I Thank You
Week of March 25, 2012
Bible Verses: Psalm
107:1-9,33-38-43.
Lesson Focus: This
lesson is about expressing thanks to God for His many expressions of goodness
toward us.
Invitation to Give Thanks: Psalm
107:1-3.
[1] Oh give thanks to
the LORD, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever! [2] Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he
has redeemed from trouble [3] and
gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and
from the south. [ESV]
In its own setting Psalm 107 is a praise song
of the regathered people of Israel after their Babylonian bondage. Thus Psalms
105, 106, and 107 form a trilogy. Psalm 105 recounts Israel’s experience from
the time of God’s covenant with Abraham to the people’s entrance into the
promised land; Psalm 106 tracks their unfaithfulness during that same time
period and reflects the years of their exile to Babylon; and Psalm 107 thanks
God for their deliverance from that exile.
[1-3] The psalmist begins by urging
the people of God to thank Him, not for any specific favor, but simply for His
goodness and unending love. He calls God Jehovah, using the name that stresses
God’s eternal, unchanging essence, conveying the idea that God’s goodness is eternal
and unchangeable. One of the great distinctions between God and man is His
goodness. And the distinction holds not only between God and sinful man, but
also between God and man in his original created state of innocence. Before
Adam and Eve ever sinned, they were distinguished from God by His goodness,
which is vastly different from the goodness of any created thing. The
seventeenth century Puritan Stephen Charnock, in his magnificent study of the
attributes of God, points out four chief senses in which God’s goodness differs
from man’s. (1) Only God is originally good, good of Himself. All created
goodness flows out of the fountain of God’s goodness. But God depends upon no
other for His goodness. (2) Only God is infinitely good. A boundless goodness that
knows no limits, a goodness as infinite as his essence, not only good, but
best; not only good, but goodness itself, the supreme inconceivable goodness.
(3) Only God is perfectly good. He is good without deprivation, because He has
the whole nature of goodness. Therefore the goodness of God is the measure and
rule of goodness in everything else. (4) Only God is immutably good. Other
things may be perpetually good by supernatural power, but not immutably good in
their own nature. This great truth of God’s unchanging goodness and love should
be a cause of praise and thanksgiving for all whom He has redeemed. Do we, privately and in congregation with others, focus
often enough simply on God’s goodness seen in itself? Or do we think mostly of
ourselves and the benefits of God’s goodness to us? There is nothing wrong, of
course, with thanking God for what He has done for us – indeed the psalmist
shortly gives some examples of benefits for which people should thank Him – but
do we not reach higher in worship when, leaving aside every thought of
ourselves, we praise God solely for what He is in Himself?
Reasons to Give Thanks: Psalm
107:4-9.
[4] Some wandered in
desert wastes, finding no way to a city to dwell in; [5] hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within
them. [6] Then they cried to the LORD in
their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. [7] He led them by a straight way till they
reached a city to dwell in. [8] Let them
thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children
of man!
[9] For he satisfies
the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things. [ESV]
God’s goodness is
shown in both cursing and blessing. The psalmist describes four kinds of people
who owe God special thanks for delivering them from distress. First [4-9] he
writes of those who were wandering homeless and suffering from hunger and
thirst. To their cry for help, God responded by leading them by a straight way to a city where they
could dwell and satisfy their hunger and thirst. Second [10-16] are those who
were chained up in prison at hard labor, at whose cry the Lord brought them out of darkness and the shadow
of death [14] by breaking their
bonds apart. Third [17-22] are fools who suffered illness so severe that
they loathed any kind of food [18];
when they cried God sent out his word
and healed them [20]. Last [23-32] are those who despaired of their lives
in a great storm at sea; in response to their cry, the Lord stilled the storm
and led them to a safe harbor [29-30]. Then
they cried to the Lord in their trouble [6,13,19,28] is one of two
recurring themes in these four choruses, or stanzas, of the psalm. The other
is, Let them thank the Lord for his
steadfast love [8,15,21,31]. All of these four groups faced grave danger
and cried out to God; He delivered them all; and they all are exhorted to thank
God for His deliverance. All of the groups also apparently had rebelled somehow
against God. The second group rebelled
against the words of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High [11],
and the third were fools through their
sinful ways, and because of their iniquities suffered affliction [17]. The
psalmist names no specific rebellion in describing the first and fourth groups,
but it seems most likely that they, too, suffered because of their sin. Of the
fourth group, the sailors, the psalmist emphasizes that God sent the danger
[25], implying that He was punishing them for something. But what of the first
group, the homeless and hungry? Nothing in the passage clearly tells us that
they suffered punishment or chastisement from God. But their wandering in the
desert reminds us of the Israelites wandering in the desert due to their sin.
