The beauty of Psalm 85—as a psalm of Advent—is that it not only makes God’s turning to us conditional upon our turning to him, but it also makes our turning to God conditional upon his turning to us. Turning as a purely natural human accomplishment would be an impossibility. The psalm, therefore, explains that our turning to God and God’s turning to us coincide. They are one and the same, for they occur in salvation—which is to say with Augustine: They occur in the God-man, in Christ himself.

Psalm 85 has long been linked to Advent. Saint Augustine makes clear why. Commenting on verse 7—“Show us thy steadfast love, O Lord, and grant us thy salvation”—the African bishop explains that the word “salvation” simply means “Christ”: “Grant us your Christ, let us know your Christ, let us see your Christ.” It’s a bold and direct identification: When the psalmist desires salvation, he is longing for Christ.
Let’s take Augustine’s interpretive move—salvation equals Christ—as our starting point. How do we make sense of the rest of the psalm if Christ is the salvation for which we long?
The psalm’s context is national calamity, namely, exile to Babylon. The return in 539 b.c. yielded a new set of difficulties—enemies at the gate and harvests that failed. The Promised Land wasn’t the paradisal salvation that people had longed for.
Two things stand out. First, the psalmist links these perduring troubles with sin (and their end with forgiveness of sin). Second, he links Judah’s return to the return of God himself. The result is a poem that pines for salvation’s advent in Christ.
The first point is obnoxious to us. The psalmist views exile as the result of sin. The first three verses depict the returns from captivity as forgiveness of sin:
Lord, thou wast favorable to thy land;thou didst restore (shuv) the fortunes of Jacob.Thou didst forgive the iniquity of thy people;thou didst pardon all their sin.Thou didst withdraw all thy wrath;thou didst turn (shuv) from thy hot anger.
We could translate the first verse slightly more literally as “thou didst return (shuv) the captivity of Jacob.” In other words, God has returned his people from exile—something directly tied to divine pardon. The implication is clear: Exile itself resulted from divine anger.
Back in the Promised Land, the psalmist asks God to relieve the difficult new situation and turn around his people’s plight. He makes this plea in the next section (85:4–7): “Restore (shuv) us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us.” God’s people may have returned from Babylon, but the new disasters are evidence of sin, while forgiveness would lead to a greater and deeper (re)turning to him.
The psalmist’s quid pro quo theology—the result, likely, of extended reflection upon books such as Deuteronomy and Jeremiah—is disturbing to us. We don’t typically share the poet’s confident attribution of calamity to sin.
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Kuyper fought for a national system of free schools for the entirety of his public life. He firmly believed that free schools were the best way to serve all parents, not just Christian parents because “it was best for all children to experience a unity of world view and values between school and home” (361). In 1917, his Antirevolutionary Party won a great victory. “As a culmination of these efforts, the Dutch constitution was amended to guarantee this right, and in 1920, the year Kuyper died, a new education bill was passed which put that amendment into practice” (xii). Although Kuyper made three substantial, albeit pragmatic, compromises to his ideal, he believed they were ultimately successful since compromise is always necessary when working in an imperfect political system. Nevertheless, while their own struggle culminated in a victory for free schools, Kuyper also recognized that the “struggle of the spirits” behind the struggle of the schools was far from over. 

Well-known for the doctrine of “sphere sovereignty, ” Abraham Kuyper once famously declared: “no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!”[1] Kuyper is also notable for delivering the 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton’s Theological Seminary in which he offered a profound and lasting treatment of Calvinism which remains relevant to us who are living in the postmodern era. But it is his significant work of educational reform in the Netherlands spanning nearly fifty years (1869-1917) that features in On Education.
On Education is a substantive anthology of Kuyper’s thoughts on Christian education, published as part of a twelve volume series of Kuyper’s works, produced by the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society, the Acton Institute, and Kuyper College. And it is precisely because of Kuyper’s “unique gifts, experiences, and writings” on Christianity and education that On Education is more than just a helpful resource; it is a uniquely prescient guide for everyone concerned with the education crisis plaguing twenty-first century North America (vii).
The volume is divided into four parts, tracing Kuyper’s involvement with the Netherlands’ seventy-year political battle over parents’ rights to choose schools representative of their religious convictions. Part One introduces the beginnings of the struggle: in 1868, the Society for the Common Good issued a manifesto stating what it perceived was a need to protect its gains of having achieved “the religious neutrality of the public school;” Kuyper responded that his party was not attempting to take back the Society’s perceived gains but, instead, to “make it possible for more children to receive the religious education desired by their parents” (9). This section further treats Kuyper’s grave concern about Dutch public schools “teaching the immortality of the soul,” something he contends is not “safe in the hands of the state school teachers” (22).
Part Two consists of four chapters dedicated to Kuyper’s antirevolutionary vision of sphere sovereignty which, when properly applied, would protect Christian schools from the revolutionary spirit of “false mingling,” whereby the state “sought to mix together precisely what God had separated” (53). Kuyper argued that it is only by properly distinguishing between the boundaries and bonds ordained by God that Christians can keep their schools from falling prey to the state and resist those secularists who would use the public trough to take away their freedom to preach Christ.
Part Three consists of six chapters of parliamentary addresses, journalistic articles, public speeches, and theological writings that address Kuyper’s pluralistic program for national education. At the time, the Netherlands was a nation that consisted in near equal measure of Rationalists, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics. In short, it was Kuyper’s position that, “The state may not use its supremacy to favor one part of the nation over another. All spiritual compulsion by the state is an affront to the honor of the spiritual life and, as an offense to civil liberty, is hateful and abominable” (xi).
Finally, Part Four consists of five chapters that treat Kuyper’s appeal to the public conscience, his concern for the injustice done to the poor of the nation, the political struggle, and ultimate victory—albeit a compromised victory. Kuyper sought a political policy of “principled structural pluralism”(xlii). And his Antirevolutionary Party “worked diligently to establish the right of all parents to provide their children with a quality education in accordance with their deepest convictions and values” (xii). Directed by his motto, “Free schools the norm, state schools a supplement,” (361) and by the foundational Christian principles of “freedom of conscience, equal treatment of religion under the law, and the place of schools within civil society” (365), Kuyper fought for a national system of free schools for the entirety of his public life.
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Truth fades quickly when it competes with the chronic pain of depression. Frequent trips to Scripture and truth were the order of the day. “I have tried to have resets throughout the day by reading a wise book or devotional.” A few followed this time in Scripture by “repenting of misplaced hopes and trust.”

