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January 13, 2016 - December 13, 2023
out of his prison cell we hear Paul’s trumpeting conclusion to his Philippian letter: “Celebrate God all day, every day. I mean, revel in him!
The premise of the psalm for all work is that God works:
Hilary of Poitiers taught that every Christian must be constantly vigilant against what he called “irreligiosa solicitudo pro Deo”—a blasphemous anxiety to do God’s work for him.
Joy,
is the gigantic secret of the Christian. G. K. CHESTERTON
There is a general assumption prevalent in the world that it is extremely difficult to be a Christian.
The easiest thing in the world is to be a Christian. What is hard is to be a sinner. Being a Christian is what we were created for.
The history we walk in has been repeatedly entered by God, most notably in Jesus Christ, first to show us and then to help us live full of faith and exuberant with purpose.
Blessing is the word that describes this happy state of affairs. Psalm 128 features the word.
The illustration that forms the center of the psalm shows how the blessing works: “Your wife will bear children as a vine bears grapes, your household lush as a vineyard, / The children around your table as fresh and promising as young olive shoots.” The illustration is, as we would expect, conditioned by Hebrew culture, in which the standard signs of happiness were a wife who had many children and children who gathered and grew around the table: fruitful vine and olive shoots.
John Calvin, preaching to his congregation in Geneva, Switzerland, pointed out that we must develop better and deeper concepts of happiness than those held by the world, which makes a happy life to consist in “ease, honours, and great wealth.”
We don’t have a production problem. We have the agricultural capability to produce enough food. We have the transportation technology to distribute the food. But we have a greed problem: if I don’t grab mine while I can, I might not be happy. The hunger problem is not going to be solved by government or by industry but in church, among Christians who learn a different way to pursue happiness.
There are no tricks involved in getting in on this life of blessing, and no luck required. We simply become Christians and begin the life of faith.
“Fear GOD.” Reverence might be a better word. Awe. The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have to him:
not to scare us but to bring us to awesome attention before the overwhelming grandeur of God,
religion is an inconvenience only to those who are traveling against the grain of creation, at cross-purposes with the way that leads to redemption.7
When Jesus said “Love your enemies,” he added nothing to what this psalmist already had before him.
The cornerstone sentence of Psalm 129 is “GOD wouldn’t put up with it, he sticks with us.”
A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering.
“The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.”
Such are the two great realities of Psalm 130: suffering is real; God is real.
For the person who suffers, has suffered or will suffer, Psalm 130 is essential equipment, for it convinces us that the big difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer.
The legend of Faustus, useful for so long in pointing out the folly of a god-defying pride, now is practically unrecognizable because the assumptions of our whole society (our educational models, our economic expectations, even our popular religion) are Faustian.
When Charles Spurgeon preached this psalm, he said it “is one of the shortest Psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn.”5
True knowledge of God is born out of obedience. JOHN CALVIN
Psalm 132 is one of the oldest psalms in the Bible.
The psalm shows obedience as a lively, adventurous response of faith that is rooted in historical fact and reaches into a promised hope.
the ark itself was important in that it emphasized that God was with his people and that God was over and above his people (for God quite obviously was not in the box). The ark was the symbol, not the reality. When the ark was treated as a talisman, as a curio or as a magical device with which to manipulate God, everything went wrong. God cannot be contained or used.
A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experience of the past week.
Biblical history is a good memory for what doesn’t work. It is also a good memory for what does work—like
For all its interest in history the Bible never refers to the past as “the good old times.” The past is not, for the person of faith, a restored historical site that we tour when we are on vacation; it is a field that we plow and harrow and plant and fertilize and work for a harvest.
All the verb tenses are future. Obedience is fulfilled by hope.
Psalm 132 cultivates the memory and nurtures the hope that lead to mature obedience. It protects us from a religion that is ignorant of the ways of God and so keeps us prey to every fear that thrusts itself upon us. It guards us from a religion run riot with fantasies and nightmares because it has gotten disassociated from the promises of God. It develops a strong sense of continuity with the past and a surging sense of exploration into the future.
Christian living demands that we keep our feet on the ground; it also asks us to make a leap of faith.
Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, that is, from the time we become a Christian, we are at the same time a member of the Christian church—even if we do not permit our name to be placed on a church roll, even if we refuse to identify ourselves with a particular congregation and share responsibilities with them, even if we absent ourselves from the worship of a congregation.
God never makes private, secret salvation deals with people.
No Christian is an only child.
Living together in a way that evokes the glad song of Psalm 133 is one of the great and arduous tasks before Christ’s people. Nothing requires more attention and energy.
my brother, my sister, is my priest.
Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.”
A community of faith flourishes when we view each other with this expectancy, wondering what God will do today in this one, in that one.
The way of discipleship that begins in an act of repentance (tĕshubah) concludes in a life of praise (bĕrakah).
There are two words which are translated “blessed” in our Bibles. One is ’ashre, which describes the having-it-all-together sense of well-being that comes when we are living in tune with creation and redemption. It is what Psalm 1 announces and what Psalm 128 describes. It is what we experience when God blesses us. The word in Hebrew “is used only of men, never of God, [and] in the NT there are only two instances in which it is used of God (makarios in 1 Tim 1:11; 6:15).”3 The other word is bĕrakah. It describes what God does to us and among us: he enters into covenant with us, he pours out
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book on God has for its title The God Who Stands, Stoops and Stays. That summarizes the posture of blessing: God stands—he is foundational and dependable; God stoops—he kneels to our level and meets us where we are; God stays—he sticks with us through hard times and good, sharing his life with us in grace and peace.
Humphrey Bogart once defined a professional as a person who “did a better job when he didn’t feel like it.”
Eric Routley thinks that, colloquially, to bless means to “speak well of.”9 The Lord has spoken well of you; now you speak well of him.
Once Barth was on a bus in Basel, the Swiss city in which he lived and taught for many years. A man came and sat beside him, a tourist. Barth struck up a conversation, “You are a visitor, yes? And what do you want to see in our city?” The man said, “I would like to see the great theologian Karl Barth. Do you know him?” “Oh, yes,” said Barth, “I shave him every morning.” The man went away satisfied, telling his friends that he had met Barth’s barber.
“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
“Charis always demands the answer eucharistia (that is, grace always demands the answer of gratitude).
We depersonalize the Bible into abstractions or “truths” that we can reconfigure and then fit into the plots that we make up for our lives. But the Bible shows us God present and active in and among living, breathing human beings, the same kind and sort of men and women that we are.
