The Severe Mercy of a Covenant Lord Text: Psalm 44:9-16
Introduction: When God Fights Against You
We come now to a passage that is a hard pill for the modern evangelical to swallow. We like our God manageable, our blessings predictable, and our victories guaranteed on our terms and on our timetable. We are comfortable with the first eight verses of this psalm, which recount the mighty deeds of God, how He drove out the nations and planted His people. We like a God who is always manifestly "for us" in a way that can be easily tracked on a quarterly report. But the psalmist, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, slams on the brakes and executes a hard turn. The music changes from a triumphal march to a funeral dirge. The mood shifts from boasting in God to a raw, honest complaint lodged directly at the throne of God.
This is a corporate lament. This is not one man's dark night of the soul; it is the cry of a nation that feels abandoned by the God who made them. And what is more, they will go on to protest their innocence. This is not the familiar territory of a Nehemiah 9, a corporate confession of rank apostasy. This is the baffling experience of righteous suffering on a national scale. This is a people who, by their own testimony, have not forgotten God or dealt falsely in His covenant, and yet they are being hammered. Their armies are routed, their people are plundered and scattered, and their name has become a punchline among the pagans.
So what are we to do with this? The first thing we must do is recognize that God Himself put this prayer in the mouths of His people. He authorized this complaint. This is not faithlessness; this is the cry of a covenant son to a covenant Father, asking what in the world is going on. It is the honest language of a relationship, not the flattery of a courtier. God is not a fragile deity who shatters if we ask Him hard questions. He invites us to wrestle with Him.
The second thing we must do is reject the morass of sentimentalism that defines so much of modern Christianity. Our God is a sovereign God, which means He is sovereign over our victories and He is sovereign over our defeats. He is the one who gives, and He is the one who takes away. And sometimes, for His own inscrutable and glorious purposes, He takes His people to the woodshed. He does this not because He has ceased to love them, but precisely because He does. This is the severe mercy of a covenant Lord, stripping away every false confidence so that our only confidence may be in Him alone.
The Text
Yet You have rejected us and brought us to dishonor, And do not go out with our armies. You cause us to turn back from the adversary; And those who hate us have plundered us for themselves. You give us as sheep to be eaten And have scattered us among the nations. You sell Your people for no amount, And You have not profited from their price. You make us a reproach to our neighbors, A mockery and a derision to those around us. You make us a byword among the nations, A laughingstock among the peoples. All day long my dishonor is before me And the shame of my face has covered me, Because of the voice of him who reproaches and reviles, Because of the presence of the enemy and the avenger.
(Psalm 44:9-16 LSB)
The Divine Rejection (v. 9-10)
The psalmist begins this section with a blunt and startling accusation.
"Yet You have rejected us and brought us to dishonor, And do not go out with our armies. You cause us to turn back from the adversary; And those who hate us have plundered us for themselves." (Psalm 44:9-10)
Notice the direct address: "You." There is no beating around the bush. The psalmist does not attribute this defeat to bad luck, superior enemy tactics, or a failure of military intelligence. He lays the responsibility squarely at the feet of God. You have done this. You have cast us off. You are the reason our armies no longer march to victory. The Lord of Hosts is no longer going out with our hosts. This is a foundational lesson in biblical realism. All things, including military defeats and national humiliation, are under the direct, sovereign decree of God. To say otherwise is to embrace a practical deism, where God winds up the clock and then lets it run on its own.
This is a frontal assault on all forms of the health and wealth gospel, whether applied to individuals or to nations. The Bible does not promise a life of uninterrupted victory and ease. The covenant promises blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. But it also reveals a God who will test His people, who will prune them, who will discipline them, and who will sometimes lead them through the valley of the shadow of death for reasons that are not immediately apparent. The dishonor they feel is real. The plundering is real. And God is the ultimate cause. He is not a passive observer in the grandstand of history; He is on the field, directing every play.
When our armies turn back, when our cultural institutions crumble, when those who hate the faith plunder our heritage, the first question is not "Where is the devil in this?" but rather "Where is God in this?" What is He teaching us? He causes us to turn back from the adversary. Why? Perhaps because we have begun to trust in the army, in the political process, in our own strength. God will not have His people trust in chariots and horses. He will personally orchestrate their failure until they trust only in the name of the Lord their God.
The Divine Judgment (v. 11-12)
The psalmist continues to pile up the charges, describing the totality of their ruin in stark, economic, and agricultural terms.
"You give us as sheep to be eaten And have scattered us among the nations. You sell Your people for no amount, And You have not profited from their price." (Psalm 44:11-12 LSB)
The imagery is brutal. The Shepherd of Israel has apparently handed His flock over to the wolves. "You give us as sheep to be eaten." This is not just defeat; it is consumption. It is utter destruction. And not only are they being devoured at home, they are being scattered abroad. This points to the covenant curse of exile, the ultimate sanction for a people who were defined by their presence in the land God had given them.
