Living by faith - 22 April 2009 |
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One of the reasons why Psalm 22 is so pastorally helpful is that the glorious conquest of the gospel reflected in the second half of the Psalm is expressed as a future hope, seen from the context of present suffering. Notice the shift to the future tense in v. 22 onwards: ‘I will tell’ (v. 22); ‘the afflicted shall eat … those who seek him shall praise’ (v. 26); ‘all the ends of the earth shall remember’ (v. 27); and so on. This contrasts markedly with the Psalmist’s present suffering earlier in the poem: ‘I cry’ (v. 1); ‘I am a worm’ (v. 6); ‘I am poured out’ (v. 14). Consequently, Psalm 22 provides a biblical window on the right way to express our expectancy of the future triumph of God’s kingdom in a time when we experience (in our little corner of the world) so little of it.
Perhaps the most obvious facet of the Psalm’s teaching in this connection is that the hope, though still future, is undimmed. The fact that it is not yet experienced does not make it any less certain. Nor does it make the vision of the future any less magnificent, or the anticipated extent of God’s rule any less total. The Psalm teaches us to believe what God has said about his Son’s triumph, even though we don’t (yet) see it as clearly as one day we will, and even though our present trials sometimes make it hard to believe that the world is headed in the right direction.
To live like this is to live by faith, in the sense that it is to believe what God has said about the future while that future is still unseen. Faith in the Bible, though sometimes connected with believing in what is intrinsically invisible (God, for example), is also often connected with believing in what is now invisible only because it hasn’t yet happened. Think for example of the future blessings to which the heroes of faith looked forward in Hebrews 11. Faith is thus confidence in the future manifestation of a victory already accomplished.
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Bible, Minister's Blog, Theology