Where is God in Injustice? (Psalm 10)

Rev. Joe Dentici

Transcript

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If you've been hanging around here long enough, you know how much I love music. You see, usually there's a quote from a band uh in the front of your bulletin, uh this week, the cranberry, singing about the troubles in uh Northern Ireland. But one of my earliest loves that I remember really falling in love with music was Tom Petty, who had a one-two punch in '93 and '94. Greatest hits came out in '93, and then two weeks before my 14th birthday in 94, Wildflowers came out. And Wildflowers is a masterpiece, an American treasure. And one of the things that I really loved about that, it turns out that the angst and anxiety you have in middle school really resonates with somebody going through a midlife crisis. This is what I've learned from Wildflowers. And what I've found is that over the years, songs on that record have given me voice to express my emotions. I think about early on in my marriage with Melissa, we'd get in a fight, no, and I'd have to go blow off some steam and ride around, and there was a song for that. I would listen to Tom Petty, and I would give full vent to what I was experiencing. And my life anthem of Seasons of Change is a transitional record. I've listened to the same song bringing all three children home from the hospital. That when I moved down from Pennsylvania to South Carolina, I listened to this song and even listened to it as I was mulling over do we want to plant a church? I remember texting Tim about this song while I was driving on Edwards Road, oddly enough. And music helps you express yourself. Music helps you find vent to your joys and your thanksgivings and your depressions and your anger. And what we find in the Psalter, the book of Psalms, is this even more so. I mean, if Tom Petty can give you a way to express your emotions, how much more so the Psalms? Because again, what you find is you get to borrow somebody else's words to express yourself. And not just express yourself, God has given us his own word that we might come to him and process our emotions the full range in the context of faith. And so that's what we're going to do this morning. We're going to look at a psalm that doesn't just express thanksgiving or gratitude. It's a psalm of frustration, it's a psalm of angst. God, where are you when there seems to be so much sin and brokenness and oppression in the world? So let me read Psalm 10 and ask God to help us. Why, O Lord, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor. Let them be caught in the schemes that they have devised. For the wicked boasts of the desires of his soul, and the one greedy for gain curses and renounces the Lord. In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him. All his thoughts are, There is no God. His ways prosper at all times. Your judgments are on high, out of his sight. As for all his foes, he puffs at them. He says in his heart, I shall not be moved. Throughout all generations I shall not meet adversity. His mouth is filled with cursing and deceit and oppression, and under his tongue are mischief and iniquity. He sits in ambush in the villages. In hiding places he murders the innocent. His eyes stealthily watch for the helpless. He lurks in ambush like a lion in his thicket. He lurks that he may seize the poor. He seizes the poor when he draws him into his net. The helpless are crushed, sink down, and fall by his might. He says in his heart, God has forgotten. He has hidden his face. He will never see it. Arise, O Lord, O God, lift up your hand. Forget not the afflicted. Why does the wicked renounce God and say in his heart, You will not call to account, but you do see, for you note mischief and vexation, that you may take it into your hands, and to you the helpless commits himself. You have been the helper of the fatherless. Break the arm of the wicked and evildoer. Call his wickedness to account till you find none. The Lord is King for ever and ever. The nations perish from his land. O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted. You will strengthen their heart. You will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more. The word of the Lord. Father, we thank you that you have preserved your word for us for thousands of years. That saints have been reading this Psalm and other psalms for 25, 300, 3,000 years. And we pray that you would meet us today as we as we contemplate and consider uh your justice in the face of seeming injustice around us. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen. Well, I mean, we just read, I mean, this is a doozy of a psalm, and one of the reasons that I wanted to look at a psalm like this is because so often, evangelical Christian culture in particular, we tend to think if I'm going to worship, I'm going to worship with goosebumps. That if I'm going to honor God, if I'm going to go to Him with faith, that means I'm filled with joy always. And that I'm never in a hard place, and yet that's just not what the Psalms show us. You and I so often think that we can't be honest about what we feel, and yet the Psalms continually say, Where are you? When you feel like God is distant, it's okay to say, Where are you? When you look around and you see brokenness and injustice, I mean, this is the sort of thing that causes many in our data to deconstruct. It's normal and natural to feel overwhelmed by the presence of sin in this world. And this is where