I must be honest: I find myself sympathising with David in Psalm 17. It is fascinating, how so much has stayed the same in the past few thousand years, and how so many other things have changed. My life is lived out very differently than King David's, but in all that time the Human heart has not changed. We still long for love, and for God. We want ( Read more... )

"My heart also instructs me in the night seasons" is a fascinating line from Psalm 16. I am writing this entry at 3:15h, feeling insomnic. Yesterday it snowed and the snow remained on the ground, some still does, which leads me to think that it will soon be Wintertime. It seems to be a night season in reality, just as in metaphor. I am in ( Read more... )

To the best of my recollection, I have not heard Psalm 15 before. That is a shame, because it is very powerful. It concisely outlines what it means to live a just life. Like everyone else, I am obviously flawed in my own individual ways. God knows this, though. Though He expects us to follow our conscience, He accepts us with our failures. I may ( Read more... )

When posting these entries I type out the psalm first, reflecting on it as I copy, and then compose my thoughts above. As I went through Psalm 14 I saw it in an unusual light. Most of the time, I take the Human side of a psalm. Today, however, I placed myself alongside God, and sympathised with how He might have felt in the midst of one of Israel's ( Read more... )

Happily, it is the last stanza of Psalm 13 which strikes a chord with me today. In common psalm-lament form, the first parts of the poetry are mournful, but broken at the end by a ray of hope. I wonder if Shakespeare was a fan of the psalms; the flow of the Biblical verses seems to be mirrored by the sonnets. Regardless, my heart is rejoicing in ( Read more... )

Communication is an interesting facet of civilisation. Without it, everything falls apart. With it, though, things can also sour if it is not done correctly. The second verse of Psalm 12 strikes me particularly: They speak idly, everyone with his neighbour, with flattering lips and a double heart they speak. The line brought to my mind something ( Read more... )

Psalm 11 opens with the declaration, In the Lord I put my trust. It goes on to describe the threat of a malicious archer who aims to kill David from afar, but returns to the theme of believing in God's ability to see us through trials. As seems to be David's style, it also includes a few choice words for God's response to snipers, a fate which ( Read more... )

I am not fatherless; I have a wonderful father. I do, however, know someone who is fatherless. Not just one who has lost his father through death or distance, though I know people in that situation as well, but one who has never at all met his father. I am not sure he even knows the man's name. Canadian culture is somewhat father-ambivalent; we ( Read more... )

Psalm 9 is prefaced by a notation to David's musical director that it is to the tune of 'Death Of The Son'. From that I hazard the guess that it is a rather sombre piece. As I typed out its lyrics, though, it brought back hints of the more uptempo worship songs we sing in Church. While I can appreciate that it may have been written before the dust ( Read more... )

The eighth Psalm is a cheery one which extols God and praises Creation. It is a song of thanks for domestication and aquaculture. As with many other parts of the Bible, I am struck by how little we have needed to change as a species and as a civilisation over the course of the past three millenia. All those thousands of years ago, the author penned ( Read more... )