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 105-107.

    I love the way these three psalms fit together. Psalm 105 shows us how God plans for the long term. Bad things happened to the people of Israel (famine in the land of Canaan, Joseph sold into slavery, etc). God did these things in order to show His great power, shape the descendants of Abraham into a people, and bring them out of Egypt wealthier than they would otherwise have been. Psalm 106 reminds us about how quickly we forget the good things God has done for us and fall back into sin. Despite our many sins, God will gather us back to Himself when we repent and call on His name. Finally, Psalm 107 calls on us to tell others how God has redeemed us. There the psalmist describes a few of the many ways in which people have been redeemed. I am always inspired by reading the accounts of how God has rescued those who call on Him.

1. Some were lost and homeless.
2. Some were imprisoned.
3. Some were fools and rebelled
4. Some faced devastating natural disasters.

But they all had one thing in common; in the depths of their troubles they cried, “Lord, help.” God heard their cry and saved them from their distress. Whatever your story of redemption, speak out, tell others about how God has redeemed you from your troubles.

    I am going to take the psalmist’s advice and tell how God redeemed me. I was raised in a Christian home and I had experiences of faith throughout my teen and young adult years. However, I was also raised to seek proof of what I believed (this is not a bad thing). I sought solid incontrovertible evidence that God existed, evidence I could present to someone else as proof. After examining the logic of the universe I came to the conclusion that either the God of the Bible had created the universe, or everything had happened by chance. I desperately wanted evidence of that God, but had not found any which truly satisfied. I was going through a period where life was hard and the idea that there was nothing more than the material world made me feel somewhat depressed. One day I was driving along and considered running my car into an obstacle at speed to just end it. However, I realized how much grief doing so would bring to my mother and I could not do that to her. I cried out to God, “What am I going to do? I cannot go on living like this. My life must have meaning.”
To which He replied, “Your life does have meaning. It’s meaning is to serve Me.”
“Yes, but how do I know You even exist? What if I am just making you up to soothe myself?”
“well,” God replied once more, “is that so bad? Here are your choices. You can choose to believe that the world happened by chance and nothing means anything. Or you can choose to believe that I AM and that I created you for a purpose.”
My response was, “I cannot live with the former. So I will act as if I believe the latter.” It was amazing, up until then, despite my many professions of faith, I had struggled repeatedly with doubt. Since that time, every time doubt starts to rise in my mind something happens to once more prove to me that God is real and created me for a purpose. Perhaps another time I will write about some of those occasions. But for now I will leave you with Psalm 34:8, which sums up my point: