The semi-certain is uncertain. The security found in stuff is unfounded. And the inconceivable, unfathomable and impossible find their fulfilment in Jesus. This is Psalm 49.
The Beatles had a crack at Psalm 49 with ’Can’t buy me love’. Paul Kelly waded into it with ’Can’t take it with you’. While their offerings probably moved more vinyl than Psalm 49, the real deal does more than merely highlight a money problem…it finds resolution and satisfaction in God (and hints at Jesus as the revelation of that resolution).
Psalm 49 is a wisdom psalm intended for instruction and teaching. And it’s mostly about the temporal things—money and ‘stuff’—that threaten to hold and control us. ‘Listen up’, the psalmist says from the get-go, ’I’m going to lay down some good thinking here so you’d best buckle up’.
Here’s his big deal: don’t rely on money for, without wisdom and undersatnding, it’s worthless. You can’t buy a life—your own or anyone else’s. Wise, foolish, wealthy, poor…everyone dies. Even those with a big house and a local park named in their honour still end up in a box/hole/jar.
So what? Do we eat, drink and be merry? Or do we bunker into the basement with cans of baked beans?
The bright light that emerges on the horizon as verse 15 approaches is this: GOD does the redeeming and He will redeem us. Verse 8 may declare that no one can redeem or pay the price for our lives but we can testify that there is a stronger declaration in Jesus. In Him we have a redeemer who lives; a high priest who ransomed his life as an atonement for our sin.
Somehow a wisdom psalm about the dangers of being intoxicated by wealth ends up being an Easter psalm, one that points us to Jesus who asks us ‘what does it profit a man if he gains the worls but loses his own soul’? As Jesus implies and the psalmist rams home, we end up with nothing.
I’d rather have Jesus…
– Simon Elliott