the psalmist starts. Why, O Lord, do you stand afar? Why are you far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? Have you ever felt like this? I mean, this is not somebody who is saying, Lord Jesus, every day with you is better than the day before. This is life feels hard, Christianity. That I feel abandoned Christianity, that I have no goosebumps, Christianity. This is not the kind of psalm that makes a lot of money in the contemporary Christian music industry, right? This isn't going to sort of fill an anthem with people raising their hands. This is the kind of thing that people look down and say, yeah, this is a hard feeling. It's a hard place to be. Lord, it seems like you are intentionally standing far away. When do you feel least present in your life? To those around you, maybe? You know, for me, it's it's when I feel exhausted. If I have just been worn down by a hard week or a hard season of weeks, I feel distant. And it occurs to me, I mean, who knows exhaustion? Quite like people with very young children. I mean, exhaustion can wear you down. You're not sleeping very well. There is more and more demanded of you. It's never enough. You can get exhausted. And whether or not you have young children, you still know this feeling of exhaustion. You can feel distant, like not enough energy to be present to those around you. And yet the Bible tells us that God never sleeps, that God never gets tired, and yet he still feels distant. Psalm 135 says, Whatever the Lord pleases, he does. In heaven and on earth, in the seas and all the deeps, whatever the Lord pleases, he does. There's so much evil in this world that God does not seem pleased to stop. How many mass shootings do we see? Scandals that rock institutions, injustice seemingly everywhere. Whatever the Lord pleases, He does. Why doesn't it please you, God, to put a stop to some of these things? The psalmist says, Why do you stand afar off? Are you hiding? And I don't know if you notice this in our first pass-through, but there's two ways in this psalm of thinking about God hiding. You've got verse one, which shows us the way of faith, and verse 11, which shows us the way of faithlessness. Verse 1, why do you hide? Verse 11, he says in his heart, God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it. There's two ways to think of God feeling distant and hidden, and one, a way of faith, coming before the Lord with who we are, using his words to address him, and another that says, He will never see. He's too far removed from me. Verses two and three tell us the psalmist, he's taking issue with the wicked who were taking advantage of the poor. He says they find ways to capitalize and make money on the most vulnerable. It makes what sends my mind thinking about title alone places sprinkled throughout Greenville that charge just ridiculous interest rates at those who are already in a hard place. You know, taking advantage of the poor is so wicked because power is meant to be used for the benefit of others and not to exploit others. This is what we see in our Lord Jesus. He uses his power not to exploit but to draw near and to serve. But the wicked, the psalmist says, he sits in ambush in the villages. In hiding places, he murders the innocent. His eyes stealthily watch for the helpless. He lurks in ambush like a lion in the thicket. The psalmist says, when I look around, I see people who are actively engaged in exploiting the poor, and they look for them like a lion looks for his prey. And the psalmist is it's not just giving us language to say, This breaks my heart, although it is doing that. It's also calling to mind and telling us we ought to have eyes to see those who are poor. We ought to have eyes to see those who are marginalized. Because God has given us words to say injustice is happening. That means it's shaping what we care about and what we see before we care and before we see. That the psalmist is saying we ought to cry out when we see injustice because it's there. And God has given us words to acknowledge and to shape the posture by which we think about it. You know, Romans tells us that we even ought to associate with the lowly. And so what we see in the Bible is that it is wicked to oppress the poor, but it's also wicked to ignore the poor. Proverbs 21, 13 says, Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered. But it's not just the lowly that we're called to listen to. And we are. We're called to listen and to see and to care for the lowly, but that's not all. We're also called to listen to the Lord. We talked about this a few weeks ago. Who are we listening to? The psalmist again is saying we listen to the Lord. Yes, listen to the lowly, but let that be informed as you listen to the Lord. Because we struggle, don't we? All of us. Instinctively, every single person knows injustice when they see it, and yet we have a hard time putting our finger on what exactly it is. Or we disagree about what it is. It's endlessly complicated, but we know, don't we? It's more than just a vote. It's not the sum of popular opinion, it's not the sum of what we feel, even though culturally we change our minds over and over again about issues of morality. Whether that happens in 1864 or 1964 or 2024, it's a moving target, culturally speaking. So we have to listen to the Lord to define for us what is justice. And it's not just that our moving, our target moves, other cultures do it as well. It's easier to sometimes see it in other cultures. Do you