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

Psalms 18 and 20 are perfect bookends for today’s reading.  Psalm 18 gives great imagery of the way in which God can, and will, exert His power when we call to Him in distress.  Psalm 22 teaches us the value of remaining faithful to God when life makes it seem as if He has abandoned us.  Often people look at Psalm 22 as a psalm of deep despair, of being abandoned by God, because Jesus quotes from it while He is on the cross.  Yet, if we read the entire psalm we see that despite feeling forsaken by God the psalmist still has faith that God will rescue him.  At the beginning of psalm 22 the psalmist seems to believe that God has abandoned him.  Later in the psalm the psalmist declares that he will praise God in the assembly. So, despite feeling that God has forsaken him, the psalmist has faith that God will rescue him, that he will have the opportunity, and reason, to praise God in the future.  When Jesus quoted the beginning of Psalm 22 He intended to communicate to us both that He was feeling complete despair and that He had faith that God had not truly abandoned Him.

I did not mean to spend so much time on Psalm 22 because there is more to be said about the other psalms in today’s passage.  In Psalm 18, we have the imagery of God coming to our rescue like one might see in an Action movie.  Then in Psalm 19 the psalmist tells us how the very universe testifies to God’s existence and His characteristics: as Elihu stated in the Book of Job, God uses the universe to speak to us of His will.  Throughout all of these psalms runs the theme that God will come to the aid of those who faithfully do His will.

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