God the Problem

They have surrounded me like water all day long;  they have encircled me altogether.  Psalm 88:17  NASB

They – Suddenly, a change.  Through seventeen verses the psalmist has decried God’s absence.  His lament holds God responsible for the sorry state of his life, for the nearly impossible burden he must carry, for the approach of death.  But now, suddenly, it isn’t God who’s in focus.  It’s “they.”

And who, pray tell, is that?

All we have is the pronoun form.  Sābab + the third person plural.  “They” surround.  Nāqap + the third person plural.  “They” encircle.  It takes but a moment to connect these pronouns with the previous verse.  “They” are the terrors God has sent.  Once more the psalmist implicates God in the evil he experiences.  The dark side of the moon is his present reality, and since God is the God of all, all that occurs must somehow come from His hand.

Do you suppose the the psalmist was thinking about the story of Job when he wrote these lyrics?  Of course, in the end Job’s tale of woe is reconciled—well, sort of.  Job never really gets an acceptable answer.  He gets divine sovereignty.  “Who are you to ask anything of Me?” isn’t very satisfying, is it?  And Job was a righteous man.  It seems as though this author is raising the same objection, demanding the same response.  “Why do you allow this?  Why do you cause this?  What have I done to deserve this sort of treatment?”

The rabbis contend that God is sovereign but man is accountable.  What happens in my physical, emotional world is a divine-human homogenization, inseparably combined.  What this means is that we can shift back and forth with the psalmist.  The divine side—the human side.  In the light—in the dark.  Perhaps that’s some kind of perspective.  Perhaps a sliver of insight.  Perhaps.  At any rate, we have the opportunity to look in another direction—out of the dark hole.  Frankly, what else can we do?

How I wish I could offer some rational, reasonable, comforting explanation.  But I see Job standing in the graveyard, weeping over all his children who were lost in this little divine game between God and the accuser.  What comfort is there for him?  New children?  No, I don’t think so.  Some part of what it means to be human is forever gone when trauma like that occurs.  Some part of who we are dies with them.  And Job, like the psalmist, lived in a world without reward in an after life.  “Will the shades arise and acclaim you?” (verse 6).  No, they won’t.  And neither will I!  Some things are just more than human existence can accept.  Oh, we’ll go on living, but there will be a part of us that has already died.

That’s just the way it is.  Obedience doesn’t always come with explanation.

Topical Index: they, enemy, sovereignty, Psalm 88:17