Unseen Footprints

The depths

Where does prayer begin? For this

psalmist, prayer—like all genuine

theology—begins in pain. Prayer is

not reciting a formula learned by rote

and repeated at a prescribed moment:

“Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray

the Lord my soul to keep” or even,

“Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be Thy name.” Nor is it the

cozy communion of a self-satisfied

soul contemplating the comforts of a

well-ordered world where no one’s

stomach is growling, no one’s heart is

broken—a kind of syrupy sentimentalism

or a God’s-in-his-heaven-andall-

is-right-with-the-world mentality.

Whatever else you might think about

that kind of prayer, it’s a million miles

away from where the psalmist lives.

Look at his verbs: I cried out. I

sought and stretched out. I groaned

and was troubled. I mused and

pondered. I was dazed and could not

speak. All night long I was in deep

distress. For this supplicant, prayer

truly begins in pain.

What caused his pain? We don’t

know. Perhaps it was some national

crisis or catastrophe that had befallen

the children of Israel, as when the

Babylonian army marched into

Jerusalem and destroyed the temple

and carried away thousands of Jews

into captivity, leaving the nation

devastated. Perhaps this psalm

reflects the experience of the Exile,

the cajoling sneer and contempt of

the captors’ taunts: “Where now is

your God? Is he blind that he cannot

see? Is he deaf that he will not hear?

Is he paralyzed that he is not able to

move?” Or maybe it was a little more

personal than that: “Out of the

depths have I cried unto you,” says

the psalmist. “O Lord, hear my cry.”

Depths? What are the depths? The

depths are those times when a

mother or father hold an all-night

vigil between the day their child was

well and the day he will be well

again. The depths are when the

doctor comes in the room, takes your

hand, and says, “I’m sorry; there’s

nothing else we can do;” when the

roses have faded, the candlelight

flickers dimly in your marriage, and

she looks at you over a plate of leftover

Tuna Helper and says, “I don’t

love you anymore. I found somebody

else. I won’t be here tomorrow when

you get home;” when that unofficial

committee wants to meet with you

after a Sunday evening service to say:

“Oh nothing personal, pastor. We

love you; we just feel your ministry’s

no longer effective in this church.”

Those are the depths. Sooner or

later, all of us know these depths.

Prayer is born in these depths.

Track 22

There are four movements or

stanzas in this psalm. We’ve been

dealing with the first one—six verses

that we might call the troubles or the

depths. There are two images for the

depths in the Psalms. They recur

again and again. One is found here: “I

stretched out untiring hands.” It’s the

image of a person who is drowning.

The floods have come, swept over

his head, and he’s drowning. Another

example is Psalm 69: “Save me, O

God, for the waters have come up to

my neck. I sink in the miry depths,

where there is no foothold. I have

come into the deep waters; the floods

engulf me.” The other image is the

pit. The pit was a deep cistern where

a criminal was placed. Jeremiah was

put there once. He sank down into

the depths of the miry, muddy pit.

That’s the depths or the troubles—

that place where pain and

prayer come together. Why is that

the place where prayer is born? As

the Irish poet William Butler Yeats

put it:

Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.

Sometimes God has to knock us

down before he can pick us up.

Track 23

The questions

The troubles in this psalm lead to the

second stanza, which I call the questions.

It appears that there are six of

them, but I’m going to argue there are

really seven. Notice the questions:

Will the Lord reject forever? Will he

never show his favor again? Has his

unfailing love vanished forever? Has

Unseen Footprints

Even in the depths where questions loom large, remember that God is at work.

BY TIMOTHY GEORGE

audio

DOUBT; PERSPECTIVE; GOD, FAITHFULNESS OF; TRIALS / PSALM 77 {ISSUE 290}

his promise failed for all time? Has God

forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger

withheld his compassion?

The background to these questions is

Exodus 34:5–6. As the children of Israel

were being prepared for the Promised

Land, God came in a cloud and spoke

through Moses:

The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate

and gracious God, slow to

anger, abounding in love and

faithfulness, maintaining love to

thousands, and forgiving wickedness,

rebellion and sin. Yet he does

not leave the guilty unpunished;

he punishes the children and their

children for the sin of the fathers

to the third and fourth generation.

This is an Old Testament creed or confession

of faith that is at the very heart of

the faith of Israel. In Psalm 77, each one

of these great characteristics of God is

called into question. The faithfulness of

God—”Will the Lord reject forever?”

