God's Goodness in This Life

God’s Goodness in This Life

Psalm 27[1]

You’ve heard me preach enough that you know I try to focus on how our faith shapes how we live here and now. I do that on purpose, because I believe Jesus focused on that. On the other hand, I’m well aware that for centuries our faith has directed our attention away from “this life” to the promise of eternal life to come. This shift took place for a lot of reasons. Essentially about 1800 years ago the church shifted its focus from what the kingdom of God challenges us to do with our lives here and now to the promise of going to heaven when we die. Since that time, our faith has been oriented toward what happens “in the sweet by and by” rather than “I’m gonna live so God can use me”!

The psalm singers had an interesting way of doing something similar. They tended to view “danger” as something that happens to us “out here” in real life, while safety is to be found “in there” in God’s presence. And God’s presence was identified with the Temple in Jerusalem. It was there, in “the Lord’s house” that the psalm singers sought refuge. As our Psalm for today puts it, “he will shelter me in his own dwelling during troubling times” (Ps 27:5, CEB). In a sense, “locating” God’s deliverance in a particular place, like the temple in Jerusalem, was similar to thinking of salvation in terms of what happens at a particular time, after we die. There’s nothing wrong with either one of those notions, as far as they go. But to limit God’s deliverance to a particular place or time runs counter to the fundamental assurance that God is sovereign and reigns over all of life, everywhere, all the time.

One of the challenges we face when dealing with the faith of the Psalms, as we’re doing this year during the season of Lent, is that they were written before Easter. All that we’ve discussed recently about how Jesus’ death and resurrection has changed everything for everyone everywhere was only something the psalm singers might have a vague hope for. While it’s still also our “hope” in that we have only tasted the salvation God has in store for us, we do have good grounds for that hope. Jesus’ death and resurrection happened. That’s not just a matter of “wishful thinking.” We have ample testimony to Jesus’ death and resurrection, not only in the writings of the Apostles, but also in the faith of believers throughout the ages, and in our own encounters with God in our lives.

Even without knowing the hope we have in Jesus’ resurrection, the psalm singers held a hope that was just as real and just as powerful for them. Their hope was in the God who created all the heavens and the earth (Ps 121:2; 146:6). Their hope was in the God who, although he is “Lord” over even death, does not promote death, but rather as the Creator of all things “affirms life and only life.”[2] Their hope was rooted in the belief that God brought order from chaos and life from nothing. More than that, their hope was in the God who had delivered their ancestors time and time again (Ps 22:4; 78:3). Particularly, despite the fact that they continually turned away from him, God was the one who “led his people out of Egypt and guided them in the desert like a flock of sheep” (Ps 78:52, CEV). They affirmed God’s power over even the dangers that his people still faced based on the many times he had delivered them from dangers of all kinds.

The psalm singers, like the prophets, affirmed their faith in God in the face of all that would threaten them. Psalm 107 particularly recounts the many ways God delivered His people when all hope seemed lost. Psalm 107 repeats the refrain “so they cried out to the LORD in their distress, and God delivered them from their desperate circumstances” four times (Ps 107:6, 13, 19, 28, CEB). The people had centuries of testimonies behind them already at the time the Psalms were collected and made into the “prayer book” of the faithful. Their hope in God as their refuge, as their deliverer, as their safe shelter, was based on their own experience, as well as the experiences of the people as a whole.

That brings us back to our Psalm for today. The psalm singer affirms that “The LORD is my light and my salvation” and “the LORD is a fortress protecting my life” (Ps 27:1, CEB). As I’ve observed before, this affirmation of trust in God as deliverer was not made in a time when all was right with the world. Rather, this psalm singer was engaged in a desperate struggle for his very life.[3] He speaks about brutal and vicious “evildoers” who were trying to “devour” him. He describes being surrounded by a vast army determined to destroy him (Ps 27:2-3). The situation is so dire that he truly feels afraid that God might “hide his face” from him, which would mean abandoning him to his enemies.

