OF DAVID
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and all that is within me,
bless his holy name!
2 Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits,
3 who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your diseases,
4 who redeems your life from the pit,
who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,
5 who satisfies you with good
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
What is it to bless the LORD? To admire Him. To prize Him as the highest good and awesome-est power. To recognize His greatness, including His great joy in being God. That last sentence is important: to bless God is to realize that God is overflowingly happy as God. Complete in Himself. Needing nothing.
What is it to specifically bless His name? To remember not only who He is but what He has done. To recall those decisions and acts whereby He’s made Himself known and earned His reputation.
What is it to qualify His name as holy? To know that God is separate from all that is not God. There is no one like Him. His thoughts are very deep; they are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. He decides, acts, reacts in surprising, OTHER ways. His goodness is OTHER. His perceptiveness is OTHER. His strength is OTHER. Deeper. Broader. Enduring-er.
Let all that is in me revel in this Holy God’s being… and statutes… and acts. All that is in me. All that is in me! I sense my limbs; my breath goes in and out; my fingers move and grasp – Come on Colin’s Body, bless Jehovah’s holy name.
That part of me that is nostalgic for my childhood and Ronald Reagan days. Bless Jehovah’s holy name, my memory!
That dreaming and planning aspect. My relational life. The tie to my native land and ancestral blood running through me. My stance within the body politic… Come on – everything in me: bless Jehovah’s holy name! Don’t hold back! Don’t allow anything about you to be unresponsive or flippant toward the great good Being and Actor who is Jehovah, the Father of Jesus Christ!
Then after that opening summons to his entire self, starting in v. 2, David lists categories of how God’s goodness presents to replenish reasons to exalt in all who Jehovah is and what He does. And following along we too are prompted to remember God’s benefits toward us.
The first on the list might be the hardest to believe: Colin Soul, God forgives all your iniquity.
What is iniquity? Iniquity is obviously a bad thing, something needing forgiveness like sins or trespasses. Iniquity specifically refers to the crookedness running through me. The lack of integrity. Between what I am made to be and do and how actually I am and act… is not a straight line. Indeed, between what I confess to admire and believe in and what actually has my attention me is much twistiness. Duplicity, frowardness, insincerity, double-mindedness form a twisted river running through ourselves.
One of my favorite quotations is from a character in a David Foster Wallace novel who has entered and quickly exited religion and church, and then broods over what he discovered in the process: “The real truth here being how quickly I went from being someone who was there [at church services] because he wanted to wake up and stop being a fraud to being somebody who was so anxious to impress the congregation with how devoted and active I was.”
He felt fake – always seeking the approval of others – so he turned to church. But then in church he soon started to be fake with the congregation. We can’t outrun our crookedness, our iniquity!
Someone says, you Christians are so fake. And guess what, he has a point. But here’s the thing: we already knew that. Our sacred text continually reminds us of our deep iniquity, that some or much of our thinking and acting is only so much scheming and pretending. We don’t approve of it, but there’s this present reality: I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. To proceed straightforwardly from what we’re supposed to be to being that… just doesn’t happen.
A growing spiritual life is not by watching ourselves carefully to see our motives become truer and purer. Rather, it is in turning away from constantly scanning ourselves, including our inner life, and hearing and trusting in what God has done to deliver us from our iniquity. Brothers and sisters, there’s a long history of God warring against human crookedness, a history that culminated in the death of Jesus Christ. The decisive blow against our distortion and fakeness and not-the-way-it’s-supposed-to-be-ness was when Jesus, the Man of perfect integrity, was crushed to death for our iniquities.
On the Hill of Skulls, something real happened. Let the old poet take you to the scene:
…The nails went through veins and flesh and wedged bones apart
And then the cross was raised, the third of that day, displaying to all eyes
…The head, turning slowly from side to side,
As always with the pinned or the empaled,
The eyes already rapt with suffering,
The hands nailed like frogs to the rough cross-timber,
The feet spiked to the foot-block, amid cries and murmurs
The cross raised…
The Man in whom was no deceit takes our iniquities upon himself and to the grave. Nothing fake there. And afterwards God raising Him from the dead, thereby justifying those whom He represents – so that 20 centuries later this preacher can say: YOUR INIQUITY IS REAL AND FORGIVEN. By grace you belong in the Presence of the God who is consuming fire, who is light, and in whom is no darkness at all. Hallelujah!
