Scripture for the Week
Psalm 44
For the director of music. Of the Sons of Korah. A maskil.
We have heard with our ears, O God;
our fathers have told us
what you did in their days,
in days long ago.
With your hand you drove out the nations
and planted our fathers;
you crushed the peoples
and made our fathers flourish.
It was not by their sword that they won
the land,
nor did their arm bring them victory;
it was your right hand, your arm,
and the light of your face, for you loved them.
You are my King and my God,
who decrees victories for Jacob.
Through you we push back our enemies;
through your name we trample our foes.
I do not trust in my bow,
my sword does not bring me victory;
but you give us victory over our enemies,
you put our adversaries to shame.
In God we make our boast all day long,
and we will praise your name forever.
Selah.
But now you have rejected and humbled
us;
you no longer go out with our armies.
You made us retreat before the enemy,
and our adversaries have plundered us.
You gave us up to be devoured like sheep
and have scattered us among the nations.
You sold your people for a pittance,
gaining nothing from their sale.
You have made us a reproach to our
neighbors,
the scorn and derision of those around
us.
You have made us a byword among the
nations;
the peoples shake their heads at us.
My disgrace is before me all day long,
and my face is covered with shame
at the taunts of those who reproach and
revile me,
because of the enemy, who is bent on
revenge.
All this happened to us,
though we had not forgotten you
or been false to your covenant.
Our hearts had not turned back;
our feet had not strayed from your path.
But you crushed us and made us a haunt
for jackals
and covered us over with deep darkness.
If we had forgotten the name of our God
or spread out our hands to a foreign
god,
would not God have discovered it,
since he knows the secrets of the heart?
Yet for your sake we face death all day
long;
we are considered as sheep to be
slaughtered.
Awake, O Lord! Why do you sleep?
Rouse yourself! Do not reject us
forever.
Why do you hide your face
and forget our misery and oppression?
We are brought down to the dust;
our bodies cling to the ground.
Rise up and help us;
redeem us because of your unfailing love.
Devotional
In the months leading up to my engagement with my now Husband, I remember having a conversation with a coworker and dear friend, about the heart impact of waiting for a proposal.
Leading up to this conversation, I had never considered that he might propose. And then the fateful day, that tore my heart down, making me miserable over something I hadn’t been expecting, came. We were in California visiting his family and he had planned a beautiful beach date day for us.
We started the day young, his sister joining us last minute, claiming a desire to read and journal on the beach. With our new travel partner in tow we stopped by our favorite local coffee shop, Lavender & Honey, to grab lattes and their heavenly goat cheese, lavender toast for our drive. Our hearts were tuned into the moment as Rebelution music floated through the interior of the car.
After we got to the beach, we split in our different directions. My husband and I wandered down to the left, just enjoying walking through the sand with waves licking at our toes. As we walked the beach, I slowly became aware of his sister trailing behind us. And that’s when the thought popped into my mind: “is he going to propose? Is his sister really here to take pictures?”
In an instant, I went from blissfully unaware to fully expectant of what I was sure was to come. You can only imagine, that as the day drew on, we got called back to the rest of the family and no proposal came, I was devastated. I had created a beautiful scenario in my mind of what would happen, based off my own understanding, and when different events came into play, my heart was hurt.
It was after this short visit that I shared my pain and frustration with my coworker; both of us hunched over the desk, unpacking a new Hearing Aid shipment as we talked. I poured my heart out to her, tears spilling past my mascara and leaving streaks in my perfectly blushed cheeks. I just didn’t understand why the proposal didn’t happen when it was all so clear to me.
It was in this moment, as she picked up my lack of work as I mopped up my tears, that she shared her own experience. Her and her husband had gotten engaged sooner than they had initially planned. Through the guidance of their church leaders, they were advised to get married over waiting until both of them had finished their desired extents of schooling. After she knew the proposal was coming, she was constantly being hurt as time and time again, the perfect scenario for a proposal came and passed.
We realized that we build up our own expectations, from our own understanding, of what is going to happen and when something goes astray from the perfect scenario in our heads, we become devastated. We feel lost, hurt and utterly confused as to why the “promised plan” didn’t happen.
