Advent 1 Waiting
Waiting
Advent 1: Psalm 44
Jason Procopio
Most of you know I grew up in the United States; I came to France when I was twenty-three years old. In America we have something which we call the “holiday season.” It can vary from state to state, but in the various places in which I grew up, the holiday season begins in mid-October. Around October 15th, everyone puts up their Halloween decorations—skeletons and jacks-o’lantern and ghosts.
Then after Halloween, on November 1st, everyone takes down their Halloween decorations and puts up their Thanksgiving decorations—turkeys and cornucopias and old Puritan hats.
We’re having our Thanksgiving event this afternoon, so we’re a little behind, but technically Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November. So the next day, which is known now as Black Friday, everyone took down their Thanksgiving decorations and put up their Christmas decorations, which are similar to what we see here in France, only much bigger. (Black Friday shopping didn’t become a “thing” until I was a teenager, so our family generally skips the sales and just does the decorating.)
The Christmas decorations stay up until after New Years: the tree doesn’t come down until it’s so dry the ornaments just fall off.
Here’s my point. From October to January, it was a party, all throughout my childhood. It was a lot of fun. It was like instant gratification, all the time. We had to wait to open our presents on Christmas day, sure—but there were all kinds of fun things to hold us over until then, so the waiting didn’t feel too terrible.
I didn’t know it until much later in life, but traditionally, the church had a different kind of celebration during the month of December, in the weeks preceding Christmas—a period called Advent.
Now we all know at least the concept of Advent, because we’ve all seen Advent calendars. (You know, those calendars on which there are twenty-four little doors, and every day, you open the door and get a chocolate.) We’ve come to think about it as a way of getting us ready to celebrate Christmas—and that is part of it.
The word advent comes from a Latin word meaning “coming” (in French, avènement). So we can easily see the ties to Christmas, during which we celebrate the coming of Christ in the form of a human baby. We celebrate Advent, in part, to remind us of what it was like for God’s people to wait for the coming of the Messiah whom God had promised.
But the incarnation is not the only coming of Christ. Jesus was born, he lived, he died, he was raised, he ascended into heaven, and he will come again. So as the people of Israel waited for their Messiah, we are waiting too.
Today we’re going to spend our time in Psalm 44. This psalm was written sometime in the halfway point of the Old Testament—after God established the people of Israel in their land and gave them the king they had asked for, and before the division of the kingdoms and the exiles in Assyria and Babylon.
This psalm can seem like a strange choice for an Advent message, because it doesn’t directly mention Jesus, it doesn’t talk about the Messiah, and it’s frankly kind of depressing. But before we can understand the joy of seeing the fulfillment of God’s promises, we have to understand the pain of waiting for that fulfillment.
And that feeling of waiting for God to fulfill his promises is what Advent is all about.
So in this psalm, we see the psalmists, and the people of Israel along with them, doing three distinct things which allow them to wait well. They give a realistic evaluation of their past; they give a realistic lament for their present; and they send up a realistic plea for the future.
A Realistic Evaluation of the Past (v. 1-8)*
* Note: The French version used in church begins verse 1 in the subtitle portion of the psalm; therefore the verse numbers displayed on screen are slightly different. For example, verse 6 in English will be verse 7 in French.
1 O God, we have heard with our ears,
our fathers have told us,
what deeds you performed in their days,
in the days of old:
2 you with your own hand drove out the nations,
but them you planted;
you afflicted the peoples,
but them you set free;
3 for not by their own sword did they win the land,
nor did their own arm save them,
but your right hand and your arm,
and the light of your face,
for you delighted in them.
4 You are my King, O God;
ordain salvation for Jacob!
5 Through you we push down our foes;
through your name we tread down those who rise up against us.
6 For not in my bow do I trust,
nor can my sword save me.
7 But you have saved us from our foes
and have put to shame those who hate us.
8 In God we have boasted continually,
and we will give thanks to your name forever. Selah
The psalm says “Selah,” which always marks a pause in the song, so we’ll pause here for now.
