Living Understanding Pt 29: Enjoy God!

Psalm 149                               1Praise the LORD.  Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise in the assembly of his faithful people.  2Let Israel rejoice in their Maker; let the people of Zion be glad in their King.  3Let them praise his name with dancing and make music to him with timbrel and harp.  4For the LORD takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with victory.  5Let his faithful people rejoice in this honor and sing for joy on their beds.  6May the praise of God be in their mouths and a double-edged sword in their hands, 7to inflict vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, 8to bind their kings with fetters, their nobles with shackles of iron, 9to carry out the sentence written against them— this is the glory of all his faithful people.  Praise the LORD.

2Corinthians 10:3-5              3For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does.  4The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.   On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.  5We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

Psalm 98:1-3                          1Sing to the LORD a new song, for he has done marvelous things; his right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him.  2The LORD has made his salvation known and revealed his righteousness to the nations.  3He has remembered his love and his faithfulness to Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.

Sing a new song.

This confusing phrase is slightly mysterious to our Western modern ears because it is not referring to new music nor to new lyrics for old music.  The phrase occurs 9 times in Scripture (Ps. 33:3; 40:3; 96:1; 98:1; 144:9; 149:1; Isa. 42:10; Rev. 5:9; 14:3) and refers to a new season of joy in the LORD.  With one exception it refers to the Day of Jesus’ return to establish his millennial reign and encourages his people to rejoice at the defeat of evil, sin, and rebellion.  That exception is Psalm 40:3 which prophetically portrays Jesus’ death.

Rejoice in the Lord.

Although the phrase refers to praising God at the End of Days, it reminds us to sing him praises in the here and now and continuously.  God loves it when we sing to him because it means our hearts are tuned to his and we are seeking intimacy with him.  Singing a new song means we are entering a new season, and our prayers, whether musical or not, release new mercies, new grace, new insight, and new miracles which strengthen us and renew our covenant with him.

This singing, then, is a celebration of God’s goodness.  God surrounds us with blessings of one kind or another:  Our sins are forgiven if we only repent of them and turn away from them.  We don’t even have to succeed in overcoming our sin nature—we just must keep getting up, hitting delete, and going forward in loving God.  And why do we praise God anyway?  He is the Creator of everything we see and everything we don’t see.  Every galaxy, planet, sun, electron, and atom were created by him.  We were created by him.  We have reverential awe of him and, if we are honest, a little fear of him.  He can take us out as easily as he created us after all.

But more than all this is that we are in covenant with the King of the universe.  Jesus succeeded at every point at which humanity failed.  He trusted his Father even to the point of death, he leads us out of bondage, he perfectly follows the laws of God, and he now sits at the right hand of God.  Because of Jesus every human being can become a member of God’s family.  We are given forgiveness of sins and the power of the Holy Spirit to deal with life’s struggles.  And what do we have to do?  One thing:  Say yes.  Everything else fades away—this one thing is enough to rejoice.

The Lord delights in his people.

It is hard for us to imagine God rejoicing over us or delighting in us.  We know what we are like inside so we are confident that God can’t possibly delight in us.  But that is in fact the truth—God does delight in us.  Why?  With everything he created God saw that it was good (see Genesis).  That includes us.  One of the greatest joys any human parent can have is to have their child say, “I love you!”  It’s the same with Him.  When we sing to him, worship him, enter into prayer with him, we are saying, “I love you.”  Even when we are asking for help, or for a solution to a problem, we are saying the same thing.  God loves it when we turn to Him because he knows his solutions are better than ours, and our turning is an acknowledgement that God has a better way.

Weapons of war.

The last part of this psalm seems altogether too militaristic.  But we must remember that while Jesus came the first time to save the world, he will come the second to finally cleanse it from sin and evil.  The reason there is a delaying interval is to give his people a chance to spread the Gospel, the good news, throughout the world.  And the world will resist.  But our weapons in this battle are not swords, rifles, or cannon—our weapons are prayer, praise, and worship.  We live lives of holiness and righteousness to the best of our ability and God’s strengthening, and people notice.  They ask, “Why is this person so different?”, and that becomes an open door to talk to them about the love of God. 

What about me?

My fellow believer, whatever your situation in life is, it could be much worse.  You could be without clothing, shelter, or food, or warmth in winter.  There are at least two times in my life that God saved my life and I suppose many more that I’m not aware of.  He has comforted me in trouble and calmed me in times of stress.  What about you?