"When Bad Things Happen to Good People" Psalm 44 Sunday Morning Worship Service

What kind of song would you expect somebody to write if that person grew up knowing God, loving God, if that person grew up with their parents who knew God and loved God, and yet that person saw their parents struck down by God for their sin?

What kind of song would you expect a person to write if this person had a legacy of faithfulness following Yahweh, holding fast to God's covenant name and covenant promises?

And yet their whole family line comes from God opening up the ground and swallowing your ancestors for their worship.

Taught to believe in God, taught the Ten Commandments, taught Torah, keeping the Sabbath, eating manna from the ground, worshiping God, and you saw the Lord open up the earth and kill your dad and his brothers and his extended family in front of your eyes, and the Lord left you alive as a testimony that he is showing mercy to the new generation.

How's that going to shape how you would worship God, especially if you were tasked with writing a psalm that people would sing in the very worship that your father was struck down at?

How would that color the song?

I mean, this is the story of the sons of Korah.

Korah was led out of slavery in Egypt.

He saw the Red Sea parted, he saw the Egyptians drown, he ate manna from the ground.

Moses in numbers 15 was giving instruction to the Israelites after years of wilderness wandering, giving instruction to the Israelites, new teaching for them on how they should dress and the clothes they should wear.

And it's that kind of instruction in Numbers 15.

Numbers 16, verse 1, Korah interrupts him and says, We've had enough of this, Moses, enough.

Numbers 16:1

You're regulating who can come to the tabernacle to worship.

They didn't have the temple yet, remember?

They had the tabernacle, they were bringing it with them in the wilderness.

And Moses has said, only Levi, and not just Levi and his family, but the line of Aaron can worship as the high priest in the tabernacle, only him.

The others cannot.

And Korah says, That's enough, Moses.

Stop.

All of Israel was led across the Red Sea.

All of Israel eats manna.

All of this is Korah's language.

All of Israel is godly.

We all have the same access to God.

We can all go to the tabernacle and worship.

We could all offer incense to God.

After all, we're all his saints.

Moses responded by saying, You want to offer incense to God?

Okay, show up tomorrow.

Bring your incense, bring your gold basin, bring what you're gonna offer your sacrifice to God in.

Bring anybody else that wants to.

Let's see what happens tomorrow.

Come on.

And Sechorah shows up.

A couple other people that were participants in this rebellion, 250 of them, in fact, and they showed up.

They get there, and and God tells Moses and Aaron, separate yourselves from them.

Don't be near them when my judgment comes.

And Moses intercedes them and prays for them and says basically, I told them to come.

You know, Lord, we're we're all here at your command.

At which point God says, You know what?

Let me prove to you that I'm real.

If they go on to die of old age, I'm not real.

If they die in a way you've ever seen before, I'm not the true God.

And then God opens up holes in the ground and swallows all of them.

And it was holes plural, because all those that were at the tabernacle were swallowed, their homes were swallowed, their possessions were swallowed, but not their children.

It was selective judgment.

Their children were left as a testimony to God's faithfulness.

Their children grew up to know the Lord, to serve the Lord.

The sons of Korah crossed the Jordan River with Joshua.

Sons of Korah marched around Jericho when the trumpets blasted and the walls fell.

The sons of Korah, when Saul was hunting David, and David was having to hide with the Amalekites, the sons of Korah hid with David.

1 Chronicles 26 says that generations later, when the temple was established and Solomon was in the temple, the sons of Korah served as gatekeepers for the temple worship.

I mean, you want an example of irony.

That should be the dictionary definition right there.

Like their family line started with God swallowing them up for trying to enter the tabernacle, and now their family line continues by guarding entrance to the temple.

In 2 Chronicles, they begin writing Psalms.

They wrote ten of them.

All ten of them have the same tone.

All ten of them reflected that kind of experience that I just said.

These people love the Lord.

Like David, they would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of the Lord than a servant in an exalted position with an ungodly king.

That's the sons of Korah.

This is one of their psalms.

To me, this is the quintessential psalm of Korah.

It is the darkest.

There's ten of these psalms.

It's in book two.

Book two is you heard Ryan walk you through last week, is a dark book.

It's the Elohim book.

It doesn't use God's covenant name.

It is wondering why there is suffering in this world, why there is calamity in this world.

