12 What man is there who desires life
and loves many days, that he may see good?
13 Keep your tongue from evil
and your lips from speaking deceit.
14 Turn away from evil and do good;
seek peace and pursue it.
15 The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous
and his ears toward their cry.
16 The face of the Lord is against those who do evil,
to cut off the memory of them from the earth.
17 When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears
and delivers them out of all their troubles.
18 The Lord is near to the brokenhearted
and saves the crushed in spirit.
19 Many are the afflictions of the righteous,
but the Lord delivers him out of them all.
20 He keeps all his bones;
not one of them is broken.
21 Affliction will slay the wicked,
and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.
22 The Lord redeems the life of his servants;
none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.
I reached out to the young woman in my History and Literature of the Old Testament class. She had not shown up for a couple of class periods. I wondered what had happened. She tearfully told me her story. It was not new or unusual, but bitter in its familiarity. She had wanted so much to go to college. Her parents had urged her, she believed the marketing rhetoric of the schools, and she knew the statistic that said a college degree meant higher income levels for graduates. But she was leaving. She could not do it for one reason or another. She felt like a failure and a great disappointment to so many people, including her parents and this professor.
I find this psalm hard to pray sometimes. I think of this young woman and the many others who did not complete their degrees but did complete too many loan applications. The psalmist says that God has his eyes on the righteous and turns his face against the wicked. He takes care of his faithful and condemns those who hate righteousness. But so often the world I see does not look like what the psalmist sees. It looks quite the opposite. Those who make the predatory loans buy vacation homes in the Caribbean and my former students work menial jobs to pay off those loans.
But then the psalmist gives me verse 20. Did that jump out to you as well? John quotes when he speaks of what happened after Jesus died on the cross (Jn. 19:37). The soldiers broke the legs of the criminals to speed their deaths, but they did not break Jesus legs for he had already died. It fulfilled this prophecy of Christ. I think about my student and her disappointment and debt. The Lord redeems the life of his servants. She is not condemned, and her tears will be dried. The injustices done to her have been righted in another day when another human being suffered for the sins of all people, including her own. This world often seems terribly unfair. It never seemed more so than the day when Jesus died. Satan’s plans for our misery have been turned on their heads. Christ lives.