What Is It Like to Get Dragged Out of the Mud?

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of sanctification and growth from Psalm 40.

Male: People have no idea how consoling it is to people who are involved in ministry day after day, just to have our souls still before the Lord and to know it’s all going to work out, not just okay in the end; it’s going to work out gloriously in the end for all of his servants. It’s such a great privilege to gather once a year here at Second with so many of our friends from around the city who are engaged in ministry and to celebrate that reality and other things with you and have the privilege of hearing from some outstanding speakers, which we shall do again this year.

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This very year I have been a Christian 30 years. When I became a Christian, of course, I learned the Bible is the Word of God, and I learned some other important things about the sufficiency of Christ and so on. Then I learned there are battles over these things. Those of you who have been Christians for 30 years will remember The Battle for the Bible, which seemed to be one of the big issues going on 30 years ago when we were believers in Christ and seeking to advocate and defend the faith.

Over the years I’ve noticed … Maybe it’s just because I spend more time in it, but I believe things have gotten a lot more subtle. As in the old days, we had people like Carl Henry and others who were writing on an academic and intellectual level and engaging the issues of the day. We need people like that in our own day as we face things like open theology and New Perspectives and emergent church and many other things that are going on from within evangelicalism.

I’m delighted to introduce today one of the key people, in my opinion, in evangelicalism in North America and around the world who is consistently addressing these issues, whether it be open theology or emergent Christianity or New Perspectives, who takes them on intelligently and graciously, speaking for so many of us who know we have an intelligent voice that is being proclaimed and being heard in a larger Christian community.

Those of you who know Dr. Carson from your ministries come here very gratefully, as I do. If you’ve preached or taught through the gospel of John lately, you no doubt grasped onto that commentary by D.A. Carson like all the rest of us who found it to be the most helpful thing we used in our preparations for teaching in the gospel of John. Those of you who have used his commentary in other parts of the Scriptures know he is consistently faithful to the text, consistently thoughtful and helpful and pastoral in his thinking.

I value him as a New Testament scholar far more than he even realizes, and I’m sure you do as well. What amazes me about him … I had the opportunity to talk with Don just last spring, having read The Gagging of God. I said to him, “I’m just amazed at the vast range of reading you do and the thinking you do and the issues you address.”

If you’ve read that book or some of his others, you know he is not just in the New Testament discipline. He’s addressing things all across the board and reading very broadly, and it was very interesting even at lunch today to hear some of the new things that are coming out that he’s doing, not only in the New Testament field, but in other fields.

We are greatly honored this weekend to have Dr. Carson with us, and he’s going to talk to us about a real high-end topic, which is What is it Like to Get Dragged Out of the Mud? Dr. Carson, we’re very eager to hear what you’re going to have to say about that, so let’s welcome Dr. Carson as he comes.

Don Carson: It is an enormous pleasure to be here with you folks who are on the front line of ministry. You have to keep remembering someone like me has a sort of quartermaster’s job, but it’s you folks who are on the front line and it is a privilege for me to be with you. If you want to know where this mud comes from, it comes from Psalm 40, and so I’ll begin by reading that chapter.

“I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord. Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not look to the proud, to those who turn aside to false gods.

Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders you have done. The things you planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them, they would be too many to declare. Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but my ears you have pierced; burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, ‘Here I am, I have come—it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.’

I proclaim righteousness in the great assembly; I do not seal my lips, as you know, O Lord. I do not hide your righteousness in my heart; I speak of your faithfulness and salvation. I do not conceal your love and your truth from the great assembly. Do not withhold your mercy from me, O Lord; may your love and your truth always protect me.

For troubles without number surround me; my sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see. They are more than the hairs of my head, and my heart fails within me. Be pleased, O Lord, to save me; O Lord, come quickly to help me. May all who seek to take my life be put to shame and confusion; may all who desire my ruin be turned back in disgrace.

May those who say to me, ‘Aha! Aha!’ be appalled at their own shame. But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you; may those who love your salvation always say, ‘The Lord be exalted!’ Yet I am poor and needy; may the Lord think of me. You are my help and my deliverer; O my God, do not delay.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

It may be for the last year you have had such unmitigated blessing. You haven’t seen a bog anywhere. Cheer up. You will next year or the year after or the year after. Sooner or later you will get kicked in the teeth. It is a fallen world. If you’ve been in the ministry for a while, you’ve already had a few rounds, and that’s apart from other kinds of discouragements and miry bogs we fall into.

