July 27, 2012 – Psalms 5 – 7

Psalm 5 – Divine Help – The singer seeks God every morning and waits for God’s reply.  He seeks the Lord and avoids evil.  He ask the Lord to do justice to those that do evil.  The one thing that stuck out to me is that he ask God to “make them fall by their own devises”. 11  That is a very interesting way of asking God to punish evil.  It is something that I don’t know if we think about when bad things happen to us.  Do we see that what we have asked for or done wrong has brought about our own suffering.  Cigarettes causing cancer is a image that comes to mind.  Being greedy and then foreclosing could be another.  The things that we obtain through our sin or lead us to sin will usually be the same things that bring us pain down the road.

Psalm 6 – Distress – Has your pillow ever been soaked with tears.  I don’t know if I have ever soaked a pillow, but I know I have dampened a pillow with tears.  What an image of how sad and fearful this person is.  If I had to choose between “cried a river” or “tears drench my bed” I think I would choose drenching the bed because it also brings an image of lying in bed, getting away from the world, and depression that “cried a river” don’t really stir.

Psalm 7 – Vindicator – We are told that most the Psalms were written by David.  As we go through them, if you are familiar with David’s story, you can tell when he would have possibly written them.  This could have been written while he was on the run from Saul or against one of the other enemies of Israel.  We will see a different feel to later ones.  The idea that he is blameless in the Lord’s sight is not something that is in all the Psalms.  We will get ones of repentance for sins and seeking of mercy.  Here we get a sense of young innocence and being chased by a mad king.

We also see this image of sinners being done in by their own actions.  “[Sinners] open a hole and dig it deep, but fall into the pit they have dug.”