In his inaugural speech on March 4, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt said, “[L]et me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.”
Is there anything more powerfully destructive in our lives and in our world than fear? Fear causes us to do extraordinary things — to lie, to mistreat, or to exclude others. Fear destroys relationships, it causes all kinds of health issues, it leads to betrayal, deceit, violence. Fear is so destructive in our lives, in our communities, and in our world. To make matters worse, politicians have used fear as a tool to motivate and manipulate people.
Our day-to-day fears may be more mundane — fear for our families, fear of disease, fear of losing our jobs. There are so many things to fear. How do we overcome fear? Getting rid of our enemies only works until the next enemy comes along.
Psalm 3 at first might appear to follow the simplistic pattern of putting our hope in taking out our enemies. The psalmist speaks of thousands of enemies gathered against him. He calls out to God and waits for God to come and destroy his enemies, to save him. “Rise up, O Lord! Give me victory, O my God! Oh, that you would smite all my enemies on the cheek. Oh, that you would smash the teeth of wicked men.” There is a lot of emotion here — fear and anger.
“God is on my side,” the psalmist appears to say. “And God will destroy my enemies, taking vengeance on them.” I think we have learned to be wary of this understanding of good guys and bad guys, in which the bad guys are out there and we are justified in calling down the power of God against them, because he must be on our side. This is one of the reasons why people today react against some of the stories in the Old Testament, which seem to portray a God of vengeance who will take our side and wreak havoc on our enemies. But is that the picture given by the Old Testament? Is that what is happening in this psalm?
This psalm is rooted in the story of David and his son Absalom.
It is a long and sordid tale that has its origin in David’s adultery with Bathsheba and his subsequent arranging the murder of her husband, Uriah. David ordered this murder because he was desperate to conceal his adultery. The sins of the father were visited on his children when, Amnon, the oldest of David’s sons, raped his half-sister Tamar.
Absalom, Tamar’s full brother, promised vengeance and then planned and schemed for two years until he finally contrived the opportunity to kill Amnon, after which Absalom fled for his life. It took a few years, but David finally forgave Absalom. Absalom, however, had never forgiven his father, and he spent the next few years quietly winning the favor of the people of Israel.
Eventually, after he had won enough support from the people, Absalom fomented rebellion in Israel against David. David fled Jerusalem in fear of his life. This conflict led to a civil war in which more than 20,000 people were killed, until those who had aligned with David finally triumphed.
But there was no joy in this victory. As Absalom’s army was fleeing, he was caught in the branches of a tree. Joab, David’s commander in chief, killed Absalom as he was hanging in the tree — although he had been told by David to spare Absalom’s life (2 Sam. 18:31). This story seems almost too extraordinary to be true; what family could ever be that dysfunctional? That is the context of Psalm 3.
Who is the Enemy?
So who are the enemies David is speaking about? Are they the people of Israel, his people? His son Absalom? His family? It becomes difficult to see how David would pray that God would destroy the people arrayed against him, his own people, his own family. Indeed, after Absalom’s army is defeated and Absalom is killed, David mourns and says, “\How I wish that could have been me rather than Absalom.”
There is something much deeper going on here. Certainly the thousands of people arrayed against David are in some senses his enemies and yet it is clearly more complex than this. David is a mature man. He is no longer the young, naive shepherd who killed Goliath. He has been battered and bruised by life, and he is becoming aware that he has inflicted a lot of damage on others, including his family. He knows that many of the roots of the issues he faces are issues of his own making. He is the one who has got his family and his country into this mess in the first place. So who are his enemies?
In his letter to the church at Ephesus (chapter 6), Paul says our enemies are not flesh and blood but principalities, powers, the forces of darkness in this world. Paul is speaking to a church struggling with division, with people taking sides against one another. He is speaking to people who sometimes feel as though the world is against them. He wants to identify the real enemy.
Our true enemies are deceit, violence, envy, pride, hatred, impurity, addiction, darkness, and fear — all those things that work to distort our lives and destroy our relationships with God and with one another. So, how do we stand up, how do we survive when we feel overwhelmed by what we are facing and overwhelmed by such complex enemies?
