To sing along with Asaph is to be invited to share in his deep and intense dismay. He has heard the rage, vented by Israel’s enemies, their shameful declaration.
Come let us wipe them out,
Let us ensure they are no longer resident in the land,
Let the name of Israel be remembered no more! (Psalm 83:4)
In his Psalm compositions, Asaph responds to this threatening declaration by taking it at its face value. It is part of the awful reality of facing up to one’s task before Heaven, when confronted with a deadly threat that is, as it happens, also aimed against Heaven.
But then, how can such a deadly threat be met without issuing one’s own deadly threat as a counter to the vitriol of the enemy?
We suggest that the collection of the Psalms of Asaph - a significant contribution within the Book of Psalms - are first and foremost directed against Israel’s own delusionary tendencies. But in the concluding Psalm 83 we have read how Israel was provoked by the delusions of Israel’s enemies.
And so we must pause to ask: How can we now join in and sing Psalm 83 today? The inclusion of this Psalm within the canon of the Psalms, within the canon of Holy Scripture, the inscripturation of God’s Word, seems to present us with what sounds like a war-cry, an enraged prayer raised to propel a fight to the finish.
But then we must also ask: Is this then a composition, as the culmination of Asaph’s contribution, to be now read by us as saying:
“It’s either us or God’s enemies”?
So we are provoked deeply, by Asaph’s collection of Psalms, with all their agony, to find the way to read and understand this today, the interpretation which we too can indulge, by which these Psalms are framed by a “zero-sum game” with eternal consequences.
It is difficult to sing the concluding composition of Asaph’s collection without first reading it in this way!
“It’s either us or God’s enemies”?
It is a prayer of a priest offered up on behalf of those who are the target of this deadly threat, yet they are those whose life has been granted to them in order that they may be stewards of the pastures of the LORD. They are the object of this vitriol and so their residence, their co-habitation of these lands under the blessing of Almighty God is at risk, their lives are viewed by these enemies as merely the dispensable rubbish, the future collateral damage of their effort when these “pastures of the LORD” are finally in their hands.
“These the LORD’s pastures?
They will not be that for long,
not if we have anything to say about it! Huh?”
Asaph prays for Israel - he composes Psalms for the tribes of Israel to sing. They are the tenants of the LORD’s land. And so, his prayer is for the LORD to act and do to this latest iteration of hate what He had done on the previous historical occasion as Israel was installed in the land of Canaan, the land that had, so long before, been reserved with the LORD’s promised blessing for all people, as given to Abraham and Sarah long before.
Psalm 83 might be read by us as if Asaph is saying:
Well, LORD, You planted us here and now our ongoing tenancy is still very much dependent upon You acting so that this shameful disgrace be silenced, be turned around and turned back ... completely! Was not this pasture, back then when You installed us here, in a land fertilised by their dust ...?
To read on, and sing on, is to realize that the former enemies with their leaders are no longer a threat, their names are only remembered in our songs, in Psalms like this one, and those names now have no effect whatsoever.
But then in Asaph’s time there is evidently, very evidently, a renewal of opposition to Israel, a new wave by which GOD’s enemies are evidently singing from the same old war-mongering song-book. Land is possession. Land is to be fought over and won in perpetuity.
But contrary to what we might wish here, Asaph’s Psalm 83 concludes his collection with what is actually a priestly prayer, laying out the communication from Israel’s enemies before Israel’s LORD that He might sort it. The prayer is that their enemies, as the enemies of the LORD, will, in the LORD’s time, face up to their shame, a shame that GOD’s own people - under such a total threat - just cannot deny, or else they would indeed be living in a delusion.
Asaph’s Psalm 83 is a cry to the LORD to act, to intervene, to establish His rule by His judgement upon this shameful set of declarations, this effort to mass together in opposition to Israel’s ongoing existence.
And so, in that sense, I would prefer to read Psalm 83, as culmination of “Asaph’s Agony”, as an Old Testamental prayer from within Israel that pleads:
You Kingdom, LORD, will come
and Your will be done
on Earth just as it is in Heaven!
