“The Way of Folly” (Psalm 14)

On my bookshelves I have a little volume entitled The Darwin Awards. In case you’ve never heard of the Darwin Awards, here is how its author Wendy Northcutt describes them:

Darwin Awards commemorate those individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion… To qualify, nominees must improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race using astonishingly stupid means.”[1]

Here is one example from 2005:

One fateful afternoon, 55-year-old Marko retreated to his workshop to make himself a tool for chimney cleaning. The chimney was too high for a simple broom to work, but if he could attach a brush to a chain and then weigh it down with something, that would do the trick. But what could he use as a weight? He happened to have the perfect object. It was heavy, yet compact. And best of all, it was made of metal, so he could weld it to the chain. He must have somehow overlooked the fact that it was also a hand grenade…[2]

I will spare you the gruesome details.

In this morning’s reading from the psalms we meet with a character who makes not infrequent appearances on the pages of the Bible. And while they do not strictly qualify for a Darwin Award, they surely fall into a related category. I am referring to the fool.

In our New International Version Bibles, the word “fool” occurs 182 times—and seventy-two of those occasions are found in the book of Proverbs, where we encounter them in little aphorisms such as these:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. (1:7)

The waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. (1:32)

The wise inherit honour, but fools get only shame. (3:35)

The wise in heart accept commands, but a chattering fool comes to ruin. (10:8)

We meet with fools in the New Testament as well, particularly in the teachings of Jesus. Perhaps you remember the story of the two house builders—the wise man who built his house on bedrock and his foolish counterpart who went ahead and built his on the sand. Or how about Jesus’ dramatic parable of the rich landowner who spent all his time building more and bigger barns to store his crops? God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.” And the apostle Paul counsels us, “Do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is” (Ephesians 5:17).

But of all the references to fools in the Bible, it is surely the opening verse of the psalm we have read this morning, Psalm 14:1, that has to be the best known: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ”

A definition

Author and preacher Eugene Peterson suggests that there are three kinds of atheists in the world. The first are what he describes as subscribing to an atheism that develops out of protest.

Angry about what is wrong with the world, they are roused to passionate defiance. That a good God permits the birth of crippled children, that a loving God allows rape and torture, that a sovereign God stands aside while the murderous régime of a Genghis Khan or an Adolf Hitler runs its course—such outrageous paradoxes cannot be countenanced. So God is eliminated.[3]

A second brand of atheism can often be the result of a quest for intellectual honesty. It is the atheism of the person who has rejected the childish distortions of God that New Testament translator J.B. Phillips described in his little book Your God is Too Small: the celestial killjoy, the parental hangover, the grand old man with a beard, the heavenly bellhop… And on the list goes. But of course as Christians we reject all those false notions as well.

These kinds of atheism [writes Peterson] can be treated with appreciation and respect. The passionately protesting atheist, sensitive to suffering, can be welcomed as a partner in the spiritual and moral struggle against evil… The intellectually discriminating atheist can be accepted as an ally in skeptically rejecting all the popular, half-baked stupidities named “god” that abound in our time…[4]

However, the Bible is not launching a diatribe against atheists of either of those two varieties. For one thing, that kind of unbelief didn’t exist in the ancient Middle East 1000 years BC when David was writing. Atheism, at least as we know it today and represented by writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens (who have been dubbed the four horsemen of atheism!), is a relatively recent phenomenon.

So who is this psalm about? A more literal rendering of the Hebrew text might help us to understand. Word-for-word the original text runs like this: “The fool says in his heart, ‘No God.’ ” The words “there is” are not there in the Hebrew. They have been supplied by our English translators in the interests of rendering the verse into more fluent English. So what the psalm is referring to is not someone who doesn’t believe in God, but a person who has chosen to ignore God—someone who has decided either that God does not matter or that God has no particular interest in what they do, whether good or bad.

