Life’s One Safe Place
LESSON FOUR: LIFE’S ONE SAFE PLACE
LONGING FOR GOD:
STUDIES IN THE PSALMS
Text for This Study: Psalm 34:1-9
1. Although this brief study focuses on the first nine verses, please take time to read through the entirety of Psalm 34 before beginning your reflection and/or discussion of it. The superscription ties it to an event related in 1 Samuel 21, when David’s life was spared when a jealous King Saul was trying to kill him. We can’t be certain of its specific setting, for the superscriptions were added long after their composition.
2. Name some of the recent events that have shaken our sense of security in a fallen world. What sorts of reactions do we tend to have to these events? Jesus focused on one of the more common things we count on for security in Luke 12:16-21.
3. The background to God’s help that is praised here is not that people deserve it, but that we need it. So, David uses these verbs in vs.4-7 – “sought,” “look to (God),” and “called.” What does this tell you? What does it imply about human failure to look to God and ask for his help? Read the teaching of Jesus on this from Matthew 7:7-11.
4. What do you believe about angels in service to God’s people? Cf. Hebrews 1:14.
5. What is the “fear of the Lord” spoken of in verses 7 and 9? Define the phrase in your own words.
6. David gives his readers the assurance that God is ready to rescue those who call on him based on his own past experiences of God’s loving care. Think back to some of the times in your own life when you have seen God at work to help you through a great challenge. What do those memories tell you about God’s presence in your life today?
The Psalms were the hymnbook that Jesus and his first followers would have known by heart. Even in today’s world, where electronic gadgets have radically reduced the need for memorization, most of us can remember the songs, whether sacred or secular, that were popular in our childhood and teenage years. Jesus and his contemporaries would have known the Psalms inside out. Paul would have prayed and sung them from his earliest years. What Jesus believed and understood about his own identity and vocation, and what Paul came to believe and understand about Jesus’s unique achievement, they believed and understood within a psalm-shaped world. That same shaping, remarkably, is open to us today.
[N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), p.11.]