Theologians have divided the Psalms into sections for study and review. We are beginning part three of our journey of praying through the Psalms written by humans in need of God for His wisdom and help.  God delivers all He promised and more for believing people surrendered and committed to Him. The “songs” written are honest reflections of His Goodness in prose of praise that can be sung in celebration of who He is with prayers of thanksgiving for what He has done, is doing and will do in the lives of all who believe and follow Him. 

The Psalms most often begin with lament and end with how God delivered on His promise to always be with us as He continually works on our behalf in ways beyond our wildest dreams.  God is God. God was, is and always will be God.  We are not Him.  To God be the glory!

For clarity and understanding, let us return to remember the words of Eugene Peterson, a pastor and theologian who taught his congregation how to pray the Psalms by paraphrasing the words into contemporary English for more understanding of the Word.  Peterson’s words of this particular portion of his introduction about the Psalms helps us to know the intention and attention of personal, desperate, honest prayers to God who is God alone and worthy to be praised as God.  He writes;

“Prayer is elemental, not advanced, language.  It is the means by which our language becomes honest, true, and personal in response to God.  It is the means by which we get everything in our lives out in the open before God.

But even with the Psalms in their hands and my pastoral encouragement, people often tell me that they still don’t get it.  In English translation, the Psalms often sound smooth and polished, sonorous with Elizabethan rhythm and diction.  As literature, they are beyond compare. But as prayer, as the utterances of men and women passionate for God in moments of anger and praise and lament, these translations miss something. Grammatically, they are accurate. The scholarship undergirding the translation is superb and devout. But as prayers they are not quiet right. The Psalms in Hebrew are earthy and rough.  They are not genteel. They are not the prayers of nice people couched in cultured language.

And so, in my pastoral work of teaching people to pray, I stared paraphrasing the Psalms into the rhythms and idiom of contemporary English. I want to provide men and women access to the immense range and the terrific energies of prayer in the kind of language that is most immediate to them, which also happen to be the language in which these psalm prayers were first expressed and written by David and his successors.

I continue to want to do that, convinced that only as we develop raw honesty and detailed thoroughness in our praying do we become whole, truly human in Jesus Christ, who also prayed the Psalms.” –Peterson, The Message, Introduction to Psalms.

BOOK III – Psalms 73–89

A psalm of Asaph.

Psalm 73, The Message

^1-5 No doubt about it! God is good—
    good to good people, good to the good-hearted.
But I nearly missed it,
    missed seeing his goodness.
I was looking the other way,
    looking up to the people
At the top,
    envying the wicked who have it made,
Who have nothing to worry about,
    not a care in the whole wide world.

^6-10 Pretentious with arrogance,
    they wear the latest fashions in violence,
Pampered and overfed,
    decked out in silk bows of silliness.
They jeer, using words to kill;
    they bully their way with words.
They’re full of hot air,
    loudmouths disturbing the peace.
People actually listen to them—can you believe it?
    Like thirsty puppies, they lap up their words.

^11-14 What’s going on here? Is God out to lunch?
    Nobody’s tending the store.
The wicked get by with everything;
    they have it made, piling up riches.
I’ve been stupid to play by the rules;
    what has it gotten me?
A long run of bad luck, that’s what—
    a slap in the face every time I walk out the door.

^15-20 If I’d have given in and talked like this,
    I would have betrayed your dear children.
Still, when I tried to figure it out,
    all I got was a splitting headache . . .
Until I entered the sanctuary of God.
    Then I saw the whole picture:
The slippery road you’ve put them on,
    with a final crash in a ditch of delusions.
In the blink of an eye, disaster!
    A blind curve in the dark, and—nightmare!
We wake up and rub our eyes. . . Nothing.
    There’s nothing to them. And there never was.

^21-24 When I was beleaguered and bitter,
    totally consumed by envy,
I was totally ignorant, a dumb ox
    in your very presence.
I’m still in your presence,
    but you’ve taken my hand.
You wisely and tenderly lead me,
    and then you bless me.

^25-28 You’re all I want in heaven!
    You’re all I want on earth!
When my skin sags and my bones get brittle,
    God is rock-firm and faithful.
Look! Those who left you are falling apart!
    Deserters, they’ll never be heard from again.
But I’m in the very presence of God—
    oh, how refreshing it is!
I’ve made Lord God my home.
    God, I’m telling the world what you do!

WHAT DO WE LEARN—HOW DO WE RESPOND?

It is dumb to please people no matter how much they are admire by you and the rest of the world.  It is wise to please the One and Only who created us in His own image.  God loved us so much He sent a part of Himself, His Son who died to save us from our sins that hold us in bondage (and one of those sins of entanglement in this world is pleasing impossible-to-please people in this world)! 

Asaph, a choir director, questioned God’s wisdom. Asaph saw the wicked prospering and the righteous suffering.  His lament ends with this conclusion;

“Until I entered the sanctuary of God. Then I saw the whole picture: 

There’s nothing to them. And there never was.”

When we are confused by events in our lives, remember to ask God to give us HIS  view of people and our current circumstances from His perspective. We must stop our useless activities of assumptions and presumptions and lean into God. 

God welcomes our questions and doubts when we come to him honestly seeking truth.  God is Good, so Good. God patiently waits for us to enter into His sanctuary of real Life through honest prayers, seeking His wisdom, insight and understanding from our point of surrender to what He sees and knows.

Only then can we truly see the “big picture” of what He sees with what He requires of us in response—to trust and obey Him while seeking justice, loving mercy, in our humbled walk with Him. (Micah 6:8) 

We need is help daily to avoid the sin of relying only on what we see and feel, assume and presume, along with trying to please people in which we think have it all together.  Truth bomb:  None of us have it all together until we surrender to God who is ready to help us with guidance to all that is truth by His Holy Spirit living in us.  Even then, we are not perfect and good; but we are perfectly forgiven by a God who knows us and helps us from the inside out and outside in—because He loves us. 

God does not expect perfection—He looks for our pursuit of Him with heart of surrender.

Truth: (ICYMI) We are His and He is our God—oh, what peace there is when we truly believe Whose we are and in Whom we can cling to forever because of Jesus sacrifice!

Lord,

Thank you for the Psalms, these prayers of honest people who suffered through trials, assumed the worst, until they walked into your throne room with opened hearts, minds, and souls in surrender.  Surrender means letting go of self-talk with a readiness to hear all that is true about You with who we are to You!  It is a holy time to be filled with your glorious will—all that right and good for us!  To you be the glory!  Your Word lifts our burdens as we surrender to what Your Word says.  Yes!

In Jesus Name, Amen