Today as we were wandering around the picturesque streets of Prague, we happened on a small protest. I can’t tell you what it was about but I’m guessing from the word ‘discriminazione’ on one of the posters and an icon of a adult and a child, that it was about fair wages.
It was a peaceful protest on the steps of one of the government offices. To be honest, having heard some of Australia’s union bosses go hammer and tongs and berate the government of the day, it all seemed a little mickey mouse. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a couple of people smirking at each other. I interpreted the smirk as ’isn’t this cool…and aren’t we being a little naughty?!”.
I think it sowed the seed of a thought. A couple of hundred metres later I blurted out to Fi: “The kingdom of God is not a totalitarian regime”. I think I got a “heh, what do you mean?”
On Tuesday we had gone on a tour of the city and the tour guide had told us about the countless years of oppression under communist rule. Of giant Stalin statues, of low education, of high censorship, and of discouragement from expressing any form of protest.
The idea of expressing thought, let alone complaining, in a totalitarian/communist regime is to put your hand up for pain.
The people I saw today were smirking because they were enjoying freedom. They were getting a taste of the upside of living in a society where it was ok to have a whinge, ok to complain and ok to be grateful.
The Psalms introduce us into this new humanity (which is actually recovering our first nature) where we get to have intimacy, through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, with our Heavenly Father.
Some of what we read in the Psalms takes us back. “You can’t say that to God”, we might think. You can convince yourself that you have no right—no right to express to the King of Kings the seeming injustice on your life, the pain you’re feeling or the suffering going on around you. But in stifling your ‘humanness’ before a Holy God, you’re denying this glorious truth: ‘the Kingdom of God is not a totalitarian regime’!
Our heavenly Father loves us, cares for us, hears our prayer, responds to our need, comforts us, shelters us, and holds us. As Psalm 71 tells us, he rescues and delivers us in his righteousness. He is the refuge to which we can always go. He can be trusted with our complaint, our joy, our sorrow and our heartache. In fact, to hide or deny the truth of our souls from a Holy God is weird strategy when you think about it.
David et. al. model so much raw honesty through the Psalms that it can feel quite confronting. Yet I reckon, as we get on with being increasingly human in our responses before God, we should do so with the sort of smirk on our faces that I saw today.
One that embodies the verse ‘it is for freedom that you have been set free’. We’ve been set from from sin and death so that we can live in Christ, enjoy His freedom and bring every care to Him.
I love that David is so overwhelmed by the goodness of his God that he ‘knows not how to relate them all’. And though he has seen the darkness that he relates in v19-21 he is reassured that God will comfort him once again. His lips will shout for joy at the deliverance he anticipates.
Praise be to God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!