Coming to Faith

Coming to Faith

John 20:19-31[1]

Faith is not easy. It never has been. And it’s certainly not easy in this day and time. In a skeptical world that demands proof of just about everything, faith is something impossible to prove. How do you prove something so inward, so personal, and so mysterious? It can seem nearly impossible to get a firm grip on faith.[2] Living a life of faith can leave you feeling like you’re hanging in mid-air at the end of a rope, and you have no idea what that rope may be attached to![3] After all, how can we ever be certain about things like salvation, the afterlife, and eternal destiny? Those are matters of faith. The plain truth is that faith is not easy. It never has been!

Yet we live in a time when many of us want “easy” answers to all our questions. Especially our questions about faith. I’ve never found that helpful. For me, the questions I’ve had about faith have always been as real as my faith itself. In fact, I would say my questions have played just as significant a role in shaping my faith as anything else. But it’s not easy to face those questions. In fact, it can be positively frightening. It can leave you wondering whether there’s some “line” out there you may cross over in the process of asking your questions, and find yourself lost and alone, without a hope or a prayer left in the world! Whether we want it to be so or not, faith simply is not easy. It never has been!

I believe our Gospel lesson for today addresses this issue. It recounts the familiar story about “Doubting Thomas.” In our lesson, Thomas, one of Jesus’ hand-picked apostles, refused to believe that Jesus was alive after his death on the cross. Refused to believe! No matter what the others told him, he simply would not accept it. Unfortunately, this incident earned him the nickname “Doubting Thomas.” As a matter of fact, when Jesus addressed Thomas, saying, “Do not doubt, but believe” (Jn. 20:27), the word translated “doubt” should probably be rendered as “faithless.” Jesus told him, “Do not be faithless, but believe.” I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Thomas found that having faith in the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t easy for him, at least at first!

But in fact, if you look at the way Thomas is depicted in John’s Gospel, he was by no means “faithless” in his relationship with Jesus. Quite the opposite. When it became clear that Jesus was determined to go to Jerusalem to die, it was Thomas who said to the others, “let us go, that we may die with him” (Jn. 11:16). That doesn’t sound much like Thomas was “faithless.” And it’s important to note that Thomas was absent the first time Jesus appeared to the apostles. While the others were hiding in fear behind locked doors, Thomas was out there somewhere. We don’t really know where he was or what he was doing, but he wasn’t hiding with the others!

I think it’s entirely appropriate for us to wonder why Thomas didn’t believe the report that Jesus was alive. I think it’s appropriate to wonder whether he may have had a good reason for that! I wonder whether it was his devotion to Jesus that made the pain of his death hard for Thomas to move past. I also wonder whether it was because he’d seen some of the others falter in their faith, especially Peter who had denied knowing Jesus, and he wasn’t prepared to rely on their word alone. What Thomas said was, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (Jn 20:25). Thomas, one of Jesus’ hand-picked apostles, refused to believe!

 Whatever the reason for Thomas’ “doubts,” a week later Jesus appeared to them again. This time Thomas was there, and Jesus invited him to see for himself that what the others had said was indeed true. When Jesus appeared to them, he let Thomas see the wounds he still bore on his body. He invited Thomas to do just exactly what he said he would need to do to believe: he invited touch Jesus’ wounds. Jesus overcame Thomas’ apparent “faithlessness.” And in response, Thomas made one of the strongest confessions of faith contained in the Bible: he called Jesus “My Lord and my God!” (Jn. 20:28).

It’s a fair question to ask what it takes to convince people in this day and time to put their faith in the message we proclaim: that Jesus died and rose again to bring us all new life. I don’t pretend to be able to answer every question we might ask about how that was even possible. But I think that our questions can help us come to faith. Asking questions can help us make the faith that we have been taught by others into our own faith. Many of us here today know by experience that pursuing our questions can be the path to deeper faith. It’s not an easy journey to take, but coming to faith never has been easy.

I would have to say that the context in which you set out on this journey makes all the difference in where you wind up. Having the support and encouragement of a family and a faith community plays a crucial role. We have role models who have shown us how faith has made a difference in their lives. Our role models didn’t have answers to every question. But if you’re like me, those role models had a faith that was real. By living out their faith in the push and pull of life, they shaped my faith and encouraged me to continue the journey. Our families and our faith community give us all the support we need to continue coming to a faith that is real for us.

