Two concurrent, contrasting themes run the length of Scripture: God’s power and purity and persistence and perfect planning, right alongside mankind’s jealousy and murder and warfare and sexual improprieties and rival kingdom building and ego flaunting. Then there’s fornication leading to murder, impalings, and lewd dancing leading to beheadings and, well, need I go on? Let’s just say, our contribution to God’s love story is not pretty. And rather than gloss it over, minimizing the ugliness to which we are prone, God comes right out and addresses it with the goal of restoring us to the path he has had us on since Jesus, leading us back to his loving, Father heart. This wildly incongruous, awkwardly juxtaposed, combination, if you stop to think about it, truly staggers the imagination! No wonder King David, who was painfully aware of his own debauchery, wrote: “I have to ask this question: Compared to all this cosmic glory, why would you bother with puny, mortal man or be infatuated with Adam’s sons?” Psalm 8, TPT (that answer is for Advent, Week 4 – stay tuned).
Here’s a Thursday ponder: if we read Psalm 91, below, from Paul’s perspective that we are dead to our false selves and are now living out loud our true, in-Jesus lives here on earth, could the jaw-dropping safety and protections written here, possibly refer to that ‘new’ life, our eternal, adopted-in-the-beloved, Shalom-drenched lives, all thanks to the blood of Jesus? Should we, if that is so, stand and shout Hallelujah? (maybe a dancing twirl or two?) PD
