Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Is God Punishing Me? | The Writings | Psalm 77

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

It's easy to trust in God's love when things are going well. But what if they're not? Do you find it hard to trust God's love in the midst of your suffering? Is God punishing us? In today's episode, Keith shares how Psalm 77 provides us wisdom for dealing with our suffering by reminding us of what God has already done. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Psalm 77

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. A friend recently asked me if God was mad at him. Was God punishing him? Had God abandoned him? Have you ever asked questions like those? Have you ever felt like God turned against you?

My friend asked me that question because he's had some personal health struggles that are threatening to take his life. He has things he still wants to do in this life. He has kids to help, grandkids to love on, a wife he wants to grow old with. but all that's in doubt. The disease he has will likely kill him. It's just a matter of when. My friend is the kind of Christian most of us wish we were.

He's a Bible reader, the kind of person who doesn't just say they'll pray for you, but actually prays. He's filled with the spirit, and that makes him kind and gracious and humble and generous. In a lot of ways, I wish I was more like him. But when darkness hit him in the form of a disease, he had the same struggles any of us have. Maybe we think that following Jesus will keep us for, suffering. But of course that's false. The Bible never says anything like that. The truth is that we all

live in a broken world. Evil, sin, sickness, natural disasters. Well, they fall on rich and poor. The beautiful and the average, the Ph.D. and the GED. The believers and the unbelievers. In other words, no one escapes suffering in this broken world. One of the most important things we can learn that will help us navigate life in this world is how to keep our poise and our confidence, our courage or faith in the middle of suffering. The Bible is full of spiritual resources that bring comfort and correct us and even challenge us when we are overwhelmed by life. Psalm 77 is one of the Bible's resources to help us when we suffer. Psalm 77 is one of the many Psalms that we find that you could categorize as Psalms of lament. Lament just means to mourn or to grieve. I don't think many Christians

or that many churches do lament very well. We like to focus on the blessings. and ignore the suffering. That's why when people go through hard times, their friends often make mistakes. One mistake is we tend to minimize people's suffering. We say things like, well, it's probably not that bad, is it? Aren't you making too big a deal out of this? Or we say at least to them. Like, I know you had a miscarriage, but at least you know you can get pregnant. I know you just lost your job, but at least your family can support you. Whenever we say at least, we're minimizing other people suffering. Another mistake people make is that they just want to avoid suffering. Suffering is just too hard to face, so they distance themselves from it, but of course that means distancing

themselves from the people who are suffering. As we've gone through the Psalms on 10-minute Bible talks, you've probably been surprised by how many of the Psalms are Psalms of lament, but maybe we shouldn't be. After all, much of our life deals with suffering, either you are suffering right now or someone you know is. So here's how Psalm 77 starts. I cried out to God for help. I cried out to God to hear me. When I was in distress, I sought the Lord. At night, I stretched out my untiring hands, and I would not be comforted.

You'll notice that in most of these Psalms of Lament, we don't know the exact problem the person or the nation is facing. It's not hard to imagine some of the difficulties God's people had, especially when they were in exile, which is when many of these Psalms were written. The people of God were discriminated against based on their faith. Some of them were enslaved. they experienced economic hardship. Sometimes they were split apart from their families.

And then there's all the suffering that comes into our own personal lives, strained relationships, sickness, death of loved ones. But I think it's helpful that we don't know the specifics that the psalmist is facing when he wrote this. That way it's easier for us to read this psalm from our perspective of what we're going through at the moment. In verses 7 through 9, the psalmist asks six consecutive questions. And let me just warn you, these questions are pretty intense. Here they go. Will the Lord reject forever?

Will he never show his favor again? Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion? Those are powerful questions and they cut right to our heart. And essentially all those questions are asking the same thing. That is, they're asking, was I right to believe that God is going to keep his promises to me?

Now, remember, these questions are being asked in the middle of intense pain. And that's the time we usually doubt God's goodness and power. When the sun is shining and everybody's healthy and you just got to raise and your relationships are all strong, it's easy to believe that God is good and does good. But when everything fails, well, that's a different story. So how would you respond if a suffering friend asked you whether God's promises had failed? Or like my friend asked if God was mad at him and that's why he was suffering. How would you show someone that God deeply loved them when everything in their life is falling apart?

Well, let's go through some of the things that I hear people say, but I don't think are accurate. Well, let's go through some things that I hear people say that I don't think quite cut it. For example, maybe someone travels safely through a storm and they arrive at their destination and they say, God is good. Or maybe someone goes on a great vacation and sees some beautiful parts of nature and they say, man, God is good. Or maybe your kid makes a team or gets good grades and you go, man, God. is good. Now, I don't disagree. Those gifts are evidence of God's goodness, but I don't think we can

anchor our faith in them. Like we've already talked about, good things come and go. Is God good if you don't arrive to your destination safely but instead have a car wreck? Is he good if you don't get a vacation or if the one you took turned out to be a bust? Is God good if your kid doesn't make the team? You see the point, don't you? God's character can't be determined by our life's circumstances. So let's go back to Psalm 77 and see how the author responds to his own questions. He says, then I thought, to this I will appeal. The years when the most high stretched out his right hand, I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.

I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds. See, the psalmist makes a conscious effort to remember all that God has done. He considers all God's works. He meditates on all of God's deeds. The primary mighty deed that he's referring to is when God delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt and led them across the sea. Here's just a couple of verses that make that point. He says to God, your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters,

though your footprints were not seen. You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron. Do you see what anchors his belief in God's character and God's faithfulness and God's goodness? It wasn't his circumstances. No, he was confident that God was good because God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt through the sea and into the promised land. The New Testament teaches us to do the same thing. Listen to what Paul writes in Romans 5,

but God demonstrates his own love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. See, he doesn't say God demonstrates his own love for us in that we never have a car rack or that the cancer is immediately cured. No, it's rooted and anchored in the cross. There, Jesus Christ died for sinners like us. That's how we can be sure that God loves us. Sometimes circumstances will be going great for us, and sometimes life will be really hard. But here's the truth. God is good. God loves his children. And the way we know that is because of the cross. I trust God because he has shown me that love when he died for me. See, I don't look to my circumstance. to determine whether God loves me, whether God is good or God's character. No, instead I look up to Jesus hanging on that cross and I know that he went there voluntarily for me because he loves me, because he loves you.

See, I don't know what you or your friends or your family are going through. I imagine some of you are in the middle of some pretty hard stuff. I just want to encourage you that God loves you. He wants the best for you. He's not angry with you. When you get discouraged, look at the cross. That's the God who knows what you're going through. When you wonder if God loves you, look at the cross.

It's love that held them there.