Psalm 44:15-26 NKJV
15 My dishonor is continually before me,
And the shame of my face has covered me,
16 Because of the voice of him who reproaches and reviles,
Because of the enemy and the avenger.
17 All this has come upon us;
But we have not forgotten You,
Nor have we dealt falsely with Your covenant.
18 Our heart has not turned back,
Nor have our steps departed from Your way;
19 But You have severely broken us in the place of jackals,
And covered us with the shadow of death.
20 If we had forgotten the name of our God,
Or stretched out our hands to a foreign god,
21 Would not God search this out?
For He knows the secrets of the heart.
22 Yet for Your sake we are killed all day long;
We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
23 Awake! Why do You sleep, O Lord?
Arise! Do not cast us off forever.
24 Why do You hide Your face,
And forget our affliction and our oppression?
25 For our soul is bowed down to the dust;
Our body clings to the ground.
26 Arise for our help,
And redeem us for Your mercies’ sake.
God allows suffering to come upon His people for two reasons. The first is punishment for sin. When we sin, God often punishes us with the consequences of our sin so that we acknowledge our sin and return to Him in repentance. The second reason God allows His people to suffer is to exercise their faith in His goodness, mercy, and promises of deliverance.
The Psalmist laments because Israel suffers despite her faithfulness to God. “All this has come upon us; but we have not forgotten You, nor have we dealt falsely with Your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from Your way” (17-18). God’s people suffered, not because of their sins but because of their faithfulness to the Lord. “Yet for Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter” (22). By comparing Israel to sheep accounted to be slaughtered, the psalmist recalls that all who believe in the Lord “arethe people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand” (Ps 95:7). As such, he can cry out to the Shepherd of Israel, “Arise for our help, and redeem us for Your mercies’ sake” (26).
St. Paul cites verse 22 in Romans 8:36. Christians suffer persecution in the world because of their faithfulness to God. They seek to live according to God’s ways rather than following the course of this world. This earns them the world’s ire and indignation. But the world can only deprive us of earthly things by bringing us “tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” (Rom 8:35). Because Christians are the sheep of the Lord’s pasture, with Christ as their Good Shepherd, we can respond with Paul, “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Rom 8:37). When we suffer and bear the cross for Jesus’ sake, we know that He will arise for our help and redeem us for His mercies’ sake. That may be deliverance in this life. However, it may mean that He delivers us by bringing us into everlasting life by means of suffering and persecution. Whether God’s deliverance means our faith is strengthened or we arrive safely in eternal blessedness, we are more than conquerors.
Let us pray: When it is Your will that we suffer for Your sake, O Lord, grant us deliverance and victory by faith. Amen.