Have You Not Rejected Us, God?

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1. Observe

   What has God done to his people in verses 1-3?

   • Blessed them with prosperity
   • Protected them perfectly
   • Rejected them, broken them down, been angry; shaken the land and torn it open; shown them hard things; made them drink the wine of staggering
   • Multiplied their territory

2. Observe

   What is the contrast between "the help of man" (v. 11) and what God can do (v. 12)?

   • Man's help is reliable; God's is uncertain
   • The help of man is vain (worthless, ineffective); through God, however, "we will do valiantly, for it is he who will tread down our adversaries"
   • They are equally valuable
   • Only man's help is mentioned

3. Interpret

   What does bringing accusation ("you have rejected us") and request ("restore us") in the same breath require theologically and relationally?

   • Lack of faith
   • Confusion about who God is
   • A covenant theology that recognizes God's sovereignty over even the bitter providence (so the accusation is theologically honest) AND a covenant relationship robust enough to hold complaint and petition together; mature prayer can name what God has done while pleading for what God will do, because trust is in his character and not in our present interpretation
   • Disrespect for God

4. Interpret

   What is the difference between doing things "for God" and doing them "through God" (v. 12), and why does it matter?

   • There is no difference
   • "For God" frames the work as our offering to a God who will then judge it; "through God" frames the work as God's action accomplished by means of us — the location of agency shifts; this matters because "for God" easily collapses into religious self-effort, while "through God" keeps the believer dependent and the credit God's, which is the only way the difficult task can actually be done valiantly
   • "For God" is always better
   • The phrases mean opposite things

5. Apply

   How can the church pray communally when facing difficulty or defeat?

   • By avoiding communal prayer
   • By insisting all is well
   • By naming the collective loss honestly, by lamenting together (the canonical psalms model this), by asking God to restore corporately, by recognizing God's sovereignty over the difficulty, and by anchoring corporate hope in God's oracle of ownership — refusing both denial and despair, and forming the community in honest dependence
   • By blaming individual members

6. Apply

   How does the exhaustion of human help (v. 11) become an entry point for divine help?

   • It doesn't — exhaustion is just exhaustion
   • Exhaustion of human resources removes the alternatives that ordinarily disguise our dependence on God; with no other route, the soul comes to God not as one option among many but as the only refuge — and discovers that he is sufficient; this is not God making us desperate, but circumstances clearing away the distractions that always pretended to be primary
   • Self-effort is the only real help
   • Exhaustion proves God's absence

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