You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me with honor [or: to glory]. (
Psalm 73:24, NRSV)
Martin Luther once said that he was attracted to pictorial Scriptures, especially the Psalms, because they awakened emotions within his soul. Luther often recited psalms to himself aloud, wanting to imprint them firmly in his consciousness. He afterward contemplated them, intent to act upon what they offered.
1Our text is from a psalm; it is a pictorial verse whose message will steady and reassure you as you deal with the sometimes painful process of recollecting the past, and the always problematic business of anticipating the future. The text offers a word of assurance for the living of our days, a steadying word about why we can affirm the future.
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The theme of divine counsel is highlighted throughout the Bible, but that theme saturates the psalms. Like us, this psalmist knew that we humans are chronic mistake-makers when left to ourselves, so he anticipated receiving counsel from God to grant him the wisdom and courage needed for life at its best. All humans need God's counsel, and we can all have it, but only those who rightly value life receive that counsel with joy and follow it in trusting obedience.
Roger Hazelton, one of my beloved professors at Oberlin Seminary, used to remind his students that God has a "controlling interest in the course of our living from day to day, an interest on which we can rely and with which we may in some real measure cooperate."
2 Divine counsel is readily available to us in Scripture and by God's Spirit, and to follow it is to invest our conditioned freedom wisely in God's will. The counsel helps us to anticipate life and meet it with wisdom.
II. We can affirm the future because God's counsel grants a clear perspective by which to view and deal with it.Perspective is a calculated angle of vision that grants the viewer a sense of the wholeness of what is being viewed. As in art, so in life, a right place to stand and view things is a key factor for meaning and value. Given the brokenness of this world, the logic of life is not immediately apparent; we are more apt to appreciate and value life when we have found the right place at which to stand and view it. Let me illustrate what I mean.
Early in this century, Paul Laurence Dunbar composed his poem about "Life." The poem is short but its message is pungent. It begins:
A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in,A minute to smile and an hour to weep in,A pint of joy to a peck of trouble,And never a laugh but the moans come double;And that is life!Dunbar was lamenting his hard and sometimes tragic existence as the black son of former slaves. But notice the next section of the poem: