Two of my nephews are Eagle Scouts. They started in scouting early on and worked their way up to Eagle Scout. The oldest has been an Eagle Scout since 1993. One of the requirements that they had to achieve was a canoe trip up in Canada. My brother accompanied the scouts on this particular occasion and he related a story of what happened on one particular day. As they canoed, they would often have to get out of the water and carry their canoes and supplies across stretches of forest. One of the boys would be designated to carry the food pack, which had all of the food for the entire troop. During one of these treks across land, the boys became separated by long distances. The boy who was carrying the food pack, stepped off into a quagmire of mud and brush that had become known as moose muck.
Fortunately, when he landed in the moose muck, he landed on tree. He could barely keep his head above water. The food pack weighed him down to the point that he was unable to climb out, but the tree trunk kept him from sinking any further. But the problem was, they had spotted a few bears as they made their journey. He began yelling for someone to find him. He became worried that one of those bears might smell the food he was attached to and decide that there was more of a meal there than just the food pack. Finally, after what seemed like hours, someone heard him and was able to help him out of his very serious problem.
God Rescues Us From Impossible Situations
Like this young boy scout, the psalmist found himself in great difficulty.
But unlike the boy scout, the psalmist’s troubles seemed to be beyond even the greatest human effort. His own efforts only proved the final futility of the problem. But God intervened, and the psalmist responded to that intervention with a fresh sense of praise and a new demonstration of obedience.
By asking God alone to act, you can find a way out of your difficult situation.
No matter how impossible things seem, you can come back to God.
The psalmist’s words present a memorable picture of human helplessness: "He brought me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay..." The words picture a deep pit where even deeper waters resound from a horrible cavern further below. Such pits were used a dungeons (Jer. 38:6), pitfalls for wild beasts (Ps. 7:15), or even as a grave (Ps. 28:1). The words could also refer to a horrible pit of desolation, a roaring, resounding pit of spiritual tumult.
The noise could be that of water at the bottom of the pit. Or the noise could refer to the screams of soldiers, their armor crashing and clanging as they plunged into its depths.
We can imagine that the bottom of the pit was a muck of filthy mire, much like the moose muck our young scout fell into. The more the psalmist struggled to get out, the deeper he sank into the bog. Such places were found at the bottom of disused cisterns in the Holy Land. Jeremiah had known the experience of being placed in just such a place as this while he was a prisoner of conscience for his preaching. The depth, the noise, the sinking slime all add up to an unforgettable picture of an impossible situation.
What kind of experience led the psalmist to express himself this way?
It may have been a military defeat, the opposition of wicked people, sickness, or the impossible situation created by personal sin in his life.
We do not know ... and maybe that is best. Not knowing the cause, we can identify our own impossible situation with the psalmist’s.
Where is your place of impossibility? Is it a relationship? You never meant it to become what it has become, but now there is nothing you can do about it. Is it a habit? At first it seemed harmless, superficial, non-threatening. You thought you could stop at any time you desired. But now, like the young scout in the moose muck, you are trapped.
Is it a bitterness, a gnawing thing within you that sours all of life and makes every day heavy with the desire for revenge? Is it a past failure, a sin,
a lapse you thought was impossible for you? Now the horizon of every day hangs heavy with the sense that you have crushed something that can never be repaired, broken something that can never be mended. Is it a loss, a loss so profound that life has lost all significance and you really have no desire to go on?
Suddenly God moves into the difficulty and the entire situation changes. From the bottom of a pit, the psalmist is elevated to the safety of a rocky cliff.
Sinking in the instability of the bog, he suddenly finds sure footing on stable ground. God not only gave him present safety but also future stability. Immersed in a threat that would have ended his life, the future opened up before him. It all happened so suddenly .... because of the intervention of God.
Another example, this time from the animal world, shows how God makes provision for stability, in the most difficult circumstances. In bold defiance of gravity, the mountain goats that live from the Northwest United States through Canada into Alaska demonstrate incredible stability in the most difficult of terrains. They leap surefootedly from mountain ledge to mountain ledge, scampering around steep, rugged mountainsides with the utmost confidence.
Unusually flexible, the two toes of the goat’s hoof can spread apart wider than the hoof is long to distribute the animal’s grip. Or they can draw together to grasp a knob of rock. The goat also have a rough, pliable traction pad on the bottom of each toe which makes them skid-resistant on ice. Dewclaws projecting from the rear of the ankles provide additional traction on steep, downhill routes.
Just as God makes provision in the animal world for creatures to stand with stability in the most difficult of terrain, He will surely make provision for His redeemed children to stand stabilize you in the midst of insuperable difficulty.
The Bible includes many stories describing how God dealt with impossible situations. We believe these stories. We believe that God gave Abraham a baby when the old man was ninety-nine and his wife Sarah was almost as old. We believe that God used an eighty-year-old, tongue-tied shepherd to pull off the Exodus. We believe that God marched a ragtag army of Hebrew slaves around Jericho and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. We believe a teen-age boy killed a giant with a stone, and a handful of fishermen turned the world right-side up with the message of Christ. We believe that the God of the Bible could do all this.
And what is more, we believe that God can do this today for others, even for our friends. If a friend came to you with the confession of some great failure, you would pray for him or her, and offer the reminder that God can rescue His people from anything.
We believe all this ... as long as it is in the Bible or happening to somebody else. But Psalm 40 means that God can deal with the impossibility of your life!
How do you make this happen? The secret is in verse 1: "I waited patiently for the Lord; And He inclined to me, and heard my cry." There is an emphatic repetition in the original language: "I waited, yea, I waited." The resounding of the words indicates a total reliance on God alone to extricate him. This also suggests an exclusive waiting on God: "I simply waited; I did nothing but wait." You must deliberately and exclusively wait on the intervention of the Lord. The opposite of waiting on God is to fret, be angry, and to take matters into your own hands (Ps. 37:7).
