Bible Reading Challenge Blog

Context:  I Samuel 26:1.

Once again David finds himself, according to the prescript, in a setting where people are telling Saul where he can be found in order to capture or kill him.  It does not make him happy and the psalm reflects the fact that he is disgruntled over this recent event.  His psalm, his prayer, is one of deliverance.  He asks God to save him from his current predicament.  He puts his enemies in a light where they are basically pagans looking not just to get after him, but disrespecting God at the same time.  Not a bad strategy.  

I sense a bit of reverse psychology when David states triumphantly that God has (I think we can probably read this as will) upheld his life and helped him and will repay those who seek him with nothing less than death.  If this were to happen then God would be showing his faithfulness to David.  

God, if you heal my mother then I will offer up my child to you.  This was a prayer that a frantic son prayed as his mother was dying from the complications of a stroke.  His mother died and now he was terrified that God was going to repay him for his prayer.  Pastor, will God be angry with me and will he curse my son?  I know I was in Southern Italy, but this could have happened anywhere.  Sometimes we simply make deals with God.  At no time is this a good idea.  God doesn’t need our deals.  God just wants our devotion and our time and our love and our very life.  He has given us everything, we don’t need to make a deal with God.  Come on David, God doesn’t have to kill your enemies in order to prove His steadfast love.  

So, every week, I think you know this, I choose another psalm in order to use it for the Call to Worship for the first service.  Sometimes it is hard to find appropriate words for a call to worship within some of the psalms.  This is such a psalm.  There are other psalms which are easy and you can choose a whole selection of words from a psalm.  But here pretty much the only words you could use for a call to worship are found in vs.6.  Can you imagine reading together for a call to worship: “God will scatter the bones of the ungodly”.  Not something that is uplifting or which you would want to triumphantly proclaim.

So, in these situations what can we get out of a psalm where the author just seems to be lifting up bad things?  Well, sometimes you have just been wronged in life and you just want to say: “They have all fallen away, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.”  But as we say these words, and this is the challenge, in the midst of our anger or frustration or sadness, it is hard to turn these words on us.  It is so much easier to say: some people do this.  

How often do we think of “those evildoers” (vs.4) as being us?  How often do we take the accusations that we want to hurl at others and turn them to us and ask the question: “Do we do that?”  So, before you read this psalm, or maybe go back and read it again, and think of the times that we have said in our hearts: “There is no God”, “We are corrupt”, “We commit abominable acts”, “We do evil”, “We have fallen away”, “We are perverse”, “We have no knowledge”, “We are evildoers”, “We eat up God’s people”.  

Today, don’t turn your eyes on someone else or think of someone else as you read this Scripture.  Think of those times that we have fallen prey to that which is written in this psalm as a perpetrator of these acts, and not the victim.  That makes this psalm a lot more difficult, but so much more valuable.

What a terribly brutal, scary story.  Go ahead and read I Samuel 22 and you will find the context for this Psalm.  David, before he was king, fled from Saul, who was the king at the time.  Saul absolutely felt threatened by David but David was gathering quite a following.  In I Samuel 22 we read that he gathers a whole bunch of people, but all of them were needy in some way.  Saul gets word from Doeg, who is an Edomite, of an alliance between the priests of God and David.  Now, keep in mind that Doeg is not even one of the God’s chosen people from the branch of Jacob or Israel.  Edomites came from Jacob’s brother, Esau.  Isn’t it interesting that Saul chose to surround himself with those who were outside of God’s plans and God’s family and gathered his counsel from them?  David, on the other hand, was surrounded by his family and by the priests of the Lord.  These very priests paid the price for their alliance with David as Doeg slaughters them because of Saul’s fury.  Eighty-five priests were killed on that day.  Outside of Moscow there is a killing field where during the Soviet times Orthodox priests were killed by communist forces.  Here is an article on the spot.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/world/europe/08butovo.html

It reminds me of this story in I Samuel of which the title indicates this psalm was written in memory.

