Ethan (the psalmist here) has a problem: he knows with a certainty, who God is and what God is like. God is righteous. Just. Full of steadfast love and faithfulness. He rules nature. He rules the nations.
Yet Ethan looks around and sees circumstances that seem to contradict God's faithfulness. God had made an eternal covenant with David, promising that his sons' dynasty would last forever. Yet Ethan sees the covenant nation destroyed by enemies, in ruins, plundered and mocked. Where is God's faithfulness now? Where is his steadfast love toward his people?
Do we not do this? We so easily use our circumstances to interpret God's ways. "If God is a God of love, a God in control of everything, and a God who has power to do everything, why does he give me chronic pain? Why did he let my loved one die?"
If Ethan could have time traveled several hundred years into the future, he could have seen and understood that God's covenant with David would indeed be fulfilled - in Christ. That God's faithfulness was always there. That God's plan was higher and greater than the physical well-being of the physical nation of Israel. That the ultimate King - and Prophet - and Sacrifice - would come one day, from the line of David, not to bring political and societal peace and prosperity, but to deliver his people from their real bondage: sin and death.
O God! Give us faith to believe in YOU. In your character. Your perfect plan. Your promises. When we see circumstances that seem to contradict all those things, help us to live by faith, remembering Ethan and the Israelites' time of exile. So many who went into exile would never see the end result, the ways that your faithfulness worked itself out in the nation of Israel. They would have had to either give up their faith that you were who you said you were (merciful and gracious, full of steadfast love, faithful to your promises) -- or to believe that somehow, you were true and faithful, and that that would be evident one day, even though they could not imagine now, how it would work itself out.
Ethan ends with "Blessed be the LORD forever! Amen and Amen."
He holds his faith though he does not understand what God is doing.
May we say the same.
