalmist praises God for the help of
God’s countenance, and in verse 11 he praises God for being the help of his countenance. Ultimately the idea that is being conveyed in these 2 verses is one of salvation (see the NIV and ESV).
And so the psalmist continues to have hope; a confident expectation of a better future,
because
he clings to the fact that God alone is His salvation.
And this is precisely the point that he touched on in verse 8 (read):
"The LORD will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, And in the night His song shall be with me --
A prayer to the God of my life."
One commentator (Delitzsch) notes that the word “lovingkindness” is "the Divine Love condescending to His creatures, more especially to sinners, in unmerited kindness.” And the psalmist, when he finds himself in the desolate wasteland of despair, separated from God and surrounded by enemies, remembers the lovingkindness of God, and trusts that the Lord will deliver him and save him from his condition. The Lord is his salvation because he is in covenant with God, and God’s lovingkindness; His Divine love and unmerited kindness, never ceases to flow toward His people.
This word “lovingkindness” is also related to the word mercy, and mercy has been described as not getting what we deserve. In other words, someone does something deserving of punishment, but in mercy the punishment is withheld. To bring the point home even more, the Bible says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and the wages of sin is death. The only thing that we deserve is to have the waves and billows of God’s wrath crash down upon us and consume us. Some might think that is a bit harsh; after all nobody is perfect! But God is so holy that He cannot even look upon sin. And it is quite true: nobody is perfect. The problem is, God requires absolute perfect compliance and obedience to even smallest or least significant of His commands in word, thought and deed. One wrong action, one impure thought, one slip of the tongue, one instance where you did not love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you have incurred the death sentence by God. Before coming to Christ, God’s wrath; His righteous indignation against sin, burns hot against us, and we will have to stand before the judgment seat of God, and there we will be pronounced “GUILTY” and then cast into hell, where as Revelation says, “The smoke of their torment rises day and night…”
If that were the end of the story, our plight would be terrible indeed. But, as the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 5:8, “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” You see beloved, before coming to Christ, spiritually we were all were in the desolate wasteland of unforgiven sin, alienated from God and imprisoned by the enemies of sin and death. But, just as the psalmist turned to the Lord for his salvation, so we turn to our God for salvation, and that salvation is found in Jesus Christ alone, who came to free us from our enemies of sin of death by living the life that we should have lived, and dying the death that we deserved to die, and rising up victoriously from the grave on the third day having destroyed the enemies that held us captive.
You see beloved, because of my sin, Christ was mocked by His enemies, brutally flogged, and nailed to the cross. Because of my sin, Christ absorbed the full measure of God’s wrath against sin. And because of the perfect righteousness of Christ that was credited to my account when I first trusted Christ, this sinner now stands forever justified in God’s sight, and He now continuously pours out His lovingkindness to me in Christ, and it is all owing to the sovereign grace and mercy of God alone.
So, the psalmist hopes in God because he knows that God is His salvation, and, he also recognizes that:
2. God is in control of his circumstances for a purpose: As we discussed earlier, the psalmist is well aware that it is the Sovereign Lord of Heaven and earth that has brought all of this into his life, and I believe that God used these circumstances to cause the psalmist to grow even more in his faith, and to look to and rely more and more upon the Lord.
This is the thing that might surprise many in today’s modern church, particularly as we watch Televangelists tell us that we are always supposed to be prospering in our health and finances. Any sign of suffering in our lives is viewed by many of them as a lack of faith on the person’s part. To them, it is only Satan that brings suffering and trials in our lives, and what we have to do is pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, make a positive confession, rebuke the devil, and then God will see how much spiritual muscle we have and will be inclined to “bless” us.
While it may be true that in some cases our trial may be the result of an attack by Satan upon us, what we often fail to realize, beloved, is that none of that has taken God by surprise! As a matter of fact, God has ordained all of those things to take place in our lives in order to accomplish something in us. The apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8:28-29: “28 And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. 29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son…”
God doesn’t work just some things together, He works all things together, to include the attacks of the world, the flesh, and the devil, for good in the lives of His people, and the ultimate purpose in view; the ultimate good that is in view that God wants to “bless” us with, is not a “financial blessing” or a “physical healing,” rather, it is that we would be conformed to the image of Christ. That is not to say that God does not bless us in any material fashion. There are times in our lives when we desperately need God to move upon our finances, or to heal our bodies that are wracked with pain. But of even greater importance than these temporal blessings is our conformity to the image of Christ, whereby we learn to love God more and more with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength, and where we learn to love our neighbor more and more even as we love ourselves. And who is your neighbor you ask? Every single person you come in contact with…to include your enemies.
You see beloved, when we are first ceased by God’s sovereign grace and are enabled to come to Christ and repent of our sins and receive Him as our personal Lord and Savior; that is just the beginning. We have now been put on the journey of faith. And the journey of faith is one whereby God is working in us every day to conform us to the image of Christ.
I remember when we went to Florence, Italy a couple of years ago. We went to one of the museums there, and saw one of the greatest works of art ever created: Michael Angelo’s statue of David. The statue stands 13.5 feet high. It took Michael Angelo 3 years to complete the sculpting. What strikes many is the incredible perfection of physical details in the statue. And when you see the statue of David, you are struck with the thought of how in the world was Michael Angelo able to take a slab of stone and turn into something as majestic as this statue. I mean, you can see the ribs and muscle definition in the statue, and you can see the veins running through the arms! Well, in much the same way that Michael Angelo took a slab of stone and fashioned it into the image of David, so God takes our hard hearts of stone and replaces them with hearts of flesh, and as the Master Sculptor God hammers and chisels away at us, and the more He does the more the image that He is creating begins to come forth; the image of Christ.
The idea then is not that we would never have any trials or tribulations, or that we would never experience any distress. On the contrary, it is that we most certainly will experience things, and the ultimate purpose for those things is that our lives would be marked more and more by a Christ-like manner and nature of living. Whatever God teaches us through pain is for gain!
Conclusion
And so, we have seen the reality of distress. Not only do we find that the psalmist here experienced distress, but even our Lord was subjected to such distress that He sweated drops of blood, and as the Scriptures tells us, it has been granted to us both to believe and to suffer for His sake.
But we have also seen the response to distress: we put our hope in the living God of Heaven and earth, because He is in control of our circumstances, and He is working all things together for the good in the lives of His people in order to conform them to the image of Christ. He is our hope, He is our salvation, and He remains steadfastly faithful to His people, as He pours out His mercy and grace abundantly upon us in Christ.
We look then to our Sovereign King and Master, our great God and Savior. He is our dwelling place, He is our portion, He is our Rock, He is our protector, He is our provider, and He is our sustainer. He is our strong tower and we run to Him and are safe. And it is to Jesus Christ and His perfect and saving life, death, and resurrection from the dead that we look to and take our stand, and find our assurance and hope as we endure distress in our lives because we know that He who began a good work in us will complete it to the end.
If you are here today, and you have never given yourself completely to the Lord and turned from your sins and received Christ as your Savior, you have to understand that like the psalmist, you are in a desolate place, separated and cutoff from God because of your sin. I pray that you would, like the psalmist, thirst after God, and that you would come and drink freely from the fountains of living water springing up unto eternal life that are only found in Jesus Christ. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved…come, come and drink in the Lord Jesus Christ by turning from your sins and receiving Him as your Lord and Savior today, and you will find rest for your weary souls!
In conclusion, I would just like us to hear and reflect upon these words that the Apostle Peter writes in 1 Pet 1:3-9:
“3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, 5 who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ, 8 whom having not seen you love. Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, 9 receiving the end of your faith -- the salvation of your souls.”
Amen.