FRIDAY 5th
Psalm 89
NIV (v1) – ‘I will sing of the LORD’s great love forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations.’
ESV (v1) – ‘I will sing of the steadfast love of the LORD, forever; with my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations.’
Psalm 89 is the last of the psalms in what is termed as Book Three of the psalms, it is quite a lengthy psalm with 52 verses and commences with a declaration of the steadfast love of the Lord and ends by saying ‘Blessed be the LORD forever! Amen and amen’.
I will just touch on a few key verses as we look briefly at this chapter. Firstly, from verse one, the psalmist is saying that ‘I will sing of the steadfast love of the LORD, forever; with my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations.’ His confidence was based upon his own personal experience of the steadfast love and faithfulness of the LORD. He had experienced God’s steadfast love, he had experienced God’s faithfulness and he wanted to make it known, he would sing about it, with his mouth he would make it known. His own experience was an undeniable testimony, whatever man or woman might say about God, even if they choose to deny God, they could not deny him of his own personal experience. And we who have come to know the Lord Jesus Christ and have known of his hand upon our lives in so many different ways have a testimony that is real and powerful, and all those who would seek to deny God and his saving grace cannot take our own personal experience from us, and just like the psalmist, it should also be our desire to ‘sing of the steadfast love of the LORD and with our mouths make known his faithfulness.’
In verses 5-13 he is looking at how awesome God is and to sum it up is saying there is no one nor nothing that can be compared to the LORD God, in verse 5 he says ‘Let the heavens praise your wonders, O LORD, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones!’ the call is for the angelic beings who day after day and night after night have constantly seen the faithfulness of God to praise him, and yet the wonder is that the angelic host do not know the wonder that we know of what it is to have been saved by the amazing grace of God. In 1 Peter as I have been doing our Bible studies from this epistle, I highlighted the verses in chapter one which tell us that the angels long to look into the good news which has been preached to us, to them it is an awesome thing that God should send his only Son into the world to redeem lost mankind, and we are the ones who have received the good news, we have responded by faith to the grace of God in our hearts and lives, therefore we have so much more to give God thanks for than even the heavens and the angels in heaven, so as the instruction goes out to the heavens to praise the Lord, in response to God’s faithfulness to the angelic beings, may our praise also ring out in response to Gods faithfulness in reaching out to redeem fallen humanity. He deserves the glory, and the honour and the praise that’s due his name, for he is great, he does miracles that are great, there is no one else like him.
We will return to this same chapter in our next devotion.