The Great Recalibration Text: Psalm 77:10-15
Introduction: The Treachery of Feelings
We live in an age that worships at the altar of authenticity, and the high priest of that cult is raw, unfiltered emotion. Our feelings are treated as inspired, inerrant guides to reality. If you feel it, it must be true. If you are offended, you must be right. If you are anxious, the world must be ending. This is the catechism of the modern therapeutic mind, and it has thoroughly infected the church. Christians now routinely evaluate their spiritual state not by the objective promises of God's Word, but by the fickle churnings of their own gut.
The result is a brittle, unstable faith, tossed to and fro by every wave of circumstance. When things are going well, God is good. When we get the diagnosis, or the pink slip, or the prodigal son refuses to come home, we are plunged into a crisis. Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has He in anger shut up His tender mercies? These are the questions the psalmist Asaph asks in the first part of this psalm. He is in the dark night of the soul, and his feelings are screaming at him that God has abandoned him.
But this psalm is a hinge. It is a pivot point. It shows us the way out of the dungeon of our own emotional turmoil. The psalmist does not find his way out by generating a new, more positive feeling. He does not try to "manifest" a better reality. He performs a great, deliberate, cognitive recalibration. He stops looking inward at the chaos of his emotions and starts looking backward at the bedrock of God's revealed character and mighty deeds. This is the essential discipline for every Christian who wants to walk by faith and not by sight, which is to say, by faith and not by feelings.
What Asaph does here is lay down a pattern for us. When your heart lies to you, and it will, you must preach the truth to your own heart. You must take it by the scruff of the neck and force it to look at the evidence. And the evidence is not found in the morning's headlines or in your fluctuating blood pressure. The evidence is found in the unchanging character of God and His unalterable works in history. This is how we fight for faith. This is how we wage war against despair.
The Text
Then I said, “It is my grief, That the right hand of the Most High has changed.” I shall remember the deeds of Yah; Surely I will remember Your wonders of old. I will meditate on all Your work And muse on Your deeds. O God, Your way is holy; What god is great like God? You are the God who works wonders; You have made known Your strength among the peoples. You have by Your arm redeemed Your people, The sons of Jacob and Joseph. Selah.
(Psalm 77:10-15 LSB)
The Turning Point (v. 10)
The psalm pivots on this verse. The psalmist identifies the source of his anguish.
"Then I said, 'It is my grief, That the right hand of the Most High has changed.'" (Psalm 77:10)
Here is the lie that his grief was telling him. The "right hand of the Most High" is a biblical metaphor for God's power and saving action. It is the hand that parted the Red Sea, the hand that brought the plagues upon Egypt, the hand that upholds the universe. The psalmist's despair has led him to a terrible conclusion: God's power has waned. His ability to save has altered. He has changed.
This is the fundamental lie of unbelief. It assumes that God is like us, mutable, moody, and subject to change. It projects our instability onto the immutable Rock of Ages. But the Scriptures are clear: "For I, Yahweh, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed" (Malachi 3:6). Our very survival depends on the fact that God does not change. If God could change, He would not be God. He would be just another creature, a bigger and more powerful version of us, but a creature nonetheless. A god who can change is no god at all, and is certainly not a god you can trust.
The psalmist's honesty here is instructive. He voices the blasphemous thought that his heart was entertaining. He brings it out into the light. And the moment he articulates the lie, he sets himself up to demolish it. This is a key step. You cannot fight an enemy you will not name. The core of his grief was a theological error, a slander against the character of God. And the only cure for bad theology is good theology.
The Great Recourse (v. 11-12)
Having identified the lie, the psalmist now prescribes the cure. It is an act of deliberate, disciplined remembrance.
"I shall remember the deeds of Yah; Surely I will remember Your wonders of old. I will meditate on all Your work And muse on Your deeds." (Psalm 77:11-12 LSB)
Notice the repetition and the resolve. "I shall remember... Surely I will remember... I will meditate... And muse." This is not a passive daydream. This is active, strenuous, intellectual work. He is forcing his mind away from the swirling vortex of his present troubles and anchoring it to the historical acts of God. He is choosing his curriculum. He will not study his grief; he will study God's glory.
He resolves to remember the "deeds of Yah." This is not some generic positive thinking. He is calling to mind the specific, historical interventions of God on behalf of His people. He is thinking about the Exodus, the plagues, the parting of the sea, the manna in the wilderness. These are not myths or fables; they are the bedrock facts of Israel's history. Faith is not a leap in the dark; it is a step onto a solid foundation of historical fact.
