Seeing Jesus in the Psalms

Psalm 118 Sometimes a big event overshadows something else very significant happening around the same time. Since I set out on this journey to handwrite a copy of every Psalm and then write a “Bible lesson” for each one everyday for 150 days, I always get asked the same question. “What are you going to do when you get to Psalm 119?” My friends were so concerned that they organised a crew of helpers to join in the task of rewriting the Psalm. More on that after this Psalm. I realised after 70 some days that I needed to have a rest day in the week and that writing 7 days a week wasn’t the best idea. But I was still determined to finish the project by the end of the year, so I made the plan with Lyssa to rest on Sunday and write two Psalms on Monday (which is my weekend day since the store is open on Saturday and closed on Sunday and Monday). But after reordering the Psalms I noticed that would put Psalm 119 on a Monday and actually couple it with Psalm 118. With all the concentration on ...

  Psalm 117 [1] Praise the Lord, all you nations. Praise him, all you people of the earth.  [2] For his unfailing love for us is powerful;  the Lord’s faithfulness endures forever. Praise the Lord! Psalm 117:1-2 MAIN POINT: No one is excluded from the invitation to join the choir called to sing, ”Christ conquers all with His love”, so Praise the Lord. I see Jesus in the ever-expanding kingdom described in Psalm 117. Do you see that you are invited to join? This invitation to praise what we will later see is a colonising love of God is extended to the nations and then to the whole earth. And the word praise here if I understand it correctly is used to say, let your voice shine about Yᵊhōvâ (יְהֹוָה) ( LORD (used 6,510 times in the Bible)) Jehovah = "the existing One". I wonder if it isn’t more than poetic Hebrew parallelism but actually a mindset of saying all you civilised people with nations and governments praise God and all the rest of you people in tribes and far flun...

  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 115  “But Jesus told him, "Follow me now. Let the spiritually dead bury their own dead." Matthew 8:22 NLT “And those who make idols are just like them , as are all who trust in them.” Psalms 115:8 NLT We trust a Living God and so we are made alive. But idolatry is mocked by the author of this Psalm as not only gold or silver items which are not alive but made by people who are also not alive. And you may ask, how can that be? How can the person taking up the activity of forming little statues of made up gods not be alive? And it is because they are not spiritually alive. Their idolatry is proof that they cannot see how silly the whole activity is. There are many places in the Bible where those who make idols are mocked for the absurdness of the activity that identifies their spiritual deadness. And so the ‘dead now’ only have the ‘dead later’ to look forward to beyond the grave. They will not be able to praise God. But we are made alive. And so we see the agreement b...

  Psalm 114 Main Point: Jesus is the earth-shaking king who produces life-giving water from the rock that is Himself. When I was in my early twenties I visited my dad’s hometown, a place he had been working a bit again as a builder. I went with Lyssa, my wife of just a year or so and stopped in a restaurant connected to a large retail place built by the company my dad worked for. When I walked into the restaurant the person at the counter very warmly greeted me with, “Hi Don!” I’m not Don, I’m William (actually Bill or even Billy to the folks in Howard City and Lakeview but that’s probably another story about names; rest assured my name is William even if I have been called many other names through the years. But I digress.). Don, my father is 20 years older than me. But apparently he looks young and I looked older. It was not an isolated incident. I unsurprisingly look like my father. I still do. Monday I asked some young theological students about the name of God used in Psalm 11...