As I have spent time reading and listening to Psalm 44, my heart always felt a pull of understanding. I could hear the cry of the people as they shared their grievances with God. I could hear their pleas for God to remember why he loved them and to help them out of that love. No matter how many times I listened to it though, I just couldn’t place my finger on what was happening in this particular Psalm. Then one morning, as I sat down on a whim and re-read Psalm 44, all the pieces started to click together and I understood.
The cries in the Psalm felt so familiar and yet so detached from me because I had already experienced, in my own way, what they were sharing. The Psalmists are singing a song of grief; a song of a proposal they thought was coming and the grief they have felt after it didn’t come.
Take a look back at Psalm 44:1 with me.
Psalm 44:1
We have heard with our ears, O God;
our fathers have told us
what you did in their days,
in days long ago.
The Psalm starts with the Psalmist immediately considering the history their ancestors had shared with the Lord. They grew up hearing the tales of how God had delivered their fathers, their very people from the land. They knew that their people had a long history of walking alongside God and that God himself had cared for and built up their people. The Psalmist knows exactly how God had delivered his people.
Psalm 44:2-3
With your hand you drove out the nations
and planted our fathers;
you crushed the peoples
and made our fathers flourish.
It was not by their sword that they won
the land,
nor did their arm bring them victory;
it was your right hand, your arm,
and the light of your face, for you loved them.
The retellings of God’s deliverance is fresh in the Psalmists eyes and hearts. These were likely stories that were told and retold as the people relived and praised God for how He had shown up for them.
Even the Psalmist sharing these remembrances is packed with awe and respect for God. He shares, with humility, that they knew it was not by their own doings that they won their land. Rather, it was God’s “right arm, the light of His face” that brought their people to victory. The psalmist shares, as though a secret, that their people found deliverance and a livelihood because of God’s deep love for them.
In the spirit of the moment, the Psalmist proclaims who God is to him. He walks with God in prayer, reliving side by side how God shows up for those He loves. The Psalmist portrays his devotion to God and boldly claims that his allegiance lies with God alone.
Psalm 44:4-8
You are my King and my God,
who decrees victories for Jacob.
Through you we push back our enemies;
through your name we trample our foes.
I do not trust in my bow,
my sword does not bring me victory;
but you give us victory over our enemies,
you put our adversaries to shame.
In God we make our boast all day long,
and we will praise your name forever.
It was in this beautiful moment of the Psalmist portraying his people’s steadfast faith in God, that I began to wonder what was really happening. On the surface it seems clear. People reminiscing of who God was and vowing to remain in the same God who is. I want you to consider with me, the verse that ticked me off to something deeper being at play.
Psalm 44:5
Through you we push back our enemies;
through your name we trample our foes.
While innocent up front, I found myself curious as to why the Psalmist, when now referring to his generation's relationship with God, was still referencing God showing up in the same way He had for their fathers.
It was this moment before the “selah”, before the tone of the Psalm started to shift, that I wondered if perhaps the mistake being made, was an expectation for God to show up in the same way that He did for their fathers. Were these people expecting to see deliverance and God’s presence in their life based on their own understanding of how that should be done? Was the absence of their own scenarios coming true making them feel as though God had abandoned them?
Psalm 44:9-10
But now you have rejected and humbled
us;
you no longer go out with our armies.
You made us retreat before the enemy,
and our adversaries have plundered us.
For the next eight verses, the Psalmist shares the grievances of his people. He shares how they have been afflicted by God no longer showing up with their armies, as He had previously. He shares the disgrace they have faced as their enemies re-gained power.
It’s almost as though the Psalmist is sharing a hidden lack of faith.
Rather than falling back on the promises of God and knowing that the same God who walked with their fathers now walks with them, they give in to shame. They haven’t experienced God in the way they expected and with His “absence” they no longer know how to defend their faith in God based on His historical goodness alone.
Psalm 44:17-18
All this happened to us,
though we had not forgotten you
or been false to your covenant.
Our hearts had not turned back;
our feet had not strayed from your path.
The Psalmist and his people know that they have done their best to follow God’s laws and commandments. They have lived a life for the Lord, as they best knew how. In the understanding of God's law at that time, if they were living by the Word, God would be present in their lives with His goodness. If they were not living by God's word, they would feel alone and experience His judgment.
