Seeing Jesus in the Psalms

  Psalm 116 As I read Psalm 116 today I was repeatedly moved to compassion for Jesus as I read various verses or phrases. Although I can hear David, Moses or some other patriarch saying the words of verse one, for instance, I think of Jesus. No one knew better how to pray, communicate or rest in the presence of the Father more than Jesus, the Son. So in verse 1 I hear Jesus. “I love the LORD because he hears my voice and my prayer for mercy.” Psalms 116:1 NLT (As a side note the ASV uses the phrase, “I love Jehovah” in verse 1) And you may well wonder how I could relate this verse to Jesus of all people? But it is the cry in the coming verse that links it back for me.  “Death wrapped its ropes around me; the terrors of the grave overtook me. I saw only trouble and sorrow.” Psalm 116:3 I find myself coming back to this scene in Mark 14 (below) so often. I care for the pain Jesus is bearing here and the anguish, I see that He understands us, He understands me. “He took Peter, J...

  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...