Seeing Jesus in the Psalms

  Psalm 143 “Don’t put your servant on trial, for no one is innocent before you.” Psalm 143:2 NLT MAIN POINT: You need to learn to discern what is sin and what is God’s will. Have you ever been on trial? I was on trial many years ago for a traffic accident where I was found to be the cause or guilty one. I had to pay the other insurance companies for years after that. I sat in a trial too a few times, as an observer, as a witness, as a supporter of the people involved in the trial. David is right, there are no innocent parties. Most situations in life are complex and even what appears to be the simplest of scenarios can often be traced back to other causes, perpetrators who had been themselves victims and so on. I want to make it clear I am thinking these things through. I have invited you as the reader to join me in the process. Depending on when you read this and in what form, you may see photos of the process of writing/copying or transcriptions of audio reflections I make while...

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 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...