Meditation on the Text of the Week

When All Is Lost.

If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?
Psalm 11:3

In the carefully crafted career of David, the king we have patterns and prototypes of redemptive history traced into his life experience. As God dealt with David and through David, Israel so He deals with us, His international, globalised people under the New Covenant. The divine pattern etched into David's life if oft repeated in the experience of individual Christian believers, the Church corporately, and the community of the Covenant in our day.

One important period in David's life was the exile or outcast years. It was the period of the “realised, but not yet” phase where David had been anointed king, but was not yet crowned or installed. The books of Samuel and many of the Psalms focus on these years, thus underscoring their importance. These passages can teach us much; they are a great help and consolation to the Church. Psalm 11 in which our text is found is but one example.

David has been told by the Lord to flee to the mountains to escape persecution. But the opposition is so strong and equipped and merciless that the wilderness mountains of Judea will not be much help (Psalm 11: 2). David does not, therefore, trust in mountains, but he takes refuge in the Lord (Psalm 11: 1). He alone can give comfort, protection, and help—for there is nothing else left upon earth. When even the foundations of life and security have been removed, nothing can be done or secured to provide safety or security (Psalm 11: 3).

There are times when society has become so enthralled under the dominion of God-haters that the very foundation of human society itself has been destroyed. When the courts are unjust, when the king and his governors have set their hearts to evil, when financial resources are no more, when God's people are without adequate food and clothing, when your neighbours are agents and spies for the God-haters—when these things have come, there is no leverage left. There is absolutely no protection. Even the caves in the wilderness are of little use.

As the Gospel is preached to the ends of the earth, there will be times in our dispensation of redemptive history when the community of the Covenant is in a very small minority. Whenever the dominant community of Unbelief comes to believe that the blame for all that is wrong can be substantially laid at the feet of Christians and the Church, the foundations will be quickly destroyed. God's people in that place enter once again into the experience of the outcast and the exile. They have to walk the paths that David has already walked before them.

When the foundations are destroyed, all that one has left is the Lord. His throne is in heaven. And what good is that, we hear you ask? In the Scriptures, dwelling is heaven is never regarded as being absent from the earth. We only think in such categories because we are finite and temporal creatures. (“God is in heaven; therefore He is not on the earth.”) But the Scriptures mean something very different—in fact, the opposite. The fact that God's throne is in heaven means, by definition, that He is everywhere upon the earth. So in our Psalm. The Lord has His throne in the heavens; therefore, His eyes see everything and His eyelids test the sons of men (Psalm 11: 4). He sees the one who does violence against His beloved and that one His soul hates.

Because the Lord's throne is in heaven He will rain fire and brimstone and burning winds upon the wicked who oppress His people upon earth (Psalm 11: 6). Therefore, David's conviction is absolutely correct: when the foundations are destroyed and the God-haters are spewing forth their bile upon innocent God fearers, the only sensible thing to do is to take refuge in Him Who is in heaven.

The ascension and exaltation of Christ does not mean His absence from the Church. It is the exact opposite. He promised that if He went away, He would come again, in the Person of the Spirit (John 16: 5—7), the same all powerful Spirit who brooded over the creation in the beginning, causing all things to come into existence out of nothing. He was exalted to a position of all authority in heaven and earth, so that He could be with us until the end of the age as we go into all the world and make disciples of every nation (Matthew 28: 18—20).

Thus, when days come when God's people are like birds in the fowler's snare this divinely inspired counsel of our father, David penetrates to the joints and marrow. Selah!