The Cross Speaks Peace

Echoes of redemption in the 85th Psalm.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

A version of this article originally appeared on 1517.

Psalm 85 is one of those psalms where the historical context remains a mystery. Even still, this hasn’t prevented it from being interpreted through a variety of different lenses and eras of Israel’s history. Some Bible scholars situate these words during the reign of King David, while others put them during the “twilight years” of the kingdom of Judah, that is, pre-Babylonian invasion and exile. Most often, however, it is supposed that this psalm was composed sometime during the decades after God’s people were allowed to return home, post-exile. The fact is, we aren’t privy to any specifics that might help us know for certain when this psalm was written or who it was originally for. What we do know is that it comes from a place of angst and anticipation.

Imbuing nearly every line of the 85th Psalm is a simmering level of contradiction. Even though the words are hopeful, they are filled with apparent distress. This is, perhaps, most apparent in verse 4, where the psalmist prays not only for God to “restore [them] again” but also that God will “put away [his] indignation.” His request to be restored is accompanied by his acknowledgment that God’s wrath is completely justified. The Lord had every reason to be indignant with his people — and yet, the underlying hope of this psalm is that there was still mercy to be found with him, even if it was only a sliver or a crumb. This doesn’t really help us with dating or identifying the history of this psalm, especially since the story of God’s people is, in many ways, one long record of people constantly in need of mercy.

1. The Pattern of the Past

The annals of Old Testament history offer example after example of verse 4 acted out. The books of Numbers, Kings, and Chronicles, for instance, trace a cyclical pattern wherein God’s people fall out of fellowship with him, exposing them to myriad troubles and trials, which prompts them to cry out, “Restore us again!” In an act of mere mercy, God postpones his wrath (at least the full brunt of it) and restores the fortunes of his people — only for them to eventually turn on him again, falling prey to iniquity and idolatry all over again. Rinse and repeat, and you are well on your way to understanding Israel’s long and troubled history. In other words, while we can’t be dogmatic about when this psalm occurred, we don’t have to be to fully appreciate its message.

You could very well insert these words into a variety of moments throughout the fluctuating exploits of God’s people, and they would still make sense. More to the point, this means that we can pray these words, inserting them into our up-and-down stories, too. Like the nation of Israel, our lives are speckled with times of rejoicing and times of groaning. At one time or another, we find ourselves in the same predicament as the psalmist: discombobulated and distressed and very much in need of someone to come to our aid. It is precisely in those moments when life feels out of sorts and God so very distant that we are invited to remember and pray the words of Psalm 85, which are uniquely suited to speak peace into your present circumstances, no matter what they look like.

2. The Hope of Reversal

The so-called “evidence” that this psalm was written after the days of exile were over hinges on the term “fortunes” (שְׁבִית) in verse 1, which can also be translated as “captivity.” If this translation is correct, God’s favor was explicitly seen in the reversal or “turning back” of what was horrendous. While this could insinuate Israel’s awful seven-decade exile in Babylon, it could also refer to any number of events in their checkered past when the Lord acted on their behalf and reversed their fortunes (e.g., the Exodus from Egypt, the Fall of Jericho, Gideon’s defeat of Midian, etc.). Consequently, what’s more critical for understanding the meaning of this psalm is the word “restore.” “Lord, you were favorable to your land,” declares the psalmist, “you restored the fortunes of Jacob” (Ps. 85:1, emphasis mine).

You wouldn’t know it from the way our English translations present these lines, but the Hebrew word for “restore” (שׁוּב) appears four other times within this psalm. Properly speaking, שׁוּב means “to return” or “turn back,” which is how it is rendered throughout (Ps. 85:1, 3, 4, 6, 8). In modern parlance, we might express this as “reversal.” The psalmist’s prayer is for God to reverse their current circumstances, which are physically and spiritually precarious. Despite all the goodness God had shown them, they had willingly punted on what God wanted to give them and do through them — namely, worship him above everything else and serve as conduits of divine blessing for the rest of the world (Gen. 12:1–3).

