A Stinking Mess
Lord, why do You reject my soul? Why do You hide Your face from me? Psalm 88:14 NASB
Reject – The Hebrew zānaḥ has two root meanings. The first is as it is translated here: to reject, spurn, cast off. But the second adds a bit to our emotional understanding of this word. zānaḥ II means, “to stink, to emit a stench.” Perhaps the psalmist has both ideas in mind. “Lord, why do You spurn me? Why do You treat me as if I stink? Why am I nothing more than garbage to You?”
In typical Near Eastern idiomatic vocabulary, the experience of the psalmist is described as “hiding the face.” More than any other physical experience, face-to-face is the expression of real connection. Forget the digital world of online images! Forget texting and emails, and yes, even this electronically-delivered study. If you really want connection, it must be face-to-face. In fact, without it our very humanity is diminished. The world that we know today is an abomination. We are systematically removing ourselves from the land of the living. For the psalmist, this feeling, this loss of personal contact, is the epitome of rejection. It is the equivalent of the other person saying, “You stink!”
Of course, the pregnant issue here is the interrogative: “Why?” Why does God do this to us? Is it some kind of spiritual training? That would be a rather uncomfortable answer considering God’s continuing attestation that He loves us. Is it because we’re sinful, undeserving, repugnant? But God knows all that. In fact, He claims that He wants our well-being despite our clear infirmities. Of what use is a god who expects us to be perfect before he will interact? The psalmist comes up short with both answers. His problem is our problem. There just doesn’t seem to be any good reason why God leaves us in those dark, musty holes in the ground. We’re left with the reality of the feeling—without the comfort of an answer.
And maybe that’s why this verse is here. There are defining moments in life when there are no answers, when our best is rejected like so much stinking trash, when we smell despite every attempt we make to be clean. There are times when life stinks—and there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do about it.
I find some comfort in this verse. Oh, I don’t mean I can resolve it. I don’t have any consoling theological propositions. What I have is the knowledge that another man who sought God is going through the same thing. God might be gone, but I am not alone. His words are my words. We share the same hole. We stink together.
Topical Index: zānaḥ, reject, stink, Psalm 88:14
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A couple of questions. 1. With this feeling of loneliness and abandonment, how do you prove God’s existence and/or Character, personally? 2. We had a study a few years back, I thought Very Good, important. We came together and each shared what we “Know”. Not what we think, or believe, or hope……but What do you Know? So this , in all of your studies, is a question to you. (Do these questions help define our paradigm?)(Sorry to pop in/out. You may have answered these questions repeatedly, I read Today’s Word as able, not as regularly as I might like. )
Is it really a matter of “proving” God’s existence? That sounds more like a Western rational apologetic argument. I’m not sure we can “prove” God exists, at least not in the sense that we can prove something in Euclidean Geometry. But we do have experiences, and those are ours, no matter what someone else says about them. If I have an experience of the presence of God, I might not be able to “prove” it to anyone else, but it is nevertheless real for me, and that might be all I need to start on the path. Of course, I will then try to make sense of my experience, and that will involve collecting evidence, exploring texts, examining theories, but none of those can make my experience disappear. Maybe that’s what you mean by “what we know.” There is always a commitment to one way of looking at things, and some ways seem more reasonable, more coherent, bigger than other ways, so I might have to adjust along the way, but there is an undeniable something behind all this.