Resting in God

My heart is not proud, Lord,

    my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
    or things too wonderful for me.
But I have calmed and quieted myself,
    I am like a weaned child with its mother;
    like a weaned child I am content.

Israel, put your hope in the Lord
    both now and forevermore. Psalm 131

A memory from my teenage years… One of our youth leaders asked a girl to read a Bible passage in the service. She gladly agreed: “What’s the passage?” she asked. He replied, “Psalm 119”. So she happily went off to look it up.

Fifteen minutes later she came back with a monster frown on her face: “Psalm 119? You kidding? It’s got 176 verses!”

Yes, he was joking. It was Psalm 131 he really wanted – just three little verses. Cue a big sigh of relief.

I wonder if you’ve ever paid special attention to the fifteen psalms, 120 to 134? They all have the added title “A song of ascents”, though nobody is absolutely sure what that means. Only one (132) is more than ten verses. I can’t help wondering if they show that God has a sense of humour, as if he is saying, “Well done! You’ve got right through Psalm 119 and perhaps at times you’ve found it a bit of a plod. Well, here are fifteen little miniatures for you to enjoy. Why not try one per day for a fortnight?”

I personally find these short poems wonderfully refreshing, and not just because they’re so short. No: because they are generally full of trust and hope, celebrating God’s fatherly goodness and anticipating good things to come. (Perhaps, if you are feeling particularly frazzled from the pandemic, that suggestion of just one a day for a fortnight may not be a bad idea: it may be all the Bible-reading you need for the moment. This is the word of the Lord, after all, just as much as chunks of the prophets or the Gospels or Paul!)

In Psalm 131 the psalmist compares himself to “a weaned child with its mother”. He has “calmed and quietened” himself. To my shame I for many years pictured this as a baby at its mother’s breast; but that in fact is precisely what isn’t being described – I was too lazy mentally to take proper notice of that word “weaned”. No, the picture is more of a small quite active child perhaps coming to the end of a rough-and-tumble day and cuddling up to its mother before bedtime.

What matters is that he or she is peaceful and secure, aware of being loved, and therefore happy in his or her dependence. And this is an image of the man or woman of God.

“My heart is not proud, Lord”, says the psalmist, “my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me…” You could take that as a cop-out, as if the psalmist is choosing to duck troubles or responsibilities which he should rightly grapple with.

But no, I don’t think there is any false humility here. Rather, he is rejoicing that in the middle of life’s ups and downs he has a solid, quiet faith in the fatherly God who overrules all things – and who loves him personally, as a parent loves their child.

But this throws up a question: Is it possible to maintain that kind of simple, childlike trust when, putting it bluntly, you are no longer a simple, childlike person?

You may have been a Christian for many years, perhaps even been to Bible college and gained qualifications; you may spend much of your time with intelligent and sophisticated non-believers who routinely challenge your faith; you may have been forced to think hard and question deeply about difficult matters of doctrine: in which case, is the kind of simple faith depicted in this psalm possible?

The answer has to be Yes. When Jesus insisted that the children should be allowed to come to him (Mark 10:13-16), he warned his disciples that “anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it”. That sounds pretty plain! – and rather disturbing.

We mustn’t pretend to be over-childlike, of course: God has given us minds with which to probe, question and think, and he expects us to do just that. Remember Job.

But at bottom, how can any human being, however clever and knowledgeable, be anything but a tiny child over against the infinite mystery of Almighty God? The cleverest Christian throughout history (whoever he or she may be) knows not even a million-millionth part of what there is to know.

When C S Lewis, a man who put his massive intellect at the service of the Christian faith, got married in his later years, his wife was amazed (and, I suspect, slightly amused) to discover that every night before going to sleep he would kneel at his bedside to pray. Just like a child.

When Professor Karl Barth - perhaps the most famous theologian of the twentieth century, a writer whose enormous output provides many other scholars with a whole life-time’s work - when Prof Barth was asked to sum up the essence of his theology, he is said to have replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”.

However wise and knowledgeable you become - and rightly so - never be ashamed to come back to Psalm 131!

Heavenly Father, help me to love you with all my mind as well as with all my heart, all my soul and all my strength. But grant too that I will never lose that simple childlike trust without which I cannot see the kingdom of God. Amen.