I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Psalms 117-118.

Everyone should praise God because He loves us deeply and faithfully.  He will never stop loving us.  His love means that we need not fear anything.  God acts for our best interest and no one and nothing can harm us against His will.  We may be outnumbered and surrounded on all sides by those who wish us harm, but we can stand and fight for the cause to which God directs us without fear.  God’s strength will over come whatever stands against us.  The metaphor of battle which the psalmist uses here powerfully applies to many of the problems we will face.

However, the psalmist uses a second metaphor in today’s passage, one which we often overlook.  This metaphor was applied to Himself by Jesus which often leads us to miss some of the meaning which it has.  “The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.”  Jesus was rejected by the religious leaders of His day.  Those who presented themselves as the experts on doing God’s will rejected the centerpiece of God’s will.  In the same way, many of those today who strive to present a moral code for others to live by reject the central assumptions upon which any actual moral code must be built.  In pre-modern buildings, all parts of a building were aligned off of the cornerstone.   If the cornerstone was not cut properly and then positioned properly, all of the rest of the building would not line up properly and will fall apart.  In the same way, if try to build our lives without God we will end up with a misshapen mess that constantly falls apart around us.