James’s Blog: The Waiting Psalms.

I’ve been reading a book called ‘Deeper Places: The Spirituality of the Psalms’ by Matthew Jacoby, and I was struck by something that I read today. He suggests that the most common experience conveyed by the Psalms is the experience of waiting for God to show up.

The Bible can give the impression that the people of God just rush from one miraculous event to another, but in reality we sometimes have to skip over hundreds of years in just a few pages in order to get to the next God thing. God promises Abraham a son, but Isaac doesn’t show up for fourteen years. In the book of Judges, the story of Deborah begins with ‘Because…[Jabin]…cruelly oppressed the Israelites for twenty years, they cried to the LORD for help.’Maybe it took many of them twenty years before they started crying out, but I imagine there were some in Israel who started their crying earlier. In Revelation 6 we read that those who were martyred for God shout out “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” Even the dead, it seems, have to wait for God.

I have at least hinted in these blog posts that I am often burdened with a sense of waiting for God. Although I’m in a good place right now, I have carried for years a sense that I haven’t yet arrived at where I’m supposed to be – where God has been leading me since I decided to follow Him. It encouraged me to realise that years and years of waiting for God is actually the normal experience of the Bible. There’s nothing wrong with me (or you, for that matter). It’s just how God does things.

I haven’t read the next chapter of Jacoby’s book yet, but he leads us towards the conclusion that waiting tests and builds our desire for God. He writes this:

‘We might declare with our lips that God is worthy of all praise, but we demonstrate what is truly worth the most to us by what we pursue.’

It’s an excellent point. I’m sure we’re all very aware these days of what we’re missing out on. I imagine that this period of waiting is building in many of us an increased desire and appreciation of going to the cinema or McDonald’s or just being able to hug a friend. We might be prevented from actively pursuing any of those things at the moment, but there’s nothing to stop us pursing God as we wait for Him to deliver us, heal us, lead us, or just give us a hug, and in the Psalms we find companionship with those who also knew the struggle of having to wait for God.