Psalm 44: Facing Trials and Suffering

Part 2

Last week, we left on a bit of a cliffhanger. In reading through Psalm 44 and comparing it to the covenant God had with Israel in Deuteronomy 28, it seems like God isn’t holding up his end of the covenant. If the Israelites are following God, why are they being defeated by their enemies? We’ll dig into this question more in this lesson. We’re still following the COMA method, and we’ll talk about the Meaning of Psalm 44 this week.

Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

Psalm 44

For the director of music. Of the Sons of Korah. A maskil.

¹ We have heard it with our ears, O God;
    our ancestors have told us
what you did in their days,
    in days long ago.
² With your hand you drove out the nations
    and planted our ancestors;
you crushed the peoples
    and made our ancestors flourish.
³ It was not by their sword that they won the land,
    nor did their arm bring them victory;
it was your right hand, your arm,
    and the light of your face, for you loved them.

⁴ You are my King and my God,
    who decrees victories for Jacob.
⁵ Through you we push back our enemies;
    through your name we trample our foes.
⁶ I put no trust in my bow,
    my sword does not bring me victory;
⁷ but you give us victory over our enemies,
    you put our adversaries to shame.
⁸ In God we make our boast all day long,
    and we will praise your name forever.

⁹ But now you have rejected and humbled us;
    you no longer go out with our armies.
¹⁰ You made us retreat before the enemy,
    and our adversaries have plundered us.
¹¹ You gave us up to be devoured like sheep
    and have scattered us among the nations.
¹² You sold your people for a pittance,
    gaining nothing from their sale.

¹³ You have made us a reproach to our neighbors,
    the scorn and derision of those around us.
¹⁴ You have made us a byword among the nations;
    the peoples shake their heads at us.
¹⁵ I live in disgrace all day long,
    and my face is covered with shame
¹⁶ at the taunts of those who reproach and revile me,
    because of the enemy, who is bent on revenge.

¹⁷ All this came upon us,
    though we had not forgotten you;
    we had not been false to your covenant.
¹⁸ Our hearts had not turned back;
    our feet had not strayed from your path.
¹⁹ But you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals;
    you covered us over with deep darkness.

²⁰ If we had forgotten the name of our God
    or spread out our hands to a foreign god,
²¹ would not God have discovered it,
    since he knows the secrets of the heart?
²² Yet for your sake we face death all day long;
    we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.

²³ Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep?
    Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever.
²⁴ Why do you hide your face
    and forget our misery and oppression?

²⁵ We are brought down to the dust;
    our bodies cling to the ground.
²⁶ Rise up and help us;
    rescue us because of your unfailing love.

Meaning

We know from Scripture that God always keeps his promises, and he doesn’t break his covenant. So why does it seem like that’s the case in Psalm 44? Let’s look at some other places in Scripture where humans face a difficult situation, but we know that they were faithfully following God at the time.

Job

What do you know about the story of Job? We read in Job 1-2 that Satan came before God, and God presented Job as one of his most faithful servants. “Then the Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (Job 1:8). For Job’s faithfulness, Satan decides to attack Job. In one day, Job lost his livestock, his servants, and his children. What was Job’s response?

Job 1:21: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
    and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
    may the name of the Lord be praised.”

Even in the midst of emotional anguish, Job refused to curse God. Satan said that this was because Job himself wasn’t harmed. So God gave Satan permission to inflict Job with painful sores all over his body. And still, Job did not sin by turning his back on God. After much debate with his friends and wife, God eventually addresses Job himself. Job humbles himself before God, and God blesses Job with double what he had before.

Joseph

And what about Joseph? Joseph was his father’s favorite. His brothers were jealous of him, so they sold him into slavery in Egypt. There, his master’s wife tried to seduce him, but he refused. For his integrity, Joseph was thrown in prison. Through all of this, he continued to worship God. In fact, God favored Joseph so much that he made the guards in the prison trust Joseph. Because of his relationship with God, Joseph was able to interpret dreams, a skill that eventually got him out of prison and into favor with Pharaoh.

For interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, Joseph was put in charge of all the land, including saving up grain for the years of famine that were coming. During the famine, Egypt was the only country that had grain due to Joseph’s foresight and planning. Eventually, Joseph’s own brothers travel to Egypt for grain, which ends up with Joseph’s whole family, including his father, moving to live in Egypt.  

Jesus

Then we have Jesus. As God’s perfect Son, Jesus is the epitome of faithfulness. He never sinned, he never turned his back on God. He had perfect fellowship with God his entire life on earth. He had a ministry of teaching and healing. And what did he get for this perfect life he lived? A horrible, painful death on a cross. On that cross, Jesus even said that he felt forsaken by God:

Matthew 27:46: About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

Of all the people who ever lived on earth, Jesus was the only one who was obedient to God in every way. He certainly shouldn’t have had to suffer for disobedience. But his death was predicted in Isaiah 53:7:

He was oppressed and afflicted,
    yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.

This verse echoes what we see in Psalm 44:22:

Yet for your sake we face death all day long;
    we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.

Psalm 44

The men who wrote Psalm 44 faced the same pain that Jesus felt on the cross. They faced death and affliction, just like a sheep being led to the slaughter. And both of them faced it willingly. Why?

Because they trusted that God had a plan. In all of these cases, from Job to Joseph to Jesus, and presumably in Psalm 44, God was working behind the scenes to bring about his purposes. Sometimes, it’s hard for us as humans to understand those purposes. God has a plan that we might not see in the moment. But his plan is always better than our plan.

Isaiah 55:8-9: ⁸ “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
⁹ “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

With this in mind, let’s look at the last two verses of Psalm 44:

²⁵ We are brought down to the dust;
    our bodies cling to the ground.
²⁶ Rise up and help us;
    rescue us because of your unfailing love.

In these verses, we see that even though they were facing trials and suffering, they humbled themselves before God. When they were at the bottom of the barrel, the only thing they could do was depend on God to save them. They knew God was their only hope. They counted on God’s unfailing love, which God had showed them throughout the ages, to bring them back out of the pit.

For every person who goes through trials and suffering, Psalm 44 shows us the foundation of why we can trust God even in the hard times—because of his unfailing love.

Come back next week for the final section in our COMA study of Psalm 44 – the Application.