Pouring It All Out Unto a Holy God

What Do Angry Christians Sing?

Warren Peel

Some years ago I read Carl Trueman’s helpful article entitled ‘What do miserable Christians sing?’ His argument was that we need the God-breathed language of lament in the psalms to enable us to articulate our grief in the face of a broken world in a godly way.

I was reminded of it over these past weeks while reading of how the world and the Church have responded to the killing of George Floyd. Where can we find the vocabulary to pray about injustice? Here in the UK this week the government at Westminster voted to allow abortion for non-fatal foetal abnormalities in Northern Ireland, in spite of the fact that the majority of politicians in the Northern Ireland Assembly (who are supposed to have the authority to legislate on this issue) opposed it. A baby can now be legally ripped apart in their mother’s womb simply because he or she has Down’s Syndrome, a cleft palate or lip, or clubfoot. At a time when that same government’s slogan has been ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ and their imposing of stringent measures to keep safe those most vulnerable to covid-19, it is more than a little sickening to see their utter disregard for the lives of the most vulnerable in our society.

We ought to feel righteous indignation and anger in the face of these and a thousand other daily kinds of evil. But how do we express our outrage in a God-honouring way?

If the Foundations are Destroyed . . .

What the Righteous Can Do 

Here is a Psalm to encourage any of the people of God who may be downcast from time to time. . .

Psalm 11 English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK)

To the choirmaster. Of David.

In the Lord I take refuge;
how can you say to my soul,
    “Flee like a bird to your mountain,
for behold, the wicked bend the bow;
    they have fitted their arrow to the string
    to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart;
if the foundations are destroyed,
    what can the righteous do?”

The Lord is in his holy temple;
    the Lord's throne is in heaven;
    his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man.

The Lord tests the righteous,
    but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.

Let him rain coals on the wicked;
    fire and sulphur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.

For the Lord is righteous;
he loves righteous deeds;
    the upright shall behold his face.

As the power of evil appears to grow throughout the West in general and our own country in particular, we are driven to cry out, "if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?"

This question is often fast-followed by discouragement, even despair.  In turn, this path leads to withdrawal or to a surrender to Unbelief.  The antidote to such discouragement is to read on, for the Lord is in his holy temple, his heavenly throne is inviolate, and the Judge of all the earth tests all mankind.

Lest We Forget

Man's Inhumanity to Man

It is not for reason of masochism we have been reading recently Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London: Penguin Books, 2004).  To say that the work is depressing is an understatement--yet we reckon that most of our readers will have already known that.

Why write such a history, then, let alone read it?  Lest we forget, is one appropriate response.  Removing the Gulag out of its Sitz im Leben--its actual life setting--we can acknowledge its importance in making clear, once again, man's inhumanity to man.  This is an evil which has dogged all men, all civilizations from the Garden onwards.  None is exempt--only the degree of inhumanity varies.  The Gulag, then, is not isolated.  Nor is it distinctly Russian, nor Soviet.

The Gulag--the system of slave labour camps in the Soviet Union--existed from the very beginnings of the Soviet Union right through to the early 1980's.  The most systematic and brutal of Soviet dictators who used the camps both as a means of increasing Russian economic output, and as a means of murdering and purging actual and imagined political opponents was Joseph Stalin.

But Stalin's predecessor (Lenin) and his successors used the labour camps as well-and that takes us well into living memory.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Why C.S. Lewis Would Not Have Liked Me Very Much

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Those who have been around here for a while know that I am a C.S. Lewis junkie. I have read and reread him, and have been edified by him in ways beyond reckoning. If I were to calculate the impact that various writers have had on me—and there have been many who have—he would always come in first, and by a large margin.

Even where you find my caveats—as in his early accommodations with evolution, or in the atrocious things he says about some of the psalms—I find myself simultaneously appalled and edified. For example, in Reflections on the Psalms, he says this:

“Still more in the Psalmists’ tendency to chew over and over the cud of some injury, to dwell in a kind of self-torture on every circumstance that aggravates it, most of us can recognise something we have met in ourselves. We are, after all, blood brothers to these ferocious, self-pitying, barbaric men” (Reflections, p. 26).

But still, reading through that book, which I think his worst, I find myself instructed and blessed at every turn. So go figure.

The problem lies with those Christians, like myself, who do not recoil from the imprecatory psalms in the same way that Lewis does.

A Man Who Is Of The Earth

An Imprecatory Psalm For Kim Jong-un

In Tolkien's fictional universe, Ungoliant is a dark, mysterious being in the form of a grotesque spider.  Her origins are unclear, but she had descendants who lingered on in Middle Earth.  The spiders of Mirkwood are one line of descendants.  The dreaded Shelob is another.

In our present world there are few indeed who conjure up the horror of Shelob: black, bloated, delighting in torture, hungering always for victims.  Kim Jong-un is one.

Like his father and grandfather before him, he has enslaved an entire nation.  He drags is corpulent, self-indulged form over the squashed bodies of his slaves, grinning, always inanely grinning.



Repression and torture is such fun.

Singing the Songs of Zion

Many Servants, Manifold Testimony

One of the most encouraging things for Kingdom servants is to realise that the Spirit of God is working His ministries throughout the world in many, many different ways.  These ways are not necessarily our ways.  God's thoughts are not our thoughts.  One thinks of our Lord's encouraging rebuke to Elijah, when he feared he was the last man standing.

We recently came across a vid of an encounter between Bono (of U2 fame) and Eugene Peterson ("The Message").  The conversation had to do with the Psalms.  The discussion covered the nature of the Psalms, the essential importance of metaphor, and the nature of the Psalms as "brutally honest" and "not pretty".  It includes some excellent thoughts about the Imprecatory Psalms, which the Church has pretty much ignored for over three centuries.

Maybe that is one reason why the Church is appears in many places to be so anemic, so confused, and so busy trying to win the approval of the Gentiles.

You can listen to the discussion below:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About Breaking Their Teeth)

Like a Fist

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 11, 2014

 

As Iraq continues to spiral toward chaos, and is doing so in the Facebook era, the one thing we should want to avoid is directionless or aimless outrage. Anger under such circumstances is certainly appropriate and necessary, but like a fist, it needs somewhere to land. I am writing primarily about the treatment of Christians there by ISIS, but of course that cannot be at all separated from a host of other issues and circumstances. Let me start with the more important, and finish with a few related observations.

1. There truly are evil men in the world, and this is what imprecatory psalms were made for. This is why we have them. There are men who will grin for the camera over the prospect of beheading Christian children, and our response to them should be to pray the words of God back to Him.

“Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: Break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord” (Ps. 58:6).

“Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man: Seek out his wickedness till thou find none” (Ps. 10:15).

Our psalter has this second example rendered as “O God, come down and break their evil arms.” In the face of the kind of evil that is abroad in the world, evangelical Christians need to stop filling up their worship services with sentimentalist treacle, and worship biblically in a very dark world. We are confronted with a great and growing evil, and we are discovering that we do not have the liturgical vocabulary to respond appropriately at all. When we sing or pray the psalms, all of them, there are two consequences that should be mentioned. One, we are praying in the will of God, and He hears such prayers. Second, we discover that praying and singing biblically transforms us. This really is the need of the hour.

Chilling Revelations

 How Long, O Lord

Below are a series of clips manifesting the depth of depravity of the monstrous regime in North Korea.  They present testimony from defectors and escapees.  It's a dirty secret that no-one likes to talk about in the West. 

Praying the Imprecatory Psalms on behalf of those suffering is by far and above the best and most potent response Christians in the West can make.