Psalm 29 Commentary

Last week the Year A Lectionary had us in Psalm 147 where God’s power and presence were depicted as being inside snow storms and icy blasts.  This week Psalm 29 makes the same move but shifts the weather to thunderstorms.  And if you think God’s awesomeness can be seen in a wintertime blizzard, that’s nothing compared to the power of storms.

Even as you read this sermon commentary, there are upwards of 2,000 thunderstorms going on across the earth. On average, each day 45,000 such storms occur (makes you wonder how we ever get through a day without a storm). They are among the most powerful forces we know. In the simplest sense, but also in perhaps the most boring sense, a thunderstorm is little more than an atmosphere stabilizer. Acting like a giant heat machine, a thunderstorm forms when there is a lot of cold air sitting on top of a lot of warm air. In order to re-balance the atmosphere, a thunderstorm pumps the warm air upward and the cold air downward until the atmosphere evens out. Once that happens, the thunderstorm has achieved its stabilizing purpose and it dies out. In that sense thunderstorms exist only to destroy themselves.

But along the way these storms can and do produce some of this planet’s most stunning marvels because that shifting around of cold and warm air can produce incredible winds. Here and there an outflow produces a microburst that can puff down toward the ground at 100 mph–we’ve all seen those grim pictures of what such wind shear can do to airplanes. In addition to wind, thunderstorms also produce rain and even ice. The storm’s strong currents can supercool water particles to well below freezing, and if enough of this ice builds up, it falls to the ground as hail–though usually no larger than pebbles, some strong storms have produced so much ice that it falls in chunks as large as a grapefruit.

But there’s more: the forces within thunderstorm clouds are so great that particles of energy smash into one another with enough wallop to exchange electrical charges. So some particles get stripped of electrons while others add electrons, thus producing both positively charged particles and negatively charged particles. Typically, the positive particles zoom to the top of the cloud and the negative ones sink to the bottom, creating a high-voltage chasm that equalizes itself through a fiery flash of lightning. Lasting only 30 microseconds, a bolt of lightning peaks out at 1,000,000,000,000 watts (one trillion) with a surface temperature of 20,000 degrees centigrade: that is three times hotter than the surface of the sun!

When Psalm 29 suggests that the people of God respond to such spectacles by crying, “Glory!”, that becomes almost an understatement!  I confess that I grew up with a fear of storms, particularly ones that could grow violent enough to spin off destructive tornadoes.  I got that from my Mom who was very afraid of wild weather.  Our standing joke was that whenever a storm was starting to form, you knew it might be serious when Mom put her purse at the top of the steps heading to the basement where we might need to take shelter!  That level of anxiety was maybe extreme but given what we just noted on the nature of storms, a healthy respect for them is warranted.

And so is a due reverence and respect for the Almighty God who controls that weather and whose majestic might in seen through such weather spectacles.  But let’s not miss the polemical aspects of Psalm 29.  This psalm throws down the gauntlet of challenge to some of the other religions of the Ancient Near East–religions that claimed that the forces of nature are gods and goddesses in their own right.  Psalm 29 reveals the falseness of those idolatrous claims by saying that the God of Israel is the One who creates all those wonders. More, he’s the one who is greater than them all. So in a way you could read this psalm as a rebuke to those who worshiped the creation instead of the Creator.

Because in the end Yahweh is seen as seated in glory on his throne above it all. Though something of his glory and strength can be seen in the storm, all of that is at best but the faintest of hints as to his true grandeur. It is almost as though the psalmist points to the magnificence of the storm and then says, “If you think that’s something, you ought to consider the God who doesn’t even break a sweat in producing such wonders!!”

To keep the ultimate focus on God, this psalm begins and ends with pairs of verses that direct us to think about Yahweh. Verses 1 and 2 open the psalm with a call to render Yahweh alone glory. Then in conclusion verses 10 and 11 redirect us to the heavenly court of Yahweh, where he rules as the supreme King.  The problem most people have is they fail to see this God in their everyday lives.  And so the middle portion of this psalm, verses 3-9, serves as a kind of illustration. Verse 2 ends with a call to worship Yahweh “in the splendor of his holiness.” That sounds kind of abstract. What exactly is “the splendor of holiness”? Holiness seems to be an invisible quality. You can no more “see” holiness than you can see kindness. You can’t see kindness the same way that you can see blonde hair or a tree. Kindness needs to be embodied by someone for you to see it.  For Psalm 29 a roaring thunderstorm is the embodiment of God’s holiness, might, and grandeur.

And yet in the midst of all the noise in Psalm 29, in the end—in the calm after the storm in this case—we are told that Yahweh gives strength to his people and this, then, leads to peace.  Peace, not a noisy storm, is where the psalm concludes.  We end with not “peace and quiet” but rather the peace that passes all understanding, with shalom. Shalom is the sense that things are as they ought to be. In this case, it’s the sense that things between you and the Almighty One of the cosmos are all right. And how do you get this peace, this sense that everything is in plumb and in proper alignment? You get it, verse 11 says, because Yahweh gives strength to his people. And after all that we’ve seen in this psalm, that little line ought to deliver quite a few gigawatts of juice to your soul!

Illustration Idea

When storms approach—especially as they roar toward you over a body of water like Lake Michigan–it is astonishing how quickly the conditions can change. A chill wind kicks up as the thunderstorm begins its pumping effort to move the warm surface air up and the colder air down. Then flashes of lightning become visible, the thunder gets louder. The waves kick up and start to wash over the pier. Hail begins to bounce off the beach like popcorn. Trees may fall, lightning may split the taller trees unlucky enough to become the equalizing point for the storm’s electrical currents. And if you’ve ever been dangerously close to a lightning strike, then you know that Psalm 29’s description of the ground shaking is no exaggeration.  The truth is, people rarely remain standing on a beach as the storm gets serious.  Instead what you see is people fleeing, ducking for cover and shelter even as beach umbrellas and inflatable water toys go flying in all directions!  Psalm 29 does not need to convince us that storms are powerful.  Most of us know that truth by experience as we are more likely to cry out “Yikes” long before we get around to this psalm’s cry of “Glory!”