Psalm 27:13 - Assurance of Seeing the Goodness of God in the Land of the Living

 

Psalm 27:13 – Assurance of Seeing the Goodness of God

in the Land of the Living

 

 

It is very fashionable in diverse religious and spiritual circles to say affirmations aloud each day.  This discipline of faith reinforces a disciple’s belief in God’s unfailing love, limitless grace and unending mercy.  The Psalmist concludes this often-quoted spiritual poem and verse with a thunderous statement of faith. “I am still confident of this, I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  His affirmation in God’s faithfulness follows His lament about facing enemies and potential opposition of an army.  The Psalmist insists he will rely upon God despite living in the days of trouble.  He will forsake his fear and genuinely rely upon God’s faithfulness and kindness.  He begins this psalm in asking a rhetorical question about the worthlessness of fear considering God’s enduring graciousness amid evil, war and danger.  “The Lord is my light and salvation.  Whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life.  Of whom shall I be afraid?”  The Psalter asks himself these questions to remind himself of God’s unquestioned trustworthiness. 

 

His questions raise the dichotomy of faith and fear which cannot coexist.  Instead of languishing in fear, the Psalter chooses to ground his life and well-being in his relationship with God.  In the second half of this psalm, he appeals to God for perfect assurance of God’s presence and protection.  Starkly, the Psalmist considers the dreadful possibility that his mother and father may forsake him.  To that horrific occurrence, he reaffirms that the Lord will “take him up.”  In addition, the Psalmist realizes the further dreadfulness that he may fall into the hands of his foes and false witnesses whose accusations may gain acceptance by misguided persons.  Notwithstanding the Psalter’s potent mental and emotional fears and well-founded external threats to his life, he declares his resolve to remain steadfast in his trust of God.  The Psalmist unequivocally expects to receive and experience the bounty of God’s goodness during his earthly journey.

 

This verse communicates an undying hope despite the Psalter experiences bleaks circumstances.  This psalm enumerates several hurtful and difficult situations that deeply afflict the Psalter.  Reciting theological tenets would be minimally comforting and helpful.  Do creeds and rituals encourage and empower disciples in distress? Quite possibly, formal and systematic faith has its limits.  Formulaic faith certainly disappoints as a disciple lingers in hard times.  To persevere and ultimately surmount them, the Psalter proclaims an unwavering hope in God’s character and power.  To hope is an expression of heartfelt expectation, ambition and trust that something will occur.  Practically speaking, the Psalter essentially says that no one and nothing will convince him otherwise.   He knows within his heart of hearts and in the deep crevices of his mind that God will overshadow his bleak circumstances.  Irrespective of his balance sheet, bank accounts, job title, physical health, mental and emotional state and well-being of personal and professional relationships, the Psalter rests upon the assurance of realizing God’s goodness at some point in the future.  The Psalter believes a reversal of fortune awaits him.  He must simply trust God’s faithfulness despite periodic weariness.  Hope fuels the Psalter’s resilience until God’s promises emerge.

 

Florence Scovel Shinn posits affirmations are to be said aloud in the present tense.  Future tenses delay blessings.  Use of past tenses prevents new occurrences.  Accordingly, the Psalter states his unambiguous belief that if he maintains hope and trust in Almighty God, he will see inexpressible blessings and joys.  Interestingly, the King James Version of this verse reads, “I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  Stating affirmations in the present is necessary to prevent surrender and faithlessness.  The Psalmist would have given up if he had not been in the practice of verbally affirming his hope in God.  His words prevented his lapse into negative thinking and experiential paralysis.  Note the emphasis upon faith in the Psalter’s use of the subjunctive mood in this translation.  His faith in God propels his perseverance through the tunnel of existential darkness.  The Psalter’s hope enables him to rise out of bed each morning and continue his daily affairs as he awaits the unfolding of God’s goodness.

 

The Psalmist concludes this grand poem with a triumphant word of exhortation and expectation to himself.  “Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, He will strengthen thine heart: wait, I say on the Lord.”  The Psalter recognizes that God rewards his boldness in faith with deepening his resolve to trust God as he expects fulfillment of God’s favor and kindness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where Are the Other Nine? - Luke 17:11-19 Allowing for Long-term Gratitude

Where Are the Other Nine? – Luke 17:11-19

Allowing for Long-term Gratitude

This healing story in Luke’s gospel involves an encounter between Jesus and ten lepers, nine Jews and one Samaritan.  A physical miracle occurs as ten men who suffer with a debilitating disease destroying their skin and internal cells and resulting in a slow and painful death are healed.  While archeologists and biblical scholars debate the empirical causes and symptoms of leprosy in the Ancient Near East, they concur that the disease was thought to be a form of defilement and ritual uncleanness.  The thinking of the time insisted that formidable personal sin contributed to a person’s contraction of leprosy. Arguably, the more definitive cause of the disease would have been the character defects that separated these men from God thereby resulting in a broken relationship with Him.  Thus, the greater miracle would be their restoration of relationship with God; their newfound physical wholeness symbolizes their reconciliation with God. 