So it is important, not least for those who are on the front line, to reflect a little on how we respond when the Lord does, in his grace, pull us out of one of these slimy pits, and that’s what this psalm is about. It depicts God as our Helper. It’s broken down into two parts, “Joyful Praise to the God Who Helps,” and then there’s a second part I’ll say just a couple of minutes about at the end. I want to focus on the first 10 verses, however.

1. Personal testimony

The psalmist begins with personal testimony, verses 1 to 3. “I waited patiently for the Lord.” Patiently is probably too weak a word. It suggests something much too passive. He endured. He persevered in it. “And the Lord pulled me out of this slimy pit, out of this miry bog.” So what is he referring to? I don’t have a clue, and it’s one of those passages where I’m rather glad I don’t have a clue.

If the specific nature apart from the metaphor of the bog were identified for us, then we would be inclined to apply this passage only to that kind of particular pit. It’s a bit like the pleasure of not knowing what the thorn of the flesh is in 2 Corinthians 12. The fact that we don’t know means there’s a kind of universality to the application.

I’m sure, even in a small assembly like this, amongst us we have some people who are either suffering from cancer or have spouses and family who are, who have been through a church split in the last three or four years, who face militant depression, massive struggle in a local church, really awkward children. That’s understatement. Caring for parents with Alzheimer’s … These things can pile up and pile up until you scarcely see your way ahead. They can so consume you that they devour your emotional life.

Every church, bar none, has somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of people who are sort of born miserable, and if you let those people take over they can devour 90 percent of your emotional strength. Part of mature Christian ministry is sort of squeezing them to the side, patting them on the back, being kind and gracious, and then getting on with the people you can actually teach who will then bear the ministry and the gospel out to the next round.

If you are young and this is your first round and now you’re providing all the care for the 15 percent who are destined from before the foundation of the earth to be miserable, God help you. They will kill you. Do you see? I’m sure there are a few in here who’ve been through some of that this year too.

Whatever it is David has been through, he has been dragged out by God, and he is grateful. Even so, in verse 3 David quite remarkably does not focus all of his attention on his own release as if he is at the center of the universe. There are some people who give testimonies like that. “God exists to drag me out of muck.”

Rather, his words give praise to God and flow outward to others. Verse 3: “He put a new song in my mouth,” a metaphor constantly used in Scripture for a new round of blessing until it’s used triumphantly in Revelation 7 for the ultimate new blessing in the gospel itself. “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and will put their trust in the Lord.”

Of course, David would also be the first to acknowledge sometimes God doesn’t sort out our mud baths by pulling us out and putting our feet on the rock. Sometimes he simply adds more grace. Paul understands that in 2 Corinthians 12, doesn’t he? “Three times I asked the Lord to take it away,” which certainly does not mean a sort of quick prayer sometimes between pulling on my socks and sipping my orange juice before I beat it out the back door on the way to work.

He obviously set aside time for diligent intercessory prayer to beg God to take away this thorn in the flesh, and God’s repeated answer was, “ ‘My grace is sufficient for you.’ Therefore, I will rather rejoice in my weakness that God’s strength may be manifest in me.” That too is an answer to prayer. It may not be the first round of our desire, but retrospect shows us that teaches us some things too, doesn’t it? Here then is personal testimony.

2. Public principle

 If you’re following in your Bibles, you probably already detected the kind of hook word that ties the last part of verse 3 to the next section. The last part of verse 3: “Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord.” Then, as if personal testimony is not enough but you have to sort of universalize this to make it a public principle, David says, “Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not look to the proud, to those who turn aside to false gods.”

Is it not the case very often that when we find ourselves in alligators up to our waist we learn dependence? When we’re in muck and quicksand and we can’t get out, this image of both helplessness and slovenly despair, we learn again of our need of grace. So we stop looking at our human resources and looking to the proud, turning aside to all that’s false and idolatrous. No, no, no. We make the Lord our trust afresh.

Indeed, it can stimulate fresh thoughts about just how great God is. “Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders you have done. The things you planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them, they would be too many to declare.” One of the sad things about being in the mud bath is it can so devour our horizon we forget how good and big God is in every dimension of life. It distorts our perception of reality.

Now as David comes out, he thinks of all of God’s thoughts. This is not thoughts in an abstract sense but God’s thoughts for David, God’s purposes for David, all of these purposes. Can you not see that in your own life? You’re going through this wretched experience at the moment, but yet if it’s not too much to ask, put it in perspective.

Look back on all of what God has already done in you and for you and through you and to you. Remember what some Christians are going through in other parts of the world; Christians, let’s say, in the southern Sudan or amongst some groups of people in Burma, where life itself is short and uncertain. “Many are your thoughts, O God.” Then put that within the still broader biblical framework of gospel blessings, not only made by God, but made for God and redeemed by this God who sent his own Son.

