“What’s the rationale for it?”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Sunday, July 28, 2024
Psalm 145: 10-18 (Forward, p. 91) CEV p. 643
There have always been those who blame ‘religion’, vaguely termed and undefined, for all the problems of the world. And there have likewise been those who blamed God. They have posed relatively unsolvable questions as, ‘Why does God allow evil in the world? Or, “Why does God permit such suffering to exist?”
Our psalmist today takes an entirely different tack. He explains to us why we should praise and honour God. He gives us the rationale for so doing:
-he speaks of God’s incredible power and the mighty and wonderful things that He does, God’s fearsome and wonderful deeds for instance, or his mighty miracles. (Surely this is something that Israel experienced first-hand—and us as well.)
-he talks about God’s kingdom, a kingdom that will never end and where God rules, a kingdom that we know only in infancy, but which we believe will be fulfilled when Christ returns.
-he speaks of God’s faithfulness and dependability, namely that God always keeps His word and does everything that He promises.
-he talks about how very good and helpful God is, such that people can depend upon Him to help them in times of trouble and provide them with whatever they need.
-and he talks about God’s own character, how good, kind, thoughtful and loving He is.
Surely, as our psalmist puts it, there are good reasons, a good rationale, for us honouring and praising God. But this is only from his own experience, so, what about us: what are our reasons for choosing to praise Him? It is a good thing to ponder. Amen.
Forward notes: “You open wide your hand and satisfy the needs of every living creature” (verse 16).
“You’ve probably heard someone groan about how they are terrible at taking time for themselves or failing to really observe a sabbath. I am guilty of this myself. But I don’t find this a badge of honour or a sign that I work hard. I recognize it as a real moral failing.
“Aldo Leopold closes A Sand County Almanac, his pivotal book about ecology, by discussing our society’s lack of an ethic regarding the natural world. He notes the temptation to take a functional view of nature, to merely see it for what it can provide us. He argues for the inherent value of nature itself and a re-orienting of our thinking about it, noting, ‘recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.’ This, then, is the purpose of recreation, of sabbath. It is not for us to double down, capitalizing on what we are already doing. It is for us to be transformed by what is greater than ourselves.”
MOVING FORWARD: “How can you humble yourself before the Lord of the sabbath and be transformed?”