Book 5: Psalms 107-150
This is a catchall collection of several smaller collections of public worship songs, including the songs of Ascents and Hallelujah psalms. In other ways it seems to celebrate specifically covenant promises and how to claim them.
Psalm 107
This is called “The Song of the Redeemed.” While the specific focus is how God has kept His covenant promises, we do well to remember there is more than one covenant with humanity. The promises under Moses are specific examples of how God acts in all times and places. If you cling to a heart-mind awareness of His divine moral character in Creation, then Creation will respond of itself, but He will amplify those natural blessings to those who love Him.
We are treated to five examples, but the last is more of a summary. All are in dire straights, as is the norm for fallen humanity. In some cases the trouble is because of a failure to keep faith with God, but some are simply the result of seemingly random circumstance. God does what He does, and humans often stumble into His works without full knowledge and run the risk of perishing. In call cases, calling on His name is the key to deliverance, while giving thanks and praise is the key to staying out of more trouble. Does anyone have to explain that the symbolic or parabolic meaning is more important than the specific imagery?
It’s not hard to pick out the pattern of musical stanzas in the first four examples. Someone comes into difficulty, cries out to God and He delivers. The psalmist encourages all to glorify God for His greatness, as demonstrated by the repeated phrase, “His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the sons of man!”
First are the travelers. For Israel, the standard symbol is wandering in the semi-desert wilderness. There is no particular sin at work; this is simply how the world is. By default, we are blind to God’s promises of provision. We cannot with our own human abilities find the basic needs of life and create a stable society. The symbol of shalom is summed up as stable and prosperous life in an Eastern feudal community. But if mankind calls on God, He will provide their needs, in this case by guiding them into His divine provision. He shows them the place He made for them and it provides all they need. When you respond to God’s call on your life, He provides all you need to glorify His name.
Second are the captives; there is little difference between slavery and prison in the ancient Hebrew world. In this case, it is the result of disobeying God, hinting at idolatry. This is a parable for those who reject whatever revelation God offers, and are forced to serve the Enemy of our souls. Calling on God is the only deliverance.
The third group is portrayed as ill, but the primary cause is moral illness — insensitive to the moral fabric of Creation. There is no pleasure in this dissolute life, and they approach death rapidly. But calling on God brings healing and restoration.
Fourth are sailors, a job that is high risk with a high payoff if you succeed. Ancient mariners were uniformly religious and quite superstitious because they were so powerless. They were fully aware of the power of God’s mighty works in Creation, because they saw it up close. When by His inscrutable will He sends storms into their lives, they experience the radical ups and downs of high waves, hardly able to keep their feet under them. But if they cry out to God, He can deliver them and guide them to their destination.
Finally, the psalmist summarizes God’s faithful to Israel. Had he called her to occupy the most desolate land of all, it would not have mattered. Were she faithful to the covenant mission, God could have easily made the desert like a garden, with streams and pools aplenty. It would become fertile and produce abundant food. Life would explode, including their own population. And if they stray from that mission, it could all be reversed and they would be oppressed and humiliated by their enemies. Don’t get too fat and sassy, because God favors the humble who depend entirely on Him.
The psalm closes with a final warning to heed the moral character of God as indicated by these examples.
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“Ancient mariners were uniformly religious and quite superstitious because they were so powerless.”
I’m having some trouble separating superstition, “acts of God” from physics and the standard naturalistic world view (causality).
Same with the judgments – can we for example point out a specific event that shows the will of God or judgment (say, Cahn’s shemitahs or 9/11), or is it just an event caused by some individuals and free will? Or all of them at the same time. Perhaps the most clearly identified acts of God would be miracles and deliverances, but on the other hand all reality is an act of God.
Tricky questions at least for me and probably not easily answerable… God works in mysterious ways? Is it even useful to try to think about these questions that can’t be known for sure usually? Reality is just complex?
Mr. T, most mariners were pagan. While the definition of “superstition” includes irrational belief, it doesn’t mean such beliefs are unwarranted. We need to break that false negative image of all things that don’t pass the test of reason. There is a certain amount of patience with pagan belief in the Old Testament. The Western Christian hard line of orthodoxy is not consistent with a biblical mysticism that says there are lot of things we dare not claim to know. Having a knowing of the mind in competition with the knowing of the heart requires we get comfortable with a tension that allows others to take their own path. So a Hebrew mariner would politely humor the pagans on their crew.
Also, keep in mind that strict monotheism was almost nonexistent until after the Babylonian Exile. Moses might have understood it, but you can be most of Israel did not. And even Moses’ concept was hardly comparable to our Western rational concept. For Moses, it wasn’t a question of absolute existence versus non-existence; it was a question of impertinence. Other gods didn’t matter.
