The Logic of Covenant Complaint Text: Psalm 44:23-26
Introduction: Prayer That Rattles the Windows
We live in an age of polite, domesticated, and ultimately anemic Christianity. Our prayers are often tailored to be inoffensive, not just to God, which is impossible, but to anyone who might be listening in the next pew. We ask for blessings as though we were Oliver Twist asking for a bit more gruel, careful not to be a bother. We have been taught a certain kind of piety that confuses reverence with a quiet and servile timidity. And because of this, we are often baffled by the raw, sinewy, and muscular prayers we find in the Psalter.
The Psalms are full of prayers that would get a man escorted out of most modern prayer meetings. They are loud, they are insistent, and they are sometimes shockingly blunt. The psalmists accuse God of falling asleep, of hiding His face, of forgetting His people. And this is not the raving of apostates; this is Spirit-inspired worship. This is what it sounds like when saints get desperate in a covenantal way.
Psalm 44 is a corporate lament. It is the cry of a nation that has a long memory of God's faithfulness but is currently experiencing the sharp end of His providence. They have been loyal. They have not forgotten the covenant. They have not bowed the knee to Ba'al. And yet, they are being routed by their enemies, disgraced, and sold for a pittance. They are, as the apostle Paul would later quote this very psalm, "accounted as sheep for the slaughter."
Our text is the climax of this lament. It is the point where the psalmist, on behalf of the people, grabs God by the lapels, so to speak, and demands a hearing. This is not the prayer of unbelief. Unbelief just walks away and mutters. This is the prayer of a robust and tested faith. It is the cry of a son who knows his father's character so well that he can appeal to that character against the father's apparent actions. This kind of prayer is only possible within the sturdy bonds of a covenant relationship. It is because they know God is faithful that they can challenge Him so boldly when He appears to be otherwise. This is not insolence; it is the logic of covenant complaint.
The Text
Arouse Yourself, why do You sleep, O Lord?
Awake, do not reject us forever.
Why do You hide Your face
And forget our affliction and our oppression?
For our soul has sunk down into the dust;
Our body cleaves to the earth.
Rise up, be our help,
And redeem us for the sake of Your lovingkindness.
(Psalm 44:23-26 LSB)
The Divine Summons (v. 23)
The prayer erupts with a startling command:
"Arouse Yourself, why do You sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not reject us forever." (Psalm 44:23)
Now, let us be clear. The psalmist does not believe, and neither should we, that the God who neither slumbers nor sleeps has actually dozed off. Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal with this very taunt, "Cry aloud, for he is a god; either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened" (1 Kings 18:27). The psalmist knows God is not Baal. So what is this?
This is the language of appearance, the language of faith grappling with providence. From their vantage point in the dust and blood of the battlefield, it looks like God is asleep at the switch. His inaction, His silence, His apparent indifference to their plight makes it seem as though He is sleeping. So they cry out based on what they see, in order to appeal to the One they cannot see. It is a rhetorical device born of desperation, a way of saying, "Lord, your current posture toward us is so out of character that the only way we can describe it is to say that you must be asleep!"
This is a profoundly theological statement. It assumes that God's normal, waking state is one of active engagement, deliverance, and justice for His people. Sleep is the anomaly. Their suffering is the anomaly. Their prayer is an appeal to God to be Himself again. "Awake, do not reject us forever." The fear is not just the present trouble, but that this apparent rejection will become a permanent state of affairs. Faith looks at the stopwatch of suffering and cries out to God that time is up.
The Covenantal Accusation (v. 24)
The psalmist presses his case with two more pointed questions.
"Why do You hide Your face and forget our affliction and our oppression?" (Psalm 44:24 LSB)
To have God's face shine upon you was the great blessing of the Aaronic benediction (Numbers 6:25). It meant favor, presence, and fellowship. To have God hide His face was the ultimate curse. It meant abandonment and judgment. The psalmist is asking, "Why are we being treated like apostates when we have remained faithful?" Earlier in the psalm, they made their case: "All this has come upon us, but we have not forgotten You, nor have we been false to Your covenant" (v. 17). Their hearts had not turned back.
This is the central tension of the psalm. They are experiencing the curses of the covenant while, by their own testimony, keeping the terms of the covenant. So they ask why. "Why do you forget our affliction?" Again, this is not a literal charge of divine amnesia. God cannot forget. Rather, it is a cry that says, "Lord, you are acting like one who has forgotten. Your promises say one thing, but our experience says another. We are holding up our end. Why, it appears, are you not holding up yours?"
