PSALM 102 BEGINS with this brief prologue: “A prayer of an afflicted person who has grown weak and pours out a lament before the Lord.” Immediately, the author states his need: “Hear my prayer, Lord; let my cry for help come to you.” (Psa. 102:1) He is in great distress, and has nowhere else to go and no one else to trust. “Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress. When I call, answer me quickly.” (Psa. 102:2) His condition is pitiful. “For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers. My heart is blighted and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food. In my distress I groan aloud and am reduced to skin and bones.” (Psa. 102:3-5)
We can both sympathize and empathize with this person. We have certainly known friends that suffer hopelessness and depression, and quite possibly we have tasted of this bitter fruit ourselves. The writer’s personal pain continues to pour out: “I eat ashes as my food and mingle my drink with tears. My days are like evening shadows; I wither away like grass.” (Psa. 102:9, 11)
If this were all there was to his complaint, we might walk a bit of the difficult journey with him for as long as we had the emotional strength, expressing true concern, but not able to do much more than listen, or pray, or maybe timidly offer well-meaning counsel. Meanwhile, we perhaps would ruminate about our own similar issues, past or present, and seek deeper levels of meaning in our own messes. But our friend says something that catches our attention; the complaints of present circumstances also allude to a cause for this misery: “Because of your great wrath, you have taken me up and thrown me aside.” (Psa. 102:10) This is jarring to our senses. It rings true to our life experiences and worldview, and fits with our underlying sense that there is a meaning to everything in life.
To give a broader context to this psalm, one that includes Christians in the heritage of God’s chosen people and therefore a universal link to the Psalmist’s angst, we must understand that it is written during a time of exile. The nation of Israel was destroyed for seventy years during the Babylonian exile of the 6 th C. B.C., and the writer’s personal pain is welling up from a shared cultural disaster. His personal tone has been painfully stretched by the national calamity, but he turns his hopes to the hope of the Holy City’s former and future glory, precious to God. He says, “You will arise and have compassion on Zion. For her stones are dear to your servants; her very dust moves them to pity.” (Psa. 102:13a-14) And then he adds, “The nations will fear the name of the LORD. For the LORD will rebuild Zion and appear in his glory.” (Psa. 102:15a-16a)
One of the reasons this connects powerfully to our own story is that the Psalmist’s prophecy has proven true in our own time. Even though they were once again destroyed by Rome in Jesus’ time, Israel has indeed been restored as a nation in our own time. The Holy City has been restored, not perfectly, and not without continuing prophetic warnings and promises, but we have seen God’s word proven true. And because his word has proven true, we trust his unrealized-as-yet further promises will also come to pass.
Another reason the psalm connects us so deeply is what the Psalmist says next. “Let this be written for a future generation, that a people not yet created may praise the Lord: ‘The Lord looked down from his sanctuary on high, from heaven he viewed the earth, to hear the groans of the prisoners and release those condemned to death.’” (Psa. 102:18-19) He could not have known specifically that God was talking about the defining work of the Messiah; he could not have known that this was meant for you and me. But God knew his own purposes, and through the pen of the Psalmist he wedges into this psalm a cosmos-reshaping prophecy that will change everything. Modern Israel does not yet know that the Gentiles and Jews have been made one. They only know that the Holy City has been restored.
But Jesus-followers know that God looked down from heaven “to hear the groans of the prisoners and release those condemned to death.” (Psa. 102:19) We know that God fulfilled and continues to fulfill this prophetic promise through Jesus, who says “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19) Paul reflects on the covenant of Law made with the Jews, and the covenant of Grace made with the Gentiles. “Through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering.” (Rom. 8:2-3)
It has always been God’s purpose to redeem mankind fallen from Grace. (cf. Gen. Ch. 1-3) Whether on the mega scale of nations, or the micro scale of individuals, his on-going purpose and plan has been to shape a people of God for an eternal destiny in a cosmos made new in shalom. That he uses affliction as a means to this end is no surprise to us, for every serious student of the Word knows that “the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as son.” (Heb. 12:6)
Q. Am I content that the Lord’s discipline will produce shalom in my own life?
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