Sing to God, sing in praise of his name,
extol him who rides on the clouds;
rejoice before him—his name is the Lord.
A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,
is God in his holy dwelling.
God sets the lonely in families,
he leads out the prisoners with singing;
but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. (Psalm 68.4-6)
As often happens over a teaching year, one of my students invited me to serve as his mentor. In our first meeting in my office, we began mapping out the discussions we’d be having together. Very quickly, one challenge seemed to emerge above the rest. This student continues to be inhibited from entering freely into his adulthood, being hindered by the traumatic impacts of childhood wounds that seem to cloud many of his current relationships.
How could they not be impacted? As an orphan child, he’d been abandoned by his parents—a part of his history that perpetually left him with a deep wound of despair that instilled a suspicion that he was unwanted. As much as he loved Jesus and was transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit, those traumatic stories give shape to so much of his daily interactions. Now, entering adulthood, the experience of being an orphan continually haunts him. “Orphan brain” (as some psychologists have called it) pops up in the most inconspicuous and surprising of times: when someone can’t go to a movie, a friend spends time with some other friend, or a scheduled appointment shows up late to coffee. Each of these, he painfully describes, seems to reenact over and over again in his mind what he experienced as a child. What would be simple annoyances for most were subtle reminders to the orphan that he was being abandoned again. His days are filled with perceived abandonments.
In one way or another, we’ve all experienced various levels of abandonment. The experience of actual or perceived abandonment in our lives is why it’s so vital we metabolize the biblical text into our souls and bodies. Psalm 68, above all, is a psalm for the orphan. Attributed to the hand of David, the song was likely written at some point in his early kingship as he faced a growing sense of opposition at the hands of his enemies and his own heart. Two themes structure the song. On the one hand, first, there’s the theme of God’s care for the fatherless, widow, lonely, and prisoner. In a furious cluster of declarations, each group is mentioned in subsequent order between verses 4-6. The reader's clear impression is that David’s God—the God of Israel—does not just love people abstractly. God specifically loves those who face the experience of abandonment.
We set ourselves short by taking for granted the fact that God cares for these kinds of people. A portrayal of God as one who cares for these despairing groups of people would have stuck out like a sore thumb. The false gods of antiquity were not prone to undertake such cares. For example, in Roman cosmology, the god Pluto—also known as Dis Pater (or “rich father”)—was the divine patron of wealth and affluence. He would be associated with wealth because he ruled the great deep under the earth where precious stones and minerals were found. Naturally, in the Roman pantheon, the gods associated most intimately with those humans who had been privileged and prosperous in this life. False gods always cozy up to the successful.
A pantheon of gods who gravitate toward the best and brightest of humanity would have permeated the cosmologies of antiquity. The portrayal of God as willingly associating and caring for the lowly in Psalm 68 would have set up a stark contrast between these gods and Yahweh of Israel. In this psalm, the divine ruler, Yahweh himself, goes out of his way to associate with what Jesus would later call “the least of these”—the fatherless, the widow, the lonely, and the prisoner. In one of his more widely read commentaries, James Montgomery Boice observed that the language of Psalm 68 would have provoked an almost uncomfortable contrast with popular religious imaginations in the ancient world:
The kings and other rulers of this world do not act like this. They surround themselves with the noblest and richest of their lands, those who can enhance their glory and strengthen their power. The highest glory of God is that he cares for the miserable and surrounds himself with them.1
But this is only half of the brilliance of Psalm 68. Sure, the God of Psalm 68 is the God of the despairing. On the other hand, second (almost in complete contrast) is the theme of God’s power and almighty-ness. God is ascribed a powerful yet rare title in this psalm. Only twice in the Psalms is God described as el Shaddai. Most English translations will translate this as “God Almighty.” Psalm 68 is one of them. This particular divine name speaks to the quality and characteristic of God as the One who is Lord over the realm of chaos, all his enemies, and the shaking creation below. God is no innocent bystander. He is powerful and mighty. And God is involved. The linguistic connection of God’s power to the frail human life of those who suffer is inescapable. The Hebrew word for ‘fatherless’ or ‘orphan’ (Heb yatom) is used 41 times in the Old Testament; many of which are in the Psalms. But that this would be explicitly tied to the powerless human is theologically jarring. “The theology of the poor in vv. 6–7 has some special features,” one German commentator writes, “[Namely that] God is Father and Advocate for the personae miserae.”2 In other words, the mighty God of Israel is precisely the God of power for the miserable and the powerless.
