Psalms – Page 3 – LOVE | ACCEPT

Psalm 98–Rivers Clap Their Hands

The Lord has made his salvation known and revealed his righteousness to the nations. He has remembered his love and his faithfulness to the house of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. (Psalm 98:2-3)

God the evangelist. There’s a phrase that we don’t often hear on Sunday mornings. The idea that God who mercifully extends His grace—of which He is the source—also trumpets that message to the world somehow seems to escape us. We take the burden and responsibility for evangelism onto our own shoulders, but fail to look back at the exemplar for the proper way of performing the task.

God the Father announced His love through His chosen people. As His people put their depravity on display over and over, the message was confused. The Suffering Servant would leave no doubt. Christ made salvation known for all the generations that would follow. Our evangelism requires nothing but to display Christ to the world.

Marana Tha!

image macieklew

Psalm 97–All The Peoples See His Glory

The Lord reigns, let the earth be glad; let the distant shores rejoice. (Ps 97:1)

The psalmist declares the fundamental tension in which God’s people exist. We recognize his sovereign rule over all but struggle to understand why He doesn’t exercise it to destroy the evil that is so prevalent. Is there reason for doubt?

Fire goes before him and consumes his foes on every side. (v3)

Confidence is rooted in faith. Faith that one day, all will be restored to its proper condition. Fire will sweep away all that mars creation and out of the tempering flame will come the restored heavens and earth. Nothing, even the mountains, will stand before God in his sweeping restoration.

Let those who love the Lord hate evil, for he guards the lives of his faithful one and delivers them from the hand of the wicked. Light is shed upon the righteous and joy on the upright in heart. (vv 10-11)

Despite what surrounds us, we trust in the God whose sacrificial act demonstrated beyond question His love for us. Look through everything to see the goodness that will be the result of the change. Look to the skies and know that He is good and righteous.

The heavens proclaim his righteousness and all the peoples see His glory. (v6)

Grace and peace to you.

image uncle jerry

Psalm 96–A New Song

For great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; he is to be feared above all gods.

For all the Gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord mad the heavens. Psalm 96:4-5

The psalm demands an allegiance as stunning today as it was in the day it was written. Praise the God of Israel as the God of peoples and lands. Dispense with all other gods as they are simply idols, powerless and without meaning. Though we may not carve idols, our age certainly replaces God with other objects of devotion. Observer the lines pouring out of Verizon stores this week to possess and iPhone, the people believing that ownership of this phone would be transformative enough to queue up for hours in the winter cold.

Three calls to action follow the psalmist’s establishment of the authority and omnipresence of God:

Ascribe to the Lord, O families of nations, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; bring an offering and come into his courts.

Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness; tremble before him, all the earth. (vv 7-9)

To what do we ascribe glory and strength, really? To whom do our offerings go? Do we tremble before anything?

Grace and peace to you.

image Truth Will Set You Free

Psalm 95–They Have Not Known My Ways

Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me, though they had seen what I did. (Psalm 95:8-9)

So many moments in our lives are marked by decisions made in haste without due consideration given to our foundation of knowledge. Whether we choose in desperation, anger or confusion, we fail to take the extra second necessary to recall other similar circumstances and their outcomes. Was God present and involved, given the distance of time in your recollection?

This was the repeated failure of Israel that the Psalmist recalls. He reminds us of the incident in the desert recorded in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20. Though the Lord had shepherded His people through the wastelands by the physical presence of fire and cloud and His servant Moses, when the struggle began to wear on the Israelites, their short term memory took over and they could only remember the past hour without water. They failed to recall the unending flow of water that they had benefited from previous. In their rebellion, all of the great works of God were forgotten, replaced by distrust and self-interest.

Has your Savior forgotten you? Consider His promises and track record before allowing this kind of doubt to influence your decisions and behaviors.

Grace and peace to you.

image malec slomas

Psalm 94–Who Formed the Eye

O Lord, the God who avenges, O God who avenges, shine forth.

Rise up, O Judge of the earth; pay back to the proud what they deserve.

How long will the wicked, O Lord, how long will the wicked be jubilant? (Ps 94:1-3)

A regular point of argument by non-believers is that the silence of God in the face of evil is proof that He does not exist. That certainly makes sense. If I’m holding a conversation on the Egyptian riots with my imaginary rabbit friend Harvey and he doesn’t respond, I shouldn’t be all that surprised. After all, he’s imaginary. To a person who is insensitive to God and His movement in the world, it can certainly seem as though He is not there. Evil and horror seem to run free, suffering is the order of the day.

The psalmist provides food for thought to those who take this tack in their thinking. Little Darwinian thinking would have intruded on the Psalmists challenges as he calls out to the scoffers in their disbelief;

Take heed, you senseless ones among the people; you fools, when will you become wise?

Does he who implanted the ear not hear?

Does he who formed the eye not see? (vv 8-9)

Does silence truly evidence a lack of presence? Meditate on the proofs that surround you.

