Psalm 50 God’s End of the Bargain

There is a phrase that occurs about 33 times in the Bible in one form or other.  It is the phrase where God is speaking, and He says: I will be God to you.  Or to them.

This occurs mostly in the Old Testament, although twice in the New Testament the Old Testament is quoted, showing that this phrase applies to Christians as well.

Most of the time, when the Bible talks of our relationship with God, it’s about things we are supposed to do:  Love your neighbor, love one another, put off the old man, put on the new. 

And that’s OK.  God is self-sufficient.  He got along quite well without us before He created us, but we often don’t know the heads from the tails in how to live our lives, we need direction.

The trick is that too often we see these commandments from God as burdensome, an unattainable standard that’s no point trying to keep. It only fills us with guilt and depression when we can’t live up to them.

But that’s for another lesson, but we need to see God’s commandments as the manufacturer’s owner manual, telling us how this thing works.  God created life as we know it, including human life.  He knows best how we function, and we need to see His commandments, not as arbitrary, make-work, stay busy kind of activity, where we are graded on how well we conform to the rules, but actions that we take by which we can and will thrive.

But it’s only fair to ask if God has made clear to us what we can expect of Him.  We constantly insist that Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship.  Well, you can’t have a relationship with somebody if you don’t know what you can expect out of them. 

We say that God is sovereign.  He can do and He does whatever He wants.

But if that means we can never know what He’s going to do, then we don’t know Him at all.  Isn’t that the point of the Bible?  If the Bible is just to tell us how to be saved, He could have given us a gospel tract.  But He gave us this thousand page book to teach us about life.  And Himself.

I mentioned that 33 times in the Bible God says something like, I will be God to somebody.  And about 20 times He says what that means.

I want to look at one of those times.  Psalm 50

Verse 7 God says: Hear, O My people, and I will speak;  O Israel, I will testify against you;

I am God, your God.

The next six verses He essentially tells them that there is nothing really that they can do for Him, so to speak.  What do you give to the person who has everything? 

But then in verse 14, He tells them what He does want:  14    “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving And pay your vows to the Most High;

Thanksgiving is music to God’s ears.  The Bible says in Ephesians and I Thessalonians about giving thanks always. 

Now I admit, that has never been easy for me.  Several years ago, I had to quit work when I got sick.  I’m still not 100%.  But not working, it was very easy for me to look back on my life, and I wasn’t happy with a lot of what I saw.  I thought surely as a Christian, a lot of things would have, should have been different.

But since that time, God has taught me to be thankful.  Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.  And I told Him and keep telling Him, I don’t understand that goodness, but  I want to.  But He is good, and I say it.

Then He says to pay your vows.  That basically means, all those things that you told God you would do, do them.  Those promises to follow Him, You know what you’ve said.

And then God tells them, us, what His part in all this is. Verse 15       Call upon Me in the day of trouble;  I will deliver you, and you will honor Me.”

Call upon Me in the day of trouble. 

The Greek translation for the word ‘trouble’ here is θλῖψις, thlip-sis, which in the New Testament is the common word for tribulation.  Call on me in the day of tribulation, and I will deliver you.

Christians are all too familiar with the concept of tribulations.  The question that Christians always have is: what do we do with them?  Or, what does God want to do with them?  Do we live with them, or will God remove them at some point?

Here God says that He will deliver you from them.  Now deliverance doesn’t always come as soon as we’d like or even the way we’d like. 

Some say the death is sometimes the deliverance.  And I would say, be careful with that. 

In the Old Testament, they didn’t have a richly defined theology of an afterlife.  They never said you’ll die and be with God and everything will be all right.  You died, and that pretty much was it.  There were hints that there would be a resurrection of the dead, but the dead were dead until then. 

Nobody would have seen death as the deliverance out of their tribulations.  Job would have seen it as a deliverance FROM his trials but not OUT OF them. 

Now I’ve had stage 4 cancer and then later a test came back that said I had fibrosis of the lungs.  Now there’s nothing they can do for fibrosis.  They give you 5 years.

Now my tests are all clear.  I never thought for a second I was going to die from any of this.  Someone may say I am just stubborn and living in a dream world.  If I’m stubborn, it’s because I know what the Bible says.  If the Bible doesn’t mean what it says, why are we reading it, and why are we supposed to read it?

Someone’s going to say that they knew somebody who really believed that God was going to do something, and He didn’t.  And this person died.  And I can tell you stories in my own life of things just like that.  Where I expected things that didn’t happen.  I could write a book on disappointment with God. 

But don’t you dare choose to believe something different from what seems like a very clear passage of Scripture.  I would rather believe that God was going to deliver Goliath into my hands and died trying than to stand on the sidelines, afraid to enter the battle.  We’ll talk about that in another lesson.

But like I will say a lot in these lessons, we can’t answer every question in five minutes.

God says that He will deliver you.  Don’t look around to see if God is delivering your friends out of their tribulations.  This is between you and God.  Start giving thanks, and do the things you said you were going to do.

Call upon Him in the day of tribulation, and He WILL deliver you.

Psalm 34:19 says:     Many are the afflictions of the righteous,  But the LORD delivers him OUT OF  THEM ALL.

The word ‘afflictions’ here is that same word ‘tribulations’ again.  Many are the tribulations of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.

15 again           Call upon Me in the day of trouble;

I will deliver you, and you will HONOR Me.

And how do we honor God?

The last verse of this psalm tells us: He who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors Me.  And so we’re back again to thanksgiving.

We give thanks before the troubles, and for that, He delivers us FROM those troubles, and then we thank God again. 

So if you want to take away anything from this lesson, start giving thanks to God.  Whether you feel like it or not, whether the circumstances look like it or not. 

If you want to take something else from this lesson too.  When the Bible says something, believe it and stop trying to look for reasons why it might not mean what it looks like it says.