Praying the Psalms: Psalms 91

I have to be completely honest with you, I chose this Psalm for two reasons;

  1. I  once wrote a song with the opening verses.
  2. It was gonna take a while to get to it from when Si was handing out the numbers.

Look I’m no bible scholar that’s for sure but I’ll have a crack at breaking this sucker down (well at least the opening verses anyway).

I must say though, upon embarking on this little study, I had not previously realised the extent that this gem of a Psalm had pervaded Judaeo-Christian beliefs and rituals.

The Jews use it on the Shabbat (their day of rest), and it’s recited before bed and at funerals. In Catholicism, it’s used at Compline (prayers at the end of the day) and also at the first Sunday of Lent.

“In Luke 4:9-11, Satan quotes Psalm 91:11-12, tempting Jesus to test God. Lent is a period forty days of Christian abstinence and prayer, in preparation for the celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ. Hence the psalm is an appropriate scripture reading, as Lent mirrors the forty day period of the fasting of Jesus in the desert.”

So finding the popularity of this Psalm is one thing, why it’s popular is something else entirely. To do so I of course had to go to the source, the fount of knowledge, the oracle itself………………………………………………………………THE GOOGLE.

So upfront be assured that if the ideas sound like Calvin, Spurgeon, Wesley, Maclaren or Henry it’s cos they are. So who wrote it? Quick answer, dunno, long answer maybe Moses cos he wrote Psalm 90 too, or David, well because he wrote a lot of em, or maybe it was actually written during or after the sixth century BC Babylonian Exile, no-one knows for sure. The lack of historical context does however allow us ADers to more easily appropriate the imagery to our modern day context, ie cos there’s no mention of a philistine army with a named King at the gates or no ’I’m hiding in a particular cave in a specific dessert’ type detail, we sorta go, well Adversity = Bad, God with us = Good, and that’s cool I guess.

Right, glossed over the background now some meat and potatoes. In the first verses it seems the psalm is famous for comparing God’s love for His children with some intriguing metaphor;

God is a ‘shelter’ and we are safe in His ‘shadow’ (v.1), the Lord is a ‘refuge’, a ‘fortress’ (v.2) and God covers us with his ‘feathers’, his ‘wings’ (v.4).

It’s easy to say, oh how charming this little poem is with it’s secrets and shadows, fortresses and feathers…(see what I did there, it’s called al..lit..er..ation people!) but equally as easy to forget how the pay off comes. ‘He who dwells in the secret place’ shall get the secrets and shadows, fortresses and feathers (and again!). Hmmm…dwells eh? So we gotta dwell, live with, hang with, stay close to, exist in, reside with, first.

That’s the hard part in all this really init? We all acknowledge God’s love, power and protection but what part do we play in this ‘salvation’ transaction? Saved, healed, delivered right?

For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” ROM 10:13.

For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. ROM 10:10.

Dwelling, calling, confessing. A fair bit of actual doing stuff here. As Maclaren says;

“notice that this cry of the soul, recognising God as its Asylum and Home, comes in response to a revelation of God’s blessing, and to large words of promise. There is no true refuge nor any peace and rest for a man unless in grasping the articulate word of God, and building his assurance upon that. Anything else is not confidence, but folly; anything else is building upon sand, and not upon the Rock.”

Only after the dwelling and all that embodies comes the abiding in His shadow, and only then will come the refuge and stuff. I guess that is what I mostly take away from this Psalm. The rest of it gets into some other fairly lofty metaphor with it’s, pestilence and darkness and plagues and cobras but I love it when the Psalmist lets God speak and says;

“he has known My name. He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I  will be  with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honour him. With long life I will satisfy him, And show him My salvation.”

And that’s the gravy….

In as much as this is a ‘time of trouble’ Psalm the reason why the Jews take so much notice of it I believe is because it is like God saying, yep, ya gonna go through some heavy times, but where ever you find yourself your home and safety and protection is in Me, I’ll get you through it, I’ll do the saving, the healing but ya gotta trust me big time, we can all relate to that I reckon.

“I will say of the Lord,  He is  my refuge and my fortress; My God, in Him I will trust”

Peace