know that Sweden, Sweden outlawed slavery 20 years before America did? That's a great thing. They outlawed slavery 20 years, they seemed way ahead of the curve in the Western world at the time. And yet, while they were right on something as profound as slavery, they were wrong with something as profound as child pornography, which was completely legal until 1979, was still legal to search for until 2010. It's a little bit easier when we step back and we evaluate somebody else and say, how in the world is that even possible? And yet, when we base our morality based on consensus, we are going to find some things because we're made in the image of God that are right, and other things because we suppress that image and we suppress the truth and unrighteousness that are flat out wrong. We need to be informed by the maker of what is right and wrong. The standard must come from God, and this is the wicked's problem in this psalm. In verse 4, he says, there is no God. In verse 11, he says God has forgotten. He has hidden his face, he will never see it. In verse 13, God will not call to account. There will be no writing of wrongs, there will be no day of judgment. The wicked man is saying, I can do what I want because God is either not there, or if he's there, he's so far removed that he won't do anything. But whatever the fact, I can do what I want because no one is going to challenge me. That's what the psalmist is seeing. And he says, it breaks my heart. But notice again, the psalmist and the wicked are both operating out of the assumption that God is hiding. And it's leading them into two very different postures. One says, I can do what I want, and the other says, Why do they get to do whatever they want? I saw a bumper sticker in my 20s. I was too young to get it at the time. I was probably 20, 21. And it just said, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention. And I remember at the time being like, paying attention to what? The older I get, I'm like, yeah, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention. There's an impulse there that's not entirely wrong. The world is broken. But so are we. And I think the problem so often when we when we point our fingers out there rightly, sometimes it's easy to forget that we can't live up to our own standards. That the brokenness, the sinfulness isn't just out there. It resides within each of our human hearts as well. That yes, we wake up to disheartening news all around the world, but we also are confronted with our response to it. We get fatigued. I don't have the energy or the bandwidth to be outraged again. Or maybe I've been outriged for the wrong reasons, or maybe I'm sad that I'm not sad. It's complicated. It's broken out there, but it's broken in here. We need an outside voice to speak into both issues. Behind this question, when we ask ourselves, am I sad enough? Am I angry enough? Do I care enough? Why don't I care enough? Behind all of this is the question of, does any of this matter to God? Does any of it matter to God? And I don't know if you've considered this, but if there is no day of judgment, then the answer is no. If there is no day when God is going to write all things, when he will call to account every travesty of justice, if that doesn't happen, then the answer is no, he doesn't care. He is not going to act. And so a day of judgment is a terrifying thought. It can be a terrifying thought, but there's also a gracious good news aspect to this. God cares about brokenness, and God cares about oppression, and God cares about travesti of justice. And she says, if it's not okay, then this is not the end. And this is not okay, so this is not the end. If it's not okay, then this is not the end. And that is what this psalmist is saying. This is not okay. And so this is not the end. How does a psalmist move on from asking, where is God? He remembers that not only do we need God's outside judgment to speak into our lives, we need his outside promises. We need him to speak not just to a standard, but to a promise that he's going to uphold that standard. And so what separates the psalmist from the wicked is that the psalmist then reminds himself it sure feels like God is hiding. It sure feels like he's distant, and it sure feels like maybe he won't do anything. And yet I have an outside word that corrects what I feel right now. His feelings are not a problem. It's good to be bothered and turned. Like if he if he didn't care, that would be a problem. But he can't just figure out by his feelings how things are going to be. He needs an outside word to say, God is going to make all things right. But you do see. For you note, right? You're taking notes. You note mischief and vexation that you may take it into your hands. Sometimes it feels like God isn't paying attention, and we get to hear again, He is. He's paying attention. He sees all things, he is taking note of all things, and he will write all things. And the psalmist says, Well, how do I know? To you the helpless commits himself. Oh Lord, you hear the desire of the flick of the afflicted, you will strengthen their heart, you will incline your ear. And the psalmist knows that God takes note because what is faith but to be met in our own sin and oppression. And the psalmist is he sees a connection. I know that God has drawn near to me, so I know that he takes note. I know that God has graciously drawn near to me in my life, so I know that he's going to graciously draw near to all the injustice