Today’s reflection focuses on Psalm 10. It has fast become one of my favourites.
Psalm 10 begins with such a human cry, echoed by Jesus on the cross, ‘Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?’ It’s broken, it’s honest and it expresses the sense of helplessness in the face of what seems hopeless.
Verses 2-11 share frustration at the state of how things seem to be – a state many of us can relate to. It gives us the wicked man. This could be a person, a nation, an institution, a system… anything that preys on the weak. This wicked man seems to get away with injustice, revelling in his own pleasure and delighting in getting away with oppressing the poor and the weak.
Verses 7-11 are brutal. They capture the unrelenting evil of injustice. They capture how the weak and poor are crippled by those who pursue gain at the expense of others.
The Message shows us that brutality:
“They carry a mouthful of hexes,
their tongues spit venom like adders.
They hide behind ordinary people,
then pounce on their victims.
They mark the luckless,
then wait like a hunter in a blind;
when the poor wretch wanders too close,
they stab him in the back.
The hapless fool is kicked to the ground,
the unlucky victim is brutally axed.
He thinks God has dumped him,
he’s sure that God is indifferent to his plight.”
What’s amazing about the passage is that even in the cry of God being distant and injustice prevailing with the wicked prospering and beating up on the weak and poor, hope is still there.
The rest of the Psalm passionately calls on God to act. David believes in a God who sees the trouble of those who are set upon by evil and he declares the Kingship of God – the one who defends the fatherless and the oppressed; the one who hears their cries; the one who sees their troubles and acts.
There is hope. So often evil seems to prevail and the ‘wicked man’ seems able to brutally prey upon the weak and the helpless with no justice playing out. In those times we declare the reality of the God who is for the victim. He’s for the weak, the helpless, the fatherless and the oppressed. Hope is there.
The big question for us is how we live out that hope in a world that so desperately needs it. We grasp it for ourselves when evil beats against us and we carry it into places where hope has been torn away. We act.
At TEAR Fund New Zealand we’re having a conversation about hope. We’re supporting three amazing projects in the Philippines, Vanuatu and Mongolia where our local partners are doing life-giving work to restore hope through very real activities. You can get involved in the work of hope by supporting those projects with us financially.
We’re also inviting others to join our conversation about hope. Grab a piece of paper and on it, finish the sentence ‘Hope is…’ Get a photo of you holding the paper with what you’ve written. Share it on the net and on TEAR Fund’s Facebook page and encourage others to do the same. Let’s see a conversation about hope spread.
When evil seems unrelenting and able to get away with injustice, may we be people who sow seeds of action through all that we do and say. May the world know a little more hope because of us.
Read more of my reflections on the Psalms.
Here’s why I’m walking this journey through the Psalms.