Today, I am reading and commenting on  Psalms 18-22.

As I read through these psalms today I realized that in many ways Psalm 18, our first psalm today, and Psalm 22, the last of today’s psalms, express pretty much the same ideas, but give us a very different emotional sense.  Psalm 18 begins with celebrating the psalmist’s trust in, and dependence on, God before going on to speak of his great distress (which he then follows by expounding on how God saves those who put their faith in Him).  Psalm 22, on the other hand, starts with the psalmist expressing his despondency in great detail before ending by declaring that he will praise God because God will save him.  We can take some lessons from the way the psalmist, in the middle of his distress when he feels like God has abandoned him, declares that God will see him through this distress and the time will come when he will praise God before men for the way in which He saved him, but today I want to focus on the theme which sort of threads its way through all of today’s psalms.  In Psalm 18 the psalmist declares that he has kept himself from sin and God has rewarded him for doing so.  I want to say that there is value in recognizing that we gain from doing as God commands, but we know from elsewhere in Scripture that no one can be blameless on their own merit.  Which is addressed by what the psalmist says in Psalm 19.  There he begs God to forgive his hidden faults and to keep him from willful sin while expounding on how wonderful God’s commands are.  Then in Psalm 20, the psalmist writes:

Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
    but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.

He continues by saying that those who trust in material things (chariots and horses) will fall, but those who trust in God will rise up and stand firm.  By putting our trust in God, and only by putting our trust in God, we can be righteous with the righteousness which God gives to us through Christ Jesus.  Finally, Psalm 22 ends with the psalmist telling us that future generations will be told about the Lord, and they will proclaim his righteousness declaring that He has done wonderful things, that He has provided salvation to the world, He has defeated evil.

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