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Psalm 80

God's people can't help feeling that He is angry with them. They're feeling the effects of it.  He doesn't seem to hear their prayers, sorrows fill their days, and their enemies are laughing at them.  And, painfully, they remember better days.  God's power had brought them out of Egypt, they had been given a great land by means of the successful conquest of strong nations, and they had been greatly multiplied in number.  They had even begun to rule from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates – they had been a great power in the world.

But now, as the psalmist observes, Israel's defenses are almost nothing, and nations all around come in and "pluck its fruits" - take whatever they want.  Not only so, but the armies of godless foreign nations come and destroy even the holy places.  Israel had been like a vine planted by the hand of God, but now it's like a vineyard that's been cut down and is ready to be burned!

Perhaps the most important thing for us to see in this psalm is that the writer recognizes why these terrible things have happened. He says that God's people "perish at the rebuke of Your countenance."  In other words, God has brought deserved judgement upon them.  Why?  Because their relationship to Him was at a very low ebb.  They desperately needed revival - the renewal of commitment and dedication to their God - and they needed a deep and powerful moving of their hearts to prayer ("to "call upon Your Name"). Three times, in fact, the psalmist repeats to God the formula for their needed restoration: "Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; cause Your face to shine, and we shall be saved!"  It's a fact that their hearts desperately needed changing, but another important fact is that such change would have to originate with God.

There's some vitally important things for all of God's people in these words.  First of all, we need to be sure we understand what is the Source of our own troubles and sorrows. We need to become fully aware that they are God's chastisement, not mere happenstance. The problem is that there's always a tendency to stray from God, and therefore always a need for restoration and revival.

For this reason God often has to use troubles and sorrows to turn our hearts back to Himself.  So this psalm should become for all of us a confession of dependence upon God alone to make our hearts faithful and warm toward Him.  And it should also be a confession that if such grace does not come, then we His people will turn away and fall - irretrievably.

This psalm is therefore a lesson for us just as much as it was for Israel.  When troubles come upon us, do they not come so that we will turn again to our Father?  They aren't necessarily direct punishment for specific sins – if we received what we deserved for each sin, then we'd all perish immediately - but they are means in our Father's hands of reviving us.  They're His love!   They come simply because we often need reviving. They are tools used by our dear, concerned Father to soften and humble our proud hearts.  We need them to move us to meaningfully call upon Him and say, "Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; cause Your face to shine, and we shall be saved?"

"His our hearts back to Himself"  typo?