Easter Sunday 2014
Psalm 147 Colossians
3:1-4 John 20:1-10
Behold, the King!
As a child, I was once told that I
had “camel knees” and that my legs resembled those of a wooden puppet named
Pinocchio. Imagine my delight then, when I discovered Psalm 147! “The Lord
takes no pleasure in the legs of a man. The Lord takes pleasure in those who
fear him, in those who hope in his mercy.”
But these verses refer to more than
the ridiculous nature of male vanity…the whole Psalm exposes the futility of
that which we consider to be powerful and what we consider to be important.
Psalm 147 is one of the Psalms of praise that make up the final collection in
the Psalter. Each Psalm begins and ends with “Praise the Lord!”, or, in Hebrew,
“Hallelujah!” In fact, before even looking at various items for praise, the
Psalmist examines the glory of praise itself. “It is good to sing praises to
our God,” he writes, “for it is pleasant and praise is beautiful.”
In verses 2 – 6 the Psalmist
mentions his first and primary motive for praise: the fact that it is God who
builds up and gathers together his people. This statement may reflect the
exilic or post-exilic hope of restoration, but we who live on this side of
Calvary know that it foreshadows the very words of Jesus himself, not only when
he said that he would build his Church upon the Rock of faith in him, but also
that he would send out his messengers (represented as stars in the Book of the
Revelation) to gather together all the elect from the four corners of the
world. Jesus also said that he had come to heal the broken hearted and to
proclaim liberty to the captives. There is so much packed into these five
verses!
Verses 7 – 11 tell us that God is
worthy of our praise as He is a God who cares. He is not a great divine clock
maker who made the world, wound it up, and then let it tick on its own merry
way. No, our God is involved in every aspect of his creation – he sends rain in
due season, he causes the grass to grow and gives food to bird and beast alike.
Of course, the implication is that if he does what seems to be so insignificant
in the scheme of things, how much more will he not do what is really important?
This kind of care is meant to evoke
wonder and worship, but verses 10 and 11 put a little bit of a spin on how we
are to respond properly. Having made it clear that our God is not impressed
with the showy displays of human strength, the Psalmist declares that our great
caring Giver looks for humility of heart demonstrated through trust in his
provision and protection. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Look at
the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet
your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” You see,
God’s strength, contrary to our understanding of power, is demonstrated
primarily in his covenant faithfulness toward his people…a faithfulness displayed
chiefly in the giving of his Son for the life of the world.
The final section of this Psalm
reveals God as both Lord of creation and Lord of recreation…in both cases it is
his Word that brings all to pass. God’s dealing with his chosen people (Israel and the Church as the continuation of Israel ) has as
its goal the restoration of the whole world. This can be seen in the fact that
the Bible does not begin with the story of the Exodus, but rather it begins
with the story of Creation. Neither does the Bible end with the resurrection
and with the birth of the Church at Easter and at Pentecost, but rather it ends
with the new earth and the new heavens in which righteousness dwells…a return
to the idyllic pre-Fall state of creation.
You see, both
The force that is behind the acts
of nature is no impersonal force…he is no unmoved mover. No, this Psalm teaches
us that the power who made the stars, who controls the snow and the frost, the
wind and the waves, is the same one who builds us up, who gathers us together,
who heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds, who lifts up the
humble, and who reveals himself in an intelligible and life-giving word to his
people. In fact, the only hope this world has is that the intelligent designer
of the complex cosmos has a personal face that looks on what he has created in
steadfast love.
This personal face is seen most
clearly in the New Testament where we are told that the Word of God, used here
in Psalm 147 to command and to communicate, took upon himself the nature of
humanity. “The Word,” John wrote, “became flesh and dwelt among us, and we
beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of
grace and truth.” And in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the writer explains why
the creator stooped down to take upon himself the form of his creation.
“Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, he likewise
shared in the same, that through death he might destroy him who had the power
of death, that is the devil, and release those who through fear of death were
all their lifetime subject to bondage.”
This verse transports us back to
the beginning to when humanity first came into being…to a time when they were
innocent and free…to a time when the only negative command was not to eat of
one certain tree in Paradise…to a time when just one bite brought not only
shame, sorrow, suffering, and slavery, but also expulsion from Paradise and ultimately
death as we were exiled from the presence of our only source of life. The story
of God’s dealings with Abraham and subsequently with Israel
shows God’s remedy for this tragedy…in the call of Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans to a land God promised to give to his
descendents… in the Exodus out of Egypt
to that same promised land…and in the return to that land from exile in Babylon .
We see God repeatedly redeeming his
people from captivity and bringing them into a land that is described in terms
of a Paradise where God’s presence is known. Coupled with this image are the many images of redemption expressed in terms of sacrifice, particularly blood
sacrifice, or more specifically, the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb. But this
image goes back even further than the first Passover – indeed, it goes all the way back to the Fall where two
animals had to die for Adam and Eve to be covered and clothed…to where Abel
offered a lamb as an acceptable sacrifice to God…to where Abraham sacrificed a
ram instead of his only son. But these were all merely pictures of something
far greater to come as nothing in the world could ever pay the penalty of death
incurred at the Fall…no animal, as it was humanity’s penalty…no human as no one
is free to pay the penalty of another as we are all guilty and under the same
sentence of death. And so, God the Father sent his Son, portrayed symbolically
in the New Testament as the Lamb of God, to take upon himself the form of a
human being to die as a human being on behalf of all human beings so that
humanity could be set free through faith in him. Free from slavery and exile,
and free to reenter Paradise .
Easter Sunday tells us that for the
first time since the Fall, there was an empty tomb. Yes, Jesus died, but death could not hold his
sinless person and so he was resurrected by the power of the same Spirit whom
he has poured out into the hearts of all those who believe in him. Surely the
only proper and fitting response to such amazingly glorious news is to echo the
very words of the Psalmist: Praise the Lord!
The Early Church
© Johann W Vanderbijl III 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment