Psalm 104:24-34, 35b Commentary

Let’s stipulate that the primary aim of preaching is not to condemn people or hurl about accusations and judgments.  The primary aim of preaching is to proclaim the Good News that just is the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Even so, skipping over Psalm 104:35a as the Lectionary apparently would have us essentially do seems a bit over the top, a clear effort to edit the Bible into a kinder, gentler piece of literature.

Of course even if we just take Psalm 104 as a whole, we would have to admit the first part of verse 35 is an odd aberration in the context of the whole poem.  This is a psalm that lyrically celebrates God’s creation and God’s abiding superintending of that creation through God’s Spirit.  (Clearly this is why Psalm 104 is appointed for Pentecost Sunday.)  The verses assigned by the Lectionary are the summation of far more specific and detailed celebrations of many parts of the created order: clouds, sun, moon, stars, birds, oceans, mountains, lions, and more are singled out for their splendor, for all the ways these features of the world showcase God’s creative imagination and overall majesty.

What’s more, the conclusion of the poem highlights that God remains integrally involved in this world.  Do we and all creatures have air in our lungs?  It is because God has breathed it into us.  Do we have food to eat and good things to drink?  It is because God has opened his divine hand to give us these gifts.  If you take God out of the equation, we all die.  That is how dependent on God’s providence we are according to the writer of this 104^th psalm.  And again, since the language of the psalm correlates that to the presence of the Spirit of God, this fits Pentecost well.

Of course, we know that the writers of the Old Testament had no notion of God as Triune and so although they knew God was also a spirit or that God possessed a part of Godself that could be described as God’s spirit, they did not envision a separate Person who along with two other divines Persons comprise the one true God.  Hence if you use a translation of the Bible (like the NIV I usually reference) and read in something like Psalm 104 the word “Spirit” with a capital “S,” we know that is the translation team’s reading New Testament Trinitarian theology back into the Old Testament and so treating “spirit” not as a feature of God but as the name of the third Person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

We could debate how legitimate that is as a translation decision.  But let’s go with the traditional notion that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the authors of the Bible told more than they actually knew.  Their intuition that God had a spirit can be seen as an anticipation of the later revelation that there is a Person who is the Holy Spirit.  If so and if we use this psalm to help us celebrate Pentecost, then we may actually be able to widen out our Pentecost perspective.

We tend to think of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost principally as the source of power for the Apostles to proclaim the Gospel.  The fact that feet-of-clay Peter stood up that day boldly to proclaim the Gospel was example #1 of this.  We see the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit as also the power of God at work in the Church to nurture the Fruit of the Spirit as well as to equip people with all manner of spiritual gifts and charisms whose source is the Holy Spirit.

That is all accurate and biblically/theologically true.  However, Psalm 104 invites us to see that the Holy Spirit is more than just all of that important spiritual stuff.  The Spirit is our very life.  The Spirit is why we breathe, why we have good things to eat and drink, why we have birds to watch and whales to see and beauty to quicken our pulses in the created world.  Our awe and wonder at all that is what motivates the outburst of praise at the end of Psalm 104 as well as the promise that our praise and worship of God would go on forever and ever.

This is why verse 35’s sudden imprecation for sinners and wicked people seems to come from out of nowhere in this otherwise upbeat poem.  The sheer abruptness of its inclusion here is cause to wonder if it really belongs here and so maybe skipping over it makes as much literary sense as it does any attempt theologically to not let ourselves go to such dim places of casting judgments.  At the very least its inclusion does beg the question of why the author put it in there in the first place and then left it in there too even after perhaps many edits and re-writes of the psalm.

We likely won’t get anywhere speculating on the reasoning of the original author.  But if verse 35a is as inspired by the Spirit as the rest of the psalm, then God must approve of this being there.  Perhaps the reason has something to do with the fact that sinners and the wicked do not view creation the way the psalmist does.  They see the awe and splendor but are not moved by it to look for a Creator to whom to direct the praise and thanksgiving that is fittingly due to God.  They do not see air and food and water as gifts but maybe think they earned all that or are somehow entitled to it all.  And perhaps that just frustrated the psalmist.  It is so wrong to miss seeing what is what and Who is Who in the cosmos.

In the end we cannot celebrate the Spirit of God at Pentecost or how that Spirit is depicted in Psalm 104 without simultaneously acknowledging that there are consequences for not embracing all that.  Even on the original day of Pentecost when the people who had been cut to the heart by Peter’s bold sermon cried out “What shall we do?” Peter told them plainly: Repent.

Celebrating the Spirit as the very source of not just our spiritual fruits and gifts but of our very life cannot be done without knowing there are consequences for not knowing that Spirit and giving due thanks to God by that same Spirit for the life God’s goodness enables.  Dwelling on such judgment need not be the principal focus for our preaching but neither can sermons ignore or by silence de facto deny the reality of wickedness and the steep consequences of it.

Illustration Idea

The preacher Heidi De Jonge recently posted a blog on the Reformed Journal that highlights a book by Dacher Keltner titled Awe.  What science and research have of late discovered on the place of awe in our lives and the effect it has on us seems to fit quite well the awe-full sentiments in much of Psalm 104.  There is much to learn here that could be included illustratively in a sermon on this lyric poem and its celebration of God’s rich tapestry of creation.