I'm amazed by Psalms 50. So much of it seems like a backhanded smack. Take, for example, verses 9-11 where God says, "I will not accept a bull from your house or goats from your folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the hills, and all that moves in the field is mine." In this passage God is rebuking the Israelites for believing that their offerings were like the pagans, who believed that they were feeding their needy Gods with their offerings. He points out that he doesn't need what they are offering to him because they are only offering him what is already his. It is the very next two verses, though, that really brings home what I referred to previously as the "backhanded smack." In verses 12-13 God says, "If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?" Listen to that: "If I were hungry, I would not tell you." Amazing! Smack! But it only gets better when he shifts and starts to talk about the wicked. I picture this passage like when my sister used to get in trouble and I would be giggling about it and then it was ten times worse for me when my parents were done with her. God rounds on the wicked and says this:
But to the wicked God says: "What right have you to recite my statutes or take my covenant on your lips? For you hate discipline, and you cast my words behind you. If you see a thief, you are pleased with him, and you keep company with adulterers. You give your mouth free rein for evil, and your tongue frames deceit. You sit and speak against your brother; you slander your own mother's son." (Psalms 50:16-20)The wicked don't even have the right to recite the statutes of God or take his covenant on their lips! Their actions prevent any sort of ability on their part to even approach him. But as with the previous section, the real smack comes in the next verse, where God says to the wicked, "These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you." That phrase in the middle, where God says to the wicked, "You thought I was like you" is quite the smack, but it is also very deep. When I consider what most people think about God that really sums it up - they think that he is just like them. Of course, he isn't. He is especially not like them when they are working evil which, oddly enough, seems to be the times that most people are the most sure that God is just like them. We would do well to be on our guard against such thinking. We need to understand that God is incomprehensible and we need to understand that with our own unaided human understanding we will only create idolatrous notions of God because we require assistance to think of him correctly. We need to be starting with the Word and allowing it to form our understanding of God instead of the other way around. This becomes extremely important when we realize that our conceptions of God will permeate our entire life and an incorrect conception of God is a garden for hedonism because our flesh will tend in that direction on its own. The remedy for this is to change our course of action to match what we find in the Word and this does not come without reward as we find in the final verse of the psalm where God tells them that, "to one who orders his way rightly I will show the salvation of God."
