Being Set in a Broad Place
The national news has not been very uplifting lately. I am not sure if it has ever been uplifting, come to think of it, but certainly recent events in the housing industry, the credit industry, the rising prices of gasoline and food, the continuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and escalating fears over Iran saturate the current news coverage.
These are not simply news stories affecting someone else. They are real stories of the everyday realities of people all around me--and including me. Close friends have lost sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Colleagues wonder how they can continue to keep up with the rising costs associated with gas and food. Others wonder how they will pay their mortgage next month as prices rise and incomes stay the same. Necessities become negotiables, and disappear altogether. We work harder and harder only to go deeper and deeper in debt. For many, these are extraordinarily dark times.
While the particular circumstances are specific to our modern context, extraordinarily dark times are nothing new. David, the greatest king of Israel, experienced great difficulties throughout his life. Most scholars believe that many of Israel’s psalms were penned by him during times of unique and profound trial. Psalm 18, in particular, appears to have been taken from the words he spoke after being delivered from both the Philistines and Saul in 2 Samuel 22:2-51. Both passages speak of unimaginable darkness; yet, both affirm the hope for deliverance by Israel’s God.
While David wrote these songs out of the threat to his physical life, we can all relate to the powerful images used to describe the overwhelming fear and despair he felt: “The waves of death encompassed me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me; the cords of Sheol surrounded me; the snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called upon the Lord” (2 Samuel 22:5-7a). His distress is palpable.
But God’s deliverance is a mighty deliverance! God doesn’t come quietly to rescue. God doesn’t slip quietly through the back door. David writes, “Then, the earth shook and quaked, the foundations of heavens were trembling and were shaken...God bowed the heavens and came down with thick darkness under his feet....The Lord thundered from heaven, and the Most High uttered his voice...the foundations of the world were laid bare” (2 Samuel 22:8, 10, 14, 16). God’s deliverance creates a cosmic earthquake on behalf of “the man after his own heart.” Sent from on high, God draws David out of the many waters of despair and destruction. Even though confronted by powerful forces at work against him, David affirms that “The Lord was my stay. He brought me forth also into a broad place; He rescued me, because He delighted in me” (Psalm 18:19).
If only God would shake the heavens like this in our day and return our fortunes! If only God would save in a way that shores up our financial collapses, and transforms our economic hardships! If only God would deliver us in the same way God delivered David!
If this is the way we see God’s rescue, only as a return to the “way things were” or to a renewed sense of comfort and ease, then we have missed the point of the song altogether. God’s rescue shakes our foundations; it creates cosmic earthquakes overturning and upending all the things in which we place our hope apart from God. David tells us that The Lord was his stay. And David would come to need God’s earth-shaking deliverance again and again, as he lost focus and put his trust in security, and comfort, and the things of this world.
Ultimately, salvation does not come from the things God does for David, or for us. Salvation comes in the Lord as our stay and our total support. While worry and anxiety choke us and narrow our focus, reliance upon God brings us to that broad and spacious place David describes as God’s deliverance and rescue. This is not to say that God brings us right back to that specific place that once was--the place of comfort, of ease, or safety. But God opens up new worlds in which we can trust no matter what we are experiencing. As one commentator notes, the psalmists’ chief concern to give thanks to God are not chiefly found in regaining “physical health, or adding more years to life, or by enhancing the life they now enjoy with greater comfort or security. That is a modern conception of life, whose emptiness is eventually disclosed. According to Israel’s way of thinking, life is missed when people do not choose it: ‘See, I have set before you life and death....Therefore, choose life.’ Moreover, the life of ‘the righteous’ is eroded in vitality when death works its power.”(1)
God’s deliverance of us in times of trial and difficulty has everything to do with seeing God as the source and goal of our life. As Christoph Barth observes, “[W]hat the psalmists pray for in laments, or thank God for in thanksgiving is the restoration of life that they have lost, or its radical renewal through true life--that is the life that is given through relationship to God.”(2) In our days of very bad news, we are in need of rescue and deliverance, to be sure. We need earth-shattering simplicity, and we need tsunamis of generosity to sustain us and infuse our living during lean times, and in times of abundance. As God’s people living at times in want and in times of bad news, our lives can be renewed and restored in remarkable ways, set in a broad place when we find our stay is God.
Margaret Manning is associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Bernard W. Anderson, ed., Out of the Depths: The Psalms Speak for Us Today, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983), 127.
(2) As quoted by Anderson, Ibid.,, 127.
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