Faith is not easy. The truth is that it never has been easy. I would say faith boils down to a choice: choosing to look at life from the point of view that God’s love creates at least the “possibility of goodness” in this world.[4] In some respects, we only find faith by having faith. It’s very much like setting out on a journey without even knowing where you’re going, like Abraham and Sarah did. Today is the day when we celebrate a group of our students who are in a sense “setting out” on their faith journey. I would be shocked if they all didn’t still have questions. Maybe a lot of questions. Because this isn’t the end of the journey for them. It’s another step along the way. Just like them, “coming to faith” is something we’re all continually called to do. As we face challenges and opportunities that we could never have expected, if we are going to respond with a faith that is both true to life and true to who we are, we’ll need the courage to wrestle with our questions honestly. As we do that, as we continue the journey of faith, life will always challenge us to “come to faith” in new ways. Because faith is a journey, it’s not going to be easy. But it’s always worth it.

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[1] © 2025 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 4/27/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Cf. John Caputo, On Religion, 15, where he speaks of faith as longing for “a reality beyond reality.”

[3] Cf. Karl Barth, Dogmatics 2.1:159, where he describes faith as feeling as if we are “suspended and hanging without ground under our feet.”

[4] Cf. Keith Ward, God: A Guide for the Perplexed, 209, where he defines faith as “committing ourselves to the continual possibility of goodness.”

Because He Lives

Because He Lives

Luke 24:1-12[1]

Today is the day when we celebrate one of the most important events in our faith: after Jesus gave his life for us all, God raised him from the dead on the third day. But, let’s face it, that first Easter Sunday happened a long, long time ago. And, truth be told, for most of us it’s something we only talk about in church. It’s not really something that impacts our lives on a daily basis. We may view faith as something that relates to our “eternal destiny.” But for many of us that feels like a future so remote that we may not really give it much thought. There are just so many other things going on in our lives that seem so much more pressing. Some of us may even wonder how something that happened so long ago and so far away could have much to do with our “real lives” right here and right now.

Of course, there are many of us who look to Jesus as an example for our lives on a daily basis. We find meaning in his teachings about how to live and how to love. But that doesn’t distinguish Jesus from any of the other great teachers throughout the ages. And the hard truth of this world is that from a certain point of view you could say it hasn’t really made much of a difference. There are plenty of people in this world who are still caught in vicious circles of poverty, violence, injustice, and despair. Right now, millions of people, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of human beings are at the mercy of those who put their faith in ideas like “might makes right.” In the face of all that, “love your enemies” can feel pretty empty.

But I believe that our Gospel lesson for today points us in a different direction—toward a hope that never dies, a hope for new life that makes a difference right here and right now. The story of the women discovering that Jesus’ tomb was empty doesn’t necessarily in and of itself prove anything. But there is more to it than just the empty tomb. Whatever you may think about “angels,” the gist of their message is couched in the question, “Why do you seek the Living One among the dead?” The point of the question is to make it clear that the one they thought was lying dead in a cemetery is actually “the Living One.”

Now, to fully appreciate this, we need to look at the background of that phrase in the Bible. Throughout the Bible, God is “the Living One.” He is the one who gives life to all creation, including those of us who are living and breathing here today. In contrast to the idols made of wood and stone and precious metals, the “Living” God is the one who is able to make a difference in people’s lives here and now. I’ll admit that doesn’t always happen the way we expect, but I will also insist that the God who is “the Living One” shows up in our lives in surprising ways. I don’t know about you, but in my experience, those surprises usually come at just the right time.

So when the angels at the empty tomb call Jesus “the Living One,” the idea is more than just a dead man who has come back to life. Rather, the idea is that Jesus again shares God’s own life. And the first Christians became convinced that this was true not primarily because of the empty tomb or the angels’ message, but because they encountered Jesus as “the Living One” personally. Those encounters made all the difference in the world for them. Instead of a tragedy that stole all hope away, the cross was transformed into good news. The cross shows us not the heartbreaking end of a failed would-be religious leader, but rather the suffering love of the God-who-is-always-with-us and the God-who-is-always-for-us. It shows us that not even death can prevent God’s love from claiming us all.