Reality is complex and multi-layered. Our minds are actually capable of handling this, but it’s contrary to our Western cultural biases. Physical causality only gets you just so far; you still have to live with a lot of unknowns. You still have to make decisions of a moral nature that don’t rest on physics. Sure, I could imagine having some kind of sixth sense capability of reading the wind currents, tidal influence of the moon’s gravity, specific density of the ship’s planks, the skill of the shipwrights, etc. But our culture would prefer to believe in such capabilities than trust in a personal God. I’ve tried very hard to bring those two together, and it won’t work. You have to consciously embrace a non-Western frame of reference.
We have to purge ourselves from the notion that God’s will can be folded into our cultural myths of objective reality. This is why I assert openly that reality is fungible. Physical causality is only apparent, not entirely reliable. God can remake physical reality on-the-fly, and apparently does so at His whim — we call it “miracles.” And yet, it’s not some intrusion of power; it remains fundamentally consistent with His design in Creation. Creation is alive and responsive, but always acts consistently with His moral character. If you start climbing up the narrow path of heart-led living, you stand some good chance of finding a place where you can hold a peaceful coexistence with uncertainty. That doesn’t mean it’s quick and easy, especially climbing out the tar-pit of Western thinking.
The Western notion of free will is badly broken. We recognize physical constraints, but we are taught to ignore moral constraints, to consider morality as fungible. We struggle with the ANE notion that every choice has moral consequences along with physical consequences. Our culture refuses to consider that moral consequences take precedence over the physical. The ANE mariners didn’t take it as a personal insult that God would hurl a storm onto the sea they happened to cross. They also didn’t take it as just random happenstance. They were ready to accept death at the hands of whatever deity they served, but would fight manfully in their god’s honor to survive. They would also pray and cry out, hoping perhaps they could persuade their god to let them make it back alive. But they were utterly certain it was intensely personal in nature, not rule-bound. They also knew the final result was according to their deity’s inscrutable plans, some of which was simply none of their business.
“The Western Christian hard line of orthodoxy is not consistent with a biblical mysticism that says there are lot of things we dare not claim to know. “
So basically that the spiritual realm is real and has effects as well — how exactly, we can’t ususally/always know. So we should leave room for spiritual things, and pray.
“And even Moses’ concept [monotheism] was hardly comparable to our Western rational concept.”
I have read Heiser’s The Unseen Realm and his take on psalm 82. There’s God (the msot high) and small g gods and other spirits (elohims). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Council#Hebrew
“You still have to make decisions of a moral nature that don’t rest on physics.”
True, and then there’s quantum uncertainty physically speaking. God is allowed to have room to act even according to modern physics. “How God does it exactly” is hard to know, I suppose, and quite irrelevant to faith. The problem is that the mind keeps wondering and trying to come up with explanations…
“where you can hold a peaceful coexistence with uncertainty. “
This is very true. Spiritual things and God can be quite intimidating sometimes. But thankfully God has good ethics by definition and history is hopefully guided to a better direction eventually. Thankfully God has all the power even if physics works mostly as well.
Mr. T. wrote: But thankfully God has good ethics by definition and history is hopefully guided to a better direction eventually.
In the biblical sense, the “better direction” is the reverse of human ideas. We can characterize it as humanity making things worse and worse in this world until it almost blows up by itself, but Christ returns just in the nick of time and redeems it all, restoring it to something like Eden. Yet, on a smaller scale we should expect to see hints of redemption in events closer to our individual existence. God will grant social stability to those who seek it by His Word to show His power to those who seek to live in it. The eventual global failure is simply the result of mankind as a whole rejecting His Word.
I was just reading this (https://www.newswithviews.com/Horn/thomas202.htm) article by Tom Horn (more here: https://www.newswithviews.com/Horn/thomasA.htm):
“According to Strauss and Howe in 1997, this chain reaction was already prepped to unfold as the result of natural cycles or “Turnings” in which generations are doomed to forget—and thus to repeat—the mistakes of the past. The authors describe a Turning as “an era with a characteristic social mood, a new twist on how people feel about themselves and their nation. It results from the aging of the generation [before it].” A society enters a Turning once every twenty years or so, when all living generations begin to enter their next phases of life.”
I’m not sure how Christian it is to for example see history as (somewhat) cyclical and what kind of things to expect in general… Ideas about eschatology seem to vary.
Cycles are entirely natural, but the final endpoint (eschatology) is unknowable. However, I struggle to swallow anything from the group associated with that article. Quayle and his associates in particular love to predict things that never happen. They claim all sorts of insider information that never pans out. I have no argument with the idea of cycles, but I don’t think too highly of the notion of Turnings as somehow causal of aging that hits a whole society all at once.
“However, I struggle to swallow anything from the group associated with that article. “
Well, their take seems certainly supernatural and perhaps too sensationalistic (“Read it Before It’s Banned by the US Government”), but has interesting tidbits and takes on modern developments (transhumanism, synthetic/exobiology) and conspiracy themes (Vatican, Freemasons, etc.) that I haven’t seen elsewhere (probably they exits in large numbers, though).
How accurate their prophetic timelines and end times schedules are, I have no idea.
