Psalm 118

Saturday morning I read Psalm 118, and verses 22-29 jumped out at me in a powerful way. In reading them, I saw clearly that they are all about Christ. The most famous is verse 22 which reads, “The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief corner stone.” Jesus uses this verse and verse 23 to refer to himself in Mark 12. This is not the part that stood out to me though; it is the following verses.

It makes sense that with the beginning of this section focusing on Christ that the rest would too, but for some reason that never registered until this morning. So, when the psalmist writes, “This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it,” he is referring to Christ. The context of the verses points specifically to the death of Christ—the day of His crucifixion at the hands of the people He came to save. Christ acknowledges that the day of his death is the right time. In John 17:1 he says, “The hour has come.” We should rejoice in this day—the day of Christ’s crucifixion—because it is the day that our salvation was won. The psalmist continues to say, “O Lord, do save, we beseech you” in verse 25. And that is just what he is doing; He is saving us through the blood of Christ—He is saving us today.

Verse 26 is shouted by the people on the day Christ enters into Jerusalem and Christ says that if the people had not shouted it the stones would have.

Verse 27 is where the message really hit home. “The Lord is God, and He has given us light; bind the festival sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar.” He has given us light as John 1 so beautifully says. The Light walked amongst us and yet we didn’t recognize it—we didn’t want it. So what did we do with the Light? We nailed it to a cross. Christ was the festival sacrifice, the necessary sacrifice to atone for sin and cleanse the people from their wickedness. The sacrifice was made, not by us, by God, by the Light Himself. The sacrifice was not one that needed to be repeated, it was sufficient for all eternity. And through that sacrifice we have life.

Verses 28 and 29 are shouts of praise to the God who would sacrifice His own Son that we might have life and have it abundantly. It records for us the only fitting response to this great act: worship. Heart-felt, uninhibited worship. “You are my God and I give thanks to You; You are my God, I extol You. Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; for His lovingkindness is everlasting.” And that everlasting lovingkindness purchased our salvation, proving His goodness to a people who deserve only wrath.

You are my God, and I worship you. You are my king and I praise your glorious name. Great are your works and great is your power to save. You have redeemed me from the pit, and you have done it for your name’s sake. Thank you Lord that I am a recipient of your grace. Thank you that you have called me to yourself, so that I, unlike so many, have not rejected the chief cornerstone. Thank you that even when I did not call to you for salvation, you gave it. I did not beseech, but still you saved me, and there is nothing I did to deserve it. Thank you Lord God. Thank you.

Walking on Water

In her book Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art Madeleine L’Engle writes that we “are coauthors with God in the writing of our own story.” And proceeds to quote Laurens Van Der Post’s writing about the Kalahari Bushman: “The story was his most sacred possession. Without a story of your own to live, you haven’t got a life of your own” (165).

This is why I am so thankful our Grace Group is doing life stories every week. Not only does it help us to know each other better, it helps us to know ourselves and the role we have played in coauthoring our own life story. Certainly God is in control, but he has also given us free will to make decisions, whether to follow his will and plan or to reject them and forge our own misguided way. But regardless of how misguided we are (or how onboard we are with God’s plans) we are coauthors—cocreators—with God in this life.

L’Engle writes that cocreation is our God-given purpose. We were made—fearfully and wonderfully made—to cocreate with our creator. We were made to be makers ourselves, but never were we intended to make and create on our own, but always to partner in the act of creation with the one whose creativity sparked this world, this universe—existence itself—into existence.

But is cocreation possible if we don’t know the creator? Yes. I have been deeply moved by images of the eternal in the works of artists and authors whose lives do not reflect obedience to Christ, whose works do not reflect the eternal, except in those few places where the transcendent overshadows and permeates the temporal, bringing reality where only illusion was intended. It is a testimony of God’s sovereignty when I can only sit and wonder if the artist knew what he accomplished, what he tapped into. Though, to be honest, he is only partially responsible, since he was not the only author but rather the cocreator, though he likely never even knew it.

Myth and Reality

I’ve been reading a book by Rolland Hein called Christian Mythmakers and it has been a true blessing as it has confirmed a lot of what I have been thinking over the course of the past 9 months. One of the more powerful passages I read was something from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. In it Chesterton writes:

“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery . . . The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticized elfland, but elfland that criticized earth.”

The nature of myth as Tolkien and Lewis defined it is a story that has at its core eternal realities and truths. It allows the eternal to break through into the temporal, just as it does in reality every day. Reality is not simply what we see around us, it is the eternal present within the temporal. Any other view presents something other than reality—it presents fiction.