Making 'Psense' of Psalms--Psalm 116: Precious

Delicate wildflowers, flourishing on the forest's decay,
a picture of new life from death

Part of an ongoing series on selected psalms.

It was the last place I wanted to be: beside my mother’s deathbed. She was only 59 as cancer knocked her down for the last time. My dad’s call had come that afternoon at my workplace, a three-hour drive away.  “Come as soon as you can,” he pleaded. When I reached home barely four hours later, a neighbor was waiting to take me to the hospital in the next city. Sometime during our death-watch that night, Dad opened a Bible and read to her. I’ve since learned that hearing is one of the last senses to go, so I believe she did hear his voice, though her struggle to breathe may have fogged the words. But these were words that I needed to hear as well:

What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits toward me?
I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the LORD.
I will pay my vows unto the LORD now in the presence of all his people.
Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. (Psalm 116:12-15 KJV)
About 2 a.m. a nurse suggested we go home and get some sleep. “She could last another day,” the nurse said.  So I drove my exhausted father home. He went to bed, I settled on the couch so I could hear the phone. The nurse’s call telling of Mom’s death came about 4 a.m. Though I would have wished to be with her at the end, I knew that she was truly not alone.  Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints, and surely His presence was in that hospital room.

To this day, I cannot read Psalm 16 without tears. Yet I have discovered that it offers a good portion of hope and praise. It is positioned in the book of Psalms as one of the “Hallel” psalms, which includes Psalms 113 through 118.  “Hallel” means “praise,” and these psalms were intended to sung on holy days. Psalms 113-114 were sung before the Passover meal, and 115-118 as the meal closed. They were also sung at major Jewish feasts. Two gospels detail how Jesus led His disciples in the Passover meal (what we now call “The Last Supper”), and afterwards, “when they had sung  a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives” (Matt. 26:20, Mark 14:26). These psalms, including Psalm 116, were among the last to come from the Savior’s lips before His arrest, trials and crucifixion.  And truly, precious in the sight of the Lord was the death of His only Son.

The psalm hinges on two big ideas: deliverance and thanksgiving.

DELIVERANCE (VV. 1-11)

The opening verse sets the tone of gratitude for deliverance: “I love the LORD, for he heard my voice; he heard my cry for mercy” (116:1). He backs this up with descriptive language of a tough, even life-threatening situation: “cords of death,” “anguish of the grave,” “overcome by trouble and sorrow.” Some Bible teachers wonder if this might describe the sickness, perhaps an infected boil, that took King Hezekiah to the brink of death before the “poultice of figs” was applied (Isaiah 38).  The psalm doesn’t list an author, so that’s just conjecture. But it could represent any of us who walk in a doctor’s office to a sobering diagnosis, or have our lives flipped upside down in an accident.

The author spends little time on his ailment, but more on God’s perspective. “Then I called on the name of the LORD: ‘O LORD, save me!” In “calling on the name of the Lord,” he describes God’s character: gracious, righteous, full of compassion, protective of the simple-hearted (vv. 5-6). Praising God’s character lifts him above “demanding” prayer.

A word on “simple-hearted” (Hebrew: petî)—it refers to silly and gullible people. To say God regards the “simple-hearted” in their foolish or ignorant ways reminds us that we come to Him without any merit of our own, except through His Son.

The bottom line is that God hears the prayers of the helpless. This psalm’s writer found himself “in great need”—a tearful, stumbling, life-or-death matter. He had a miserable outlook, saying all men are liars (v. 11).  God saw through all that, and reached down to help him.

THANKSGIVING

As the writer considers what God has done for him, he responds with thanksgiving:
How can I repay the LORD for all his goodness to me; I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD. (vv. 12-13)
This verse is a rhetorical question.  How can we “repay” God for His goodness? We can’t. It is impossible. But the psalm writer was compelled to express his thanks some way, and so he turned to a ritual of his time, described in Leviticus 7:11ff and Deuteronomy 12:17ff.  He would bring a “thank offering” (an unblemished animal) to the sanctuary for sacrifice. In part of the ritual, the priest would pour a portion of wine on the altar, symbolizing the worshipper’s life poured out before the Lord.  This is the “cup of salvation.”  The priest also kept back part of the meat from the slaughtered, sacrificed animal for the worshiper to share in a special joyful feast with family and friends. During that feast, he’d express public thanks for God’s mercy and love. 