There is a significant shift that happens in this psalm. In the first two verses, the focus is on those arrayed against David: “O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying to me, ‘There is no help for you in God.’” But in the third verse, the psalmist turns to God: “But you, O Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, and the one who lifts up my head.”
When David is focused on the forces arrayed against him, he is overwhelmed. His foes grow larger, more formidable, more deadly. But when he turns his attention to God, his foes are put in their proper place, they are put into perspective: “I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the Lord sustains me. I am not afraid of tens of thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around. … Deliverance belongs to the Lord.”
David’s prayer is a fundamental declaration of God’s faithfulness — not that God is faithful to David because he deserves it, because he certainly doesn’t. No, it is a focus on the faithfulness of God because of who he is. In turning to and focusing on God, the power of the forces arrayed against David are put into perspective.
When I was in my mid-20s, I went through a period of depression. It was as though the world around me turned black. It overwhelmed me. I became deeply afraid of the darkness of that depression because it was overpowering. I feared it would destroy me. I prayed, when I was able to pray, that God would save me, that he would destroy or take away the depression, before it destroyed me. I felt helpless before my fear.
At some point during that time, more out of desperation than anything else, I began to sing the 23rd psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; he leads me by still waters; he restores my soul.” At times I sang the psalm simply to shut out the voice of fear that kept telling me the darkness was going to overwhelm me.
I’d like to say that God wiped out the depression and I never struggled with it again, but that isn’t true. God didn’t take away my depression, despite my pleading, but something else happened. The words of the 23rd psalm, and what they declared about God and his faithfulness began to shape in my heart a deeper sense of who God is. It helped turn my heart and my mind toward God. The truth of who God is became bigger than the darkness I faced.
Eventually, I realized that I was beginning to trust God, that my hope was in his deliverance. I wasn’t trusting him that he would take away the darkness. No, God was forming a deeper trust in my heart: that even amid the darkness, God was there with me, that the darkness of depression had no ultimate power over me. I continued to struggle with depression, but its power over me, the power of fear, was broken.
I want to pause for a minute. Some might say that what I have just described is the power of positive thinking — that if we just focus on good things instead of bad things, we will start to see things in a different light. Some people have even argued that God is nothing more than the projection of our wishful thinking, an image we project in order to handle our fears. And if that is true, we are most to be pitied, because instead of facing reality we are running from it.
If this were just the power of positive thinking, then my confidence would be based on everything working out the way I wanted it to, and that is not what happened. Instead, God was hollowing out space in my heart for himself in the face of my fear.
Jesus dying on the cross points to the true enemy, the source of all fear — it is the power of sin and death and how it distorts and manipulates human beings to live in ways in which we are destructive to one another. Jesus exposes our true enemy and shows us how we have been shaped by that enemy in ways that are destructive. In the cross, God robbed sin and death of their final power not by annihilating them once and for all but by exposing that even when they do their absolute worst, they have no power over God, which means they have no ultimate power over us.
Perfect love has cast out fear. The perfect love of God finally and fully demonstrates that nothing can ever separate us from God; neither death, nor life, nor mourning. nor sorrow, nor anything else in all creation, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:37-39).
Throughout history, the psalms have been used as part of people’s daily pattern of prayer. In many cases, people have prayed the psalms and not even thought about what they were saying, in much the same way that I sang the 23rd psalm. Praying the psalms, or just praying, is often boring, confusing and difficult.
We deceive ourselves if we think that prayer must be meaningful, intentional, and fulfilling to be real. Prayer takes us into the presence of God. When we pray the Psalms or the Lord’s Prayer, the prayers work on us, even when we are not aware of it. They begin to reshape our hearts and minds, reordering them toward the truth of God.
Prayer is not our endeavor to attract the attention of a distracted God. Neither is prayer the power of positive thinking. Prayer is the practice of turning to God so that over time, as we gradually begin to see God more clearly, our fears are displaced, our hope is enlarged, and we are given the courage to go into the world, learning to live in the truth that God is Lord of all.
The Rev. Dr. Peter Robinson is professor of proclamation, worship, and ministry at Wycliffe College, Toronto.
The Rev. Dr. Peter Robinson is Professor of Proclamation, Worship and Ministry at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto.
