Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-035 Sunday 18 Feb 2001

Reading: PSALM 50 – THE GOD OF ALL THE EARTH

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

Praise God because, needing nothing, he chooses to desire our worship.

Once more, mankind needs reminding that God is the only God (See Job 38:4). He has no need of sacrifices or burnt offerings ‘for every animal of the forest is mine and the cattle on a thousand hills’ (v 10).

To his own people God says, ‘You can bring me nothing that is not mine already, but call on me and I will deliver you’ (vs 7-15). Perhaps this was the psalm that inspired John Milton’s poem On His Blindness – ‘God doth not need either man’s works or his own gifts’. There is nothing that God’s people can bring him to increase his wealth or buy his favour.

As for the wicked, they had better abandon any form of religious observance (v 16), lest they add hypocrisy to their list of sins. The wicked are those who incline more naturally towards self indulgence than towards God and the details of self indulgence are listed here as theft, adultery, deceit, slander and disloyalty, but these are only examples. Saddest of all, perhaps, is that when God did not judge their evil on the spot, they accepted this as licence to add to it.

The fact is, we all belong in the ‘ungodly’ half of this psalm. We all incline toward the evil of self indulgence, and should be beyond the pale of God’s recognition. All our religious observances should cause God to recoil from our hypocrisy.

Yet the good news is that it is not so. We cannot buy God’s favour, yet any thank offering we might clumsily, unworthily or utterly ineptly seek to make, as long as it comes from some wish to seek God and not to enhance our own reputation, will ‘prepare the way so that I may show him the salvation of God’ (v 23).

We cannot buy our way into the kingdom, but there is One who has paid the price.

– Ken Edgecombe

Copyright Scripture Union, 2001