Grace and peace to you.

image Rickydavid

Psalm 93–For Endless Days

Your statutes stand firm; holiness adorns your house for endless days, O Lord. (Psalm 93:5)

Think about your life and the amount of impermanence that passes for relationship. We have ‘friends’ on Facebook that we have barely come in contact with. Communication takes place in 140 characters or less, and we follow along, hanging on the every word that chirps on our smart phones. Things that used to change from year to year now transform from minute to minute. We lack foundation.

And yet our souls crave it.

We want something permanent to hang on to, to base our lives upon. Our souls yearn from something that is the same tomorrow as it was yesterday, something we can trust to be there. Israel knew this angst. The psalmist knew all too well how quickly fortunes could change, how one could go from the Chosen ones to the Exiles. He also knew the One who never changed, who was from everlasting to everlasting despite the changes seen.

The seas have lifted up, O Lord, the seas have lifted up their voice;

the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.

Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea – The Lord on high is mighty. (vv 3-4)

Millions of years of crashing waves have reduced the coastlines to sand, but the surf has no effect on the permanence of the one who made the land and the sea. His permanence is our rock. Though we don’t know how many tomorrows we have, we can know and trust the One who numbers them.

Grace and peace to you..

image mfmoriginal

Psalm 92–You Make Me Glad by Your Deeds

The senseless man does not know, fools do not understand, that though the wicked spring up like grass and all evildoers flourish, they will be forever destroyed. (Psalm 92: 6-7)

Contrary to the childhood rhyme that we all remember, ‘cheaters never prosper’, we know from the harsh realities of life that they do. This is always difficult to accept for Christ followers. He warned us that we would always have troubles (Jn 16:33) but that He has overcome the world. The Lord’s words were meant to comfort us and help us to persevere until the end when all would be made right.

Maybe we’re missing something. We note that the psalmist appears to be much more aware of God’s work around him. For you make me glad by your deeds, O Lord; I sing for joy at the works of your hands. (v 4) Have we become self-absorbed to the point where see only our immediate surroundings and circumstance? There are innumerable evidences of His hand in restoring righteousness all around us and we have the ability to become more aware. As we grow in our knowledge of His works, we will also sing. The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a palm tree, they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon; planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God. (vv 12-13)

Grace and peace to you.

image lars hammer

Psalm 91–My Tent is Secure

For He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in your ways;

they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone. (Psalm 91:11-12)

How timely that we re-enter the Psalms here at the beginning of a new year and decade. There is an air of optimism that pervades the nascent days of a new year, a feeling that whatever travails we faced last year will be erased with the turn of a calendar So confident are we that we proclaim structural changes in our life, beginning now!

The source of the psalmist’s security is not earthly riches, the strength of men or fearsome weaponry. It is rooted in a life tucked in close to the shelter of the Lord most high. Though the trajectory to the conclusion may be of different lengths, all people come to this truth. Move in close.

Grace and peace to you..

image Robert in Toronto

All That Needs To Be Said

Psalm 100

A psalm. For giving thanks.

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.

Worship the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful songs.

Know that the Lord is God.

It is He who made us, and we are his; we are His people, the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise;

give thanks to Him and praise His name.

For the Lord is good and his love endures forever;

His faithfulness continues through all generations.

Bless and be blessed.

Psalm 89–Love and Faithfulness Go Before You

O Lord, where is your former great love, which in your faithfulness you swore to David? (Ps 89:50)

Like so many of psalms we have read before this entry, we could easily substitute our own name in place of the king’s. When we enter a season of spiritual winter, or even encounter travail in the otherwise sunny seasons, our tendency is look upward and outward rather than inward, in order to comprehend the perceived lack of love from the Father. Cries of “why are You doing this to me?” fill our prayers and thoughts. We labor to align the ‘promises’ of our faith with dark chasms that we suddenly have to cross. We Christians are prone to disillusionment in far greater percentage than the unbelieving souls around us.

Perhaps, this is because we have not developed a mature understanding of the promises of God.

Psalm 89 turns on verse 38. After rehearsing the greatness of God and reciting the promises of the covenant made with David, the psalmist points a finger at the sky and speaks aloud his accusations.

But you have reject, you have spurned, you have been very angry with your anointed one.

You have renounced the covenant with your servant and have defiled his crown in the dust. (vv 38-39)

The temerity of the final accusation is fascinating and telling. The crown that God has ‘defiled’ was formed, shaped, adorned, fitted and assigned by Him! It is His crown, only temporarily assigned to a mortal creature and conditionally, at that. The poet fails to include the countless failures and apostasies that God has endured within the kingdom he promised his love to. His expectation is wholly out of line with the covenant agreement and yet, he does not hesitate to ponder out loud why God has ‘failed’ to uphold his end of the bargain.

We will rarely know what greater good our seasons of struggle are intended to for. Our first thoughts should turn inward toward our own sin and breaches of love with God. Is this a time of discipline that is meant for correction? Be a good student and allow the Tutor to reform your heart. If the spirit does not bring sin to mind, search the Scriptures and find all those who struggled through similar circumstances. Their roles, however minor, in the greater span of the Kingdom give us hope that our pain is not wasted. God does and will turn all things for good. Count on that before raising your next accusation to the sky.

Grace and peace to you.

image Krystn Palmer