A Bridge Too Far (2)
You have removed lover and friend far from me; my acquaintances are in a hiding place. Psalm 88:18 NASB
You have removed – A short excursus into enemy territory followed by an immediate return to the major theme: God is sovereign. This poem describes whatever happens as under God’s control and direction. Therefore, even if “they” surround me (as noted in the previous verse), in the end it is God who removes me from human contact. “You have removed” is the Hif’il qatal perfect of rāḥaq, a verb form that describes actively accomplishing something. In other words, the psalmist clearly portrays God as the active agent in his social distress.
The primary meaning of the Qal stem expresses the state of a person or thing as being “far” from someone or something else. In many passages there is also the notion of “being too far” as if the person or object was unreachable (Deut 12:21),[1]
The thought is uncomfortable, isn’t it? Zornberg noted that non-believers have a much easier time dealing with trauma. The world is essentially accident. Bad things happen. Don’t expect to explain why. But believers have a different view, and that view makes things much harder. Believers maintain two almost contradictory positions. One, God is sovereign, and two, God is good. So, when bad things happen, it can only mean that the good God either caused them or let them happen, and since these are bad things, believers have to struggle with the implication. Either God isn’t sovereign and can’t control those bad things or God isn’t good. Neither option seems right. Perhaps that’s why Bible translations struggle with Isaiah 45:6-7:
So that people may know from the rising to the setting of the sun
That there is no one besides Me.
I am the Lord, and there is no one else,
The One forming light and creating darkness,
Causing well-being and creating disaster;
I am the Lord who does all these things.
If you look at the Hebrew text, you’ll immediately notice that verse 7 doesn’t use the word “disaster.” It uses the word “evil.” God asserts through His prophet Isaiah that He is the only god, and that He creates shalom and ra. Could it be any clearer? Or any less contradictory? All kinds of theological gymnastics and translation glosses become necessary.
But the psalmist doesn’t care about the theology. He is describing what it feels like! His world is the experienced world, and right now it feels as if the sovereign God has taken away his lover, his friends, and even his acquaintances. God has put him in solitary confinement, and there is no escape.
Amazingly, this is the last thought of this poem. There is no Pollyanna resolution. There is no theologically satisfying conclusion. This is just the way it is. It’s amazing that this poem is even included in Scripture. But then it has to be, because it is the real experience of even the faithful. And when we feel as if we’re in solitary confinement, well, we have David right there with us. I guess we’re not alone after all.
Topical Index: rāḥaq, removed, too far, isolation, sovereignty, Isaiah 45:6-7, Psalm 88:18
[1] White, W. (1999). 2151 רָחַק. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 844). Chicago: Moody Press.
Indeed! “… it is the real experience of the faithful. And yes, we also “have David right there with with us.” Yet we also… in our “feelings of solitary confinement”… have Christ Jesus crucified “right there with us” as well. Moreover, we have the resurrected Christ right there with us in our real experience of solitary confinement and removal from the experience of his presence with us. This requires a basis of faith that is not secured in our own being; rather, it is secured in God’s faithfulness to himself as He is in his own being.
“And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which is translated, “My God, my God, for what have you forsaken me?”) (Mark 15:34)
It is the Son’s fittingness for us (in the divine economy) that provides for us… Christ Jesus is the critical lens for seeing God’s beauty and the Son’s glory in every stage of our experiencing of the material theodrama played out in the divine work of creation, redemption, and consummation.
The Psalmist’s rather pessimistic view… is that as can only be produced within the enclosed frame of historical materialism. Frighteningly, all of this comes to it ultimate end… destruction (or perhaps more accurately… de-construction… the complete unravelling of the material matrix).
Thanks be to God… his Divine being remains unmitigated… persisting as He himself actually is in the nature of his own being and in faithfulness to Himself… pursuing man’s soul as man appears and actually is in the created schema of divine reality in relation to the created material matrix— that is, as fallen through sinful rebellion and coming to death as consequence.
Thanks be to God… for his indescribable divine work and gift to and for sinners: mercy, grace and peace mediated by Christ Jesus, Savior and Lord!
Sometimes your comments strike me as a bit too paradigmatically based. This one is an example. A lot of theological verbiage that could only be unravelled via Christian philosophy. Would it not be easier to understand if we just agreed that the psalmist speaks about our human reality. His lens isn’t through Jesus. That takes a serious anachronistic slant. His view might be pessimistic, but how else could be describe a world where the benevolence of God seems overridden by evil forces every day? And is man actually “fallen.” I know Christian doctrine makes a great deal of the Fall, even claiming it has noetic effects, but this doesn’t seem to be the view of the Tanakh. It came much later, after Hellenism. Perhaps we should stick with the exegesis of the author’s time and culture, and leave theological development for later periods.
Your point is well-taken, Skip.
In my experience it was only when I began to understand my relation to God as a function of belief and the framing of faith in the context of what Christ demonstrated in his own extraordinary humanity that I was able see my actions as located in the condition of my own rebellion and sin and myself as being altogether apart from God and lost in my own sense of self- righteousness (as compared with others who were “doing worse things” than I was). In short, Christ corrected the lens of reality for me… apart from which I would have remained resident in the reality of only sin and death (rather than resident in eternal life by the Goodness of God’s mercy and grace to and for me) with the clock continuing to tick on the life I had been granted… irrespective of the context of my experience of of human reality.
Moreover, my experience (to that point of “relocation of residency”) had literally brought me to the point of a planned suicide, and one final plea… “God, if you really are there, you need to let me know…now… because I don’t want to live in this way”… (I.e., in the pain of moral bankruptcy and hopeless dispair). God’s response was immediate and persistent, and the result was that my faith was “relocated”— “moved” from myself to God in Christ— as I began to understand the nature of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth by means of the Scriptures.
My personal experience was indeed “a fall”… a continual spiraling into a deeper and deeper occupation of sin and degradation (from a ‘relatively’ morally upright and honorable place and manner of living). So I must admit, I wouldn’t have vacated my “fallen” experience of reality apart from the corrective lens Jesus Christ brought to my experience of reality, because by that point I was powerless to do so.
Thanks for sharing this part of your life. I’m glad you found the right perspective and discovered God is merciful and generous.
Yes! God is indeed merciful and generous! Emet… and amen. (And thank you for your considerate responses.)
To be clear, I think man left to himself has only the the empowerment of desire… to which these questions may be proposed, “How is man’s lens of reality in one’s experience aligned with (rather than opposed to) God? Precisely what is the prescribed corrective lens that enlightens one’s understanding of the true nature of divine reality in the context of the reality of human experience?
Is it not the paradigm of faith?… (and that found throughout the entirety of Scripture).