July 15 - Psalm 136 | Psalm 146 | Psalm 147 | Psalm 148 | Psalm 149 | Psalm 150

Good morning everyone,

Today we have the last of the Psalms and personally, I have really enjoyed the candid truth their pages have held for us, allowing a look at the personal thoughts, the real life situations, the children of Israel felt and encountered while making their way on this crazy place called earth. A couple different of times, while reading through them, I wondered who might possibly stumble across my journals, perhaps excavating them from some ruin and what would they think about my words which reveal my joys and my fears. Hmmm …. 

Psalm 136 is a responsive psalm which would have had the priests singing (or maybe chanting) the first line if each verse with the people responding, “His love endures forever.” My mother’s family are of the Lutheran denomination and when I was a child on Christmas Eve, Easter, maybe once or twice more during the year we would go with all the family to attend services at the Lutheran church where they would sometimes do responsive reading. I can see where it has it’s benefits. When people know they are going to have to read they pay attention. Right? But so much more than that, is, it serves to be a terrific witness. When you have a room full of people saying that they believe, they worship, and they strive to honor God, it sends a powerful message to a nonbeliever. Would you agree? Imagine yourself, never before being interested in Yahweh, walking by a church and hearing several hundred people in unison saying “His love endures forever.” Who wouldn’t, even if just for moment, pause and wonder about who they’re talking about. 

The remaining psalms are psalms of praise for who He is, His creation and all He has done. For a moment, though, I want to take a look at Psalm 147:4, this psalm really grabbed hold of me. It says, “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.” Are you kidding me?!? He calls each and every star by name! One of the things I like to do most is sit outside on a clear, moonless, night and just look at the galaxy, seeing (in my mind’s eye of course) Psalm 8:3, God hanging the stars in the sky like ornaments on a tree. I am always amazed at all the activity and how vast the night sky is and friends this is just one galaxy. Now, I am not an an astrologer, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, but it is not rocket science to know that that there are billions of stars in the sky, three billion (with a B) in the Milky Way Galaxy alone and there are an estimated hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, with many older than the Milky Way. Do the math on that; 3 billion stars, times, even just one hundred billion galaxies equals 300,000,000,000,000,000 or three quadrillion. What!?! And each star is named? To put this in perspective, the Oxford English dictionary has definitions for 171,476 words. What I am wondering is, if you combined all the words of all the languages in all the world if you would have enough different words to name each and every star, though I do not have the answer to that question, I do know that God knows each star personally and calls them by name. My goodness, wrap your head around that.

If ever you thought, if ever I thought, that Yahweh, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, were not big enough to handle any situation in our tiny, little lives, we should open up our Bibles, come back Psalm 147:4 and be reminded, remember how God not only made all of the universe, seen and unseen to us, but cared enough to name them. Our God is a very Big God, though we could never comprehend just how big, we must never underestimate Him and all He can accomplish. Psalm 147:5, “Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit.” Amen?

Have a great day and to God be the glory!

God bless you all …