Reading
SAA Notes
Times of prosperity are times for serving the Lord joyfully and gladly. (v.47) When you read verses 58-63, remember that the public hygiene regulations of Leviticus preserves life today wherever their principles are practiced. The Base Hospital signs asking visitors to wash their hands under running water before and after visiting a ward have a real public health purpose that we disregard because of ignorance. We don’t think it matters!
SJA Notes
We had the blessing of a wonderful sermon from Psalm 44 on Sunday. The psalmist was speaking out of great anguish and pain of heart, their physical/external surroundings reflecting the curse, the seeming removal of God’s covenant blessings.
Psalm 44 v11, “You have made us like sheep for slaughter and have scattered us among the nations.”
Compare that with Deut 28 v64, “And the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other,”
A big truth of Israel’s history is that the curses _did_ fall on them. They were broken, destroyed, made the tail, besieged and taken into slavery. All the terrible outcomes, the curses, came upon Israel.
Psalm 44 though, and this is a big hard word to struggle with, comes from a faithful believer, one of God’s people in truth, who cries out to God, “Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever!”
For me, these words are hard to wrestle with, because the reality of our sin is that we are so often to blame. We are broken. And so I find it hard to grasp that we could cry out to God as the psalmist does in v18, “Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way;”
How is this so? For Israel then before Jesus, and for us, now, post-Jesus?
Granted, as we heard on Sunday, it is not a state of mind this attitude, but rather an outworking of the situations we find ourselves in. Death. Despair. Turmoil. Hardship.
Our mind is to be set on things above (Col 3 v2).
The curses section ends here, and next reading the Lord renews His covenant with Israel.
Praise our God that He has made an everlasting covenant with us in Jesus, one that is not founded on our obedience or disobedience but on Jesus! Hallelujah!