The Lord Delivers the Righteous Psalm 37:23-40 Part Three

The Lord Delivers the Righteous

Psalm 37:23-40 – Part Three

Last week, I posed several perplexing questions for North American Christians as we read the grand promises of this psalm.  We greet each with the automatic saying, “I’m blessed and highly favored of God.”  Also, we exchange the positive affirmation, “God is good.  All the time, God is good.”  These simplistic and perhaps even simpleton sayings insidiously cloak the fundamental reality that millions of Christians throughout the world cannot repeat these words with any honesty.  Again, consider the face the millions of God fearing and faithful believers go to bed hungry each night.  We Americans comprise one sixth of the world’s population but we consume a disproportionate amount of the earth’s resources.  Our luxuries occur at the direct expense of believers in the Third World and within the Pacific Rim.  The desire to wear T-shirts in the winter and ride around in gas guzzling sport utility vehicles comes at the behest of Christians who work for unconsciousable wages.  The average family of four in such situations lives on an annual income of fifteen hundred dollars ($1500).  Is not the Psalter wrong as he affirms, “I was young and now I am old and I have never seen the righteous forsaken and their children begging bread?”  Apparently, these brothers and sisters of the developing world seem to have been forgotten by the Lord and excluded from this grand and immortal promise of obedience.

I am very tempted to leave this question unanswered.  I think that we hasten, too often, to offer Pollyannaish replies to difficult contradictions between the Bible and daily life.  How do we reconcile the two?  Do we ask the enduring theological question about theodicy?  Why would an all-powerful, all-kind, ever-present, and all-knowing God allow such intractable inequity with regard to the distribution of the world’s resources?  Does God really possess the proactive and inherent power to alleviate pain and suffering?  Why does it continue in the light of God’s main and non-negotiable attributes?  You may proceed to offer your own version of this question of juxtaposing God’s eternal existence and infinite abilities with the perpetuation of evil in the world?  More specifically, how can God pledge His unfailing love, provision and protection of the righteous when so many of them seem forsaken by Him?

Assuredly, we cannot direct these questions to Almighty God.  Job, in the latter chapters of his book, discovers this fallacy.  Instead, the problem of the presence and persistence of evil is quintessentially a human one.  More directly, this question rightly haunts the people who profess to know the love of God.  Simply stated, the Church, generally, and individual disciples, specifically, must grapple with what it means to receive the love of Christ and the grace of Almighty God as He blesses us materially, economically and otherwise and our biblically mandated obligation to demonstrate this love tangibly with others.  How do we, in North America, reconcile our incalculable concrete blessings with the hard facts that we cause the hunger and suffering of so many people in the world?  Do these difficult contradictions of our Christian rhetoric and the reality of our acquiescence of the subjugation and dehumanization of so many of our fellow Christians disturb us?  Does it coerce us to re-examine our lifestyles and contributions to missions?  Straightforwardly, has our insatiable appetite for creature comforts evolved into a depth of greed that is simply evil?