Surrounded from Within and Without
Psalm 70:4-5 May all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you! May those who love your salvation say evermore, “God is great!”But I am poor and needy; hasten to me, O God! You are my help and my deliverer; O Lord, do not delay!
If you love God. If you’re grateful for the forgiveness of sins and the mercy and grace of God shed abroad to you in Jesus Christ, then you oughts to be saying in any number of ways, “God is great!” It’s a necessary consequence. This is not only a response of worship but it is evangelism as well. Christians don’t need to spend time defending Christianity as not being toxic. Forget that. We need to be defending God, not as a tolerable religious fabric in the sacred canopy, but as being great. God is great.
Notice that the chapter ends on the request for the Lord to be the psalmist’s helper and deliverer, even after the request for all who seek God to rejoice and be glad in Him, to the worship of His Name. Why might the poem end on the refrain of the psalmist’s neediness rather than on God’s willingness to help? Why not end the chapter with verse 4? After all, verse 5 was already stated in verse 1. Well, if it was music, we would recognize that the lack of resolution means we need to get ready for another go-around. The hook has to come back to the root and so the end must still be on its way. But it’s not only the poetic structure that requires the refrain to close the song. This psalm, remember, is used on a daily basis as the Christian prays about his daily, even hourly need to rely on the Lord for help. It is a cyclical lesson. It is habitual. And until the Christian enters glory, your constant posture is to be one of desperately needing, at all times, the salvation of the Lord. Listen to the counsel of Augustine.
Overcoming well means overcoming all the machinations of the devil. He [the tempter] serves up enticements: he [the believer] overcomes by self-restraint. [satan] inflicts pains and tortures: [The believer] overcomes by patience. [satan] suggests error: [The believer] overcomes by wisdom. As a last resort, when all these ploys have been defeated, [satan] suggests to the soul, “Well done. Well done. How much you’ve been able to do. How valiantly you’ve contended! Who can be compared with you? How well you have overcome!”
At this last attempt to throw the Christian off course, the believer must never end the day and look back on his battles with lust, ungratefulness, pride, and the like and think, “Well, another day lived to the glory of God.” We are to end every day on verse 5, not verse 4.
Augustine acknowledges what is even more true in our own day, thanks to the digital revolution . . . that the human clearly lives within, as Michael Sacasas calls it, an ever-present field of temptation. Listen to Sacasas:
Consider the discipline required to responsibly direct one’s attention from moment to moment rather than responding with Pavlovian alacrity when our devices beckon us. Or the degree of restraint necessary to avoid the casual voyeurism that powers so much of our social media feeds. Or, how those same platforms can be justly described as machines for the inducement of petty vindictiveness and less-than-righteous indignation. Or, alternatively, as carefully calibrated engines of sloth, greed, envy, despair, and self-loathing. The point is not that our digital media environment necessarily generates vice, rather it’s that it constitutes an ever-present field of temptation, which can require, in turn, monastic degrees of self-discipline to manage. I’m reminded, for example, of how years ago Evgeny Morozov described buying a timed safe in which to lock his smartphone, and how, when he discovered he could unscrew the timing mechanism, he locked the screwdriver in there, too. Under certain circumstances and for certain people, maintaining a level of basic human decency or even psychic well-being may feel like an exercise in moral sainthood.
The Christian ends the day on the last note of gratefully acknowledging the closeness of God, His willingness to help, and God’s worthiness to be praised. Then the believer casts himself on the salvation of the Lord one last time. This will be the closing moment for each of us when it is our time to die as well. There will be one final episode of evening prayers. Yes, you must live to the glory of God. But you do not approach the final moments before exhaling for the last time and think, “There it is. A life lived to the glory of God.” You don’t ever stop casting yourself on the mercy of God and the assurance that His salvation is near and effective. Your best insurance is your need and your knowledge that God will not turn anyone away who runs to Him for rescue.
