Pastor Fredo Ramos: Today, we come to Psalm 83, a Psalm of Asaph. Oh God, do not be silent. Do not be deaf. Do not be quiet, oh God. Don't you hear the uproar of your enemies?
Don't you see that your arrogant enemies are rising up? They devise crafty schemes against your people. They conspire against your precious ones. Come, they say, let us wipe out Israel as a nation. We will destroy the very memory of its existence.
And, there, this was their unanimous decision. They signed a treaty as allies against you. These Edomites, these Ishmaelites, the Moabites, the Hagrites, the Gebelites, the Ammonites, and the Amalekites, and the people from Philistah and Tyre. I can't believe I said all those that that fast. Verse eight, Assyria has joined them too and is allied with the descendants of Lot.
Verse nine, due to them as you did to the Midianites, as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the Kishan River, They were destroyed at Endor, their decaying corpses fertilized the soil. Let their mighty nobles die as Oreb and Zeb did. Let all their princes die like Zeba and Zalmanah, for they said, let us seize for our own. Use these pastures of God. Oh my God, scatter them like tumbleweed, like chaff before the wind.
As a fire burns a forest and as a flame sets mountains ablaze, chase them with your fierce storm. Terrify them with your tempest. Utterly disgrace them until they submit to your name, oh Lord. Let them be ashamed and terrified forever. Let them die in disgrace.
Then they will learn that you alone are called the Lord, that you alone are the most high, supreme over all the earth. By way of reflection, wanna draw our attention to the reality that this Psalm is not always an easy one to read, much less consider that someone prayed like this. The descriptions are very detailed. God come and judge and then he names very specific people. He calls back to the way that many of them had, been defeated and their corpse fertilized the soil.
What what an image. And then he calls for them, you know, to to be to be burnt, to be chased away, to be utter utterly disgraced, to be terrified forever, to die in disgrace. Like, you and I might be led to think, man, someone prays to God like this? And again, a psalm like Psalm 83 is preserved in scripture for us so that we might notice a few things. First, that it is natural for you to go before God and be very angry, very angry.
Secondly, it's also natural for you to go before God and to invite him to not be silent. To to to say, God, don't don't you see what's happening? Don't you understand what's going on? Like, please deal with your enemies. And you might be going about your day to day thinking, man, I'm not in that kind of place.
I don't have that kind of anger simmering in me. I don't know if God's been like that with me. And I just want to to resist the temptation to not give yourself to these prayers and these kinds of psalms so that you would learn to identify with people whose life is like this and who do experience this level of pain. And then secondly, I would caution you that you do and, you know, you and I all have a kind of anger that simmers towards things that are not right in the world. And prayer becomes a healthy place for us to process that anger before God.
And so as you go about your days, you've kind of faced the circumstances. I mean, maybe you got someone at work that you wouldn't mind praying this like towards. But whatever the case is, learn the wisdom of praying your anger before God and opening your hands and offering it to him. Even if it leads you to a place like verse one, oh God, don't be silent. Don't be deaf.
Don't be quiet. And Jesus, we hear your invitation now to pour out honestly what is in our hearts. Even if it's anger towards things that are not right in the world. And as this psalmist reminds us, would you not be quiet, God? Would you respond?
Would you speak? And even more so, God, would you help us to trust you in the process of this? King Jesus, you are the resurrected king who makes all things new. And so even as we face what is wrong in the world, today we put our hope in the reality that you are making all things new so that our anger could be safely handed into your hands, and you can deal with it. We pray these things in Jesus' name.
Amen.