Let them know that the Lord alone
is the Most High over all the earth
[Psalms 83]
Yesterday, on Tuesday morning prayer meeting, I meditated on Exodus 3:7-8: “The LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware of their sufferings. So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite.” I thought about God's work of salvation for us, centering on the six verbs in these two verses: “seen,” “heard,” “concerned,” “come down,” “deliver” and “bring them up.” I applied these verbs to my church grandmother Mrs. Jang who passed away: God saw her pain, heard her cry our, ‘God, take me to heaven,’ knew her pain, came down and delivered her from the pain and led her to the land of promise, heaven. When we consider the work of this God, we cannot but confess that our God is truly a good God. He is the God who wants to show us His goodness like this. In other words, our God is the God who reveals Himself.
If we look at Psalms 83:18, the psalmist is asking God like this: “Let them know that you, whose name is the LORD-- that you alone are the Most High over all the earth.” Based on this word, I want to meditate on the prayer of the psalmist who wanted only the Lord to be known as the Most High over all the earth. I would like to receive two lessons that God gives by meditating on how only the Lord is known as the Most High over all the earth. .
First, the Lord is knows as the Most High over all the earth by protecting us, His people.
Last year, at the New Year Eve worship, I blessed all the members of my church with three things with Aaron's benediction words of Deuteronomy 6:22-26. Among them, the first blessing was the blessing of God’s protection. I had been praying for God to protect us from sin, from evil, and from Satan. At the same time, I encouraged my church members to hold onto the words of Psalms 121:3-8: “He will not allow your foot to slip; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel Will neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD is your keeper; The LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun will not smite you by day, Nor the moon by night. The LORD will protect you from all evil; He will keep your soul. The LORD will guard your going out and your coming in From this time forth and forever.” Why is God guarding us and protecting us without sleeping or slumbering? The answer can be found in Psalms 83:3: “With cunning they conspire against your people; they plot against those you cherish.” The reason why God guards us and protects us is because we are His people and His cherish ones. Here “those you cherish” means that we are the ones whom the Lord cherishes in His heart (the ones whom He has in His heart). We are the ones God has in His heart. That’s why we are under His protection. We are God’s treasured possession: “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession” (Deut. 7:6).
The reason whey God guards us and protects us, neither slumber nor sleeps, is because we not only His cherish ones but also His sheep. Look at Psalms 83:12 – “who said, "Let us take possession of the pasturelands of God.” Here, “the pasturelands of God” refers to the land of Canaan (Park). The wicked tried to invade the land of Canaan, where the Israelites, the flock of God, lived and tried to make it their own. Pointing to the land of Canaan where the Israelites reside as God's pasturelands implies that God is thinking of the Israelites as His sheep. The Lord, who is the Shepherd, is the Lord who loves us enough to lay down His life for us, His sheep (Jn. 10:15). He is God who guards us and protects us. The Lord, who is our Shepherd, cherishes us in His heart. We are the sheep whom He loves to His death. He guards us and protects us without sleeping or slumbering. Therefore, the Lord is making known that only the Lord is the Most High over the earth.
Second and last, the Lord is knows as the Most High over all the earth by destroying the wicked.
The wicked men who were trying to destroy the Israelites whom the Lord had cherished in His heart, tried to attack His people, and also conspired against them and gathered together to plot against those God cherished (v. 3). What did they get together to plot against them? Look at Psalms 83:4 – “’Come,’ they say, ‘let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more.’” When these wicked people gathered together and plotted how to destroy the Israelites so that their name would never be remembered again, they plotted with one mind (v. 5). Someday, as I think about the word from Acts 4:25, I remember the words that Herod and Pilate, who were enemies to each other but joined together and became friends in order to oppose Jesus. If we look at Psalms 83:4, 5, the enemies who were against the Israelites also joined forces and gathered together to plot and destroy the Israelites. Not only did the wicked who were trying to destroy the Israelites gather together to plot, but also formed an alliance against them (v. 5). In other words, the wicked opened the united front. The enemies of the Israelites who were on the united front were “the tents of Edom, the Ishmaelites, of Moab and the Hagrites, Gebal, Ammon and Amalek, Philistia, wit the people of Tyre. Even Assyria has joined them to lend strength to the descendants of Lot (vv. 6-8).
At this time, the psalmist remembered the God’s work of destroying the enemies of the Israelites in the past, and prayed to God that God would do the same to the enemies of the Israelites as they did then and destroy them (vv. 9-11). For example, in verse 9, as the psalmist remembered the events in which Gideon destroyed the great army of Midian under God's help during the time of the Judges, and Barak's destruction of his enemies Sisera and Jabin at Gishon under Deborah's direction (Park), he asked God to destroy the enemies of the Israelites. A further analysis of the psalmist's petition against the enemies of the Israelites can be summarized in two ways:
(1) The first prayer content is ‘Let the enemies of the Israelites be put to shame’: “Cover their faces with shame so that men will seek your name, O LORD. May they ever be ashamed and dismayed; may they perish in disgrace”(vv. 16-17).
Here, the psalmist asked God that the prayer that the enemies of the Israelites to be put to shamed is a prayer that the plan of the wicked to destroy God's chosen people would fail (Park). And through that failure, he prayed that the wicked would find the name of the Lord. In other words, the psalmist asked God for the enemies of the Israelites to repent and return to God as their plan to destroy the Israelites failed.
(2) The second prayer content is ‘Let the enemies of the Israelites to be destroyed’: “Make them like tumbleweed, O my God, like chaff before the wind. As fire consumes the forest or a flame sets the mountains ablaze, so pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your storm.”
This psalmist's prayer, who wanted to drive out the wicked who were nothing before God by the storm of the Lord, implied that the wicked were like chaff before the wind. This implies that if God judges the wicked by blowing them away with His storm, they are bound to fly away. Our holy Lord makes known that He alone is the Most High over al l the earth by judging the wicked. By revealing His holiness and His righteousness, God is the God who makes known that only the Lord of the whole world is the Most High.
Our God is the God who reveals Himself. He is the Most High over all the earth. Only the Lord is the Most High of the world. When the Most High Lord came to this very low earth and died on the cross, the tree of curse, He not only made known the holiness and righteousness of God to the whole world, but also made known His great love, grace, and compassion to the whole world. We are saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who was punished on the cross in the wrath of the God for our sins and for us who must be destroyed forever. We are exalted by the death of the Most High Son of God on the cross. We have become God's precious and honored children. And we are still being led by the Lord toward that high heaven. We must leave this world and enter into heaven while praising the greatness of the Lord as much as possible until we die.
As I think about Mrs. Jang who praised God until she passed away,
James Kim
(Desire to sing “How Great Thou Art” until I die)