Shame and Salvation

Psalm 83 isn’t a song that most people would be comfortable singing in church. It’s a prayer that names names and asks God to bring wrath and destruction against nations who oppose His people. Here in Fargo North Dakota and our mid-western church culture of niceness and peacable theology, Psalm 83 is uncomfortably violent. In our mind, anger and that kind of destructive justice can’t be associated with grace. However, the Psalmist doesn’t seem to think so. After imprecations asking God make his enemies, “like whirling dust, like chaff before the wind,” and to “pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your hurricane,” he declares the reason, “Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek your name, O Lord.” How is it that being filled with shame would lead those opposed to the Lord to seek his face? How can the Psalmist ask for God’s wrath to be poured out and expect it cause revival among the nations?Elsewhere in the Psalms we read, “For you save a humble people, but the haughty eyes you bring down,” and Jesus makes it clear that pride is one of the most powerful deterrents from entering the Kingdom and salvation. Throughout his life Jesus encounters the Pharisees, men who prided themselves on their knowledge of God’s will and their own holiness.  Their pride blinded them to their salvation. They needed what the Psalmist prayed in his day when he asked God to “fill their faces with shame, that they may seek your name, O Lord.”

Shame is the rod God uses to shatter prideful souls. He brings the shame of defeat, of exposed sin, of personal failure, of loss of position, and uses them as hammers to knock the floor out from under our prideful selves. There, with the ground giving out under us, we realize that God alone can save us. We cry out, seeking his face and in his infinite mercy he answers. He saves a humble people. Humble people are the ones who can be rebuilt in the shape of Christ.

Friends, there are people in our lives who we need to pray that hard but beautiful prayer of Psalm 83 over. “Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek your face, O Lord.” When the people we minister to are self-sufficient, satisfied with the things of this life, and proud of their accomplishments than it is only the Lord who can destroy the idols of their false foundation. This isn’t a prayer of anger. It’s a prayer of sorrow and trembling, mingled with the confidence that we serve a Shepherd King who will stop at nothing to reach his lost sheep, even if it means wounding them.

There are also times where we need to receive the humbling hand of our King that presses us, teaching us the beautiful path of complete dependence upon his grace. Don’t fear it. Instead, revel in the fact that we serve a God who is powerful enough to break down every barrier that would keep him from working full salvation in us. Oh what a good thing that is!