Blessed Be God – Psalm 66

A text – Psalm 66:8-20

⁸ Bless our God, O peoples; let the sound of his praise be heard,
⁹ who has kept us among the living and has not let our feet slip.
¹⁰ For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried.
¹¹ You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs;
¹² you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.

¹³ I will come into your house with burnt offerings; I will pay you my vows,
¹⁴ those that my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble.
¹⁵ I will offer to you burnt offerings of fatted calves, with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams; I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Selah

¹⁶ Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for me.
¹⁷ I cried aloud to him, and he was extolled with my tongue.
¹⁸ If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.
¹⁹ But truly God has listened; he has heard the words of my prayer.

²⁰ Blessed be God, who has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me.

A reflection:

What do you hear or see when you read these verses of Psalm 66? I am imagining a crowd of people in the temple, or maybe the tabernacle in the wilderness, led in worship by one person, male or female. The leader is calling for praise and thanksgiving to God who has faithfully brought the crowd through some kind of trial that has abased and weakened them but left them alive and back home. Then the leader’s voice continues, narrating the bringing of sacrifices that were promised to God during the worst of the trials, if only God would help them.

This psalm is a picture of a community that has huge ups and downs in its history, but through everything they turn to God, ask for help, and give God praise for being their faithful protector, not from trials but during trials. This tells me something about the parent-child relationship that God keeps with believers. We parents wish we could protect our kids from every ill, but in truth we cannot. We can only be there for them as they learn to walk for themselves, make choices for themselves, and be faithful and also lapse. I love the last line in this passage: ^“Blessed be God, who has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me.” We love God as much for what God hasn’t done (leaving us without hope) as for what God has actively done. Children love parents for that, too.

I have known in my lifetime parents who are passive aggressive with their children, sometimes in jest but often for real. “I told you you shouldn’t do such-and-such, but now you are reaping what you sowed,” they say in a sugary sweet voice. They seem smugly self-satisfied that the child has learned on his own by doing exactly the opposite of what the parent told them ought to have been done, and the child sees their satisfaction. But our God is not like that. Our God is not the prodigal son’s father who, seeing his son return home far off down the road, sits with his arms folded on the porch, greets the son with a long silent stare, and then says, “Come inside and we’ll have a long, long talk.” No, our God is the father who runs down the road toward us with a massive hug and throws a party for us, much to the chagrin of the hard-working son who stayed at home. Our God is generous. When we’ve made mistakes, we should not fear. Turning to God and repenting of those mistakes gets us a mighty warm welcome from God that remains with us while we live through the earthly consequences we surely have earned. God is the One who is always on our side. God never removes God’s steadfast love from us. Never. Amen.

A prayer:
Lord God, thank you for loving us. Thank you for the many ways we learn about you from your psalmists, your apostles, and your Son. Help us to remember that you love us and are close by, always, for whatever we need from you. Amen.