May your unfailing love be my comfort,David intermingles here two paradoxical word pictures that are repeated often throughout scriptures: God as the one who loves and comforts us, versus God as the one who deals with us as servants.
according to your promise to your servant.
Psalm 119:76
Many believers take this mixture for granted. For many unbelievers, it's an irreconcilable contradiction.
Most preachers have explained the differences between slaves and indentured servants in biblical times, and explained how servants often became like cherished family members.
But to the modern skeptical mind, any talk of bond-servants and slavery triggers all sorts of alarms. American progressive culture cannot abide the concept of servant-like submission, whether to a god, to an owner or boss, or to -- especially to -- other people. It's seen as totally demeaning, regressive rather than progressive.
This isn't a new problem. Paul's reference in Romans l to the ones who, "though they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him," is a description of people who balk at submitting to God. Behind their philosophy and politics is a more elemental reason for their disdain:
they want to be their own masters. They don't want to adapt their behavior to the wishes of anyone else, not society, not moralists, and certainly not God.
They're either unaware or stubbornly ignoring the universal truth that everyone serves someone or something.
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes
Indeed you're gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody
Bob Dylan, Gotta Serve SomebodyI've met numerous women in the prison chapel who will admit they were servants to their impulses and addictions. They'll also tell you their master did not love them. And their masters failed to fulfill their promises eventually.
For people who have been abused by their masters, it's hard to believe their could be a different sort of master, one whose love never fails, one who keeps every promise.
It's not about legitimizing the many faces of slavery and servitude that humankind has known throughout history. Those are merely a fact of life, the way of the fallen world.
People who embrace their identities as servants of God will - or perhaps I should say they should - be actively engaged in not only opposing all other forms of slavery but rescuing the enslaved.
Rescuing is, after all, the Master's primary mission.
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