But more than that, encountering the risen Lord Jesus as “the Living One” points us to the power of God to bring new life even from death. That’s not just something that applied to Jesus all those centuries ago. It’s a promise that the goal toward which God has been working and continues to work even now is a whole new creation. Although it’s a pretty big concept to try to wrap your head around, that’s precisely the promise of Easter. It’s a part of God’s “plan” that I alluded to in our Good Friday service the other night. God’s plan is not only that Jesus would die to absorb all the vicious circles of sin and death into himself. God’s plan also includes raising Jesus from the dead, and in so doing restoring everything in all creation. I believe the plan has always been to return all of creation to the way it was intended to be in the first place.

As our affirmation of faith for today puts it, Jesus’ resurrection brings the promise of “a new world … in which God is really honored as God, human beings are truly loving, and God will … make all things right on earth.”[2] That may sound too good to be true, but it’s a theme that runs through the entire Bible. At the end of the book of Revelation, God declares “now I am making everything new” (Rev. 21:5). And we see it in the way the Bible ends where it began: with a whole new garden, on a whole new earth, in a wholly renewed creation. There the river of the water of life is available freely to all who are thirsty. There the tree of life is available to all, and its “leaves” are for “healing” all the nations. That’s where the Bible ends, where it began!

And what makes all this more than just “pie in the sky” wishful thinking is that God raised Jesus from the dead. In Jesus, “the Living One,” God’s new creation already breaks into this world. It changes our world by promising that all the pain and suffering will be turned into good, and all the death and destruction will be changed into new life. I know it seems too good to be true. But that’s the promise of what happened on that first Easter! It still has the power to change our lives right here and right now. One way it does that is the assurance that Jesus “the Living One” is with us gives us courage to face the present challenges of our lives. But more than that, as “the Living One,” Jesus points us to the final hope that we will all share the life of God with him in the end. We have this hope because Jesus is “the Living One.” Or, to borrow a phrase from the hymn, we have this hope “because he lives” in our hearts even now.

Without Jesus “the Living One” and the hope we have in him, life in this world can seem empty. When all you can see is the vicious circles of poverty, violence, injustice, and despair, there’s not much left to give life meaning. But the fact that Jesus overcame even death to become “the Living One” points us to the promise that nothing, not even death itself, can separate us from the hope we have through him. Because Jesus lives even now, the new life that raised him from the dead spreads from him to everyone who encounters him. And as we encounter the “Living One,” we each take our place and do our part in spreading that new life throughout all creation until finally God makes the whole world new again!

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[1] © 2025 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 4/20/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Adapted from “The Study Catechism: Full Version,” Approved by the 210th General Assembly (1998), qq 85, 87, 88.

Forsaken?

 Forsaken?

Psalm 22[1]

On Sunday we talked about the prayer that Luke’s Gospel places on Jesus’ lips as he was dying: “into your hands I commend my spirit” (Ps 31:5). I mentioned how hard it is for us to understand that as a prayer entrusting all of life into God’s hands because it has become associated with Jesus’ death. Our Psalm for this evening, Psalm 22, is equally difficult for us to hear for the same reason. Matthew and Mark recount Jesus’ final cry with the words of Psalm 22: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 26:6; Mk 15:34). They actually report variations of the Aramaic words Jesus used: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” But because Matthew and Mark associated those words with Jesus’ death, we tend to hear them as a cry of desperation, not a cry of faith.

I’ve chosen this as the final Psalm in our series on “Faith in the Psalms” for this very reason. Because while the cry, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me” in Psalm 22 clearly express the anguish of the psalm-singer, it is not a cry of desperation, but most definitely one of faith. The same person who asks at the outset, “why have you forsaken me?” can also affirm that God “has not forgotten those who are hurting. He has not turned away from their suffering. He has not turned his face away from them. He has listened to their cry for help” (adapted from Ps 22:24, NIRV). And yet, I think that initial cry, “why have you forsaken me?” haunts us all at times. We wonder whether God might actually abandon us in our time of greatest need.

