Psalm 79:9 “Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name: and deliver us, and purge away our sins, for thy name’s sake.”
Psalm 79 was written as a lament or mourning over an attack on the city of Jerusalem and the devastation of the Holy Temple. So when it was written the writer uses yeshai {yay'-shah} for “salvation”. It has the idea of liberty, deliverance, prosperity:--safety, salvation, saving. This request is made based on God’s character via His name. So in this instance, the writer is saying that, if God saved the Israelites, his power would be very apparent to the rest of the nations.
I recently got into a discussion where another person was asking me to prove God’s existence via “what God had done for me”. It was a long discussion where this person had berated me several times and used profanity against me and all of that and by that time I know their ears were pretty much fully closed. If I had given a time when I saw the power of God in my life, it would have merely been mocked and discarded anyway. I remember specifically one time when my father was driving me and my brother to his house for the weekend and the light turned green, but he refused to push the gas to start going. Other cars were in the area and they also stopped. I looked to see what was going on and there was no apparent reason, and my dad shouted “hit the dash”, when suddenly a truck came flying through the intersection so fast the pebbles from the ground shot up and hit the windshield. The truck plowed into a few nearby Semi-trucks and the passenger was killed instantly. No one could explain what happened or why no one proceeded through the intersection outside of that they “felt” something was wrong. I accepted Christ when I was 4 and I knew in an instant what had happened. God delivered us from death. He provided safety we did nothing to deserve. However, I did not share this or any of the other hundreds of stories of things that have happened to me because this person would have tried to explain it away. Instead, I stood on truth and did not get angry as much as I wanted to punch this dude through the internet. I needed to get out of the way. This person has the truth of Christ that I presented to them. And I also explained that hearing my stories would not help if he wasn’t ready to hear them. Luke 16:31 “But he said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.’” We live in a twisted “oh, that was anything but God” society. We have an unrepentant nation.
Application: A lot like when the Psalms were written, the nation is in need of restoration. Israel needed restoration. Israel needed repentance and the Psalms go on to address those things as well. America needs repentance. We need repentance in our lives and our sins can only be purged away by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Back then the appeal was to God the Father, but the same thing applies. God is glorified in our repentance and obedience, but we need to have a heart of repentance. Only as we do this on an individual level will we grow in our relationships with God and see our families, loved ones, and others start to be lifted up as well as God works through us and within them.
Questions: Do you pray for God’s help even when you don’t think you need it? How would you handle a situation like the one I brought up today? Do we expect God to deliver us from various trials even if we are not walking in our relationship with Him with a repentant, contrite or “humbled” approach? Did I handle the situation I got into correctly? Is there something I could have done better?
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