Good Monday Morning to this week 51 of 2021
All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee. Psalm 22.27
Have you ever been to Palau? Or do you have Palau on your bucket list? It would be a good idea, the island is subjected to sea level rise that threatens low-lying coastal infrastructure, including schools and transportation, as well as ecosystems and cultural sites.
Palau is a country in the western Pacific Ocean somewhat at the end of the world!
It consists of some 340 coral and volcanic islands perched on the Kyushu-Palau Ridge. The Palau archipelago lies in the southwest corner of Micronesia, with Guam 1,300 to the northeast, Papua New Guinea 650 km to the south, and the Philippines 890 km to the west.
Reading in the magazine of PMA (Pacific Mission Aviation) that both my Mum and Dad were involved in over many years, I see and read some of the urgency that is mentioned in Psalm 22 mentioned above. The Psalm begins abruptly; My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me: a disturbing scene: someone who knows and trusts God is forsaken and cries out to God in agony.
The Cambridge Bible put it this way:
There was a knowledge of God, to which the nations might attain through the witness of His works without and the witness of conscience within. But they ‘forgot Him’ and turned away from Him to idols of their own imagination. But one day they will ‘remember’ and ‘return.’
Martin Luther wrote to this Psalm:
This is a kind of gem among the Psalms and is peculiarly excellent and remarkable. It contains those deep, sublime, and heavy sufferings when agonizing in the midst of the terrors and pangs of divine wrath and death which surpass all human thought and comprehension.
Then after vers 21 something changes, it’s the last: Hasten to help me…
After pouring out his soul in agony, now the Forsaken One has a glorious sense that God has answered Him. The crisis became bearable in the knowledge that God is not removed from His suffering nor silent in it. The deliverance from the crisis itself may be yet to come, but the deliverance from the sense of being forsaken by God in the midst of the crisis was his.
For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; Nor has He hidden His face from him; But when he cried to him, he heard.
The poor shall eat and be satisfied: If God shows such faithfulness to the afflicted, there is hope for the poor. The good God will take care of the poor who trust Him and seek Him. The faithfulness of God to the Forsaken One becomes a foundation for His faithfulness to others in need, such as the poor.
This Psalm 22 shows us much of God in Jesus coming to this world, with a special highlight on the group of those that would “remember and return to the Lord”.
Let’s take this thought into these Christmas days.
Remember and return!
Wishing you a blessed start to this week!
Philemon