Again, I would say that fear is actually engendered by the way we’ve heard Jesus’ cry from the cross. The prospect that God abandoned Jesus at the moment when he fulfilled his commitment to God’s purpose most completely is hard for us to process. I think Jesus knew he had to give up his life. And yet he cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” I think Jesus trusted that God would raise him from the dead. And yet he cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” What troubles us about all this is the question where God was while Jesus was hanging on the cross and crying out in anguish.

I know the standard response: “God had to turn away because Jesus took all the sin of the world on himself, and God cannot look upon sin.” That just doesn’t cut it. It never has for me. How can we find any meaning in the promise elsewhere in Scripture that “I will never abandon you” (Dt 31:6; Josh 1:5; Heb 13:5) if God abandoned Jesus on the cross? And yet the question still haunts us: where was God during the awful silence that followed Jesus’ prayer, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me”? It is a prayer after all, addressed to God. Jesus wasn’t just acting out some sort of elaborate play. This was the real thing. And when the agony of the cross overwhelmed him, Jesus cried out one of the most heartbreaking prayers of the Bible. And God’s response was … ? Actually that’s precisely the question. What was God’s response? Did God really forsake Jesus on the cross?

Maybe we’ve been looking at this in the wrong way all along. We tend to equate silence with abandonment. But maybe that’s not what’s going on at all. Sometimes we’re silent with those who are suffering because we’re suffering with them. I believe that’s where God was; rather than abandoning Jesus, God was right there, experiencing all the anguish that heartbreaking prayer expresses.[2] God was silent because God was suffering with Jesus. To some of us it might seem even more deeply unsettling that God would allow himself to become so apparently powerless and weak.

Again, I think it depends on how we look at it. The Scriptures tell the story of how, time and again, God reveals his power in precisely in weakness.[3] This is a mystery as deep and as hard to explain as any in the Bible. In the moment when Jesus uttered that heart-rending cry, God made it clear once and for all that his suffering has become our redemption, that his apparent weakness was actually his powerful love transforming all creation. Yet it also communicates the absolutely essential truth that God suffers with us. Especially when God is silent. Especially when we may think God has abandoned us! In fact, I would say that’s one of the lessons of Psalm 22: God is with all who suffer. He never abandons anyone. And his presence with us, his support for us is so real that God actually suffers with us when we’re suffering. I think that’s what Jesus’ cry on the cross teaches us. I think that’s also what Psalm 22 teaches us.

I think it’s also important, however, to notice that the psalm-singer expresses his faith in God in the form of a question. And it’s certainly not a question we might use in prayer to God! It has an edge on it: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest” (Ps. 22:1-2). That’s quite a question to put to God in prayer! Most of us probably wouldn’t feel comfortable being that “in your face” with God. But not only did the psalm-singer ask that question, so did Jesus! And they’re not the only ones. Prophets and sages and spiritual guides from Bible times to the present day have expressed their faith in God by asking what we might consider to be “impolite” or maybe even “irreverent” questions. It might seem like “expressing faith” and asking “irreverent” questions of God couldn’t possibly go together. But I think that’s one of the lessons of Psalm 22: when we feel abandoned by God and we wonder where God is, it doesn’t threaten God at all to be that honest with him in our suffering!

But the psalm-singer discovered what Jesus knew when he made that cry: God is with all who suffer. Prophets and sages and spiritual guides throughout the ages have discovered the same truth: God is the one who’s on the side of those who suffer, all who suffer. Again, the psalm-singer says it this way: God “has not forgotten those who are hurting. He has not turned away from their suffering. He has not turned his face away from them. He has listened to their cry for help” (Ps 22:24).[4] I particularly like the way Gene Peterson puts it in The Message: “He has never let you down, never looked the other way when you were being kicked around. He has never wandered off to do his own thing; he has been right there, listening.” And I would add: “and suffering every bit as much as you, maybe even more”!

As we bring our discussion of “Faith in the Psalms” to a conclusion, it seems to me one of the most important lessons for us to learn is that God is always “God-who-is-with-us.” Most particularly when we are suffering. God is always the one who is giving us the strength to go on, always the one who is comforting us in our sorrows, always the one who raises us up when we fall, always the one who hears our every cry for help. That is the lesson of the Psalms. God is the one who never abandons us, even and especially in the worst of the pain we may have to undergo in this life. And his presence with us, his support for us is so real that God actually suffers with us. The lesson of the cry that opens this Psalm, the lesson of Jesus’ cry from the cross, is that we are never, ever forsaken by God!

