Psalm 60 - God's Help vs Mans' Help

So here it is, the second time I am creating this post. I had a fairly complete post on Friday, but felt like the post was not really connecting with the scripture, and was me trying to paste the scripture onto what I wanted to say, and in the end, I have decided to scrap it and start all over. So here I am with psalm 60, having come back to it repeatedly over the weekend and finally ready to write about it.

After much reading and pondering, I find that I want to focus on verse 11 of the psalm;

¹¹ Give us help from trouble,
For the help of man is useless.

It brings up an interesting ideas that I have been thinking about over the weekend, how is the help of man different from the help of God and is mans' help really useless?

I can certainly think of times that I have been helped by other people and it certainly hasn't felt useless and I have appreciated it greatly, so how can it be considered useless? Well, first of all, it is important to remind myself that this is a psalm, a piece of poetic writing, given to the overly dramatic and imagery, not given to specific, concrete spiritual truths. In that context, I see that the question of mans' help is not the question to ask, but the idea to understand is the difference between God's help and mans' help. 

Considering this, it is important to understand the ability of God's help and the ability of mans' help. It is more difficult to understand the ability of God's help for me, because my understanding of God is limited by my human abilities to perceive and conceive of things, so let's start with understanding mans' help. 

People, can (not always will) help to the extent of their abilities, meaning gifts, skills, physical strength, etc, to the extent of their resources, time, money, etc, and their understanding, ability to see and understand the need, circumstances, the request, etc. In many ways this is quite broad and allows for a great deal of help from people. And perhaps it is better to talk about how people can't help. Here are some things that I find others' can't help me with: fully defining the nature of God, perfect truth, the environment around us, in other words, there are many mysteries around me that are not satisfactorily understood within the limits of human understanding.

Enter God. God is not limited by human understanding and therefore can understand these things. And it is through my relationship with God that understanding is revealed to me. Now, do I (or will I) perfectly understand these things, of course not, I am still limited, but I do find myself knowing or understand things for which I can't explain because my source is not my ability (or someone else's) ability to logic out the information, but through revelation. 

The other thing that comes to my mind when I consider this idea of God's help vs. mans' is the idea of things that when added together are greater than the sum of their parts. In nature we find things that when combined create something more that the elements that have gone into it. We can also see this with actions taken, when people combine their actions, at times, they become greater than the sum of those actions or labor. Consider a project that would take you two hours to complete, but when you get two other people to help you, it is completed within a half hour. (because this is experiential, I can't provide you with a concrete example because it would be my experience but not yours, but I have certainly known enough people to experience this that I hope you have a point of reference).

Enter God. God is in the midst of the task, bringing us beyond our abilities to accomplish something greater than we have the ability for, In many circumstances this occurs when we work in community but occasionally when we are working solo.

Does these ideas resonate with you? Have you experienced the help of God? I believe that David did understand the help of God and saw how it went beyond the help of man and therefore sought God's help in the midst of circumstances that were beyond his control. 

What about you. What help do you seek in situations outside of your control?