Psalm 66:8-20 Commentary

Psalm 66 requires a bit of a theological balancing act.  On the one hand most of this song is a pretty straightforward expression of thanksgiving to God for delivering the psalmist from plights of various kinds.  The songwriter had passed through a season of suffering.  And so he cried out to God to save him.  He made vows and promises that if God came through for him, he’d repay God the kindness by offering sacrifices and praises in God’s Temple.  What’s more, he’d spread far and wide the wonders of God, calling on all people to consider the deeds and the works of God and for them to then join the psalmist in being a member of God’s praise team or choir as a response to seeing God’s wondrous deeds.

Again, all pretty straightforward.  Such language of deliverance and subsequent praise for that salvation is pretty common across a lot of the 150 psalms in the Hebrew Psalter.

Except then we need to puzzle out verses 10-12.  Because suddenly the psalmist lays the cause of his recent sufferings and trials at the feet of God.  “You tested us,” the psalmist writes. “You brought us into prison.  You laid heavy burdens on our backs.  You let people trample all over us and beat us down.”  Hmmm.  Those are some pretty active verbs with God as the subject.

Unlike some psalms, including ones we’ve considered just recently in the Year A Lectionary in Eastertide, the “blame” if you will or the “cause” of the bad season the psalmist endured is here not chalked up to the machinations of enemies or foes—people who count as enemies of God therefore as well.  Instead, God himself seems to be the proximate and ultimate reason these bad things came the psalmist’s way.

There is a sense, then, that what parts of Psalm 66 boil down to is something like:

You tested me and directly placed me in a bad place.

I cried out to you to get me out of that bad place where you placed me.

You did get me out of that bad place (where you had put me in the first place).

Therefore, I am going to praise your name for getting me to a better place of abundance and safety.

There are few theological questions so vexing as the theodicy-related questions of why bad things happen to us; why bad things happen to otherwise mostly good people who try to follow God in their lives.  And perhaps the Book of Psalms is not the place to go looking for definitive answers to all that.  This is poetry after all not systematic theology or philosophy.  So we could play a little fast and loose with parts of Psalm 66.  Does this poem intend to teach us that God is directly responsible for even the more unhappy things that come our way?  Or could we read this as saying that maybe God allowed these things to happen (verse 12 after all does use the word “let” with apparently the sense of “allow)?

Some philosophers like Alvin Plantinga have suggested that one way to understand our world is in terms of what he called “strong actualization” and “weak actualization.”  That is, perhaps to allow for things like truly free will and to avoid a pre-programmed creation in which we are scripted to do what we do (thus depriving us of being able to generate genuine love among other things), God had to allow for the possibility of people’s choosing badly.  So when a bank robber shoots and kills a teller, this happened because in the grand scheme of things God set up a world where this tragedy was possible—God then weakly actualized the shooting.  But God did not strongly actualize the shooting in the sense that this was something he arranged and executed.

In that case Psalm 66 could be saying that although God may not be directly responsible for imprisonment and the laying on of heavy burdens and being trampled upon by others, ultimately God is somewhat involved in all that and perhaps when such things happen, God is able to turn them into a test that may well lead to something good in our lives.  But when God delivers us from dire straits, that is a strongly actualized action of God—God did this saving with intentionality.

Is this all getting a bit ponderous?  Perhaps.  It reminds me of comment Psalms scholar John Goldingay wrote: The Psalms represent some of the most robust and thick theology in the whole Bible.  The Psalms are not just pretty songs whose words now and then can be transferred onto counted-cross-stitch wall hangings.  We do well to wrestle with the theology here.

And as preachers we need to know that when we preach on something like Psalm 66, we do so in front of people who have lost children or who are agonizingly watching the slow deterioration of a spouse from dementia.  And for people like this, the idea that God brought them these things in some strong fashion is likely to feel scandalous and offensive.  And it will raise a whole cloud of questions in people’s minds and hearts.  We preachers would do well to anticipate this a bit ahead of time to do some pastoral care work in the sermon itself.  Yes, we are right to praise God when something good happens or when someone gets healed or led out of a dire situation.  But we don’t also have to say that God directly willed any of that to happen in the first place or that when the healing does not come, this is every bit as much God’s doing as when a healing comes.

Probably we need to be a bit careful with also verse 18 where the psalmist says “If I had harbored sin in my heart, God would not have listened to my prayer.”  Again, let’s be overt to point out that it may be true that God may not listen to someone actively engaged in wicked behavior and with little or no intention of stopping.  But it does not follow that every time a given prayer for deliverance or healing is not answered as we’d hoped, the reason is that God rejected the prayer because we are too sinful for God to listen to.  Remember this is pretty much the conclusion of Job’s friends: “Bad things have happened to you, Job, so come on now, ‘fess up: What did you do!?”

Along with the psalmist, it is always right for us to give God all the glory for the good things he brings us, for the prayers he answers, for the salvation that comes.  But life is sufficiently complicated that we don’t want certain lines in something like Psalm 66 to obscure the due expressions of gratitude and we certainly don’t want anyone listening to a sermon on this song to be made to feel unworthy or sinful or that they are the victims of a capricious God who actively doles out bad things to his people.  That is most certainly not the bottom lie of this psalm.

Illustration Idea

Kate Bowler wrote a book a few years ago titled Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved).  And since this psalm sermon commentary on Psalm 66 ended up pondering the things Bowler writes about, I commend the book to you but you can more quickly pick up the gist of her thought in a TED Talk video she recorded around the time she was working on her book.  You can view this talk on YouTube here.