More than that, notice that the fool does not utter this decision aloud. It is a denial that lies hidden deep within the confines of his heart. To quote Peterson once again,

This is a quiet, unobtrusive atheism … These people do not say with their mouths, “There is no God.” To the contrary, they say with their mouths what everyone else says about God. They recite the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer along with the best of them. With their mouths they articulate impressive arguments for God’s existence. With their mouths they demand public prayers and official religion. But in their hearts they say, “There is no God.”[5]

Thus it becomes clear that the word “fool” in the Bible has nothing to do with intelligence or brains. Rather, it is a moral category. A fool is someone who has chosen to live life without reference to God. And as a consequence they have no sense of moral responsibility. We hear more about this sort of individual in Psalm 10:

     He blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.
In his pride the wicked man does not seek him;
     in all his thoughts there is no room for God…
     Your laws are rejected by him …
He says to himself, “Nothing will ever shake me.”
     He swears, “No one will ever do me harm.” (Psalm 10:4-6)

The apostle Paul offers a stinging criticism of the same kind of person in the opening chapter of his letter to the Romans:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them… Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools… (Romans 1:18-19,21-22)

A denunciation

I can imagine that if you had heard only the first verse of this psalm, you might be tempted to mentally gaze around your workplace or among your relatives and maybe come up with some suitable candidates—and you probably wouldn’t need much time! Without wishing to be too political, I suspect there are not a few among us who might be tempted point to certain politicians—I’ll leave it to you to choose your favourite.

But before we become too smug, we need to look at the second half of the verse. And what do we find there? The focus shifts, first from the singular (“The fool has said in his heart, ‘No God’ ”) to the plural (“They are corrupt, their deeds are vile”), and then it becomes universal: “There is no one who does good.” And to make his point perfectly clear, the psalmist continues,

The Lord looks down from heaven on the human race
to see if there are any who understand,
     any who seek God.
All have turned away, all have become corrupt;
     there is no one who does good,
     not even one.

We begin to realize that if a finger is pointing anywhere, it is pointing at us all. It is pointing at you. It is pointing at me. There are no exceptions.

Jesus made the point dramatically in the course of that famous incident of the woman caught in adultery. The men had already made a public spectacle of her and were ready to stone her. But then Jesus challenged them, “Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone.” And the silence that followed was deafening.

Could this be why Jesus warned his followers, “Anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell”? Because folly is the universal human condition. Because there are times in our lives—in my own case, I know there are times every day—when we live without reference to God, when we put God on the back burner, when we choose to travel the road that is broad, because things are so much easier, so much more convenient, without him. We read those early chapters of Genesis thinking they are about someone else, when in reality they are about us. We miss the point that I am Adam; I am Eve.

A deliverance

After all of this, is it any wonder that the psalmist should cry aloud in verse 7, “Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion”? The deliverance we need is as much from our own foolishness as the foolishness of others. And God has chosen to do it through what the Bible calls the foolishness of the cross.

A crown of thorns was shoved mockingly on his head, a purple robe on his back, as the soldiers slapped his face and spat on him and ridiculed him with the words, “Hail, king of the Jews.” A notice was placed above his head in derision: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” The passers-by laughingly shouted, “You who were going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!” The religious leaders sneered, “He saved others, but he can’t save himself!” For all who witnessed the cross on that fateful day, the man who hung there was a fool. What they did not know was that in his suffering and death Jesus was taking into himself the consequences of their folly—and of yours and mine.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:18,20,22-25)

That the creator of heaven and earth should take upon himself our mortal flesh… That the one who rides upon the heavens should be born as a helpless baby in a broken and persecuted nation… That the hands that formed the dry land and spread out the stars in the sky should be fastened to a cross… It all seems like foolishness. It contradicts every tenet of human logic. But it is the way in which our gracious God has chosen in the lavishness and mystery of his grace.

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” cried the apostle Paul. “How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33-34). “The fool has said in his heart, ‘No God.’ ” We may abandon God. Thank God that he has not abandoned us!

