Psalm 108: Hesed

On the night of Jesus’ arrest, He said a lot of profound and important things. He commanded the apostles to love each other as He had loved them. He served them “the Lord’s Supper” from within their Passover celebration. He told them that one of them would betray Him, told Peter that he would deny Him three times by morning, told them that He was leaving but that the Holy Spirit would come. That night they rejoiced, they celebrated, and they grieved. There were things they understood, things they agreed with, and things they tried to reject. In the middle of it all, Jesus said to them what just might have been the most difficult thing to accept or accomplish, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.” 

How were they supposed to not let their hearts be troubled? Emotions were high, their feelings were raw, the news they were hearing was nearly impossible to understand and hard to accept, the circumstances were changing on them without notice. How, in the middle of all of this were they supposed to control their hearts? Was this a command to not feel what they were feeling? Were they supposed to pretend that everything was all right? They probably thought, as many of us would and have, that they could not help how they were feeling. And yet, at their lowest point, Jesus gave them not only a command to control their hearts, but the secret to fulfilling the command, “Believe . . .” 

Let us go back to a question that I ask often, “What do you know to be true?” Truth is an absolute, it is solid, immovable, it remains the same in every circumstance, season, age, and trauma. For something to be true, it cannot change. Truth is not the answer to a question or the outcome of a situation, it is the embodiment of God, there are glimpses of it in creation, but it is only found in the Creator. As John 14:6 reveals, truth is a person and Jesus is the person of truth. Emotions rise and fall, truth holds steady. Feelings come and go, truth remains. Our hearts get troubled, but Jesus never changes. He is the truth we can know, but even more, He is the truth we must learn to believe.  

Psalm 108 is a psalm of David, but David did not write it, not exactly anyway. If it sounded familiar when you were reading it, it is familiar. This psalm is a combination of Psalms 57 and 60, both written by David. Psalm 108:1-5 is nearly identical to Psalm 57:7-11 and 108:6-13 to Psalm 60:5-12. Someone at some point found so much solace in the words of David that he joined them together for himself. The truth that David had remembered in the past became the truth that our writer wanted to remember in his present. It was a different time and different circumstance, even a different man doing the writing, but the truth remained the same. 

Is that not what Jesus was telling the apostles in John 14? “Everything is about to change, your expectations are not going to get met, your disappointment is going to be real, your heart is going to want to be troubled, concentrate on, trust in, believe Me.” The truth we know leads to the actions we make, and those actions reveal what we really believe. All the important action verbs of the faith: trust, obey, follow, even love, bear with, endure and overcome, are all birthed in this one command, believe. The secret to controlling our hearts is found in what we believe. If we want to know what we really believe, we must look at our actions.   

James wrote, somewhat controversially, “Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” (2:17) His point was that belief that does not lead to action is not belief at all. He used physical examples, telling the cold or the hungry to go and be warmed and well fed neither warms nor feeds them. James writes that even saying, “God bless you” does nothing to help them. Then there are our personal and internal examples. We can sing “Jireh” and talk about God being our Provider, but until that truth battles back our anxiety when we need provision, we do not fully believe. We can quote Matthew 5:4, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted”; but we cannot say we believe it until we allow God to comfort us in our grief. We can declare, encourage, and even preach to others to “Trust in the LORD with all your heart” (Proverbs 3:5) but until I trust Him, stop leaning on my understanding, rehashing all the scenarios, and having my mood altered by what feels like me not getting my way, I do not yet believe. 

I am not writing today to question or judge your beliefs but to tell you a truth that often gets overlooked, believing is hard. But as difficult as believing might be, it is the key to freedom, to hope and maybe more than anything else, to joy. Psalm 108 begins with a statement of faith, “My heart is steadfast, O God!” The Hebrew word used there means “to stand perpendicular”. This was not a religious or hopeful statement; it was one that had been proven by being tested. He was also doing more than stating a fact, he was giving a testimony. Not only had he tasted and seen, but he had been tested and formed, he had not just gone through some stuff, he had been made by the stuff he had gone through. His heart was steadfast not because his troubles were over, but because he had learned to believe.

Jesus told the disciples exactly what to believe, “Believe in me”! He did not tell them to believe in what He would do or what the outcome would be, He told them simply but clearly, to believe in who He was, His heart, His character, to believe that He was and is the truth. 

In Psalm 108 we do not know what the problems were that Israel was facing at the time, we did not even know there was a problem until verse 6 when the author asks for them to be “delivered”. But two verses before, he told us what he believed: “For your steadfast love is great above the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.” Just like in our discussion of Psalm 107, the Hebrew word we translate as “steadfast love” is hesed. The Psalms use the word 127 times, all but three times to describe the heart of God. It can mean mercy, kindness, lovingkindness, and is most often and probably most accurately summed up as steadfast love. But even that does not really tell us the whole story. The word describes God’s covenant love for His people, it is filled with pictures of loyalty and faithfulness, it is the disposition of God’s heart, His nature toward us. John Oswalt wrote, “The word speaks of a completely undeserved kindness and generosity done by a person who is in a position of power.” Lois Tverberg wrote, “Hesed is love that can be counted on decade after decade. . . It’s not about the thrill of romance, but the security of faithfulness.”

The psalmist was writing from a deep belief in God’s hesed. He was not simply saying, “I know God loves me”, but “I believe in the love of God.” Jesus was commanding the apostles to control their hearts by believing in Him, in His hesed. Circumstances change, grief comes, losses occur, enemies gather, disappointment is real but the steadfast love of the LORD never ceases. Our calling is not to overcome our anxiety but to build our faith, it is not to change our feelings, but to believe in God. Sometimes it is not enough to remember what is true, we must stand perpendicular in our trouble because we are convinced that we will be held up by and surrounded with God’s steadfast love. That is how we control our hearts, we move from knowing and saying that God loves us, to believing it by living in it and from it. We push into the hurt rather than trying to go around it. We stop worrying about whether we will fall and begin to believe that He will catch us. Hesed, steadfast love, means not that everything will be okay, but that God’s love for me, His presence with me, even His Spirit in me, will endure through everything. Knowing gives us something to hope for, believing gives us the courage to go through. I know that you are loved, today I pray that you will believe in the One who loves you.