The Lutheran Hour
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"The Way Through the Maze"
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Text: Psalm 25:4-5
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Hear the word of the Lord from Psalm 25: Make me to know Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; for You I wait all the day long.
Let us pray. When life becomes a maze, Lord, with no clear exit, take us through to the other side. Shepherd us, Lord, lead us, and teach us along the way. In the Name of Jesus, our way out and our way through. Amen.
Among the many good things about fall in Minnesota, where I come from, is the corn maze. As if farmers didn’t already have enough to do, some decide to cut pathways through ten-feet-high stalks of corn that lead to twists and turns, switchbacks and dead ends and, ultimately, hopefully, a way out for those who enjoy walking their way through a good puzzle. One of the biggest corn mazes I’ve ever seen is the Stoney Brook Farms Maze in Foley, Minnesota, no less than 110 acres with 32 miles of twisting pathways.
Some mazes cheat a bit and provide exit signs for the faint of heart who may get lost and panic. Usually the exit sign takes you to an outer circle around the maze. Most mazes, though, leave maze walkers to their own resources. The advice they give includes guidelines like never walk a maze alone; never start your maze walk late in the day; be sure your phone is charged; have the owner’s number handy if you get really lost. 911 calls, by way, climb during the maze season. Some people have actually had to spend the night in a maze, waiting to be rescued. One couple lost their three-year-old in a maze, who was thankfully found safe.
If you think about it, a maze is a good metaphor for when we’re trying to find our way through a difficult and puzzling time in our lives—a time of decision or crisis, relational stress, or a health challenge. Poet David Barber launches his poem, “Corn Maze,” with the words: “Here is where / You can get nowhere / Faster than ever / As you go under / Deeper and deeper.” He could be talking about life, not just corn mazes. If ever poet Robert Frost’s truism was true, it is especially true for maze-walking, “The best way out is always through.”
Psalm 25 is a way-through-the-maze psalm. Attributed to David, king of Israel and coiner of the phrase, the inspired phrase, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” the psalm prays for guidance and leading from the Lord. “Ways” and “paths” and “pathways” are all over Psalm 25. Listen.
“Make me to know Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; for You I wait all the day long. … Good and upright is the Lord; therefore He instructs sinners in the way. He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way. All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep His covenant and His testimonies.”
For Christian believers, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the way in, that is, the way that leads into heaven, into eternal life. It’s no secret that Jesus called Himself “the Way” as in “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” We also know that the first Christians were called “followers of the Way” or “those belonging to the Way.” For sure, that meant Christians had come to know the way of salvation, Jesus Christ. A thousand years earlier David had sung in this Psalm 25:5, “You are the way of my salvation.” Christians know that the way in is only through faith in Jesus Christ. How blessed are we to know the way into the Kingdom!
But a theology of the way is incomplete if we stop there. When life puzzles us, closes in on us, or falls apart around us, when we feel like we’re lost alone in a corn maze as the sun sets, then the Gospel of Jesus Christ, our relationship with Christ, provides a way through and, ultimately, a way out.
So what kind of a mess had David gotten himself into as he composes Psalm 25? What had him puzzled as he begged for a way through and out? It helps a bit to know that this psalm is an alphabetic acrostic where each verse or half verse begins with a new letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, so that each of the 22 verses in Psalm 25 begins with a new letter in the Hebrew alphabet—aleph, beth, gimel, etc. If you were to write an alphabetic acrostic song lyric in English today, you might have 26 lines, each starting with a new letter of the alphabet from A-Z. Good luck with q and z. “Quiet my spirit Lord” or “Zany is the world around me.” It’s likely that the acrostic psalms in the Bible (there are eight of them) were written in this way to help with memorization. As people put the psalm to work in their lives, they’d recite the psalm with some help from their alphabet.
