#DailyDevotion When You Feel God Is Against You
Psalm 102 0 LORD, listen to my prayer, and let my cry for help come before You. 2Don’t hide Your face from me when I’m in trouble; turn Your ear to me; when I call, answer me quickly.
In the midst of trials and tribulations it may seem as if God is hiding His face from us and closing His ears to us. Why are we in this situation in the first place? Why did the LORD have us fall into this situation? Well we open our mouths and cry out to Him. It doesn’t seem He is listening. So we are like the psalmist here. We cry out to the LORD to not hide His face from us or to close His ears to us. We beg Him to let our cry for help to come before Him. This is the life under the cross of Christ who called out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
3My days vanish like smoke, and my limbs burn as on a hearth. 4My heart is parched and withered like grass — I forget to eat my food. 5As I groan my bones cling to my flesh.
Some of us may feel this more than others of us, especially those who have an illness that is debilitating. Our whole body aches and suffers. We can’t eat, we are so troubled. We become nothing but skin and bones. Others of us simply feel this way spiritually, internally. Our minds are captive to the weakness of our flesh and of our spirit. We may not feel it physically but we do feel it inwardly.
6I have become like an owl in the desert, like a night-owl among ruins; 7I’m always awake, like a bird alone on a roof. 8All day long my enemies insult me; raging at me, they bind themselves with an oath against me.
When we suffer, we often feel very alone in the world. We may even strike out against those trying to comfort us and to empathize with us saying they don’t know what we are going through. Perhaps we should be a little more gracious to them when they are trying to be gracious to us. We should ask them to pray with us and for us. Hopefully, our only enemies during these times are the spirits of wickedness and not human enemies. They most certainly are taunting us and tempting us to believe God is against us and doesn’t love us. They try to convince us we must have done something wrong. The cure to this is to look at Jesus hanging on the cross and know He who is hanging there is the only innocent one. He is taking our suffering upon Himself there and returning it to us sanctified, to purify our faith, to build us up spiritually. We are being prepared to bear the weight of eternal glory through this suffering and we are being made examples of faith to those who are not suffering yet.
9Yes, I eat ashes like bread and mix my drink with tears. 10You were so angry and furious You picked me up and threw me down. 11My days are like a shadow getting longer, and I wither away like grass.
Yes, we are having a pity party here. That’s ok. We need to do this sometimes. I don’t mean to demean this. I’m telling you, its ok—for a while. We simply feel this miserable sometimes and it just doesn’t go away. Nothing tastes good. We have only our tears to drink. Verse ten describes how we feel about what the LORD has done to us. We believe what we are going through is His anger and fury. It reminds me of the scene where the Hulk takes Loki and thrashes him about like a rag doll and Loki just lies there trying to catch his breath. We may feel like him when it seems God has sent us through the wringer (that’s a clothes cleaning tool where your clothes go through two pressurized cylinders to clean them). In times of trouble like these we feel as if death is taking too long and we are slowly withering like the grass. When we are older and going through old age pains this feeling may be particularly pointed to us.
Merciful God and Father, have mercy upon us and all who suffer, that they may see Your love in bad times as we look to our model Jesus Christ crucified. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.