Seeing Jesus in the Psalms

Lead me by your truth and teach me, for you are the God who saves me. Psalm 25:5 NLT   Psalm 25 As I copied the Psalm today I had three impressions.  The first is grace. I was taken aback by how loving, gracious, forgiving and helpful God was in the eyes of David.  The second was that David was concerned about his sin. He talks about it a lot, and all of his sin: past youthful sin and present sin too.  Lastly I noticed a preoccupation with problems, enemies and depression (a negative perspective).  I am going to explore all three and see if I come out with a unified central theme. My first question is possibly obvious for you. If God is so gracious, so loving and so kind, why does David have such a concern for his sin? Further, if the rescuing presence of God is with him, why does David have all these problems all the time? This is a common cry of David and it persists throughout the Psalms. Isn’t David chosen? Isn’t he anointed? Hasn’t he been rescued and does...

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him. Psalm 24:1 NLT   Psalm 24 Main Point: You are invited to welcome the God King coming with transforming power. God the king owns everything and everyone. vv.1-2 On every level this is a bold and confrontational statement.  This reminds me of the parable Jesus told of the owner of the vineyard which represented the kingdom of God, recorded for us in Matthew 21:33-46 , Mark 12 . Psalm 24 is claiming the same “right of eminent domain”. Paul confirms this fact by establishing Our God the King’s further right of property when he reminds us we have been bought and our very bodies are not our own ( 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 ). And just like any conquered subject of any king, we must switch allegiance. Being a subject is not in question, but how you serve the King is where you exercise your freewill. Not everyone can approach God the king, only the holy. vv.3-4 But even though you are propert...

The Lord is my shepherd; I have all that I need. Psalm 23:1 NLT   Psalm 23 Much has been written about Psalm 23 . It is preached regularly at funerals; it is often offered as comfort to those who are suffering. I want to explore an aspect of Psalm 23 that I myself don’t remember preachers or authors explaining. We can easily listen to David saying these words and explain why it fits him in the context of various areas or time periods of his life. And we can naturally discuss Jesus/God being the Shepherd and how God functions in these roles for David or us. But this morning I want to think about Jesus saying these words in His life about His Father. Remember that I spoke in an earlier psalm about the complex nature of the believer being in Christ and Christ being in you as a child of God? Jesus the man, who can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing ( John 5:19 ) Compare to verse one “The Lord is my shepherd v.1” Jesus the man, who was led by the Spirit...

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far away when I groan for help? Psalm 22:1 NLT   Psalm 22 We have a phrase in English, “All’s well that ends well.” But you could contrast that with the saying, “The ends don’t justify the means.”  Do you understand the conflict between these two snippets of common sense wisdom? " The whole earth will acknowledge the Lord and return to him. All the families of the nations will bow down before him." Psalm 22:27 Surely, we want to end up at verse 27 but oh what a desperately difficult path David has to walk to get there.  In verses 1, 11 and 19 David expresses fear that God is not near. v.1 Why are you so far away  v.11 Do not stay so far from me, v.19 O Lord, do not stay far away! There are about 1000 years between David and Jesus. And the Davidic literature was well known to all Jews during Jesus’ time. And yet so many details of what David writes in Psalm 22 happened at the crucifixion of Jesus. v.6 But I am...

You have endowed him with eternal blessings and given him the joy of your presence. Psalm 21:6 NLT   Psalm 21 (Please read the Psalm before reading these thoughts about the Psalm.) Introduction: A few of the more difficult questions to answer in literature (particularly biblical literature) are, “Who is speaking?” and “About whom is he speaking?” This is not just because the text might be unclear but because the Bible may use a place or person as a representative of a whole nation or family or the other way around: a group of people or a whole city or nation might represent one person. This is uniquely true of Jesus, David, God’s chosen family and each individual believer. When a text clearly points to Jesus in the Bible but was written before Jesus was born, we refer to it as a messianic passage. By that we mean it is a passage pointing to or giving information about the messiah (המשיח, 'anointed'). Jesus said that he was the person to whom those prophecies were referring. So...