There is an anger at the beginning of this psalm which is not difficult to identify.  It is a righteous anger, but anger nonetheless.  You can imagine David’s state of mind as he is writing this psalm.  He feel responsible for the killing of these priests because it was due to their collusion with him that they are killed.  If they had not helped him, they would still be alive.  You can hear his anger as he states: “But God will break you down forever; he will snatch and tear you from your tent; he will uproot you from the land of the living.”

But he also snaps out of this anger and at the very end of this psalm he removes is anger and his discouragement and is able to focus on the fact that God is on his side.  As Romans tells us, if God is for us, who can be against us?  He ends by giving thanks to God, even in the midst of a terrible tragedy, even in the midst of feeling as if a genocide was your own fault.  But God is still good, even in the midst of this.

There is a very specific Scripture which matches this Psalm.  You can find it in II Samuel 11.  I remember well using this Scripture when Bill Clinton was unfaithful and speaking about what it means when our ruler is found to be morally lacking.  Of course, we are all morally lacking, but what does it mean when our President, or our pastor, or our teacher, or whatever position in society you may want to lift up.  How do we handle the unfaithfulness of people to God in a very visible, hard to argue manner?  David paid the price.  He continued to rule, but he paid a price, a very steep price.  We read about his state of mind in this psalm.  

It is a psalm that has a song taken from it which back in the old day was incredibly popular.

I’ll never forget singing this song around campfires.  When we served in Italy one of the churches where we pastored had a booklet of songs with all of these older praise songs.  You know, As the Deer, Shine Jesus Shine, these kinds of songs that we would sing around the campfire.  Boy, they would belt them out.  To this day I can’t hear any of these songs without the Italian first coming to mind and then I struggle for the words in English.  

But this Psalm does elicit an incredible amount of thought and material for the writer.  It is perfectly suited for Lent.  We find David fully recognizing his sin and asking for forgiveness and asking for his heart to be created clean again.  The Psalm begins with an appeal for mercy.  It then transition to a recognition that if David received mercy and forgiveness then he would be able to teach others what not to do.  

Remember yesterday when we talked about sacrifice and that which is acceptable to God.  Today we find that out.  Again, it is within a context of one being found guilty in sin that they cannot escape.  What is the sacrifice that God requires and that is pleasing to the Lord.  Yesterday we saw that it was thanksgiving.  Today?  We can look at vs.17 and hopefully understand the context from which David is writing.  The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit.  That is what the Lord requires.

Let’s talk about that for a bit.  A broken Spirit, what does that look like?  Someone who has been beaten down their entire life has a broken spirit.  I can assure you that this is not what the psalmist is describing.  Someone who has experienced a traumatic life event could have a broken spirit which is difficult to overcome.  That is not what the author is describing here.  A broken spirit is what is needed in relationship to our interaction with God.  Think about the actions that David took to not only commit adultery with Bathsheba but then to try to cover it by murdering her husband.  It is an action taken by someone who feel entitled and who feels like they can get away with anything.

David’s actions are the opposite of a broken spirit.  David’s actions are those of someone who thinks they are untouchable, and that God basically doesn’t exist.  Or, even worse, if God does exist then He exists at my pleasure and for my purposes.  David knew God existed, but probably thought that God existed merely for the purpose of furthering David’s cause and not God’s own kingdom.  A broken spirit is one that recognizes our desires and our wishes and our wants are subject to God’s plans.  That is hard to bring into the equation when your whole life God has seemed to present before you all that you want.  That was David’s experience.  In this psalm he has a broken spirit because he recognizes that it is for God’s glory that he moves and has his being.  That would be a good lesson for us.

We heard that every civilization at one time has sacrifice as a part of their system of thought.  The sacrifice of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is unique in that this sacrifice is actually God incarnate, the one who was given for our sins.  Normally a sacrifice is an animal, that which is life in order to make right something that we have made wrong.  But it is not normally God himself who says: “I will be the sacrifice, it will be enough.”

In this psalm we read the author state that the people of Israel were giving perfectly fine sacrifices.  This is even though in other parts of Scripture we read the type of sacrifices that the Lord requires is different from the rams and goats that are mentioned in this psalm.  Wait, I don’t want to give it away, that’s coming next week.  Let’s at least once again look at Micah 6:8 where we read what the Lord requires.  This verse is set within the context of a sacrifice.  Walk humbly with the Lord is much more important than to give an unblemished ram.  The sacrifice that the Lord requires, even if we do give perfectly good ones, is to pursue His kingdom.  vs.8 states that God is happy with the sacrifices that we make.  But there is more to it than that.

