His Powerful Name; His Awesome Promise

Saturday of the 22nd Week in Course 2023

The overall impression one can get from this very brief Gospel from Luke is that the Pharisees have nothing better to do on the Sabbath than find fault with how other Jews keep Shabbat. In this case, it was not a violation of Torah to eat the grain on Shabbat, but the Pharisees were interpreting the taking of grain from the growing plants as harvesting, which was a violation. Here the Son of David, Jesus, appeals to the actions of David many centuries earlier when he got showbread from the priests for his hungry band of warriors. Jesus, Son of Man and Son of David, is master of Shabbat. The next passage in Luke actually shows Jesus in action on another Sabbath, healing a man with a withered hand. And that act of love and mercy does what? It infuriates the scribes and Pharisees. Some people will take offense at anything a prophet does, even doing good.

Our psalm today is an appeal to God for salvation. When we pray this, we ask God to save us “by your name.” What does that mean? The hashem, the name of God, was YHWH, which was voiced in reading as Adonai, or Lord. God’s name is considered powerful, and the Messiah’s even more so–Jeshua means “YHWH saves”, exactly the point of this psalm. When we pray this psalm we give thanks to God’s name, to His power, for goodness. Remember, He looked on all He had made and found it very good. So we need to learn the goodness of His creation and His mighty deeds. I find it helpful to write what I find of God’s goodness every few days in my journal.

But that’s not the end of the story, isn’t it? We look forward at the end of our lives to participating in a New Creation, the very Kingdom of God and of His Christ, the Kingdom of Heaven. God is invisible and almost all the time we have to deal with uncertainty about His doings. We infer the greatness of God from what we see and experience. That requires continual practice of faith, a divine gift in our lives. But since we have been reconciled by the death of Christ to each other, to creation, and especially to the Father, we can look forward to being presented to the Father as holy, blameless and irreproachable. In His presence we will constantly sing praise to the Trinity forever. That’s a promise made in the OT and fulfilled in Christ.