Indeed, the whole psalm seems designed to recall, from Deuteronomy 28 and 30,
the threats of curses in response to disobedience to the covenant and the
promises of blessing in response to obedience. If this is true then two lessons
appear: first, the distress each group of people suffered was a punishment for
sin, and deliverance must have come as God’s response to repentant, humble
cries for help. Second, the psalmist must intend by describing the four groups
of people in distress, and by describing God’s curses and blessings, to further
His chief design, which is to depict God’s goodness in His dealings with His
people and to urge His people to be thankful for it. Both cursing and blessing,
then – both the distress in which His people found themselves and the
deliverance He wrought in response to their cries – demonstrate God’s goodness
and love. Punishing sin is, in other words, as much as act of grace as
pardoning and saving the repentant, for it can move sinners to repentance,
which is a necessary prerequisite to pardon. Regenerate people whose lives are
conformed increasingly to the moral image of God expressed in His Law rejoice
at both judgment and mercy because both declare the goodness and love of God.
Response of the Thankful: Psalm
107:33-38,43.
[33] He turns rivers
into a desert, springs of water into thirsty ground, [34] a fruitful land into a salty waste, because
of the evil of its inhabitants. [35] He
turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water. [36] And there he lets the hungry dwell, and they
establish a city to live in; [37] they
sow fields and plant vineyards and get a fruitful yield. [38] By his blessing they multiply greatly, and he
does not let their livestock diminish. [43]
Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things; let them consider the
steadfast love of the LORD. [ESV]
In the first two parts of Psalm 107, the introduction [1-3]
and the overview of the diverse deliverances of God’s people [4-32], we have
seen how God delivers His people from the many dangers, toils, and snares of
this life. Now we will see how he also brings us home, anchoring our souls in a
safe harbor at last. We have a home in God here and now, a home enriched by our
having Christian brothers and sisters. Even more important, we have the
assurance of a happy, eternal heavenly home hereafter. Psalm 107 tells how God
gave a fruitful harvest and increased the numbers of the people and their
livestock but then also allowed the harvests of these same people to fail and
their numbers to decrease. In fact, it repeats this cycle twice in the last
section: hard times [33-34], blessing [35-38], hard times again [39-40], and
blessing again [41-42]. At verse 33 there is an abrupt change in tone and even
(to some extent) in subject matter. The first half of the psalm rejoices in the
deliverances accomplished by God and calls on the people who were delivered to
praise and thank God for it. The final section reflects in a distant, settled
way on God’s sovereign workings by which His people are sometimes lifted up and
sometimes brought low. The first few verses uses images, noting how God turns rivers into a desert [33] and a desert into pools of water [35], fruitful land into a salty waste and parched land into springs of water
[34-35]. As far as the people were concerned, the psalm says God blessed them,
and their numbers greatly increase but also that their numbers decreased, and
they were humbled by oppression, calamity and sorrow [38-39]. The difference in
tone and content is only a case of the psalmist’s honesty, depth, and spiritual
sensitivity being greater than our own. He is acknowledging that not everything
the people of God experience can be described as a deliverance and be received with utter joy. Life has its pain
and tragedies, even for Christians. Yet in spite of them, we can and should
praise God for His wisdom and goodness. We can do this by seeing God’s wise,
loving, and sovereign hand even in hardships. The psalm ends with a humble
acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty over all things and all circumstances,
reminding us that even the bad things of life are in God’s hands.
There are at least four things we can learn from the
biblical truth that God sends sorrow as well as joy. (1) Reverence for God.
Since God’s ways are not our ways and His ultimate purposes in life are usually
beyond our finding out, we must revere Him and be humble. There is nothing
wrong with trying to understand the judgments, paths, and mind of God. We are
encouraged to do so. But we should never forget that God’s ways will always be
beyond our full understanding and that many times we will simply have to clap
our hands over our mouths and wait to see what God will Himself do or say, if
anything. (2) Looking for things that are eternal. Looking beyond the
seen to the unseen and eternal is faith. Abraham is one example of those with
faith. He was called out of his home city of Ur to go to a land that God would
give him. He never actually owned that land, except for the small part he
purchased as a burial plot for his wife, Sarah, and his life was not easy even
when he was living where God had told him to go. There were famines,
disagreements with his nephew Lot, danger from marauding desert tribes.