I was born in 1951 and so raised, at least nominally as most young children my age were in those immediate post-war days, as a Christian. We grew up knowing of our baptism as infants. And I have lived within the post World War II effort to extend the project of making the world safe for democracy from that time. That had already gained some momentum decades before I came on the scene, when an international effort was made to make the world safe for those of Jewish ancestry and beliefs. What had been prefigured by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, formulated in a context of Jewish effort to establish a homeland in Palestine where Jews could be safe, then gained further considerable momentum from sober political reflection upon the horrors of the Nazi “final solution” that had been revealed for all to see.
Asaph’s Psalms and Psalm 83 in particular were in our Bibles when Israel’s independence was declared in 1948, but then there also arose the accusation, that continues to this day, that implies that Psalm 83 was being sung again within the new State of Israel directed at those lawful residents of the land who predated this post World War II initiative (as both President Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu feared was a completely unjustifiable imposition of an apartheid system over the lands of Palestine since 1947-8). And now, for us to read and sing this Psalm in 2024, we must not sing it blind to the fact of the historical context in which we receive it.
I have lived in the context of a persistent Christian effort to understand that international political effort as in some or other ways a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. But the effort to do so has also had to deal with the efforts within Islam to come to terms with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. And from 11 September 2001, we have learned to understand that there has been concerted effort to revive Islam, if not establish a 21st century Caliphate, that would stand as a Muslim global political force. The 9/11 “initiatives” were engineered in the name of Allah who commands jihad. The Al Qaeda terrorists denounced what they call the Judaeo-Christian Crusade or Anglo-American Zionist conspiracy.
So, these matters we cannot ignore as we today receive Psalm 83, let alone Asaph’s agony as he composed it along with his other 11 contributions to our Bibles.
As we noted in relation to Psalm 79, there is the tortured conclusion to the critical post-Enlightenment philosophy that says that after Auschwitz, poetry is mere blasphemy. Does this not cast a defining shadow upon Asaph’s poetry in its entirety, if not the entire Biblical canon?
So the question arises: are we then to turn Asaph’s exposé of the delusions of Israel, the misunderstandings of GOD’s will that tempted Davidic Israel at Asaph’s time, upon his own poetic efforts and interpret Psalm 83, for example, (if not the entire corpus) as his own delusion?
Or are we to conclude that Asaph, under the leading of the Holy Spirit had written and compiled these Psalms in anticipation of the path that Jesus commended to His disciples? Are we, members of the flock of Jesus of Nazareth, the true son of David, born of Mary, to dare with Biblical hope to sing Psalms, these Psalms, in thankfulness to the LORD who continues to search for us because He is driven by His loving-mercy to do so? Have we now been found? Is love of enemies to be an integral part of our rule of gratitude or not? Is not that the challenge of Asaph’s agony, and how we should now sing the Psalms that are in the Bible under his signature?
We should sing Asaph’s Psalms to empathize with the pastoral, priestly efforts of King David’s Chief Chorister as he composed lines that indicate he was holding on in faith, even if, at times, by his fingernails, even as we too are doing the same because of our feeble trust in Jesus Christ.
Asaph’s prayers in the context of an ongoing ungodly vow to wipe out the flock of the Good Shepherd, to usurp possession of His pastures, enables us to discern - amid the fog of angry propaganda and the invective of terrorists - the distinct outlines of a path to total destruction, a complete disgrace that should be faithfully resisted also in our singing.
So the prayer ends and Asaph’s contribution to the Psalms is sealed without descending into “zero-sum delusions” of the violence of the enemies of the LORD who presume to themselves the power to maintain their rage in perpetuity. Asaph’s prayer is complete in its fragility.
Let them know that it is You,
You alone, whose name is the LORD,
who is Most High, over all the earth!
Asaph prays in the historic liturgical line of Melchizedek who pronounced a blessing upon Abraham who then refused, after a bloody war was won, having liberated Lot and his family, to consider prisoners as booty. Psalm 83 is a patient priestly prayer, also in Aaron’s line, that anticipates the prayer given to GOD’s people, in answer to their petition: “LORD teach us to pray!”
Lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil!
Don’t take us down paths where we will be sorely tried
But deliver us from every evil!
And whenever you stand to pray, forgive,
If you have anything against anyone,
So that your Father in Heaven may forgive you for your sins!
BRUCE C WEARNE
21.9.24
The complete collection of “Asaph’s Agony: Psalms Composed for Israel to counter godless delusions, affirming the LORD’s faithfulness” is available in PDF format upon request of the author bcwearne@gmail.com
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