Year 2, Day 232: Psalms 100-101

Psalm 100

I love the initial focus of Psalm 100.  But before I go into that, please note the expression “joyful noise.”  I checked the Hebrew just to make sure.  It is what I suspected.  Rua!  Make a joyful noise!  Give a jubilant shout!  Bring forth the battle cry!  {That remains as my new favorite way to translate this word.}  Enter into the Lord’s presence and let loose with calls of joy, fellowship, and loyalty.  Let’s rua in the presence of the Almighty, people!

Knowing the context of this psalm, look at the flow of the psalm.  After all, it is short enough to summarize the verbs in a simple list: rua, serve, come, know, enter.  Those are great verbs to use when we talk about our relationship with the Lord.

I’ve already spoken about rua, so let’s move right into serve.  Serve: to do something for the sake of another.  Whether we are doing it for the person being served or doing it at the request of another regardless of who gets served – service is something done on behalf of another person.  In this case, the person is God.  After making a rua to Him, we are to then look for ways to serve Him.

I had many interesting conversations with my mom over the past few days.  Without going into too many details, I found myself being mindful of an expression that I need to hear more about.  {For the record, don’t you just hate when your own words convict you?}  I found myself saying over and over again, “For me, the most important thing is how an action will affect my witness for Jesus Christ.  If something doesn’t promote that witness, why do it?”  I’ve asked myself that question many times in my own head the past few days.  I think that is an important question to ask as we develop a servant’s mentality.  If it doesn’t promote my witness of Jesus Christ in some manner, why am I doing it?

The next verb is come … come into His presence with joyful singing.  The Hebrew word to describe the singing is renanah – a joyful shout or a ringing cry of triumph.  Again we hear the importance of declaring our allegiance to God!

Even more, we are to come.  He wants us there!  In this line I hear echoes of the sad parable of Jesus in Matthew 22:1-14.  Here we find a Jesus who tells us that it spite of humanity’s attitude towards God, God has prepared a wedding banquet and He wants us in attendance!  God desires that we come!  How cool is it that He desires us to come!  We don’t deserve it, but He desires it anyway!

The next verb is know.  We are to know that He is God.  We are to know that He made us.  We need to know that we are His people and we belong to His pasture.  Do you hear the prior two points within this expression?  God wants us as His people.  God wants us to come and partake of His pasture.  But in doing so, we need to recognize that we are not the one in charge.  We are His people.  Thus, we serve Him.  So often we get that backwards.  We may not say it this way, but we often act as though we are in a relationship with God so that we can get Him to serve us.  No, we are the people of His pasture.  He is God.  We need to know that.

Finally, we come to the verb enter.  It might seem strange to have this verb last, but it is a great summary of the other points.  In order to give a rua or a renanah in His presence, must we not enter?  In order to serve Him, must we not enter?  In order to partake of His pasture, must we not enter it?

The great part of this verb is that it is a verb of response.  It shows that we have an expected action.  God has invited us.  He has laid out His salvation for us to embrace.  The work of salvation is entirely His.  But we do need to respond to that work.  We receive His grace.  We enter.  We leave the world and its ways behind as we enter into His presence with a rua on our lips and blessing His name!

What a great experience of God in such a short little psalm!

Psalm 101

Psalm 101 shifts the focus entirely.  It should not surprise anyone that this is a psalm of David.  This is a great and challenging psalm that talks about how we as human beings deal with sin and evil.

I’m going to be blunt, because I chose to spend most of my space today talking about being in the presence of God – which I think is the higher priority.  So in being blunt, look at what David says about dealing with evil.  Verse 3 tells us to not set the work of anything worthless before our eyes.  It also tells us to hate the work of those who fall away from God.  It doesn’t get any blunter than that.  If it’s not of God, don’t bring it into your life regardless of how much you enjoy it or how harmless it seems.

We are to cast away slander, haughtiness, and arrogance.  {That’s a pretty blunt and tough verse for people of the American culture, too!}  We are to not even allow deceit to enter our house.  People who continue to practice unrepentant lying are not supposed to be allowed to continue in our presence.

That’s a pretty tough list there, but I think there is something that we can really learn from it.  David sets a high bar.  He sets expectations of himself {And by inference, the faithful}.  David doesn’t let people just “slide through” their faith.  No, he calls people to set and attain expectations.  That’s what I appreciate most about this psalm.  It is about bringing our expectations up to God’s rather than rationalizing the lowering of God’s expectations to meet ours.

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