Seeing Jesus in the Psalms

  Psalm 90   Reflections on Psalm 90 written by Lyssa Bode The family home is more than a building with walls and a roof. It’s a picture of roots, stability, identity and relationship. Do you remember your grandparents living in the same house your entire life? Did your entire extended family gather there every summer for a barbecue, or at Christmas for games and a glorious Christmas dinner? Generations of memories have been made there, and no one would dare sell it to someone outside the family. It is known by all as the ______ family home. But Moses, the writer of this Psalm, was a nomad. He was born in Egypt , a slave condemned by the Pharaoh, along with perhaps thousands of other Hebrew boys. Moses was hidden by his parents, and through a series of events, grew up in that same Pharaoh’s house. Forced to flee as a young man, he landed in Midian, where God eventually came to him in the famous burning bush incident. You know the history of how God raised up Moses to lead the ...

  Psalm 88 “ He was despised and rejected— a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.  We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.” Isaiah 53:3 The verse above from Isaiah is universally accepted as a messianic verse referring to Jesus the Christ and can be linked to a few gospel passages such as: “He told them, “ My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death . Stay here and keep watch with me.”” Mark 14:34 Two songs came to mind as I read Psalm 88 today. One is a hymn I have know since I was a child and I feel emotional when ever I sing or say the words even today. It deeply expresses the wrongness and yet rightness of the way Jesus suffered: Man of sorrows what a name for the Son of God, who came ruined sinners to reclaim: Hallelujah, what a Savior! If you don’t know this hymn and the story of the writer then I encourage you to enrich your heart and mind with both the music and story of P. P. Bliss. The other song mi...

  Psalm 86 Each morning I sit here and I have a pretty good idea what I will write about Jesus. Not yet today. It is not that I have not seen things that make me think of Jesus. But I’m distracted and the clarity of the Psalm has not yet struck me. Maybe you can help? I’m of two minds.  Firstly I see Jesus, in David. That is the man seeking God. And we see the conversation between Jesus and His Father several times in the gospels as well as teaching about the relationship between Father and Son in the rest of the New Testament. Yesterday I was looking at and thinking about Jesus' prayer in John 17 and I could probably see links between that prayer and this prayer of David in Psalm 86.  Then there is the way of seeing the Psalm as Jesus being the God David seeks. Jesus reveals to us that He has all the character qualities that David in this Psalm attributes to God. And then as I was rereading the Psalm maybe for the 5th or more time, verse 15 hit me and I started to look a...

  Psalm 54 The background to this Psalm is found in 1 Samuel 23:19-20 .  David’s life is filled with problems from his childhood through to his death. Can you recount the challenges that David faced in his life? David saw great triumphs, but these did not lead to the peace, prosperity, relative ease and rest that you might imagine. David had those moments in his life, but more often than not, we read of enemies attacking him: from wild animals, to brothers, to mighty warriors, to the king, to foreign armies, to his own sons and on it goes. According to the notes above Psalm 54 and 63, we read David’s prayer to God. And according to the more historical book of first and second Samuel, we read of the events leading up to the prayers and the events following the prayers. David was delivered in a fashion. He still was a fugitive, he still was not yet recognised as King, Saul and the Ziphites were still living and not conquered or destroyed. David escaped, and you could see that i...