Living in a world after Christ, we have the incredible honor of knowing that being a Christian sometimes means suffering. Being Christian means that we will face hardships and trials. However, in Christ we can set aside our own trials and choose to pick up Christ's. It is through picking up Christ’s yoke, that we know He is walking by our side in all circumstances, and in that, we have peace.
We have been blessed by living in a world that once knew the Son of God.
Because we get to walk on this earth after Jesus, we have a new understanding of what our relationship with God looks like. We know that Jesus paid for our sins so that no matter what we do, as long as we humble ourselves to repent and give ourselves back to God, we are forgiven.
The people who are suffering behind the words of Psalm 44 didn’t have same reassurance we have now. They were living with the laws and promises of a people who didn’t have a mediator between them and God. Their understanding was that God delivered when his people followed Him, and God punished when His people went astray.
With this deeper knowledge, it’s so easy for us to understand why these people would be so hurt and confused by God’s abandonment; all the while still fighting to choose Him.
Psalm 44:20-21
If we had forgotten the name of our God
or spread out our hands to a foreign
god,
would not God have discovered it,
since he knows the secrets of the heart?
It is in this understanding that they remind themselves and God that He formed them in the inmost of places. That He and He alone can know the depths of their hearts. That if He was doubting their faithfulness to Him, He could look at their hearts and know the truth.
Psalm 44:23-25
Awake, O Lord! Why do you sleep?
Rouse yourself! Do not reject us
forever.
Why do you hide your face
and forget our misery and oppression?
We are brought down to the dust;
our bodies cling to the ground.
And then, out of pure frustration comes the heart wrenching cry. The cry we have all likely experienced at least once as we scream into the night air “where are you God?!”.
This is the breaking point, the point where the pain, frustration and confusion boils up and overflows. The Psalmist pours out the truth of his and his people's pain and bears the depths of his soul. He’s tired. His people are tired. They’ve fought hard and they don’t know how much further they can go. They were made from the dust and in this moment, it feels as though they are returning to the dust.
Psalm 44:26
Rise up and help us;
redeem us because of your unfailing love.
In one last final plea, the extent of emotional energy worn thin from the abrupt outburst of pain, they ask God to remember love.
In my attempts to learn more about Psalm 44 before God helped open my blind eyes, I listened to a recorded sermon by a pastor in Oregon. He shared in his sermon that Psalm 44 was a bummer of a Psalm. That there was nothing to it outside of God’s people complaining. I understand where he is coming from. I understand that reading this Psalm can feel like a bummer. But friends, I disagree so immensely. I think there is so much truth for us to learn from this cry of God’s people.
I shared at the beginning of this devotional that our own expectations can lead to great hurt and disappointment. I truly believe this is exactly what is happening in this Psalm. Yes, it’s a Psalm where God’s people are sharing their suffering, but it’s so much more than that.
Time and time again, this group of people, their thoughts and pains being penned by the Psalmist, share their expectation for God to show up how He had for their father’s. They share 26 verses of crying out and asking God to show up for them. For him to deliver them from their enemies and to make them proud again.
Friends, I ask you, what if God had been there all along? What if it was less about God not showing up for His people, and more about His people looking for Him solely based off their own understanding?
I shared how crushed I was when the idea of an engagement proposal, that came from nowhere, and formed itself into a beautiful plan, didn’t happen.
I think we often tend to create a beautiful scenario in our minds of what we want our own realities to be. A certain word, an action, even a simple look triggers something in our minds and we conjugate a false understanding of what will happen. When we create an expectation for reality, based on our understanding, we are almost always setting ourselves up for a disappointment.
We trick ourselves into believing that this scenario we have built into our minds had an actual chance of being reality. I somehow tricked myself into believing that a proposal was on the line and that it had been taken away from me. Friends, as far as I know now, there wasn’t even an inkling of an idea of a proposal at that time.
When I went sobbing to my now husband about this months after the fact, he was stunned that I had thought that was happening. To him, it was a nice trip on the beach. For me, I experienced the disappointment of a mind that had gathered small “clues” and pieced them together to create a different story.
See, I don’t think God was abandoning His people as they claim in this Psalm. I think He was actively working to provide for them and deliver them the entire time. The difference is that our understanding, their understanding, was not large enough to realize that something greater was at work.
I want you to consider Exodus.
Exodus 2:23-25
During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.
