Trouble's Take-Away
As we near the end of Book Five of the Psalms in Sunday morning’s Life Builder class, we meet again a psalmist who is a familiar voice: David.
Among the many purposes God had for David’s life, the Book of Psalms was certainly one of them. About half of the psalms came from David’s imagination as a poet. Many others came from his will as a king, as he commissioned an arm of the priesthood to sing continually before the Lord in the tabernacle. From this commissioning we received psalms by Asaph, the Sons of Korah, and others, possibly even including some of the unattributed psalms.
It is fitting that we meet David again in the penultimate group of psalms in Book Five (138-145). So what does the wily King of Israel have to tell us near the end of the largest book of the Bible?
In Psalm 138, David opens with thanksgiving, reminding us that God has exalted two things above all others: His name and His word (v.2). David looks toward the day when “all the kings of the earth” will thank God and sing praise to Him. As one of those kings, David remembers how God has preserved Him and saved him, and, in a statement of typical psalmic paradox, he declares, “The Lord will fulfill his purpose in me,” then implores God, “Do not forget the work of your hands.” David was sure of God’s faithfulness and, perhaps ironically, this knowledge incited him to plead fervently for God’s faithfulness.
This was David’s big take-away from a life of trouble. Of the eight psalms in this group, half of them are cries for help. David cries out to be delivered from his sinful heart with as much fervency as he cries out to be delivered from the traps of the wicked. In 140, he draws attention to the words of the wicked, saying, “They make their tongues sharp as serpent’s, and under their lips is the venom of asps.”
Later in that psalm he states, “Let not the slanderer be established in the land.” Because David was looking toward something else being established in the land: the blessing of God. As he writes in 144: “May our sons in their youth be like plants full grown, our daughters like corner pillars cut for the structure of a palace; may our granaries be full, providing all kinds of produce . . . may there be no cry of distress in the streets.”
Why would God give his blessing? “The lord is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works. The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.”
