“You are my hiding place…”

What do you think of when you hear that someone has gone into hiding?  Probably that person is afraid of something, as Salmon Rushdie hid himself after a mufti issued a fatwa against him for writing The Satanic Verses.  Rushdie feared for his life after the death sentence was proclaimed, remaining under cover for years.  He resurfaced after the fatwa was canceled.

Before he was king, David knew something of hiding.  King Saul hunted him down like the US armed forces searched for Saddam Hussein in the Iraq war before he was finally caught and executed.  There was no rest day or night for this young Israeli soldier or his mighty men.  Close calls and near-encounters occurred several times, but for the most part David avoided them at all costs.  He hid in caves and fields, among the Philistines, in the south, in strongholds and on hills, anywhere he could go to flee Saul’s army.  He fled for his life, as Saul wanted to turn him into bird feed for the vultures.

So when David says of the Lord, “You are my hiding place…” he knows from personal experience what that meant.  We find this description in Psalm 32, a psalm expositors describe as one of the primary confession psalms in Scripture.  It begins by proclaiming the blessing of forgiven transgressions and covered sins (v. 1).  He moves on to describe another kind of hiding — spiritual hiding — when one knows he has done wrong and doesn’t confess (vs. 3-4).  Then he describes the breakthrough of confession and the healing and safety it brings (v. 5).

It’s interesting, this urge to hide.  It’s been going on a very long time, since Genesis 3.  After Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and sewed fig leaves for “coverings” (v. 7), a form and symbol of hiding.  Not enough, though because they also “hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (v. 8).  Clearly these two attempts at hiding were insufficient to fix their spiritual dilemma.  An accounting God will not be appeased by lame attempts to hide.  David described it this way: “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you’” (Psalm 139:11-12).  God will catch you cutting even the smallest corners of black paper on a moonless night in the deepest unlit cave.

Back in Psalm 32 David hinted that not confessing was a kind of hiding that had serious damaging consequences: “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long” (v. 3).  Interestingly, scientists now know that serious prolonged emotional trauma can cause a literal weakening of the bones.  David had it right all along.  This kind of hiding is known as hiding from… hiding from God, hiding from life’s storms, hiding from enemies.  However, there is a huge difference between hiding from and hiding in, and that is how David describes the Lord, a place to hide in.

Many advantages can be found in hiding places.  The most obvious is safety and security, what the rest of verse 7 says: “You will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.”  This is what Corrie ten Boom’s family of Holland called their home when they made it available for endangered Jews of Europe in the 1940s. But David went on to describe another often missed benefit of God as our hiding place — and remember, he discovered this personally in his own trials.  It’s in the next verse: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will guide you with my eye” (NKJV).  What does it mean to be guided by one’s eye?  It is a process of instruction that occurs over time.  When a child is young, his parents want him to learn how to do things.  So they begin their instruction by telling their little one what needs to be done, explaining the steps, and showing them how it’s done.  Often they need to down on the child’s level and walk them through the task.  As the child improves on his skill and gets older, the parents can give instructions without all the elaboration. That’s because along the way the child gains a knowledge of the parents as well as a knowledge of tasks.  Greater maturity only deepens intimacy.  In the best relationships this instruction graduates to a mere look of the eye.  David says that this growing, maturing process is gained by being in touch with God frequently enough, long enough, in the hiding place.

How long and how frequently are you meeting with the Lord, your hiding place?