Theological Commentary: Click Here
I believe
that this psalm is two-fold.
The vast
majority of this psalm speaks about giving glory to God. How many times in the opening verses do we
hear about giving thanks to God, praising His name, exalting Him, and giving
Him glory? God is great; He deserves to
have that remembered.
What truly
strikes me about the bulk of this psalm is where God dwells. Naturally, we think of God as dwelling in
Shechem, Succoth, Ephraim, Gilead, Manasseh, and Judah. Those are places where Hebrew people dwell,
why shouldn’t they be where God dwells?
However, we also hear about Moab and Edom. Those aren’t Hebrew lands, but they are lands
that are settled by some of Abraham’s offspring through the likes of people
such as Esau. Even they make a bit of
sense. But then we hear about
Philistia. That is the place of the
Philistines. Those are people that God
told the Hebrews to drive out. They were
opposed to God and rebelling against His ways.
What this reminds
us is that God dwells everywhere. This
is His creation, He has a right to all of it.
Even the darkest places filled with the greatest of evil are places
where the Lord has the right to tread.
God may not inspire the people who live there, He might not be pleased
with the life of the people living there, and He might not even be welcome
there. Even so, the whole creation is
still His. That’s powerful to remember.
Finally, we
end up at the last stanza of verses.
Here the psalmist turns the tone on its head. We see the psalmist appear to ask where God
is? The psalmist wonders why the Lord
can be everywhere yet not go out with the Hebrew people.
This is an
important question to ask. What does it
mean when we don’t feel the blessing of His hand? There are a couple of possible answers, but one
thing that we can say is that when the blessing of the Lord is not felt
something is wrong. It could be that God’s
people are doing something that the Lord hasn’t blessed. It could be that the action is blessed but
the people are doing something that is interfering with God’s blessing. The important thing to understand is that the
absence of feeling the blessing of God is an opportunity for us to examine the
world around us.
<><
No comments:
Post a Comment