This psalm begins with celebration for God’s past graces to his people. The psalmist (or psalmists) speak of the deeds you performed in the days of their ancestors. The stories of these exploits were passed down from generation to generation, which is how the people of Israel remembered their own history.
They did this in obedience to what is called the schema: the great commandment given to the people in Deuteronomy 6.4-9:
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
So “these words” God commanded the people to teach to their children weren’t just rules: these words included the stories of everything that God had done for them.
As we see in the psalm, the Lord drove out the nations with his hand. He judged the sin of the nations, but he had made a covenant with Israel. So against all odds, he showed them grace, when all around them was judgment; he brought them into the land he had promised them, and “planted” them there; he “set them free” from oppression instead of judging them like their enemies.
And the people sing because, clearly, they are not the ones who made all this happen. V. 3:
...not by their own sword did they win the land,
nor did their own arm save them,
but your right hand and your arm,
and the light of your face...
Now of course this begs the question, why did God treat them this way? It doesn’t take long reading the Old Testament to see that the people of Israel were not inherently better than the nations around them. They were just as sinful, just as imperfect. So why did God treat them with special favor?
The end of v. 3 says:
…for you delighted in them.
When the Bible talks about God “delighting” in his people, we shouldn’t take that to mean he simply liked them better. When I was a kid we had a dog, and my dad decided to breed her; so one day, she had a litter of puppies. There was one puppy in the litter who was clearly the ugliest one; and for some reason, I took a liking to her. She was ugly, but she just had something about her—a little twinkle in her eye—that I liked.
That’s not the kind of “delight” that God has for his people. Again, they were no better than the other nations in terms of their own morality. Rather, when the Bible says that God “delighted” in his people, that means that because of his own free and sovereign will, he chose to set his affections on them—to choose the descendants of Abraham out of all the other peoples of the world to be his people, the people whom he would love and care for.
So the people of Israel, at this time, held an incredibly priveleged place in humanity. They alone, of all the nations of the world, were God’s people, the people in whom he delighted, and whom he protected and provided for.
And they proclaim that if ever they have won, or will ever win, victory against their enemies, it would be through God’s hand and might. It is through him, through his name, that they have the victory (v. 5). In other words, they were aware of their own limitations. V. 6:
6 For not in my bow do I trust,
nor can my sword save me.
7 But you have saved us from our foes
and have put to shame those who hate us.
8 In God we have boasted continually,
and we will give thanks to your name forever.
The point is that the people have, throughout their history, maintained the memory of God’s faithfulness to them in the past. So their evaluation of the past isn’t romantic; it is realistic. They know God has been faithful, because they and their ancestors have seen his faithfulness.
But at this particular point in history, they find themselves in a situation in which the faithfulness they know God has committed to showing them seems to be totally absent.
A Realistic Lament for the Present (v. 9-22)
9 But you have rejected us and disgraced us
and have not gone out with our armies.
10 You have made us turn back from the foe,
and those who hate us have gotten spoil.
11 You have made us like sheep for slaughter
and have scattered us among the nations.
12 You have sold your people for a trifle,
demanding no high price for them.
13 You have made us the taunt of our neighbors,
the derision and scorn of those around us.
14 You have made us a byword among the nations,
a laughingstock among the peoples.
15 All day long my disgrace is before me,
and shame has covered my face
16 at the sound of the taunter and reviler,
at the sight of the enemy and the avenger.
Now we don’t know exactly what event brought about this particular lament. Some people think it was the exiles in Babylon or Assyria, but Israel had known defeats before, and had been made of the prisoners before.
In the end the specifics of the event don’t much matter. What matters is that despite their realistic evaluation of the past, the people now find themselves in a situation in which the faithfulness of God they’d just been singing about seems completely absent.
They say (v. 9): But you have rejected us and disgraced us… V. 11: You have made us like sheep for slaughter… V. 12: You have sold your people for a trifle, demanding no high price for them.
