That Psalm 74 is a doozy, and it doesn’t
easily resonate when we try to apply it to church life in 2017 in our (comparatively)
easy-going Western world. The Asaphian contemplation of Zion in ruins appeals
to me poetically and dramatically, but in our day the “sanctuary” (assuming any
of us would recognize a sanctuary if we saw one) is not burning, and the
enemies of God have not recently taken their axes to the dwelling place of his holy Name.
Well, not visibly anyway.
To the Lone Islands, Caspian!
There are a couple of chapters in C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader
that I first disliked as a child, then kind of grew on me as I aged. (And yes,
I still go back to all those Lewis books ... er ... religiously.) It’s the story of
King Caspian’s official visit to the Lone Islands, in which, instead being
paraded regally into rightful Narnian territory as ought to have happened, he
is unrecognized, taken prisoner and sold as a slave in the market. (Don’t
overlook the allegory there; it’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer, though I managed
to miss it entirely on my first four or five reads.)
Anyway, what irked me as a boy about the Lone
Islands pit stop in Dawn Treader is
that it’s full of clerks, letters, dossiers, ink-pots and sealing wax, as
opposed to wizards and dragons. The latter, obviously, are much cooler and more
other-worldly. Even as an adult, I’ve had enough clerks and their dossiers for
twelve lifetimes. You can keep them all, thanks, and I suppose technically I’m
one of them.
Psalm 74 is all dragons and wizards — or
at least fire, destruction and sea monsters. The churches in 2017? Well,
sometimes it feels like we’re a bunch of clerks sending out non-compliance
reports and filing sufficient numbers of useless dossiers to choke Leviathan.
Meh.
Papers and Schedules
A few months back, I walked into the
physical dwelling place of an old, medium-sized downtown church I’d had
recommended to me. If the Holy Spirit of God was working dramatically in that
building, he was definitely doing it on the sly. I was introduced to a bunch of
soft middle-agers puddling around with paper and schedules. Amiable enough, but
quick to drift back to their laptops to respond to yet another email.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that nothing
good was happening there. But whatever spiritual battles were being waged
behind the glass of office dividers, they weren’t obvious.
That shouldn’t be the way of it, should it?
Despite the fact that most of us laid-back twenty-first century Churchians rarely
break a sweat over sin, hardly ever talk about hell, can’t picture the spirit
world as a concrete reality and see at least half of Old Testament prophecy as
near-meaningless allegory, we recognize that at least in theory “we do not
wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the
authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness,
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Somewhere way, WAY back in our minds, a few of us are not entirely reduced to
bureaucratic mush, not least because this is the word of God speaking. Even if
we can’t picture it and have never seen it, God himself has declared through
his apostles that it is so. Orthodoxy and simple faith demand that we assert it too.
An Enemy Has Done This
And in fact those dire warnings of Asaph’s
day are not without their counterpart in twenty-first century Christendom. In
the Lord’s kingdom parable, when the servants tell the master of the house that
his wheat field is full of weeds, he replies, “An enemy has done this.” That’s the kingdom of heaven for you. We’re in a war, and there are stakes,
enemies, lost territory, disputed allegiances and fallout of eternal consequence.
But in those parables in Matthew 13 we
have the whole thing in a nutshell: a (literally) garden-variety
agrarian metaphor that speaks to a potent and imminent spiritual reality. On the
surface it’s wheat and weeds. What could be more mundane? Underneath it’s angels,
the fiery furnace, the gnashing of teeth and the end of the age.
Do we dare fall asleep when such things are
happening on our watch?
Flesh and Blood
Quite accidentally, I got into a discussion
about Greek and Hebrew translation with a co-worker last week. It started from the
most innocent and inconsequential trivialities about everyday French and
English, and suddenly in the middle of it I realized I was no longer
wrestling against flesh and blood. To all earthly appearances, we were merely
sitting in an office lunchroom passing time after a very ordinary plate of
burritos, but in reality we had been transported into cosmic territory.
Her eternal destiny hangs in the balance. Those
are not small stakes.
I found myself talking about the fact that
God has stepped out of eternity to communicate with man, and that being the
case, then what he has said matters.
If God has spoken, we must use every asset at our disposal — even if we
are merely clerks and functionaries — to figure out what it is that he was
trying to communicate. Our personal opinions are worthless. Only truth matters.
And of course then we got interrupted. By
another clerk. There were dossiers to be filed. And we dutifully filed them. I speak metaphorically.
Crushing the Heads of Leviathan
But this is the nature of the Christian life,
isn’t it? It’s small and seemingly insignificant, and then suddenly …
it isn’t.
Anyway, when I read Psalm 74, that’s
what I’m looking at. Applying the words of Asaph or his descendants literally
to the church today would be a grotesque exaggeration. But if we are talking
about hidden spiritual realities, it’s not impossible that the One who crushed
the heads of Leviathan and gave him as food to his fellow creatures might have
something to say about my conversation with a lost fellow flunky in the corporate
wilderness of the Lone Islands.
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