Psalm 56
Afraid.
The word
rings twice in Psalm 56. “When I am
afraid, I put my trust in You.” “In God
I trust, I will not be afraid.” David
felt fear.
Haven’t we
all felt fear? As I am writing this, I
think about the times in my life when I was genuinely afraid.
A few
years ago, I was driving on a back road in Pennsylvania just after a
rainfall. It was spring, and there was a
place in the pavement where the ground had heaved underneath. For about a hundred feet along the road,
there was a place where the road on the left was a full inch or more higher
than on the right. As I drove up that
road, my tire fell off that ledge. As
the tire hit the wet road below, the car began to fishtail. I slammed into the guardrail having done a
270 turn across the road. I bounced off
of the guardrail and came to rest facing the wrong direction in the far lane of
the road. Immediately I go out of the
car and started directing traffic to slow as I collected pieces of my car that
had broken off. It was then that I got a
good glimpse of the sheer eighty foot drop on the other side of the guardrail. Had that guardrail not been there, I would
surely have died. I felt fear.
I remember
one night after midnight when my cousins and I were visiting my grandparents in
Upper Michigan. We snuck out of the
house and headed into town just to get out and talk without anyone hearing us. We didn’t do anything wrong, but on the way
back home we had to walk about a mile without very many houses near to us. It was dark, foggy, and we constantly heard
noises behind us. We felt like we were
being watched. About halfway home, the
three of us decided to just run for the house.
I doubt there was anything there except some deer or maybe a dog. But I felt fear.
Fear is
all around. In some cases, fear helps
keep us safe. A healthy fear of death
has turned me into a better driver as I have learned many lessons behind the
wheel. A healthy fear of the dark and
deserted places has kept me safe on many occasions. But in other cases, fear paralyzes us. There are things I wouldn’t try because I was
so afraid of failure that I was genuinely afraid to even try. There are people who have been slandered in
my presence because I was too afraid of peer pressure to speak the truth. Fear is all around us, and it can be for the
good or for the bad. The real question
becomes, what do we do with the fear that is around us.
What does
David do? David senses the fear and
turns to the Lord. He knows that he
cannot prevent the fear from coming. But
he can go to the Lord to help minimize the fear and maybe even use it to his
advantage. Through the fear, David’s
relationship with God grows.
I love
where David goes towards the end of the psalm.
He echoes the point that he makes in the first stanza. If we are with God, why let fear affect us
negatively? What can man do to us that
God cannot make right? Even if I should
die, cannot God deliver me into His promised eternal life?
This is
reason to praise God. This is reason to
enter into service to God. He can
deliver us from fear so that we might walk in His light.
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