Anyway, because this inspired psalm is an acrostic, it can be hard to follow David’s train of thought. He seems to be all over the place in the psalm, wandering from one thought or emotion to another and all that alphabetically. I think we know what that’s like when life becomes a mess or a maze. We may try to bring some order to it, we may attempt to navigate it with the precision of an engineer, or the cadence of a songwriter, or the determination of a bulldozer, but we can still find ourselves lost and looking for a way through and out.
We can, if we look closely, get a sense of David’s struggles, scattered throughout the psalm. Frankly, there is enough here for every one of us to find some touchpoint with his struggles. There is conflict. In verse 2 he prays, “Let not my enemies exalt over me” and in verse 19, “Consider how many are my foes, and with what violent hatred they hate me.” So King David was embroiled in conflict. There’s also loneliness. “I am lonely and afflicted,” he says in verse 16. There is something worse than suffering; that’s suffering alone. “Never walk a maze alone,” the guidelines say. David was not alone, but he was lonely.
David also struggles with guilt in the psalm, particularly guilt over sins committed years ago when he was young. Our sins may be forgiven and forgotten by God, but they can come back to haunt us. It’s not uncommon for Christians to talk about sins that go way back to when they were young: the way that maybe they had treated a family member, the guilt of an abortion that goes back 30 years, the horrific violence still haunting a combat veteran. So David prays in verse 7, “Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions,” and again at the very center of the psalm, in verse 11, “For Your Name’s sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt, for it is great.”
And David is afflicted and under attack. He prays in verses 17-18, “The troubles of my heart are enlarged; bring me out of my distresses. Consider my affliction and my trouble.” Do you know what it’s like to carry a burden, to wage a personal battle, to suffer with no end in sight? To have the troubles of your heart enlarged as David puts it? And it all has him wondering and longing and fatiguing and waiting. “For You I wait all the day long,” he prays in verse 5. “For I wait for You,” he prays near the end of the psalm, at verse 21. This is a confounding maze for David, a multi-faceted challenge over time. He’s been walking the maze for some time and he can’t see over the stalks of corn.
I know you must be thinking, “Wow, David was a mess! How does the “a man after God’s own heart,” get to a point where he is such a bundle of woes? What happened to the perfect specimen of a human being we know from Michelangelo’s sculpture? Is this just one more stained hero? Hold on. Listen to David sing his song, really listen to his inspired lyrics, and you’ll see God showing us an inspired way through the mazes of our lives.
It begins with self-awareness, knowing yourself well enough to name the struggles you face. David gets an “A” for self-awareness. He can name his struggles all right. We’ve already seen that. Yet for those of us who follow the Way, the way through and the way out, there must be more. David’s secret for getting through the maze is not just in self-awareness or self-care or self-improvement or self-actualization. Rather, as he puts it in verse 15, “My eyes are ever toward the LORD; for He will pluck my feet out of the net.”
We know this LORD, even more than David knew the LORD because of Jesus Christ. In Jesus all the promises of God, all the covenants have been fulfilled. By faith we have watched Jesus Christ navigate conflict, affliction, suffering, loneliness, fatigue. In the maze of testing and obedience, Jesus carried our sins for our pardon all the way through the cross, through His resurrection, and on to His ascension from the maze, until He was finally home again with the Father. He walked the maze with His eyes on His Father. From the cross He quoted Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” But in His last breath from the cross, He prayed from Psalm 31, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” His eyes were on His Father.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ provides the way into heaven. But it also provides the motivation and the pattern for a way through life’s mazes. So we focus on the Godward side when life becomes a maze. It may be getting dark and the cornstalks may seem taller and taller, and nowhere is there an exit sign, but our eyes are on the Lord, who the LORD is, what the LORD does. In verse 14 David sings, “The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear Him, and He makes known to them His covenant.” David has a Friend in the maze, the LORD, Yahweh, Maker of heaven and earth, Redeemer of Israel. David calls the great I AM his friend. “The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear Him.” And David talks about the Lord and to the Lord as a friend. The LORD is full of mercy, steadfast love, goodness, and faithfulness. David’s eyes are on the LORD. “You are the God of my salvation,” David sings in verse 5. He will not wallow while he waits; he will focus on the LORD. “I take refuge in You,” he sings in verse 20. Perspective, faith perspective, is everything in the maze. You can lose sight of God or you can stay riveted to the God who sent Jesus to be the Friend of sinners, your Friend, the God whom you trust for your salvation, the God who has never let you down, the God who keeps His promises. Grace has gotten you through before, and grace will get you through again. When life becomes a puzzle, we focus on the Godward side.
