March 4th

Psalm 138

Defiant in Spirit

If you have been reading these blogs carefully, you have realized that the God of the OT is the God whom Jesus called Abba Father.  (Jesus also quotes often from the Psalms; they were his prayerbook).  There is a remarkable continuity between the testaments.

Two ideas in this psalm connect directly with NT teachings:

First, David prays,

⁶ Even though the Lord is high,
    God can still see the lowly,
    but God keeps his distance from the arrogant.

Many centuries later, David’s descendant, Mary, would echo these words after the angel announced she would be the mother of the Messiah.

46 And Mary said,
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
⁴⁷   and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
⁴⁸ for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant….

⁵⁰ His mercy is for those who fear him
   from generation to generation.
⁵¹ He has shown strength with his arm;
   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
⁵² He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.

Of course, this theme of kindness toward the lowly and confrontation of the arrogant marked Jesus’ entire ministry, truths he learned at his mother’s knee. But justice and mercy for the lowly was not a Christian invention. Its roots are deep in the Old Testament and the character of YHWH.

Second, in Psalm 138, David praises YHWH for “your unfailing love and faithfulness” (verse 2). The two Hebrew words here are hesed and emet.  These words, when translated from Hebrew into Greek—the language of the New Testament—and then into English, read that David praises the Lord’s name “for your grace and truth.”

John uses this Old Testament phrase in the opening of his Gospel to describe Jesus. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). John is identifying Jesus as the incarnate presence of YHWH; the same God of grace and truth that David celebrated in Psalm 138 has now clothed himself with flesh to dwell among us. That is why, unlike David, we no longer fall and worship at the door of a temple in Jerusalem, but at the feet of Jesus Christ. 

And then our psalmist ends with statement of confident faith:

Finish what you started in me, God.
    Your love is eternal—don’t quit on me now.   [Message]

The psalm is a sound guide to the meaning and practice of thanksgiving by the redeemed community.  It reminds us that salvation comes to us as individuals in community and creates a community that can speak as one in unity.  It teaches us that our salvation is not first of all and only for our sake, but is also and foremost the revelation of the coming kingdom of God.  Of that we are to be witnesses to the gods and rulers of this world (vs.4-5).  The outcome of salvation is a life of trust and prayer.  Life with all its uncertainties and dangers goes on for the redeemed; God’s salvation gives them reason to hope that what God has begun, God will surely bring to completion. 

‘I am sure that He who began a good work within you will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ.’  (Philippians 1.6).

In other words, “giving thanks” Old Testament-style, has less to do with some internal feeling of gratitude and more about sending God a thank you note. And the thank you note that God desires is to tell others what God has done. To proclaim the good news of God’s gracious actions to the assembly of believers, to the surrounding neighborhood, and to the world. 

Jimmy Carter might not have been one of greatest presidents in the U.S, but since his four years in office (1977–1981), and a bitter defeat for re-election at the age of fifty-six, the 39th president has lived a full and purposeful life.

Faith expressing itself in love, says the apostle Paul, is "the only thing that matters" (Galatians 5:6).  For Carter faith is both a verb (to believe or trust), and also a noun (that which is believed).  And it is an action.  Carter draws heavily on his own personal experiences of Christian faith and political service including:

• In 1982 he founded the Carter Center to combat the global scourges of war, poverty, and disease.
• In 2002 he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
• For the last thirty-five years, he and his wife Rosalynn have spent at least one week a year building houses for the poor.
• He laments that in 2017 “there were 240,000 American troops openly stationed in at least 172 foreign countries, plus more than 37,000 others in places militarily classified as secret,” while the American “infrastructure investment gap” is the largest of the 50 richest nations. He similarly objects to our country's highest incarceration rates in the world, and our environmental degradation.

It's also worth remembering that back in his own day, the people who really disliked Carter were his own Southern Baptists and the newly founded Moral Majority (1979) that voted him out of office for cancelling Bob Jones University’s tax exemption, supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, calling for a Palestinian homeland, and holding a family conference where abortion, contraception, gay rights, and divorce were part of the discussion.

This is a simple book by a man who in some ways has a simple faith.  But Carter, who died recently, trusted in God to ‘fulfill His purpose for him.’   Carter "kept on teaching his Bible classes well into his 90s.  To the end he kept looking in the Bible for the mercy and love of God.   

Jimmy Carter, Faith: A Journey for All (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 179pp.