There’s also the ancient “supernatural Biblical history” (fallen angels, giants) that’s interesting:
“However, of all the ancient records, the most telling extra-biblical script is from the Book of Jasher, a mostly forgotten text referred to in the Bible in Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18. Jasher records the familiar story of the fall of the Watchers, and then adds an exceptional detail that none of the other texts is as unequivocal about, something that can only be understood in modern language to mean advanced biotechnology, genetic engineering, or “transgenic modification” of species. After the Watchers had instructed humans “in the secrets of heaven,” note what Jasher says occurred:
[Then] the sons of men [began teaching] the mixture of animals of one species with the other, in order therewith to provoke the Lord. (Jasher 4:18)” https://www.newswithviews.com/Horn/thomas164.htm
Re: Book of Jasher — See this highly accurate comment in the preface to one of the various copies of that…
“Re: Book of Jasher — See this highly accurate comment in the preface to one of the various copies of that…”
Thanks, a very good point!
This is the problem with being a beginner — you don’t know exactly what and who to trust. But I guess the essentials are the essentials and Horn/Quayle could be closer to entertainment than sound exegesis/sources with perhaps some occasionally valid points…
The problem is that religion isn’t exactly science so it’s easy to go overboard in inclusiveness and believe everything, such that the apocalypse happens today or tomorrow at the latest.
Still figuring things out…
I assure you, my Brother, that my religious education would mean nothing without the Holy Spirit keeping an eye on me. There was a time I’d have been a big fan of folks like Quayle, and it was when I was very close to ministerial “success” — meaning that I would have been treated like an entertainer, but with a “sacred” wrapper on everything. I was on that path and it nearly drove me insane, to the point I was suicidal. I’d rather be a nobody who is well known to trees and shrubs, and greeted by stones and birds, than to be famous. Fame has its place, but not at that price. It’s not science; it’s calling and obedience.
“Life would explode, including their own population.”
What are your thoughts about evolution, biology and health/disease + faith/spirituality/religion/Christianity?
I’m not really sure I have any firm opinions at the moment, it seems like there’s a split between “spiritual things” and “natural things” even though God can have an impact on everything on all levels. But exactly how things work “in reality” or how we should think about them is not clear at all.
For example it feels like you need a separate dictionary/vocabulary for spiritual talk and science. Of course in a sense “science” is a subset of the “spiritual world” and obviously our brains can’t handle that much so some deparate domains might be needed. But is there a better answer?
Mr. T asked: What are your thoughts about evolution, biology and health/disease + faith/spirituality/religion/Christianity?
Sure, I can dash that off in a few sentences 😉
Evolution is an observable fact of life; it cannot explain how we got here, though. It is a necessary element, but not a sufficient cause to explain things. We can observe the process of change, but we cannot extrapolate backward. Speculative extrapolation is very, very bad science; it’s more like a religion.
I hold a standard Western liberal arts education, which includes a big dose of science and math. I got good grades in the math-related stuff in particular, but it’s not my calling. So you might imagine that I allowed a lot of that stuff to slip into the dusty closets of my mind because I don’t use it. I don’t think about it much, and plenty of it I ignore. Health is a moral question first and foremost. Lots of people who really do know that stuff, to include physicians, still don’t act according to the best medical advice. They might not have a ready explanation why, but I do have one — my calling trumps mere medical advice.
I live in an urban environment because God said, “reside here.” I eat what I can afford because God said I should avoid certain activities that might earn me a lot more money. I can’t grow a garden because God put me in a place where it can’t happen. What He normally provides naturally is also not much available because of human interference. The conceptual scientific ideal means nothing against the moral necessities. So I go to the VA and don’t always listen to the doctor. I rely on my convictions (heart-mind) to give me a clue about ignoring medical advice. Perhaps dying from these choices is part of His plan for me. Perhaps He’ll perform miracles against those natural consequences. And perhaps it doesn’t matter for my life either way.
But that doesn’t change the broader moral message we offer to the world. Ideally you would live closer to nature, so we promote that as an orientation, not some discrete law. It’s not an orthodoxy, but an indicator of how God works in this world in a broad general sense. The blessings of Moses’ Covenant for Israel didn’t rest of accounting for all the variables, but upon a moral orientation. Christine offers a lot of potent teaching about living closer to Creation and I endorse that. But we both also insist that you still have to hear from God or our generalities mean nothing. Creation is not just the natural world external to our human existence. Without that sense of divine calling, you cannot discern what matters to you and what doesn’t. It’s not a question of what’s good or bad health practices alone, but a question of whether consideration of this or that issue belongs in your mission. Neither Christine nor I walk in anything resembling objective moral perfection, but we are both at peace with God. We both fully expect to die sooner or later.
So the ignoramus out there who can barely tie his own shoes, but has a powerful sense of peace with God, is far better off than most of humanity. Even if he dies pretty early in life, regardless of what we might imagine were the proximate medical causes, he’s still way ahead of them because he’s at peace with God — before and after he dies. Peace is contextual, not something you can define and catalog.