God is happy when we fast.  But there is more to it than that.  God is happy when we give chocolate up for Lent, but there is more to it than that.  God is happy when we decide to abstain from television, but there is more to it than that.  Vs.23 really brings this entire psalm together.  Read it and take it to heart: “Those who bring thanksgiving as their sacrifice, honor me.”  Thanksgiving, the greatest honor that God can receive from us.  Because it is in the act of giving thanks that we recognize who we are and who God is.  There is nothing that puts life in perspective better than thanksgiving.  We can give thanks because of God’s presence and God’s blessings.  God loves thanksgiving because He then knows that we understand Him.

You can’t take it with you.  You’ve heard that before.  The New Testament says something similar when we read in Matthew 6:20 that we are to store treasures in heaven.  The New Testament implication, actually it is stated quite directly, is that where our treasure is, there our heart will be as well.  But the psalmist takes a completely different approach and basically tells us not to rely upon and not to be discouraged when we see others with a lot of wealth.  It is a very different approach.  Sometimes people can compare themselves to others.  Think about that for a while.

Do people go through life comparing themselves and their salaries to people that they know?  Oftentimes if one does not make as much as another we feel maybe as if we aren’t worth as much.  I am speaking completely in the hypothetical because I think those who know me realize that when I talk about finances it is fairly unorthodox.  I think pastors get paid too much.  I think there should be a level playing field and every pastor within the Presbyterian Church should get paid the same, and maybe account for the cost of living in certain areas, but that is all.  I think we should get paid close to, if not at, the same level as those in the lowest economic class of our church.  You don’t want to talk to me about money, you will leave somewhat bewildered, but again, I hope I am not making this stuff up.  I’m pretty sure I can point to Scripture and support my thoughts on this.  I won’t do that here in this space, however.

But the psalmist does say that we are not to worry when we see others making much more than us or if their house is nicer than ours, if they have more toys than we do.  Nothing we have on this earth will go with us to our death.  We should not find pleasure just in what we have here on this earth  thinking that it will in any way translate to what we will have beyond our time here on this earth.  It doesn’t hurt us to remember that there is something, and it is something really, really good, that lies beyond this life.  What we have in this life, especially our material things, are not going to make us happy in the next life.

This Psalm really focuses on the location of the presence of God.  It had always been thought that with the building of the temple then God would reside, live, take habitation in Jerusalem.  Keep in mind that Jerusalem was not the location of the residence of God until King David was around.  When we read in Scripture about Mt. Zion it is a reference to the Holy Hill, or Jerusalem.  Before David came around Jerusalem was not considered the capital, David made is such.  It was just another fortress and walled city in that region.

Remember it was the ark of the covenant which traveled with Moses and Joshua which distinguished the presence of the Lord before the kings came around and before David’s son Solomon had it built.  That ark would be placed in the tabernacle which was considered a traveling residence for God.  I’ve gotten into this in the past, but it is important to note again that for David when we talk about the Holy Mountain we are talking about Jerusalem.  We are not talking about Mt. Sinai which is where Moses climbed to receive the covenant in the form of the 10 commandments. 

Here is a picture of our family climbing Mt. Sinai as the sun is rising.  One of the most powerful experiences of my life.

Here is a picture of Jerusalem which is hard to tell that it is actually on a hill, but it is.  Credit to John Faltin for the picture.  King David was absolutely in love with this city and you can tell from this Psalm that he fully sees this city as the city of God.  

That creates a bit of a problem in our modern age when politically we talk about Israel and the problem of Jerusalem.  I’m not sure if people realize that currently there are four different people groups who see Jerusalem as their capital: Jews in Israel, Muslims in Palestine, Christian arabs, and Armenian arabs.  Each of them lay claim to the city for a number of historical and religious reasons.  This psalm reflects the deep claim that the people of Israel have on Jerusalem, a claim which is no more convincing than the ones held by the Muslims, or the Christians or the Armenians.  And yet, we have taken sides.  Jerusalem could be the one place on earth where the type of harmony which is reflected in the kingdom of God could take place.  It has more potential than any other city in the world.  But unfortunately, because we are involved, it has continued to be a place that has seen more violence than most places in the world.  Pray for peace in Jerusalem.  Just peace, not ownership.