Why might this connection be so potent for our life with God? I remember reading a book years ago by Jack Frost entitled Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship. Within, Frost contrasted what he called the person with an ‘orphan spirit’ and the person with the ‘spirit of sonship.’ For the orphan, often, their life is marked by:
Seeing God as a taskmaster rather than a loving Father
Always having to be self-reliant
Needing to strive for constant approval
Feeling enslaved to life’s circumstances
Striving for approval from everyone
Living to survive day-to-day
Residing in a constant state of fear and trepidation
In contrast, the person who has fully lived into their identity as sons and daughters of God can have an entirely different posture toward their life. Their life is marked by:
Envisioning God as a loving father
Being interdependent (not independent or dependent)
Seek God out of delight rather than dead duty
Being at peace with who they are and who God is
Not needing to pursue constant affirmation from those around them
Resting in the harbor of safety3
Spiritual maturity, for Frost, is identifying the places in our lives where we operate with an “orphan spirit” and move into our new identity as sons and daughters. This is, I believe, the impulse of Psalm 68: God desires the orphaned being to know their true identity under the rule and reign of an all-powerful God. Or, put another way, that the power of God is strong enough for the powerlessness of the weak. This matters deeply for the student I am mentoring. For the orphan—who knows the physical and existential experiences of abandonment—any moment throughout a day can quickly transform into a return to the wounds of the past. Or, worse yet, all of life becomes subsumed under the story of that abandonment narrative. Every moment becomes a moment to return to the abandonment story. But Psalm 68 turns it all on a head.
God does not abandon the orphan. This God sticks. Which is of ultimate concern for us today. Because we will all be hurt, wounded, and even abandoned by humans. Sometimes, time and again. This is impossible to guard against when you are dealing with sinners. But when one begins to understand that despite human frailty and failure, God, and God alone, comes to be with us through every last part of this abandonment story. When this becomes the new narrative, our thinking begins to change.
With the young man I’m mentoring, it means that he can learn (over time) to laugh at life’s frustrations of people who are too busy or have other friends or are just late. With the help of the God of Psalm 68, he can learn to resist that impulse to import into each of these moments the despair of being orphaned again. God is with him. Everywhere. And he will not be abandoned by God. Again, becoming aware of this changes the very neurological make-up of a person like my student. The impacts of which are named by people such as Heidi Baker who has spent her life serving the unwanted and the orphaned in Mozambique. The gospel changes everything about the self-knowledge of an orphan spirit:
When you understand who you are, then you will start taking risks. But if you have an orphan spirit, you will be too afraid to try in case you fail. Sons and daughters are able to flow in great humility and great authority at the same time. They are confident that they have access to the Father’s house. They know that they are His so they are able to suffer without fear.4
And the same glorious psychological impacts of knowing one’s identity in God are echoed in Howard Thurman who described the way his enslaved grandmother would describe the potency and healing power of the words of Exodus to the slaves in Egypt and her generation of slaves:
The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and result in new courage, fearlessness, and power. When I was a youngster, this was drilled into me by my grandmother. The idea was given to her by a certain slave minister who held secret religious meetings with his fellow slaves. How everything in me quivered with the pulsing terror of raw energy, when she would come to the triumphant climax of the minister: ‘You are not a slave [word change]. You are God’s child! This established for them the ground of personal dignity...This individual now feels that he counts. Even death becomes a little thing...To the degree to which a man knows this (that he is a child of God) he is unconquerable from within and without.5
When an orphan, a slave, the lonely, the prisoner, or any other despairing person, begins seeing the God who is with them, it begins the journey to a whole new way of thinking about their lives. As I sat with my orphaned student and saw him discover God’s love for him in the most vulnerable parts of his history, I came to realize again why we do what we do as ministers of the gospel: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ actually changes lives. Time and again. And it works most with those who are most in need of it. The rich and the powerful—well, they are often buffered from truly needing God. Which is why God goes to those who need him.
Whenever I hear someone say: “you can’t give away what you don’t have,” it always hurts a little. Too many want to be good fathers, lovers, brothers, sisters, and the like. But we can’t. Because we didn’t have any human do it for us. Psalm 68 returns us to hope. For in the economy of God, we don’t have to have a great earthly father to be one. Because we know the Father who is better than them all. Indeed, we can give away what no person ever gave us. Because we get it from God.
That’s good news for the miserable.
James Montgomery Boice, Psalms: Psalms 42-106 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2005), 555.
F. L. Hossfeld et al., Psalms 2: A Commentary on Psalms 51-100 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 164.
Jack Frost, Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image Publishers, 2006), 120–30. I take some liberties in my paraphrasing some of the characteristics of each for brevity and clarity.
Baker, Heidi, “Primacy of Love,” in Renewal Journals, ed. Waugh, Geoff, vol. 3 (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2012), 284.
Thurman, Howard, Jesus and the Disinherited (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press, 1981), 50.
Wow. I love this AJ. I like how you remind us to examine ourselves- our hurts and resulting behaviours that can take root. But, you also remind me that in the light of God’s perfect Fatherly presence, and love, we can find peace. I’m going to show this to my teenage daughter, and hopefully it will be a comfort to her. She has not lost her Dad, but has lost her eldest brother who is still alive but has very sadly fallen into the “cult”of transgenderism- the out-workings of which have caused her a great deal of personal pain, and I think that includes a sense of abandonment by him. Again, thank you! I find a great deal,of encouragement from your thoughtful, considered writing. God is so good!!
There was a year God had me pick Psalm 68 as a text to read regularly, and I read it over and over again, not often knowing why. Likely, I had an orphan spirit then, and even under the power of sonship, the enemy can bring this up in strange circumstances to keep you from wholeness. I suppose like anything in our lives, it takes intentionality.
Aside from that, I definitely needed the reminders you offer here. This was a needed encouragement for me today. Thank you!