Everywhere we look we are confronted with big questions. Will Boris Johnson defy some people’s expectations and make a good Prime Minister? What will Donald Trump say next? Today’s Big Question is: is it possible to write a blog on a Psalm in more words than the Psalm itself contains without having recourse to repetition, replication, reiteration, restatement or recapitulation or simply resorting to chatting about the weather?
I begin this blog on a cool, grey, overcast morning with rain in the air and a strong prospect of heavy showers… ok, I’ll stop doing that and get on with it.
This psalm, as the description goes in my Bible, is “a Psalm for giving grateful praise”. A slightly comic understatement in view of what follows, perhaps, but it covers the basics!
The psalmist, unlike this writer, does not waste words with preambles or preliminaries. Instead he piles straight in with an exhortation to himself and anyone else who will listen: “Shout for joy to the Lord… Worship the Lord with gladness”.
I don’t know about you but I do a fair bit of shouting for joy. I shouted for joy, for example, as time after time Ben Stokes dispatched the Aussie bowling to the boundary to pull off an astonishing Ashes win at Headingly. I also shout for joy on those sadly all-too-rare occasions when Crystal Palace Football Club find the back of the net. To my shame, I am not so ready to shout for joy to the Lord. I suspect I am not alone in that. Even if one allows that the shouting bit could sometimes be figurative (although why not lift our voices, dance, leap around or whatever when we praise, if what we do is a true reflection of the worship that is in our hearts?), how often is it that we experience an outpouring of joyful praise to God?
Why should we shout our praise to the Lord? We should do so, the psalmist says, firstly because of who God is (verse 2), secondly because of what we are to him (verse 3) and thirdly because of his commitment to us (verse 5).
I love the simple complexity of the psalmist’s exhortation in verse 2 to “know that the Lord is God”. He is inviting us, not to express an opinion, but to acknowledge as a fact that the one whom we worship is Creator, Father, Shepherd, King. In short: God. Simple. Yet complex. Is your faith weak? The Lord is God. Fact. Are you facing storms in your life? The Lord is God. Fact. Are loved ones far from God and not getting any closer? The Lord is God. Fact. The list could go on and on and on and on. We should praise God for who he is.
We should also shout our praise to God because of what we are to him – verse 3: “…we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.” The more we experience of God, the more incomprehensible it is that he should choose us to be his people, or his sheep as the psalmist, in metaphor-mixing mode, puts it. In our natural state we are not lovely woolly white baa-lambs, we are filthy, depraved and frankly stinky but God has taken us as his flock and whereas a good shepherd does not easily allow a single sheep of his flock to come to harm, THE Good Shepherd CANNOT allow his sheep to come to harm. It is not in his nature. So, shout for joy because of what we are to God: “… you are precious and honoured in my sight, and ... I love you.” (Isaiah 43 verse 4).
Finally (for now) we should shout our praise to God because of his commitment to us. In my last blog (“a psalm of three halves” on Psalm 77), I wrote about God’s unfailing love and it crops up again (though not with those actual words in my Bible) in verse 5: “For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.” “Endures forever” is pretty much interchangeable with “unfailing” (though I prefer the latter) in that both speak of the permanence of God’s love. His loving commitment to us will not, simply cannot, fail or come to an end.
Now THAT’S worth shouting about.
Thanks Trevor - more please.