Word Live: Story Time
As I look back on my life, I bring to memory the events and relationships that have shaped me the most. I offer them to the Lord as part of my thanksgiving and worship.
Bible passage
Psalm 114
1 When Israel came out of Egypt,
Jacob from a people of foreign tongue,
2 Judah became God’s sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.
3 The sea looked and fled,
the Jordan turned back;
4 the mountains leaped like rams,
the hills like lambs.
5 Why was it, sea, that you fled?
Why, Jordan, did you turn back?
6 Why, mountains, did you leap like rams,
you hills, like lambs?
7 Tremble, earth, at the presence of the Lord,
at the presence of the God of Jacob,
8 who turned the rock into a pool,
the hard rock into springs of water.
Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Explore
For many societies and cultures, the meaning of life is narrated through stories and symbols. Myths, legends, heroes and villains are remembered in verse and song. For the people of Israel, their sense of vocation as being a people chosen by God (v 2) is regularly rehearsed throughout the Old Testament. And this identity is inseparable from God’s mighty acts in creation and history, particularly in the epic story of the Exodus.
This hymn uses highly poetic imagery to capture his sovereignty over nature as he frees people from slavery and brings them into freedom. Creation is astonished to witness it. The Red Sea and River Jordan are terrified (v 3) while the mountains and hills skipped like rams and lambs (v 4). Faced with such power, the earth is summoned to tremble at his presence (v 7).
The church has continued this rich tradition of singing redemptive history in hymns and worship songs. The apostle Paul urges people in the church in Ephesus to sing to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs as they give thanks for Jesus (Ephesians 5:19).
Author
Gethin Russell-Jones
Respond
As we continue to worship God, let’s speak this psalm out (or even sing it if we’re feeling musical), giving thanks for his mighty deeds in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Deeper Bible study
‘Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!’1
As a child, I derived great pleasure from my skipping rope. It brings back happy memories of high-spirited abandon!
Our psalm takes us back to the Exodus from Egypt, when the Lord rescued Israel from slavery – and it is equally high-spirited and full of skipping! It tells of a people made to serve God (vs 1,2). It tells of waters repulsed, of mountains shaken (vs 3,4); again, the waters repulsed, the mountains shaken (vs 5,6) and a world made to serve God’s people (vs 7,8).2 With the psalm’s simplicity goes a sense of exultation; it draws the reader into desiring to skip for joy too. Between implied references (vs 3,5) to the crossings of the Red Sea and – at the other end of the Exodus – the Jordan, comes the earthquake at Mount Sinai (v 4), when God gave to his people his covenant demands and made them his ‘treasured possession’.3 This was a significant and solemn moment. It was the start of their special relationship with God, so it is appropriate that nature itself is described as skipping with joy, yet also trembling before the awesome presence of the Lord (v 7).
We, too, who have been invited into a relationship with God through Jesus, naturally desire to praise him and to express our joy because he has rescued us from the slavery of sin. Older readers may not turn to skipping, but we all have ways in which we can show our love and gratitude to the one who has saved us. We do well to tremble before him, too. Worship includes reverence and awe, for ‘our “God is a consuming fire”’.4 That fire was unleashed on his people at the time to which Obadiah refers, because they had lost sight of who God really is. Let us not make the same mistake.
How do you express your joy and gratitude to God for all he has done for you?
1 Joachim Neander, 1650–80 2 This kind of poetic structure is called ‘chiastic’ 3Exod 19:5 4Heb 12:29
Author
Vivien Whitfield
