Psalm 95 - a meditation

Here I go again....

In the first verses of Psalm 95, the Psalmist gives three reasons why we should praise and thank God. First, he says that we are praise God simply for being God. This, of course, is the greatest answer to all the questions about God. We are to obey Him simply because He is God, and we are to praise Him for that same reason. No one else is worthy of the same sort of praise or obedience because no one else is God. Second, we are to praise God because he created the world and sustains it. He keeps the sea in its place and guides the stars in their courses. Last of all, we are to praise Him because He takes care of us. He is our shepherd, and we belong to Him. Every man takes care of His possessions, and so God takes care of us.

This aspect of the Psalm leads to some other interesting ideas. Sheep are not simply supposed to wander around on their own. If they did, they would soon get lost and be eaten or fall off a cliff (they are rather stupid animals, which also, perhaps, says something about human beings). Instead, God has placed His people in a flock with other sheep. We are not alone. This is one of the blessings of belonging to God. Not only do we have fellowship with Him, but we have fellowship with other believers. We find protection and encouragement from remaining with the flock, and if one member of the flock leaves, the other members of the flock are hurt because of it. This is another cause for us to praise God: He does not neglect our need for companionship, but fulfills our need by He placing us in families and giving us friends so that we may grow in grace.

Towards the end of the Psalm, the psalmist recalls Israel's past history. He talks about the rebellion in the wilderness, God's patience for forty years, and God's final judgment. This lends to the analogy of the flock: History is like a sheep-dog. Christians, the sheep in God's flock, look at history to see the pitfalls along the way and to learn to avoid danger. As men remember history, God pricks their hearts so that they will not commit the same mistakes as their ancestors did. God uses the Law and Conscience, too, asHis sheep-dogs to guide Christians along the road toward Heaven. These three dogs work together to keep Christians in the right way. Just as the Israelites disobeyed God in the wilderness and He punished them with death, so the sheep who don't heed the sheep-dogs will never reach the safe pasture.

As a note, another of the things that God uses to keep Christians along the way is His shepherd's rod. These are the circumstances that the Christian meets in his life: difficult people, illness, poverty, persecution. If a Christian won't heed the nipping of the three sheep-dogs, God uses His rod on their backs to keep them from sin (this isn't really my idea but something that Mr. F, my Sabbath school teacher, brought up). As a Christian refuses to obey God, He uses harder and harder blows of the rod to bring him out of sin. The hardest blow of God's biggest rod is death itself, which serves to sanctify and purify the Christian. It is the last step on the road to Heaven.