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[1]     The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection, 2,3

[2]     http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2005-09.html

[3]     Earth & Altar, 107

[4]    Earth & Altar, 109

[5]     Earth & Altar, 109

“The Lord our Dwelling Place” (Psalm 90)

Here we are, standing at the cusp of yet another year. It’s an annual opportunity to stop and think for a moment about the passage of time, and not just about time in general, but our time, the time that has flown past (for many of us all too quickly and for some not quickly enough) and the time that stretches ahead of us, for some filled with opportunities and new adventures, for others perhaps bringing a sense of apprehension about what may lie ahead. To help ourselves put all of that in perspective, I don’t think there are many more appropriate passages of Scripture than the psalm we have just read—Psalm 90.

We tend to think of the psalms as the work of King David. In fact, of the one hundred fifty psalms in the Old Testament, seventy-five are ascribed to him. However, the psalm we read together a few moments ago is unique in all the Old Testament in that it is attributed not to David but to Moses. If you turn to it in your Bible you will see it has the superscription, “A prayer of Moses the man of God”.

Some scholars question this attribution, but as I have read this psalm over and over and meditated upon it during the last couple of weeks, it makes a lot of sense. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations…” It is not difficult for me to imagine that these are the words of a man who has spent the better part of forty years wandering through the wilderness with his people, with no home to call their own. Yet throughout that time the Lord has been with them, visibly witnessed through the cloud that led them by day and the pillar of fire at night. But he had been with them long before that, as they toiled as slaves under the searing Egyptian sun, with Joseph and Jacob and Isaac, and going back to Abraham as he answered the call to journey from the banks of the Euphrates to the land that God had said would belong to him and his descendants.

So picture Moses, if you will, late one night lying back and looking up into the clear desert sky. My son Simon and I had the opportunity to do this in Libya on the edge of the Sahara several years ago and it was a memorable experience. Gazing into a sky uncluttered by pollution and the glow of city lights, he knew that behind all those innumerable stars that paraded across night after night, mightier than the mountains that surrounded him, reaching back past the ages beyond the dawn of time, there was God. “In the beginning, God …” And in this morning’s psalm: “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” 

 

God’s Eternity

If you take a few moments to go online and visit the NASA website, you can see an amazing photograph with Saturn’s rings in the foreground. Not far below them you can discern a tiny, almost insignificant, softly glowing dot. That dot is our planet earth, as seen from a distance of nearly one and a half billion kilometers[1]. The image gives us a picture of the vastness of our solar system, which itself is only a tiny dot within the Milky Way, which in turn is another tiny dot in the seeming limitlessness of the created order.

Moses certainly did not have access to any of the kinds of sophisticated astronomical data that are available to us today. But he didn’t need them in order to find himself overwhelmed by the limitlessness of God. The Bible tells us that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20). And we could spend all morning just considering the wonder of God’s eternal nature. We find it sprinkled throughout the Bible, in Psalm 104, for example:

Lord my God, you are very great;
     you are clothed with splendour and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
     he stretches out the heavens like a tent…
He makes the clouds his chariot
     and rides on the wings of the wind. (Psalm 104:1-3)

Or again, in one of the most exalted pieces of poetry in all of Scripture, from the prophet Isaiah:

Do you not know?
     Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
     Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
     and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
     and spreads them out like a tent to live in…
‘To whom will you compare me?
     Or who is my equal?’ says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
     who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
     and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
     not one of them is missing. (Isaiah 40:21-22,25-26)

And how about that unforgettable catalogue of questions with which the Lord peppered poor Job?

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
     Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
     Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
     or who laid its cornerstone –
while the morning stars sang together
     and all the angels shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea behind doors
     when it burst forth from the womb, …
when I said, “This far you may come and no farther;
     here is where your proud waves halt”?
Have you ever given orders to the morning,
     or shown the dawn its place … ?
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
     or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
     Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
     Tell me, if you know all this. (Job 38:4-18)

In Psalm 8 his consideration of God’s creative power and eternal majesty leads the psalmist to ask a question:

Lord, our Lord,
     how majestic is your name in all the earth! …
When I consider your heavens,
     the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
     which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
     human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:1,3-4)

And that is precisely the question that burns through the middle section of our psalm this morning.

