SHADOW OF THE ALMIGHTY Psalm 91:1-16 First Presbyterian ...

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4 I like the way that scholar James Mays expresses it: “The temptation was to take the promised protection of God into the control of his own will and act. That would have shifted the power of the promise from the free sovereignty of God to individual willfulness. Jesus saw that as a way to test God, not as a way of trust. Real trust does not seek to test God or to prove his faithfulness” (Psalms p. 298). Jesus believed that his miracles had a purpose: to honor God and help people. Jumping off the temple does neither. The miracles were not for show. Not for jumping off buildings or zapping stones into bread. Jesus could have attracted many to his ministry by using such showy methods. Instead, he chooses to make disciples slowly, to teach people who are willing to hear, to die upon a cross. We too are tempted to manipulate God, often in very subtle ways. We are tempted to box God up with our expectations. We do so when we expect God to do too little or too much or for the wrong purposes. We are often tempted to go “without a net” so to speak because God, we think, will surely protect us or preserve us. We are tempted as a church to use the tools of the marketplace when they may not be Christ’s ways at all. We are tempted whenever we salute the big production more than small acts of kindness. We are tempted whenever we applaud the spectacular, the showy, the miraculous, at the expense of the disciplines of prayer, teaching, and humble service. "Do not put the Lord your God to the test." The inappropriate use of the psalm by the devil should caution us concerning how we use the psalm. It is easy based on the middle section of the psalm to claim that God will protect us from everything. And there is no question that believers will sense God’s protection from time to time in their lives. God will help us, God will heal us, God will watch over us. There are also times, though, when we don’t seem protected at all. As a pastor, I’ve been involved in people’s lives long enough to know that troubles still come our way as believers in God. Christians do face serious illnesses, they do die in battle, they do face terrible situations. Even this psalm recognizes this in verse 15 when God speaks: “I will be with them in trouble.” We will face trouble as God’s people. So what we can’t do is interpret this psalm in such a way that says God will protect us from all of life’s troubles and difficulties. “We should not use Psalm 91 as a magical guarantee against danger, threat, or difficulty” (New Interpreter’s Bible IV p. 1048).
5 This is the way that God’s people have understood this psalm. A couple of examples might illustrate the point. In 1956 Jim Elliott went to Ecuador as a missionary. He was murdered along with four other young missionaries- killed by the very people they came to share the Good News with. Jim’s wife Elisabeth Elliot was left. She was a young wife and a new mother, and now she was a widow. Could she still trust the promises of Psalm 91 When she wrote Jim Elliot’s biography a few years later, the title she gave it answered this question. It came from Psalm 91- Shadow of the Almighty. She understood that in spite of life’s difficulties, we still abide in God’s shadow and care (Ben Patterson God’s Prayer Book p. 230). I have also been helped in thinking about God’s providence by the writings of John Calvin. We celebrate his 500 th birthday this year in 2009. He did not have an easy life. His wife died at an early age. His only child, a son, died in infancy. He suffered from many diseases. He was rejected more than once by his followers, once being kicked out of Geneva by bodily force. And yet Calvin’s writings shine forth with some of the most glorious praise for God’s care. Calvin recognized the problems of God’s providence and devoted thirty pages to it in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin says we must acknowledge secondary causes for events as well as seeing God as the primary overseer or superintendent for our world. These secondary causes are often in conflict with the way that God would like to work in our world. We live in a damaged world. These things will happen, Calvin would say, and we need to recognize that they come as a result of our damaged world not because God wills it. Calvin also acknowledges that we will not be kept from all problems or evil. He certainly wasn’t. The prophets or apostles were not. Jesus didn’t escape it all. And neither will we. Calvin says rather that God’s care and protection means that God’s presence in our lives will enable us to deal with the difficulties that we encounter. In Psalm 23 there is a valley of death and yet the psalmist trusts even still in the Lord as shepherd. Life has real problems that Christians, like everyone else, will encounter. God’s providence means that God’s presence and care will enable us to cope with them. Calvin adds that when it is difficult to believe, that’s what faith is all about. Sometimes we don’t know all the facts or have all the evidence but we trust anyway. Sometimes it looks hopeless or as if God is asleep but we put our fragile faith in his hands. We can do that because of past experience or by
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