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- [00:06]
A
Hey, you're listening to A Year in the Bible with Daily Grace. We love reading through scripture this year with you, and we hope that you're loving it, too. If you are, we'd love for you to leave us a review wherever you are watching or listening to this podcast. We like reading those reviews and we like sharing them here on the podcast with others. So we're in the book of Psalms C.J. today, we're covering Psalm 81 through Psalm 85, and we're gonna focus in on one particular Psalm. One is that.
- [00:33]
B
Exactly. We're going to focus on Psalm 83. And today I want us to consider what it means to have righteous anger. So the psalmist is angry because people are plotting and scheming evil. And oftentimes we might think that the Christian thing to do is to ignore evil because we know that God has it in the end. So we end up being apathetic. We end up sort of turning a blind eye or ignoring it. And I think this psalmist, and I think as we're going to see that that's just not really the good Christian response or maybe the Christian response. So our psalmist, instead, he pleads with God. He says, God, do not keep silent, do not be deaf, do not be quiet. In other words, act and listen to our pleas and do something about the evil that we are witnessing. And even more than that, in pretty extreme language, the psalmist says something like, as a fire burns a forest, as a flame blazes through mountains, so pursue them, that is the evil ones with your tempest and terrify them with your storm. Let them be put to shame and terrified forever. Let them perish in disgrace. And I think probably for a lot of Christians, including me, this is probably alarming language to think about talking about evildoers in this way. But I think what the psalmist does is it shows us that the anger that we do have needs to be directed towards God, trusting in him to deal with it rather than being apathetic or rather than taking things into our own hands.
- [02:04]
A
So, yeah, I'm glad that we're focusing in on this psalm and that you're drawing this out. I'm curious, for someone who's reading this psalm today, how do we apply this to our lives?
- [02:17]
B
Right. So I think, first of all, it is a very Christian thing to despise evil. I don't think being apathetic is the best Christian value. I think we should care deeply about evil that we witness in the world, and it's a very Christian thing to wish that evil were no longer, and that God deals with it. But I think we need to be careful in wishing away evil in the way that we wish it were destroyed and done away with, because we would probably be swept up in God's righteous judgment along with it. But I think as we work our way through the Bible and we ultimately come to Christ, we can filter our anger through Christ. And what I mean is, is that it's Christ who destroys evil, it's Christ who cared about evil more than we ever could, and it's Christ who cared so much that he came to take it upon himself on the cross and he conquered it when he rose from the grave. And I think that this psalmist is content to trust God. And we can learn a lot from Christ's humility in the face of evil, but also the psalmist's passion and Christ's passion wanting to destroy evil. So in other words, Christ came to do the work of His Father, knowing eventually that all would be made right. And he trusted the Father's plan. He didn't call down legions of angels to destroy, even though to destroy evil, even though he could have. But he destroyed evil through prayer, through humility, through kindness, by bringing people into God's kingdom, but ultimately by taking evil upon himself and pointing to a future time when the Father would make all things right. So here we have sort of an attitude adjustment in this psalm and through Christ's example and how we should be considering evil and treating evil in the world around us.
- [04:03]
A
That's super helpful, C.J. thanks for breaking that all down for us. I'm going to draw our attention to Psalm 84, which is where I had a takeaway for us today. There's a pretty common or well known verse, verse 10, where it says, better is a day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. And that day in your courts is speaking of time in God's presence. And that verse, I have like sung it in songs growing up in the church. I've seen it in different places. You know, many, many times the challenge that comes to me from that verse is, am I treasuring God's presence in my life? Am I taking it for granted? Am I not even really spending time? Of course I'm always in his presence, but spending time really meditating on that, communing with him in. And so I don't know, that was just a challenge to me. Am I treasuring God's presence in the same way the psalmist does in Psalm 84? Love reading through the Psalms. We learn so much from each one and we covered like a range of emotions in these psalms today. But I'm really thankful for you breaking down these chapters for us and we'll be back to talk about more tomorrow.
- [05:20]
B
Good deal.
- [05:22]
C
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