“I know, O Lord, that Your judgments are righteous, and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me” Psalm 119:75

Amen to that

Faithfulness – Every day I receive prayer requests for health related issues.  Most of these are pleas for recovery or safety from cancer.  I never know exactly what to pray when I take these requests to God.  I know that my brothers and sisters in Christ need His loving hand, but I am fearful to tread ignorantly on the purposes of God.  The truth is that I don’t have the right to ask for God something that is outside of His plan.  And so I pray, “Lord, Your will be done in the life of this person.”  Too many times I have gone to the Lord asking for something that I thought made perfectly good spiritual sense, only to discover later that God was working along an entirely different tact.  Too many times I have prayed without first listening.  My prayers were really pleas for God to follow my agenda rather than His.

David adjusts my perspective.  He sees that afflictions come from God’s devotion, not from God’s desertion.  If we read Hebrew, we would have seen the perspective immediately.  The root word is aman.  In this verse, the form is emunah.  There is another form of the word that is quite familiar:  amen.  All of these words circulate around the idea of utter reliability and certainty.  For the psalmist, using this word immediately brought to mind everything about the “amen” of God:  the heavenly ratification of perfect will executed in human life.  This is the bottom line:  only God really knows what He is doing.  Unless we hear expressly from Him, we risk presumption to assume that our prayers are endorsing His purposes.  When we say, “Amen”, we affirm that our thoughts are God’s thoughts.  We grant to our requests the full endorsement of the Father.  We ask God to make it certain.  So, we better be careful what we ask for.

David sees that affliction has divine purpose and it is because God is utterly reliable that affliction enters my life.  To most of us, this seems backwards.  We think that if God is involved in my life, it should be getting better, not worse.  But that presumes on God.  God knows exactly what He is doing with my affliction.  My prayer must be in line with His purposes.  The psalmist says, “Your judgments, your decisions, are always upright.  Of that there is no doubt.”  Jesus said it another way.  “Not my will but Yours be done.”

Amen to that.