Today, I am reading and commenting on  Psalms 136-142.

I echo the sentiments the psalmist expresses in today’s first psalm: give thanks to the Lord because He is good!  He has done wonderful things and His love endures forever.  When we call to Him, He answers.  He rescues us from our troubles.  More importantly, He has searched our hearts and knows us thoroughly.  He knows what we are going to do before we have the thought.  He knows us completely.  The way the psalmist expresses God’s knowledge of us is so powerful.  He writes that hiding from God is not possible.  There is no place we could go, or even a place we cannot go to, where God could not see us.  There is no place where God is not already there.  On the one hand, that means that we cannot hide from God and that it is pointless to try.  However, it also means that there is no place where God cannot reach us to save us from trouble.  The psalmist goes from there to explain that God not only knows our thoughts and our actions, but He knows how we are “put together”.  He knows the intricacies of our bodies and of our minds because He built them.  He understands how we have allowed sin to distort us from what He made us to be, and because He made us He knows how to put us right again after we have been damaged.  So, let us call on God to search our thoughts and desires in order to settle our anxious thoughts and lead us away from offensive thoughts so that we may serve Him faithfully.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Psalms 136-142.

We should give thanks to God because He is good and His love endures forever.  The psalmist gives us some examples of things which God has done which demonstrate both His goodness and His love, but each of us should think about the good things God has done for us.  If we honestly appraise what God has done for us, we will praise Him before those who seek to take His place in our lives.  But let me get back to God’s enduring love for us.  God loves us deeply and fully.  Everyone I know struggles to one degree or another with thinking that no one will love them if they truly knew who they were.  But this is a false belief, because no one can possibly know our deepest darkest secrets as well and as thoroughly as God does, yet God loves us with a love beyond our ability to fully comprehend.  So, when the psalmist asks God to search him and know his heart, he is not asking God to learn more about him.  Rather, he is asking God to reveal to him things he has hidden from himself.  Let us ask God to reveal to us the things we do, or say, or think, which He finds offensive, and then to transform us so as to remove those things from our lives.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Psalms 136-142.

I have an idea of what I want to write about today’s psalms which comes together as a cohesive whole.  Let’s see if it works out that way when I type it out.

We ought to give thanks to God for His goodness and love.  When we look at the world and what happens in it, time and again we see the great wonders which God has done, and the endurance of His love for those who fear Him.  I will praise God before the powers and authorities which set themselves up in His place, letting them know that they fall short of His greatness.  I read Psalm 139 and I think of the surveillance apparatus of the government, and of the ways in which “Big Tech” tracks our actions, behavior, and movement, but compared to God, they know nothing about us.

You have searched me, Lord,
    and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
    you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
    you are familiar with all my ways.

Those I mentioned think that they can search me and know my heart, that they can know if there is any offensive way in me, as they define offensive.  They even think they can guide me to the right way to think.  But they are mistaken, because they did not form me in my mother’s womb.  They did not shape my innermost being.  In fact, unlike God, they cannot truly see my innermost being.  Each one of us is fearfully and wonderfully made by God, and only He can see into the depths of our hearts.  Those others misuse God’s name and attempt to appropriate for themselves that which only God can command.  When I first read the psalmist’s plea to the Lord to keep him safe from the wicked my thought was to rephrase that thought to keep from being wicked or violent because those things could trip my feet and bring me down.  However, as I wrote what I wrote above it occurred to me the ways in which those who think they are ‘gods’ attempt to trip us up, to separate us from God.  Which caused me to echo the psalmist’s plea.  I, too, beg God to protect me from them, to protect me from the ways in which they seek to manipulate me into worshiping them in place of God.  Finally, I ask God, as the psalmist does, to guard my mouth so that I say only those things which bring glory to Him.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Psalms 136-142.

All of these psalms are worth reading, but I am going to focus on Psalm 139 today.  I am struck by how this psalm addresses those who think they were made wrong, that their mind should be in a different body, or that there is something wrong with their body.  No, the psalmist tells us that God knew what He was doing when He shaped us.

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.

If you are one of those who think the above, the psalmist was talking to you when he wrote this.  But there is more to this psalm than just that.  Before he got to that point the psalmist reminded us that knows us: He knows what we think and what we do.  There is no place we can go where God does not see us and cannot reach us to help us, or to discipline us.  And this is where I need to go back to today’s first psalm, where the psalmist says again and again about God, “His love endures forever.”  No matter where we are, or where we go, or what we do, God is with us and we are with Him…and He loves us.  Let us embrace His love and seek to be the person He made us to be.

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

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 136-142.

Every time I read Psalms 136 I imagine it being done as a congregational responsive reading.  Today, I actually pictured a large outdoor gathering, perhaps in a stadium.  I am imagining the leader being amplified by a microphone and thousands of people responding “His faithful love endures forever” with the final line being both the amplified leader and the crowd shouting that line.  I hope you can form that image in your head and feel how powerful it would be.

God has plans for our lives and He will work them out.  Psalms 139 describes how God knows everything we do and everywhere we go.  He uses that knowledge to shape our lives according to His plan for us.  He began that shaping before we were born, while we were still in our mother’s womb.  If we choose to do God’s will, that knowledge brings us joy and comfort, because we know that even the things that happen that we don’t like serve God’s purpose and make us better able to serve Him and share His love.  On the other hand, if we are tempted to rebel against God, the psalmist reminds us that there is no place we can go to do anything of which God will be unaware.    If we rebel, God will still use our actions to accomplish His purpose.  We can choose to serve God’s purpose and experience the joy of seeing His plans come to fruition.  Or, we can rebel against God and experience the suffering of seeing His plans come to fruition.