So this goes far beyond simple lamenting over a painful situation. In this case the people are suffering to such an extent that they feel that God has betrayed them.
If you’re not ready for it, this kind of language is shocking coming from the Bible. When the outside world thinks about Christianity, one of the common ideas that come up automatically is that Christians sugar-coat everything in an attempt to pretend that things aren’t as bad as they seem. In the minds of many people, Christianity is a religion of self-deception: we need a way to cope with the world, so we invent a magical divinity who is in control of everything and really does want our good. And we do it because that way, we don’t have to deal with real human pain and real human loss.
This psalm alone should disabuse everyone of that idea; and there are many texts like it.
What makes this psalm exceptional is, again, how profoundly realistic it is. This is not a song of wish-fulfillment. It is not naïve. This is a song of intense pain, and intense disillusionment. We’ve seen God act in the past, but now, everything we can see is telling us that he has rejected us, that he has thrown us to the wolves without a second thought.
Now, two things could make us feel better at this point. The first would be to imagine that God simply doesn’t exist, or is incapable of doing anything to help us. But remember the beginning of the psalm. We have seen God’s past faithfulness, so we know he can be faithful.
He could do it now again, if he wanted to… But for some reason we can’t fathom, he won’t. And that is actually far more painful.
The second thing we could do is tell ourselves that we have done something to deserve this. That it’s punishment for some sin we have committed. So even if that doesn’t make us feel better, at least we can explain the suffering we’re going through.
But sometimes, we can’t even do that. Of course we are all sinners, and we are all deserving of God’s wrath—that’s why Jesus came in the first place, to absorb that wrath in our place. We see this over and over in the Old Testament: the people rebel against God, and suffer the consequences of that rebellion.
But many times, we do not suffer as a consequence of anything we have done, or that someone else has done to us. Sometimes these things just happen, although we did nothing to bring them about. We see this in the Bible too—the suffering of Job is very different than the suffering of David after his adultery with Bathsheba. The suffering of Jesus is very different than the suffering of the Israelites in the exile. Sometimes, we haven’t done anything to bring about our suffering; suffering just happens.
And this seems to be one of those times.
V. 17:
17 All this has come upon us,
though we have not forgotten you,
and we have not been false to your covenant.
18 Our heart has not turned back,
nor have our steps departed from your way;
19 yet you have broken us in the place of jackals
and covered us with the shadow of death.
20 If we had forgotten the name of our God
or spread out our hands to a foreign god,
21 would not God discover this?
For he knows the secrets of the heart.
22 Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
So the people of Israel have the only two possible sources of emotional relief taken from them. They can’t assume God doesn’t exist, or that he is powerless, because they have seen his power in the past. And they can’t assume that this is punishment for something they have done, because they haven’t done anything to bring this about.
They are suffering, and God is letting them suffer…and the only explanation they can find for their suffering is that they are God’s people.
They say (v. 22): Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
Whether they’re talking about religious persecution or not, the complaint under the surface is very clear: Other peoples don’t seem to suffer like us. You say you’re our God; you say you’ll protect us…but your protection seems very far. Rather than sparing us suffering, belonging to you seems to bring us even MORE suffering.
We all have times like this.
What we see so far in this psalm is a demonstration of what we sometimes call the “already” and the “not yet.” There are a certain number of things that God has already done to deliver his people. He has done all they talked about in v. 1-8, and more. He has given us the promises. He sent his Son to live our life and die our death and be raised for to declare us righteous before him. He has obtained salvation for his people. These things have already happened.
But at the same time, we don’t yet see the full result of these things. Already, right now, God calls us “saints”—but at the same time, we struggle with sin. Already, right now, eternal life in heaven is 100% secure for us…but we don’t yet live there.
This is the paradox of the Christian life. Perfect, eternal life in the new heavens and the new earth have already been perfectly secured for us. Christ has already done these things for us, but we haven’t yet seen the full fruit of what he did.