Yes, my mother died of Alzheimer’s, but on the last day a voice will say, “Elizabeth Margaret Maybury Carson, arise,” and my mother will arise. Many indeed are the things our God has done and all because of a small cross on the outskirts of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. “Many indeed are the things our God has done.” Do you see? You have to be put into a God-centered frame of reference, or else you cannot even see what the muck is about.

There are a lot of psalms that make that same sort of point, the bigness of God, his plans for us, from our very womb on. Psalm 139: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.”

Then this … very similar to what we just read. “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!” That’s not thoughts in the abstract. In the context it’s, “All your thoughts that have ordered and ordained my life.”

Do you see? Exactly as in Psalm 40. “How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.” So here is a public principle David has learned, not only for himself, but to apply to the people of God at large.

3. Personal self-dedication

Not only personal testimony and public principle, but now personal self-dedication. What’s the only proper response to such deliverance? Offer up one more sheep. A pair of turtle doves, perhaps. “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire.” A kind of mechanistic offering of something back up to God by way of thank you is just woefully inadequate.

At the end of the day, you have to offer yourself. You are God’s in any case by creation, and if you’re God’s also by redemption, you’re doubly his. The only appropriate response is just to offer yourself, which is exactly, of course, what Paul understands in Romans 12:2, isn’t it? “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but my ears you have pierced; burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, ‘I have come to do your will, O my God.’ ”

What do we make about this pierced ears bit? There are two ways of understanding that passage. One, of course, comes from Exodus 21 and the pierced ears ceremony. In the ancient world sometimes slaves were taken because of military raids or full-scale war, but sometimes slaves were made because there were no bankruptcy laws. There was no Chapter 11, no Chapter 13.

So you borrowed some money to start a business, and then your business goes belly up and you sell yourself, or yourself and your family, to the person who holds your note. But under Israelite law, sometimes only observed in the breach but nevertheless there on the books … In the best times of Israelite law actually operating, it was more like an indentured service than slavery, because at the end of seven years you were supposed to be freed.

Supposing the economy was really bad. Don’t forget in those days most people never traveled farther away than 20 miles from where they were born. The economy is still bad. You don’t have any money. It turns out this particular master is really good, providing for you and your family food, shelter, clothing, security, honest work, favor. He treats you more like a fellow Israelite than anything else.

Then maybe you want to stay on in his service rather than try your hand in the open market where the unemployment rate is 30 percent. In that case there was this right provided in the Old Testament to have your ears pierced to say you could continue as a slave in that home. You put your ear on the door of the house. They took a small awl and just punched a hole in it, indicating you belonged to the household.

Is that a kind of symbolism that’s being used here? “You didn’t demand sheep. You demanded I become your slave eternally.” It makes sense, but I’m not convinced it’s quite right. That’s because every time the old ear-piercing language is used in the Old Testament of slaves it’s always one ear that’s pierced. Here this text says, “My ears you have pierced,” and so you start wondering, “Is this really what’s going on or is something else going on?”

There’s another explanation that in my judgment is more convincing. The word rendered in some of our Bibles pierced can also be translated dug. “My ears you have dug,” or we would say, “My ears you have dug out.” If you don’t know what that means, you haven’t met my mother. My mother was a Cockney, and she had all kinds of expressions. You never knew where they came from.

This one, it turns out, came from the Bible, but very few people outside of a small range of people ever used it. When I was a boy, I can remember my mother’s dulcet tones ringing in my ears, “Dig out your ears!” That’s not meant to be taken literally, a spade or even a spoon. It’s not a charge that there’s too much wax in there. It means we’re not listening. “Dig out your ears!”

Interestingly enough, that same expression shows up elsewhere in the Bible in connection, if you please, with the suffering servant. Listen to Isaiah 50, one of the great suffering servant songs. “The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught. The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears.” He has dug them out.

“And I have not been rebellious; I have not drawn back. I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.” In other words, the suffering servant endures, finally, all of the torment that is ordained for him because he is obedient to God. He’s called by God to suffer, and his ears have been dug out so he listens to what God wants him to do.

In which case the psalmist is saying here, “Sacrifice and offering you have not required, but you have dug out my ears.” That is, “You have given me a listening heart so I am yours. I do your word.” Isn’t that what the text says? “It is written about me in the scroll. I have come to do your will, O God. Your law is within my heart.”