Feared to be contagious, lepers were banished from regular social interactions.  They were to live in leper colonies.  Were they to commingle with normal people, they were to announce loudly and persistently their presence as a warning to others.  Hence, this healing story includes the social and human relational challenges of Jesus’ willingness, in defiance of Old Testament regulations and social norms, to listen to the plea of ten lepers, one of whom is a Samaritan.  From the lepers’ standpoint, they did not have anything to lose and only something to gain.  There was not a cure for this disease in biblical times.  Inexplicably, word reached them that healing was possible if they encountered Jesus of Nazareth.  These lepers left their deathbeds and doggedly pursued this possibility.  After the physical healing, the question remains whether they were really healed of the underlying disease of sin.  Only one leper expresses joy and thanksgiving as a demonstration of his intent to lead a new life.  Ironically, it is the Samaritan who immediately offers gratitude.  Jesus’ fellow Jews return to their personal affairs without even saying, “Thank you.”  As I previously read this passage, I silently condemn these ingrates for their failure to articulate or demonstrate any thanksgiving for God’s grace and love.  However, I increasingly appreciate the reality that when Jesus asks, “Where are the nine,” I am one of them.

Luke’s gospel always records where Jesus is relative to Jerusalem.  He opens this story by telling us that Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem and travels along the border between Samaria and Galilee.  This detail refers to the racial and ethnic strife between Jews and Samaritans.  The former group considers the latter group to be “half breeds.”  The Assyrians sacked the Israelite people in 722 BCE.  The subjugated Israelites who remained in the capital of the Northern Kingdom intermarried with their conquerors.  They were designated as “Samaritans” to distinguish them from “full blooded” Israelites who remained faithful to the covenant with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the patriarchs.  Both groups despised each other.  Luke positions Jesus who personifies God’s unfailing and unconditional love within this historic racial and ethnic conflict.  Jesus is the One who share grace, mercy and compassion with anyone who believes.  Hence, Luke utilizes this story to teach his audience that the love of God in Christ transcends human limitations and divisions.

In a village which was probably a Samaritan one as it includes a mixed group of lepers, Jesus hears their cries from a distance.  The lepers observe the social conventions of the day.  They keep their distance yet still cry aloud for Jesus’s attention.  Their call of desperation to Jesus reminds me of the four lepers in 2 Kings 7 who lied at the city gate.  Living and dying within a famine, the lepers ask themselves, “Why stay here until we die?”  They rose and went to the camp of the Arameans to seek food, relief and life.  The lepers in this story act with a similar motivation.  They ask Jesus to have pity on them.  They request the grace and gift of His healing power. 

Jesus instructs them to go show themselves to the priest.  His directive accords with Old Testament law stipulating the necessity of priestly confirmation to enable a previous leper to return to normal social interactions.  “As they went, they were healed.”  Notice their obedience precedes the miracle.  The lepers receive the healing for which they pray after they demonstrate their willingness to follow the Word of God as Jesus speaks.  You recall Naaman, commander of the army of Syria, did not receive healing of his leprosy until he obeys the prophet’s instructions to dip seven times in the Jordan River. (2 Kings 5) These healings demand obedience to the Word of God.  In your prayer requests, do you ask God if there is something He requires?

Upon realizing he had been healed, the Samaritan returns and falls at Jesus’ feet.  The Samaritan who had been a leper praises God in an equally loud voice.  As a sign of wholehearted and enduring thanks, he throws himself at Jesus feet and thanks Jesus for the healing.  Imagine the Samaritan’s exuberance.  What might he have said to Jesus?  Consider the amazement of the disciples and crowd.  Did any to them think, “Why did Jesus waste this healing on a Samaritan?”  What did the residents of the adjacent Samaritan village think when they heard of Jesus’ willingness to heal one of their brothers?  Did this miracle heal any of the racial and ethnic strife between these groups?

