Psalm 30 Commentary

A core tenet of the Christian faith is, to quote from the much-loved hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” “Thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not, as Thou hast been, Thou forever will be.”  The more fancy theological term for this is the Doctrine of Divine Immutability.  Or we sometimes say God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  God and now our God in Christ is the great Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last and in between those two temporal poles God remains the same.  Sometimes the idea of Impassibility enters in here too: God is not subject to the whim of emotions much less emotional change or alteration.  God does not suffer and he is not a being who blows hot or cold such that you never know which you’ll get moment to moment.

Some of that could make parts of Psalm 30 a little difficult to parse.  On the one hand the God of Israel is clearly portrayed as a saving God, a God who listens to our prayers and a God who most certainly harkens to our cries for mercy and deliverance from grave distress.  The psalm opens with an exultation for the way God delivered the psalmist—David by tradition—from a dire situation that appeared at the time to be headed toward certain death.   The psalm is bookended with a similar sentiment of how God took a season of weeping and mourning and turned it into a jubilant season of dancing and rejoicing.

But then in between we get a couple of crosscurrents.  First we are told that although God is very loving, he can also become angry.  That anger may last “only for a moment” but apparently being on the receiving end of some serious divine pique is a possibility.  Then in verse 7 we are told that it seems also to be possible that at any given moment God might “hide” his face from us, just stop looking our direction or somehow God prevents us from being able to see God even if we try to locate him.

So what do we make of that and how does it square with the doctrines mentioned above on Divine Immutability and Impassibility?  Well perhaps the first question is the easier to answer.  If nothing else, the psalms reflect the human experience.  The psalms are at times brutally honest about the fact that now and then we are in a time of lament and we complain to God for his apparent absence, for his failure to hold up his end of the covenantal bargain.  Or we have moments of intense anger at our enemies, at those evildoers who trample on the innocent and seem over and again to get away with murder.  And so curses and imprecations get lobbed in their direction and the psalmists were not shy about enlisting God’s aid in snapping teeth out of mouths or breaking arms and performing other mayhem.

Perhaps as part of that honesty in reflecting common human experience, what we get in Psalm 30 is a reflection that sometimes it surely seems like God is angry with us.  Sometimes is sure seems like God has hidden the divine face from us.  Sometimes it feels like our prayers are bouncing off the ceiling and not coming anywhere close to making it all the way to God.  Does the fact that this is how things seem to be once in a while mean that this is the actual state of affairs?  Is God really angry with us?  Has God actively taken steps to move away from us, to hide from us?  Well, here we have to admit that we may not always be sure.  Perception does not always equal reality.  In fact, many times it doesn’t.  But that’s how it feels and if nothing else, Psalm 30 reflects on this experience.

The second question raised above is more difficult, more theologically fraught.  The simplest way to square Immutability and Impassibility with such experiences would be to say flat out that as a matter of fact the psalmist’s perceptions most definitely do not equal the divine reality.  Our doctrines about God rule that out.  If we start with human experience and try to build doctrine on that foundation alone, we may be led into error.  Instead we begin with God’s revelation to us as to God’s nature and demeanor such that if we encounter something that flies in the face of those doctrines, then it is our perception that is in error, not the theological underpinning of the doctrines.  Theology says certain things cannot happen and therefore they never do.

We could perhaps throw in two small caveats however.  First, even our best theology is not infallible.  The Word of God from which doctrine springs is reliably infallible in all it seeks to reveal and teach.  Absolutely.  But that does not mean we always interpret that Word with 100% correct precision.  We can get it wrong and in the 2,000 year history of the Christian Church, we have gotten it wrong, repented of our errors, and revised various doctrines or interpretations of Scripture.

Second by way of a caveat is the simple fact that the Word of God from which we derive Immutability and Impassibility does not always run in straight lines that make every story and detail (or psalm in this case) align precisely with some of our doctrines.  In the Old Testament God is repeatedly said to be capable of anger.  In the Flood story God is said to grieve and he is also said to change his mind.  The Flood made some kind of sense to God as a response to the intense grief he felt over how wayward his imagebearers had become and how they had besmirched his good Creation with their wicked ways.  A good cleaning was in order and hence the Flood.  Yet when it was done God is all-but depicted as repenting of that, hanging up his bow in the sky and declaring, “I’m never going to do that again.”

Is that all just metaphor?  Or does it point to the idea that although we persist in believing in the unchanging core attributes of God, perhaps as those attributes interact with a sometimes messy race of human beings made in the divine image things are more complex than what the simple and rigid lines of our doctrine might suggest.  Maybe.

As Christians we believe God does not punish us anymore for our sins.  That punishment—all of it according to Scripture—fell on Jesus so it did not fall on us.  He took our place.  But might God still allow certain things to happen to us as a consequence of certain sins but God then uses that as a tool of sanctification, as a form of discipline to help us grow more into Christlikeness?  That also seems biblically true.  And might such seasons be a time when it seems God has hidden God’s face from us, is maybe even angry with us?  Well, let’s not deny that might be how it feels even if we might need to parse it pretty carefully.

However, if a few lines or words within Psalm 30 raise such clouds of practical and theological questions for us, the tenor of the whole psalm and surely its beginning and its conclusion remind us of something that transcends all of that: God is good.  God is love.  God is compassionate.  God wants us to flourish and has done and will do all he can to ensure it.  The posture of faith is that even when we wrestle with certain unhappy seasons or difficult questions, we do all of that nestled in the palm of an all-loving God who will not let us go.  And it is for that deliriously happy reason that we can all echo the final verse of Psalm 30: I will praise you Lord God forever!

Illustration Idea

The German professor I had for my very first college class back in 1982 was a man named Wally Bratt.  Not only did Professor Bratt become a favorite professor and then a vital advisor and mentor to me, he slowly on became a close friend, then a confidant and colleague, and later for twelve years I became his pastor.  Wally died on Easter in 2021 and among the reflections I put together for an initial memorial service and then later the full funeral was the fact that every time I came to Wally over the years in moments of distress as a college student, a seminarian, a friend, and later as his pastor, the last words Wally invariably spoke at the conclusion of our longer conversations were “Joy cometh in the morning, Mensch.”

Wally was a saint (though I can feel his cringing at that even as I write it) and as such, he reflected the posture of all the saints.  Specifically an unshakeable core belief that although we can never deny that difficult moments and seasons come to even the most faithful of Christ’s disciples, God is still out ahead of us leading to a better new morning of a new day dawning.  And when Christ’s kingdom fully comes and the New Creation is upon us, it may indeed be so that looking back, all the weeping we did may look but a fleeting moment, the passing of a short night, compared to the joy and the rejoicing we will forever have with our loving God.