Psalm 44

There is nothing else in the world like being a parent. Especially when you have a baby, you realize how children are constantly changing. Nothing much stays the same. They are always growing, learning, and maturing. It’s an amazing process. In our view, maturity has a lot to do with age. While this isn’t always the case, the older a person is, usually the more mature he is. So, the job of parents is to raise their children from infancy to adulthood, guiding them through the process of maturity.

God is also a parent, and He is also trying to guide His children through the process of maturity. The difference is that, when it comes to spiritual maturity, age is not a deciding factor. For example, when the Israelites were brought by God out of Egypt, the majority of them were adults, but they were spiritual infants. With respect to their moral development, they were babies. That’s why we see God doing so much of what He does in the Old Testament: You treat babies differently than you treat adults. You treat immaturity differently than maturity.

The author of Psalm 44 begins by recounting the war victories God had given to Israel in the past: “With your hand you drove out the nations and planted our ancestors; you crushed the peoples and made our ancestors flourish… Through you we push back our enemies; through your name we trample our foes… you give us victory over our enemies, you put our adversaries to shame.” (vs 2, 5, 7)

It’s no doubt that when God brought Israel out of Egypt, He needed to first establish them as a nation—one nation under God. In the culture of the day, disputes between nations and disputes between gods were settled on the battlefield. It was simple: if your god was the strongest, then you would be victorious in battle. So, when the Israelites insisted on going to war with the surrounding nations, God brought them battle victories not only in order to establish them as a nation, but also in order to communicate to the other nations that the God of Israel was the true God.

However, as stated numerous times throughout the Old Testament, God’s purpose in establishing the Israelites as His people was so they could communicate about Him to the other nations. The Israelites were never supposed to destroy everyone else and live like kings for the rest of their lives. They were called to be a nation of missionaries—to help heathen people come to an understanding of God.

But becoming a nation of missionaries requires maturity.

So, I believe that God wanted to move them along in their spiritual development, and that’s why the author of Psalm 44 went on to say this: “But now you have rejected and humbled us; you no longer go out with our armies… All this came upon us, though we had not forgotten you; we had not been false to your covenant.” (vs 9, 17)

At some point, though the people had not been unfaithful to God (which was usually the reason why they experienced defeat on the battlefield), they stopped experiencing victory in battle. I believe this is because God wanted them to stop fighting. Once they had seen the evidence that He was the true God and knew that He would take care of them (which they certainly knew, because the author admitted it in verse one), they were ready to advance in their spiritual development.

They didn’t need to fight any longer. They didn’t need to continue to experience battlefield victories to know that their God was the one, true God. Instead, God wanted them to grow up and grow past that to the point where He could communicate through them in different ways—not with the sword. At least on this occasion, it seems that they still had quite a ways to go in the maturation process.

What about us? God would also like to help us mature in our spiritual development. But it is so much easier to want to remain like infants—to have life be nothing more than a joyful string of eating, playing, and sleeping experiences. When the hard moments come, will our spirit shrink back from the suffering? Or will we, like our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, embrace the struggles that we encounter, knowing that we are safe in the hands of our God?

Like every good parent, God is interested in helping His children mature. And we can trust Him to know just how to lead us through that spiritual development… in the right way, at the right time.