From Calvin Seerveld, Voicing God’s Psalms. 63-64
***
Wrestling
in faith with God for rescue and blessing, knuckles bared, fired up
with chutzpah, is what the Lord wants from God’s adopted children
(Psalm 91:14-16; Matthew 7:7-11; John 16:23-24). Wrestling with God is not
pretty, because it is a matter of life or death. One must not cry “Wolf!” to God
if there are no wolves on the horizon. But the Lord
does want us to tangle with God to come through. God promises that the prayer
of right-doing faithful ones avails much and can change God’s mind (Jonah 3;
Matthew 15:21-28; Luke 7:1-10; James 5:13-18). Pulling fervently on God in
prayer is to pull on a biblical lifeline for our buffeted, Melchizedek[i]
ministry in the moil and roil of the world.
It is absorbing and instructive
to find that the psalmists mince no words with God. They have a history with
God, are familiar with how God does things, and are ready to chew out God for
attention: “Listen to us, listen to us crying, Lord!”
(Psalm 86:1-7). “We can’t go on living with the suffering: You carry it for us,
Lord – carry us through the
misery, loneliness, uncertainty, and frightening hurt” (Psalm 25:16-21; Psalm
43; Isaiah 63:7-9). “If we have become strangers to You, O Lord, at least show us decent
hospitality in this world of yours where we dwell so briefly!” (Psalm 39:12).
Such entreaties in
the psalms openly remonstrate with God in an accusing vocative case: “Lord, we belong to you – why leave us in
the lurch?” (Psalm 22:1-11; 38:21-22). “How long will you keep on forgetting to
take care of us?” (Psalm 13:1-2). “If you let me succumb to this wasting
illness, Lord, I can’t praise you
in the grave, can I?” (Psalm 6:4-5; 30:6-10).
Are the psalms perhaps foreign to our vocabulary
because we do not normally find ourselves in dire straits? How can it make
sense to pray for our daily manna if the freezer is well stocked with meat?
Perhaps our prayers are often just superficial, much too prim and polite in
diction for God to give a rough and ready answer, because we do not know
firsthand the oppressive predicaments the psalmists experienced – left behind
as an outcast, covered in feces, facing extinction.
Would to God the psalms
could teach us the tensile strength of pleading with the Lord, of wrestling with God, if not for
ourselves then as intercessors for others who desperately need protective
custody. If we take these psalms on our lips, in our mouth, actually to wrestle
earnestly with God, the Lord will indeed give grit to mature our faith and
maybe, as the Angel of the Lord
did once upon a time for Jacob (“The Deceiver”), bless us with a handicap, a
thorn in the flesh, to keep God’s servants seasoned and humble (Genesis 32; II
Corinthians 12:1-10). The well-worn phrase of the prayer Christ taught us has a
feisty existential dimension: “Give us today, Lord, our daily manna – the food
we need, the emotional well-being, the reflective insight, the wisdom to rule
with mercy, O Lord, lest we perish!”
[i]
From the same book, page 17: “So ‘Melchizedek’ stand for the mysterious
mediating role of men and women who are anointed by the Lord God to
rule and lead others with, as it were, their slips of mercy showing…
Melchizedek, then, is the biblical code name for being an ambassador on earth
for God revealed in Jesus Christ, to bring healing to the nations of the world…
Melchizedek is why Jesus taught us to pray, ‘Lord, may your kingdom, your Way
of ruling, come…soon.’”
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