Devotional Essay thru Psalm 27, Part VI:  Your Face, O Lord, Do I Seek!

It’s an existential kind of life.  We are acutely aware of the reality of our existence.  We breathe; therefore, we live. 

We think, according to the French philosopher Descartes, who given the distinction of being labeled the Father of Modern Philosophy; therefore, we are. 

We feel, an accentuation of emphasis being accorded modern and western man, a phenomenon seemingly and otherwise minimized in order of consequence; therefore, we live.

 We desire, whether of licit or illicit things, depending upon whether one gives priority to the holy or to the unholy impulses of our lives; therefore, we are.  Wholesomely; we long for meaning, for justice, for beauty, for belonging and for direction.

We are an existential kind of people; aren’t we?  We go from day-to-day, making decisions, earning a living, dealing with problems, whether of the past, the current or anticipations of the future.  And we do so in concert with other people who are an admixture of noble and ignoble impulses, going about their lives with the same besetting issues, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, and sometimes not even trying.

It’s complicated.  It’s maddening.  It’s frightening.  And it’s all-too-often a lonely run.  One of the leading news weeklies from the 1980s (Time; I believe) ran a cover story entitled, “Loneliness:  An Epidemic of Our Time.”  It sure was, and just as assuredly remains so; perhaps, even more than ever.

We are estranged from one another.  It can be so off-setting betwixt men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, conservative or left, Occidental or Oriental.  The human heart can find itself bereft; indeed, it calls to mind the prayer of Augustine:  “O, Lord, the human heart has a hole in it that only You can fill.”

David, for all of his stunning success, accomplishments and possessions – from his harem to his army to his family – understood from the gut that sense of the loneliness of it all. 

Earlier in his career, he found himself on the run at the hands of an increasingly deranged King Saul.  Saul wanted him dead.  No one has ever wanted me dead, though some may not have wanted me around.  David was a hunted man.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” to quote Shakespeare’s Henry IV (Henry IV, Part 2), became the experience of Israel’s greatest ruler.  The burden of command became more burdensome; still, in the aftermath of David’s lustful episode with Bathsheba, as divine discipline was to come upon him, and rebellion against him, from amongst his army and even within his immediate family. 

But, when all else fails and everyone else has either abandoned ship or has attacked, there is always God – Thankfully; there is always God to whom one may turn.

Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud. 

I cry aloud; therefore, I am.  It is instinctive to the heart of man, even modern and godless man, to turn to Him when there is need.  There are; no doubt, exceptions to the rule, but the rule holds true in the main. 

Man may cry out to an idol, not realizing that the idol is not Almighty God.  President Lincoln uttered the famous observation about two warring factions, both seeking divine approval (“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”).  The truth is that they were crying out to gods of their own devices and desires, to apply the famous phrase taken from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer – “We have followed too much the devices, and desires of our own hearts.”  We have.

But David was blessed to know something about the one true God.  He was; after all, a man after God’s own heart, something that God Himself acknowledged and valued.  David knew that he could turn and cry out to God, and that his cry would be heard. 

But he cried aloud.  This doesn’t mean that he was screaming, but that he was fervent from the heart in his articulations for help.  Prayer must always be from the heart.  It must always start with a cry, though it may be spoken in a whisper.  It must begin with an attitude of humility, though it may be boldly uttered.  Else how will God hear? 

Our God is a God of the heart.  Our powers of intellection, great though they may be, are nothing to Him.  Our aggregate of resources are derided by Him.  “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord” (Zechariah 4:6), the same Spirit who, according to the Apostle Paul, was “poured out into our hearts” (Romans 5:5).

A human heart crying out to God is precious to Him.  Its cries are like music, similar to a mother’s response to the cry of her baby.  David well knew this.

I have cried aloud to my Lord.  He has always heard my cry.  He has always been engaged and responsive.  “Test me in this … and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it …”  (Malachi 3:10) says the Lord concerning the giving of tithes and offerings; it is a similar examination concerning His responsiveness to the cries of His people.

Be gracious to me, and answer me!

“I cried aloud to the Lord, and He answered me from His holy hill” (Psalm 3:4).   It is a kind of an inviolable spiritual equation.  God is always graciously-inclined to such a cry. He is thoroughly gracious in all His ways, always gracious in His disposition towards us.

Graciousness is such that it finds expression in the presence and in response to that which has no inherent hold or claim upon its blessing.  A gracious woman is not one who is so-disposed to a loved one, but to a stranger or a potential adversary.  Grace, as Protestant reformer John Calvin has so defined, is God’s unmerited favor towards sinful man.