Some of you are saying, “Oh, that’s all very well, Don, but you and I both know that verse is quoted in the New Testament and applied to Jesus. What’s going on there?” It’s important to remember where it’s found. It’s found in Hebrews, chapter 10. We’re told in Hebrews, chapter 10, verses 5 and following, “Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me.’ ” He changed it again. We’ll come to that in a second.

“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, O God.’ ” Then that is applied specifically to Christ and his obedient suffering even unto death. What’s going on? Changing the Word of God?

I was brought up in French Canada. My accent betrays me, doesn’t it? When you speak two or three languages, one of the things you discover is the way you say some things in one language is not always the way you say things in another language. Different idioms, different vocabulary, different ranges of meaning.

For example, in French there is no word for home. Do you want to say, “I’m going home”? You have to say, Je vais chez moi, “I’m going to my place;” or chez nous, “to our place;” au foyer, “to the hearth.” There’s ‡ la maison, “to the house,” but there’s no word for home. So you have to find some way of getting around it, don’t you?

I can’t prove this. What is clear is the writer to the Hebrews always quotes the Greek Old Testament that was already available. The Greek Old Testament has this other funny expression, “A body you prepared for me.” The real question is why does the Greek translator of this psalm render, “My ears you have dug out,” as “A body you prepared for me”? That’s the real question, and I suspect it’s a simple answer.

He knew in the Greek language, “My ears you have dug out for me,” is just going to leave everybody’s eyes glazed over. It doesn’t make any sense at all. So he puts it into an idiom that makes sense. If your ears are dug out in Hebrew, it means you listen. So your whole life, your whole body, your whole being, is God’s. So he puts that down. “But a body you prepared for me. I am yours. My whole body is yours.”

David … So much of his life foretells great David’s greater son, does it not? So it is applied to great David’s greater son. If David abandons himself to his heavenly Father, how much does great David’s greater son abandon himself to his heavenly Father, coming to offer his whole being in response to God’s Word, to God himself, which is finally in the incarnation and the cross and the atonement that frees us from our sin?

So even by being obedient here, David constitutes a picture that foretells Christ himself. There is here then also not only personal testimony and public principle but personal self-dedication, which ultimately issues in the final model of Christ himself.

4. Public proclamation

Verses 9 and 10: “I proclaim righteousness in the great assembly; I do not seal my lips, as you know, O Lord. I do not hide your righteousness in my heart,” which doesn’t mean, “I don’t protect it in my heart.” It means, “I don’t just keep it in. Rather, I let it out. I talk about it. I speak of your faithfulness and salvation. I do not conceal your love and your truth from the great assembly.”

You and I both know there are different sort of cultural expectations about how you talk about God and how you give your testimony, aren’t there? You come from some very enthusiastic denominations and some very enthusiastic subcultures, you have a little sniffle during the week, some little minor thing, and the next Sunday, “Oh, the Lord gave me a great miracle. I was so ill. Yet the Lord intervened and I have been healed.”

Some of us want to say, “Give me a break. It was a cold.” Then there are others of us, more conservative, maybe too much Anglo-Saxon blood flowing in our veins, a bit withdrawn, appreciate understatement, no sympathy for slapstick. As a result, you come to a situation in life where you lose your spouse and your house burns down and your dog dies.

Somebody says to you, “How is it going?” and you say, “It could be better.” Then five years later the Lord has given you a new spouse, your house has been rebuilt, your job is going well, and you even got a new dog. Somebody says, “How is it going?” You say, “Lots to be grateful for.” You want to say, “Some life here, please, somewhere.”

David is not going to get into this sort of withdrawn, “I’m an independent sort of sphinx,” attitude. Listen to what he says, “I proclaim righteousness in the great assembly; I do not seal my lips, as you know, O Lord. I do not hide your righteousness; I speak of your faithfulness. I do not conceal your love.”

Listen. We are obligated after we come through these periods of miry bogs to articulate our thanksgiving and our worship to proclaim God’s righteousness publically, because it shows then to the whole new generation of Christians coming along behind, who have not yet been pulled out of their bogs, how we ought to be responding, how we ought to handle these things, the centeredness of God in our lives. So we pass on worship and adoration and thanksgiving to a new generation. That’s part of devoting ourselves unabashedly to God, isn’t it?

Let me tell you about Mike Wheeler. Mike Wheeler went as a single missionary to Bolivia quite a number of years ago. He learned the language well. He was a tall, six-foot-four, skinny as a beanpole sort of chap, working with Bolivians with an average height of about five-five, but he fit right in.

