Psalm 50:7-15 Commentary

In an episode of the original Star Trek series titled “The Apple,” the crew of the USS Enterprise visits a planet that is ruled by a god by the name of Vaal.  One inhabitant of this planet named Akuta has what looks like a small antenna attached to his neck and it is through this device that Akuta receives commands and messages from Vaal.  Mostly what he receives are messages for when it is time to throw large quantities of food into Vaal’s giant mouth at the head of a cave no one can enter.  When Vaal is hungry, the people dutifully feed their god.  Of course it turns out Vaal is not a god but a malevolent machine that Captain Kirk ends up destroying as Vaal was trying to kill Kirk and company and destroy their ship in orbit.

But the basic premise of this episode—that gods require things, including food and other sacrifices—has a long background in actual history.  Many religions have had the premise that gods and goddesses need to be appeased, fed, and served.  Gods can be quite demanding and their needs must be met or else!  Back in the day Israel was surrounded by people who believed that to be true of their gods and since Israel had a tradition of sacrificing animals and birds to their God Yahweh at the Temple in Jerusalem similar to the sacrificial traditions of other religions in the Ancient Near East, it was likely tempting to assume that Israel’s God had needs same as the gods of other religions at the time.

Psalm 50 was written to clear up this confusion.  God needs nothing.  He really does own the cattle on a thousand hills, as an old hymn says, and is not served by human hands.  Nor does he need to be appeased.  He is the God of all grace and of lovingkindness who initiated his covenant with first Abraham and then on down the line because of his great love.  Yes, he can become angry at sin and evil but he does not need people to do anything to let his grace kick in.  He saves by grace alone.

So why did Israel sacrifice animals and birds if God did not get hungry and was in no need of appeasement from the human side of things?  Psalm 50 has a simple answer: Gratitude.  Thanksgiving.  Sacrifice did not curry divine favor but expressed gratitude for the divine favor that had already been shown and would be shown again and again.  So just because Israel’s sacrifices at the Temple might have looked a lot like what other people serving other gods also did, the truth was very different.

For whatever the reason, people all through history have struggled to remember this.  And that is surely still true in the Church today.  We all seem to have a hard time shaking the idea that what we do, how moral we manage to be, and the merit points we rack up are the real deal maker when it comes to being saved (or not being saved).  We sing “Amazing Grace” but as often as not we live “Trust and Obey” with the emphasis being on what WE do.  Somehow we think God grades on the curve and so long as we keep our grades up to a certain level, we are earning our own way to heaven.

“Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” an earnest young man once asked Jesus.  It was the wrong question but Jesus played along with it a bit to make a point.  “Keep all the commandments” Jesus as much as said.  “Done!” the man replied.  “Got anything else or can you just punch my ticket to the kingdom now?”  Jesus did have one other thing and it was the one thing the man found almost impossible to do and he walked away sad.

When we think we are working our own way up salvation’s ladder, Jesus will always have one more thing for us.  It won’t be the same in each case.  But if a pristine moral scorecard is how we view our getting into heaven, there will always be something—and usually more than one thing if we are honest—that would make also each one of us walk away sad.  “Who then can be saved?” the incredulous disciples cried out as they watched that moral paragon of a man walk away downcast.  “Oh,” Jesus replied, “it’s impossible.  Or I should say, it’s impossible for you to pull off.  But with God the impossible is possible because God is going to take care of everything for you.”

Our response to this is sheer gratitude.  That is the keynote of our lives now.  A grateful heart is why we try to live better lives, to lean into God’s commands, to follow Jesus down the path of true discipleship.  Our sheer thankful wonder over grace should be more than enough motivation to spur us to act and live in Christ-like ways.  And yet once again, we often see in too much preaching in the church that instead of promoting the beauty of grace as the spring of all that is good in our lives the old cudgel of guilt gets wielded instead.  Guilt over past failures and fears for divine retribution are too often a sermon’s bottom line to get people to straighten up and fly right.

Psalm 50 is a poem from another world and in truth it sounds very foreign to us modern people.  Few if any of us have ever witnessed the sacrifice of a cow or pigeon and we cannot imagine the time when Israel’s core place of worship looked and smelled more like a slaughterhouse than a church.  But the core concern behind Psalm 50 is something we do still know only too well.  We are pretty sure we need to bring something to God that God needs to get him to like us.  But no, Psalm 50 says, all God needs is your open and grateful heart.  God will take care of the rest.

Illustration Idea

C.S. Lewis was the master of analogies, metaphors, and similes and a lot of his best ones centered on questions surrounding how Christians get saved and how we are to think about our own moral conduct in relation to that.  Here are my top three such images from Lewis:

First, suppose a 5-year-old little boy goes to his father and asks him for $5 so the boy can buy his Daddy a gift.  The father happily gives the lad the money and later is thrilled to receive the gift.  Only a fool, however, would conclude that the father came out $5 ahead on the deal.  So for us: God gives us the funds via his Holy Spirit to live for him and is thrilled when we do.  But God does not thereby receive something he needed or lacked before time.

Second, when we see a pear tree bearing fruit on its branches, it is easy to focus on the fruit and forget about the roots.  We can see the branches but not the roots.  But of course no roots, no pears.  When we focus on the fruits we bear for God and assume that God likes us on account of what we produce, we forget that God alone gave us the roots by grace through which the sap flows to produce what the branches bear.  You never seen an upside-down pear tree with roots above and branches below the soil.  That would be ridiculous and so although it is easy for us to focus on the spiritual fruit we can see instead of the subterranean roots we cannot see, we need to keep matters straight as to what brings about what in our lives.

Third, a greenhouse is warm and is a wonderful environment for growing plants of all kinds.  But the warmth does not come because the roof of the greenhouse somehow attracts the sun and causes it to shine upon it.  First the sun shines and everything else is the result of something that happens completely outside of anything else the greenhouse roof can do.