A passion for God
Psalm 103
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Most of our worship songs are extravagant in the praise they offer and (I feel) exaggerate the depth of our devotion to God. In contrast to this, the prayers of ancient Israel were breathtakingly honest, try this for size:
Sureley in vain I have kept my heart pure,
In vain have I washed my hands in innocence,
All day Long I have been plagued
I have been punished every morning!
Psalm 73:13-14
When did you last sing a worship song that said, “What’s the point of living a holy life when the only reward I get is more grief”? Well, that is the gist of what Asaph was saying.
So we are relieved to read Psalm 103, here at last is the kind of extravagant praise that we like! But I am not so sure…
Praise the Lord O my soul!
Imagine arriving at church on Sunday morning. You’re late, the family argued all the way to church, you have a busy week ahead and can’t get it out of your head. They are in the middle of the first song, everyone is singing their heads off. The whole congregation is enjoying God, but not you. Perhaps this is where Psalm 103 starts, “Praise the Lord, O my soul, come on soul, get moving…”
We are built to worship, but we don’t always find that we are on the mood to worship. So what do you do?
This song moves forwards by giving us good reasons to worship God; “He forgives all your sins, and heals… He redeems your life from the pit, and crowns you with love…” Step by step we discover that there are good reasons to praise the Lord.
Cold hearts begin to warm up when informed minds tell them to. It is a mistake to think that worship is all about emotion, just as it is wrong to believe that it is all about intellect. Worship happens when our heart and our reason are working together to draw us into the presence of God. David knew this, and he fuels his cold soul with wonderful reasons to worship.
Driven by compassion
Suddenly, the subject seems to change. In verse 6 he sings about God’s passion for justice, and in verse 7 he jumps to sing about Moses. But the flow of thought has not changed. I love God because he is passionate about social justice! Moses’ experienced this for himself as he watched God liberate his oppressed people from slavery. And when they escaped into the Sinai desert God began to reveal himself to them.
One critical moment in God’s self-revelation is recorded in Exodus 34:6-7 as God passes before Moses and explains more of his nature:
The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.
It is a terrifying moment, and it has been easy for the church to conclude from this that God is a law-giving, law-enforcing being who will crush you and your family if you so much as put a foot wrong. But David’s song, Psalm 103, quotes these words from Exodus and goes on t explain very carefully that God is not driven by law he is driven by compassion.
“The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love”, he sings, quoting from Exodus. Then David, inspired by the Spirit, spells out what that really means, “He will not always accuse, neither will he harbour his anger forever, he does not treat us as our sins deserve or reward us according to our iniquities, for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him…”
I first rumbled the connection between Psalm 103 and Exodus 34 as I walked ‘round the field behind my house trying to memorise the Psalm. I was working verse 8 and 9 into my memory by saying it over and over again to myself when I realised that I was quoting Exodus. This was a moment of pure joy! God reminding me, that he is driven by grace and compassion and not by law.
I don’t know an inhabitant of planet earth who does not need to hear this message:
As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.
Oblivion or eternity?
Life is so brief. When I was a kid I used to play in a little wilderness near my home called Galleys Gill. Hiding in the undergrowth I would often discover old tombstones, the last memorial of people who died a hundred years before. As I got older I realized that this was a derelict cemetery. I would sometimes try to imagine what these people were like, and what kind of lives they lived, but I had nothing to go on. These people were gone forever.
Read the Old Testament sensitively and you discover that ancient Israelites were terrified of this. To die and be forgotten was a terrible thought; that is one of the reasons why they recorded so many genealogies in the bible. They didn’t want to be forgotten.
The thought of oblivion frightened David too:
As for man, his days are like grass
he flourishes like a flower of the field,
the wind blows over it
and it is gone
and it’s place remembers it no more…
Tony Hancock, the British comedian, had the same fear. This is a passage from his last recorded episode of Hancock’s Half-Hour for BBC TV in 1964, he comitted suicide soon after:
‘What have you achieved? What have you achieved? You lost your chance, me old son. You contributed absolutely nothing to this life. A waste of time being here at all. No place for you in Westminster Abbey. The best you can expect is a bunch of daffodils in an old jam jar and a rough-hewn stone bearing the inscription, ‘he came and he went.’ And in between? Nothing? ’Nobody will even notice you’re not here. After about a year somebody might say down the pub, ‘Where’s old Hancock then? I haven’t seen him around lately.’ ‘Oh he’s dead you know.’ ‘No, is he?’
A right old raison d’être that will be. Nobody else will even know I existed. Nothing to leave behind, nothing to pass on. Nobody to mourn me. That’s the bitterest blow of all.’
David arrives at a different place, “But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him…” The Father will love his children long after their deaths, their destination is not oblivion, it’s eternity!
We have lift-off!
After this, David’s song takes off as he shouts to the angels, the hosts of heaven and the whole of creation to join him in his song of praise.
Praise the Lord, O my soul! And this time, he really feels it!
Next time you find yourself hurrying into church after a horrendous Sunday morning, taking your seat and asking yourself, "What on earth am I doing here?" Take a leaf out of David's book...