And he doesn't just remember; he meditates and muses. This means he is not just listing the facts. He is chewing on them. He is turning them over in his mind, considering their implications, and extracting their theological nutrition. What do these acts tell me about the God I serve? What does the Exodus reveal about His power, His faithfulness, His covenant love? This is the process by which our minds are renewed. We don't just read the Bible; we wrestle with it. We meditate on it until its truth begins to saturate our thinking and displace the lies of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
The Theological Realignment (v. 13)
This meditation immediately bears fruit. It leads to a profound theological declaration that corrects the error of verse 10.
"O God, Your way is holy; What god is great like God?" (Psalm 77:13 LSB)
To say God's way is "holy" means it is set apart, distinct, and utterly unique. It is not like our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8). He does not operate according to our timetables or our expectations. The pagan gods of the nations were just super-powered, immoral humans. They were capricious, lustful, and unreliable. You could bargain with them, trick them, or appease them. But Yahweh is not like them. He is in a category by Himself.
This is the great comfort. Our God is not a bigger version of us; He is altogether other. And because His way is holy, we cannot judge His present silence or apparent inaction by our limited, creaturely perspective. We must interpret our circumstances in light of His revealed character, not the other way around. The psalmist's meditation on God's past works has reminded him of God's utter transcendence and sovereignty.
This leads him to the rhetorical question: "What god is great like God?" The answer is resounding. None. All the other gods are idols, the work of men's hands. They are nothing. To even compare them to the living God is a category error of the highest order. This is the beginning of true worship. It is the recognition of God's absolute uniqueness and incomparable greatness.
The Unchanging Character (v. 14-15)
The psalmist now builds on this foundation, rehearsing the very character of the God he has called to mind.
"You are the God who works wonders; You have made known Your strength among the peoples. You have by Your arm redeemed Your people, The sons of Jacob and Joseph. Selah." (Psalm 77:14-15 LSB)
He moves from a general statement about God's greatness to a specific declaration of His nature. "You are the God who works wonders." This is who He is. It is His nature to act in powerful, surprising, and redemptive ways. It is not something He used to do, but has now retired from. He IS the wonder-working God. His essence has not changed. The right hand of the Most High has not changed.
And these wonders are not done in a corner. He has "made known Your strength among the peoples." The Exodus was not a private affair. God intended for the pagan nations, for Egypt, for the Canaanites, for the whole world to see His power on display. God's redemptive work is a public declaration of His sovereignty over all nations and all false gods.
Finally, he brings it home to the covenant. Why does God do this? For whom does He bare His mighty arm?
"You have by Your arm redeemed Your people, The sons of Jacob and Joseph. Selah." (Psalm 77:15 LSB)
The ultimate motivation for God's action is His covenant faithfulness to His chosen people. He redeemed them not because they were worthy, but because He had made a promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The mention of "Jacob and Joseph" is significant. It points back to the origins of the nation in the patriarchal promises and their deliverance from bondage in Egypt. God's relationship with His people is not a temporary arrangement; it is an everlasting covenant.
The word "redeemed" is crucial. It means to buy back, to set free by the payment of a price. This points us forward to the ultimate act of redemption. If the psalmist could find such comfort and stability by looking back at the redemption from Egypt, how much more should we? We look back not just to the Red Sea, but to the cross of Jesus Christ.
The Gospel Recalibration
This entire passage is a blueprint for how Christians are to handle the onslaught of doubt and despair. Our feelings will tell us that God has changed, that His promises have failed, that His right hand has lost its power. And when they do, we must not argue with them on their own terms. We must perform the great recalibration.
We must remember the deeds of the Lord. We must remember His ultimate wonder, the incarnation, when the transcendent God took on flesh. We must meditate on His ultimate work, the cross, where He displayed His strength by being made weak for us. We must muse on His ultimate deed, the resurrection, where His mighty arm defeated death, hell, and the grave forever.
Our God's way is holy, supremely displayed in the mystery of the gospel, where His perfect justice and His measureless mercy met and kissed at Calvary. What god is great like our God, who saves His enemies by sacrificing His own Son? You are the God who works wonders, and the greatest wonder is that He has made His strength known not just among the peoples, but in our own dead hearts.
For He has, by the mighty arm of the cross, redeemed His people, the true sons of Jacob and Joseph, all those who are united to Christ by faith. He has not just redeemed us from a brickyard in Egypt, but from the bondage of sin and death. This is the unchangeable, historical fact upon which our faith rests. Therefore, when grief whispers that God has changed, we must shout back with the full force of redemptive history: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." Selah.