What Keeps Us Going? (Psalm 27:13)

We can see from the psalm that David was facing many problems. He does not indicate when he wrote it, although we can see from verse 10 that his parents were still alive. Not that they were much comfort to David at that moment because he says that they had forsaken him (the phrase could mean that David was supposing this possibility, and even if they did forsake him, he would still know God’s help). Perhaps this happened under pressure from Saul when he was hunting for David, because he does say that an army surrounded him (v. 3). Probably, the point of mentioning this detail about his parents is that David felt utterly alone.

 

What was the goodness that he wanted to see? We get an answer to that question in verse 4: ‘One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to enquire in his temple.’ The Lord was his hope in his isolation and therefore he looked forward to many divine blessings coming his way.

 

In the meantime, he would experience the Lord’s help as described in verse 5: ‘For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will lift me high upon a rock.’ Those thoughts gave him such comfort that he could anticipate the day when he would once again attend services at the Tabernacle: ‘And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all round me, and I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the Lord.’

 

But until then he would go on praying: ‘Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud; be gracious to me and answer me! You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, Lord, do I seek.” Hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help. Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!’ (vv. 7-9).

 

His faith in God

Faith is sometimes difficult to distinguish from other outlooks. After all, one could read this verse and say that the person who said it was an optimistic man, someone who was not letting his current circumstances get him down. We have sometimes met people like that, but when we ask them how they know their suggested outcome will happen, they cannot give a reason. All they are expressing is wishful thinking or mere assumption. Faith is often optimistic, but it is never only optimistic. Faith has its reasons.

 

This leads us to ask what a believer is and on what he bases his outlook. A believer, by definition, is a person who looks outside of himself. He has learned not to look into himself for his security and his comfort. But it is not enough to look out of oneself. After all, a person can look to other humans for the answer. But to be a believer requires more than that. A believer looks to God alone.

 

Even that is not enough, however. It is possible to look for God in more than one place. After all, it would be possible to look for God in his actions and obtain help through doing so. On a nice sunny day, it is comforting to look at the creation and observe the goodness of God. A farmer may be very happy to have a rainy day and see God in that experience. But things go wrong on sunny days and on rainy days. The power and kindness of God in creation points to his abilities, but my enjoying them today is no guarantee that I will have them tomorrow.

 

So where would David have looked for confirmation that he would receive divine blessings? The answer is that he would have considered the descriptions of God that are given in his Word, descriptions that highlighted things like the faithfulness of God and the mercy of God. And he would have interpreted those divine attributes in light of the promises of God. He had begun the psalm by stating that the Lord was his light as well as his salvation.

 

Of course, David had personal promises from God to go on as well. The Lord had said that he would yet be King, so he knew that would happen at some stage. Nevertheless he had to read his current providence in the light of those promises. He would need something else as well – he would need some level of assurance from the Holy Spirit that God’s Word was true. This assurance is a divinely given conviction that God will do what he says in his Word.

 

His future on earth

David describes his future as observing ‘the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living’. He mentions two things: (1) the goodness of the Lord and (2) the land of the living. The first is the provision of God and the second is the place where God provides it. The phrase ‘land of the living’ merely indicates that David would experience God’s bounty before he would die, that life would not always be the hard experience it currently was.

 

Regarding the provision that the Lord would supply out of his goodness, many things can be said about it. David felt isolated, yet he knew that he could look ahead to having fellowship with God’s people. David was currently not experiencing all that God could provide for him, but he knew that God would give a greater fullness instead of what he was missing. David was surrounded by people he could not trust, yet he knew that God would yet surround him with the faithful. Even if his family had forsaken him because of pressures, he knew that there would be a time when he and they could rejoice together in God’s forgiveness.

