Hurry!
no delays, please
Psalm 70 is a short psalm, sandwiched between a number of larger ones,1 so it’s easy to bypass if you’re in a hurry. Which would be ironic because the psalm is an urgent plea for God to hurry, to take notice and respond. Not once but twice within a few breathless prayers he is urged to intervene:
Hasten, O God, to save me;
come quickly, LORD, to help me…
As for me, I am poor and needy;
come quickly to me, O God.
You are my help and my deliverer;
LORD, do not delay. (vv.1,5)
The need is urgent and it’s right to ask. But the picture in scripture is more complex — demanding, but richer.
You might be familiar with divine delays. The most famous is perhaps John 11, where Jesus chooses to wait before going to heal his friend Lazarus, and in the delay the need intensifies as Lazarus passes from sickness into death.2 The choice to wait, says the Lord, is for the glory of God; we can be sure it was also an immense blessing to Lazarus, Martha and Mary — to be taken into the depths of grief, and, for Lazarus, the depths of the tomb, only there to discover the even deeper compassions of God and his saving power.
The Lord’s delay did not finally endanger his friends — he would never be reckless with the lives of those so dear to him, not to this family nor to any whose hope is in him. When divine delays occur we can be sure it is always the expression of a wisdom that is purposeful and progressive. The clouds of dread will then be seen to have been “big with mercy” and will “break in blessings” on our heads.3
Without doubt those delays have so much to teach us, schooling us into a keener awareness of the ways of God, pursuing pathways we hadn’t expected to walk, until we feel able to say with Paul, “O the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgements and his paths beyond tracing out.”4 But we need to be careful we aren’t over-schooled by those accounts of delay, such that we diminish the place and the privilege of doing just as Psalm 70 does in good faith: pleading with God to please hurry.
Our need is vital and urgent and time is slipping away; the negatives are piling up and calamity feels like it’s beginning to get to its feet, ready to extend itself to its full and monstrous height. It feels like our resilience has slipped into almost terminal decline. So, Lord, please hurry. Things are getting really, really tough.
Do divine delays preclude or qualify into submission such prayers? No, and we must make sure they don’t. As children of God who have been gifted the Spirit of adoption we are to never outgrow the simple and sincere appeal for a speedy intervention. As time-bound creatures, subject to its fragility and its terrors, we have liberty to call upon the timeless Lord.
And often, when we do, another biblical beam breaks through the gloom:
“Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear.” (Isaiah 65:24).
“Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” (Matthew 6:8).
“From the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard.” (Daniel 10:12)
Not only did you feel it was an emergency, says the Lord. So did I. You won’t need to wait. Trust me. Help is already on its way. This is part of why Psalm 70 is able to affirm that those who seek him can and will be joyful in him.5
The persistent widow of Luke 18, who is promised God will give justice and quickly, is an important benchmark in the life of faith. But do those words mean each and every time the need will be speedily solved and mercifully met? It seems the picture is larger than that, which is a huge blessing for us because it means there is space for us to grow into a deeper and “closer walk with Thee”. And within that space, on that larger canvas, is found the desperate plea for hurry and the honoured response of ‘It’s already being sorted’.
Another account of divine delay is found in Psalm 44. You might want to read this piece on its implications and resolution:
Here are the line counts for the surrounding psalms — 68: 45 lines; 69: 42 lines; 71: 29 lines; 72: 25 lines; 73: 30 lines; 74: 26 lines. Psalm 70 itself has only 8 lines of Hebrew text.
John 11:5,6 has the surprising juxtaposition: “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days…”
See William Cowper’s great hymn, God moves in a mysterious way.
Romans 11:33
See verse 4
Thank you Richard.. God bless you brother 🙏
Thank you, Richard. Our daughter has started a full time job this week and we are therefore on a new routine to look after our grandchildren. So I’m waking up a bit earlier in this season of Lent. And coincidentally, in his Psalm Psupplement by James Cary (The Wycliffe Papers and Cary’s Almanac on Substack), he was writing about Jesus’s delay before raising Lazarus. Thank you for your weekly reflections which I don’t always manage to read but do appreciate when I do. Also, I’m just about to send a verse from Psalm 70 to my troubled friend who did say thank you on Sunday for the occasional verses that I have been sending. Praying that he will be safely brought through his present dark valley. Take care, Richard, and God bless.