Then the psalmist uses the language of the slave market. "You sell Your people for no amount." This is the ultimate indignity. It's one thing to be sold into slavery; it's another to be treated as worthless, to be given away for free. The complaint is that God has disposed of them as though they were cheap refuse. "You have not profited from their price." God didn't even get anything out of the deal. This is the depth of their humiliation. Their suffering seems utterly pointless, a cosmic fire sale where God gets nothing and they lose everything.
Of course, we know from the rest of Scripture that God always has a purpose. But from the ground, in the midst of the humiliation, it can feel meaningless. This is an honest prayer. It is the cry of a people who feel they have been devalued and discarded by the one who was supposed to be their protector. This is what it feels like to be under the heavy hand of God's fatherly discipline. It feels like rejection. It feels like you have been thrown on the trash heap of history.
The Public Reproach (v. 13-14)
The consequences of this divine action are not private. They are intensely public, leading to international mockery.
"You make us a reproach to our neighbors, A mockery and a derision to those around us. You make us a byword among the nations, A laughingstock among the peoples." (Genesis 44:13-14 LSB)
Again, the agency is God's. "You make us..." God is the one orchestrating this public relations disaster. The people of God, who were meant to be a light to the nations, a city on a hill, have become a joke. Their neighbors, the surrounding pagan nations, are pointing and laughing. Israel's God, they would say, is weak. He cannot protect His own people. Look at them, scattered and defeated. Their God is no better than our gods.
This is the great agony for the true believer. It is not just our own suffering that grieves us, but the reproach that falls upon the name of our God. When the church is corrupt, when Christian leaders fall, when Christian nations decay, the world does not blame the church; it blames the church's God. Our failure brings dishonor to His name. And the psalmist feels this keenly. They have become a "byword," a proverbial example of what happens when a people are abandoned by their deity. They are a "laughingstock."
We must understand this in our own context. When the West, which was built on the foundations of Christendom, gives itself over to decadence, foolishness, and self-destruction, the world mocks. And they mock our God. This public shame is a tool that God uses to chasten His people. He will make us a spectacle. He will allow our folly to be put on public display until we are sick of it, until we are humbled by it, and until we cry out to Him to vindicate not our name, but His.
The Pervasive Shame (v. 15-16)
The corporate, external reproach leads to a constant, internal sense of shame.
"All day long my dishonor is before me And the shame of my face has covered me, Because of the voice of him who reproaches and reviles, Because of the presence of the enemy and the avenger." (Psalm 44:15-16 LSB)
The psalmist, speaking for the nation, cannot escape this feeling of disgrace. It is before him "all day long." It is the first thing he thinks of in the morning and the last thing on his mind at night. The "shame of my face has covered me" is a Hebrew way of saying he is utterly consumed by it. He cannot look anyone in the eye. This is not the godly sorrow of repentance, but the raw humiliation of public failure.
And the source of this is constant. It is the "voice of him who reproaches and reviles." It is the taunts of the enemy, the jeers of the unbeliever, the smug satisfaction of the pagan who sees the people of God brought low. This is spiritual warfare. The enemy loves nothing more than to see the saints disgraced, to point at their suffering and say, "Where is your God now?" The enemy is an avenger, one who seeks to settle a score, and he delights in the downfall of God's elect.
This is a profound description of what happens when a Christian culture collapses. The shame is pervasive. The taunts are relentless. The enemies of God are emboldened. And it is in this place of utter humiliation that God often does His deepest work. He brings us to the end of ourselves, to the end of our cultural capital, to the end of our political solutions, so that we have nowhere else to look but up.
Conclusion: The Logic of the Covenant
So what is the takeaway? Are we to conclude that God is fickle, or that our faith is in vain? Not at all. We are to conclude that God is a covenant-keeping God, and His covenant has two sides. He is a Father, and a good father disciplines his children. This entire litany of disasters is a description of covenantal discipline. God is sovereignly orchestrating this national humiliation in order to purify His people.
This psalm is a gift because it gives us a script for when we find ourselves in such a position. It teaches us to be brutally honest with God. It teaches us to trace all events, good and bad, back to His sovereign hand. It teaches us to care deeply about the public reputation of His name.
And for us, who live on this side of the cross, this passage has an even deeper resonance. For there was one who was truly innocent, who never broke covenant, who was nevertheless given over as a sheep to be slaughtered. Jesus Christ was sold for a pittance, thirty pieces of silver. He was made a reproach, a mockery, and a derision. The shame of our sin covered Him. He endured the ultimate divine rejection on the cross, crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
He did this so that the final word for us would not be rejection, but redemption. He endured the full measure of the covenant curse so that we might receive the full measure of the covenant blessing. Therefore, when we as a people, as a nation, or as a civilization experience the lash of God's discipline, we do not despair. We see it as the act of a loving Father. And we know that because of Christ, this discipline is not punitive, but restorative. It is designed to drive us back to the cross, back to the source of our hope. This humiliation is the necessary prelude to exaltation. This defeat is the strange and glorious pathway to ultimate victory. For our God brings low, and He also raises up, and He does all things for the glory of His name.