Where is God and the darkness?

That's book two of the Psalms.

And Psalm 44 really kicks off this book with a powerful view of suffering.

Let me read it.

Verse 1 to the choir master, a mask of the sons of Korah.

Oh God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have told us what deeds ye performed in their days and the days of old.

With your own hand you drove out the nations, but them you planted.

You afflicted the peoples, but them you set free.

It wasn't by their own sword that they won the lands, nor did their own arm save them, but it was your right hand in your arm, the light of your face.

You delighted in them.

You are my king, O God.

So ordain salvation for Jacob.

That's the covenant name of Israel there.

Though you push down our foes, through your name we tread down those who rise up against us.

For not in my own bow do I trust, nor can my own sword save me, but you have saved us from our foes.

You've put to shame those who hate us.

In God we've boasted continually, and we give thanks to your name forever.

But you have rejected us.

You've disgraced us.

You haven't gone out with our armies.

You've made us turn back from the foe.

Those who hate us have gotten the spoil.

You've made us like sheep for slaughter.

You've scattered us among the nations.

You've sold your people for a trifle, demanding no high price for them.

You've made us the taunt of our neighbors, derision and scorn of those around us.

You've made us a byword among the nations, a laughing stock among the peoples.

All day long my disgrace is before me, and shame has covered my face, the sound of my taunter and reviler at the sight of my enemy and the avenger.

All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you.

We haven't been false to your covenant, our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way.

Yet you have broken us in the place of jackals, covered us with the shadow of death.

If we had forgotten the name of God or spread out our hands to a foreign God, wouldn't God discover this?

He knows the secrets of the heart.

Yet for your sake, we are being killed all day long.

We're regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.

Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord?

Rouse yourself.

Don't reject us forever.

Why do you hide your face?

Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?

Our soul is bowed down to the dust.

Our belly clings to the ground.

Rise up.

Come to our help.

Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.

That's Psalm 44.

That's what I mean by saying this is a dark psalm.

This is the goth period of the Psalter.

This is a Psalm for rainy days.

And you almost feel the rain in it.

You can hear the dripping in the first paragraph.

You feel like you're getting overwhelmed by a tidal wave in the second paragraph, and the water recedes in the third paragraph, but there's not dry land.

You're just left there.

It is an oscillating psalm bouncing through time.

It begins in the past.

And this makes it very different than the other lament psalms.

Most lament psalms begin present tense, like things are bad.

Certainly you know about that, God, and they end with worship.

So the normal way lament works in the Bible is things are bad, present tense, but we still worship you.

This psalm is backwards.

This psalm looks backwards and says, things used to be good.

Present tense, things are terrible.

Also, God, you're asleep.

It's a very unusual psalm.

Past victories, present worship, and yet presently no sign of God.

It was Emily Dickinson who said, pain is missed in praise.

Very famous line from the poet.

Pain is missed in praise.

And the theologian in me wants to quibble with that quote from Emily Dickinson and say, No, Emily, you're wrong.

Pain isn't masked in praise or missed in praise.

Pain is rightly ordered in praise.

Like the theologian in me wants to say, no, when somebody is suffering, you order your suffering around God and God's purposes, and you you recognize uh you know what God is doing in your life to sanctify you and prepare you and all of this.

And so that rightly orders your pain so that it's on display through your praise.

And so I have a good answer about that, and I can explain that in a way that would pass an ordination exam or whatever, but still in your heart you're like, she's kind of right.

Pain is masked in praise.

And that's Psalm 44.

Psalm 44 has pain amplified.

Well, the other lament psalms end with praise, not Psalm 44.

You could say the last paragraph is praising God, but it's more like yelling at God, isn't it?

Wake up.

The psalm as a whole is tragic.

It's a song written for national tragedy.

It's not a very commonly referenced psalm among Christians.

Maybe one of the first times you've ever read it.

But it is a very well-known psalm among the Jews.

One contemporary Jewish scholar, Herbert Levine, has a commentary called Sing Unto God a New Song.

He's not a believer as far as I know, it's a Jewish commentary.

And he writes in there, quote, few verses in the Psalms have been as important to the Jews and the history of the Jewish response to Holocaust and genocide as Psalm 44.

You understand, he explains that the Jews have gone from one Holocaust or genocide to another throughout their existence.