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[1] © 2025 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm Phd on 4/17/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] In several of Jürgen Moltmann’s works he holds in tension the idea that Jesus died a “God-forsaken” death together with the idea that Jesus was never more closely aligned with God’s will than when he died on the cross. He resolves this tension in different ways in several of his works, but in The Way of Jesus Christ, 173, he says that far from being unconcerned about what was happening, far from abandoning his Son, “in the surrender of the Son the Father surrenders himself too.”

[3] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV:244-48. Cf. also Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 205: “God is not greater that he is in this humiliation.  God is not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender.  God is not more powerful than he is in this helplessness.  God is not more divine than he is in this humanity.”

[4] Cf. J. Clinton McCann, Jr., “The Book of Psalms,” New Interpreters Bible IV: 764: “The affliction is still very real, but the affliction itself has somehow become an answer (v. 21b). What the psalmist now affirms is that God is present with the afflicted.”

Before We Know To Ask

Before We Know to Ask

Psalm 31:1-5, 9-16[1]

Trust is a precious commodity these days. It seems the more divided we become as a people, the less we’re willing to risk trusting anyone. Many of us live by the motto, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” We’re just wired that way. Self-reliance has been a virtue for generations, since long before Emerson wrote an essay about it.[2] We believe in pulling ourselves up by our own “bootstraps.” And that can make it difficult to trust—really trust—anyone. After all, making the choice to trust someone, anyone, means taking the risk that our trust will be broken. It’s simply one of the costs of living fully. It’s much easier to withdraw into our protective shell and isolate from anyone who might hurt us in any way. But if we want to experience the full spectrum of what it means to live this human life, we’ll have to learn to trust.

I think our general attitude about trusting anybody for anything rubs off on our ability to trust God. As we’ve seen in our journey through the Psalms during Lent, the psalm-singers framed trusting God as a matter of relying on God wholly and completely for every aspect of our lives. That cuts directly against the grain of our self-reliance. From my perspective, trusting God means acknowledging that there’s nothing we can do to come up with a better version of our past. It means accepting our lives just as they are in the present moment. And it means entrusting our future entirely into God’s hands. It’s hard to do that when we’re busy trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Even and especially when we can’t even find any straps to pull ourselves up by, or when we’ve lost the strength to even take hold of the straps, let alone pull them up.

I believe our Psalm for today addresses this question of trusting God with every aspect of life. It may be difficult to hear that, however. Because Luke’s Gospel has Jesus cry out, “Into your hands I commend my spirit” as his dying breath (Lk 23:46), we tend to hear Psalm 31 as a “prayer for the dying.” We think that the Psalm is about giving up our “spirit” into God’s hands at death. But the prayer in Psalm 31 is better translated, “Into your hands I commit my very life,” as in the New International Reader’s Version we used in worship today. I’ve mentioned before that the Hebrew word translated “spirit” in the Psalm means more than we may think. It refers to one’s whole existence, heart and mind, body and soul. It’s like the way we use the word “self.” Entrusting one’s very “self” to God in this way is not a prayer for dying, but rather a prayer for living.

 In Psalm 31, the psalm-singer recalls all the hardships of life, including the “frenemies” who sought to undo him, along with all the anxiety and sorrow that caused.[3] As a result of the anguish he had borne, the psalm-singer could say, “I am as forgotten as a dead man” (cf. Ps. 31:12, TEV). He likens himself to so much “broken pottery.” And yet, in spite of all the pain he’s had to endure, at the end of the day he summed up his trust in God by saying, “my times are in your hand” (Ps. 31:15). Again, this points us in the direction that the Psalm is a “life-prayer.” In this song, the psalm-singer expresses his faith in terms of relying on God wholly and completely for all of life.