God is gracious in-and-of-Himself.  It is one of the fundamental attributes of His character.  He did not have to learn to be gracious.

 My wife shares that I taught her how to be more gracious than she considered herself to be.  I don’t know, as she is a gracious lady, as I can be decidedly ungracious in my off-moments but, for many, it is a quality of character that can be surprisingly deficient, a lack often to be found in the very lives whose profession of faith is grounded in an act of divine grace – As a matter of fact; at the time of this writing, I was treated to a very ungracious response from a leading bastion of grace-oriented theology.  It was exceptionally distasteful.  I have every reason to believe that my gracious Lord would have been displeased; to say the least.

God is gracious beyond measure to any-and-all who will call upon Him.  He is graciously-disposed to the penitent sinner.  His grace knows no boundary lines.  The most sordid of sinners, the most depraved of our species – none are exempt from the prospect of His grace.  David Berkowitz, the infamous “Son of Sam” who terrorized people on the New York City subway system in the 70s, a man literally beset by demons, was delivered of those demons, forgiven of his sins and transformed by the power of the Gospel, and who now, from his prison cell, has made a vocation of getting the Word of God to many within and beyond the walls of his life-long incarceration.  God in His grace be praised!

And every Christian should be able to testify of the fullness of divine grace.  The Apostle John writes that “from the fullness of His grace we have all received one blessing after another.  For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  No one has ever seen God, but God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made Him known” (John 1:16-18).

The fullness of His grace – That sums it up quite aptly.  He graciously dispenses a succession and myriad of blessings upon those who look to and who love Him, the greatest of these being the privilege of having a personal and life-transformative encounter with God the Father through Jesus the Son – As always; praise Him!

If that weren’t enough; praise Him some more.  The Apostle Paul deepens the picture: 

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.  For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight,  In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will – to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves.  In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding” (Ephesians 1:3-8).

Get the picture?  Assuredly; you will, because His grace will enable you – Praise God!

You have said, “Seek my face.”

A gracious God and His graciousness towards us are, in Him, effectively synonymous.  But man, who is not always gracious, is a divided creature.  So; we have an interesting distinction to make, one that has profound consequence to our Christianity.  We either want the hand of God, or we seek after His face.  What’s the difference?

Well; the hand of God relates to His provision, while the face of God pertains to Himself.  Do we want from Him solely what we want or need, or do we want Him?  God wants a relationship with us; all-too-often, we simply want Him to satisfy some need or want, whether legitimate or selfish.

A friend of mine who is a priest shares the story of a man who visited his Catholic church every morning, asking for prayer on behalf of his sick wife.  He never missed an opportunity.  God in His mercy and grace healed the lady, at which point the man was never seen again in the church.  He wanted God’s hand, but not God’s face.

We sing a spiritual song in our church that accentuates our desire for the face of God.  We appreciate His hand, as is natural and appropriate, but we desire Him and want to lift up Him, regardless of circumstance:

“Blessed be Your name

In the land that is plentiful

Where Your streams of abundance flow

Blessed be Your Name.

Blessed be Your name

When I’m found in the desert place

Though I walk through the wilderness

Blessed be Your name.

Every blessing You pour out, I’ll

Turn back to praise

When the darkness closes in, Lord

Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord

Blessed be Your name

Blessed be the name of the Lord

Blessed be Your glorious name.”

… 

If Christians were as mindful of God’s glory, as appreciative of His beautiful Presence and as desirous of authentic rapport with Him, Christianity would be once again in the ascendancy of influence throughout the world, bringing life to legions of people!

It’s not all about us.  It’s about God.  I continue to grow in my delight of His Presence and desire for His face.  And I continue to know the favor of His saving hand.

My heart says to You, Your face, Lord, do I seek.

It becomes an existential moment of decision.  Who or what or we want?  The renowned French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, when asked by a young man whether he should remain home to care for his sick mother or enlist into the army and fight the Nazis, was told that it didn’t matter which course he took so much as that he simply had to choose.  It was the act of making a choice that mattered.

I think it is true to say that one’s final decision will be predicated upon one’s priorities of the heart.  God gave the Israelites a choice when as they wandered around the desert.  “Choose life or death.  This day choose life” (Deuteronomy 31:19).  One would think that such a decision would be a matter of the heart, as the instinct towards survival runs deep and is pervasive.  Yes; there are some who have a proclivity towards suicide, but their instincts are certainly not those of the vast majority. 

David chose God.  He made a decision to cast His lot with Almighty God.  The king of Israel yearned for the King of the universe.

