Psalm 91:9-16 Commentary

If you have been reading my sermon commentaries here on the CEP website over the years, then you have no doubt sensed that I hold a very high view of Scripture as God’s Word.  I take it more than seriously and I reverently honor its inspired nature and believe it is infallible in all the Bible intends to teach.  Still and despite what we read at the end of Psalm 91, I would not recommend using these words as an excuse to be rather careless when, say, walking along the edge of a cliff or along a roofline (or while sitting atop a church’s steeple let’s say) on the assumption your faith will mean you won’t fall to your death should you slip.

Likewise if you run across a lion or a cobra, I’d refrain from waltzing right up to them much less jumping on the lion’s back or dangling your foot near the cobra’s mouth.  I am fully aware of what Psalm 91 says on these prospects but . . .

Of course, I am helped in this position by Jesus himself.  After all, we well recall the occasion when no less than the devil himself used these verses as a reason to suggest Jesus fling himself off the highest point of the Temple in Jerusalem so that God could send his angels swooping in to keep him from hitting rock bottom.  I am sure as the Word of God made flesh Jesus believes Psalm 91 just fine but even he knew those words do not exist in Scripture as a reason to test God out on such matters.

But as with so many other psalms in the Psalter that make similarly sunny promises of divine protection, how are we to understand this?  What do we make of the fact that there appears to be not a caveat or a proviso in sight in the actual text of this poem?  Instead we get highly confident sounding sentiments here that when you really make the Most High God your refuge and shelter and strength in this life, you are immune from all harm whether that harm were to try to come at you from the outside or via some set of circumstances like falling off a cliff or bumping into a predator out on the veldt somewhere.  Protection and also long life are promised to any and all who fit the bill of someone who trusts the God of Israel just this much.

Well, some may claim that if you are someone who is not thus insulated from all harm, that proves retrospectively that as a matter of fact you have not actually made God your shelter and strength and refuge even if you thought you had.  If someone gets hurt, if some would-be believer dies young, we can suss out the reasons easily enough: weak faith.  Of course, conclusions along these lines have been used for a very long time to make people feel terrible about themselves, their faith, their true commitment to God.  And I don’t think that is why these words are in the Bible in Psalm 91.  And anyway there are all those Psalms of Lament in this same Hebrew Psalter that bear witness to the unhappy fact that sometimes—often times even—people whose faith could not be firmer suffer harm, sickness, danger, and even death.

So maybe these words are aspirational.  Maybe they represent one of those “All things being equal” lines of thought.  All things being equal and in an ideal world, this is just how it would go for people who believe in God but we live in a world where all things are not equal.  We live in a broken and fallen world that is still reeling from the consequences of sin’s entrance into God’s otherwise good creation.  We live in a world where God cannot do all the things the end of Psalm 91 goes on and on about on every possible occasion without taking away free will, without turning the life of every person into some pre-scripted drama that perhaps even God does not desire.  Because when every person in the world becomes a pre-programmed automaton, then the ability to generate even true love is taken away.  And that includes true love for God.

Maybe.  So perhaps we would arrive on more solid ground if we inferred from Psalm 91 that all of this reveals to us something of the heart of a very loving God.  The serenity these words could generate, the leaning definitively in the direction of shalom we see here, this is what God most truly desires for all of us who bear the divine Image.  And in this life as God in Christ works through all our brokenness and fallenness toward a day when the kingdom will fully come, if for now things do not always look as happy and sunny as the picture painted by the end of Psalm 91, the existence of a psalm like this one tells us that there is one thing we can know for sure: Even when things don’t look or work out quite this way, that most certainly does not mean God has given up, God has been defeated, God is powerless to bring a better cosmic day by and by.  No, our faith tells us these are the desires of God we see sketched in this psalm.

Does this line of thought hold up?  Is it a satisfying way to honor the truth of the psalm while acknowledging the difficulties we all encounter from time to time that do not land us in the same places Psalm 91 seems to promise?  All of us who preach on something like this passage need to answer that for ourselves and alongside the people who hear us preach.  One thing is for sure and as we mentioned above: this psalm is not here to make us feel bad about ourselves or to cast doubt on the sufficiency of our commitment to God.  This psalm is here to foster hope.  And so we preach it just that way.

Illustration Idea

Lewis Smedes once wrote that we should avoid being fake or hypocritical and just admit that deep down what each one of us wants is some enjoyment in life.  Deep down we hope that the day may come when people will stand up and cheer over something we did.  We want the bells to ring and the Hallelujah Chorus to sound for us, too.  Smedes even said that anyone who claims otherwise, anyone who says he could care less about whether or not anything good ever happened to him, such a person is not only being dishonest but is probably a bit of a nasty person, too.

Our great God created us for joy and one day, as C.S. Lewis predicted, joy itself will be the serious business of heaven.  So as Psalm 91 reminds us, already now we can be confident that our God wants us to feel joy.  God wants us to make him our very home, the place we want to be more than anywhere else.  And he wants us to flourish and be protected in the ways the end of Psalm 91 describes and if not quite all of that is possible in this lifetime, there is an eternity in which to make it happen in the kingdom of God.

The CEP website also has a commentary on Psalm 104:1-9, 24, 35c:

from 2018: Leonard Vander Zee: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2018-10-15/psalm-104-1-9-24-35c/