Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
There is a prayer in the Bible that can be the last stand for any human in distress. It's the one that will always be answered in kindness and grace: "God be merciful to me a sinner!" (Luke 18:13; the little Greek particle ho makes the publican pray, "God be merciful to me the most sinful sinner!") But is there any prayer in the Bible like, "God, be merciful to me, a fool"?
Is a fool more difficult for God to save than a plain ordinary sinner? King Saul confessed to David, "I have played the fool and erred exceedingly" (1 Sam. 26:21). He had been persecuting David, "the anointed of the Lord." But we do not read that King Saul prayed for God to have mercy on him; he finally ended his brilliant career in suicide.
In rejecting Jesus, the Jewish leaders accused Him of tremendous delusional grandeur: "For a good work we do not stone You, but ... because You, being a Man, make Yourself God" (John 10:33). As Jesus hung at last on His cross apparently "forsaken" by His Father, and ridiculed by the crowd, Satan wrung His heart with fierce temptations.
Only a few short hours before, He had regaled His disciples with prophecies that when "the Son of man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory, [and] all the nations will be gathered before Him" (Matt. 25:31, 32). Now behold Yourself, says Satan, naked on a Roman cross, forsaken of Your Father, ridiculed by all the people; how could you have been plunged from Your delusions of grandeur any lower than You are! If Jesus was tempted, He wondered if His enemies may have been right all along.
As we read Psalm 22 (the transcript of His prayer as He hung there), we find that He was sorely tempted to think of Himself as less than human, "a worm" (vs. 6). The agony of forsakenness was not cosmetic; He drank the cup of hell to its dregs. When finally by His faith He broke through the darkness of the second death into the sunlight of His Father's acceptance, His prayer indicates that he had been tempted to think of Himself as the Fool of all fools: "Save Me from the lion's mouth and from the horns of the wild oxen! You have answered Me. ... You who fear the Lord, ... He has not despised nor abhorred ... the Afflicted, nor has He hidden His face from Him; but when He cried to Him, He heard" (vss. 21-24).
Man may despise a fool, but God does not "abhor" a repentant one. If any "forsaken" sinner anywhere in the world reads this, let him or her take heart.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: May 7, 2004.
Copyright © 2019 by "Dial Daily Bread."