He didn’t speak cheap talk about religious sentimentality or tradition.  A theological system was the farthest thing from his mind.  But in his heart he made a decision to seek after God.  To put it this way:  He may have gone waylaid by the sight of Bathsheba’s naked and sensuous body, but his sights were soon set aright on the face of the Almighty.  “My heart says to You, Your face, Lord, do I seek!”

It was as honest a cry as ever to traverse the globe, travel down the long road of history or ascend unto the heavens; but for crocodile tears (and we all know the difference), a cry is as honest as it gets.  And God loves honesty.  It is what one finds behind the mask, the curtain or the flowery words.  It’s always from the heart.

I had no choice as a young boy.  Lack of honesty would accomplish nothing for me.  No calculated cogitation could possibly have advanced my purpose.  That would have been tantamount to a sick joke (and humor, even then, meant too much to me to be wasteful).  Everything in me cried out to God for His attentive ministrations, which ran deep. 

I had the privilege of looking aloft and all around to see the face of my Lord Jesus in those days.  For me; it wasn’t even a decision as it was a compulsion.  I was that desperate, yet I was that earnest.  I wanted to know God and Jesus, who He had sent.  (It would be years later when I entered into a desire to know the Holy Spirit, but that is a thread of discussion for another day.)

His Presence opened up to me whole new vistas.  It is unimaginable to me what life would be like outside of the gracious and good-keeping of Jesus Christ.  Thankfully;        

I don’t have to know; praise God!

There have been seasons over my life during which I have been more attentive to His Presence, more desirous of Him and, while I would wish that my personal ardor for God had been a continuous constant that was continuously growing, I have learned that the extent to which I wanted God, to that extent I had His full attention. 

It is something that has grown from an inclination to a proposition to a conviction that I must seek after God with my life.  My life is worth nothing without or apart from God.

I have known seasons in my life during which it has become apparent that God was disciplining me.  He was disciplining me, whether for indolence and inaction, or action and attitude misapplied or given over to the ever-faithful folly of my foolish flesh.  It often felt terribly (dead-wrong; thankfully!) as if He was no longer there.

Hide not Your face from me; Turn not Your servant away in anger, O You who have been my help.  Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!

I am quite conversant with the cry of David.  It feels worse than a child crying for Mummy, but mummy isn’t there, or isn’t there quickly enough.  God never left me.  He never ceased to love me, but He God disciplines those He loves (Hebrews 12:10), and I have known His disciplining hand.  It isn’t pretty (it’s not meant to be), it feels lousy (it’s supposed to be), but it’s absolutely necessary (it always will be).  His love is comforting, but often severe.  C.S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, nails it when he speaks of “the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.”

American Christians would do well to understand this sooner rather than later in today’s increasingly godless age, one in which the very texture to the air intimates, not simply of societal indifference, but of a looming antagonism towards anything that smacks of godliness, whether sound teaching or sanctified people.

God had been with me since my earliest awareness of things.  An angelic visitation when  I was between three and four years-of-age gave me a vivid sense of what Shakespeare’s Hamlet was telling Horatio:  “There are more things in heaven and earth; Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

My ambition, if I can call it that, when I was a growing boy, if not to play First-base for the Boston Red Sox or teach high school history or host a radio talk-show, was to be a minister, though I could not then have been particularly articulate as to why.  I was always drawn to “religious” things, like the Bible or church, or a little book in second grade called Jesus’ Disciples.  I guess I wanted to be one of those.

I became one, and, though I would sometimes wander from the fold, He never left my side, not through all the years of ups-and-downs, fits-and-starts, triumphs and traumas, godly walks and sinful detours.  He may have had to discipline me from time-to-time, but He never left my side for a moment, always overseeing, guiding and convicting, comforting and challenging me – You see; He has always loved me.  I know this as well as did King David; praise Him!

For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in.

Unlike our loving and heavenly Father, the world does not love us.  It may like us or lust after us, all under the guide of welcome, esteem and hospitality, but it doesn’t ever love us.  It is a truth that needs to be learned by huge swaths of the Church that are inclined to accommodate the world, all in the interests of being on the right side of history or of not wanting to offend, though the world and its agents won’t think twice of offending you!  Frankly; it will spit our wayward brethren right into the gutter when they cease to be of any further value – Useful idiots; I believe, is the term ascribed by Lenin to those who broke ranks with their convictions to coddle for favor the prevailing powers.

Many amongst us know what it is like to be forsaken by one or both parents.  It is a not uncommon reality for far too many. 