And David stays teachable through the struggle. This is a second way through the maze: be teachable. “Teach me Your paths,” David prays in verse 4. “The LORD leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble His way,” he sings in verse 9. So we stay teachable. We stay humble enough to learn something. It’s not just about getting out of the maze. It’s learning along the way. It’s being stronger by God’s grace on the other side, because we grew in faith, hope, and love. So on the way through, we are teachable.
A third way through the maze found in this psalm is how David recognizes the role sin has played in his predicament. In other words, on the way through, confess your sins. “Pardon my guilt,” David prays in verse 11. The link between his struggles and his sins shows up in verse 18, “Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.” We are sometimes victims as we make our way through the maze. Often, though, our struggles and pain are the results of a sinful world and our own sinful choices. So on the way through the maze, we confess our sins and receive forgiveness. We make our way through the maze with a clean heart.
A fourth way through the maze is staying true to our identity and values. David prays near the end of the psalm, “May integrity and uprightness preserve me.” You belong to God. You are a baptized child of God, a treasure in God’s heart, worth the sacrifice of God’s only Son. In the maze, stay true to that identity. Integrity means you are who you are who you are. Integrity means you refuse to give up your identity in Christ for some quick way out. Uprightness means your values and your ethics match up with who you are. You walk the way of the maze as a disciple of Jesus Christ. So on the way through the maze, we define our identity and our values.
Finally, in the last verse of Psalm 25, David prays, “Redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles.” David expands the circle of his prayer to include all of Israel, his nation. He prays for others. It’s what Jesus did the night before He gave His life for us—He prayed for His disciples, for all who would come after them. So in the maze, we are not blind to the needs of others. The tall corn can limit our vision if we let it, lost and troubled, we still pray for others.
David’s words in Psalm 25 in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ show us the way through the maze. We focus on the Godward side. We remain humble enough to be taught. We confess and receive pardon for the role of sin in our predicament. We stay true to our identity and values. And we expand the circle of prayer to include others.
We will be blessed to follow David’s way through the maze, not in obedience to some legalistic list of “should’s” or “have to’s,” but in response to the gracious God we have come to know and love in Jesus Christ. For Jesus our Savior, the best way out was through! For us that has made all the difference. We follow where He leads. Thanks be to God! Amen
Please pray with me. Lord, when life leaves us puzzled or afraid, entrapped with no way out, turn our eyes toward You and take us through by grace. In the Name of Jesus who is our way of salvation and our way through the maze. Amen.
Reflections for October 1, 2023
Title: The Way Through the MazeMike Zeigler: We’re visiting again with Dr. Tim Saleska, professor, author of a commentary on the psalms of the Old Testament. Welcome back, Tim.
Tim Saleska: Thank you very much, Michael.
Mike Zeigler: Now, as I hear Psalm 25, there’s a lot I can identify with in it: the feeling lost in the corn maze like Dr. Nadasdy discussed in the message, feeling confused, feeling guilty, needing direction and teaching. But then on the other hand, there are points that I don’t identify with as well, such as the talk about the enemies, the people who hate him with this violent hatred. It raises this bigger question. As we read the psalms and we encounter things that we can’t identify with, and we try to pray them as our own prayers, how do we do that? Aren’t we supposed to identify with it all because it’s God’s Word, right?
