Ps. 36-38
Boy, is Psalm 36 ever a today-relevant Psalm!! The first 4 verses speak so clearly of the so-called ‘leadership’ that we are faced with today – it brought several names to mind while reading it. But the rest of the Psalm? Therein lies our hope. It is all about the steadfast love of God. Verse 5, “Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens…”. Verse 7, “How precious is your steadfast love, O God!…”,. And verse 10, “Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you…”. No evil exists that is a match for the steadfast love of our God!
And wow, there is so much I could say about Psalm 37! Its theme, though, is how we should focus our lives. “Fret not yourself because of evildoers,” it says in verses. 1, 7, and 8; “Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.” (vs 8) That’s right – fretting over the evil that evil-doers do only leads us down the same path. What are we to do instead? Psalm 37:3-6 has the answer. “Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in Him, and He will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday.”
Another thing that struck me is that verse 16 says that the little that the righteous has is far better than the abundance of many wicked. And yet verse 21 points out that the wicked are stingy with what they have, while the righteous lives generously. Why is that so? Because, “those blessed by the LORD shall inherit the land, but those cursed by Him shall be cut off” (Ps 37:22). We give because God gives to us, and even if that leaves us with little, we know that God provides for our needs and that the treasures we are storing up for eternity will far outweigh whatever we had to do without here and now.
John 12:1-26
Isn’t it just like people…when something doesn’t fit their narrative, they simply seek to eliminate that evidence! Pride is the enemy of Truth!! The religious leaders were losing market share, so to speak, to Jesus because of Lazarus. Their answer was to kill them both. The behavior of evil has not changed since the beginning of time. God shows this to us in His word so we can stay alert and not fall prey to its wicked ways.