Another reason for seeing Psalm 31 as a “life-prayer” is because the psalm-singer expresses his confidence in the “faithful God.” That’s the second part of the prayer: “Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God” (Ps. 31:5, NRSV). In Hebrew the idea of God as the “faithful God” is literally worded, “the God of truth” (el-emeth). One could also translate this as “the God of trustworthiness.” This phrase points us to the one whose very character is defined by dependability. The psalm-singer entrusts his entire life to “the God who can be relied on … because [God] is true to himself.”[4] Being dependable, being reliable, being trustworthy in relationship to us all is what it means for God to be true to himself. The psalm-singer shows his confidence in the God who is always faithful by essentially praying, “it is up to you, God, what becomes of me, and I am willing to have it so.”[5]  

As we’re learning about “Faith in the Psalms” during Lent this year, I think that may be the foundation for everything else. To be sure, like the rest of the Bible, faith has different facets in the Psalms. Sometimes we learn faith by hearing about all the ways God was faithful to people in the past. Sometimes we learn faith from their affirmations about God, like “God’s love never fails.” And sometimes we learn faith by following the example of those who entrusted their lives wholly and completely to God. When we take that step of faith, we’re not just engaged in so much wishful thinking. In the Psalms, faith is based on the firm foundation that God’s love for us never fails. And through the stories of those who entrusted their lives to him, God has demonstrated time and again that he is the God we can rely on. More than that, we have our own experiences of God being there for us, through good times and bad times. Again and again, God has been true to himself by being true to us. God does this simply because that’s who God is. God is the “faithful God” in whose hands we can “entrust” our “times,” all our times, past, present, and future.

If you’ve been in worship here for a while, and if you’ve been paying attention, it’s likely you recognized the title of my sermon for today, “Before We Know to Ask.” It’s a phrase I’ve used every week in my pastoral prayer since before I came here over ten years ago. I don’t use that phrase because it’s something I just memorized or it’s an “easy” way to close my prayer. I composed that phrase years ago as a way of concluding my prayer with the kind of trust this Psalm expresses. It’s a way of formulating in words that I hope we can all relate to the faith that the psalm-singers encourage us to embrace. It’s the faith that God always shows us grace, mercy, and love in little ways every day. Theologians call it God’s “prevenient grace.” I know that’s not likely a phrase you’re familiar with. One of the things I love about the Reformed Christian tradition to which we in the Presbyterian Church belong is that we believe God’s grace is always “prevenient.” That means it always precedes anything we might do. A theology of grace teaches us that God is constantly at work in all our lives, even and especially when we’re not aware of it. God is “for us” in many more ways that we can know simply because that’s what it means for God to be true to himself. And God’s unfailing love always precedes our asking or even knowing what to ask for!

Our faith is not about “pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps”! Our faith teaches us to recognize that we don’t have any bootstraps strong enough to actually pull ourselves up at all. Every grace, every mercy, all the goodness in our lives comes as a gift from God’s love. Our faith is not about relying on ourselves for every little thing. It’s about acknowledging that there’s nothing we can do to come up with a better version of our past. It’s about accepting our lives just as they are in the present moment. And it’s about entrusting our future entirely into God’s hands. We do that when we follow the psalm-singer’s example and entrust our “times,” all the times of our lives, into God’s hands. We do that when we live out the faith that the God whose essential character is reliable, trustworthy, and faithful will bring grace, mercy and love into our lives before we even know to ask.

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[1] © 2025 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 4/13/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, 1841; accessed at https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/selfreliance.html

[3] Most modern versions follow the (Greek) Septuagint version which reads “misery” in v. 10 rather than “iniquity” in the Hebrew text (and KJV, ASV, NASB, ESV, CEV, NET, NLT [2015; NLT 1996 has “misery”]; contrast GNV, “pain”).  Cf. H.-J. Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 360; Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 1-50, 258.

[4] James L. Mays, Psalms, 143; cf. also Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 363, who renders it “the faithful, dependable God.” He also adds (p. 365), “The truth of God is the confirmation of [God’s] grace and faithfulness.”  See further, Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 2.1:459-60, where he relates this to the doctrine of God’s “simplicity,” or the idea that God is entirely true to himself when God relates to us with love, mercy, grace, and patience. God does so because God has chosen to do so, and because God always faithful to God’s self. It is a matter of “the unity of grace and holiness, mercy and righteousness, patience and wisdom, in the total work of His love” (ibid, 460).

[5] This is Mays’ interpretation of “into your hands I commit my spirit.”  Cf. Mays, Psalms, 144.