What fills the psalmist’s lament is the hope that God can and will reverse their distress, turning it into deliverance and their sorrow into salvation (Ps. 85:4). But why was the psalmist so sure of this? What allowed him to pray this way? Because God had done it before:

Lord, you were favorable to your land;
you restored the fortunes of Jacob.
You forgave the iniquity of your people;
you covered all their sin. Selah
You withdrew all your wrath;
you turned from your hot anger.
(Ps. 85:1–3)

In unison, the assembly recalls all the ways they’ve experienced God’s grace in the past. He showed favor to them even when there was a famine afflicting them. He restored them when they were utterly depleted and defeated. He made a way for them to be forgiven when they were filled with sin. He withheld his wrath from them even though they deserved it. Israel’s past was fraught with instances of the Lord’s merciful turning from anger to restore his people’s favor, and the gist of this psalm is for God to do again what he has done before. “Do it again, God,” rings the psalmist’s appeal. This anthemic hope of reversal is not a specimen of biblical wishful thinking, nor is the psalmist “wishing upon a star” that this might be true. Rather, he is articulating his and the rest of the people’s faith in who God is — namely, he is a God who can reverse our trial into his triumph, our grief into moments of grace, and our distress into the very means of our deliverance.

The long and winding history of God’s people, bespeckled though it was with rebellion and unrest, served to demonstrate the depths of God’s patient and faithful love, revealing his heart for them both now and in the future. “What was true in the past (vv. 1–3),” Samuel D. Giere writes in an article for the Lutheran Forum, “is also true in the present (vv. 4–9), in spite of the people.”¹ Even in spite of what we do or don’t do, “God’s past doings,” Charles Spurgeon once remarked, “are prophetic of what he will do.”² There is no circumstance so grim, so dour, or so dismal that the “God of hope” can’t reverse into a token of his glory and grace (Rom. 15:13). Our failures can’t outmaneuver his mercy, nor can our sin outrun his grace. It has been God’s penchant, and it always will be, to take the lost causes of the world — you and me included — and let the grace of his reversal turn them into vestiges of his redeeming love.

3. The Need for Revival

But beyond turning them around and reversing their fortunes, the psalmist also prays for God to revive them. “Will you be angry with us forever?” he inquired. “Will you prolong your anger to all generations? Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” (Ps. 85:5–6). These probing questions betray the psalmist’s desire to be made alive, which is what “revival” (חָיָה), properly speaking, means. It is a restoration of health and life. “Revive us again” is a prayer for God to resuscitate you, within which we find that same sense of contradiction as before. After all, to entreat the Lord to dispense his resuscitating and reinvigorating grace is to, likewise, admit that one is spiritually dead.

Much like it had many times before, the collective faith of God’s people had withered and died. Their relationship with the God who had delivered them, who was patient with them, and who had made an eternal covenant with them was disordered, to say the least. They were running after this, that, and the other thing in hopes of finding and getting what God had already promised to give them. But all that running after other things slowly but surely deteriorated their trust in God, causing their faith in his Word of Promise to dwindle. Israel’s atrophied spirituality was a result of their turning from God. They turned on him. But even so, this prayer represents a moment of clarity for the psalmist and the rest of Israel as well. Even though their predicament is due to their own actions (or inactions), they appeal to God’s innate inclination to show mercy. “Show us your steadfast love, O Lord,” the assembly cries out, “and grant us your salvation” (Ps. 85:7).

God’s Word is riddled with reminders that he is not quick on the trigger with his wrath. Ours isn’t a God who is waiting with bated breath for his followers to screw up so he can rain judgment on them. That’s not who he is. Instead, the prevailing theme of Scripture is that ours is a God who is “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” This was David’s hopeful confession throughout the Psalter (Ps. 86:5; 103:7; 145:8), just as it was the heart of the Levites’ message to the Israelites during the heyday of Ezra’s revival (Neh. 9:16–17). Significantly, though, this is the Lord’s description of himself to Moses on the slopes of Mount Sinai. “The Lord passed him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’” (Exod. 34:6). Accordingly, it has always been true that ours is a God who is bent toward mercy, not judgment, and it always will be.

The need for revival, or, to be more precise, for resurrection, is based on the unchangeable truth that God’s heart of grace isn’t prone to change. Just as the psalmist does, we, too, are welcome to pray for the Lord to “revive us again” because even though our condition is distressing, ours is a God who delights in delivering us out of our distress. “Do it again, God, so that we, your people, can ‘rejoice in you’ again,” we might render his words (Ps. 85:6). Consequently, the hope of reversal and the need for revival begin right there — in the ruin of poor decisions, in the rubble of words you can’t unsay, in the angst of choices that cost you relationships. “It is just here, among the ruins and bones,” W. H. Auden once wrote, “that we may rejoice in the perfected Work which is not ours.” Indeed, as we can’t turn ourselves around, nor can we resuscitate ourselves, we are in need of someone better to do that for us and in us.