These verses, at the very beginning of Exodus, come right after Moses' birth and his retreat to Midian. Exodus 2:24 mentions God’s covenant with Jacob; the same covenant the Psalmist mentions in his cries.
As we have seen through the ages, God’s people have suffered. They’ve been persecuted and they’ve faced trials. In Exodus, God’s people were being persecuted by the Egyptians. They had become slaves and their physical lives belonged to another being. In this heart wrenching reality, they cried out to God; much like the Psalmist, asking God to remember and deliver.
I wanted to share these verses in Exodus because they share so much truth about the illusion of our understanding when in comparison to God’s ultimate plan. God heard his people’s cries, He inherently remembered how much He cared for them and what He promised them. God instantly felt His people’s pain and went to work to deliver them.
But His deliverance didn’t come when the people wanted it or expected it. He didn’t hear their heartfelt cries and immediately fall upon Egypt to make his presence known. No friends. After God’s heart goes out to His people, He appears to Moses in a burning bush and makes his presence known.
Exodus 3:7-10
The Lord said, “ I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned for their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey - the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites have reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Isrealites out of Egypt.”
Friends, can you imagine how alone God’s people felt while God was calling on Moses? While God gave Moses the power to create signs, so the people would believe God had sent him? While Moses gathered his brother, Aaron and they traveled across the land to Egypt?
They probably felt like God had abandoned them. Each one having an idea in their mind as to how God would deliver them; and no one seeing their expectations coming true.
What we learn from Psalm 44 is that our own expectations create an illusion to make us feel like God has forgotten about us. But friends, God has never forgotten. His greater understanding and His master plan is just so much greater than ours; and what a relief that is.
In the very last verse of Psalm 44, the Psalmist asks God to remember his unfailing love. Friends, God has never forgotten His love for His people.
He created us, rebuked us and gave us His son because of His love for us. He watches over us and invites us into His peace, His joy, the weight of His yoke because He loves us.
It’s not God who needs to remember that He loves us, but rather us that need to remember that God has never stopped loving us.
Thoughts for the Week
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It’s so easy for us to get caught up in our own heads about how we think something should play out.
What areas of your life have you found yourself disappointed in when things didn’t go as you planned?
How has your desire for your own plans and expectations prevented you from really feeling God’s presence in your life?
How and where has God shown up, where you’ve initially missed His presence, because you were stuck in your own illusion?
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In Psalm 44, we see God’s people feeling abandoned by God not showing up in the same way He previously had.
Do you have an area of your life, your faith, where you have been disappointed in God when He didn’t show up the same way you had seen Him do previously?
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Have an honest conversation with God this week. I’m talking the kind of conversation where all the ugly truths, pains, hurts and anger come out onto the table. God already knows what is living in your heart; all you have to do is have the courage to start sharing it with Him.
I want you to have this conversation with God this week so you can get everything off of your heart. Let anything that has been holding you back go so that you can start a new beginning with Christ.
Even if we have spent our whole lives as Christians, even if we choose to follow God with everything we have, we can still build up hard feelings against Him.
Friends, God is big enough to handle all your hurts so let Him have them. Choose to love yourself and your God enough to hand over everything that’s built up inside of you so that you can be set free from yourself.
I promise you, if you humble yourself, if you share that ugly conversation with God, you will start to find healing.
Not in the way you expect, or maybe even want, but in a way more beautiful and needed then you could have ever known.
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Prayer
God,
We come before you this week as a people in desperate need of remembering who you are and how much you love us.
We can see so clearly in Psalm 44 how our own understanding and expectations can lead us astray. They trick us into an illusion of believing we are alone while you are gently holding us close the entire time.
I pray that we can have the courage to bring our hard truths to you this week Lord. We know you know the depths of our hearts, but there is freedom and healing in us voluntarily giving our pain and ugly feelings back to You.
Lord, I pray that you will set your people free from whatever is holding them back. Not in our time or understanding, but in yours.
May your people come before You in patient praise. Choosing You and remembering Your goodness even before we can see Your work.
Rise up Lord and help your people.
Redeem us because of your unfailing love.
Shine the light of your face on us.
You are good Lord and we praise You for all that You are. For all that You have done. And for all that You see fit to do.
We are your people.
In your Son’s Name we Pray,
Amen
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