Meditation on Psalm 12: Disappeared
Reading 3: Psalms 12-13
Psalm 12 focal phrase: “there is no longer anyone who is godly” focal word: disappeared “Help, O Lord, for there is no longer anyone who is godly; the faithful have disappeared from humankind.” This is either a stirring pledge of loyalty in the face of overwhelming opposition, or—the way I heard it when I read it—an almost humorous exaggeration with a tinge of self-righteousness. No one who is godly? Not a single person alive with a moral conscience? Elsewhere in the Bible, even when the moral compass is going way south, you can find at least a handful of people worth keeping around. Before God flushes wickedness from the earth with the flood, he puts all of Noah’s household on an escape vehicle. Before God zaps Sodom, a desperate Abraham bargains with God to hold off for 50—no, 40 ... no, 10—righteous people. I remember a Christian author living in Washington D.C. who asked a Christian friend on Capitol Hill: how many good people—truly good people, sincerely but humbly working to connect their Christian faith to their work in quiet but meaningful ways—are there in the entire U.S. Congress? The friend thought and said, “Five.” I found that really depressing at first, but now I find it heartening—five humble Christian servants serving in the seat of American power! It’s a critical mass, if not a majority. David claims to be the only righteous person left in the entire human race. (Lexicons say that this is the only occurence of the Hebrew word pacac, for “disappeared,” in the Bible, so lexically it’s a unique complaint.) Now, I couldn’t find any commentaries that took this angle, and I could be way off, but to me that claim seems a little paranoid, and a little self-serving. “It’s just you and me God,” David says, and the subtext I hear is, “you better be glad you have me left! I’m your man.” I even hear a trace of entitlement: “I deserve your best treatment.” I don’t mean to make light of David’s situation. He was living in the court of King Saul, which was politically hostile territory. He was surrounded by double-talkers, and may (one commentator suggests) have been suffering from a false accusation by one of them—a charge that the jealous Saul would try to seize upon to undercut this young spotlight-stealer. So we can forgive David for feeling isolated, threatened, and mistreated. But I also wonder about our tendency to try to get the highest righteousness report card in the class. And then use that to bargain with God: Come on, God, no one can beat my church attendance. I’ve been praying every day lately. I don’t deserve what I’m going through right now. Where’s my VIP treatment? It is natural—and, this psalm shows, biblical—to sometimes feel like a lonely warrior against hate, greed, and duplicity in a world gone wrong. But some of the encouragement we can take in these moments is that we are far from the last person—or the last congregation—standing. We are among countless citizens of a new kingdom, a body of believers that spans centuries and continents, a worshiping church whose eventual victory is sure, though not always obvious. “I alone am left,” Elijah whines to God in 1 Kings 19, and God tells him there are 7,000 knees that have not bowed to Baal. We’re never cut off, and, when lifted up by the prayers of Christians around the world, and the intercessions of Christ and the Spirit, we’re never outnumbered.
More Meditations on the Psalms
Related Resources
The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
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