And then he has this line that just it's like a slap in my face when I read it.

He said, The irony of Psalm 44 is that it is the most quoted psalm of Jews in suffering, and it is quoted mostly by its victims.

I've never heard somebody described as a victim of a psalm before.

And this is the hopelessness of somebody under the truth of Psalm 44.

Somebody who's being put to death because they're a Jew, somebody who's being kicked out of Israel or executed because just of their ethnic identity.

And what are they supposed to say about God?

Does God know the Holocaust is happening?

Does God know they're suffering?

I mean, it's a yes or no question.

And if yes, then where is he?

That's where Psalm 44 functions in the kind of Jewish liturgy.

Where is he?

Not ultimately a psalm of hope.

I think it's for that reason that Christians are such hopeful people that we often don't know what to do with Psalm 44.

I mentioned that it's oscillating between past and present, but it's also antiphanal.

It's also, there's an echo to it, the pronoun shift between I and we.

It's almost as if it's a call and response, that the choir master is up there singing, we have trusted God, and the congregation sings, we have trusted God.

And the choir master sings, but we are being destroyed, and then the congregation sings, we are being destroyed, and the choir master sings, God, turn to me and answer me, and the congregation sings, God, turn to me and answer me.

It's bouncing back and forth through time, through pronouns, I and we, and it's moving in entirely the opposite direction of all the other lament psalms.

Ending, of course, with God.

What's wrong with you?

Why aren't you listening?

Why'd you forget my trials?

Aquinas said of Psalm 44 that it connects faith and reason.

And what he meant by that is your faith believes that God is real and that he's aware of everything, but your reason looks at the world and says, How do you explain this then?

And prayer is what joins those two.

It takes what you believe about God and you wrestle with that to try to make sense of the world around you.

The psalm begins, as I mentioned, by looking backwards.

As it goes backwards, it reminds you that this is a psalm about good people.

Now I know you can have the same theological tendency in you when you hear the phrase good people to say, There is nobody who's good, no, not one.

And that's also true.

But grant for the reading of this psalm that there is a category distinction between good people and bad people, between the covenant people of God who believe the covenant, and between those who are in open rebellion against God and are attacking the covenant king.

Like there's that basic category distinction.

There is such a thing as good and evil, and there are people that are trying to walk in the good of the world through faith in God.

However, you want to define those two categories, is not the main point of the psalm.

The main point of the psalm is, though, at the first paragraph, is that the psalmist is in that first category.

He's in the good category.

Like he believes God.

And it's not just that he believes God, it's that his ancestors believe God, going all the way back to Korah, who's swallowed up by God in the ground, and the generation of the sons of Korah didn't leave Yahweh after that point.

They didn't then bounce and say, God, you're gonna kill my the kids watch their father get swallowed, and they don't say, okay, I'm done.

They still go along in worship, ultimately writing the scripture.

That's what it means at the beginning of this in verse one.

God, we've heard with our ears.

Our fathers have told us the deeds that you performed in their days.

How all you did this by them, and then verse four, you are my king.

So it's not just that they heard about it, because that can have a sense of distance, right?

God, God, I was told you were good.

It's that they heard about it, but they also believe it.

I mean, this would be an entirely different psalm.

It wouldn't be a theological problem, this psalm, if it went this way.

My parents believed in you, but I don't.

Theologians refer to this as the problem of evil, theodicy, not a book by Homer, but theodicy.

Being, how do you explain why bad things happen to good people?

Well, this psalm wouldn't present theodicy if it started with, I was taught that you were real God, but I don't buy it.

That's not theodicy, that's just rebellion against God.

That's just atheism.

No, theodicy is, God, I believe that you're real.

And I actually do believe that.

That's why it's a problem.

That's where the psalm goes.

God, we believed you.

We listened to you.

We heard that you were good and we believed it for ourselves.

These people have read the stories of Joshua, they practically referenced them.

Why did God do that?

Because God delighted in them in verse 3.

And in verse 4, they say we appropriate that for ourselves.

We know that you ordained salvation, God, you're the one in charge, you're sovereign.

We believe that.

In verse 6, he's saying, I don't trust myself.

The guy's not saying, my grandparents were godly, my parents were godly, therefore I'm godly.

