There is no end to the opportunities to complain. And there are days when I avail myself of almost all of them.
I didn’t sleep well. The weather sucks. My cereal ran out. I bit my tongue. The clothes I want to wear are in the laundry. I dropped my toast and it landed butter-side-down. My TV show got cancelled. The record I ordered arrived, but it’s severely warped. That politician did more maddening things. The kids aren’t cooperating. I forgot the thing I needed most from the store and had to go back again. The mechanic found even more wrong with the car than usual. Something I ate is causing major inner turmoil. And on it goes.
I call it complainitude. It’s the opposite of gratitude. And it’s just miserable. But sometimes there’s a strange pleasure to be had in feeling miserable and complaining.
There are plenty of instances in the Bible of God’s best people indulging in complainitude, sulking and whining and grumping about. Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, Job. They’re just a few from a long list of biblical whiners.
As much as God likes these people, he’s not a fan of their complaining. And he confronts them about it.
There is a place for complaint and the Psalms offer many expressions of displeasure, anger, depression, hatred, frustration, disgust, and indignation — complaints registered against other people and even against God. There is wide open room for honest unhappy prayers.
Those are the honest prayers, the honest complaints. But there is a dishonest unhappiness as well. It doesn’t wrestle with God. It walks away from God.
It’s not honest complaint when we talk about God instead of to God. That’s just gossip and slander, like when we grumble with fellow employees about how our boss is doing things instead of talking with her directly.
It’s not honest complaint when we ignore the gifts God is laying out in front of us because we don’t like the details of our circumstances. That’s like the teenager who was given a car by his parents but got mad because of its color.
Love is an expansive life. Love moves outward toward others. Sin is a collapsed life. Sin turns away from others, concerning itself with itself. The question I need to ask myself when I’m complaining is this: Am I turning toward God and others right now or am I collapsing into myself?
In the middle of the Psalms, surrounded by honest complaints is Psalm 95. It’s an abrupt stop sign, an adamant rejection of whining. It begins with a call to joy.
Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song (Ps. 95:1-2).
The lives we live are received. None of us made ourselves or earned ourselves. We may have worked hard for much of what we have, but even that is mostly given to us. None of us started out as zeros. We all have gifts and privileges in this life. In some cases, it’s our physical abilities, our mental abilities, the loving families we were raised in, our educational opportunities, our musical abilities, our knack for fixing things, our singing voices, and so on.
And it’s not just in the beginning of our lives that we receive. We receive throughout our lives. And the most appropriate response to being given a gift is thanksgiving, giving the gift of thanks to the giver.
And so the psalm starts with a call: Come! Don’t stand back! Enter! This is a choice, a movement. Don’t stand still. We’re welcomed into the Presence, so don’t stay where you are. Move!
Where we see the received nature of our lives most clearly is in creation. The world around us is pure gift.
For the LORD is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land (Ps. 95:3-5)
The gift of creation is an owned gift, and it’s not owned by us. It’s owned by God, its maker.
This confronts our idolatries. Our idolatries exist in order for us to exert our control over creation — health gods, fertility and family gods, business success gods, and so on. Our false gods are a rejection of the kingship of Yahweh, the God of creation, and arise from our belief that he is inadequate.
But biblical faith always reasserts the kingship of God and his ownership of his creation. All is his. He is sufficient. He is enough. I may not be enough (contrary to the silly popular claim that “I am enough”), but he is.
The psalmist offers two pairs of extremes, a Hebraic way of expressing that everything in between is included — from the depths of the earth to its highest peaks; from the seas to the dry land. All of creation is his. He made it. He holds it in the palm of his hand.
But he’s not just the Creator of the environment around us. We’re included.
Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care (Ps. 95:6-7a).
We worship God in grateful joy simply because we’re alive. We have knees, so we kneel. We have breath in our lungs, so we sing. Our created bodies respond to our Creator.
But he’s more than a Creator. He’s a Savior, as alluded to earlier in the psalm. He takes interest in us like a shepherd caring for his sheep.
To this point, Psalm 95 is almost exactly the same as the beloved Psalm 100, which is used regularly as a call to worship by uncounted churches. It’s the harsh rejection of hard and whiny hearts that follows which keeps Psalm 95 from being similarly loved.
Today, if only you would hear his voice,
“Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,
as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
where your ancestors tested me;
they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
For forty years I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest'” (Ps. 95:7b-11).
Psalm 95 has been written to “us” until this point. But now it switches to “you.” The psalmist is pointing a warning finger at you and me from here on out. The psalmist knows us. The call to worship, with its theology of creation, is now matched with a very human reality. We have fickle hearts and reject God with our ingratitude.
We don’t want to hear this (which is why this is a less popular psalm), but the psalmist is wise enough to ignore our feelings and offer us a necessary warning. As Annie Dillard has suggested, worshipers should receive warnings whenever we enter worship.
The psalmist reminds us of the wilderness wanderings and specifically the following story:.
The whole Israelite community set out from the Desert of Sin, traveling from place to place as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. So they quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.”
Moses replied, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the Lord to the test?”
But the people were thirsty for water there, and they grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?”
Then Moses cried out to the LORD, “What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.”
The LORD answered Moses, “Go out in front of the people. Take with you some of the elders of Israel and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.” So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?” (Ex. 17:1-7)
In Hebrew, Massah has to do testing and Meribah with quarreling. The names were given to that place as a memorial of what happened, an unhappy memorial of an unhappy occasion, a memorial not lost on the psalmist. He’s emphatic: Don’t you dare do that again!
He blames the Hebrews for hard hearts and straying hearts. They proved they didn’t really know him because they didn’t know and follow his ways.
Bad theology leads to bad living.
Their theology was not only weak, it was weakly held. And these “sheep” were strays. Their feet acted as if they didn’t know the way they should go, God’s way (which would be a really good way to get to know!).
Instead of joyful, thankful worship, we’ve got its opposite: straying and grumbling. And so the psalm ends with a dramatic thud: “They shall never enter my rest.”
Ouch! No rest for whiners.
There is no final call to thankful worship. Instead, we’re left without rest and God angry. We’re left with a warning ringing in our ears. So, it’s left to us to return to worship, rejecting the complaining that snared the saved by whiny Hebrews.
Worship is yet another gift God offers us. It gives us the opportunity to reorient our lives. Will we continue to be self-absorbed and whiny? Or will we get drawn out of ourselves in worship of the God who has created us, saved us, and shepherded us?