We have heard with our ears, O God, Our fathers have told us, The deeds You did in their days, In days of old: You drove out the nations with Your hand, But them You planted; You afflicted the peoples, and cast them out. For they did not gain possession of the land by their own sword, Nor did their own arm save them; But it was Your right hand, Your arm, and the light of Your countenance, Because You favored them. You are my King, O God; Command victories for Jacob. (vs1-4)
We want God to save us and deliver us from oppression and failure, even as He did in times past when He brought Israel into the Promised Land, or when He moved the early Church, or like in other times when He's worked powerfully in the gospel (vs1-4). He said, “You are my King, O God; Command victories for Jacob”. We want His power over sin, His power to save others by what we speak, and we want Him to be nearer to us in experience than He presently is. We have God in Christ, but we want more, and we're to bring our miseries to Him, rather than pretend the misery is to be tolerated... or vainly to try and fix it ourselves.
Bless God. When we are WEAK and empty, miserable and defeated, we have a proven Savior to call unto. He will hear us, indeed, and we're to trust Him to help us, rather than despair or pretend.
Secondly, we praise and honor God because He saves us entirely by the Spirit rather than by our human contributions (vs5-8). He said, “Through You we will push down our enemies; through Your name we will trample those who rise up against us. For I will not trust in my bow, nor shall my sword save me. But You have saved us from our enemies, and have put to shame those who hated us. In God we boast all day long, and praise Your name forever”. There is no real difference in men: even the highest IQ is incapable of understanding the gospel, and the Lord chose ignorant fisherman, tax-collecting criminals, and ordinary men as His apostles. He didn't prosper anyone because they were superhuman or great; it was ALL because of Him: His Spirit made the difference between truth ignored and truth so powerfully spoken that no man could be indifferent. Praise the Lord that we don't have to be great, nor must we get PhD's from men: we don't have to reduce ourselves to human tactics and compromise. We may go all the way to God in Christ, expect a blessing, and know that He's able to use us as we are, giving us the real power of the Spirit to meet our need.
Finally, we're not asking to be saved by merit, but by mercy; we want Him to pity us in our need (vs9-26). He says, “Awake! Why do You sleep, O Lord? Arise! Do not cast us off forever. Why do You hide Your face, and forget our affliction and our oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our body clings to the ground. Arise for our help, and redeem us for Your mercies' sake.” We have believed the truth, and even though we suffer, we STILL cast ourselves wholly and completely upon Christ, with no righteousness and no power of our own. He says, “But You have cast us off and put us to shame, and You do not go out with our armies. You make us turn back from the enemy, and those who hate us have taken spoil for themselves. You have given us up like sheep intended for food, and have scattered us among the nations... You make us a reproach to our neighbors, a scorn and a derision to those all around us... All this has come upon us; but we have not forgotten You, nor have we dealt falsely with Your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from Your way... If we had forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our hands to a foreign god, would not God search this out? For He knows the secrets of the heart. Yet for Your sake [the gospel of Christ and His glory] we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter”. Indeed, if we left the gospel, He would not save us, and we'd go from bad to worse to hell; but our miseries have not caused us to forsake His mercy. We still believe Jesus Christ has earned the mercies that we need, and we BELIEVE the Spirit will work a change in us, indeed.
Yes, the world mocks us and we're ashamed that we're not better and more fruitful Christians, but we trust Him to save us still, and we come to Him anew in this hour of need. We're MORE dependent upon His mercies, by the miseries that we endure. His strength, as our shame and disappointment clearly tell us, is the only strength we have or need.
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