No, he says, My grandparents were godly, my parents were godly, I believe in you, God, and I don't trust myself.

I mean, this guy has all the theological I's dotted and T's crossed.

He's saying the right thing because they're true.

He's saying, God, I believe you, you're my covenant God.

Also, I don't trust my own heart.

I know that.

I know I'm a sinner.

I know this.

But I still hold on to your name.

That's verse 8.

Despite I don't boast in myself, verse 8.

I boast in nothing except God.

That's what verse 8 says.

I'm godly, I don't trust myself.

I boast in Yahweh, not my own righteousness, of course.

In other words, this guy has it right.

That's verse 8.

If verse 8 ended, this would be such a happy psalm.

This would be your favorite psalm.

You get it like on your Bible covers and stuff if it ended in verse 8.

But it doesn't end in verse 8.

It keeps going from good people to bad things.

Bad things happen.

And these bad things aren't necessarily individualistic.

It's not like I got fired for my job unjustly, or my spouse left me, or cancer, or those kind of things, which are all bad things.

But that's not the category of bad things that the psalm is engaging with.

This psalm is engaging with kind of corporate covenant-keeping disaster.

Not cancer job loss, but God, you've forgotten who we are.

You're not around.

I pray you don't answer.

And on top of that, I pray you don't answer, and my enemies show up and take all my stuff.

And then I look over the hill, and the Amalekites are having a little party about how they're stronger than Yahweh, and they're all laughing at us.

I look for what happened, and I find out, oh, you actually sold us to them.

That's the kind of disaster we're talking about here.

Look at verse 9.

You sold your or 12, you sold your people for a trifle.

You didn't even demand a high price for them.

The psalmist realizes, hey, we've been sold out by God.

And he didn't even hold out for a good deal.

Like it was like an auction.

One dollar, do I hear a dollar?

And somebody says one dollar, and God says sold.

The person is there saying, Couldn't this have gone higher?

And God's like, get him out of here.

And the guy's walking away into captivity, going, I thought I had a relationship with the Lord.

Like I said, you don't know when the psalm was written.

Like, was this a particular battle that David lost that we don't know about in the Psalter?

Maybe it was written when Absalom kicked him out of Jerusalem.

Maybe, but that wasn't the enemies of God, it was the king's own son.

That doesn't seem to fit.

Was it written when the Assyrians took Israel into captivity?

Maybe.

When the Babylonians destroyed the temple, that's when it could have been written.

When Ezra came back and saw the Jews intermarrying, possibly.

Maybe it was written in any of those losses.

You know that it was written by the end of Ezra's life because that's when the Psalter was put together, but it could fit any Jewish occasion, really.

I mean, Antiochus IV plundered the temple under the Maccabeans 200 years before Jesus, disgraced the temple.

This Psalm fits with that exactly.

The temple was destroyed in 70 AD after Jesus, that he predicted.

The psalm fits with that.

Islam sacked Jerusalem.

The psalm fits with that.

Of course, the Holocaust and all of that.

The Psalm fits with all of those occasions.

The point, though, is not which of these occasions it's written in or for.

The point is that you have people that say, I was keeping God's covenant.

And he walked out.

And now we've lost.

And now we've lost.

Rachel's tears of weeping, that's the background of this psalm, not Joseph's teeth Joseph's tears of joy.

This is a psalm that's not like David's shepherd psalms, but it's a psalm that's like David's, it's more like Psalm 22 than Psalm 23.

I'm encircled by bulls, my hands and feet are pierced.

And it's God who's doing this.

That's the point.

The psalmist knows it's God who's doing this.

And our tendency would be to try to get God off of the hook.

I remember as a very new believer, this friend of mine from church, Sarah, was her name.

She wanted to be a missionary.

I was teaching a high school Bible at a Christian school, and Sarah was a substitute teacher there.

She was preparing to.

Go to Central America as a missionary, and Sarah was hit by a drunk driver and killed.

And the chaplain for the school is gonna announce this to, I don't know, four or five hundred Christian high school students.

And he does so by wheeling in a whiteboard to chapel.

Our chapel was in the school gym, so they're all in the gym.

Wheels in a whiteboard, and he writes on the whiteboard God equals love, love equals freedom, freedom equals choices, choices equal results.