Jesus asks, “Were not all ten healed?  Where are the nine?  Has no one returned to give praise to God but this foreigner?”  Jesus characterizes the Samaritan as a “foreigner.”  Is He too embracing the cultural and ethnic strife that persists in the region?  Does Jesus note this difference to admonish the Israelites who observed the miracle?  Nine of the lepers are Israelites who seemingly took God’s miraculous power, grace and love for granted.  Being descendants of Abraham and heirs of the covenant with God, these healed former lepers may have mistakenly assumed they deserved the miracle particularly if Jesus would heal a Samaritan.  Given that the Samaritan received a gift of a lifetime, he rightly should have returned and given thanks.  “Well, at least that half breed had enough home training and manners to say thanks.”  Nevertheless, the miracle undoubtedly gave the audience both Israelites and Samaritans a new perspective on their relationship with each other.  Why would Jesus, a Jewish healer, be so merciful to a Samaritan?  Does God absolutely love everyone, His chosen people and Gentiles?  With both groups staking claim to the patriarchs and covenant as the Samaritan woman at well informs Jesus (John 4), the healing undoubtedly left both to them with a new and enlarged understanding of God and God’s love.  Still, there is the primary question, “Where are the nine?”

Where Are the Other Nine? - Luke 17:11-19 Allowing for Long-term Gratitude Part II

Where Are the Other Nine? – Luke 17:11-19

Allowing for Long-term Gratitude – Part II

Jesus tells the grateful Samaritan to rise and leave as the man’s faith has made him whole.  What is the role of faith in a miracle?  Biblical miracles are instantaneous.  In His sovereign prerogative, God suspends natural law to empower people with faith and glorify Himself.  Countless contemporary disciples ask for the benefits of similar supernatural acts of love and grace though they have the blessings of medical science.  Moreover, if the underlying cause of illness is a profound character defect, then the ultimate miracle will occur much later.  Transformation of character rarely happens instantaneously.  It is a lifelong process.  Faith necessarily equips the person requesting the miracle to remain steadfast in practicing spiritual disciplines; which reinforce adjustments in thinking and actions to achieve change of personality and principles.  Faith is willingness to obey God’s Word and guidance as we incrementally acquire the mind, heart and character of Christ.

“Were not all ten healed? Where are the nine?”  For many years, I harshly judged those nine men who miraculously received God’s grace as He recalls them from death to life, physically and spiritually.  What colossal and contemptible ingrates!  With the unrelenting and pure condemnation of uninformed adolescence, I wondered whether something worst occurred in their lives. I just could not understand how they arrogantly and indifferently trampled upon God’s grace and love.  With the hindsight of decades of life experience with myriad personal and professional successes and failures, my heart is more gracious and generous towards those nine former lepers.  As I have reached different milestones on the road of life, I realize the depths of human prodigality, ingratitude, brokenness and inclination toward sin particularly within myself.  Hence, I no longer think of these men as ingrates.  Rather, I extend to them the benefit of the doubt.  I suspect that they were as grateful as the Samaritan.  However, I imagine their gratitude formed from the moment of the miracle and grew within their inner person until it swelled and exploded one day in a defining moment of kindness and generosity.  Providentially, God put someone as broken as these former lepers were in their respective paths.  Looking upon those persons in need, possibly these lepers saw themselves on the day of their healing.  Banned from society and nearing death, they yelled in a final act of desperation to an unknown man whom they heard had the power to heal.  Seeing someone similarly situated, these healed lepers may have interceded and ask God to heal their neighbors as He had healed them.  I imagine these nine men became God’s ambassadors of love, grace, mercy and healing wherever they went.  Instead of demonstrating revolting ingratitude, these nine men teach us to be patient with persons whom we have helped as gratefulness evolves in time.  Gratitude is an internal  characteristic beyond being words and deeds that reflect a person’s appreciation.

Being thankful explodes in a person’s heart after cumulative experiences that create overwhelming gratefulness for God’s goodness and faithfulness.  As Jesus tells parables throughout the Gospels, there is no indication that He expects the hearers immediately to grasp the wisdom of His teachings.  He realizes their need to mentally and spiritually digest His words.  In time, after the Rich Young Ruler and others leave Jesus, the message of the parables implodes between their ears.  Likewise, it may take decades before a person becomes genuinely grateful to God and His human vessels.  In October 2000, Warner Brothers Production distributed the movie, Pay It Forward, starring Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt.  Its predictable saccharin plot managed to impart its title and primary premise into American social discourse and relations.  In the greater New York City area where I reside, people began to do random and anonymous favors for people without expecting anything in return.  The giver would recommend to the recipient that he or she demonstrate thankfulness by paying it forward.  I suggest the nine healed lepers did the same thing.  I imagine that they stumbled upon people and experiences that compelled unimaginable gratitude within them.  That confluence of circumstances hurled them down memory lane.  Vividly, they recalled the day on which they encountered Jesus who healed them.  They considered the reality that they were inches and minutes away from death.  Acknowledging that they were undeserving recipients of God’s grace, they became willing to share His unfailing love with other anonymous persons.  Their thanksgiving unfolded in time.

