If you don't know, we don't use just any old fireplace ashes for an Ash Wednesday service, they're ashes from burned palm branches to honor the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. I made an impressive sight standing there outside of the church standing beside a trashcan with an open flame inside it being stoked by palm branches while wearing dress clothes. Afterward, my clothes smelled like the smoke from a slightly different plant that might have gotten me fired, but altogether a great time was had by all.
Palm rhymes with psalm. (Nailed it)
So Psalms is a cool book! It's not one that I find myself reading often, but I feel like every time I do, I find something incredible. I love that Psalms gives us such a rich vocabulary to talk about God in ways that we'd probably never think of. Most recently, the one to catch my eye was Psalm 103, a truly beautiful psalm. I'm only going to be talking about the first few verses, but it felt like a disservice to shorten it, so here it is:
1Praise the Lord, my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
2 Praise the Lord, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
3 who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
4 who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,
5 who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.6 The Lord works righteousness
and justice for all the oppressed.7 He made known his ways to Moses,
his deeds to the people of Israel:
8 The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
9 He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.13 As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
14 for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
15 The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
16 the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.
17 But from everlasting to everlasting
the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children’s children—
18 with those who keep his covenant
and remember to obey his precepts.19 The Lord has established his throne in heaven,
and his kingdom rules over all.20 Praise the Lord, you his angels,
you mighty ones who do his bidding,
who obey his word.
21 Praise the Lord, all his heavenly hosts,
you his servants who do his will.
22 Praise the Lord, all his works
everywhere in his dominion.Praise the Lord, my soul.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I've been struggling mightily to be in a "Praise the Lord" type of mood. And I think that's okay. I'm of the belief that God wants all of our emotions, positive or negative, just as long as we're bringing them to him. He can take it.
But that's not the point.
How do you think of God? I'm sure if you were trying to tell about what kind of God you worship, you'd play a fill-in-the-blank kind of game with the sentence "God is _______." In America, we tend to fill this in with adjectives such as loving or gracious or merciful or just or all-powerful.
Hear me say, these are both theologically correct as well as wonderful aspects of our Creator. But I do think that the ancient Israelites had a better vocabulary when it came to talking about their God. They knew that adjectives would just never do the trick.
For the Israelites, the single most important defining feature of the God that they served was that he was the God who brought them out of Egypt. During the Exodus, he enacted the ten plagues, he split the Red Sea, he defeated Pharaoh's army, and he brought them into their Promised Land.
To put this another way, Israel was far more concerned with the verbs than the adjectives when they spoke about God.
It is important to understand the qualities of God, though they may be far above our own understanding, but I think our human brains will have a much better concept of who God is when we focus on the actions of God. That's what the psalmist does in Psalm 103, and I think we have something to learn from this. They focus on the actions of God before they ever look at the attributes of God. In answering the question, "Who is God?" they decide to start with the verbs.
"Well let me tell you: God forgives, . . . heals, . . . redeems, . . . crowns, . . . satisfies."
When we limit God to adjectives, we tend to forget that he actually acts. He's alive, he's working, he's moving in the world all around us. We stop looking for his activity in our lives, content to just accept the kind of God he is. Genesis 2 tells us that our God gets in the dirt, works with his hands, and still makes things that are good. Who says that isn't true today? He works in the dirt that is our lives and transforms it into something good.
How is God working in your life? And if your answer is "I have no idea," like me, I have a follow-up question: how hard are you looking for God's working in your life? Keep your eyes open, and he might surprise you. Are you looking up to heaven asking him to come down and help you? Because chances are, he's already down in the dirt working, waiting for you to see the good that he's making.
~RJS~
