I read Psalm 17 this morning, one of King David’s God-directed cries of desperation. David had learned the expediency of adultery, murder, and political backstabbing—he’d dealt out tragedy as well as experienced it—but he also had a conscience and saw the darkness of his heart. David was a warrior-poet with soul.
So in this song, pleas for forgiveness are interwoven with requests for protection from the wicked—a paradoxical begging for mercy/crying for justice that I think all God’s people learn eventually. Set in this framework, it’s the final verses of the psalm that caught my eye. David calls for God to confront the vicious wicked, who are rolling in cash and accolades, and then he says:As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.
As for me… David’s forward-looking vision kindles my imagination. His understanding of the present is set firmly in the frame of the nonnegotiable future: When I awake… David wasn’t just talking about sitting down with his Bible and a cup of coffee the next morning. No, he had wider vistas in mind.
At last, God’s country would be the reality, earth melting away like a dream—eddying and swirling like water down a drain, the last grimy traces of the old life washed away—taking the wicked, and David’s own wickedness, with it. And then? God himself—no longer glimpsed in flashes of created beauty, in moments of spiritual comfort, in the inspiration of the poet—but face to face, God-as-God-is.
Memory on earth is wistful. Memory in heaven will be bright and forward-looking, because nothing we taste in heaven will be gone or lost, but always waiting for us ahead to be found and enjoyed with greater intensity. Christ is our great Guarantor of Final Joy. As David wrote his heartbroken-hopeful, bittersweet songs, I can’t help but think he understood this well.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Earth Will Melt, We Will Wake Up
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