 

Our faith in God

While there are some similarities between David’s faith and our faith, there are also some distinctions. Obviously, our faith is more informed than his was. David wrote Psalm 22, but that does not mean that he understood all the details of the cross. The psalmist never had the pleasure of reading the Gospels and observing the beauty of the life of Jesus that he lived out in behalf of his people. And we know the activities of the Good Shepherd of Psalm 23 in ways that David could not have imagined would be possible.

 

There is also a sense in which our faith is more intense that his was because we have the Holy Spirit in a manner that was different in some ways from the experience of David. The psalmist had profound experiences of the Holy Spirit as we can see from his words in Psalm 51 which describes his repentance after he had committed great sins. When he sinned, he could appeal to the mercy of God, which was wonderful; we however can look at the sufferings of Jesus on the cross and see the distance that Jesus was prepared to go to in order for us to appreciate the reality of divine forgiveness.

 

Our future on earth

Obviously, there is a sense in which future life on earth is unknown. We don’t know the particulars of any day. It is not possible for us to say with precision anything about the future. Yet bearing that in mind, there are aspects of the goodness of the Lord that we can say we will see if God permits.

 

For example, we see the growth of the church as it expands in numerous places throughout the world – David because of the time in which he lived could only anticipate events that would occur in Israel. Connected to this, we see the grace of Jesus in the lives of people in many places, and there are features of this that we can see that our forefathers could not see because they did not possess the technology we have.

 

Paul reminds us that we can have foretastes of glory because the Holy Spirit comes to us as the firstfruits of the inheritance, and in Romans 8 we see that this can occur even in the middle of sufferings. The Holy Spirit can also give to us the gracious blessings connected to the fruit of the Spirit, and what amazing blessings are listed by Paul regarding it – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

 

So while we cannot state that we will be alive in ten years’ time, or even ten minutes’ time, we can say that if we continue in the land of the living we will see and experience many blessings that come from the goodness of the Lord.

 

Applications

One application that comes from this verse is that we should remember that the Lord has his times for us. After all, he is the God of providence who determined for David when he would be in the period he was in when he wrote the psalm and where he yet hoped to be in the future. The same is true of ourselves. We are where we are because God has brought it about. If we are in difficult times, we can recognise this and remind ourselves that the God who has brought us here can also give a bright tomorrow.

 

A second application is that we should not judge the future by the present. There are many applications of this principle. People tell us that we are in a post-Christian era. How do they know that? They can have their projections, but there is a God in heaven who is not bound by human projections. The best days of the church may be ahead of us. This is not pie in the sky. Rather it is a reminder that the future belongs to God and we should be glad that it does.

 

A third application is that we should remember that spiritual fainting is a good sign. Older versions added the phrase about fainting because the translators could see that a negative situation was described in the verse. What is spiritual fainting a sign of? It is an indication that we are not content with having low experiences, and that because we know who God is, we know that he can yet do great things for us. It is true that often he takes his people through fire and water, but he does it so that he can take them to a wealthy place.

 

A fourth application concerns what we want to see in the future? The buzz phrase is ‘the new normal’, and people are using it without knowing what it might involve. As Christians, we want a new normal, where the church recovers its spiritual values, enjoys its spiritual privileges, loses its worldliness, and becomes marked by the spiritual power that once was normal. Is that not the challenge facing us? If all we want is for life to be the same as it was, perhaps we have lost something of the desire of the psalmist to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

 

Fifth, we can say that faith has binoculars for viewing the future. The binoculars are the promises of God in which he tells us what he is eager to do. Faith often survives by looking ahead. It sees the future as the field where God will be in action. The future belongs to Jesus and he will work in it in order to fulfil the great eternal purpose of God. We take the promises and through them we anticipate what is going to happen in the kingdom of Jesus.

 

Sixth, how do we do this? David gives the answer in the next verse of the psalm: ‘Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!’ Waiting is a picture of prayer, but it is not a picture of merely passive prayer. Rather it is a picture of anticipatory prayer, a form of prayer that is justified by the great promises of God. We wait upon him because we know his great and precious promises.