That calls God’s election of Israel into

question. “Will he never show his favor

again?” His hesed or compassion—”Has it

vanished forever?” Has his promise failed

for all time? Has God forgotten to be

merciful? Is there something wrong with

his memory? Has he in anger withheld

his compassion?” One-by-one, the

psalmist is questioning the great attributes

of the covenant God of Israel.

Track 24

I want to ask this question of you:

Why are these questions in the Bible?

Don’t they seem inappropriate? There

are two answers. First of all, they’re in

the Bible because we do not serve an

antiseptic God who is removed, remote,

untouched, or untouchable. We serve a

God who came into the very depths of

our human condition and, according to

the Book of Hebrews, was put to the test

in every conceivable way that we can be

put to the test—with the exception that

he never sinned. This means Jesus was

not a stranger to questions: “My God,

my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

• illustration • The second reason

these questions are in the Bible is that

there is no pathway to Easter Sunday

that does not lead through Good Friday.

[When I was a student at Harvard

Divinity School, I learned preaching

from Dr. Gardner Taylor, a pastor in

New York City.] I’ll never forget those

lectures. I remember him telling us a

story from when he was preaching in

Louisiana during the Depression.

Electricity was just coming into that part

of the country, and he was out in a rural,

black church that had just one little light

bulb hanging down from the ceiling to

light up the whole church building. He

was preaching away, and in the middle

of his sermon—all of a sudden—the

electricity went out. The place was pitch

dark, and he didn’t know what to say,

being a young preacher. He stumbled

around until one of the elderly deacons

sitting in the back of the church cried

out, “Preach on, Preacher! We can still

see Jesus in the dark!” Sometimes that’s

the only time we can see him—in the

dark. The good news of the gospel is

that whether we can see him in the dark

or not, he can see us in the dark.

Track 25

I said there were seven questions. A

lot of modern translations render verse

ten as the introduction to the rest of the

psalm. This is how the NIV translates it,

for example: “I will appeal to the years of

the right hand of the Most High.” But

there is a variant way to read this in

Hebrew, and I think it’s the better way.

Verse ten is not to be read as the introduction

to the rest of the psalm but as

the conclusion to the first part of the

psalm, and as a seventh question. This is

how the New English Bible translates it:

“Has God’s right hand lost its grip?”

Does it hang powerless and withered,

the arm of the Most High? Or as the

New American Bible has it: “Has the

right hand of the Most High changed?”

This is the presupposition of process

theology: that God changes and does

the best he can with what he has.

Ultimately he’s not in control of these

forces that swirl about and within. He

can feel our pain, but he can’t really

make it go away. This is why I write so

much against the openness of God

theology. It has a diminished view of

God, a view that God doesn’t really

know the future. They say, for example,

that God doesn’t really know who’s

going to win the World Series. I will

concede God may not care a lot, but God

does know. He knows who’s going to

win the election. He knows everything

that has happened, is happening, and

will happen. The right hand of God has

not lost its grip!

Track 26

The confession

I call these next two stanzas the confession.

The confession begins in verse

eleven, and the key word is remember. This

is the turning point of the psalm. The

psalm began with the pain that leads to

questions and despair and then comes to

the turning point: “I will remember the

deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember

your miracles of long ago. I will meditate

on all your words and consider all your

mighty deeds.” The surest way to reconnect

when you’re in the depths is to

remember how good God has been to

you. There’s a song that comes from the

African-American tradition: “If it had not

been for the Lord on my side, where

would I be? Oh, where would I be?” That

song has some gospel. Where would we

be if it hadn’t been for the Lord on our

side? That’s what this psalmist is talking

about: I will remember; I will meditate; I

will think about who God is, what he has

done, and his faithfulness in days gone

by, and I will let it sink into my soul.

The psalmist says he will remember

all of God’s mighty deeds, his works

among the nations and the peoples. God

is at work everywhere in this world, and

don’t you ever forget it. He is the one

who raises up kings, potentates, and

princes and puts them down again.

Whoever is elected President of the

United States, God Almighty will still be

God Almighty.

Track 27

• illustration • It’s when we remember

this that we come back to ourselves. I

don’t see movies very much, but one I

remember seeing with my wife is The

Notebook. It’s a love story about Noah and

his wife Allie. Most of the movie is about

their young love together and how they

met, but every now and then, the movie

tells the other end of their life, showing

them in their old age. Allie has developed

Alzheimer’s, and she’s in a nursing

home. Noah doesn’t have to be there,

but he insists on staying with her. Some

years before, she had written down the

story of their love in a notebook. Every

day, Noah comes, they have lunch

together, and Noah takes out the notebook

and reads Allie the story of their

love. As he reads the story, her eyes will

open every now and then, and she comes

back to him for a few minutes.

