Today’s Passage: Psalm 44
Something changes in this psalm before we are two lines in, and it is the pronoun. Now it is we, and our fathers, and You have rejected us. A whole congregation stands and prays a single complaint together: they have not forgotten God, and yet they are still going down. We will let the psalm say exactly that, without reaching for some system that explains the pain away, because the psalm itself never reaches for one. Its last word is not an answer but a request, and we should leave it there where it ends. Rise up, and redeem us.
As you read, hold this: We have not forgotten You. Rise up; redeem us.
Context A Maskil of the sons of Korah, a nation's "we"
The heading tells us where the song comes from: “For the choirmaster. A Maskil of the sons of Korah.” It is the same house that gave us Psalm 42, though now a different mouth is singing. Notice that no particular battle is ever named in it. That silence is a kindness, for it lets later generations pick the song up as their own. Any people who find themselves defeated, with no ready confession to explain why, can still stand and pray these words.
Psalm 44:1-8 (BSB)
¹ For the choirmaster. A Maskil of the sons of Korah. We have heard with our ears, O God; our fathers have told us the work You did in their days, in the days of old. ² With Your hand You drove out the nations and planted our fathers there; You crushed the peoples and cast them out. ³ For it was not by their sword that they took the land; their arm did not bring them victory. It was by Your right hand, Your arm, and the light of Your face, because You favored them. ⁴ You are my King, O God, who ordains victories for Jacob. ⁵ Through You we repel our foes; through Your name we trample our enemies. ⁶ For I do not trust in my bow, nor does my sword save me. ⁷ For You save us from our enemies; You put those who hate us to shame. ⁸ In God we have boasted all day long, and Your name we will praise forever. Selah
Before there is any complaint, there is memory. The fathers told the children what God had done, and the children never forgot that it was not their own sword that won the land, but God’s hand, God’s arm, and the light of God’s millipnê, pronounced mil-lif-NAY. Strong's H6440, from before, away from the presence/face of. The word carries the sense of a face, and so of a presence, and so of favor. The light of God’s face once won a whole land for His people. Hold on to the word as you read, because verse 24 will take it up again and ask, in real pain, why that same face is now hidden from them. turned toward them in favor. Whatever hard thing they are about to say, then, is not the grumbling of a people who imagine they earned anything. They begin by handing God the whole of the credit.
Psalm 44:9-16 (BSB)
⁹ But You have rejected and humbled us; You no longer go forth with our armies. ¹⁰ You have made us retreat from the foe, and those who hate us have plundered us. ¹¹ You have given us up as sheep to be devoured; You have scattered us among the nations. ¹² You sell Your people for nothing; no profit do You gain from their sale. ¹³ You have made us a reproach to our neighbors, a mockery and derision to those around us. ¹⁴ You have made us a byword among the nations, a laughingstock among the peoples. ¹⁵ All day long my disgrace is before me, and shame has covered my face, ¹⁶ at the voice of the scorner and reviler, because of the enemy, bent on revenge.
It all turns on one small word: But. And the accusation that follows is aimed straight at God. You have rejected us, You have made us retreat, You have given us up, You have sold Your people for nothing. A whole congregation says this out loud, in words that were written to be sung together. The Psalter does not ask them to go and manage the anger privately first and come back composed. It hands them the words and lets them sing the grief as it is.
Psalm 44:17-22 (BSB)
¹⁷ All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten You or betrayed Your covenant. ¹⁸ Our hearts have not turned back; our steps have not strayed from Your path. ¹⁹ But You have crushed us in the lair of jackals; You have covered us with deepest darkness. ²⁰ If we had forgotten the name of our God or spread out our hands to a foreign god, ²¹ would not God have discovered, since He knows the secrets of the heart? ²² Yet for Your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.
Study notes Suffering without a stated cause
This community is not confessing some hidden sin as the reason for its suffering. It is doing the opposite: it is insisting there is none. Other psalms will confess real guilt plainly when guilt is the truth of the matter, but this one refuses that shape, because it does not fit. Faithful people do sometimes suffer while remaining faithful, and the hymnbook of God’s people gives them words for exactly that, without handing them a tidy explanation that ties it all off.
Verse 22 is the hardest line of all. They face death all day long for God’s sake, it says, not in spite of serving Him but because of it.
Paul, when he reaches for that very verse, will not soften it either. He takes it up and uses it to close one of the great passages of the New Testament.
"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For Your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 8:35-39 (BSB)
Paul agrees with the psalm completely. Believers really do face death all day long, and he does not pretend otherwise. But then he draws the line the sons of Korah could not yet see all the way to: none of it, not trouble or danger or sword or death itself, can separate us from the love of God in Christ. That love was never waiting for the suffering to end before it took hold.
Psalm 44:23-26 (BSB)
²³ Wake up, O Lord! Why are You sleeping? Arise! Do not reject us forever. ²⁴ Why do You hide Your face and forget our affliction and oppression? ²⁵ For our soul has sunk to the dust; our bodies cling to the earth. ²⁶ Rise up; be our help! Redeem us on account of Your loving devotion.
Wake up, they cry, as if God had merely fallen asleep. Why do You hide Your face? It is the same word, pānīm, from verse 3, the face whose light once won them everything. And here is the honest, difficult end of it: no angel arrives on the page, and no enemy turns and retreats. The psalm simply runs out while they are still asking. The last ground they have left to stand on is God’s ḥesed, His loving devotion, and that is exactly where they plant their final plea: redeem us on account of Your loving devotion.
We have not forgotten You. Rise up; redeem us.