Brothers and sisters, it’s one thing to hear that we’ve been forgiven for those things we’ve done or left undone, for all the ways we’ve fallen short. That’s fabulous in itself. But to hear that God – fully knowing the crookedness of our humanity as it presents in sneaky thoughts, speech designed to throw off the scent, double-mindedness, intentional short-cuts – has FORGIVEN YOUR INIQUITY! Rejoice in this God! Rejoice in the God whose name is forever linked to the Hill of Skulls!
Who heals all your diseases. Now we’re being prompted to review 2024 and even our entire lives to recall everything from sniffles to cancer that God has brought us through and made right. It’s amazing – in one moment we look down and there’s a gash in our knee and we can even see some fluffy white stuff inside…and a few weeks later sturdy skin covers the whole mess and nothing anymore is spilling out. Bless the LORD all that is in me and stays in me!
It is good to remember God’s benefits to our bodies, to not take these for granted. In order to do this, we’ll need to recall that God providentially almost always alleviates and heals through agents that aren’t God: mothers, baths, humidifiers, general practitioners, surgeons, tourniquets, weight lifting, sun, salt, Dayquil, sleep, Big Pharma, RFK Jr.…. Every good and perfecting gift comes down from Above, from the Father of lights…
God, this God whom we exalt in, is opposed to death and all that is related to death, and is committed to renewing bodies…healing all diseases!
But of course, it’s here that a stab of unreality might enter our thoughts. You say all diseases, huh? I guess back when this was written those primitives were so naïve they thought that God would actually save them from dying. Couldn’t they see that every temporary healing was just prolonging the wait before disease or some other blunt or consuming force shuts down our bodies?! The psalm should read some disease but not all our disease.
But this line, like so many others in the Old Testament and even the New, while referring to something current in our experience also points to something ultimate. The current thing is that God does indeed heal diseases. Let’s bless God for being that kind of God! But our celebration of God expands because these momentary healings also point to a Day when He will completely eradicate and heal us from every trace of all diseases.
Why are we so sure of that? Because Christ has been raised from the dead! God reigns over every power, up to and including disease/death. Just look at the lines in this Psalm that ground this whole celebration in God:
The LORD has established his throne in the heavens/ and his kingdom rules over all. (v.19)
Good news: The LORD rules in heaven and earth. This is the Gospel: that in raising Jesus Christ from the Pit of death God has conclusively asserted His authority over everything that isn’t God.
And why in particular is God’s assertion of authority good news? Because of what Romans 1:16 claims: the Gospel of Christ’s resurrection isn’t only the assertion of God’s authority, but His expression of what He is doing with that authority. And what is God doing through the Gospel? Romans 1:16: The Gospel is the power of God for salvation. Salvation. Hallelujah! God saves!
And do people ever need saving!? We don’t even have to bring up diseases to address that question. Look around into the tired, used faces. Look at the cynicism and wariness in so many middle schoolers. Consider the sheer number of marriages that end in divorce.
You read news stories or you simply step out of the front door of your house or you stay in your house and you think: we’re in big trouble. Addictions. Personal debt. State debt. National debt. Gender confusion. Human confusion. Outbursts of rage. Unbridled lust. Boasting, selfish ambition and self-promotion color many acts. Laziness rules from its couch. Perversion runs through all boundaries. We are losing the battle to focus, and our work is being compromised?
Bodily disease is just one presentation of what we see in every corner of society and our own souls: all around outside and inside we see corruption unto death.
And yet, the Gospel insists, there’s a future. Death doesn’t get the final word. Christ is raised. Christ is King!
The Gospel ‘s efficacy is that it addresses the source of every individual problem, especially including physical disease – – – which is the person’s standing before God. We have looked before at the episode of Jesus healing the paralytic man who’s lowered through the roof. He is set down before Jesus, obviously incapacitated, and in response to their faith Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven you.”
The more we think more about those words, the more irritated we become: here’s an immobile person, without a livelihood, at the mercy of others’ goodwill… and all Jesus wants to talk about is forgiving his sins!
How impractical Jesus is! What God offers isn’t what I need!
But then, to show the strong link to the paralytic’s sins being forgiven, afterward Jesus heals him, restores his mobility and now he can work, produce, decorate.
And so, when I leave that scene, I understand that God sees beyond the difficulties on the surface – no matter how ghastly those might appear – and fathoms the deepest problem: in my whole self I’m sick; I’ve fallen short of what I was created for. And only after that gigantic fundamental problem is addressed can there be other important but less important healings, and from thence the right kind of stability and energy for culture making.
The Gospel is God’s power for salvation from real, powerful destructive forces that first destroy the soul and then move outward into the body. Exalt in this God who has determined and already decisively started to heal all diseases through the death conquering power of the resurrection.
