Category: PSALMS

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 22 (day six)  “You who fear the Lord praise Him!  For He has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one.”  (vs 23-24)  “Does Jesus care when my heart is pained too deeply for mirth or song, as the burdens press and the cares distress and the way grows weary and long?  Oh yes, He cares!  I know He cares!  His heart is touched with my grief.  When the day is weary, the long nights weary, I know my Jesus cares.” –Frank Graeff (1901)  It is an old hymn.  An older question.  Sobbed out over the centuries by people of faith caught in darkness and grief.  David answers affirmatively.  As he “prayed through” his fear and distress, he found strong evidence of God’s help and concern.  He “walked THROUGH the valley of the shadow of death” and emerged on the other side with a new confidence in the care of his loving Father.  Yes!  He cares!

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 22 (day four)
It was a time of great anguish for David.  There were pressures on all sides.  Verse 6 says, “But I am a worm and not a man, A reproach of men and despised by the people.” The people were mocking his faith in God, but how did he respond?  He responded with faith…he trusted God even though he could not see His hand at work at the moment.  Where did this faith, to stand strong in the face of opposition, come from?  Verse 9-10 says, “Yet You are He who brought me forth from the womb; You made me trust when upon my mother’s breasts.  Upon You I was cast from birth; You have been my God from my mother’s womb.” David’s faith was learned from his parents.  This is God’s plan…that parents teach their children the ways of God.  What David learned as a child, made him able to stand firm in his faith in the face of great persecution.  We, too, must build faith into our children to stand firm.

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 22 (day three)
“All the ends of the earth
will remember and turn to the Lord…”  Solzhenitsyn famously stated the converse of David’s prophetic vision: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”  What is the “this” to which he referred?  Look around, and look inside your own heart.  You will see.  But creation is groaning, stretching toward the day when it will be renewed.  And mankind, suffering in its own physical and spiritual squalor, will know God again.  Some will reject him, as many already have.  But even as David faced the cruelties of those who had set their faces against him, what he knew of God told him that it could not end like this.  And so it is in our day.  God will not be satisfied until this whole universe is restored.  The end will be only the beginning.

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 22 (day two)
“But You are holy…” (Psalm 22:3). It’s a strange place to find comfort. We would have expected a suffering person to cry out to God who is merciful, just, compassionate, loving, near or powerful. But no. He says, “You are holy.” Holy? How can holy be a comfort? Consider for a moment what holy means. Its use in the Bible is to speak of that which is set apart, without defect, sinless, beautiful, clean, and perfectly alive. Rather than being an impossible notion that drives us apart from God, the whole story of the Bible is that the holy God gifts his holiness to his creation. Creation becomes holy because it has been touched by the Holy One. So when the psalmist seeks comfort in the holy God, he points us to an important insight. If we move toward the holy God, we get more than just his comfort. We get his mercy, justice, compassion, love, nearness and power. The holy God is perfect in all of these as well.

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 22 (day one)  “I will declare your name to my brothers. . .You who fear the Lord, praise him!. . .For he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one.”  (vs 22-24)  Psalm 22 is a prediction of the cross.  For 21 verses, in amazing detail, David narrates both his own troubles and a clear vision of Christ on the cross 1000 years later.  It is impossible to read these verses and not be impressed with the exactness of his words.  In vs 22, however, the mood suddenly shifts.  From suffering to praise, from defeat to victory.  It is a prophecy of the resurrection!  In Philippians 2, the Bible says, “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the cross. . .therefore God has highly exalted Him”  (vs 8-9)  The Christian faith rests on this confidence.  We are to be faithful to Him in our sufferings.  He will be faithful to us when they are over.  Those who seek Him are promised a Psalm 22:22 life!

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 16 (day seven)
“I will bless the Lord who has counseled me; indeed, my mind instructs me in the night. . .because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken”  (vs 7-8)  In David’s time, to be at someone’s “right hand” meant to be his counselor/advisor/confidant.  (Think of Jesus sitting at the “right hand” of God).  When David (vs 8) uses this term to describe God, he is repeating with different words the truth of vs 7.  “I will bless the Lord who has counseled me”.  I wonder how many times David proved this great promise of God.  “Call and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things that you do not know.”  (Jeremiah 33:3)  “If any man lacks wisdom let him ask of God who gives to all men generously and without reproach and it will be given to him.”  (James 1:5).  What David had,  is what we all need. . . wisdom from the Wonderful Counselor. (Isaiah 9:6)

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 16 (day six)
We do not know when David wrote Psalm 16.  We know that he was old enough to look back  on his past experiences with God, look around at this present standing with God, and look forward to a secure future with God.  In vs 2, he says, “I said to the Lord: I have no good besides You.”  A watershed moment in the past that David still remembers.  Have you had such a similar moment of verbal commitment?   Vs 5 says  “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance.”  This is David’s present confident assurance.  Vs 10-11 says,   “You will not abandon my soul to Sheol. . .you will make known to me the path of life.”  This is David’s perspective on the days that stretch out ahead, his certainty that God will continue to lead.  In a heart of true faith, the past prepares us for the present which teaches us to have confidence for the future.

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 16 (day four)
It was the day of Pentecost…a noise like a great rushing wind…and the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit!  The results were amazing.  People did not know what to think.  It was Peter (anyone surprised?) who stood to preach and give explanation.  In Acts 2:24, Peter said, “But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power.”  He then says in verse 25, “For David says of Him,…” and then he quotes from Psalm 16:8-11.  Peter recognized, through the power of the indwelling Spirit, that when the Psalmist wrote the inspired words of God, it was impossible for them not to come true.  All of God’s promises come true.  He promised that His Holy One would not undergo decay.  For Peter, with his new understanding, there was no doubt as to God’s faithfulness.  What promises has God made that you have yet to accept and believe?  He never fails!

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 16 (day three)
“Apart from you I have no good thing.”  Where there is good, there is God.  The trouble is, the human heart finds it hard to determine what is truly good.  We can marvel at a newborn baby or stand in awe of the photograph of a distant star coming into existence, and we can surmise that a Creator must be at work.  But we can just as easily treat gossip like “choice morsels” (Proverbs 18:8).  Sin has severely stunted our ability to tell the difference.  It is true that where there is good, there is God.  But we would do well to seek God first, and know that where there is God, there is good.

Re:Verse reading–Psalm 16 (day two)
Water filling your bathtub… a good thing. Water filling your house… a destructive thing. Fire consuming wood in the fireplace…a good thing. Fire consuming a forest…a destructive thing. Sexual expression between a man and a woman in marriage…a good thing. Sexual expression whenever and with whomever you might desire…a destructive thing. Ambition for excellence guarded by loving my neighbor as myself… a good thing. Ambition for excellence with no thought for my neighbor…a destructive thing.

God’s gift of desire, even the strongest desires, is a good thing. However, every good thing requires a context, an order for it to function properly. A good desire out of order becomes a great evil and destroys lives. What can order my desires? “I have no good besides you,” (Psalm 16:2). When my desire is aimed at God as my only good, all other desires are given their proper order, their appropriate context. Water, fire, sex, ambition; all are proper joys when I am enjoying God as my only good.