Overcoming our past

Ps 9 4 For you have upheld my right and my cause; you have sat on your throne, judging righteously.

5 You have rebuked the nations and destroyed the wicked; you have blotted out their name for ever and ever.

6 Endless ruin has overtaken the enemy, you have uprooted their cities; even the memory of them has perished.

7 The LORD reigns forever; he has established his throne for judgment.

8 He will judge the world in righteousness; he will govern the peoples with justice.

9 The LORD is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.

10 Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you.

11 Sing praises to the LORD, enthroned in Zion; proclaim among the nations what he has done.

12 For he who avenges blood remembers; he does not ignore the cry of the afflicted.

13 O LORD, see how my enemies persecute me! Have mercy and lift me up from the gates of death,

14 that I may declare your praises in the gates of the Daughter of Zion and there rejoice in your salvation.

15 The nations have fallen into the pit they have dug; their feet are caught in the net they have hidden. 

This Psalm teaches that when our desires are united with Gods desires we experience an eternal kingdom that has no limits of time. Believe it or not when our kingdom desires are frustrated, we are expressing our inability to exercise our own power to have success in having our desires fulfilled. This is seldom taught in the pragmatic age we live in. The Psalms describe the holistic activity of God in working all things for His purpose as the evidence of His holiness.  Gods sees all time in one view. His desire according to His law and covenants is completely successful. The king is saying that when he is frustrated in his desires there is a sense in which past desires are always being redefined in the present in order to experience the holistic purposes of God as He defines His holiness. His desires of anger or joy in the past events are never forgotten. 

There is a teaching that God forgets our sins like He erases them from history. We have this obsession with forgiveness as if our not remembering is what heals us. But this is just a foolish idea. Because everyone remembers their past. And to say that we are able to forget what has happened is to be disingenuous in describing the human condition as if we are able to do things that are not human. If people were honest who proclaim that they are forgiven because they ask for forgiveness then in reality they should be silenced for the rest of their days since the law requires death upon confession. Why is it that we take these biblical concepts and bring them down to a level that we can control. The truth is that as our desires are experienced based upon our history that we are functioning under an obligation that God has given us to fulfill His perfect government that can only satisfy our desires. In this Psalm it teaches the legitimate use of past desires that come up in the present. This is what Ive been teaching for a long time. Its not whether we can forget and deny but its how we can use our desires both from being wronged or from receiving rewards as motives for greater success. 

And you see this in the teaching of the Revelation where God collects our prayers in heaven and they are presented before the altar and they are cast as balls of fire of judgement upon the earth, Here the Psalmist is presenting his past anger in a legitimate way according to Gods government as a motive to to experience freedom and success in the present. You will find this kind of timeless perspective in how he complains about his present suffering. He adds from his past memory of anger or happiness in the sense of increasing the passion in the desire as God sees the events from His eternal perspective. They are always before God in this timeless view. Our rewards come from using the good and bad desires to increase our passion to overcome all opposition and to see the salvation of God.