Tim Saleska: Here is the difference between saying a psalm in worship and actually meditating on it. Because when you’re singing it or saying it in worship, you don’t have time to ask yourself those kinds of questions, and they kind of go right past you. But meditation first of all entails that you slow down, and as I’ve mentioned before, start to have a conversation with yourself and the psalm. And one of the most important questions that you can ask yourself is “How and where do I identify with what the psalmist is saying?” I mean, notice one of the assumptions are that we identify with the beliefs of the author. So sometimes that seems very simple, but you should still stop and say, “Is that really what I believe? Do I really identify with that?”
Something as simple as the Lord is my Shepherd. Ask yourself, “Do I really believe the Lord is my Shepherd? What does that look like?” All those kinds of things. So, the same thing here. When we have trouble, I think the first thing we should say is “I’m having trouble identifying with this author’s experience and these words. I don’t like the words. They make me feel uncomfortable.” Just admit that. That’s part of what it means being honest with God and your heart. It’s just like talking with a stranger or a friend even, and they tell you something that you’ll be able to resonate with and identify with, very simple. Other times they will say things that are strange and foreign to you, that are outside your experience that you feel uncomfortable with. Does that mean you stop listening or that you give up or what they’re saying is not important? Of course not. You keep listening and trying and seeking to understand. And I would say we take the same thing with the psalms, which is what makes them so great.
I also realize that in the larger picture of the Scriptures, Paul reminds us, for example, that we don’t fight against flesh and blood, but against a spiritual power. So, we, in a sense, start to put the psalm within that background. There are foes out there. We have to read the psalms with humility and with an eye to ourselves as sinners first, especially when we approach questions that have to do with the enemies and the expressions that we see in the psalms.
Mike Zeigler: Psalm 25 brings up the enemies, and it’s rather tame compared to others where we go from complaining about enemies to actually cursing enemies. I think you mentioned somewhere in your commentary that there are a hundred verses in the psalms of these active cursing of enemies. So it’s not a minor theme. We come against these psalms, come to these psalms, and they just sound strange and offensive to us. So, say some more about that.
Tim Saleska: Throughout the psalms, people are going to see this dichotomy between those who are God’s people and those who are enemies of God. The righteous, the unrighteous, it calls them. The wicked versus those who are His, and on and on. There’s that dichotomy that is in the world and is a reality of God’s kingdom. But on this side of Jesus’ Second Coming, the distinctions are blurred. It’s like the parable of the weeds that grow up in the wheat and …
Mike Zeigler: Can’t sort them out.
Tim Saleska: “Let’s just sort these guys out.” Not right now. What does Jesus say? “Love your enemy.” So, the challenging work is to love, to bring people the Gospel, to not react in anger, and wait for Jesus to come again in judgment. The psalms give voice to it. The psalms get your anger out, so to speak. Jesus tells us then, “Go love your neighbor. Go love your enemies. Turn the other cheek.”
Mike Zeigler: Like you said, it takes us somewhere. At the end, after he gets all that out, spews it all out, he comes back around and says, “Search me, O, God. Test me. Try me. See if there’s any harmful way in me and lead me in the everlasting way.”
Tim Saleska: See, in a sense, the psalms can offer healing for the heart because they are so honest. They get it out, and they give voice to these, even these darkest, darkest thoughts. God can take them and offer forgiveness in His Gospel and mercy in His Gospel. And so in a sense, praying those and thinking about them and then reminding yourself of who you are as one of God’s children, and what Jesus has done for you as a miserable sinner, as God’s own enemy, as someone who was not reconciled to Him, to remember to have compassion on those who fight the Gospel, fight the Kingdom, who live in darkness. We too are sinners with deep, dark thoughts, and God redeemed us.
Mike Zeigler: Thank you again for joining us, helping us approach the psalms like a conversation, some with strangers, some with friends, but always leading us in conversation closer to the character of Jesus Christ.
Tim Saleska: You’re welcome.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“All the Day Long” by K. Lee Scott. From The Glory of Christ by K. Lee Scott (© 1996 Concordia Publishing House)
“Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in Your Word” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.