Seeing Jesus in the Psalms

Psalm 83 “Then they will learn that you alone are called the Lord, that you alone are the Most High, supreme over all the earth.” Psalm 83:18 If I don’t see that God alone is the Master of the universe, then I am His enemy. Asaph sees it that way, and he wants God to respond to all enemies of God in such a way that they too will see it. I don’t know about you, but when I read once again a Psalm where the author is asking God to take action, I am uncomfortable. And I hear it as sort of accusing God for being too slow to act. I worry that Asaph is too aggressive in his desire for retribution and vengeance by asking God to utterly disgrace them. And some people might wrongly conclude that this is an Old Testament phenomenon. ‘Jesus isn’t like that,’ you might hear from someone. But Asaph isn’t out of step with God and God’s plans, desires or ways of thinking. So once again it is old William’s heart that needs to be adjusted. I wonder if it is repeated so often in the Bible because I am so...

  Psalm 81 MAIN POINT: Jesus is the God who speaks in Psalm 81, and He offers to save you and to take your burden, or you will face His justice and judgement. “...I heard an unknown voice say,  “Now I will take the load from your shoulders; I will free your hands from their heavy tasks.” Psalms 81:5-6 “Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” Matthew 11:29 The burden of work is a result of the fall. We were made for work but we also need rest and we need to work together. Jesus offers to put His shoulder to the burden of work with us. It is as if Jesus sees us struggling with the never-ending burden of work, the discouragement of thorns and thistles, the lack of progress, the lack of fulfilment and the ‘one step forward and three steps back’ scenario of life. We struggle to get the work/rest balance right. And Jesus says, come on, strap in. I’m going to do this with you. In fact, leave your unprod...

  Psalm 80 MAIN POINT: Jesus is the Shepherd who can hear our cry and rescue our hearts so that we turn to God and are saved. Aspah has been on a roll and he uses imagery that Jesus also uses many times to refer to Himself. As this Psalm talks about a grapevine and then links it to the chosen son, we see where Jesus got His references to describe Himself in John 15 . And so it is the desire to be restored and to be attached to the person, power and plan of God that brings Asaph to cry out: 3“Turn us again to yourself, O God. Make your face shine down upon us. Only then will we be saved. “ 7“Turn us again to yourself, O God of Heaven's Armies.  Make your face shine down upon us. Only then will we be saved. “ 19“Turn us again to yourself, O LORD God of Heaven's Armies.  Make your face shine down upon us. Only then will we be saved.” Psalm 80:3, 7, 19 NLT Three times Asaph asks God to change the focus of the people. But how? Psalm 80 is the 4th Shepherd Psalm in a row from A...

  Psalm 79 (Skip the rant and scroll down two paragraphs) The Bible has so much to teach us. Each time I read it my modern sensibilities and conventions are challenged. We saw yesterday and today a Psalm by Asaph that ends with God shepherding His people. But we also see a rather macabre depiction of death, dying and vengeance. What is suitable for general audiences? Well God thinks that everyone who reads and even children should be learning His word--and His word, like today in Psalm 79, is graphic, bloody, full of war and grisly judgement and labels and categorisations. It is full of deeply disturbed emotional descriptions and outbursts of disbelief. One of the notable differences is between children who grow up agrarian or children who grow up urban. Because often the child who has grown up in a rural, agrarian life has lived with raising and slaughtering animals for food, and had to deal with loss, blood and death on the scale of a small farmstead. In smaller, poorer household...

  Psalm 78 I found this Psalm difficult to write out, not so much because it was long with 72 verses but because it shows us how deeply emotionally involved God is in the relationship with His people. MAIN POINT: Believing in a good God Who can and will take care of you is of paramount importance. God has made a way for you to believe. Jesus is shepherding your heart through His sacrifice of His life for you. The anger of God is not greater than His merciful plan to Shepherd your heart into a believing heart. He has made a way for me to overcome my unbelief.  I saw Jesus in the first seven verses because we are told that Asaph or God through Asaph will teach: in parables v.1 teach hidden lessons v. 2 teach and welcome children vv.4-5 But then we see that each generation must not become like the generations described in verse 8, and it is from here that we start a real downer. That is not to say that it isn’t like Jesus. He said the generation of His time was also like the one ...