And he tells everybody that the drunk driver made a choice to be a drunk driver, and that's why Sarah died.

Did God know Sarah was gonna die?

Yes, but God couldn't stop it, because stopping it would have meant violating the driver's, the result of his choice, which should be violating the driver's freedom, which should be violating God's own love, and God can't violate his own character, therefore God couldn't stop Sarah from being killed.

That's how this was explained to the high school students.

And and I I didn't, I was a very new believer, and even then I'm listening to that going, that's just awful.

That doesn't help anything.

Like God knew what happened, but God couldn't fix it because freedom is choices.

Like, what in the world is that?

It's so bad.

Why would somebody say something like that, though?

I mean, just think through the logic of the person who's saying that.

That guy's hurting, also, and he knew Sarah, he's hurting too.

He's just trying to work through like, how do I explain to people that God is not to be blamed for this?

Let me get God off the hook, is the goal of that kind of logic.

And Psalm 44 just operates in a different universe than that.

Six or seven times in these six verses, it's you, God, you did this.

You sold us, you were there when we were taken captive, you were there when our enemies were mocking us.

You, you, you, you, you, you know love is freedom, and freedom is Amalachite's choices.

You did this, God.

God is at work in their suffering, and they're upset about it for obvious reasons.

It's bad things happening to them.

So why is God afflicting them in such a way?

That's the third stanza.

Verses 17, all the way down really to the end of the Psalm.

There's a little prayer, if you want to call that, in verse 23, but verses 17 to the end, verse 26 is this final stanza with why?

I mean, that's the main point of the last part.

Why, God?

We've established that we are a good people, we've established that horrible things are happening to us, and so now the final question for you to answer God is why?

Why are you doing this?

It is a principle from 1 Peter 4, verse 17, that judgment begins with the household of God.

1 Peter 4:17

That's true.

God begins his judgment with his own people.

Why, though, is the psalmist's question.

I grant that God judges his people, and in this case, judges them harshly and severely, but why?

One commentator writes on this paragraph that at this point the fog is so thick at the top of this psalm that the psalmist can't even see anything.

It's just questions.

I don't know why you're doing this.

And verse 23, he's saying, God, God, you must be asleep.

What's another explanation?

You can phrase the question if you read this psalm backwards.

I tried to put it on the screen so you can kind of naturally get yourself there.

This psalm is rephrasing the question: why do bad things happen to good people?

And one way to answer that question is that there are no good people.

We all deserve everything that happens to us.

And I grant that that answer is often very effective in apologetic circumstances, especially when it's a non-believer who's asking that question.

It is a very helpful way to answer that question of like, who said anything about good, you know?

We're all sinners and fall short of the glory of God and deserve a judgment.

I'm not trying to undercut that answer that so many of us use in apologetics.

That's true.

But that's not Psalm 44's answer.

Psalm 44's answer is not, we deserved it.

Psalm 44, remember that the guy looks at himself, and he even says in here, verse 18, I haven't turned back, God.

I haven't turned back.

Verse 17, this has all happened to us, even though I didn't forget your covenant.

You've broken us like we're jackals, in verse 19 says.

And verse 20 says, if we deserved it, you would know.

Had we secretly denied God's word, of course God would know.

They're not trying to hide their sin from God.

This is reminding me of Job and his friends.

Remember, Job's friends come to him and say, Job, this is terrible.

Terrible.

You must have done something horrible because it's so bad.

Think of the logic of Job's friends, which has a certain kind of logical cohesion to it.

Job, what you're going through is so bad, you must have done something so horrible because otherwise God would not be allowing this.

That's their logic.

And you can roll your eyes at Job's friends all you want until trials come your way and you're suddenly like, I don't deserve this.

That's where Psalm 44 is.

I did not deserve this.

I didn't deny God.

Job says the same thing in Job.

I didn't sell my people into slavery.

I didn't, I didn't sell slaves, I didn't mistreat people, I didn't not pay my workers.

I walked in justice and mercy, Job says.

That's where the psalmist says, I didn't deny God's covenant name.

You would think the way I'm being treated that I must have denied God, but that didn't happen.

In fact, had that happened, this would be a different psalm.

It would just say, God, bad things have happened, so I'm walking away from you.

And again, it wouldn't be a problem then.

