You are My God – I Cannot Be My Own Master: Augustine on Psalm 143

[In the February 21 sermon on Psalms 142 and 143, I quoted from Augustine’s commentary on 143:10. As mentioned in a December blog post, we do well to interact with believers who are not our contemporaries, for they will often see in Scripture what we miss. I commend to you, therefore, these excerpts from Augustine’s comments on Psalm 143:5-11, based on this 19th century English translation. I have made some edits, updating the verb forms, generally replacing the cited Scriptures with the ESV, adding Scripture references, and clarifying some sentences. So I pray that you may profit from this 1600-year-old exposition! – Coty]

[Verse 5] In all the works of God then, and in meditation on all the works of God, [David] introduces grace, he commends grace, he boasts that he has found grace, the grace whereby we are saved without price…. Why do you boast of your own righteousness? Why lift yourself up, being ignorant of the righteousness of God? Because you contributed to your salvation? What did you contribute to being made a man? Look back then upon the Framer of your life, the Author of your substance, of your righteousness, and of your salvation: meditate upon the works of His hands, for even the righteousness in you, you will find, is the work of His hands [Ephesians 2:9-10]…. Turn from your own work, to His work Who made you; He fashioned you, and let Him refashion what He fashioned and you destroyed. For you exist because He made you; you are good – if you are – because He made you good.…

[Verse 6] And what did I do when I saw that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning [James 1:17]? When I saw this, I turned from the evil work which I had wrought in myself, and I stretched forth my hands unto You…. Indeed, my soul is as a land without water to You. Rain upon me to bring forth from me good fruit…. I can thirst for You; I cannot water myself. My soul thirsts for the living God. When shall I come to Him [Psalm 42:2], save when He has come to me?

[Verse 7a] “Answer me quickly, O Lord!” For what need of delay to inflame my thirst, when already I thirst so eagerly? You delayed the rain, that I might drink Your flow. If then You delayed for this cause, now give, for my soul is as a land without water to You…. Let Your Spirit fill me, for my spirit has failed me. This is the reason why You should quickly hear me…. I am now poor in spirit; make me blessed in the kingdom of heaven [Matthew 5:3]…. But quickly hear me, O God, rain on me, strengthen me, that I be not dust which the wind drives away from the face of the earth [Psalm 1:4]. Quickly hear me, O God; my spirit has failed: let not my need suffer longer delay…. “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” [2 Corinthians 5:17]. Old things pass away in our own spirit, they are made new in Your Spirit.

[Verse 7b] “Hide not Your face from me.” You hid it from me when I was proud. For once I was full, and in my fulness I was puffed up. Once in my fulness I said, … “I shall not be moved.” I knew not Your Righteousness, and tried to establish my own; … but from You came whatever fulness I had. And to prove to me that it was from You, You hid Your Face from me, and I was troubled. After this trouble, … then I became like a land without water to You: hide not Your Face! … Hide not Your Face from me, because, if You hide it, I shall “be like them that go down into the pit.” What does “go down into the pit” mean? … He no longer believes in Providence, or if he does believe, he thinks that he has no longer anything to do with it. He sets before himself license to sin, the reins of iniquity being let loose now that he has no hope of pardon. He does not confess his sin…. “Hide not Your face from me or I shall be like them that go down into the pit.”

[Verse 8a] “Let me hear in the morning of Your steadfast love, for in you I trust.” Behold, I am in the night, yet I have trusted in You, until the iniquity of the night passes away. For we have, as Peter says, “the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” [2 Peter 1:19]. He calls “morning” the time after the end of the world…. “If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience [Romans 8:25] The night requires patience, the day will give joy.

[Verse 8b] But what do we do until the morning comes? For it is not enough to hope for the morning; we must … seek Him…. Since then we must thus hope for the morning, and bear this night, and persevere in this patience until the day dawn, what meanwhile must we do here? So that you will not think you should do anything of yourself to earn your being brought to the morning, he says, “Make me know the way I should go.” That is why God lit the lamp of prophecy, that is why He sent Jesus in the vessel, as it were, of the flesh…. Walk by prophecy, … walk by the word of God. As yet you do not see the Word as He was in the beginning, God with God [John 1:1]: walk by the Form of [the Word as] a servant, and you shall be conformed to the Form of God. “For to You I lift unto up my soul.” I have lifted it up to You, not against You. With You is the Fountain of life: to You have I lifted up my soul. I have brought my soul as a vessel to the Fountain: fill me, therefore, for unto You have I lifted up my soul.

[Verse 9] “Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord, for I have fled for refuge to You.” I who once fled from You, now flee to You…. I think not here of human enemies. We wrestle not against flesh and blood. But against whom?… The rulers of this world, of this darkness, the rulers of the wicked [Ephesians 6:12]; against these you wrestle. Great is your conflict, not to see your enemies, and yet to conquer. Against the rulers of this world, of this darkness, the devil, that is, and his angels….

[Verse 10a] “Teach me to do Your will, for You are my God.” Glorious confession! glorious rule! “For You are my God.” To another I would hasten to be re-made, if by another I was made. You are my all, for You are my God. Shall I seek a father to get an inheritance? You are my God, not only the Giver of my inheritance, but my Inheritance itself [Psalm 142:5]…. Shall I seek a patron, to obtain redemption? You are my God. Lastly, having been created, do I desire to be re-created? You are my God, my Creator, Who created me by Your Word, and re-created me by Your Word. But You created me by Your Word [the Son], Who was with You: You re-created me by Your Word, made Flesh for our sakes. Teach me then to do Your will, for You are my God. If You do not teach, I shall do my own will, and my God will abandon me. Teach me to do Your will, for You are my God. Teach me: for it cannot be that You are my God, and yet I am to be my own master. See how grace is commended to us. This hold fast, this drink in, this let none drive out of your hearts, lest you have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge [Romans 10:2]; lest, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and going about to establish your own righteousness, you submit not yourselves to the righteousness of God [Romans 10:3]….

