Discipleship in the Psalms: The Response to Relief
Author: Daniel Owens, PhD
October 09, 2024
Ninth in a series.
Psalm 138, OF DAVID.
1I give you thanks, O LORD, with my whole heart;
before the gods I sing your praise;
2I bow down toward your holy temple
and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness,
for you have exalted above all things your name and your word.
3On the day I called, you answered me;
my strength of soul you increased.
4All the kings of the earth shall give you thanks, O LORD,
for they have heard the words of your mouth,
5and they shall sing of the ways of the LORD,
for great is the glory of the LORD.
6For though the LORD is high, he regards the lowly,
but the haughty he knows from afar.
7Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life;
you stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies,
and your right hand delivers me.
8The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me;
your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.
Do not forsake the work of your hands.
A relative of mine once shared that he is suspicious of people who are only there for you during the bad times. It was a counter-intuitive statement. I think conventional wisdom is that friends are there during the good times but desert you when times get tough. But some people are there for crisis, only they are nowhere to be found when things are normal. Crisis requires presence, so foul-weather friends are those who show up only when you are in difficulty. True friends are always there, whether the weather is foul or fair. What a missed opportunity it is for discipleship, if we only have a foul weather faith.
In this post, I want to consider what it means to be steady in discipleship and to build consistency across different seasons. In between lament and praise psalms are the thanksgiving psalms. Arising from the experience of lament and deliverance, they invite the community to praise, and that praise bears fruit in trust for the future.
The psalm can be divided into five sections:
A - Thanks before the gods because of God’s name and his word (vv. 1–2).
B - Testimony to God’s answer to David (v. 3).
A’ - Thanks from the kings of the earth because of God’s ways and his glory (vv. 4–5).
B’ - Testimony to God’s regard for the lowly and for David (vv. 6–7)
C - Trust regarding God’s steadfast love (v. 8).
Conveniently for us, this boils down to the three T’s of thanks, testimony, and trust. It demonstrates the wisdom of Paul’s admonition in 1 Thessalonians 5:18: “give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” A thankful heart remains steady through foul and fair weather.
The first thing to note is that David’s thanksgiving is a public act. Verse 1 describes his singing before “the gods.” As monotheists, this seems strange to us. Why would David, inspired by the Holy Spirit, even acknowledge the existence of other gods if there is only one God? Deuteronomy 4:35 affirms, “the Lord is God; there is no other besides him.” The doctrine that there is but one God shows up in many other places, such as Isaiah 45:5 and 1 Timothy 2:5. So how do we explain David’s reference to the gods? Perhaps this reflects David’s own context, which we know was polytheistic. He came of age within a generation of the period of the biblical judges, which was a time of considerable religious diversity, to put it gently. For David to ascribe glory to Yahweh publicly before the gods would have been an assertion of the name of Yahweh above all other so-called gods. Yahweh had been faithful to David, and so David responds with thanksgiving.
Although verse 2 ends with a “for” clause explaining the reason for his thanks, it is actually the testimony in verse 3 that is the occasion. David experienced some answer to prayer that fortifies his soul. We have no hint from the psalm itself about the nature of this answer. But note that this testimony has objective and subjective dimensions. God’s answer is objective, but David’s strength of soul is subjective. An embrace of thanksgiving is the fruit of the two.
The psalm then takes thanksgiving to a new level in verses 4–5. This time it is not David’s lone voice of praise but rather the kings of the earth, who are moved by God’s word to praise him. What context might this reflect? David does not give us a context but instead envisions the kind of future that Isaiah later describes in Isaiah 2:1–4: the nations streaming to Zion to hear the law. It is a global vision of God’s word and his name being exalted among the nations. What began as the piety of an individual has now blossomed into a global chorus of praise. And this outcome is indeed what God has done in Christ and through the church, bringing his grace to the nations. Thanksgiving at the level of the individual can raise our hopes for God’s global purposes.
David then returns to testimony in verses 6–7. At first, he generalizes about God’s attention to the lowly, who are in contrast to the kings who sit on their lofty thrones. But God’s attention to the lowly is what moves kings to praise. This brings us back to David, who has been that lowly person whom the Lord has delivered. Thanksgiving connects the universal to the particular and vice versa. God’s work to help individuals results in the praise of the whole community, even an international community of national leaders.
Knowing the experience of deliverance, David concludes with trust in verse 8. This three-line verse begins with expectation that God will deliver David in the future. He grounds this in God’s faithful love (see also in 2). But the verse concludes the psalm with a twist. He pleads with God, “Do not forsake the work of your hands.” What is the work of his hands? It could be his entire creation or more specifically his people.1 In the context, it is probably best understood as God’s people, Israel. Though a psalm of David, this psalm is placed in the post-exilic collection of Book V. The exile to Babylon involved the destruction of the temple, the kingship, and the city of David, and so naturally God’s people were unsure of their identity as a people.2 Had God abandoned the work of his hands? David’s prayer from before the exile echoes down to the shattered Jewish community, scattered among the nations and lacking a king on David’s throne, much less a kingdom. The faith that preserved David could breathe new life generations later as a prayer for God to keep his promises to his people.
So why cultivate friendship with God when times are good? Because hard times are coming, and God is the one who watches over us at all times. Thanksgiving is that bridge between lament and praise that keeps us rightly oriented to God, trusting him through pain and praising him when he delivers.
Daniel Owens, PhD, is NCC’s Pastor of Discipleship. Go to the NCC Blog for the previous posts in this series.
1 Willem A. VanGemeren, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Psalms, ed. Tremper Longman and David E. Garland, rev. ed., vol. 5 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 958.
2 Nancy deClaisse-Walford, Rolf A. Jacobson, and Beth LaNeel Tanner, The Book of Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 960.
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