Human Mortality

The main preoccupation of the psalm is not much with God’s eternal nature as it is with its contrast to our human mortality.

A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.

But Moses was not the only one to recognize this. Poor old Job cried aloud to his friends,

My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,
     and they come to an end without hope.
Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath… (Job 7:6-7)

And Solomon mused,

Everyone comes naked from their mother’s womb,
     and as everyone comes, so they depart.
They take nothing from their toil
     that they can carry in their hands. (Ecclesiastes 5:15)

Nearing the end of his life, the apostle Paul wrote to his young friend Timothy, “We brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it” (1 Timothy 6:7). And Jesus exemplified that truth in his parable of the rich fool. Many of you will remember his story of the man who kept having to build bigger barns to store his surplus grain. But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you” (Luke 12:13-21).

Isaac Watts put poetic expression to this morning’s psalm in the hymn we’ll be singing in a few minutes’ time:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
     Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
     Dies at the opening day.

Now isn’t all this a cheerful way to look ahead to the New Year? I hope I haven’t thoroughly demoralized you! But before you sink too far into depression, there’s something else we need to see in this psalm—and that is that it recognizes, indeed it laments, that none of this is the way things should be. You know those puzzles that ask you to spot what’s wrong with this picture? This psalm has something like that in it. The hints come out in verses like these: “You turn people back to dust…” “You sweep people away in the sleep of death…” “We are consumed by your anger…” “All our days pass under your wrath…”

The psalmist is painfully aware that things don’t have to be the way they are—that the power of life and death lies in God’s hands. All of this leads to the desperate cry in verse 13: “Relent, Lord, how long will it be?” The verb in Hebrew is shub. It means to turn around. It is as though God has his back towards us.

So you see there is something deep within the psalmist’s heart—something in all our hearts—that protests, that cries out this is not the way it’s supposed to be. As we read in Ecclesiastes, “He has set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). So it is that C.S. Lewis reflected,

We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed: unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal…[2]

Eternal Habitations

Turn with me now to the second-last chapter of the Bible, where the seer John gives us a picture that is so breathtaking that it cannot be compared with the sky even on the most glorious starlit night. There, John is given a vision of the new heaven and the new earth. He looks on with awe as the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, descends from the skies, “prepared,” as he describes it, “like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband”. Then a loud voice booms from God’s throne with the words, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:1-4).

Now shift the scene to the night before his crucifixion, as Jesus gathered with his disciples in the upper room. There he gave them the promise, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2-3).

And now in this Christmas season we remember how the Lord of time and eternity, he who has been our dwelling place throughout all generations, the eternal Word, became flesh and made his dwelling among us. “We have seen his glory,” John declares, “the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). It is in Jesus that we see life as God truly intends it to be. It is in Jesus that we find our eternal dwelling place in the heart of God.

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
     Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
     Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heav’n, stoops heav’n to earth…[3]

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[1]     https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17171

[2]     Reflections on the Psalms, 114,115

[3]     Richard Crashaw (1612-1649), “An Hymne of the Nativity”

“An Alphabet of Praise” (Psalm 145)

 I will exalt you, my God the King;
     I will praise your name for ever and ever.
Every day I will praise you
     and extol your name for ever and ever.

So ran the opening verses of the psalm we read together a few moments ago this morning. And did you realize it? But as we walked through those first eleven verses, we walked through half the Hebrew alphabet as well? Aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, he, waw, zayin… Psalm 145 is one of eight of what are known as acrostic psalms in the Old Testament, with the first word of each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The longest and most complex of them is Psalm 119, where each line of each succeeding set of eight verses begins with the same letter of the alphabet.

The psalms encompass a rich variety of poetic forms. More importantly, they cover the entire range of human emotions, from overflowing joy and praise to deep sorrow and lament.

