Week 15 Psalm 100
There’s a kind of ‘ownership by production’ rule in verse three: (the Lord) made us and we are his. So it looks like I’m the product of a producer.
Of course the other side of it is that I’m my-own-man. I’m free. More-or-less self-determining. Independent. I’ve got a lot of personal elbow-room to do what I decide to do. I can do pretty much whatever I have the mental & physical & emotional & genetic & skills-training to do.
There’s some things I definitely can’t do. But natural limiters aside I have the capacity and initiative and freedom to act on what I do have.
But then at the same time I bump into this Psalm 100 Statement of Constraint about being made by someone else who has a kind of a soft-claim on me.
It’s not an autocratic claim. Not dictatorial. I have quite a bit of liberty to do what I want. The claim’s a partial claim. An outsider’s quiet-claim. It’s a resistible claim – if I don’t like the outsider or his soft-claim I can disregard it.
The psalm ends with a short description of the outsider: he is good. His unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation.
I prefer the idea of being free of outside-claims. At the same time if someone had a claim on me I could do a lot worse than this claim-maker.
Note: quotes from Psalm 100:3 5 (NLT)