in the world. And this side of the New Testament, we know exactly what that looks like in the person of Jesus. That he didn't, that God did not stand afar off and just look at us wallowing in our sin. That he didn't just stand afar off and say, My day of wrath is coming and look at them, not a chance. He enters into the human story and he listens to us and he endures oppression himself. I mean, do you realize that the only utterly pure victim of oppression is Jesus Christ Himself? Now there's oppression, and there are people who are victims of oppression, but the only pure victim, the only one who Who doesn't respond in any way with the same kind of sin is Jesus. And he drew near so that he might take on the punishment of the ways that we per the ways that we oppress others. I mean, just ask any little brother if there's injustice in the world, right? Anyone with a big brother knows that there is injustice in the world, and any of us know we have that same heart. And to cry out for God to write all things, we have to say, I also want you to write those things in me. And by Jesus coming and taking on the sin that I bring to the table makes the day of judgment good news. Because not only is Jesus the only pure one who has been oppressed, what that means is that any oppressor can be redeemed, save one, the devil. That anybody who has been, who has taken advantage of the poor or the marginalized in whatever way that takes shape, anybody can be redeemed by crying out for mercy to the one who endured punishment for our sin. Now, when you wonder, I mean, it's one thing to say God cares about injustice. It's another to say, now we know how to see it. And that you even in a room like this, we're not all going to agree on is this an instance of injustice? We're gonna come at it from different angles. And that's because we're finite and we're still sinful. But but I will highlight, you know, no, we need to be suspicious of places and people that have answers that come from somewhere that's not outside of us. I mean, just think about the different ways that stereotypically people on the right and left would respond politically would respond to the fall. I mean, broad brushes, and I'm and I'm talking about both so nobody can say I'm picking a favorite. But in the garden, stereotypically on the right, those of us on the right would say, good grief. These people need to learn a little accountability for what they've done. The law was clear, they broke it. Tough love, right? Just shrug, a real sort of indifference towards them. But God doesn't respond that way. Of course, on the left, stereotypically, we might say, How dare God allow something like this to take place? This woman was deceived by the serpent. It's not her fault, it's all his fault. There's no culpability on her part at all. And speaking of structures, why is this tree in the garden in the first place? It should never have been there. But God doesn't do that either. Right? God does hold accountable, but he also draws near with grace. And so the gospel, it's really going to agree with an aspect of any sort of philosophy, but it's also going to grate just as hardly against it. And we need to remind ourselves, who are we listening to? Listening to the one who can speak not just about how things are, but the one who draws near with grace and a promise to restore all things. I'm going to close by just saying, you know, as we navigate the difficulties of finding these things, how do we how do we recognize injustice? We need to acknowledge, well, injustice happens. It's real. It may not be behind every rock, but it's real. Whether or not we can agree on all of the things that make for injustice, one thing that we can and ought to agree is that the posture in which we engage should be one that is gracious. Because God has been gracious with us in the ways that we have fallen short. That we ought not to be filled with self-righteousness because we know that we're guilty ourselves and God has drawn near to us with mercy. And so, on the one hand, we want to take these things seriously because it was serious enough, the sin was serious enough for Jesus to die for it, and yet there's also comfort in the resurrection that Jesus has conquered it. And it also ought to give us hope and patience as we try to navigate our way through this because we don't have to figure it out. That's not the same thing as saying we should abdicate from any responsibility, but knowing God knows what he's doing. He has shown us that his heart is one that moves toward us, and he's going to continue to do that, and that ought to shape the posture of our hearts as we seek to recognize the poor and the marginalized in our lives, whatever that looks like, filled with a certain grace that prevents us from adopting a savior complex ourselves because we have one. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for the good news of the gospel, and we thank you that you have drawn near to us in Jesus, and we confess that there are people that we have we have ignored or made fun of. And the good news is that you have washed us, and we ask that you would help us to lean into a lifestyle that has been washed of our sins. That as you have drawn near to the poor and needy in us, that you would enable us to do the same thing, and we're going to need a lot of wisdom and patience and humility in how we go about doing that. But you are the giver of good gifts. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.