My academic dean in India was a man named Dr. Samuels.  He came from the Dalit class – aka the “Untouchables.”  He was abandoned by his father when he was little; shortly thereafter, his mother died.  He was left alone in a world wherein there was little mercy or pity or concrete help to be had.  He was led to faith in his young adulthood by the English missionary Lesslie Newbigin, who became a kind of spiritual father to him.  Dr. Samuels shared his story with me after chapel one day, after I had shared from Psalm 27!

Countless children have been victimized by their very parents, a kind of forsaking that did not entail physical separation from their offspring, but sexual or verbal abuse, often entailing a mother’s tacit permission for fear of where she and the children would go (in an earlier era; an honest concern).  My own wider family was struck by this woeful phenomenon, and I bore witness to how children so subjected go through the entirety of their lives, apart from God’s intervening grace, living ravaged lives.

Beyond the exegetical scope, yet pertinent today and within bounds of a devotional essay, we are now living through a time during which we are discovering the predatory instincts of clergy who monstrously feasted themselves upon children within their pastoral purview.  The Boston Globe broke the scandal of pedophilia with the Roman Catholic Church back in 2000 or 2001, with the Church paying an exacting price, both financially and morally, surpassed only by the price accrued to the children.

But my Protestant colleagues would best be mindful of our own internal scandals.  An entire denomination, widely-known within conservative evangelical circles, enabled predatory behavior to ruin any number of young lives, an enablement that came from the very highest echelon of pastoral authority within its fold, as it discouraged any call to the police or reporting to the governing authorities, the travesty being (as it would appear) that ecclesiastical authority held too high a position in its own mind, an authority deemed of greater worth than the welfare of innocents. 

And we have witnessed more than one generation of children having been given over to the malls, the entertainment industry and the digital age as pacifiers so that their parents might more narcissistically seek after their own pleasures and ambitions.  It separated children and youth from older generations, a divide that is now reaping horrific consequence for our society with its spawn of lack of respect, wanton disregard and a massive accrual of knowledge and a brutal void of wisdom.  

Our governing authorities have abandoned all of us, with our children having to pay the heaviest price, as they are like sheep being led to be slaughtered, along with a corresponding sense of humanity and integrity and compassion being devoured by an insidious godlessness that is eternally criminal.  The quest for political power has seemingly trumped the demands of societal welfare, notwithstanding the pretense of social justice, racial equality and the myth of the global village. 

But the Lord will take me in.

His arms are wide open.  There is welcoming warmth to His countenance.  He will turn no one away who comes to Him in humility of heart and sincerity of desire.  Jesus spoke in terms that the simplest mind may understand:  “Seek and you will find.  Ask and it will be granted you.  Knock and the door shall be opened to you.”  It is really that simple.

He will bring us into His Presence.  He will adopt us into His family.  He will grant us citizenship in His Kingdom.  He will appoint us as His ambassadors, empower us as His witnesses and reveal Himself through us.

We will know love in place of mere “like” (a flimsy, paltry word) and, lust (a hideous word conveying a filthy, exploitative desire), whether affably or sleazily expressed.  Love, as in the agape, or holy and sacrificial love of Jesus, will bless our lives, warm our hearts, captivate our minds and make dramatic use of our bodies in loving service to God and to others.  He will use our acts of love to draw others into His Presence; also.

Peace will be given to us by Christ, a peace both palpable and pervasive, unlike worldly peace, the likes of which require a multiplicity of signatures, a mountain of preparatory talks, whole armies to maintain and a legion of cheap, tawdry words of multiple syllables, exacting articulations and lots of sleight-of-hand tomfoolery.  Even then; it will be easily shattered.  But Christ’s peace, a peace that defies human reasoning, will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, and will attract the attention of an otherwise war-weary world.

And we will be afforded the joy of the Lord, as distinct from a tenuous and fickle happiness that we are urged at every turn to acquire – literally acquire, as in the purchasing of goods and services that offer nothing more substantive than mere artifice, or expedient but ephemeral pleasure.  Such joy will prove captivating to those around us, as they have rarely if ever encountered anything like it, as they have been too busy following or chasing after their worthless idols, after which they are left frustrated, exhausted and impoverished.   But the refreshing, enervating and enriching joy that Christians display will prove a powerful drawing card to incline their hearts and minds to the One who will take them in!

 Lord, I will seek Your face.  I will pray and endeavor that others will see Your face in me.  And I thank You for the beneficent hand that accompanies it.  As already articulated and reflected upon in an earlier essay within these pages, “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek:  That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and to seek Him in His temple” (v 4).

Yes; Lord, it is an existential world – I will seek Your face; therefore, I am!

Bradley E. Lacey

May 10, 2021