GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
PSALM 71:22-24
22 I will praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, O my God;
I will sing praise to you with the lyre, O Holy One of Israel.
23 My lips will shout for joy when I sing praise to you–
I, whom you have redeemed.
24 My tongue will tell of your righteous acts all day long,
for those who wanted to harm me
have been put to shame and confusion.
The harp was used for many occasions in the Bible, but the lyre (also called the “ten-stringed lyre,” Psalm 92:3) was a real noisemaker. In one place, David says that with it “I can wake the dawn” (Psalm 108:2). Perhaps a few readers might remember a fictional documentary (“rockumentary”) about a Rock band known as “Spinal Tap” in which actor Christopher Guest told Rob Reiner that his guitar volume goes all the way “up to eleven” instead of just to ten. Maybe David felt that way about his awesome ten-string. When we want to praise God, sometimes we just want to turn the volume up. Organists pull out all the stops. Singers shout. Joyful people laugh. And David turned it “up to eleven.”
In the beginning of this psalm, the old man prayed, “never let me be put to shame” (71:1). Now he praises God and can do nothing else but praise, because the Lord has reversed his complaint completely.
He asked God to “turn your ear to me” (71:2) and now he opens his mouth in praise; his lips shout and his tongue tells of God’s righteousness, which was the path of deliverance (71:2). Now he will tell of God’s righteousness and his righteous acts all day long.
His enemies spoke against him, and therefore against his God (71:10), but by the word of God, the will of God, the mighty deeds of God, they have been undone.
Our author shouts and sings the praise of God at full volume and beyond, and in so doing, he shows what our eternal deeds will be hereafter in heaven. We will do nothing in eternity but praise God with every act, every deed, and every word. We will hide nothing, not even in the deepest recesses of our dreams, nothing at all of which God will not be aware—and nothing at all for which we could ever be ashamed. Everything we will think and do will conform to his holy righteousness. We will be like God—not in power, not in authority, not in splendor, and not in majesty, but in our sinlessness (thanks to Christ), in our sweetness (in obedience to his will), in our holiness (cleaned by the blood of the Lamb of God), and in our joy for all his work in our place. We will belong to God—God’s with an apostrophe, but not gods without one. That was the Devil’s mistake, and by the glory of the resurrection it will never be and can never be our mistake. We are protected by the blood of the holy cross. We are cherished in the bosom of Christ. We are gripped in hand of God, and that firm grasp will never let go.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota