Prayers from the Rearview Mirror of the Foxhole
You, Lord, keep my lamp burning;
my God turns my darkness into light.
With your help I can advance against a troop;
with my God I can scale a wall.
- Psalm 18:28-29
Undoubtedly, we’ve all been there. In the depths of the foxhole with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune whizzing above us, we drop to our knees with hands clenched together to offer the most fervent and desperate of prayers to God for deliverance.
This was David. On the run from the all the king’s horses and all the king’s men who tried to trap him and end his life, he prayed with a desperation worthy of, well, a man after God’s own heart.
And God answered. God thwarted the malevolent schemes of Saul and his henchmen and spared David’s life, which sets up the key question: what does life look like when we emerge unscathed from the foxhole?
When deliverance occurs and hope finds a way when no seeming way exists, our memories tend to shorten.
Put it another way. How often do we gather under the beauty of a rainbow to thank God for his thunderstorm-laden answer to our fervent prayers? The prayers for deliverance are rife with intensity. Are the prayers of gratitude quite as impassioned as the prayers we utter in the foxhole? Maybe we could learn a thing or two from David.
He gives quite the prescription for a post-deliverance anthem of praise. For the first 19 verses of this Psalm, David recounts, in script worthy of a novelist, the epic deeds of his God. He starts by explaining the dire circumstances:
The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me. - vs. 4-5
Pinned in the sober clutches of such menacing environs, David explains the way God roared to deliver David. The picture he paints is equal parts gripping and inspiring, evoking images of a superhero stopping at nothing to bring his beloved to safety.
Smoke rose from his nostrils;
consuming fire came from his mouth,
burning coals blazed out of it.
He parted the heavens and came down;
dark clouds were under his feet. - vs. 8-9
After a few more imagery-rich verses, David finally gets to the simple blessed fact of God’s rescue:
He brought me out into a spacious place;
he rescued me because he delighted in me. - vs. 19.
That whole recounting of the epic nature of God’s rescue is a backdrop to the text for today. David next realizes that he did nothing to enact his salvation except remain faithful. David doesn’t revel in his military strategy nor celebrate his wilderness survival skills. He acknowledges that he tried to be true, and God honored that commitment.
I have been blameless before him
and have kept myself from sin.
The Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness,
according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight. - vs. 23-24
Sometimes it’s hard to be stand up against wrongdoing, especially when we’re standing alone, when it seems like everyone else choose the wide path with no seeming consequences. David testifies to the fact that the Lord cares for the righteous. He loves the devotion of his people.
After David acknowledges that all he’s done is remained faithful, he frames the whole experience with recognition. He again extols the Lord for who he is, our great deliverer and the one who saves us from times of trouble. Maybe David’s line in verse 28 features just the right imagery for us when we experience God’s deliverance:
You, Lord, keep my lamp burning;
my God turns my darkness into light.
It’s the Lord who keeps our collective lamps burning, who lights our frightened path to the foxhole and illumines our way when we emerge from it again. When the trials pass and we get rescued time and time again, our posture on the other side says as much as our knelt-down prayer pose in the foxhole. Maybe in the aftermath, there are two takeaways for us from this passage for when we face woe and experience the deliverance of the Lord:
1. We must remain faithful, realizing that such devotion is the only thing that God really wants from us.
2. We must pause after a time of deliverance and testify to the Lord’s surpassing greatness.
He is, after, as David says, a God of perfection and refuge:
As for God, his way is perfect:
The Lord’s word is flawless;
he shields all who take refuge in him. - vs. 30.