It’s in that setting of real danger and real fear that he can affirm his faith that God will bring good, not harm, into his life: “I have sure faith that I will experience the Lord’s goodness in the land of the living” (Ps 27:13, CEB)! That’s quite an astounding statement! He’s not just saying that whatever happens in this life, he trusts God to fulfill his promises ultimately. He’s saying that he’s firmly convinced that he will see God’s goodness in this life. And the way this affirmation is worded in the Hebrew, we might say that this psalm singer had “established” or “solidified” his life by trusting in God.[4] In a very real sense, the God who Created all the heavens and the earth, the God who had been Israel’s Deliverer throughout the centuries, had become the “solid rock” on which he staked everything! In the midst of very real danger and equally real fear, the psalm singer puts his trust wholly and completely in God.[5] That’s the pattern of faith throughout the Psalms.[6] At the end of the day, that kind of faith allows him to say that since God is on his side, there’s no one and nothing in life that truly deserves his fear!

Bringing this back to our lives, the question this Psalm poses for us is whether we can put our trust in God as wholly and completely as the psalm singer did.[7] To be sure, it’s not an easy thing to do. And it’s not something that you start your faith journey being able to do. It takes time and experience to build up that kind of faith. And we learn it precisely by doing what the psalm singer calls us all to do: “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Ps 27:14). As we “wait” in faith and hope, in essence “relying” on God to bring good into our lives here and now, we’re staking everything on God, just as many others have done before us.

I think the essential factor in being able to do this in the face of real dangers and real fears is that we have to let go of our expectations about what God’s “goodness in this life” will look like. We all tend to have some expectations about that: “If God’s going to be ‘good’ to me, he’s going to give me what I want, or he’s going to make this problem go away.” Faith in God does not guarantee specific outcomes in life’s hardships. Sometimes life and faith are mysteries we simply can’t explain. Sometimes, we have to go out on a limb, and say with St. Paul, “If God is for us, who can ever be against us?” Sometimes we have to go out on that limb a little further and say with Paul, “nothing can ever separate us from God’s love” (Rom 8:33, 38, NLT). Nothing that life throws our way, nothing that anyone brings down on us, can ever separate us from God’s love! Even when our hardships don’t come to an end in the way we want them to, when we stake everything on God, come what may, we find God’s goodness in surprising places, sustaining us through it all, despite it all.[8] In a sense, this kind of faith, this level of trust, is about developing the capacity to see the good that God is always bringing into our lives, no matter what we may have to go through.

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[1] © 2025 Alan Brehm.  A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 3/16/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 2.3:616.

[3] H.-J. Krauss, Psalms 1-59, 337: “Even though still far from the sanctuary, the psalmsinger puts his confidence in Yahweh. He longs for the redeeming bestowal of salvation in the temple area and for being sheltered in the holy place (v. 4*). But the God of salvation (אלהי ישׁעי, v. 9b) is also present in the midst of the battle, in the midst of the external danger of his servant (vv. 1–3).”

[4] Krauss, Psalms 1-59, 336; cf. also H.-J. Krauss, Theology of the Psalms, 161: “האמין (“believe”) contains the root אמן (’aman), which means ‘to be firm,’ so that the hiphil of the verb could be translated as ‘make oneself firm,’ ‘have unshakable certainty’ (cf. Ps. 27:13).”

[5] Cf. James L. Mays, Psalms, 132: “Trust is active and real precisely when one is aware of one’s vulnerability, of one’s ultimate helplessness before the threats of life, ‘in the day of trouble,’ as the psalmist puts it.”

[6] Indeed, Karl Barth would say that is the faith of the Hebrew Bible. Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.3:618, “That God exists, and is true to Himself, is Israel’s help and consolation in death, its deliverance from death, and its hope.” While Barth speaks primarily of the “danger” posed by death, I think his observations relate to faith in God in general. He says further (p. 620), “All man’s [sic] deliverance, redemption, preservation, and salvation in and out of death is enclosed in God, in His existence in faithfulness. That it is all enclosed in Him and to be expected from Him, is the hope of the Old Testament in relation to death.”

[7] In fact, that is the testimony of the Psalms as a whole. As J. Clinton McCann, Jr., “The Book of Psalms,” New Interpreters Bible 4:667 puts it, in the Psalms to be “blessed” or “happy” “is to entrust one’s whole self, existence, and future to God.”

[8] Cf. Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, rev. ed., 189: “Remembering what God has done in the past and promises to do in the future,” which is the biblical foundation for trusting in God’s ongoing care, “recognizes signs here and now of God’s presence and work in our lives and the world around us.” (emphasis original)