Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 3-066 Sunday 06 Apr 2003

Psalms on Sundays Reading: Psalm 4 – PRAYER AS A WITNESS

Search your heart, in private, and be silent for a moment (v 4).

If the Psalms are the Word of God to us today, they speak to us because they come out of a special kind of conversation between the psalmist and God, inspired, frank and unrestrained. This psalm does not open politely. God is not approached with wary circumlocution. At the same time, the ‘answer me’ of verse 1 does not seem to come with the desperation of some later psalms. It is almost immediately matched with the confident witness of ‘the LORD will hear’ (v 3). Calling is swiftly answered with hearing in these early verses. God and his people, individually and collectively, are in a covenant relationship based on a history of trust.

However, if we look more closely at the targets of the individual verses, we might conclude that this is actually a more complicated dialogue between the psalmist, his God, and men. Something has been said, some criticism or accusation made – it’s not exactly clear what – and this indeterminacy, while frustrating at one level, may actually open up this psalm for use and application by anyone who feels they have been unfairly accused.

The first thing to remember is that anger is natural, may even be righteous, and not necessarily sinful (v 4). The stoics, as Francis Bacon noted long ago, ‘seek to extinguish anger utterly’; whereas Christians should seek to limit and temper it, and he quotes this verse alongside Paul’s advice not to let the sun go down on your anger.* The psalmist suggests that a retreat into private space might help. What you may feel, and what you can constructively say, are two quite separate considerations.

Have you any stored-up anger? Is it righteous, and should you express it? Or do you need to get rid of it?

* Francis Bacon, ‘Of Anger’, in Essays, 1625; Eph 4:26

– Roger Pooley

Copyright Scripture Union, 2003, Encounter with God

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