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Psalm 9:17  The wicked go down to the realm of the dead, all the nations that forget God.

In my younger days we were quite accustomed to saying of Christ in the Apostles Creed, “He descended into Hell” before acknowledging that “On the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into Heaven.”;  but, because of our modern sensitivities, we are less inclined to use the word ‘Hell’, so we just refer to it as ‘the place of the departed’.  The Hebrew word is ‘Sheol’, so its occurence in today’s verse is translated in most modern translations, as in the NIV, as ‘the realm of the dead’, or is just transliterated as ‘Sheol’ (eg ESV).  Atypical of this modern trend is Eugene Petersen in ‘The Message’: “The wicked bought a one-way ticket to hell.”

Psalm 1 identifies ‘the wicked’ as those who have no place in their world-view for God, and David is obviously using ‘Sheol’ to refer to that ‘hell’ here – a place where God and his presence and loving, caring, sustaining influence are NOT present!  The significant thing for us is that David includes among ‘the wicked’ ‘all the nations that forget God’!  Such a blatant statement drives me to prayer for Australia.

The ‘nation’ into which I was born as a citizen in 1940 was founded on the assumption that God, the Eternal Creator-Redeemer, exists, even if the majority of its citizens only gave lip-servicevto this reality and didn’t let it interfere too much with their lifestyle!  But I think it would now be more accurate to say that we have forgotten God.  I have experienced the evidence of this slowly taking place during my eight and a half decades as a citizen.

And that makes David’s statement here much more scary, and my need to pray and witness much more urgent.  With apologies to Isaac Watts, my urgent prayer today is: “O God, our help in ages past, [please will you once again be] our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.”

Obviously, if we choose to forget God, he will leave us to our own devices and abandon us to an eternal existence apart from him – hell.

In Romans 1:18-31, Paul uses the expression “God gave them over” to describe the consequences of our decision to “not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God” – ie to forget him, and these inevitable consequences are not at all a pleasant read as we see them being played out before our very eyes in our media today.

Thankfully, our loving, compassionate God is already giving us a taste of these consequences before they become a permanent, eternal reality in hell, in the hope that we might heed his warning.  O that we will do just that, before it is too late.

– Bruce Christian