Verse 15, which touched me so deeply at my mother’s deathbed, has prompted a lot of discussion among Bible teachers:

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.
“Precious” also means “costly.” The death of a “saint” reminds us that sin brought death into the world, but Christ’s death brought eternal life to those who trust in Him.  His death (and resurrection) was costly beyond all understanding. A saint’s death is “precious” to God because it means that person will come to enjoy His presence. Like the psalmist, Paul wrestled with the possibility of dying soon when he wrote his letter to the Philippians. His only desire was that Christ be exalted either by his life or his death. “I desire to depart and be with Christ,” he said, “which is better by far” (Philippians 1:23). 

It is human to fear death. I will never forget the night a drinking driver nearly wiped out my family. But it is the privilege of a believer to trust God for the timing of death. He permits us to stay on earth until He sees that our work here is finished.  We may die of disease or an accident, but the timing is no surprise to God. And after that, “to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). That transition is precious to God.

And so the psalmist ends at this feast in which he praises God. Apparently it happens in the temple courts (v. 18), where his friends and family and more will hear his story. The psalm concludes, “Praise the Lord,” which in Hebrew is, “Hallelu-jah.” The phrase is common to all of the “Hallel” psalms (113-118) and that is appropriate.  For whether we are making a costly public declaration of faith (like the psalmist’s sacrifice-feast) or quietly witnessing the transition of earthly life to eternal rest, the focus of our hearts should be God Almighty, who loves to hear us lift up His name.

Next: Psalm 118

 

This fragile grass

My husband is a substitute teacher, and one recent snowy day he went to the tiny rural school at Palisades, about a 40-minute drive from here. It’s at the end of a narrow coulee carved long ago in the Ice Age. Part of the coulee has been scrubbed of sagebrush for alfalfa fields and orchards. Coming home from teaching, he passed dozens of deer foraging where they could. Going back up there the other day, we counted probably five dozen, chewing what they could out of the frozen turf.

I’d been thinking a lot about Psalm 90 recently, and those hungry deer reminded me of verse 5: “You sweep men away in the sleep of death; they are like the new grass of the morning—though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered.”

Talk about a downer verse! A little background may help. This is the only song by Moses included in the book of Psalms. Though he wrote other songs (like the epic one in Deuteronomy 32), this one must have been significant enough to pick for an ancient hymnal largely featuring the songs of King David.

We’re not told when he wrote it, but I imagine it was near the end of his life as the Israelites finished forty years of wandering before entering the Promised Land. Moses wouldn’t go with them, a consequence of dishonoring God with a temper tantrum at Meribah (Numbers 20). Plus, as judgment on unbelief and cowardice after spies checked out Canaan, all but two who left Egypt (the believing spies, Joshua and Caleb) would miss out on the Promised Land. Thousands of graves dotted the landscape of their wanderings around the Sinai. Now only descendants remained.

If I were in Moses’ sandals, I probably would have said this, too: “All our days pass away under your wrath: we finish our years with a moan” (v. 9).

Psalm 90 has been on my mind in part because of people we care about “finishing their years.” In some cases, it’s been when they’re too young¸ like a talented violinist who befriended my daughter at college. She married a widower with child, had two more children with him, and is now gone in her thirties—of colon cancer. A friend our age is slipping away with ALS. Another couple we know nearly lost their son to a dying heart until a heart transplant gave him extra years. He married, and last week his wife (age 36) had her life turned upside down by strokes.

Three weeks ago I helped an older friend with Alzheimer’s navigate the curb to a car; her funeral is Friday. This week someone died as a result of an accident barely a block away in early December. I remember coming home at dusk after my walk and seeing the red lights of emergency vehicles just beyond my street. A 79-year-old man who lived alone in a little cottage was struck when he jay-walked across the street. He was walking home from the grocery store, as he had done hundreds of times—sometimes nodding to my “hi” when we passed. The police markers of where he landed reminded me how life can change in an instant. I could sing a duet with Moses: “Relent, O Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants!” (v. 13).

Psalm 90 has this discouraging “you-live-and-then-you-die” tone to it—unless you hear the “Hallelujah Chorus” ringing behind stanzas like this: “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days” (v. 14). In this I hear echoes of the Westminster confession: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Moses would have had a different song if he knew what we now know: that Jesus changes things. And that includes death. Our earthly bodies may be as grass, vulnerable to the day’s heat and dryness (or to the nibbling of starved deer). But Christ has “destroyed death and has brought life and immorality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10). We have the assurance that “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21) and being with Him in Heaven will be better by far (v. 23).

Moses almost got it all correct. “May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us,” he wrote (90:17)—and indeed it does, for those who believe in Christ, and who express that through growing love and service in His name, for however many days allotted on this planet. And then, for God’s children—better by far!