When the Foundations are Destroyed: A Meditation on Psalm 11
Note: Besides singing Psalms 10 and 11 at Evening Prayer, we also read Genesis 19.1-29 and 2 Peter 2.4-11, both treating Lot and the destruction of Sodom, to which Psalm 11 alludes.
The time we live in is, in many respects, the greatest time in the history of the world. We have unbelievable prosperity; we heat our homes with the flip of a switch, and unlike thousands of years before us, we can cool our homes, too. We have a government that, despite its problems, keeps the roads open, walls off the sea for the low-lying cities, and keeps the peace. The libraries provide free books and internet for the use of all people; even the uninsured are given care at the world’s greatest hospitals, and we all have benefited from immunizations, vaccinations, and medications that keep us alive from sicknesses and diseases that killed our ancestors. We live in the greatest country in the history of the world, at the most prosperous time in the history of the world.
Yet despite all that, we do not feel secure. Tomorrow our nation will remember the horrific attacks by Muslims against us – and it would take only one Muslim success with a dirty bomb or deadly toxin, and our lives and world would be changed forever. Unrest in the credit markets and the global oil trade make us wonder if our economy is a house of cards that might come crashing down, and our comfortable lives along with it. Communist powers are rising again, and arming themselves. And Church leaders, Lutheran and otherwise, are too busy with marketing and fundraising schemes to notice the apostasy that has almost overtaken us. Our country faces dangers within and without; and the doctrine, worship, and morals of the Church are collapsing so fast it seems that we cannot survive.
It is a comfort to know that we are not the first to confront such questions. Holy David said in tonight’s Psalm, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” How beautiful the answer! It is not up to us, who fain righteousness or who would like to be righteous. “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? The LORD is in His holy temple; the LORD’s throne is in heaven.” Change and decay in all around I see – but the throne of the LORD was, is, and every shall be firm, fixed, unchanging. Christ Jesus, the God-Man, has ascended to the right hand of the Father, and the certainty of His throne, His rule, His atonement, His resurrection, His Words and promises, are our hope when the foundations of world and church seem to be crumbling.
Catastrophic times are indeed coming. Did you think we could escape them? As it was in the days of Lot, when men were buying and selling, eating and drinking, and what is worse, when men exchanged the natural use of the love of women for the unnatural love of men, so it is today. As in the days of Noah, as in the days of Lot, men were unaware of the impending judgment. Coals rained down on the wicked, fire and sulfur and a scorching wind were poured into their cup. In a world where unrighteousness is presented as good, where wickedness is blessed in churches, where courts release the guilty and senators condemn babies to death, what is given to us to do is to pray Psalm 11 and other psalms like it.
But when we pray, we must not do so pretending we are the righteous ones spoken of in the psalm. The righteous, upright, just man in the psalm is our Lord Jesus Christ. On His hard arms, so widely flung, He bore the weight of all this world’s injustice and wickedness. Yet that death became the foundation for our life, and our only hope when we see the foundations of this world tottering, and even the foundations of the church. For our church is not founded on a deed to a property, the families and history of our congregation, a synod, a program, or a logo. The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord. “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” There is nothing for us to do. By our own strength and power we cannot sustain our congregation, synod, or country. “The LORD is in His holy temple; the LORD’s throne is in heaven.” He is our foundation, He is our Lord, He is the king of the universe, and He will deliver His people just as surely as He delivered Lot. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the Lord’s Church, because it is founded on a permanent, everlasting, unmovable foundation, even the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. So go in peace and joy, and never despair, about anything.
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The battle is the Lord's. Like the man who built his house, not on sand, but with a firm foundation, we need to be sure our foundation is Jesus Christ.