You would say, trials come to people to separate the saints from the pretenders, and that guy was obviously a pretender because he bounced when the going got rough.

That's what you would say.

But the psalmist does not give you that out.

The psalmist ends with this psalm saying, the going got rough, and I'm sticking around God because you're sleeping, apparently.

I'm not going to walk out on you.

A sleeping God.

That leads you to some bad answers for this.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Let me frame the question that way.

Here's the bad answer.

Because God forgot.

Or God rejected his people.

Or God wasn't paying attention.

And the psalmist toys with those answers, doesn't he?

Or you could say it this way, because God is asleep.

That's how he says it in verse 23.

Why are you sleeping, Lord?

Now, ask yourself.

Does the psalmist actually think God is asleep?

Is this a literal question?

Of course not.

You know, his theology is clearly better than that.

It's the the gods of the other religions that their God is asleep, or their God went on vacation, or their God took a potty break, and you gotta wait before you pray to him until he comes back out, kind of thing.

That's the false religions in the world, that their God doesn't know what's happening with their people.

Of course, the psalmist knows that God is not actually sleeping.

The one who watches over Israel neither sleeps nor slumbers.

He knows this.

So this is like a process of elimination.

God, why are terrible things happening to us?

Is it because you're asleep?

If so, wake yourself up, God.

And I don't think he's even joking.

I think he's being serious.

He doesn't seriously think God's sleeping, but he's communicating to God in such a way to tell God, this is so terrible that I really need you to pay attention right now.

And you can think of a little kid, you know, who is talking to their dad, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah on the way home from school, blah, blah, blah, here's all this, and they said that, and blah, blah, blah, just jibber-da-da-da.

And your mind can, as a dad, your mind can tune out at some point during that.

And at some point, the kids are aware that you tuned out, you know, and at some point the kids will say, Okay, dad, pay attention to this part.

And you're like, Alright, I'm back in.

That was easy.

That's what the psalmist is doing here.

It's like, okay, God, you've had 33, or sorry, 42 Psalms, 43 Psalms.

Now back in.

Listen.

This is terrible.

He knows it's not God.

It says God's not asleep.

The question in verse 24 is, why did you forget us?

Why did you forget?

You know God didn't actually forget.

So what's the right answer?

What do you actually answer that question with?

Well, when I read this psalm, hopefully you picked up on the New Testament use of this psalm.

Maybe you did.

You can open your Bibles and turn to where the psalm is quoted in the New Testament.

I hear some pages.

Romans 8.

You think, yeah, it's an old covenant reality.

This is about Jewish genocide.

Nothing to do with Christians.

Go to Romans 8.

In Romans 8, Paul enters this discussion in verse 18 by saying, I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is waiting for us.

So Paul is framing this discussion about why are Christians suffering in a future context here that there's a glory waiting for us.

That's Paul's logic here.

He's entering into this discussion by saying you're suffering now because there's a future reward for you.

So this is not victory in Jesus kind of logic that if you are following Jesus now, you have present tense victory in Jesus.

That's not Paul's logic here.

And that's so common in the American world.

That's so common in our American world that doesn't know what trials and suffering often is.

We either personalize it with I lost my job or cancer or marriage issues, which are of course serious trials, but that becomes, you know, in our middle class America, that becomes the kind of trials that we think of right away as those personal things.

Less about corporate, less about the church at large.

Paul's writing here is a future martyr.

Like Paul is going to be executed for being a Christian, along with a lot of other Christians that will be violently put to death in a very public way.

So when he's talking about suffering, that's what he's talking about.

So why does God allow Christians to have their heads chopped off?

Why does God allow Christians to be crucified upside down or to have 70 of them lined up on a beach in Africa and shot in the head, kind of thing?

Why does God allow that?

Is he not aware that it's happening?

Are those 70 people that are executed not really followers of God or whatever?

I mean, we try to come up with all these explanations because if they were like actual missionaries that are church supported, God wouldn't let them be killed like that.

Of course not.

And that's the kind of thing we keep in our minds.

And so it is helpful to think of the example of Jesus who demonstrated for us his own perfections.

He was sinless, and yet he was turned over to sinners.

He was turned over and the sinners mocked him.

He was put up on the cross and stripped naked, and the sinners hurled insult at him instead of if you're the son of God, come down from there and just totally making fun of him.