Finally, we only have time to glance at David’s phrase rejoicing in this God who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s. Every year an eagle goes through a process called molting – their flight feathers fall off to be replaced by new ones…that enable them to keep flying high!
David is celebrating this God who cares for each of his children by sending some good their way that deeply renews them… and thus prepares them for regular times, tedious times, hard times. Think about it…. Look carefully. You’ll spot these in your own life.
May I tell you about a couple incidents in my own life by reading from a monthly letter I’d write to our congregation in Newton. This was a few years ago in November, and we’d just had our first snow.
My Dear Friends:
The snowfall has got me to some reminiscing about the halcyon days of my youth. I recall an end-of-November day in my senior year of high school. Our class was preparing to head downtown to visit some museum on a field trip, and the small bus provided for the trip couldn’t carry quite all the students. With a spectacular lapse of judgment, the teacher signed off on the idea for three of my classmates and me to drive separately en route to this rich cultural experience. Did she miss that we were all good friends and that we left the school parking lot without our observation notebooks?
Only to confirm your suspicions do I need to say that we got lost and never made it to the museum. We were in the car listening to loud music, talking, joking; eventually we found ourselves in the lovely neighborhood of Cherry Creek, south of downtown Denver, south of what I still presume was an excellent museum.
On the way to Cherry Creek, snow started to fall. We parked the car on the street, entered the Cherry Creek Mall through the doors at the Sax Fifth Avenue, exited the other side of the mall, crossed a street, and entered our goal, the Tattered Cover bookshop.
Once inside this huge (four levels of books) yet elegant, booklover’s paradise, we split up and set about perusing. In the very very back of our minds a couple of us worked on the problem of explaining ourselves to the teacher when we saw her next. Occasionally during the next couple of hours we’d run into each other and share a laugh. When we glanced through the store’s big windows, we saw the city slowly being buried in white.
If possible, my next story is even less exciting. Home from college over winter break, I was sent on an errand somewhere. As always, Storm the Boxer dog hopped in the truck with me. On the way home from the now forgotten errand, we were in the environs of Boulder, a town about 35 miles northwest of Denver nestled in a valley surrounded by foothills. Snow was falling.
We happened by a lake, perhaps a mile around, and I stopped the car so we could hike the loop around the lake. It was around 4pm and the sun was beginning to set. During the entire trek Storm and I were alone, save for a flock of Canada geese which Storm drove off. Angry honks and then swish swish swish the wings.
Once we’d encircled the lake, back into the car. Storm’s coat was cold, he panted happily, his huge tongue lolled out of his mouth: he was alive. Indulge me as I drop in some Jack London: “He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant…”
We drove home.
I’m almost ashamed at how many times over the years (and now over the miles) in my mind I’ve returned to these two episodes. In fact, up until recently, many of my online passwords were “boulderboxer” plus a few random numbers and letters. Why?
How could a few hours spent with friends in a bookstore dodging a museum, or even more improbably, an hour walking around some water with some dog, mean so much?
What happened in those moments? A pleasure, tied to an occurrence, yet that is so much more than what the total elements of that occurrence could allow. In fact, the word “pleasure” can’t do the feeling justice. Moreover, the word “feeling” is also insufficient.
Also, these “something[s] never to be described” simply can’t be reconstructed and entered into again. This sweet longing coming out of the sense that, in an otherwise ordinary moment, you’ve brushed up against something vast and beautiful and mysterious . . . can’t be grasped for long. It can be remembered but won’t be summoned to your experience again. Call it a precious and fleeting gift.
I interpret these moments as instances of common grace, we are given a bit of natural revelation, God is near to us. God is reviving us with good.
What these encounters do is expand the horizons. After “Cherry Creek/Boulder,” with new ears we hear the truth that in the Almighty’s presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. Yes! Please! More! At Cherry Creek we’ve been given a taste of something (Someone!) and now we want the full cup. Now going to God’s heaven means more, much more, than ever before. Saved from hell – yes. But I’d been given a momentary taste of what we’ve been saved to – knowing God.
Verily, after this experience of goodness, knowing God isn’t merely a noble phrase: our view of God expands. Now to our former notions of him we need to add on: Vast. Other. Frightening. Old. And even our grasp of the old ideas change: definitions of goodness, holiness, beauty unfurl into something much larger than before.
What a gift! How renewing. I’m ready to go again.
Yours sincerely, Colin Landry
Brothers and sisters, bless this God who fills you with good! Who heals all your diseases! Who forgives all your iniquity! Bless the LORD and let all this is in you bless his holy name!
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