Difficulty was all right with Abraham because he knew that the best blessings
he was promised were not to be enjoyed in this life but in the life to come.
Hence the author of Hebrews sums up Abraham’s lifetime walk of faith by saying,
he was looking forward to the city that
has foundations, whose designer and builder is God [Heb. 11:10]. Although
there are ups and downs in this life, the end of all things for God’s people is
not down but up. We can know this and look for it because we know that God is
both good and sovereign. God loves us, and because He does He comforts us,
preserves us, and brings us through even the hardest experiences of life. Psalm
107 ends on this note, for it calls us to consider
the steadfast love of the Lord [43]. (3) Calling sinners to repentance.
Although the ways of God in this life are not always within our understanding,
nevertheless we do discern some important patterns, and one of them is that
arrogance, strife, self-love, greed, and other forms of wickedness are
generally punished, while virtue is frequently rewarded. This fact enables us
to argue that we inhabit a moral universe governed by a moral God and to warn
sinners against persisting in behavior that will eventually result in their
eternal condemnation by God. The psalm’s last verse is telling not only the
righteous but also everyone to wise up and consider how things actually are.
(4) Thanksgiving. Believers should thank God for being what He is and
acting as He does – and not only when things are going our way or we have it
easy. The apostle Paul suffered enormous hardships in his efforts to take the
gospel throughout the known Roman world, including an imprisonment at the end
of which he was beheaded. But it was this very apostle who wrote I have learned in whatever situation I am
to be content [Phil. 4:11]. What matters most in life is not the number or
severity of the perils from which we are delivered, but whether we are actually
in the hands of that greatly loving God. If we are in His hands, then we can be
wise by considering His steadfast love
and then praise him as Psalm 107 does.
What lessons are there in this psalm for the
wise to heed? The first lesson is that, no matter what our condition, we must
depend on God’s merciful provision for even the most basic things in life. The
second lesson is that suffering is rooted in sin, particularly as rebellion
against the words of God, sin that provokes God’s wrath in punishment. There
have been times in the history of Christianity when nearly everyone assumed
that any suffering must be justly deserved punishment for the sufferer’s sin.
That assumption sometimes stood in the way of compassionate response. Some suffering
is not punishment for sin, as Job’s life demonstrates. But in this psalm the
four groups of people described by the psalmist all suffer due to their
disobedience to their covenant God. And their punishment by God is meant to
drive them to repentance so that they can then experience covenant blessings.
Should we not then, when we suffer, sincerely ask God whether our distress is
chastisement for sin, and if it is, put no confidence in ourselves but cling
wholly to God’s mercy for deliverance? The central theme of the psalm, though,
remains this: Give thanks to the Lord,
for he is good. Thanksgiving should be one of the chief traits of God’s
people. It should be often on our lips, always in our hearts. In every
circumstance, we should think, “What is there here for which I can thank God?”
And we should not rest until we have identified it and rendered thanks to Him.
Are the people of God troubled, cast down, or weary? Are they lifted up in
prosperity, full of energy and joy? Are they free or confined, ill or healthy?
No matter their condition, Let them thank
the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to the children of man!
[8].
Questions for
Discussion:
1. Describe God’s goodness.
What are the four chief senses in which God’s goodness differs from man’s,
according to Stephen Charnock? Concentrate this week on thanking God for His
goodness.
2. Both cursing and blessing
demonstrate God’s goodness and love. Why is that statement true? How have you
seen this truth in your own spiritual journey?
3. Today we often hear believers,
when they are blessed by God, say “God is good!” But this psalm teaches us to
say “God is good!” both when He blesses us and when He curses (or disciplines)
us. Why should we do this? How does His discipline show His goodness?
4. List and meditate on the
four things we can learn from the biblical truth that God sends sorrow as well
as joy.
References:
Psalms, Volume 2, James M. Boice, Baker.
Psalms 76-150, Steven Lawson, Holman Reference.
Psalms of Promise, E. Calvin Beisner, P&R
Publishing.