God may place you in an impossible situation where only a divine act can deliver you. But the promise is that God will hear and respond to those who ask for His help. The image is that of one leaning forward to catch a faint or distant sound. The God of the cosmos hears and intervenes for those who cry to Him.
We’ve heard stories of how waiting has saved people from impossible situations here on earth. For example, there’s the story of Barry Beck, a thirty-four-year-old geology professor and a veteran of caving, who led a group from the Georgia Southwestern College Outdoor Club on an expedition to Anderson Springs Cave in the Appalachians of northern Georgia. By 4:30 on Saturday afternoon they had been in the cave five hours, following an underground stream that was nearly a mile beneath Pigeon Mountain. Suddenly the stream began to rise.
Where water had been dripping from the walls, it suddenly came gushing out like water from fire hoses. What they did not know was that the hardest rain to hit the mountain in fifty years had created tons of water pressure on top of the cave.
The spelunkers made their way back upstream to a large cavern and climbed to a ledge about forty feet above the rising water. Their teeth chattering, their limbs jerking, they knew the possibility of hypothermia, shock and coma. Finally, Beck found a sort of den under the cave roof. To keep warm, they stacked themselves like cord wood. Then there was nothing to do but wait in the pit and listen to the roar of the rushing water. Their situation seemed impossible ... until a scuba diver made his way up the roaring underground river thirty hours after their ordeal began. They had to wait; they had no other choice. (Reader’s Digest, July 1980, pp. 55-58).
Similarly, God sometimes makes us wait for His intervention. Psalm 46 records a situation where God’s people needed His help, but He did not intervene until the last moment: "God will help her when morning dawns." After waiting throughout the night for divine help, the people were about to give up. At the peep of dawn, the last possible moment before their enemy invaded, God demonstrated His power to rescue.
Sometimes God waits until we and everyone around us clearly see that our only hope is His intervention. God also waits because there is a renewal of our strength in the process of waiting. "Yet they that wait upon the Lord Will renew their strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not grow weary, They will walk and not faint" (Isaiah 40:31). Literally, those who wait on God "exchange" their weakness for strength. When we are spent, tired and exhausted we need to exchange our “spentness” for His power.
We feel like a flat tire. We wait on God. He fills us with Himself again. In the act of waiting, there is an exchange of our emptiness for His fullness.
Responding Appropriately to God’s Delivery
How do we respond when God rescues us from an impossible situation? We can respond first with fresh praise to God: "...He put a new song in my mouth..."
How long has it been since you have praised God with a new song?
God had done such a dramatic new thing in the psalmist’s life that none of the old psalms would do. He wrote a new victory hymn celebrating God’s recent deliverance in his life. The emphasis rests on the new quality of the song, not just its recent composition. The phrase may suggest constantly new songs, each one succeeding the other as daily new material offers itself for praise. Or the word may suggest newness in the sense of always being fresh and full of life. The believer lives constantly with that sense of newness: a new name (Rev. 2:17), a new commandment (John 13:34), a new covenant (Heb. 8:8), the new Jerusalem (Rev. 21:2), and a new man (Eph. 2:15).
God can bring fresh praise out of both tragedy and glory, as illustrated by this story about a favorite hymn. Luther Bridgers began preaching at the age of seventeen while he was a student at Asbury College in Kentucky. He was a young Methodist minister of unusual zeal and evangelism. In 1910 the future looked bright for the twenty-six-year-old preacher, who by then had a young wife and three children. The Bridgers family was visiting Mrs. Bridgers’s parents at Harrodsburg, Kentucky.
After the family retired for the night, a neighbor noticed flames coming from the house. He roused Mrs. Bridgers’s parents and Luther, but the rest of the family were beyond reach. The young pastor lost his wife and children.
In the awful days of sorrow that followed, Luther remembered that God offered songs of comfort in the night (Ps. 42:8), and would never forsake him. It was during this period that Luther wrote the words and music that we sing so many times: "There’s within my heart a melody Jesus whispers sweet and low fear not, I am with thee, peace be still; in all of life’s ebb and flow."
In the fourth stanza he referred to his own experience: "Tho sometimes he leads through waters deep trials fall across the way..."
In the darkest night, in the depths of despair, God gave an inward song to Luther Bridgers that blesses millions. Out of a pit of grief came a song of blessing.
Part of the reason for the psalmist’s new song the was impact of God’s intervention on those who observed his life: "Many will see and fear, and will trust the Lord" (Psalm 40:3). God’s act will compel the attention of bystanders to the power of God. Does anything in your life do that?
You can also respond with a new obedience when God rescues you from impossible situations. When the psalmist struggled with how to express gratitude toward such a delivering God, he weighed all of the outward religious rituals of his day. Animal sacrifices, meal offerings of fine flour, burnt offerings indicating total dedication, and sin offerings propitiating God all presented themselves as possible ways to indicate gratitude. But God does not want ritual; He want reality. He desires us to be in harmony with Him rather than perform ceremonies for Him.
The psalmist expresses that he has heard God: "My ears thou hast opened" (40:6b). This unusual phrase meant that God had broken through at a new level of speaking to the inward person. The result of that is an immediate sense of obedience to the will of God. "Then I said, ’Behold, I come’ ... I delight to do They will, O my God" (40:7-8). These are the characteristic words of a servant who comes immediately to do the will of the master.
When will we learn that God wants obedience and reality above all else?
Everything else is ritual. The only real response to God’s intervention in your life is to hear and obey. When you do so, you will have a new song for God to sing tomorrow and every day.
When you come back to God, He meets you at your point of impossibility.
