Psalm 68

If I were to ask you to fill in the blanks for the following sentence, what would it be?

God is ______________  ?

I think I can very quickly guess what it is…. Loving, merciful, holy, faithful, forgiving, caring, patient, awesome ….

Hmmm…. would you say…. angry, jealous, judging….?

That’s what a lot of us would tend to do.  We tend to associate God with only the ‘nice’ qualities that we are comfortable with.  But for those “not so nice” qualities, we try and avoid them.

But does this give us an unbiased and balanced view of who our God is?  Now read today’s passage and tell me what you think…

Bible Passage:  Psalm 68

In this Psalm, we can see how good God is towards His people:

• He is a Father of the fatherless and a defender of widows (v. 5)
• He brings out those who are bound (prisoners) into prosperity (v.6)
• He leads His wandering people (v.7)
• He sustains the Elect (v. 8-9)
• He provides for the poor (v. 10)
• He fulfills His word (v.11)
• He is a victor for His people (v.12-14)
• And most of all, He is the God of our salvation (v.19)

Wow!  All wonderful qualities that we certainly are most happy to see it in our God.

But the Psalm starts off with:

Let God arise,
Let His enemies be scattered;
Let those also who hate Him flee before Him.
² As smoke is driven away,
So drive them away;
As wax melts before the fire,
So let the wicked perish at the presence of God.

~ Psalm 68:1-2

The picture of God we see here is certainly not what we normally will associate with God.

We see an angry God, jealous or His people and He judges the wicked.

That’s the beauty of this Psalm.  The psalmist has managed to showcase the so-called “nice” and “not so nice” (in our eyes at least) qualities in a seamless portrait of our great and awesome God.

Holy fear ought to accompany godly reverence in our daily walk with the Lord.

Another psalmist reminds us…

You, Yourself, are to be feared;
And who may stand in Your presence
When once You are angry?

~ Psalm 76:7

If You, Lord, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand?

~ Psalm 103:3

Paul reminds us that we will all one day stand before the judgement seat of Christ (Rom 14:10).

It is indeed the mercy of the Lord that we are able to now stand in the grace of Jesus.

When we first started our door to door evangelism, we met an elderly man who was active in his church.  But the sad thing was that he did not want to believe in the God in the Old Testament because according to him, that God was always judging and condemning.  And that God was very unforgiving, destroying people without mercy.

Instead, he liked Jesus in the New Testament because Jesus was gentle and loving.

But he forgot that even in the New Testament, Jesus was always condemning the hypocritical Pharisees.  He rebuked Peter and the other disciples when needed.  He held radical views about sin which included plucking out your eye or cutting off your hand.  He was furious at the people for making His Father’s house into a den of thieves.

Guess the questions today are:

Do we have a balanced view and proper appreciation of who our Holy God is?  And do we communicate this properly to our family, our brethren, our friends?

If God is angry toward and judges sin, how should we behave towards sin in our own lives?

If God is jealous toward His people and their holiness, what volume does that speak regarding our own concern for personal holiness?

We should be like the psalmist to rejoice and give thanks that God is loving, caring, forgiving, faithful, patient, merciful and angry, judging and jealous!  Because in so doing, we are reminded of who God is and how we ought to live our lives.

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