Your Own Worst Enemy?
Good day, Henry here. What do you make of the world in which the psalmist lived? I know, I know, you’ve been walking around all day wondering about the world of the guy who wrote the psalms. Well, humour me, I’m going somewhere with this. The psalmist, or the person or people who wrote the psalms, currently to be found in the Bible, lived many hundreds of years ago, but no one’s quite sure when. Most people are familiar with Psalm 23 and maybe Psalm 40, which gives you a good idea what they’re all like.
The psalms are full of the endless criticism and danger that the psalmist had to try to survive. All during my theological studies, I always assumed that the writer or writers of the psalms lived in a period of desperate battles, turmoil and personal danger. He is always being attacked and endangered. It just seems logical that, for example, talking about “the valley of the shadow of death” was his colourful way of saying that things were not good.
Then one day it struck me that perhaps the psalmist’s world was not that dangerous because of external threats; perhaps he was his own biggest enemy.
That is true for all of us: We are all our own biggest enemy. We get ourselves in trouble because of our blind spots, arrogance, anger, lust - the entire seven deadly sins. We destroy our own chance of success and a creative life. To some extent we all deliberately shoot ourselves in the foot. You can run away from an external enemy, but you can’t run away from yourself, though many have tried.
Is that what the Psalmist is talking about? Is he complaining about the inner adversary, which we all know about in our own hearts? Is he, like he rest of us, his own greatest enemy?
The more I have thought about this idea, the more sense it makes to me. As with the rest of us, the Psalmist has to be rescued by, as A.A. says, his “Higher Power.” He always turns to the Divine for rescue and safety. Makes more sense than shooting yourself in the foot!