In the summer of 2021, a question appeared on the CCEF website: “What has helped you to endure in the midst of depression?” We received 365 responses—each one a gift. Thank you. If you were to read them, you would have been strengthened in your faith in Jesus. I certainly was, and I plan to read them again. They remind us that there are many fine people, some of them within reach, who fight every day, with every speck of life and every resource the Spirit gives them. They are heroes of the faith whose strength and beauty are seen by some of us now, by all when faith becomes sight.
Everyone who endures hardships by faith in Christ stands in the tradition of witnesses. Israel was called upon to be a witness to the greatness of God in contrast to the emptiness of idols. “You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord (Isaiah 43:10). Witnesses are those who believe that God exists, and they draw near to him even when they have only heard his words and not yet seen him (Hebrews 11:6). They continue to draw near when they endure fiery tests.
Survey Results
Here is how these witnesses were helped as they endured depression.
The basic summary of the answers is what you might expect:

daily time in Scripture supplemented by anything spiritually good,
time in prayer,
time with people who understand and care well, and
wise routines.

These might seem ordinary, but they are evidence of the Spirit’s power, and they are truly impossible when you feel as though all life has left your body, soul, intellect, and affections. When Scripture suddenly becomes a foreign language, a normal person will not take the time to decipher it, but those who endure by faith will keep trying. When you live with accusations—“you are a failure, nobody loves you, you don’t deserve to live”—why would you turn to God? When you believe that even if God loves you, he loves you less than the upbeat people in the church—why would you turn to God? One person wrote: “I ruminate on things that are so unhelpful.” Those ruminations were about how God was displeased with him. But those who endure work hard to not give these questions or their answers the last word. Instead, they turn to Jesus because they have a faint memory that he “loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood” (Rev 1:5). And they know they will not find life anywhere else.
Here are some details from the survey.
1. Time in Scripture. For the depressed, this can mean: the truth, force-fed. “I have to remind myself that God loves me every day, and pray every day, whether I feel like it or not.” If you ever had to eat when you had absolutely no appetite, you know how hard this can be.
Aim for “slow listening.” By this, this individual meant that he waited to hear one thing that could possibly be good for his soul, and then he held on. Respondents slow listened to Isaiah 61:1–3, Psalm 27, Psalm 131, Zephaniah 3:17, Romans 5, Hebrews 11, 1 Peter 1, or anything that said, “but God,” or a hymn book, or the Book of Common Prayer. Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy made a few lists, as did biographies of old saints of the church, especially those digested by John Piper. Some were able to read. Others could only listen — to sermons, podcasts, music, and a spouse who “just read Scripture, even Leviticus.”
“I have to think hard about the suffering of Jesus and the eternal joy that followed.” Think hard? Amazing. Most of us don’t think hard about spiritual truth after a good night’s sleep and a day that seems manageable. Another said, “I lost my ability to think.” This is a common reality of depression. But here is that evidence of power: “At that bottom, I was met by the Man of Sorrows and high priest who had suffered.” And then, they must find him again tomorrow. Truth fades quickly when it competes with the chronic pain of depression. Frequent trips to Scripture and truth were the order of the day. “I have tried to have resets throughout the day by reading a wise book or devotional.” A few followed this time in Scripture by “repenting of misplaced hopes and trust.”
About 20% of respondents found refuge in God’s sovereign control over all things, including their depression. This is more than I anticipated, but it should be no surprise. Job and Habakkuk have led the way. Both men, each approved and loved by God, faced great suffering, and both had very personal encounters with the Lord. They asked God questions, and he actually spoke with them. In visitations such as these, people bow to God’s greatness and authority. They learn that he is the LORD. Habakkuk said, “I hear, and my body trembles . . . I will quietly wait for the day of trouble” (Hab 3:16). Job said, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5–6). The eyes of both men were diverted from the troubles of the day to something bigger, which freed them to grow in simple obedience and joy.
One woman was led to this same place through the greatness of God’s presence and love.
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