That’s what the Bible is. The Bible is

God’s covenant love story for his people

through all the ages. When we’re in the

depths and it seems that the Lord has

rejected us forever and his mercy is gone,

we take out the notebook and we read, “In

the beginning, God created,” and “he

delivered my people out of Egypt with a

mighty hand,” and “God so loved the

world that he gave his only begotten Son.”

When we read, we come back to reality,

and we know who we are because we

know who God is, what he has done, and

that his unfailing love will never perish.

Track 28

The conclusion

There’s a final stanza I call the conclusion.

You have this thunderstorm psalm

here: the waters saw you, the depths

were convulsed, thunder was in the

whirlwind, lightning lit up the world,

the earth trembled and quaked, your

path led through the sea, your way

through the mighty waters, and—here’s

the sermon title—your footprints were

unseen. Unseen footprints. We often

don’t immediately see how God is at

work in the circumstances that are

swirling about us when we’re in the pit,

sinking in the depths and wondering

where God is. But the witness of the

Holy Scriptures and the people of God

through the ages, is that God has never

left his people alone, and that he guides

through all the torturous pathways of

life even though his footprints are

frequently unseen:

• illustration •

I fled him, down the night and

down the days;

I fled him down the arches of the

years;

I fled Him down the labyrinthine

ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst

of tears

I hid from Him, and under running

laughter.

Up vistaed hopes, I sped

And shot, precipitated,

Down titanic glooms of chasmed

fears.

And I fled Him and I fled him,

And I ran from those strong feet

that followed, followed after.

That’s Francis Thompson’s The Hound of

Heaven. He was an alcoholic on the

streets of London. He was a drug addict

in the gutter, utterly lost, running. But

behind him, invisibly and imperceptibly,

came those strong feet that followed,

followed after.

Track 29

• illustration • [There’s an Apocryphal

story called Bel and the Dragon.] It’s a

story about Daniel in Babylon. Bel was

an idol that “consumed” a lot of food—

40 sheep a night and all kinds of wine

and grain. However, it was the priests in

charge of keeping the temple of Bel who

were really eating all that was being put

out. The king asked Daniel, “Why don’t

you sacrifice something to the god Bel?”

Daniel laughed, saying, “That’s no god!

He’s an idol. He can’t eat anything. He’s

as empty on the inside as he is on the

outside.” “That couldn’t be true,” the king

said. He called all the priests together

and said, “Daniel says Bel isn’t eating the

food you put out. What’s happening?”

The priests replied, “Why don’t you seal

off the building and not let anybody in at

night? Bring all the food in, and the next

morning you can tell us whether or not

Bel has eaten all the food.” All the while,

they had a little secret door in the back

of the building. They were going to

come in, sneak out the food, and the

king wouldn’t know.

Daniel was on to their tricks, so he

took some dust and ashes and spread it all

around the floor. Sure enough, the priests

put all the food out—the 40 sheep and

everything else—and they locked the

door. During the night, the priests came

in and did what they always did—they

took away the food and ate it. The next

morning the king came and said, “Is the

door locked?” “Yes!” the priests replied. “Is

the seal still on the door?” “Yes!” said the

priests. “Looks like old Daniel is a liar, isn’t

he?” Daniel then said to the king, “Ha!

Look at the floor. See their footprints all

over the place? That’s what happened to

that food! The priests came in at night

and snuck it away and ate it. Bel is an idol!

He’s not a god! You don’t need to give him

any food! Look at their footprints!”

You can see the Devil’s footprints, but

the footprints of our God are unseen.

They lead through the sea, through the

depths where we know he goes before us,

where he walks beside us, where he lives

within us, where he has promised never

to leave us nor forsake us. Isn’t that how

the song concludes? “You led your people

like a flock by the hand of Moses and

Aaron.” What does that recall? It recalls

Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I

shall not want. He maketh me to lie

down.” Yes, in green pastures sometimes,

but also along the ravenous cavern.

Always, though, he leads his people to

that land where there will be no more

tears, no more sorrow, no more death.

There will be no more pits. There will be

no more mire and muck to sink into. But

we shall forever bask in the presence of

our great and living God.