TUESDAY 14th
Psalm 104
NIV (v33) ‘I will sing to the LORD all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.’
ESV (v33) ‘I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.’
This psalm before us today is yet another that extols the greatness of God, in the first verse the psalmist says, ‘Bless the LORD, O my soul! (There it is again!) and continues, ‘O LORD my God, you are very great! Not just great but VERY great! He is the greatest! As you look through the psalm it paints a picture for us of firstly God in his majesty, (vv1-4) then God in his creativity (vv5-6) and then continues to show God in his provision toward all that he has created. (vv6-23) When we get to verse 24 the psalmist declares ‘O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.’
God is great, very great as we are reminded here, he is the God above all gods, he is the true and living God, and as we are reminded in Acts 17:28 it is ‘in him we live and move and have our being’. It is in him alone that we have come to know and to enjoy the benefits of salvation as we saw in the previous psalm, he alone is God, he alone is the Saviour of the world. The psalmist continues to talk of God’s provision in verses 27-30 and then ends with the words that we know so well as they have been set to music and song, ‘I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.’ As we learned from Psalm 103, may we also learn from this psalm to meditate and to contemplate the wonder of who God is and of all that he has done so that we too will sing to the LORD as long as we live. As verse 24 says, ‘May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the LORD.’ That means may our meditation or our thoughts about God as we think about him be pleasing to God, that throws up another challenge—how much of our thinking in each day is spent thinking about God and the things of God? I am sure that the more we meditate upon him, the more we will find ourselves blessing the LORD with our souls!