Now often when we talk about this, we rush into it a bit too quickly. What I mean is, when someone we know is suffering, we are quick to remind them of the Already. We go to the hospital room where our loved one is dying of cancer, and we remind them, “Your life is hidden with Christ in God. Your place is secure. You don’t need to worry.”
And that’s not bad: we should remind each other of these things. But we need to remember that if you are suffering, and you feel like you are just being massacred by the Not Yet…reminders of the Already are almost always going to painful.
I have a buddy whose eight-year-old daughter is suffering from cancer, going through her second round of treatment. Do you really think a parent watching their daughter go through chemotherapy, which ruins her body and makes her hair fall out and turns her into a version of herself he barely recognizes… Do you really think it’s comforting for him to know how God has healed other people in the past? Even if he knows it’s true? Maybe it is, but only if he’s done a lot of work beforehand, and even then, he has to fight to get to that comfort. Because naturally, in those situations, your brain wants to say, “Sure, it’s great that God has healed other people…but if God can do it, why hasn’t he done it for my little girl?”
That kind of talk scares us—it almost sounds sacrilegious to us—but that is what’s going on in this text, and we can’t shy away from it. There is a time and a place in which, if we are going to be honest with God, we have to say, “Lord, I don’t understand. I’ve seen your goodness in the past, I know your power is real, I know you have been faithful to me. But I feel like you have rejected me. I feel like you’ve thrown me to the wolves, and you don’t even care. I didn’t do anything to bring this about, I’ve stayed faithful, so I don’t understand this.”
This is a good prayer. It is a good prayer because it takes into account the fact that we live in a world broken by our sin and rebellion against God, and even if Christ has already freed us from sin in our own lives, he has not yet freed us from the effect of sin in the world around us.
In v. 1-8, the psalmist makes an honest and realistic inventory of what God has done in the past, and what he is capable of doing. And then in v. 9-22, he makes an honest and realistic lament over the situation he finds himself in, and of the pain he feels from knowing that he didn’t do anything to produce this suffering.
And if we let ourselves be honest with God in this way, if we let ourselves be realistic about the power of God and the nature of our own pain, then inevitably we will be driven to beg God to act.
A Realistic Plea for the Future (v. 23-26)
23 Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord?
Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever!
24 Why do you hide your face?
Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?
25 For our soul is bowed down to the dust;
our belly clings to the ground.
26 Rise up; come to our help!
Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!
Notice first that the psalmist asks God questions which he knows won’t be answered. If you are suffering, then inevitably you’ll ask questions like that.
Where is God? Why is he sleeping? Why is he hiding? Why has he forgotten us?
Christians—particularly Reformed Christians—want to offer a nice, tidy answer to these questions, something to do with the sovereignty of God.
But the psalmist doesn’t do that. He doesn’t say, Oh actually it’s okay, I forgot: "All things work together for the good of those who love God...”
Sometimes, when we or someone else is confronted with those questions of where is God, and why doesn’t he act, the only honest answer we can give is, “I don’t know.”
We can’t be afraid of asking unanswerable questions. We can’t be afraid of telling God when we feel like he’s absent.
But if you’ve ever been in that situation, you know that those questions are almost never left alone. Almost as a reflex, we can’t leave it alone. These unanswerable questions are almost always—instinctively—accompanied with requests that God might act.
V. 23: AWAKE! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever!
V. 26: Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!
Like I said, a lot of us who have asked these questions, and made these kinds of requests before, know that these prayers that God would save us, redeem us, help us, are often almost knee-jerk reactions—like children when they cry out for Mommy when they fall down.
But one thing sets the requests of this psalm apart. One thing changes—in a subtle but massive way—these prayers from a depressed, instinctive reaction to a solid, worthwhile prayer.
And that is the realism we’ve been talking about this whole time.
The lament they have given is entirely realistic: this is what it feels like to be desperate and in the dark concerning that desperation.
But their evaluation of the past is just as realistic.
