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But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness Gal 5:22 |
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Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning. Saturday, June 27, 2020
Today's Passage : Today's Passage:Faith Persevering in Trial Bible Verse:Psalm 40:4-10 "4 Blessed is that man who makes the Lord his trust, And does not respect the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies. 5 Many, O Lord my God, are Your wonderful works Which You have done; And Your thoughts toward us Cannot be recounted to You in order; If I would declare and speak of them, They are more than can be numbered. 6 Sacrifice and offering You did not desire; My ears You have opened. Burnt offering and sin offering You did not require. 7 Then I said, “Behold, I come; In the scroll of the book it is written of me. 8 I delight to do Your will, O my God, And Your law is within my heart.” 9 I have proclaimed the good news of righteousness In the great assembly; Indeed, I do not restrain my lips, O Lord, You Yourself know. 10 I have not hidden Your righteousness within my heart; I have declared Your faithfulness and Your salvation; I have not concealed Your lovingkindness and Your truth From the great assembly." Message:
The Psalms are generally included under the rubric of “wisdom books”, grouped with Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and the Song of Solomon. But (like the other four books) this does not describe them so much as set them apart in a group of non-narrative books that needs some sort of collective title. Perhaps they are called “wisdom books” because three of them - and two of the Psalms - were written by Solomon.
They are always poetic; they follow rules and conventions, and it is the poets' inventiveness within those rules and conventions that makes them special. The content must praise God and must concern the relationship of God and man. Other than that, one sees different categories of content: Prayer, prophesy, petition, thanksgiving, drama — there really is no limitation. Ps. 120-134, called psalms of degrees (or ascents), were written specifically for pilgrims to sing on their way to Jerusalem. All of them were originally sung, but the melodic element is a total mystery.
We must always be aware of the extreme difficulty in translating a language that had already been dead for 500 years when Latin was first becoming popular. Scholars do not even know what some of the words mean, much less fully understand the phrases.
The first convention of psalms is parallelism; it was to the psalmist what rhyme and rhythm were Shakespeare and Wordsworth. (There must have been some art and beauty in the way the words sounded, but it is utterly lost to us.) This convention depends on the relationship of thoughts rather than sounds.
Parallelism can involve any kind of relationship between thoughts: repetition in different words, a true “parallel”, is the most common, but there are many others: a contrasting thought; the same thought illustrated by a negative example; a variation; an idea that results from the previous one (a “therefore”); and so on. These can become quite involved and complex, but the simple parallel can be seen in nearly every verse.
So, verse 4 first states an idea directly, the blessedness of “the man who makes his trust in the Lord”; the next line parallels it by negating an opposite: “the man who does not respect proud people and liars”. By implication, the psalmist asserts that respecting prideful and lying people is inconsistent with trusting the Lord.
Verse 5 is a triple parallel, each line illustrating the innumerability of God's works. But the entirety of verse 5 is, itself, a specific illustration of verse 4: why do we trust the Lord, rather than the proud people and liars?
We are, unfortunately, out of room. This short commentary will hopefully help everyone find more depth in the Scripture excerpt (or the full Psalm 40 for the more ambitious). But one other thing to keep in mind: we must remember that both the language and the idiomatic meaning of many lines had much more poetic power to the Jew of 1000 B.C. For instance, “Your thoughts toward us/Cannot be recounted to You in order”. We have only our imagination to give this line its full meaning; but in puzzling out what it might have meant, we find a window into the thought process and religious doctrine of the ancient Hebrew.
Meditation : Prayer : Lord, pour your love into my heart, that I may love you above all things, and my neighbors as myself. Through Christ our Lord....Amen |
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