"Make us glad according to the days wherein thou has afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil." (Psalm 90:15)Is our life only a pouring out of affliction? Has its content been through the years only evil? It is true there is evil in our days, and affliction. We share our existence with evil. Why would we want to be glad about God measuring out affliction for us? Or is this really what the Psalmist is saying? The Psalmist is giving voice to measure upon measure of truth. The truth of God's holiness is a cause and a category unto itself, or rather one that is beyond category and cause. It is. God the Father's actions are holy* and we do no other worthy action ourselves than be glad in God's actions, to acknowledge that God has acted. The sharp bitterness of life itself is a gift. We are tempted to think that we are like God (or some "equivalent") sometimes, or that God should be like us. The Psalmist is saying (I propose) that God is God and man is distinct as His creation, that this divine relationship of Creator-created is true. That in itself is close to the pinnacle of human understanding. Closer still to the summit is our hope. We look for a hope - and that is our comfort, beyond this affliction. Through our Savior and the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, we have learned to have this hope.
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*The presence of evil in this world, the City of Man, in the context of God's holiness is addressed in a similar manner. We as humans lack the ability to comprehend the greater context, the true context of God's holiness. It is as if we are given two pieces of evidence. The first is our faith which is true. The second is the world around us which is true. Paul writes famously in Romans 8:28 that "all things work together for good to them that love God." One way to think about this, perhaps, is that our first truth, that of faith, encompasses, swallows up the second. There are not two truths, of course, only One.
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