A twenty-four-year-old gunman opened fire in a crowded In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho, last Saturday. He killed three people and wounded seven others; two of the injured were in critical condition as of Sunday. He then took his own life after coming under fire from a bystander and an off-duty Idaho state trooper.

At this writing, authorities have not yet established a motive for the shooting. But they are praising thirty-five-year-old Jordan Salinas of Kimberly, Idaho, who returned fire after the shooting began. “He did not like it when bullets started firing both ways,” Salinas said. “There’s a task that needs to be done, and we’re the ones who need to do it,” he added.

Police said Salinas and the off-duty trooper who responded “are true heroes in our community. They diverted the shooter and without a doubt saved many lives.”

If you were at the restaurant last Saturday and the heroism of the two men saved your life, you might be thanking God today for their bravery and his protection. If you love one of the people who was killed or wounded, however, you might be grateful for the men who protected others, but grieving that their protection and God’s providence did not extend to the ones you lost.

We have all been in both groups. I thanked God when our older son and youngest grandson survived cancer, but still grieve that my father died of heart disease at the age of fifty-five. You can cite times when God acted with benevolence in your life and times when it seemed he did not.

You might not know that you can be as honest with him about the times he disappoints you as you can be grateful for the times he provides. I can prove it with Scripture today.

 “Why are you sleeping, O Lord?”

I was reading Psalm 44 this morning as part of my personal Bible study and found the first eight verses to be a highly encouraging start to the day. The psalmist praises God for the time he “drove out the nations” and planted his people in their promised land (v. 2), acknowledging that “your right hand and your arm” delivered them (v. 3).

Accordingly, he prayed, “You have saved us from our foes and have put to shame those who hate us. In God we have boasted continually, and we will give thanks to your name forever” (vv. 7–8).

So far, so good.

But with verse 9, everything changes. The psalmist complains, “You have rejected us and disgraced us and have not gone out with our armies. . . . You have made us a byword among the nations, a laughingstock among the peoples” (vv.  9, 14). The entire section is a litany of ways God has not protected his people in the face of adversity.

Now comes the part that struck me: “All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant” (v. 17). They are being faithful to God, but he is not being faithful to them: “For your sake we are killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered” (v. 22).

The psalm concludes with a cry for God to do what the psalmist believes he should:

Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself? Do not reject us forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly clings to the ground. Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love! (vv. 23–26).

“Come, let us argue it out”

I’m not surprised when skeptics hold innocent suffering against God. The so-called “angry atheists” of recent years have sold numerous bestsellers by claiming that innocent suffering proves an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God does not exist.

It’s one thing to read such theological animosity in the work of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. But Psalm 44 is part of God’s inspired word. It is included in Paul’s blanket assertion that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16, my emphasis).

So it would seem that God inspired the psalmist to complain to God. This should actually not surprise us, since the Lord invites us to do the same. In Isaiah 1, we read, “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lᴏʀᴅ” (v. 18). The Hebrew translated as “reason together” means literally, “argue it out.”

Remember Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), echoing words written a thousand years earlier by David (Psalm 22:1), whom the Lord described as “a man after my heart, who will do all my will” (Acts 13:22). If the sinless Son of God and Israel’s most beloved king could give voice to their honest disappointment with the Lord, can’t we?

“Measure not God’s love and favor by your own feeling”

In this sense, I’m glad Psalm 44 ends as it does, without resolution to whatever crisis prompted its complaints. This way, the psalm is relevant to us all in every hard time and place. It’s in God’s word so we can pray its words to our Lord when our hearts are broken, knowing that he welcomes our honesty and shares our pain.

But I am also glad to note that v. 22 finds a second use in Scripture. In Romans 8, one of my favorite chapters in all of God’s word, Paul asks, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?” (v. 35). Then he quotes Psalm 44:22: “As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’”

Now he gives us the answer to his questions, an assurance that the honesty of Psalm 44 positions us to experience today:

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 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 (vv. 37–39).

Our hard days are never our last days. In our Psalm 44 days we can claim God’s Romans 8 love, knowing that the living Lord Jesus is praying for us, walking with us, and living in us by his Spirit as he shares our pain and redeems our suffering for his glory and our good.

If today is a Psalm 44 day for you, the psalmist would encourage you to be transparent with your Lord. Share with him your suffering and pain. “Tell God on God.” Then know that your Father loves you when you feel unloved and suffers with you when you feel alone.

The Anglican theologian Richard Sibbes (1577–1635) counseled,

Measure not God’s love and favor by your own feeling. The sun shines as clearly in the darkest day as it does in the brightest. The difference is not in the sun, but in some clouds which hinder the manifestation of the light thereof.

The clouds may be thick, but the sun is more powerful. Which will you trust today?

 

 

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