Day 40: Psalm 8 & 136

While I’ve devoted much of my thoughts over these forty days to the content of the Psalms, in my last post, I want to spend some time thinking about the setting of the Psalms.

As I write this, I am sitting inside. I imagine as you read this, you are sitting inside. However, think for a moment about what most of the Psalms are. The Psalms are largely a collection of David’s hopes, fears, laments, songs, and poems that he writes while sitting under the stars. To be clear, the Psalms are a product of their environment.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? Psalm 8:3-4

To consider the heavens you have to stare at them.

To Him who made the great lights, For His lovingkindness is everlasting: The sun to rule by day, For His lovingkindness is everlasting, The moon and stars to rule by night, For His lovingkindness is everlasting. Psalm 136:7-9

At one level, we can read this as a reminder to get outside and see creation. That’s certainly a strong theme. There’s a connection between wonder and worship.

At a deeper level, this is a reminder that God does His best work when we have entered the wild and the unpredictable. Moses met God through a burning bush. Jacob met God in the wilderness. Paul meets Jesus on an eerie highway. When God wants Israel to grow and hear from Him, He leads them into the wilderness for forty years.

Yet, we often confine God to an hour on Sunday or an air-conditioned Bible study. If this quarantine is teaching me anything, it’s that God doesn’t need a building to reach people. Apparently, He never has. As you and I have been thrown into the wild in a thousand ways over the last six weeks, let us remember that this is the exact environment that produces the Psalms. It’s the exact environment where the Spirit refines and deepens.

As we come to an end of this 40 Day Devotional, may the stars over your head tonight be a reminder that the untamed and unexplored edges of our universe are there to spark wonder in us, and to remind us to lean into the unpredictability of the future.

Jared