4. The Means of Renewal

The Lord alone, of course, is the source of all for which the psalmist prays (Ps. 85:8–9). He longs to hear God’s words of peace and grace echo again in the hearts, minds, and souls of God’s people. To that end, he not only asks that God show them mercy but also that his glorious presence dwells with them again, as in the days of old when God’s glory could be found among them in the Tabernacle and the Temple. The psalmist’s plea, therefore, is for God to “tabernacle” (שָׁכַן) with them again. But how could a God who is so blindingly, unflinchingly, and inflexibly holy come to dwell with people who are so horribly sinful? After all, wickedness and wrongdoing have no place in the presence of the thrice-holy God (Isa. 6:3; Rev. 4:8). “Evil may not dwell with you,” David says in another psalm (Ps. 5:4). How is it conceivable, then, that the Lord of perfect justice and righteousness would tabernacle with the very people who had spurned him and had sinned against him over and over again?

In short, it’s neither conceivable nor feasible at all unless, as the psalmist envisions, the perfect mercy and truth of God “embrace.” The prophetic imagination of the psalmist sees God’s “steadfast love and faithfulness” coming together like a husband and wife in the throes of marital bliss (Ps. 85:10) — and out of this convergence of “righteousness and peace” comes every ounce of blessing. This psalm of “hopeful lament” ends with the expectation that the Lord will make a way forward, that God himself will come down and clear a path of righteousness for us, the utterly unrighteous, to walk in (Ps. 85:11–13). By the end, the dissonance of the psalmist seems to crystallize into newfound faith and confidence that God will do what he promised to do. But where this psalm ends is where the good news begins for you and me. After all, to cite Samuel D. Giere again, “there is no locus other than Christ Jesus for the fulfillment of the promises of Psalm 85:10–13.”³ In his exposition of Psalm 85, Rev. Alexander Maclaren agrees:

The Psalmist’s vision was fulfilled in Jesus Christ, in whom these sweet twin characteristics, that are linked inseparably in all the works of God, are welded together into one in the living personality of Him who is all the Father’s grace embodied; and is ‘the Way and the Truth and the Life.’⁴

The psalmist’s plea for restoration, his hope for a dramatic reversal of fortunes, and his longing for renewal are what the gospel announces is ours in the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. In the person of Jesus, the very Word of the Father, “full of grace and truth,” tabernacles “among us” (John 1:14). He comes down not just to reverse our fortunes but to utterly redefine them in the light of his resurrection. In him, salvation is brought near. Through his cross and empty tomb, Jesus shows us that he isn’t waiting for us to clean ourselves up or get our act together before we are restored or revived. Rather, God in Christ makes the first move to renew us by surrendering to death on the cross for us. It is precisely there on Golgotha’s tree that the “righteousness and peace” of God converge and collide. With nails piercing his hands and feet and with blood streaming down his forehead, the whole world is given a glimpse of what a God who is unwaveringly righteous and unhesitatingly merciful looks like. He looks like a God who heaves, suffers, and dies so that the world might be redeemed.

“The God Who delivered the people of Israel from Egypt and from Babylon,” Giere concludes, “is the same one Who delivers all in Christ Jesus.”⁵ The God whose righteousness demands justice looks upon the Crucified One and is satisfied, as the justice we deserve falls on him so that his peace and steadfast love might be lavished on us. We who long to be restored, revived, and renewed don’t have to wander to this, that, or the other reservoir to find it. The relief we so desperately crave is found in the splinters and blood of Christ’s cross. This is the word that “God the Lord will speak” (Ps. 85:8) — namely, the word of the cross, which relieves and reconciles sinners to God by speaking peace to them and making peace for them. You are restored, revived, and renewed, not because you did anything to make that happen but because the only one who ever could already has — and he delights to do it again.

1. Samuel D. Giere, “The eighth-day kiss of Psalm 85,” Lutheran Forum 45.4 (2011): 10.

2. Charles Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, Vols. 1–3 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1988), 2:1.450.

3. Giere, 12.

4. Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Vols. 1–17 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1944), 4:2.151.

5. Giere, 11.