[Verse 10b-11] Your good Spirit, not my bad one, … shall lead me into the right land. For my bad spirit has led me into a crooked land. And what have I deserved? What can be reckoned as my good works without Your aid, through which I might … be worthy to be led by Your Spirit into the right land? What are my works? … Listen, then, with all your power, to the commendation of Grace, whereby you are saved without price. “For Your Name’s sake, O Lord, You shall make me live.” You shall make me live. “Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name give glory” [Psalm 115:1]. “For Your Name’s sake, O Lord, You shall make me live in Your righteousness;” not in my own righteousness. Not because I have deserved to live, but because You have mercy. For I deserve nothing of you except punishment. You have pruned from me my own merits; You have grafted in Your own gifts.

Delighting in the Trinity

[We will consider the Trinity before long in our sermon series on paradoxes in Scripture. Michael Reeves’ 2012 volume, Delighting in the Trinity, is an engaging, insightful, and enjoyable meditation on the importance of this key teaching. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite. Page numbers are in parentheses – Coty]

Neither a problem nor a technicality, the triune being of God is the vital oxygen of Christian life and joy. (18)

Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God ‘does’ being Father as a day-job, only to kick back in the evenings as plain old ‘God’. It is not that he has a nice blob of fatherly icing on top. He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation. The French Reformer, John Calvin, appreciating this deeply, once wrote:

we ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us . . . To conclude once for all, whenever we call God the Creator of heaven and earth, let us at the same time bear in mind that . . . we are indeed his children, whom he has received into his faithful protection to nourish and educate . . . So, invited by the great sweetness of his beneficence and goodness, let us study to love and serve him with all our heart.

It was a profound observation, for it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence. We might acknowledge that the rule of some heavenly policeman was just, but we could never take delight in his regime as we can delight in the tender care of a father.”  (23)

Knowing God to be the triune God of love, [Augustine] held that we were not created simply to live under his moral code, hoping for some paradise where he will never be. We were made to find our rest and satisfaction in his all-satisfying fellowship. Moreover, our problem is not so much that we have behaved wrongly, but that we have been drawn to love wrongly. Made in the image of the God of love, Augustine argued that we are always motivated by love—and that is why Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They sinned because they loved something else more than him. That also means that merely altering our behavior, as Pelagius suggested, will do no good. Something much more profound is needed: our hearts must be turned back. A little over a thousand years later, Martin Luther picked up Augustine’s line of thought to define the sinner as “the person curved in on himself,” no longer outgoingly loving like God, no longer looking to God, but inward-looking, self-obsessed, devilish. Such a person might well behave morally or religiously, but all they did would simply express their fundamental love for themselves. (67)

Everything we have seen means that life with this God is as different from life with any other God as oranges are from orang-utans. If, for example, God wasn’t about having us know and love him, but simply about having us live under his rule, then our behavior and performance would be all that mattered. The deeper, internal questions of what we want, what we love and enjoy would never be asked. As it is, because the Christian life is one of being brought to share the delight the Father, Son and Spirit have for each other, desires matter. … The Spirit is not about bringing us to a mere external performance for Christ, but bringing us actually to love him and find our joy in him. And any performance ‘for him’ that is not the expression of such love brings him no pleasure at all. [Jonathan] Edwards compares such loveless Christianity to a cold marriage, asking:

if a wife should [behave] very well to her husband, and not at all from any love to him, but from other considerations plainly seen, and certainly known by the husband, would he at all delight in her outward respect any more than if a wooden image were contrived to make respectful motions in his presence? (99)

What is your Christian life like? What is the shape of your gospel, your faith? In the end, it will all depend on what you think God is like. Who God is drives everything. So what is the human problem? Is it merely that we have strayed from a moral code? Or is it something worse: that we have strayed from him? What is salvation? Is it merely that we are brought back as law-abiding citizens? Or is it something better: that we are brought back as beloved children? What is the Christian life about? Mere behaviour? Or something deeper: enjoying God? And then there’s what our churches are like, our marriages, our relationships, our mission: all are molded in the deepest way by what we think of God. In the early fourth century, Arius went for a pre-cooked God, ready-baked in his mind. Ignoring the way, the truth and life, he defined God without the Son, and the fallout was catastrophic: without the Son, God cannot truly be a Father; thus alone, he is not truly love. Thus he can have no fellowship to share with us, no Son to bring us close, no Spirit through whom we might know him. Arius was left with a very thin gruel: a life of self-dependent effort under the all-seeing eye of his distant and loveless God. The tragedy is that we all think like Arius every day. We think of God without the Son. We think of ‘God’, and not the Father of the Son. But from there it really doesn’t take long before you find that you are just a whole lot more interesting than this ‘God’. And could you but see yourself, you would notice that you are fast becoming like this ‘God’: all inward-looking and fruitless. (99)

(Quoting Miroslav Volf) I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.  (119)

With the God who is eternally love, his anger must rise from that love. Thus his anger is holy, set apart from our temper-tantrums; it is how he in his love reacts to evil. (119)