Bible Reading Challenge Blog

Did you catch how the people of God were worshipping in this setting?  They were lifting up their hands to the holy place.  They were standing at night and lifting up their hands to the holy place.  Last night was pretty special.  We had the LMH campus chorale and we had to put out probably 40 chairs in order to fit everyone, I would guess we were close to 300.  It was special, it was Mother’s Day, it was at night, and we were enthralled.  I know that I am biased because my daughter sings in the choir, but I have seen them sing probably more than a dozen times, and this time it was special.  Because it was in our holy place.  They had come to our holy place.  

This Psalm is incredible and it does make me think of this song from Chris Tomlin.

This is, again, one of my favorite psalms.  I have used this psalm so many times in ecumenical settings.  Whenever I find myself with people of other denominations it seems easy to say: How good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!  It is easy to say, but it is also something that I say and I mean it.  It is exactly what God requires of us.  God wants us to live together in unity.  I can point to John 17:11 and other verses in chapter 17 where we find that Jesus asks that God would make his disciples one just as God the Father and God the son are one.  We need to be one, all the different denominations across the globe, because what unites us as one is our faith in Jesus Christ.  

The greatest scandal to our faith is the fact that we are divided and those divisions have created wars and produced death and destruction because the disciples of Jesus Christ want to show and prove that they are worshipping Him in the only true way.  There have been plenty of wars between religions, but there have been just as many within Christianity itself.  My approach to our Christian faith is that we are not in competition with each other but rather in competition with Satan.  It is good against evil and Jesus is on the side of good and we are on his side, all of us.

As soon as I read this Psalm I try to place it chronologically.  It certainly seems to be in the time of David, or maybe it could be in the time of Solomon.  Probably Solomon now that I think about it.  While he isn’t mentioned by name there is a strong request to forgive David of his past misdeeds.  Something a son would want for his father’s legacy.  They would have been legendary by the time Solomon came around.  But we also have the words of Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, given to David as the king swears not to enter into his own home until the temple is completed.  It is the same action that Uriah takes when he is sent home as David tries to make up for his son by having Uriah sleep with Bathsheba.  And yet we know that the temple is not built until Solomon.  So, somehow David is given credit for building the temple here, or at least really wanting to, when we know that it was Solomon who ended up building it.  

He then shifts from speaking about David’s praises to speaking about the horn that will sprout up from David and that this son will then be the one who will be the Lord’s favorite.  That is definitely speaking about Solomon so maybe, just maybe, this is Solomon who is writing this.  He is making up for his father’s misdeeds and still he is able to speak about the one who would be coming up after David, that would be him.  

It is a great psalm which praises David and at the same time praises all of Israel as the nation which is most in tune with the Creator God.

Okay, so I have never breastfed, but I have three daughters who have been weaned.  I’m pretty sure that a weaned child is not calm and quiet, at least they were not with me.  They were so fidgety at that point and they obviously wanted something from me which I could not provide.  I wonder if there is some sarcasm in this psalm especially in vs.2.  I’m going to need some insight if any of you think I’ve misunderstood David at this point.  How can he say that his soul is like a weaned child and then pair that up with peaceful and quiet?

We find a confession of David as he states that he is not able to lift up his head or look people in the eye.  I’m assuming that this is because of his sin.  David seems to have settled for things that are not too great or too marvelous.  He seems to have settled for less than what the Lord really wanted of him.  My take on this Psalm is that the key to it is found in vs.3 where David directs his words to his people and reminds them that they are to direct their thoughts to the Lord.  He basically tells them that they are to think of God and not David.

It reminds me of when he showed up at the gates of the city and pretended to be crazy just so that the king would not send out soldiers to kill him.  It was a great strategy and it worked.  So maybe here he is pretending to be the village idiot by saying that his soul is content and quite and peaceful just like a child who had recently been weaned.  It should direct the gaze of the people away from the King, who obviously is not worthy to be praised, and to the Lord, who is the only one to be praised.  But I’m probably giving him too much credit.

When I hear the beginning of this Psalm I think of Jonah chapter 2.  When Jonah is in the belly of the whale you hear him cry out: “I called to the Lord out of my distress and he answered me.”  The Psalmist states: “Out of the depths I cry out to thee.”  It sounds similar to me.  

Do you also hear a recognition of the psalmist, especially in vs.3, that no one can be brought before the presence of the Lord righteous.  For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  But he recognizes that and states that all people fall short of what you want them to be, Lord.  But vs.4 turns everything around and moves the focal point from the sin of the individual to the forgiveness of the Lord.  That is where the focal point should always remain.  It should remain on God’s unconditional and undeserved forgiveness.  We can find redemption, even the final redemption mentioned in vs.8, only in the Lord.  

So there are a lot of references in this psalm to agricultural imagery.  We see deep furrows being dug…on the backs of people.  We see grass which grows quickly and cannot be gathered…as an example of those who do not follow the Lord.  But the Bible is ripe (see what I did there) of agricultural examples.  Think of Jesus’ parables when he speaks of vineyards, when he curses fig trees, when he walks the wheat fields with his disciples on the Sabbath.  We could go on and on.  This might be why I love this place I call home… Strasburg.  The images we have in the Bible are easily accessible and easily understandable for us living here in the farmlands, as opposed to those in the big cities.  