So their hope that God might answer these prayers is absolutely warranted. These prayers that God would act aren’t mere gut reactions to pain. They are realistic requests, grounded in realistic memories of God’s faithfulness in the past.
No matter their confusion over their present state, they know God can save them. And so they call to him to fulfill his promises and come to their aid. And because of what they know, because their evaluation of the past is realistic, their request is also realistic.
Learning to Wait
I’m well aware that this might seem like a depressing way to begin the holiday season. This doesn’t have a lot in common with much of the festive things we love about this season. But we should not be afraid of times or experiences which force us into a feeling of uneasy, or disquiet, or even pain, because that's the reality of living in a fallen world while we wait for Christ's return.
And that is what Advent is all about.
There is a cycle of waiting and fulfillment we see over and over in the Bible.
We see fall…and promise.
Slavery…and exodus.
Wilderness…and promised land.
Judges…and kings.
Bad kings…and good kings.
Exile…and return from exile.
The promise of a Savior…and the birth of Christ.
Three days in the tomb…and resurrection.
The story of God’s people is the story of waiting and fulfillment. And we are still in that story.
Christ came. He lived the life God called us to live, and he suffered the death we deserved, in our place. Because of his finished work, we have been declared righteous before God, and now, even though we are living in this world, through the grace of God in Christ, we no longer belong to this world. We are citizens of another country, the kingdom of God, waiting for our King to return and bring us home.
And until he does, we wait—just as the Hebrews waited to be freed from slavery in Egypt; just as the people waited for God to bring them to the land he had promised them; just as the exiles waited to be brought back from Babylon; just as the Jews waited for the coming Messiah.
We wait. And more than likely, unless Christ returns first, we will be waiting until the day we die.
So we must learn to wait well. We must learn to wait in hope.
Look back at v. 22: Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
It’s not as if this sentiment ended with this psalm. The apostle Paul quotes this verse in Romans 8, perhaps the most famous chapter in the Bible which speaks about our reasons for hope in God. He quotes this verse in Romans 8.36, and follows it up by saying (Romans 8.37-39):
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
We often forget that Paul doesn’t write this passage to people who are already in heaven. He writes about the sufferings of this present time, which are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us (v. 18). He writes about how we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies (v. 23).
He writes about our hope, which is by definition not rooted in what is going on around us, but in what we have not yet seen. Romans 8.24-25:
Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, WE WAIT FOR IT WITH PATIENCE.
We celebrate Advent to help us do that.
Fleming Rutledge said, "Advent begins in the dark." But in the dark, “[what] the church holds on to, by grace through faith, is two things: we hold on to memory, and we hold on to hope."
Advent is a time of year when we consciously slow down and consider our past and our hope, our Already and our Not Yet, in order that we might learn to wait.
This text calls us to constantly celebrate the Already. To consider the past. To remember God’s faithfulness in the past, to build up in ourselves the absolute certainty that God is faithful to his people, always.
This is where the reminders of the truth of God’s sovereignty have their place. If we’ve done the work ahead of time, and taken the time to grow in our knowledge of the truth that God is sovereign over all things, and that he is good, and that he is wise, then when we arrive in a time of suffering we’re actually able to rest in those truths rather than be put off by them.
At the same time, this text calls us to be honest about the Not Yet. To lament when lamenting is called for. To not make attempts to brush off pain through naïve positive thinking, or to pretend everything’s not as painful or as difficult as it is. Because that is the reality of our situation. Death and sin are intruders in the world God has created. There’s nothing “normal” about sin or its effects. So it is right, when facing loss, to grieve that loss.
And because we have spent our lives celebrating what God has already done for us in the past, we can rest, even in our time of waiting, in the sure hope that God will act in the future.
We celebrate the Already, and we lament the Not Yet, so that we can pray realistically, and confidently, while we wait for God to right every wrong, and fix everything that is broken.
So in the coming weeks, we’re going to be looking at the various ways the Bible helps us do that. We’ll be looking at what it means to believe, and to learn, and to see, and to anticipate Christ’s return.