So, to start I want you to go back to the blog on Psalm 46 and look at Dot Rineer’s comment.  She continuously posts music that is incredibly appropriate (as opposed to Jethro Tull) and fits the psalm that we are covering perfectly.  There is a song there from Shane and Shane in her comment where you should click the link and just worship.  That is what it reflects, just pure worship.  I know, I know, what kind of worship does the Lord require of us?  Not just listening to music and feeling uplifted but to feed the poor, clothe the naked, house the homeless, give refuge to the outcast and the one without a nation.  That is pure worship.  But boy, that video is really, really uplifting.  Thank you all for your comments.

Okay, what does Psalm 47 provide for us?  It is obviously a psalm of praise as we begin with a command to clap your hands, all you peoples.  Hmm, that’s funny.  You know, I don’t like to clap in church.  I’m not one of those stodgy people who will frown upon clapping in church, if you want to do it, I’m fine with it, but I just won’t do it.  There is a big part of me that wants to clap to God for all that He has done.  The purpose of the clapping in this psalm is for the power and presence of God.  Not for a good song that we have sung or a good performance that we may have done.  But again, if you are good with it, so am I, just don’t ask me to do it and I won’t ask you to stop.

I guess I did sound a bit stodgy, especially in light of what this psalm reflects.  It shows a celebration for the people as we are to sing praises to God.  Did you see that phrase, sing praises, repeated 4 times in one verse and then it is followed up one more time in the next verses just for good measure?  There is no excuse for how we have treated communion as a funeral dirge.  Okay, that may have come out of the blue, but aren’t we talking about celebrating and praising God in church?  We should be singing praises for all that God has done, even as we take communion.  I think it is the most misrepresented and miscelebrated (sic) sacrament that we have.  We should be clapping our hands to God as we take the bread and the juice.  God, you are awesome, look what you did for me!  We ought to sing praises to God as the elements are being distributed.  

The basic strong thrust of this psalm is that we are to recognize that God is over all things.  He is enthroned on high and he is Lord and ruler of all.  That should make us clap our hands and sing praises to God.  

So this is one of those psalms that you remember and that your refer to over and over again in your life.  It is in line with Psalm 23, and 121, and 139, and others that I draw from when I am in need of consolation and relief.  God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble.  Boy oh boy do we need to hear that daily!  God is our refuge and our strength.  That is the way that it starts.  But the way it ends we also are very familiar with as the Scripture tells us: Be still and know that I am God.

When I hear that verse it reminds me of Elijah’s moment on the cliff waiting to hear God’s voice in I Kings 19:11-18.  It was difficult for Elijah to stay still and to listen to God’s voice, because we expect God to come in earthquakes, and fires, and wind, but he doesn’t.  This Psalm commands us to be still.  How in the world do you expect us in the 21st century to be still?  We have kids, pets, appointments, church work, all sorts of things that we have to work out so we have to constantly be on the move.  Staying still is just for the lazy.  Don’t tell me to stay still.  I’d rather meet God on the road, like Paul as he was on the way to Damascus, than meet him as I’m still.

Be still and know that I am God.  Also, it is interesting to note that the word for refuge, God is our refuge, is also the word for fortress.  God is our fortress.  Be still.  Meditate on that today.

How appropriate is it that this psalm happens to fall on Valentine’s Day?  Traditionally this psalm is thought to be a royal wedding psalm which reflects the day when the king would be married.  It also reminds me a lot of Song of Solomon (or Song of Songs which is the same thing) where we find the closest thing to an R rated description of events.  If you are married and want to read something interesting with your spouse, go ahead and crack open that book of the Bible.  I guarantee it will make you blush.  Okay, maybe it just makes me blush.  Anyway, happy Valentine’s Day.  Enjoy Psalm 45.