January 11, 2017: Day 11 – Psalm 11

I wonder if Jesus was thinking of this psalm when he said in Matthew 5:45: “for [God] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”  Here we just might find a somewhat clouded reference to vs.6.  In this Psalm we find David probably speaking about the times when Saul was pursuing him and he is told to flee to the mountains to escape his troops, or the time that Absalom, again, was pursuing him and he had to flee.  But you see his reticence to flee because he felt a certain responsibility to stay behind and make sure the foundations are upheld.

From there you find a transition to the presence of the Lord which gives us a great opportunity to speak to the difference between Old Testament and New Testament understandings to the presence of God.  In the Old Testament God was sitting upon his throne either on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, or in heaven, or in the temple, or in the ark of the covenant.  There was a literal definitive place where one could locate God and then go and worship Him.  I am fully aware that this is a simplistic approach to a much more developed theology, but let’s stay with that for now.

With the advent of Jesus our understanding is that the veil which separates people from God has been torn.  We find that reference in Matthew 27:51 where we find the veil from the temple torn down the middle when Jesus was crucified which signified access to the Holy of Holies.  Okay, what it means for us as disciples of Jesus Christ is that with the death and resurrection of Jesus there is no need for an intermediary who would establish and clean up any relationship we might have with God.  God establishes that relationship directly through Jesus.  We can reach out to God without the help of a pastor, or a priest, or a rabbi or anyone at all.  We can in the quiet of our room cry out to our Lord just as King David did.  That’s pretty extraordinary.