I cite two examples of delayed yet powerful and transformative gratitude.  The first comes from American political history and the second is personal.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia at his Southern White House.  Then Vice President Truman took the oath of office within a few hours.  On his first trip back to Washington on the presidential train, having visited his home state of Missouri, Truman arrived at Union Station.  The platform was mostly empty.  Dean Acheson and his wife were there to greet the newly sworn in President as an act of respect to the office and the man who then occupied it.  That act of kindness engendered considerable gratitude within Truman’s heart according to Acheson’s biographer, Professor Robert L. Beisner.  That act of respect for the new President from the Mid-West, who lived in the shadow of his predecessor, the Harvard educated, New York patrician, yielded the Secretary of State position during the Cold War.  Acheson was nominated partially due to the gratitude that swelled within Truman’s consciousness possibly a year following the greeting on the train platform.

Where Are the Other Nine" - Luke 17:11-19 Allowing for Long-term Gratitude Part III

Where Are the Other Nine? – Luke 17:11-19

Allowing for Long-term Gratitude – Part III

Nearly seven years ago, I wrote separate and personal letters to my former teachers spanning first grade to high school.  As I sat in my office one day, a tidal wave of thanksgiving for these people flooded my mind and heart.  In the previous years, I had taught fulltime at an independent middle school and an inner-city public school in a Southern state where I lived for a nearly a decade.  The gratitude that I felt on that afternoon I could not have felt until I had taught.  I recalled the experience of awakening at 4:30am in order to prepare for work inclusive of assisting my young children and dropping them off to school to ensure my prompt arrival at 7:00am each school day.  I more greatly appreciated the seminal contributions of my teachers to my educational and personal preparation for life.  As it relates to compensation, I was shocked by the salary compression in the teaching and education profession.  It is incredulous that someone enters this field, works for three decades or more and only receives cost of living adjustments and not raises.  Practically, teachers retire after thirty or more years of hard labor at the same salary with which they began if they only receive increases to stave off inflation.  Beyond inadequate pay, teachers spend countless hours outside of the classroom in which they advise extracurricular activities, grade papers, prepare lesson plans, serve on committees and attend meetings.  Arguably, they do not receive minimum wages.  Nevertheless, as I rehearsed the breadth and depth of my few years of teaching, I was overwhelmed with a newfound realization of personal, professional and financial sacrifices that my teachers made.  I chose to concretize my gratitude in the previously mentioned letters.  I made a list of each of my teachers.  I searched the web for addresses and email addresses.  I wrote the one who were still alive.  In some instances, thirty-five years had passed since I had been a student of some them.  Genuinely, I wanted my teachers to know I am enduringly grateful for their labor of love, faithfulness and duty in their vocation.

I did not expect any responses from my teachers.  My purpose in writing was to celebrate their seminal contributions to my life and express my heartfelt thanks.  Surprisingly, a few of them wrote emails, responded with postal letters or called to thank me for my correspondence.  One response particularly impressed me.  One teacher said, “I walked in and out of that building for thirty-seven years wondering whether I was making a difference in anyone’s life.  I often asked myself, ‘Is it worth it?’ When I received your letter, I finally had my answer.”  Over the course of her career, this elementary school teacher would have taught minimally twelve hundred students.  Statistically, another five hundred of her former students share my wholehearted thanks but did not write to her for any number of reasons.  Nearly half of the persons whom she taught for nearly four decades share my appreciation.  Life’s busyness and competing commitments impeded their ability to concretize their gratitude.  Interestingly, it took nearly the length of her teaching career to receive formal thanks.  Like the nine lepers who were healed and returned to their daily affairs, her students proceeded with their education; some of them proceeded to college and graduate school, others entered a branch of the armed services; and the remainder  took jobs.  Chances are all of them felt grateful for her instruction and vocational willingness to empower them with a solid learning foundation.  She may have asked, “Is anyone appreciative of my teaching and me?”  Her questions parallel Jesus’ question, “Where are the nine?” In both instances, I posit her students and the nine lepers deeply felt gratitude but failed verbally to express it.  I conclude they paid it forward and demonstrated their gratefulness by sowing random and anonymous deeds of kindness in the lives of needful persons whom God mysteriously put in their paths.

“Where are the nine?”  Wait for them.  Thanksgiving will grow in their hearts and minds as time passes.  Within God’s mysterious ways, these healed lepers will verify their gratitude in the shadows of human pain and suffering.  Having received such an incalculable gift of love and grace, thankfulness compels these nine men to materialize their thoughts and feelings.  As we contemporary disciples are lepers in our own ways, we are recipients of divine healing, restoration and transformation.  The Lord may ask of us what He asked of them.  As we realize just how great, gracious and giving our God is, we will show our appreciation of Him through generosity of time, talent and treasure in healing someone in need as God guides us.