The following paragraph quoted from a recent re-translation of the Psalms by one of the world’s foremost ancient Hebrew scholars, Robert Alter, poses a serious challenge to some of Reformed theology’s most cherished theories about the doctrine of faith and God’s will in respect of the difficulties every believer faces on this earth in the here and now.
The question Alter raises for Christians is whether we are being scripturally honest if we relegate all hope of deliverance and rescue to the “great bye and bye”, and ignore Alter’s powerful justification for reading the promises of the Psalms as unmistakable evidence of God’s clear will for a present rescue, in this life, out of our most dire afflictions.
The “spiritualization of the promises”, meaning that the promises are not to be taken literally, but are intended strictly for the domain of the eternal and unseen, is how modern Western theologians sought to maintain the truth and inerrancy of God’s promises of rescue in the face of mountains of empirical data to the contrary. In other words, we in the West have concluded that problem of unfulfillment of the ‘very great and precious promises’ lies not with us but with the Lord – not with our fecklessness but, presumably, with His. So through the “spiritualization of the promises” approach, theologians and the religious hierarchy have graciously fashioned an exit option for the Lord so that He does not lose face with us.
Whether intentionally or not, they’ve also conveniently shielded themselves from any questioning or testing of their own faith.
The result, of course, of this daunting level of presumption has been the emasculation of faith, and a church largely crippled by a passivity and a theology of helplessness that often ensures the triumph of Satan and His schemes in our lives, while the promises of God are deemed inapplicable to life on earth and therefore remain unrealized. (I have not addressed the obvious insult to the Lord in our deeming it necessary to protect His reputation from His own words. But see what happened to poor Uzzah when He dared to lay His hand on the Ark of the Covenant as it tottered in the ox-driven cart on the way to Jerusalem. (2 Sam. 6))
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Here’s the excerpt. Please read carefully:
The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary
By Robert Alter
Introduction, Section iv, par. 9:
…
‘Salvation” is the term that the translators in 1611 (King James) chose to represent the Hebrew ‘yeshu’ah’, and it has shown more than a little persistence in the various modern versions. “Salvation” is a heavily fraught theological term, pulling in tow all sorts of associations of eschatological redemption or radical spiritual transformation and sublime elevation of the individual sinner. In Christianity, it also implies a particular Savior (whose name is derived from this verbal stem); in post-biblical Judaism as well, the Hebrew word ‘yeshu’ah’ comes to designate a global process of messianic redemption. But in Psalms this noun and its cognate verb hoshi’a are strictly directed to the here and now. Hoshi’a means to get somebody out of a tight fix, to rescue him. When the tight fix involves the threat of enemies on the battlefield, yeshu’ah can mean “victory”, and hoshi’a “to make victorious”, more commonly both the noun and the verb indicate “rescue.” It will no doubt take getting used to for some readers to feel comfortable with “the God of my rescue” instead of “the God of my salvation”, but that is precisely the sort of readjustment of mind-set that this translation aims to effect. The relationship between man and God is as urgent as readers of Psalms in English have always imagined, but it is not enacted in the kind of theological theater that has conventionally been assumed. The psalms of supplication, where rescue is the central issue, are poems emerging from the most pressing sense of personal or collective crisis. The speakers in these poems, however, do not seek some transport to a different spiritual realm, some radical transformation of their inward self. Instead, they implore God to extricate them from terrible straits, confound their enemies, restore them to wholeness and safety. Notions of the heavens opening and flights of angels in glorious raiment bearing redeemed souls on high have their own excitements, but they are not within the purview of these Hebrew poets. This translation is an effort to ground Psalms in the order of reality in which it was conceived, where the spiritual was realized through the physical, and divine purposes were implemented in social, political, and even military realms. [End of quote]
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Just think: the promises in the Psalms are now to be viewed as a solemn blood covenant promise would be viewed by any two human blood covenant partners, meaning that they apply with full force to the immediate and the pressing, the frightening and the deadly, the here and the now, that they marshal the full resources of both covenant partners to meet any threat, and that the penalty for any breach of the promise is death, except for this one difference:
As we know from Genesis 15, the blood covenant partner to the covenant with Abraham from which sprung the promises of the Psalms, is the Holy One of Israel, the Creator of All Things. Think about that for a moment, for what it really means is that if God did not fulfill even a single covenant promise to any of us at any time, God would immediately ‘off’ Himself, and the Universe, no longer sustained by Him, would immediately disappear…
Apparently, those are the stakes.