Psalm 65

Psalm 65, another short Psalm of David. Goes like this,

Well, this is obviously a very prayerful, praiseful sort of a Psalm. He begins just praising God, starts with praising God for forgiveness. He says in verse 3, “When iniquities prevail against me…” That’s a fancy way of saying, when I fall to sin, what happens? He says, You atone for my transgressions. And the word, atone, here means to cover sin and its effects, and its effects. To atone. Okay? David is thankful, thankful to the Lord. Even when I mess up, You atone, You take care of me, You cover my sins.” He says in verse 4, “Blessed is the one you choose and bring near, to dwell in your courts!” And in David's mind, he's talking about Israel. Blessed is the nation that You bring near and the people of that nation that You draw to Yourself and so forth. But in a larger sense, we understand this to be true for all those who have come to faith in the Lord and become children of God. There's a blessed condition for those of us who have been chosen to draw near. And then, as David moves on in this Psalm, his praise doesn't stop with God's work among the Israelites. Notice he says in verse 5, “By awesome deeds you answer us with righteousness, O God of our salvation, (then he calls Him) the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas;” Notice that? And then look again in verse 8. He says, “so that those who dwell (look at this,) at the ends of the earth are in awe at your signs.” In other words, God is…and when the Bible talks about “the ends of the earth” or the ones who are the farthest away, He's not necessarily talking about geographical distance, but it’s included in the idea. But it means the unreachable, those who are away from You, those that are the farthest from You. Israel being the closest, but these other nations being the farthest. He says, so that even those who dwell the farthest away are going to be in awe at all the things that You do. ---

He begins to talk in those final verses about how God has revealed Himself in creation. Look at those last verses, 9 through 13. I mean, good grief, he talks about enriching the earth with water! Do you ever…do you think about that very often? We have been hearing very, very good news about the snowpack in the mountains around our area here. I guess February was like one of the wettest months on record. I saw that at Bogus Basin they were…was it Bogus? Yeah, I think so. They were celebrating a hundred inches of snow at the base of the mountain, which they said they hadn't had since 1940, so, it's been an amazing water year here, this early spring, is it too early to call this early spring? I'm calling it early spring. We're calling it, all right? You can tell everybody I said so. We got really good news. I mean, it's better than when we hear some of those years, well, the snowpack is pretty low. Not this year! Wow. It looks like it's going to be a good water year. But have you ever thought…do you think about that much that God enriches the earth with water? I like the way David says it. We just expect it. We've become so casual about things like that most of the time, even living here in the desert. I mean, when we're thirsty we just go turn on the tap. But God enriches the earth. The hydrological cycle of the earth is constantly refreshing, constantly I mean… It's really amazing. I don't know if you've studied that whole hydrological cycle of rain falling from the clouds, and watering the earth, and then evaporation, and then up into the clouds again. And just the cycle going over and over and filling the oceans, flowing to this, flowing to there and it just keeps going. He says, providing the grain. God provides the grain, softening the earth with showers so that they can plant their crops, blessing it with growth. Crowning the year with bounty, girding the hills and pastures with joy, clothing the meadows with flocks. I know it sounds rather poetic, but it's neat. Decking the valleys with grain...So, what is David doing here? He's saying, even to the ends of the earth people are going to be in awe when they see what You've done. Notice that? When they see what You've done. Paul writes in Romans chapter one that the heavens are literally speaking. (Romans 1:18-32) And he says that creation is such that it declares the Lord, and that, for that reason, men will be without excuse when they look at creation and they see how beautiful…And the more we've learned, scientifically speaking, the more it seems impossible to think that this just all happened. Do you know how many things had to come into being with just our one planet so that life could exist on this planet? I mean, it's astronomical to think about all of the things that had to happen in just the exact right way. Any one of them being off by just a little and life could not be sustainable on this planet. God made this planet to sustain life for us. He created it that way and the more we learn about it, the more you have to choose to say, I refuse to believe it. Not because I can't believe it, I just refuse. That's a theory I'm not willing to even entertain. Right? What the Bible has to say. This Psalm is a celebration of the goodness of God. It's a beautiful Psalm. It just recounts both His spiritual and His physical blessings that have been poured out upon us.