Psalm 65:(1-8), 9-13 Commentary

As I write this in July 2023, it feels at times like the world is on fire.  Canada certainly has been on fire for a good bit in 2023.  Canadian wildfires burning thousands of miles away have been blanketing with smoke cities as far away as Washington D.C. and also in the Midwest, giving us almost life-threatening poor air quality on quite a few days.  Climate change can be a controversial topic in the church—though precisely why eludes me—but what no one can deny is that we are seeing spectacles few if any alive today have ever before witnessed.

In the Midwest and in Michigan where I live, we pivoted from the wettest year on record through early April of 2023 to a two-month period of the driest weather we have had of late leading to drought conditions.  We continue to see wild swings in the weather, stronger hurricanes and typhoons, rising sea levels threatening coastal communities, and more.

Maybe that is why reading the final five verses of Psalm 65 feels so at variance with what we are seeing all-too-often now.  Because here we get a lyric picture of a Creator and Providential God who lavishes the natural world with everything it needs.  Rain falls where and when it is needed, leading to bumper crops of food.  Verdant hillsides are dotted with healthy flocks of animals and all around them the whole earth is “mantled with grain.”  (Nice use of that word “mantle” too!)  The picture is idyllic.  The snapshot the psalmist gives us could almost be described a kind of Paradise, an Edenic vision where everything is in perfect order and harmony leading to robust harvests from an earth bursting at the seams with the stuff of life.

How do we understand this psalm in a world where, in many places and with increasing frequency, we see dried-up lake beds, smoky skies, and failing crops?  Well and of course, at any given moment in various places on planet Earth you could run across vistas that look about this perfect.  Certainly we can understand the conclusion of Psalm 65 as the way the world should be, as the way God created it to be in the beginning.  And certainly we can suggest that insofar as we can find potable water and sufficient food, these are gifts of God.

God desires this world to be as richly life-giving as Psalm 65 pictures it.  And when it isn’t, very often the reasons behind pollution and such are the doings of human beings run amok.  People, not God, belch smoke into the skies and threaten the ozone layer that protects life on this world.  People, not God, allow mercury and other toxins to seep (or to be directly dumped) into rivers and oceans.  People, not God, clear-cut Amazon rain forests and turn once beautiful vistas into a scarred-over moonscape.  If God is to be praised for all he brought forth in creation and for God’s ongoing providential ongoing acts of creation, then people are the ones who need to be in a penitential mode when forced to admit that the planet God handed over to Adam and Eve to tend and to nourish and to keep has been sullied by our sinfulness, our recklessness, our heedlessness.

Where is hope to be found in such a world?  In Psalm 65.  Because whether the earth we survey always looks as nourished and lush and lavish with water and provisions and fields and flocks as Psalm 65 presents to our imaginations, we know (as just noted) that this is God’s desire for the world he made.  And thus we can also know that God intends to redeem and restore this cosmos too and has already begun doing so through his Son, Christ Jesus our Lord.  The New Testament makes it abundantly clear that Jesus is not the Savior of human souls only but of also their bodies and of also the physical creation.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Colossians 1:15-17

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.  Romans 8:19-22

Since everything here today might well be gone tomorrow, do you see how essential it is to live a holy life? Daily expect the Day of God, eager for its arrival. The galaxies will burn up and the elements melt down that day—but we’ll hardly notice. We’ll be looking the other way, ready for the promised new heavens and the promised new earth, all landscaped with righteousness.  2 Peter 3:11-13 (from The Message)

Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say:

“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they were created
and have their being.”  Revelation 5:9-11

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ² down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ³ No longer will there be any curse.  Revelation 22:1-3a

Once in a while in this world we catch glimpses of a verdant, nourishing, and life-giving creation and when we do spy this, we are seeing a vision of how it should be but we also get a glimpse of how it will be.  And that is why Psalm 65:8 is so lyric and so right:

he whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;
where morning dawns, where evening fades,
you call forth songs of joy.

Illustration Idea

Stephen Ambrose’s wonderful book Undaunted Courage details the exploration of Lewis and Clark who had been directed by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the Western territories that would one day become part of the United States.  According to their journals, these two men and their team routinely ran across scenes in the natural world that would leave them gob smacked.  One day while navigating a river and having just come around a bend in the river, Lewis and Clark were startled to discover the water was clotted with some white substance.  There was a colossal amount of it.  Turns out these were the feathers of a gargantuan rookery of molting American Pelicans.

At other times the sky was so covered with flocks of Carrier Pigeons as to block sunlight (alas, those abundant birds would be extinct very soon).  They encountered herds of Bison so enormous, their hoofbeats thunderously shook the ground and today would probably have registered on the Richter Scale of a seismograph.

It is all a reminder of how Genesis 1 depicts God in creation: God never created just a few of anything but reams and reams of birds, of fish, of land animals, of stars and planets.  When God created the earth, he let it rip and created dazzling arrays of different creatures and in huge numbers as well.  And every time God looked at what God had made, he said the same thing: “That’s good!”