Today’s
Scripture Reading (June 26, 2019): Psalm
85
Oscar Wilde asked, “How else but
through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?” Wilde’s truth is that when
everything is going well, we have nothing present in our lives that will drive
us toward understanding our need for salvation. It is in the broken moments,
which we all experience, that the concept of salvation can find its way through
our emotions and into our consciousness.
What makes salvation even harder in
our culture is that we do not like to admit our brokenness. I have meetings
with people who through their sobs, will insist that nothing is really wrong.
Often the excuse that we use is that we are just tired, but we are definitely
not broken. And in doing so, we lose sight of the purpose that brokenness plays
in our lives, not just in the underscoring of our need for salvation, but also the
way that our brokenness often shapes our lives, and it creates a beautiful mosaic
in the process.
The Psalmist was no stranger to
sorrow and brokenness. And he understood the history of the land. God had
blessed Israel. He had brought his people out of slavery and into this new
existence. But Israel had become proud and had wandered into sin. And in the
process, God’s blessing had been obscured. Now they were broken, and amidst
their brokenness, they were beginning to understand their need for God.
And so the Psalmist pleads for
salvation; a salvation that would be a direct result of God’s unfailing love.
It is interesting that we often think of the God of the Hebrew Bible as being
different from the loving God we see in the Christian Testament. We mistakenly
believe that “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that
whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send
his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him”
(John 3:16-17) could never be spoken about a God of the Mosaic Covenant. But that
is wrong. The Psalmist cries out to the God of unfailing love, asking that he
would come, not to condemn Israel, but to restore it and save it.
It
that is precisely what the God of the Hebrew Bible did when he gave us his son,
Jesus bar Joseph, who is the Christ.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 87 & 88
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