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Reading through the Psalms is a wonderful experience. You could park on one for days mining the depths for nuggets of truth into the greatness of our God. And God is the point of all 150 of them. One of the reasons the Psalms have been so beloved over the millennia is because sinful, fallen human beings can relate to the pathos we read there. The struggles of the writers are familiar to us as we go through the often painful experiences of living life in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body. But we mistake the power of the Psalms if we think they are about us. The words connect with us because they are profoundly about God which then puts our struggles into perspective.
When I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I was introduced to a metaphor that became my favorite way of explaining living in the messy world as I described it above: a puzzle. The fallen human tendency is to focus obsessively on the puzzle pieces. Until we grow older we imagine the pieces are all that exist; there is no puzzle into which each piece fits to make the picture of life make sense. Then depending on our level of maturity, or not, will we be able to keep the individual puzzle pieces of our lives in perspective with all the others we encounter.
Our secular Western culture, however, expects us to believe that in a universe filled with profound particulars (puzzle pieces), like sunsets, and birth, and music, and taste buds, and love, and sex, and DNA, that nothing transcends the pieces to give them ultimate meaning (the universal). We’re expected to believe the puzzle doesn’t even exist! We’re just stuck with the pieces. Christian Philosopher Douglas Groothuis in his wonderful book Truth Decay puts this exquisitely:
It is as if a stained‑glass window, which offered a pictorial message of a reality beyond itself when illuminated by the sun, were shattered into countless fragments, which a bemused onlooker is now rearranging into every pattern but it’s lost original.
Brilliant! Why do you think film maker Woody Allen always looks so miserable? He’s rid the universe of the only universal that can give particulars meaning—God! Every movie he makes is a different pattern, but nothing comes close to the original. Inevitably there is despair, dissatisfaction, or the blind leap—I’ll just pretend I found the original and ignore the vacuum in my soul.
It isn’t only atheists like Woody Allen who tend to see the world this way, that the particulars are where our true meaning and hope and purpose are found—we are too! Where do you think worry and doubt and fear and anxiety and frustration and anger come from? They come from thinking the pieces are sovereign and God is not! Shame on us, but it’s a constant temptation for every single one of us, and it requires constant vigilance to not fall into the clutches of this perniciously appealing temptation. Once we give in, it can turn into a sink hole growing bigger and bigger until it completely envelopes us. Which brings me to Psalm 112.
The answer to these ubiquitous temptations is found in the words of Jesus: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” That and prayer and praise and thanks to God can make us the person to whom this Psalm refers, the blessed man:
Praise the Lord!
Blessed is the man who fears the Lord,
who greatly delights in his commandments!
The right God-honoring attitude in all things we encounter is, Praise the Lord! How about that being our knee-jerk reactions to the “stuff” happening in our lives instead of complaining and moaning and whining. I know, I’m convicted too. But the promise is that we’ll be blessed if we do it. The blessings, i.e., the happiness and contentment that comes with praising the Lord is outlined in the next several verses, and what stands out to me are the following words:
7 He is not afraid of bad news;
his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.
8 His heart is steady; he will not be afraid,
until he looks in triumph on his adversaries.
Oh, to live this way! Instead of living in fear we are steady; the Hebrew literally means to be established and is interpreted as to lean, lay, rest, or support. This person, which can be you and me, is stable, unmovable, reliable. Notice in verse two the impact this kind of life has on his children:
2 His offspring will be mighty in the land;
the generation of the upright will be blessed.
Living a truly Godly life of the blessed has a generational influence; it can’t be helped!
If we consider the “adversaries,” it is all those things in our lives that cause the opposite of triumph in the puzzle pieces of life. It’s treating those things as if they somehow had a power beyond the reach of Almighty God, as if in Christ all things did not work for our good, according to the Apostle Paul which is the promise of God himself. And notice the kind of person it is who lives in this reality of God’s ever-present goodness and power. He is gracious, merciful, and righteous, he deals generously and, conducts his affairs with justice. Those who are righteous in Christ—they who trust him in all things—will never be shaken.
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