Hello, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray with Me”.

In Psalm 94, the poet speaks with three voices of prayer: a voice of complaint, a teaching voice, and a voice of confidence and praise. 

The psalm starts with a complaint to Jehovah, God of vengeance.

This psalm, and others, present two different views of God’s vengeance. The first view is the vengeance as imagined by the poets. The poets are not impartial judges, objectively suggesting measured punishments for measured evil. As victims of ruthless oppressors, bloody wars, slander in court, sometimes hounded to death, they want God to set things right…now… by stopping the evil and stomping on the evildoer.. The poets offer helpful suggestions for how to punish enemies and destroy their lives and property. While we approve the poets’ desire for justice, we are sometimes shocked at their vicious suggestions for revenge. 

The other view of God’s vengeance is how God works to bring about justice. He rarely follows the poets’ violent suggestions. Instead, he’s fair and just in protecting the innocent, delivering the weak, and helping the poor against abusive adversaries. God’s administration of justice often lets people reap what they sow.Those who live by the sword die a violent death. 

After his prayer for justice, the poet adopts a teacher’s voice, pointing out that ignoring God is not an option. Despite God’s silence and apparent indifference, he is attentive to the world he made and the people he loves. God who created ears . . . hears what is happening. God who created eyes . . . sees injustice. God who disciplines the nations . . . will set things right. But perhaps not on the urgent schedule the poet would prefer.  

The poet now moves to his third voice, expressing praise and thankfulness to God. He says,
  When my foot was slipping,
        your unfailing love supported me.
  When anxiety was great within me,
        your consolation brought me joy (vv. 18-19).
  The Lord has become my fortress,
        my God the rock in whom I take refuge (v. 22). 

Let’s pray. 

Lord, we feel that violence should be rewarded with violence. Isn’t the answer to bad guys with guns, good guys with guns? Isn’t the answer to murder, to kill the perpetrator by capital punishment? Isn’t the answer to assault and bloodshed to visit violence on the guilty? Are you not God, the avenger? Do you not find our suggestions helpful?

O God, you are slow to avenge, slow to stop the violent in their tracks, slow to rescue the orphan and widow and alien. Is this because you are not paying attention? Do you not see? Do you not hear?

But you who created the eye, you do see. You created the ear, you do hear. You discipline the nations, surely you will punish the wicked and set the world right. We submit our case to you, God. If our violent solutions are not acceptable, if our proposed schedule is unhelpful, we invite you to do your work in your way and in your time.  

We give thanks that you are God. When we have great anxiety, you console us with joy. When we are vulnerable, you are our fortress. Lead us and protect us until our lives are safe and our world is at peace.

Amen.

I’m Daniel on the channel “Pray with Me”.

Hello, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray with Me”.

Psalm 93, which we look at today, highlights three immovable foundations of the poet’s faith: God on his throne is eternal, the earth is immovably fixed in place, and God’s law is unchangeable. 

For us moderns, these fixed foundations raise questions. The poet imagined a stationary earth, with sun and moon and stars circling around it. Our modern imagination pictures a moving earth circling the sun, part of a solar system moving through space, belonging to one galaxy among millions traversing the universe. The earth is far more moveable than the poet imagined. 

The poet also cites God’s law as immutable. To him, God’s law was the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. These books regulated ancient Israel’s diet, clothes, sacrifices, worship, and morality. Our modern understanding of the Old Testament law divides it into obsolete bits we’ve discarded (like animal sacrifices and unclean foods), flexible bits we tweak (like choosing Sunday instead of Saturday for our sabbath), and inflexible bits which we see as mandatory (like most of the Ten Commandments). When we take the Bible literally, we don’t mean we do everything it says. We mean we subscribe to a system of interpretation that carefully selects the bits that apply to us. God’s law in the Bible is not immutable for us in the same way it was for the poet; because we discard bits we think are culturally conditioned and emphasize bits we think are unchanging moral laws. And argue endlessly about how to tell the difference.. 

The poet’s third immovable foundation is God’s eternal throne. Here we are on firmer ground, because like the poet, we believe God is eternal, that he created heaven and earth, and that he rules them a hidden providence. We have moved beyond the poet’s understanding to a faith in Christ who will one day bring the world under his direct and visible government.

Let’s pray. 

Our father, even though our cosmology and our relationship to the Old Testament law differ from the poet’s, we share his articles of faith. 

