(This year, our church is reading Scripture together throughout the season of Advent. I am going to blog thoughts on the text of the day here. If you’d like to read along, click here and download our reader.)
Psalm 80:3-7
Restore us, O God;
make your face shine on us,
that we may be saved.
How long, LORD God Almighty,
will your anger smolder against the prayers of your people?
You have fed them with the bread of tears;
you have made them drink tears by the bowlful.
You have made us an object of derision to our neighbors,
and our enemies mock us.
Restore us, God Almighty;
make your face shine on us,
that we may be saved.
Psalm 80 is not my favorite psalm. It’s a downer. Smoldering anger and tears by the bowlful are not where I like my daily devotionals to start. I want promises, encouragement, and edification. This psalm holds none of those things out to me, and sometimes when I read texts like this, I don’t know what to do with them because they don’t behave like I think Scripture should.
Yet who among us hasn’t felt like this before? Where are you, God? When are you going to show up? When are you going to do what you said you’d do? Like the psalmist here, we can look back and see what God has done in the past, but only though the broken reality we find ourselves in today. We look at our current situation and cry out for God to act, “that we may be saved”.
Advent is a season of waiting. In the time before Christ was born, there were 400 years of silence from the prophets of God. In this season, questions like the ones in Psalm 80 were probably frequent. When is God going to do what he said he’d do? They were looking for the Messiah, the one who would establish the Kingdom of God in the world around them, a world that was chaotic and full of hardship.
We have a hard time understanding this kind of waiting because we have seen the great light of Christ. His incarnation, death, and resurrection speak great hope to us, even in the darkest of times. Yet there are times where we long for God to finish what He has started, for Christ to return and establish forever his Kingdom on the earth. It is in those times where Psalm 80 makes the most sense, in the times where the distance between what God has promised and what seems to be true is most great.
It comforts me to know that the writers of Scripture wrestled with God’s timing. They struggled with the why’s, the how’s, the when’s of life. There is room for these things in the fight to believe. The story of salvation in Scripture is one in which we find ourselves in the middle of what God has already done and what He has not yet done. That can be a hard place to live; the Scriptures are full of encouragement to the people of God to hold fast as they wait. “He who has called you is faithful; he will surely do it!” (1 Thes 5:24)
If you are in a hard place in life, and you feel like you’re waiting for God to act, join me in praying the refrain from this psalm during Advent: “Restore us, God Almighty; make your face shine upon us, that we may be saved!”
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