Psalm 30 When bad things happen

Maybe the biggest question Christians ask is: why is this happening to me? 

God could easily have prevented this from happening.  You may even have prayed that something like this wouldn’t happen.  I have. 

I teach a lot on the Lord’s Prayer, especially the part about deliver us from evil, because I believe God wants us to pray before bad things happen so that they don’t happen. 

But still, from time to time, bad things happen. 

So I was reading this morning Psalm 30.  Verse 5 caught my attention.  I like the way the Hebrew text puts it.

Psalm 30:4       Sing praise to the Lord, you His godly ones, And give thanks to His holy ^dname.

            5          For a moment in His anger, a lifetime in His favor

In the evening will spend the night weeping, and at the morning, a shout of joy.

It’s not I will spend the night weeping, but weeping will spend the night.  The Hebrew reverses the word order, emphasizing that the weeping is just for the night.

One of my favorite Bible commentators called a moment, “the briefest time that is known to usage.”

So you might ask, why bother?  If this is merely a speck of time in God’s mind, and comparatively speaking, in ours as well, then why do it?

Why would God allow or bring it, this bad thing in my life?

Psalm 30 gives us several reasons for this:

1) This issue isn’t really so much God about causing bad things to happen, but we just aren’t aware of how much the good things that happen in our lives actually depend on God’s active action on our behalf.

Verses 6-7 here: 6        Now as for me, I said in my prosperity,  “I will never be moved.”

The word for prosperity here emphasizes more the ease of the prosperity rather than the magnitude.  This is people in prosperity relaxing in their wealth.

            7          O Lord, by Your favor You have made my mountain to stand strong;

You hid Your face, I was dismayed.

That was a quick change.  Going from a feeling of total confidence to feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck.  You sit there stunned by what happened, and you don’t know what to say. 

I felt like that a few years ago when I got sick and had to quit work.  Actually it took a few months to start getting back to normal, if you want to call it that.

When the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, their clothes and sandals didn’t even wear out.  When your car or your hot water heater goes for years without problems, we need to see God as much in that as when He answers our prayers in bad situations.

So the first reason is to help us understand and appreciate the times when things were going well.

2)         We learn about God in difficult situations.  When things are going well, it’s like summer vacation.  School’s out.  No learning taking place here.  Unless, of course, you have learned the lesson of gratefulness, for all the times when nothing is going wrong.

Verse 9:    “What profit is there in my blood, if I go down to the pit?     Will the dust praise You? Will it declare Your faithfulness?

You learn of God’s faithfulness through experience.  I’ve had so many jobs I can’t count them.  And I’ve tried.  I remember how many I counted years ago, but I say now, nah, that can’t be right.  It couldn’t have been that many.  But I have learned not to worry about getting a job.

3)         People are more grateful when God fixes things than when they were never broken at all.   It’s not that God is fishing for compliments.  He’s trying to inform us about how life really works.   

       

Verse 11:         You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;  You have loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness,

Gladness here isn’t just being in a good mood.  This is mirth, merriment.  You just can’t contain yourself.

People are happier after a bad spell than they were before.  That’s just a fact.  But we learned something valuable about God.

Psalm 30:5       (For) a moment in His anger, a lifetime in His favor

In the evening weeping will spend the night, and at the morning, a shout of joy.

I wouldn’t really call this anger.  God’s anger.  We may think of it like that.  What else could it be?  There is just too much going on in the world, including the unseen world, for us to understand everything that happens in the world.  The Bible wants us to focus on our reactions to these things.

The man in the Psalm’s life was shattered.  His response? 

8          To You, O Lord, I called,  And to the Lord I made supplication:

10        “Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me;  O Lord, be my helper.”

And he found that God would help him.

Again, as I will say so often in closing, I don’t expect one short lesson will solve every problem or answer every question.  They are all like pieces in a puzzle or individual bricks.  You put them all together to form the big picture or to build your life so you can live well or a wall big enough to protect you.