With him we say,
  You reign Lord,
        you are robed in majesty and armed with strength.
  Your throne was established long ago,
        you are from all eternity (vv. 1-2). 
   The seas have lifted up their voice,
        the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.
  Mightier than the thunder of great waters,
        mightier than the breakers of the sea–
        the Lord on high is mighty (vv. 3-4). 

You, God, are mighty: greater than Carribean hurricanes and cyclones in southeast Asia and tsunamis in the Pacific. In the short history of mankind as we know it, the earth has provided a predictable home for us. The waters of the ocean are held back by land, the rain and sun nurture crops, the climate has been stable. But now, as the globe warms, perhaps due to natural cycles or to human activity, we see the stability of the earth changing. Lands once fruitful are becoming deserts, coastlands flood as oceans rise, weather events are more destructive. 

O Lord, are these changes your judgement for our greedy stewardship of the earth? Or in the cycles of nature that you supervise, is it time for the earth to change, causing the death and dislocation of billions as we seek liveable climate and politics and security? 

Your statutes, O Lord, stand firm. May our lives be defined by your laws, whatever happens in our government and weather. Help us to welcome strangers instead of building walls and buying guns. Help us preserve life instead of destroying it. Help us build community instead of escaping off the grid. As others turn to lies and selfishness, help us hold fast to the truth.  

You are mighty Lord, mightier than floods and winds and changes of time. In our short, uncertain lives, may we be good stewards of everything you have given us. Hold us in your eternal hand, bring us at last to your eternal home. 

Amen.

I’m Daniel on the channel “Pray with Me”.

Hello, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray with Me”.

Psalm 92 is constructed like a Big Mac. The bun on the outside and in the middle is praise to God. The top and bottom halves are identical twins: each contains a meaty offering of the poet’s experience of God’s faithfulness, garnished with an assortment of predictions about the overthrow of God’s enemies. 

Or, to describe it more technically, the first half of Psalm 92 begins with praise to God,then  predicts the downfall of his enemies, and climaxes by stating the central theme, “You, Lord, are forever exalted” (v. 8). The second half of the psalm repeats these themes in reverse order, predicting the destruction of God’s enemies and concluding with a confident statement that yes, the righteous will flourish and praise God. 

Let’s pray some phrases from the psalm. 

   It is good to praise you, Lord,
    and make music to your name,
  proclaiming your love in the morning
      and your faithfulness at night (vv. 1-2).

Lord, in the evening I  see a full moon over a glittering field of snow. In the morning I see sunlight sparkling in the winter white. You paint a beautiful world, Lord, with palettes for each season. In our dark northern winter, we sing your love and faithfulness in morning sun and evening moonlight,

    You make me glad by your deeds, Lord,
        I sing for joy at what your hands have done.
    How great are your works, Lord,
        How profound your thoughts (vv. 4-5). 

We praise you for your works: creating and sustaining the universe, giving your son to save us. We thank you for healing our minds from fear and superstition and ignorance, for freeing out hearts from narrowness and isolation, for caring for our bodies with medicine and exercise and food, for our souls with salvation and communion. 

How great are your works, Lord, how profound your thoughts. Johannes Kepler, an early pioneer of the hypothesis that the earth circles the sun, said his research was “Thinking God’s thoughts after him.” In the 15th century, he studied the motions of the planets and cast horoscopes for his classmates and tried to explain scriptures where the sun was circling the earth. Lord, take our modern minds with their modern superstitions and assumptions, and change them until we think your thoughts after you. Give us the mind of Christ.

As the psalm says,
      Senseless people do not know,
          fools do not understand,
      that though the wicked spring up like grass
          and evildoers flourish,
          they will be destroyed forever.
      But you, Lord, are exalted forever (vv. 6-8). 

Yes, Lord, your presence and your thoughts are light to our darkness, overshadowing senseless and foolish worldviews. With the poet, we believe that those who reject the light of your truth and reality and morality will be consigned by their choices to darkness. But you, Lord, will reign forever in light, you are forever praised. 

   Your enemies, Lord, will be scattered,
      but the righteous will flourish like a palm tree.
    They will still bear fruit in old age,
      proclaiming, “The Lord is upright” (vv. 9c, 12a, 14a, 15a).

Yes, Lord, you alone are upright, you alone are our rock in the shifting sands of modernity, you alone are our compass in a morally bankrupt society, you alone our health in a diseased and decaying world. Care for us, that we may flourish like trees, bearing fruit even in our old age. 

Amen.

I’m Daniel on the channel “Pray with Me”.