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord,
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.

Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere.

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord; Lord, hear my voice.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept…
How can we sing the Lord’s song while in a foreign land?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The psalms were at the core of the magnificent worship of the Temple. But they were also composed for more humble circumstances, to be used both within the context of the family home and also on an individual basis. Some of the most loved psalms are the most deeply personal ones: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…”

It is no wonder, then, that the psalms, which are so central to Jewish worship, should also have become essential to Christian worship from the very beginning. In the mediæval period this led to the incomparable music of plainsong and Gregorian chant. Sublime as that music is, it meant that for the vast majority of congregations the psalms became something to listen to rather than to be sung. And so one of the hallmarks of the Reformation was the introduction of metrical psalms, psalms that could easily be sung to the popular tunes of the day.

The metrical psalms formed the backbone of Protestant hymnody for more than three centuries. In my mind’s eye I can picture great crowds of people gathering not only in churches, but in the marketplaces and public squares (maybe even in the taverns!) to join in singing the metrical psalms.

The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want;
He makes me down to lie…

All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell,
Come ye before him and rejoice…

Through all the changing scenes of life,
In trouble and in joy,
The praises of my God shall still
My heart and tongue employ…

I can only believe that the church would be greatly strengthened today by a return to the psalms. How much would we be enriched if they were to take their rightful place both within our public worship and also in our private devotions! And so, with those thoughts in mind, I’d like us to turn for the next few moments to Psalm 145, which I have entitled “An Alphabet of Praise”. (Take heart, by the way. I don’t intend to preach through all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—but just to highlight three themes that I see more generally emerging from this psalm.)

Our Mighty Creator

As David opens, he acknowledges that he is standing in the presence of the King of all creation. Indeed, he is astounded by the sheer majesty and awesomeness of God. “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise,” he sings. “His greatness no one can fathom.” “His greatness is unsearchable,” runs the old King James Version of the Bible. “God is magnificent,” is the way Eugene Peterson puts it in his translation in The Message. “He can never be praised enough. There are no boundaries to his greatness.”

Whenever we begin to worship God, it is important to stop and to take time to recognize the one into whose presence we are coming. It is a temptation to rush into worship. Most of us lead busy lives. We have jobs. We have families. We have things to do. I remember before I retired, friends who had already retired warning me, “You’ll be so busy in retirement that you won’t know how you managed to do all the things you did before.” Frankly, I’m not sure I believed them. Well, I’ve been retired for a couple of years now—and they were right!

If we are truly going to offer God the worship he deserves, though, we need to take time to stop and to consider who he is—to be still, as another psalm instructs us, and know that he is God. We need to put behind us all the cares and busyness of life—the children that need attending to, the bills that need to be paid, the papers that are piling up on my desk at work, the emails that need to be answered, the lawn that needs to be mown and a thousand and one other preoccupations—and focus on him. To remember that we are entering the presence of the King of all creation, the Ruler of all that is. And I grant that that is not an easy exercise.

As David does this, he becomes aware that he is not alone in his praise—that his praise is just an echo of the praise of every generation and indeed of all creation. I know that I have had that sense as I have stood in some of the great cathedrals of Europe. As I gaze up at the ancient stained glass, as I see the places where the stone floor has been worn down by generations of worshippers, I become aware of the deep truth of what we say week by week in my own Anglican liturgy,

Therefore with angels and archangels
and with all the company of heaven,
we laud and magnify thy glorious name,
evermore praising thee and saying,
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts.
Heaven and earth are full of thy glory.
Glory be to thee, O Lord most high!

David himself said this in his own words in Psalm 19 when he sang, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” And do you remember that incident in the gospels when a crowd of Jesus’ followers began to burst forth with joyful praise to God for the miracles they had been witnessing? The Pharisees wanted Jesus to tell them to stop. But Jesus replied, “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:37-40).