This is the kind of honesty that our modern therapeutic piety cannot handle. But it is thoroughly biblical. It is Job's cry. It is Jeremiah's cry. And ultimately, it is a dim shadow of Christ's cry from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus was the only one who could ever plead perfect innocence, and yet He experienced the ultimate hidden face of God, the ultimate divine forgetting, so that we who are guilty might never have to.
The Depths of Despair (v. 25)
The psalmist grounds his urgent plea in the reality of their utter degradation.
"For our soul has sunk down into the dust; Our body cleaves to the earth." (Psalm 44:25 LSB)
This is a picture of total defeat and humiliation. They are not just beaten; they are prostrate. Their faces are in the dirt. The language here evokes the curse of the serpent in Genesis 3, who was condemned to eat dust. It also evokes the sentence of death on Adam: "for you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). They are at the very brink of death and dissolution as a people. They have hit rock bottom.
Their soul, their very life-force, has sunk. Their body is glued to the ground. There is no strength left in them to rise. This is not a minor setback. This is a catastrophic collapse. And it is from this lowest possible point that they make their final appeal. Their helplessness is part of their argument. They are saying, "Lord, if you do not act, no one can. We are done for. We are in the dust, and we cannot get up. Our only hope is a rescue from outside, a rescue from above."
The Ultimate Appeal (v. 26)
The psalm concludes not with a demand based on their own righteousness, but with an appeal to the very character of God.
"Rise up, be our help, And redeem us for the sake of Your lovingkindness." (Psalm 44:26 LSB)
After all the bold challenges and raw complaints, the prayer lands on the only solid ground any prayer can ever have: the character of God. "Rise up, be our help." This is a call for a divine intervention, a theophany. It is a plea for God to get off His throne, as it were, and to enter the fray.
But notice the basis of the appeal. It is not, "Redeem us because we have been so faithful." They already made that point, but they know it is not the ultimate basis. Their faithfulness is a condition of the covenant, but it is not the ground of the covenant. The ground of the covenant is God Himself. So they plead, "redeem us for the sake of Your lovingkindness."
That word "lovingkindness" is the great Hebrew word hesed. This is not a sentimental, squishy affection. Hesed is covenant loyalty. It is steadfast, unrelenting, stubborn, faithful love. It is God's commitment to be our God because He has sworn an oath to be our God. The psalmist is saying, "Lord, act. Not for our sake, ultimately, but for Your name's sake. For the sake of Your reputation as a covenant-keeping God. Your hesed is on the line here. If you let us go down into the dust, what will the pagans say about your faithfulness?" This is the final and unanswerable argument in the court of heaven. We do not appeal to our merits, but to His mercy. We do not appeal to our performance, but to His promises.
The Cross as God's Answer
How does God answer such a prayer? In the short term, we do not know how this specific crisis was resolved for Israel. But in the long run, in the ultimate sense, God answered this prayer in a way they could never have imagined. He did arise. He did come to be their help.
The Apostle Paul takes up a quote from this very psalm to describe the condition of Christians. "As it is written, 'For Your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered'" (Romans 8:36). Paul places this verse in the middle of the most triumphant declaration of God's love in all of Scripture. How can this be? How can the experience of being slaughtered sheep be part of our victory?
Because God did not just "rise up" from heaven; He came down. The Son of God took on flesh and entered our dust. His soul, too, was sorrowful, even to death. His body was laid in the dust of the tomb. God, in Christ, hid His face from His own Son on the cross. On that cross, Jesus experienced the ultimate divine "sleep," the ultimate "forgetting," the ultimate rejection that we deserved for our faithlessness.
And then, on the third day, God the Father answered the cry of Psalm 44 once and for all. He said, "Awake! Rise up!" And Jesus Christ rose from the dead as the great helper and redeemer of His people. He was redeemed from the dust not for His own sake alone, but for the sake of God's eternal hesed toward us.
Therefore, we can now pray with this same covenantal boldness, but with even greater confidence. When we are in the dust, when it seems God is asleep, when His face is hidden behind a frowning providence, we can point to the cross and the empty tomb. We can say, "Arouse Yourself, O Lord! Not just on the basis of your ancient promise, but on the basis of the finished work of Your Son. Redeem us, help us, for the sake of the hesed you displayed and sealed in His blood." Because of Christ, we know that even when we are being killed all the day long, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For He is the God who wakes up.