Lamenting, Innerancy of Scripture, and God's Empathy

*A lot of this was taken from and built around a great sermon by Tim Keller. That sermon is here.
David's lament in Psalm 39 is amazing and disturbing at the same time with emphasis on the last two verses:

I said, “I will guard my ways, that I may not sin with my tongue; I will guard my mouth with a muzzle, so long as the wicked are in my presence.” I was mute and silent; I held my peace to no avail, and my distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me. As I mused, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue: “O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! Surely a man goes about as a shadow! Surely for nothing they are in turmoil; man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather! “And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. Deliver me from all my transgressions. Do not make me the scorn of the fool! I am mute; I do not open my mouth, for it is you who have done it. Remove your stroke from me; I am spent by the hostility of your hand. When you discipline a man with rebukes for sin, you consume like a moth what is dear to him; surely all mankind is a mere breath!

--“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not your peace at my tears! For I am a sojourner with you, a guest, like all my fathers. Look away from me, that I may smile again, before I depart and am no more!--

1. God in His grace understands your weeping. It’s safe to pour your heart out to Him.

“Look away from me” ?? This Psalm has been a struggle to accept because it seems to just not fit. Yes other Psalms are filled with wrestling, weeping, crying, but they always end with a note of triumph, at peace, or confidence/trust in God.

But in Psalm 39 it ends in absolute theological incorrectness. He is saying to God, ‘look away so I might have a little bit of peace before I die’. David ends here with such an overwhelming feeling that he ends by telling God the opposite of what he is “suppose to”. We aren’t “suppose to” talk/pray/feel/be like this! Are we?? What is it doing in my Bible? He is “suppose to” be telling me what to do. And what does this mean to the idea of the Bible being without error. Isn’t this an error?

And then I ran into this: “The prayer ‘look away from me’ makes no more sense then Peter’s ‘depart from me’, yet God knows when to treat this plea, as He does to Peter in Luke 5 or when the crowd says it in Matthew 8. The very presence of such prayers in the scriptures is a witness to His understanding, He knows how we speak when we are desperate.” -- Tim Keller

That blew my mind.

In Psalm 39, God gives us a glimpse of His empathy, understanding, assurance: its inclusion in the Bible means it is safe to pray to Him like this. It shows us that our deepest emotions, anger, fears belong, not in some managed, manufactured confessional prayer, but belong in a pre-reflected (God wants you to know yourself) outburst from the very depth of your being in the presence of God. This may or may not be how we are “suppose to” speak, but God knows us better than ourselves and He says it is safe to do so in His presence.


2. 'Plant your tears' (taken from Psalm 126) in the vision of the cross.

Why is He so understanding? It is because God Himself came down and became a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53) even saying the night before His crucifixion, “My soul is sorrowful even unto death”. He was so sorrowful that He thought His sorrows could actually kill Him before He even got to the cross.

God knows what it is like to look to God and have Heaven barred (apparently). God knows what it is like to look to Heaven and feel nothing. God knows what it is like to cry out desperately: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me??” God is able to keep coming to us even after we have said “turn away” because when Jesus said, ‘Come to me!’ God turned away from Him. Jesus was calling for God and God turned His face away, or in other words, Jesus got the abandonment we deserved. And so now when we turn our face, God will come because He experienced what we should have received and therefore He is understanding.

If you look at Jesus on the cross saying, ‘Why me?’ You will still sometimes cry 'why me?', but you will never cry 'why me?' in the same way. Jesus’ tears in the cross produced joy. It produced our welcome into the embrace of God. Whenever we see that here is what you can do: take your tears and think about Him crying out on the cross, think about Him looking for God and God turning away from Him... and here’s what will happen, your tears will change because whenever bad things happen we have a tendency to feel guilty. Right? Be honest. Don’t we say: what’s wrong, why me, am I being punished, am I a bad person? Get rid of that! How? Look at the cross and you can say: 'even though I feel like I am being abandoned by God I am not. Even though it feels like God is punishing me for my sins He is not'. Why? Because He was punished for my sins. Even though it feels like God is abandoning me it is only an apparent abandonment because on the cross Jesus got real abandonment so I didn’t have to. And so if you ever feel, during your suffering, that God has rejected you, abandoned you, or you feel like a terrible person or weighed down with shame and guilt... look at Him die for you. God has not rejected you because Jesus was rejected for you.

And if you process your sorrows through the reality of the cross here is something else that will happen: you will get rid of that self-pity. The thing that will really kill you! Weeping, grief, disappointment are all fine. Jesus was always weeping, but weeping in self-pity? NO. That will make you a small little person who can’t forgive, who is always feeling ill-used, who gets incredibly touchy and incredibly oversensitive.... Look at the cross! And you can say, ‘you have really suffered for me. My sufferings are nothing compared to yours. If you suffered for me, I can be patient with this suffering for you.'

What if you are weeping and you say: I don’t see what God is doing in this??!! Impatient tears and you don’t see what God is doing... Look at the cross. and think of all the people who went home that night, who saw Jesus dieing on the cross (which was the greatest act of wisdom, salvation, grace, and love in history) and went home and lost their faith. Do you realize that many people looked at the cross, and not understanding it said, ‘I don’t even believe in God anymore. I don’t see what good God could be bringing out of this!’ They looked right smack into the face of the greatest thing that God ever did and said because I don’t understand - I don’t believe. (Why is it the greatest thing God ever did? It is because without it, Jesus abandonment here on the cross would have been ours.) When you see Jesus dieing on the cross and you can’t figure out what God is doing in your life, remember that.