He just loved those people, learned the language, and saw a lot of fruitfulness. Eventually, his mission sent him back to us, to Trinity, to do a PhD in New Testament so he could then go back and help upgrade some of the educational standards of their clergy and so forth. He arrived on our door and started his PhD.

What was interesting was when he was down there for the first 12 or 14 years, low and behold, he met another missionary who was single, a young woman from another part of the country. Eventually, they were married in their late 30s. They had one little girl, and when they came back to Trinity, then 40 or just a little after, this little girl was about 2 or 2-1/2.

They were into this program by about six months when his wife was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. It slowed up the training a bit, but in fact with a mastectomy and chemo and radiation, the whole gamut … miserable stuff … it looked as if she was coming out of it. He went back to his studies full time, and he was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer. Chicago, where I live, has a lot of very good cancer hospitals, but they looked at him and they said, “There’s nothing we can do for you.”

The mission decided they had enough invested in this chap and they liked him so well they would take him up to Mayo, which they did. Mayo said, “We only have experimental treatments. We’ll try.” They took out 90 percent of his stomach and gave him drugs that were really designed for bowel cancer. Low and behold, he recovered with 10 percent of his stomach, now having to eat little bits about every two hours or so because he doesn’t have a stomach to hold the food.

He came back and worked full time again on his PhD, and then his wife’s cancer came back and she died. Last autumn Mike came back to our church. Our church is one of his supporting churches. He came back to our church on his way back to Bolivia with his daughter, now 8, almost 9, to say thank you and to give praise to God.

For half an hour all he spoke about was the goodness of God. The goodness of God in giving him a wife, the goodness of God in giving them a child, the goodness of God in not taking both of the parents so this child still had a parent, the goodness of God in calling them to salvation, the goodness of God in his assurance he would see his wife again, the goodness of God in sending him back to Bolivia where he could serve the people he loved so much, the goodness of God in the healthy normalcy of the child, the goodness of God in having the availability of the Mayo clinic, the goodness of God in all the Christians who have supported him.

All we heard for half an hour was the goodness of God, and I tell you that’s merely normal for the Christian. Anything else is subnormal. It’s Davidic, isn’t it? “I will not conceal your righteousness from the great assembly. I will not seal my lips. I will not hide it in my heart.” Do you see? For God is our Helper. Let us pray.

Forbid, merciful God, that we should become so professional we can no longer acknowledge cheerfully, wholeheartedly, humbly, wisely your sovereignty and your goodness in our lives. To whom else will we go? Your Son has the words of eternal life? Oh, Lord God, give us endurance, faithfulness, integrity, public testimony, humility of mind, and help us to acknowledge in word and deed … May the Lord be exalted. For Jesus’ sake, amen.

Male: I feel like we need to stay and have several of us just arise and give public testimony to the goodness of God. I know you feel that way just as I do, also convicted I’ve not been very Davidic in my approach to my own miry bogs and my mud. I suppose some of you have felt the same way. Don, thank you so much. God is good and he is great and he is greatly to be praised by those who serve him like ourselves. We appreciate that reminder so much.

In just a moment, David, if you would lead us in the closing prayer, I’d appreciate that. You can just come right on up here so we can hear you. I didn’t ask him before, but he’s a preacher, so he should be ready. Let me just say we, of course, will have Dr. Carson here for the rest of this weekend.

Dr. Walt Kaiser is also here in town and will be speaking. You all are very busy people. You have your own places of ministry. We know that, but if you have time available to come out tonight, we’d love to have you. There will be refreshments at 6:00 in the reception area, and then at 6:30 we’ll meet in the sanctuary and we’ll hear from both Dr. Carson and Dr. Kaiser tonight.

Then we’ll hear from them also in the morning. If you’d like to come in the morning, that will be at 9:00. Please, just take in whatever you have time or desire to take in. We would love to have you. It’s an honor to have you on our campus today and to be in fellowship with you. May the Lord continue to bless all of you and your ministries in every way. David, thank you for coming to pray, and with this prayer we’re dismissed.

David: Let’s pray together.

O Lord, our Lord. How excellent is your name. Lord, I thank you for speaking to my heart today. Thank you for your words through your servant from your Word. Lord, you are so gracious, so good, and we praise you today. Lord, I pray, as we go back to people who are experiencing the mire and the bogs or are about to or have just finished experiencing them, that we will indeed have a word of praise to testify to you and your greatness, but also to lift them and to strengthen them in their experience.

So we thank you today for what we have heard from your Word. O God, may it be a part of our very being, quick to praise our God, not flippantly, but because of what we know of you. Thank you. We praise your name. We bless your name. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray, amen.