Why does Jesus spend forty days in the wilderness, confronting public enemy number 1 (Satan, the accuser of the people of God), immediately after he has been declared Son of God (echoing Psalm 2) at his baptism?
I know that one answer is that it relates to the 40 years Israel spent in the wilderness. Jesus must be faithful at the exact point at which they failed.
A few of us spent a good hour, a few weeks back, reading and reflecting on Psalm 42-43.
We did talk about when Jesus might have prayed such a Psalm, and thought that Gethsemane was the kind of moment.
What we didn’t pick up
Psalm 88 has been a huge comfort to me over the years, as I know it has to many other Christians. There is something paradoxically comforting in the presence of such a black Psalm in the Psalter. A Psalm that truly records life as we feel and experience it, without embarrasment, without contradition to the other Psalms that step back to see life from God’s perspective.
There is, of course, much debate over the title.
“A Song. A Psalm of the Sons of Korah. To the Choirmaster: According to Mahalath Leannoth. A Maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.”
Rich Lusk points out in his fine book Paedofaith how the testimony of the Psalmists is of God being their trust since birth and even conception.
Psalm 87 gives another slant on this wonderful truth that the blessing of being one of the people of God can be traced back to the earliest days. (Thomas, and others who have studied the Psalms much more than I, please correct me if needs be!)
I’m a bit hopeless when it comes to lists.
But I do have a vague idea of the people I would like to pray for regularly.
Somehow, I tend to pray most for those people who are most in need of God’s help, those who are weakest, those with unrealised potential, etc.
Then I read Psalm 72.
