I am using One Year Bible Online for my daily Bible study. For today, One Year Bible Online links here. I have found that by writing this daily blog of what I see when I read these scriptures, I get more out of them. I hope that by posting these ruminations others may get some benefit as well. If you have any thoughts or comments regarding these verses or what I have written about them, please post them.
Solomon continues his closing prayer by asking God to watch over the Temple and hear prayers said towards it (I believe that this is the origin of the idea of facing towards a holy place when praying). He acknowledges that the Temple cannot possibly contain God, since not even the heavens can contain Him. Solomon then asked God that when people sin and suffer for their sins, if they turn to God, confess their sins and repent of them, he asked that God forgive them and return them to His favor. Solomon asked that God extend His mercy not only to the people of Israel, but to anyone from any land who turned to God and sought to serve Him.
God responded to Solomon’s prayer and gave Solomon a message that is as important for the Church today as it was for the people of Israel. “Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.”
Things are bad in the world today and getting worse. The answer is not to point to those who have never accepted Christ and blame them for their sin. The answer is for those of us who are called by Christ’s name, those of us who are Christians, to humble ourselves, admit our sins, turn from them, pray, and seek God’s face. We need to seek to do God’s will, not our own. The Christian message is not one for me to tell you what you should be doing differently. The Christian message is for me to look at my life and see what I should be doing differently. This does not mean that we do not tell people the consequences of sin and encourage them to stop sinning. It just means that law is not the answer. Law does not stop people from sinning. Only God’s grace can do that. We will not stop sinning because of our own goodness, or because of the strength of our will. All we can do by the strength of our will is substitute one sin for another. It is only by God’s grace that I will stop committing sin.
I did not read this part of today’s reading before I wrote what I wrote about the Old Testament passage, but Paul touches on exactly the point I made at the end of that. We want to do what is right, but we don’t. We don’t want to do what is wrong, but we do. It is human nature to want to do what is right, what God commands. But it is also human nature to be enslaved to sin. But God has given us a way out. We can die to the law through Christ and allow the Holy Spirit to control us, rather than sin. If we continue to think about sinful things, we will be controlled by sin. On the other hand, if we are controlled by the Holy Spirit we will think about spiritual things.
There are two ways to deal with our nature. The most common is to redefine what is right and what is wrong. In order to stop feeling bad about themselves for doing things that they know are wrong, people tell themselves that those things are not wrong. They tell themselves that it is the people who say that it is wrong who are doing wrong. The other is to admit that we are powerless to do what is right and turn control of our lives over to God. The latter is much harder. It is hard to not attempt to snatch control of our lives back, always forgetting that when we do that all we are doing is choosing the master who makes us do that which we do not wish to do.
The beginning of this psalm is very familiar to us.
you are my strength.
The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my savior;
my God is my rock, in whom I find protection.
He is my shield, the power that saves me,
and my place of safety.
I called on the Lord, who is worthy of praise,
and he saved me from my enemies.
All of this is wonderful and lovely, and true. I think of God in these ways all the time. The psalmist goes on to explain why he said those things. He tells us that he was on the verge of being destroyed and of death. Then he tells us:
yes, I prayed to my God for help.
He heard me from his sanctuary;
my cry to him reached his ears.
The psalm goes on to describe how God reacted when He heard the psalmist’s cry for help. This is the God who will save us as well if we turn to Him.
The foundations of the mountains shook;
they quaked because of his anger.
This is the force that God will expend for us when we call on His name, a force that causes the earth itself to tremble in fear. I am reading this psalm and writing this commentary on it and I almost missed how it fits into the theme today’s other passages have for me. What led to God coming forth with the force that the psalmist tells us caused the earth to tremble? Why, the psalmist told us that to, he humbled himself and prayed. If we humble ourselves and pray, we will see God burst forth onto this earth with a force that will cause the very mountains to shake.
If you strike a mocker, someone naive and/or simple-minded may learn to be shrewd. But all it takes for those who are wise to learn is a simple correction of their mistakes.