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 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...