Slaughtered yet Loved

Psalms 44:20‭-‬23

If we had forgotten the name of our God
or spread out our hands to a foreign god,
would not God discover this?
For he knows the secrets of the heart.
Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord?
Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever!

...............

On first glance, this Psalm appears to be a simple cry for help. The psalmist is clearly in the depths of despair, feeling abandoned by God. There is a familiar pattern we see in many of the laments. The structure of the poem breaks down like this:

A recounting of God's past faithfulness (v. 1-8)
An accusation of God's present rejection (v. 9-22)
A plea for God's future deliverance (v. 23-26)

Granted, no painful crisis is simple, and pleading for God's intervention is not all that simple either. We are reminded again of the importance of remembering God's real intervening actions in times past. We are reminded that great men and women of faith had times of real doubting and even voiced honest accusations in prayer to God. God can handle our honesty, and that is often the path of reflection that reconnects us to our merciful Savior in the midst of deep pain. He empathizes with our weakness and temptations because he too bore them in Christ.

But compared to other Psalms, this does not appear to break new ground or reveal anything new about who God is or what he has accomplished. That is, until you recognize how this Psalm is quoted by Paul in Romans 8. Let's focus there for a moment:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,

"For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered."

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35‭-‬39)

This passage in Romans is one of the richest promises in all of Scripture. The assurance and permanence of the love of Christ is described with absolute certainty, no matter the circumstance. And here we find that the more we grasp the depths of Psalm 44, the more rich and relieving this promise becomes.

That must have been Paul's intention. His Jewish audience should have been familiar with this painful Psalm and the emotions it would invoke. And despite the sense of rejection the persecuted Roman Christians felt, God had not fallen asleep or forgotten his precious children. Nothing, absolutely nothing in all creation, could separate them from the love of God now fully revealed in the finished work of Christ.

Lord, help me to bring my crisis to you in honest prayer. I am weak and short-sighted. Help me to see and believe that you remain faithful even in this hard time. And I know this is true because you have offered your Son who has conquered death and now lives in me. All I have and all I will ever need is found in you:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31‭-‬32)