One lesson that stands out in both biblical redemptive history and in the history of the Church is that God is never in a hurry. One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. His plans and purposes unfold slowly, deliberately, and ultimately exhaustively.
One of the challenges to Christian maturity is learning to live coram Deo--before the Face of God--with patience and perseverance. Our lives on this earth are of course ridiculously fleeting and brief, like the flower in the field which blooms at the dawn, but is limp and spent by day's end. There is a perpetual temptation to expect (even demand) that all of God's promises come to pass now, in our days, in our lifetimes. Another, opposite temptation is to conclude that since God's promises are not going to be realised in our lifetimes, why worry? Be happy. Such thoughts are anthropocentric, man centred, not God centred. They do not flow from living coram Deo.
One of the essential steps to Christian maturity is to learn to live our lives in God's time, not ours. In many cases this requires that we need to live through seasons, if not lifetimes, of lamentation. Unfortunately, it's not something we hear much about today, which is a sure sign that the Church in the West is misdirected, impatient, triumphalist, and, thus, largely irrelevant. What do we mean?
In the West, the First Christendom has fallen apart. Unbelief rules the councils of our lands. Christians are assailed on every hand by militant secularism. We are regarded as irrelevant relics, piteous anachronisms of a darker, ignorant age. Yet Christians are not found in lamentation before God. Why? We suspect that most Christians believe that the travails of our age and generation are not our travails, and in any event, will soon be over.
Some Christians expect to be "raptured" off the planet--in their lifetimes. Others have locked themselves in Christian ghettoes, separating as much as physically and mentally possible from the militant march of Unbelief.
They speak of "two Kingdoms"--the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of this World. Every lead step of Unbelief is matched by the backward step of Christians as the slow dance of surrender circles the hall. Christians in the West remain largely supine as they await their deaths, and transport to Heaven. There is no mourning, no lament, no fasting, no imprecatory prayer over the state of the Kingdom in our generation. Modern Western Christians have surrendered most of the creation to the Secularists, and have retreated to the wardrobe. Whilst there is no sign of Aslan, we will see Him soon enough when we die.
The brevity of our lives has been used to justify a studied unconcern about the ageless Kingdom of God upon the earth. We are focused upon our time, not His. The fleeting nature of our lives has been misused as a reason to disregard the lamentable state of the Kingdom in our day, and, instead, to chant, "Don't worry. Be happy. For tomorrow we die and go to be with Jesus." This puerile self-centredness passes for spiritual maturity in our generation.
Asaph was one of the most celebrated musicians of formal worship in ancient Israel. Appointed by David, he also served under Solomon, and lived to see the horrors of the divided kingdom. The Psalms attributed to him (50; 73--78) are largely Psalms of lament. They are in the Canon for a purpose. They are there to be used by Christians in times such as these. It's high time we started using them--for it is what God requires of us in such days in which we have been called to live and serve.
Psalm 74 is both typical and instructive: in our lifetime we have never heard it used in public worship as a lament for the state of the Church and the Kingdom. We have never heard a sermon on this Psalm. Yet, when we consider the times in which we live, its words leap off the page of Holy Writ. But only for those who understand that one of the most pressing duties, in light of the circumstances of our generation, is to make lamentation before the Lord.
A Maskil of Asaph.
74 O God, why do you cast us off for ever?Why does your anger smoke against the sheep of your pasture?
2 Remember your congregation, which you have purchased of old,
which you have redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage!
Remember Mount Zion, where you have dwelt.
3 Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins;
the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary!
4 Your foes have roared in the midst of your meeting place;
they set up their own signs for signs.
5 They were like those who swing axes
in a forest of trees.
6 And all its carved wood
they broke down with hatchets and hammers.
7 They set your sanctuary on fire;
they profaned the dwelling place of your name,
bringing it down to the ground.
8 They said to themselves, “We will utterly subdue them”;
they burned all the meeting places of God in the land.
9 We do not see our signs;
there is no longer any prophet,
and there is none among us who knows how long.
10 How long, O God, is the foe to scoff?
Is the enemy to revile your name for ever?
11 Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?
Take it from the fold of your garment and destroy them!
12 Yet God my King is from of old,
working salvation in the midst of the earth. . . .
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