Seeing Jesus in the Psalms

  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 77 I have heard it said that all sin is insanity. And I think that Asaph illustrates that well here in the jumble of discouraging questions and statements he first poses in Psalm 77 and maybe best in verse 8. “Is his unfailing love gone forever? Have his promises permanently failed?” Psalm 77:8 When we are struggling to trust God, everything becomes upside down. So we say things that don’t make sense. We say something that is unfailing has failed. We say that unfailing love could be gone forever and permanently failed. So which is it? Which is true: the permanent failure of God’s love or the unfailing nature of God’s love? And so are all the fears, concerns and complaints of Asaph in the first 12 verses of Psalm 77. I invite you to find the other blatant inconsistencies of our fears and complaints to God expressed by Asaph in Psalm 77 or in our own thinking and prayers. I’m not a psychologist and I don’t know all the proper terminology for mental health problems, but I have...

May he grant your heart’s desires and make all your plans succeed. Psalm 20:4 NLT   Psalm 20 We can learn a lot about the character of God by observing how others interact with Him. Psalm 20 reveals the expectations of David when he as King represents his people before God. Imagine for a moment that you have arrived at our Christian bookstore, Het Goede Boek in Leuven, and you discover a wealthy businessman in the area has offered to pay for whatever your family wants from the coffee bar that day. And one of your children says they want a deluxe hot chocolate. And the barista replies, “Yes sir we have that and I will make it for you right away, would you like that with a free delicious vegan brownie or super yummy lactose free big chocolate chip cookie? You have learned a lot about what’s on offer from the coffee bar. You have not learned everything we have on the menu but some items have been revealed to you. When they come you can inspect further the very nature of what HGB Leuve...