So there really isn’t much development of the thought of eternal life in the Old Testament.  There is the very well developed concept of God’s blessings that extend beyond this life through the birth of children, actually specifically sons.  This Psalm perfectly reflects that well developed concept which we find in the Old Testament.  Verse 6 really shows that this is what we all want, isn’t it?  Don’t we all want to see our children’s children and have peace in the land in which we live?  I would say we do.

But as Christians we know that life consists more than how many children we end up producing and how many children our children end up producing.  While it is a great goal toward which to look, we know that the eternal life which is promised of us also entails an eternal life where we are present both bodily and spiritually once we die on this earth.  This is what we look forward to more than anything else.

There are a number of different intersecting points in this psalm that should be shared.  The first is the most obvious which is that this psalm, and especially the beginning of vs.1, points to the necessity of the presence of the Lord in all of our lives.  .  Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build, labor in vain.  The statement is that it doesn’t matter how hard you work, if God is not a part of your life, then what you work towards will never come to the kind of fruition you would want.  If the Lord is not a part of our life then we can never realize the dreams that God has for us.  This is an important concept.  But we can’t forget that God still calls us to work hard.  The converse of this psalm is not true.  While if you work hard but God is not a part of your life it will inevitably lead to unrealized potential.  There is no truth to thinking that if I don’t work hard but just pray enough and know that God is on my side then God is going to bless me.  Uh, no, sorry, it doesn’t work that way.  I have heard pastors say at times that they don’t prepare for their sermons on Sunday because they just want the Holy Spirit to move them.  For me, that is an excuse to not work hard.  There are other examples in other lines of work for other people as well.

But this first verse is used more often than not in building dedications, and specifically in the dedications of church buildings.  It is nice and it is a great reminder that God always has to be in charge of all that we do.

The other aspect of this psalm which has been burned in my memory is seen in vs.4-5.  We were on a bus in Israel and I was in my second year at the church in Florida.  I was maybe 30 or 31.  I was in Israel with a bunch of people that I knew who had graduated from Princeton, probably 6 years earlier, so it was a great reunion of sorts for all of us.  I was reading the Psalms (I do have some good habits every now and then!), and I ran across this psalm.  For some reason it struck me as especially significant.  Maybe it was when Stacy was pregnant with Bethany and I was feeling especially blessed.  I leaned over to a friend of mine and said that this psalm is especially powerful because it speaks about the incredible blessing that children are.

He looked angry and said something like: “What if you are someone like me who has been married for 5 years and has not been able to have children, does that mean that God has cursed me?”  I was much more circumspect after that in my eureka moments.  But I’ll never forget that and I’ll always remember it as a perfect example of something that may seem obvious to me is sometimes incredible painful and opaque for others.  It was a good lesson and I was grateful for his candidness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFu1MvU0rfo

A total flashback.  Really appropriate for this area of the nation, even if we don’t really have much wheat in this area.  But if look at vs.6 it speaks about the bringing in of the sheaves.  I had no idea where this hymn had come from, but if you listen to the last verse of this hymn you see it comes directly from this psalm.  

The entire psalm is a thanksgiving for the Lord having brought them out of captivity and into the land of Israel.  So, keep in mind that the people of Israel have had a number of times in during biblical history when they were made slaves.  Egypt was probably their best known time of slavery, but there were also a couple of times when nations came into Israel and invaded and took the Israelites in what were called times of exile.  So the restoration of the fortunes of Zion would have been in the times of Nehemiah when the wall around the temple was being built up again after years of exile.  It was a time of celebration, even while at the same time there was some bittersweetness realizing what once was.

I fully recognize that it is called a song of ascents so it would be a psalm that the pilgrims would say as they entered Jerusalem.  But just think if they were coming back to Jerusalem after years and years of exile.  What a celebration, and sadness, that would have been.  

So when we lived in Florida there really were no mountains around.  It was wonderfully flat and so I loved to go to the Ravines and run.  Here is a link to the Ravine State Park in Palatka, Florida: https://www.floridastateparks.org/park/Ravine-Gardens

You can’t tell from the pictures but there is a loop around the park which is a few miles and it is incredibly steep and hilly.  It was the closest thing to a mountain that I could find to train on.  I needed mountains.  Then just a few years ago as I was training for the half ironman I had to find mountains, or at least steep hills, in order to train for the bicycling.  I can’t tell you how helpful that was because when the race came around the course proved to be much less hilly than my training runs.  I wish I could say the same for the running.

Here, the psalmist is giving thanks for the mountains that are surrounding Jerusalem.  We normally see mountains as obstacles, as things which need to be moved, but here in this psalm the author sees it as a place of refuge and protection.  As vs. 2 tells us, just as the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people.  It is quite awe inspiring to drive into Jerusalem as you make your way either over a mountain or through a tunnel which has been cut through a mountain.  The city itself does gleam on a hill.