"My soul is dead; they have sucked all the life out of me."
--words of a friend
This is Scripture; this is the entire story, from the opening pages of Genesis to the close of Revelation. The pattern is always from death to life, from utter darkness, chaos, and confusion to light, harmony, and balance. The world and our lives tend toward entropy, destruction, unwinding, descent into darkness. We are overwhelmed and the waters of destruction close over our heads; we are "hard-pressed and are falling," in the words of one of the psalms, but "the Lord heard my cry and delivered me." If we read the Psalms, again and again, we see the pattern from death to life:
unless the Lord had given me help,
I would soon have dwelt in the silence of death.
When I said, "My foot is slipping,"
your love, O Lord, supported me.
When anxiety was great within me,
your consolation brought joy to my soul (Ps. 94:17-19).
David was destined to be Israel's greatest king, the one annointed by God to bring order, peace, and harmony -- "The Golden Age" -- to Israel, where for the first and only time, God's people would dwell in peace and security in the Promised Land. But before David came to the throne, before his life-mission was to take place, he was forced to flee to the wilderness for a number of years, to hide out in caves for fear of his life. In his hatred and jealousy, Saul sent his army to hunt down David, to pursue him relentlessly, and to destroy him. David's long and tortuous experience in the desert, when he could not even leave the cave for water to satisfy his thirst, taught him the providence of God. When all human and natural resources were denied him, he learned for the first time in his life to rely on God. All of his songs, which today we call the Psalms, flow out of his wilderness experience. He was for all practical purposes, dead and buried, but the Lord brought him out of the grave and "set him on a high place, and did not let his enemies rejoice over him."
If we read the Psalms with the background of history, we know the source of David's Songs of Praise and Thanksgiving:
Psalm 27: The Lord is my light and my salvation---whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life---of whom should I be afraid?
When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh,
When my enemies and my foes attack me,
They will stumble and fall.
Though an army beseige me,
My heart will not fear;
Though war break out against me,
Even then will I be confident......
for in the day of trouble, he will keep me safe in his dwelling;
He will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle and set me high upon a rock.
Then my head will be exalted above the enemies who surround me;
At his tabernacle will I sacrifice with shouts of joy;
I will sing and make music to the Lord.
Only those who have been "laid low in the dust" and brought back to life know the salvation of our God. Only those who have been crushed by the cruelty of Egypt, of godless men, can know the saving and rescuing hand of God and can then sing with Miriam and Moses: "Sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. Horse and rider he has hurled into the sea" (Ex. 15:21).
This is the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection: He had to submit Himself willingly to the death we all undergo -- the death of mind, body, and spirit -- in order to descend to where we lie crushed, abandoned, dead, and enslaved. There, and only there, united to Him, can we rise to a new life. 2 Cor. 5:17 puts it this way: If anyone be in Christ Jesus, he is a new creation; the old has gone; the new has come! Jesus told Nicodemus, Unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven. Why "born again?" Because the old man is weighed down with the weight of the past -- his family, his world, the cruelty of others becomes part of our DNA, and we pass it on, willingly or not, to the next generation. We are our history, and we cannot escape it -- except by death. In the words of Isaiah, Your whole head is injured, your whole heart afflicted. From the sole of your foot to the top of your head there is no soundness--only wounds and welts and open sores, not cleansed or bandaged or soothed with oil (1:5-6).
There is no remedy for this kind of injury. We cannot recover unscathed and act as if it never happened. But if we are willing to go down into death with Christ Jesus, if we are willing to allow Him to crucify our "natural man," chained by our past, to the cross, we are free of it forever. In His resurrection, we rise to a new kind of life, no longer crippled and lamed and beaten and bruised and raped and scorned. Now, we know ourselves to be someone else, "a new creature," chosen and accepted by God, brought to a new birth, delivered from the past, and sent out to sing a song of praise and thanksgiving to the God who allowed us to be brought low enough to look up.
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