It’s a beautiful book containing some of the most heartfelt poetry and musical poetry ever written and every emotion that we explore in our human experience is explored in the Psalms. There are like heart cries that are so passionate and broken, it’s like hard, it’s hard to believe that they came from thousands of years ago because they feel so immediate, we know what that feels like. And they bridge the gap of time, and we realize that the human heart and the things that we go through are the same. We’re wearing different clothes and using different technology, but the things that go on inside of us are the same. And we’ll also see these mountaintop experiences of absolute tangible presence of God in the Psalms. David, who we haven’t met yet, he’s a king of Israel. And we’ll get to know him really, really well, as we move forward. He was a master musician and so most of the Psalms were penned by him, and even though we’ll get a pretty good biographical sketch of King David as…as we move forward, his heart is really exposed in his art and his craft in the way that he expresses himself. But there are other writers in Psalms too: Solomon, the sons of Kora, Asaph, Ethan and then there are a number of anonymously written or unknown authors that are in the Psalms. But ultimately the purpose of the Psalms is to bring the people together and give them language and to enrich their worship experience and the songs that would’ve been song in the public and in their private homes as they went around and did their business and went about their daily lives. And they’re collected together, and they’ve stood the test of time, and we sing and quote from them now. They’re power is unmatched, it’s some of the beautiful, most beautiful literature in all of the world. Scholars think that Psalms were written over, like a long period of time, maybe from about a thousand years before Christ, until maybe about a hundred and 70 years after. Three different periods in Israel are covered, the first would be during the reign of David and Solomon, which we’ll read, all of their poetry. The second would contain songs written when the children of Israel were taken into exile in Babylon and getting very close up story, picture of that, that exile when we get there. And then the third section would be writings from when they were able to leave exile and return to their land and rebuild. So, we have a large time span, different cultural points in their existence, but the Psalms are cohesive in their purpose: to bring glory and honor to God in authentic, heartfelt way and every conceivable situation that we face in life. So, we started the Psalms a couple days ago, now we’re moving into them. Today we will read Psalm chapter 3, a Psalm of David, regarding the time David fled from his son Absalom.
Commentary:
Okay so, in the first few days, we have a bit of a context for the stories that are unfolding in front of us in the different sections of the Bible. Yesterday, in Genesis, we learned about the fall of mankind from a place of perfection. What we would know as shalom or peace and wholeness, the way things are supposed to be with complete intimacy…intimacy with God. We watched murder, we watched death come into the story. Things that we were never supposed to experience. So, in Genesis today, we jump a thousand years into the future, and we saw how devastating the results had become. The human race had become so corrupted that they were acting like animals with only evil intentions. So much so that God’s heart is broken, and He regretted making them. To see us so far from what the plan was, to see us so far from the perfection that He had made and the intimacy that He had offered, it grieved him. But then we met Noah, the one righteous man. And we saw this thread of redemption start to pull its way into the Bible right here. And this thread of redemption weaves its way through the rest of the Bible. We saw the earth being reset in a great flood.
And as we’re reading in the gospel of Matthew, we’re meeting Jesus. And so, we followed him as he went into the wilderness because we had met John the Baptist and Jesus was baptized. So, we saw Jesus go into the wilderness where He is tempted by the evil one. And while in the… in the wilderness the evil one was tempting Jesus with an invitation to not go through with His mission. So, basically take the easy way out. I’ll give You everything You came here to get. All You have to do is bow down and worship me. We understand what’s going on here though. We just read about Adam and Eve right, just a couple days ago. And they were perfect. There was nothing bad going on and then they rebelled right. We haven’t seen a perfect person upon the earth until now, here in the gospel of Matthew, we’re looking at Jesus, the first perfect person to be upon the earth since Adam, which is why we’ll find Jesus called the second Adam in Scripture. He is a perfect representation of how things were supposed to be. If we remember in the garden of Eden, there was a tremendous deception. What we’re watching in the Gospel of Matthew is this same sort of humanity distorting, temptation and deception being put before Jesus. But we’re just seeing Jesus make a different choice. He stayed true. He was faithful and loyal to the Father. He rebuked the evil one and sent him away. All we have to do though friends is understand that’s not just Jesus, that we are confronting similar deceptions and distortions of who we are and what we are every day. And we’ll either respond like Adam and hide right, Adam and Eve and be naked and ashamed and hiding, or like Jesus and casting away, turning away from what will distort us and deceive us and ruin us. Each day we…we have plenty of forbidden fruit right, and all sorts of various shapes and sizes and in all kinds of categories. We have forbidden fruit. Or we can know God. Right, we can have our knowledge, or we can have God and walk with Him and live with Him intimately in every thought and word and deed. And so, that might be a big thing to think about for life but what about just like today. Is it forbidden fruit today or is it to know God today. And we can make that choice and see how things play out.
Prayer:
And Father, we invite You into that. Come near to us, Holy Spirit and allow us to see the truth before us, allow us to see the path that we are walking. Show us where that is leading. Help us to find the narrow path that leads to life. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
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And that’s it for today, I’m Brian, I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.