Week 17 Psalm 107
This psalm could be quite a bit shorter if the writer had jumped straight from the first paragraph to the final two verses. And it would still be a pretty good – and short – psalm:
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his faithful love endures forever.
Let the redeemed of the Lord proclaim that he has redeemed them from the power of the foe
and has gathered them from the lands – from the east and the west, from the north and the south.
The upright see it and rejoice, and all injustice shuts its mouth.
Let whoever is wise pay attention to these things and consider the Lord’s acts of faithful love.
A five-verse psalm would save me some reading time. At the same time it would still give me some good content. For example, God is Good. Short. Simple. A factual statement and an excellent reminder of something that’s very easy for a reader to lose sight of. God is Good. Lots of people look around and figure that God isn’t all that good. Or that he’s an on-again-off-again unpredictable God – good sometimes & bad other times. And some people figure that he’s flat-out terrible.
So reading my abbreviated psalm I get a nice reminder: God is Good. A world of disastrous inexplicables happening all around me doesn’t fundamentally tell me much about God. Any more than my (poor old) dog dying of bone cancer says very much about me.
Note: quote from psalm 107:1-3 & 42-43 (CSB)