And you think, does God not see that?

And of course, remember what Jesus says at that moment, Father, why have you forsaken me?

I mean, did Jesus, did the Jesus really think that the Father in heaven had forgotten that his son is on earth on a cross at that moment, like God had just tuned out or something?

Of course not.

But that's the expression of the experience he's going for.

Is Father, don't you know about this?

It's Psalm 44 kind of language.

And what happens after his death is his resurrection.

You can very truly and really say with Jesus that his sufferings prepared him for his glory.

Now he's eternally perfect.

He didn't need preparation in a real sense, but just think about the most basic sense imaginable.

You can't resurrect unless you die.

So if you want to engage with the gospel on a level of resurrection, you're engaging with it on the level of death.

You don't get resurrection without death, or you don't get the crown without the cross.

So if you believe in the resurrection, then you can engage with martyrdom and suffering in the church at a different level.

Then, God, aren't you awake?

Don't you know it's happening to me, God?

Aren't you aware that it's terrible?

Come on, God, I still believe you.

Pay attention.

And if you believe in a resurrection, you can shift your focus to the future.

And you can say, as Paul says in Romans 8.18, this present suffering isn't even worth comparing to what's waiting for us.

He says in verse 28 of Romans 8, for those who love God, all things work together for good.

All things, suffering, martyrdom, heads chopped off, crucified upside down, it works together for good.

And you think, well, whose good is getting your head chopped off?

Yours, if you're going to glory when you die, actually yours.

It is actually working for your good.

If you close your eyes in this world and wake up in heaven, that's good.

That's why all things.

And don't think he's treating you differently than he treated Jesus.

Verse 31 if God is for us, who can be against us?

He didn't spare his own son but gave him up for us all.

He's going to graciously give you all things.

So in what sense did Jesus get all things?

He was crucified and killed for sins that he didn't commit, and yet Paul says he got all things.

So he got all things through the resurrection.

And you will be with him.

And if you believe that, verse 35, nothing can separate you from the love of Christ.

And that reality is what the psalmist of Psalm 44 knew.

The psalmist in Psalm 44 knew nothing would separate him from God's love.

He knew that.

I mean, obviously, he's saying, I'm still here.

God, you did your most to separate me from your love, and it failed.

I'm still here.

So of course, this Psalm 44 is echoed in verse 35.

Nothing can get us away from God.

Not tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword, all things Jesus went through himself.

And then here it is.

We're at the end of Romans 8 is the Psalm 44.

Quote, Paul quotes it.

For your sake.

Notice the urigon.

That's the you back from that paragraph in Psalm 44.

You did this, God.

For your sake, God, we are being killed all the day long, and we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.

Now in Psalm 44, that is most obviously a complaint.

God, you're doing this to us.

But you see how when you have the resurrection and the crucified and resurrected Messiah, that gets colored differently, doesn't it?

It's for your sake, God, that we are putting to being killed all day long.

For your sake, we bury you the name of Jesus.

We're going to be crucified like Jesus and resurrected.

We are regarded, it says, as sheep to be slaughtered.

And of course, you can't read that as a Christian and your mind not go to Jesus, right?

He was a sheep led to the slaughter.

And we suffer in this life because we're with him.

We don't all suffer.

I mean, martyrdom is so rare today.

We have houses.

You know, you look at your clothing rack today.

I I had eight suits to choose from.

I mean, how hard is my life?

Which car are you going to take to church today?

Which jacket will you wear because it's raining?

I mean, we just have such a it's our world.

It's so easy to forget Psalm 44.

That's not everyone's world.

It won't be our world forever.

Persecution comes.

It's a normal part of the church's experience.

And when it comes, you want to say, God, how can you close your eyes to this?

It's so terrible.

And the answer is because there is no crown without the cross.

Of course there's a resurrection.

That's what we do here.

We believe in the resurrection.

God, we're grateful that you use suffering to prepare us for glory.

We know that bad things happen to good people because there is a resurrection in our future.

We're grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ that our Savior bore our sins, took away the reproach of heaven, and it should be ours because of our sin was given to Christ instead.

So, Lord, there are trials and sufferings in this life.

Of course there are.

We know all of them.

Prepare us to be fitted for glory.

Help us see them through the lens of glory.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.