So this morning here at St James’ Church in Truro, Nova Scotia, we recognize that our prayers and our songs of worship are an echo of the praise that rings down a thousand generations and throughout the world today, as we stand in the presence of the Maker of the universe, supreme over everything that exists.

Our Gracious Provider

From his contemplation of God as his mighty creator, David moves in the psalm to a more personal level. In verse 8 he declares, “The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.” Now those words were not original to David. They are found a number of times in the Old Testament. We first meet with them in the book of Exodus, when Moses has climbed to the peak of mount Sinai to meet with the Lord. Moses has had the audacity to ask the Lord to show him his glory but God answers him no, for no one may see his face and live. However, not long afterwards he does pass in front of Moses, proclaiming these words: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7).

What David was doing was echoing the very words that God himself had used to describe himself. And the point is this: that our God is a god who reveals himself personally. And he wants each of us to know him on that level—not merely as the Creator of the starry skies, but as the one who loves and cares for each of his children, who calls us by name.

One of the things I didn’t take into account when we bought our house in Halifax a couple of years ago was how long it would take me to mow the lawn. It turns out that it takes more than two and a half hours. Rather than it being a nuisance, however, I’ve come to enjoy that time, as it gives me an opportunity, with the lawn mower buzzing and my ear protectors on, to shut out the rest of the world for a little while and to meditate and praise God. One song I found myself singing as I mowed this past week (and I can’t explain why, but that goes for a lot of things that pop into my head) was a hymn that I don’t think is in any of the hymnbooks any more—perhaps because it’s regarded as too sentimental. But maybe there are some of you who remember it from your childhood:

God sees the little sparrow fall,
It meets his tender view;
If God so loves the little birds,
I know he loves me too.

And then there’s the chorus:

He loves me too, he loves me, too,
I know he loves me too;
Because he loves the little things,
I know he loves me too.

So it is that David writes, “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.” One of the discoveries I was delighted to make this past week as I studied this psalm is that the word “compassion” here is used elsewhere to describe the tender love of a mother. In fact, it is related to the word for “womb”. And so we find that our heavenly Father watches over us and cares for us with a mother’s love.[1] We see this further in verses 15 and 16:

The eyes of all look to you,
     and you give them their food at the proper time.
You open your hand
     and satisfy the desires of every living thing.

Our Faithful Protector

In this psalm, then, we look to God as our mighty creator, supreme over every being, and our gracious provider, who looks after our every need. There is one other thought that I would like us to focus on this morning, and it’s found in the final section of the psalm:

The Lord is righteous in all his ways
     and faithful in all he does.
The Lord is near to all who call on him,
     to all who call on him in truth.
He fulfils the desires of those who fear him;
     he hears their cry and saves them.

King David himself could bear personal witness to God’s faithfulness in his life: in giving him victory over the giant Goliath, in protecting him from the jealous rage of King Saul, in forgiving him for his egregious affair with Bathsheba… No doubt if David were here this morning he could share numerous other evidences of God’s faithfulness in his life. And I’m sure that many of us would not have to think too hard to do the same.

Yet as we follow that path of God’s faithfulness from whatever direction, whether forwards from King David writing in 1000 bc or backwards from today in 2017 ad, it will inevitably lead us to a homeless couple in Bethlehem gazing in awe at a tiny child, to a preacher who reached out his hand to touch a leper, to a dying man hanging naked on a cross and gasping, “Father, forgive them…,” to a woman standing outside an empty tomb and stuttering in amazement to the man who stood in front of her (who she thought was the gardener), “Rabboni!” Years later the apostle Paul would reflect, “All God’s promises find their ‘Yes’ in Christ” (2 Corinthians 1:20).

Like so many of the psalms, this one will have done its work if it draws you and me into greater gratitude, into deeper amazement, and into closer fellowship with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—our mighty Creator, our gracious Provider and our faithful Protector. In the final words of our psalm,

Let every creature praise his name for ever and ever!

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[1]  See note on Psalm 103:13 in the New Bible Commentary Revised, page 515.