Psalm 128:1

So here's the follow-up I promised to my little artwork a few posts down. I'm still not going to answer all the questions this stuff may bring up... or just not yet. Anton would be upset if I did.

So the designs were spurred on by my sermon on Psalm 128. My imagination was peaked by the first verse: "Blessed are all who fear the LORD, who walk in His ways." What does this verse say to us? What are we to learn of God through it?

I think this verse tells us of our appropriate relationship and response to God. I spent a good amount of time unpacking what it means to "fear the Lord" in my sermon, so I won't bore you with all that now (if you're interested, you can read it here, or listen to the mp3). But I suggest this fear is not a state of being scared, but rather a proper relationship with God where we respect Him as He is. That means that we have to let God be God.

I think we have a general tendency to only allow God to be who we want Him to be. We only accept or believe or submit to the aspects and characteristics of Him that we can handle. Essentially, we put God inside a box that we create, one with boundaries we can handle. Sadly, this means we are basically serving a God that is made in our image, made by us, instead of the other way around. And if this is the case, we are serving an untrue God.

So, to fear God, is really to accept that God is bigger than we can handle or understand. That is our right relationship with Him. In doing this, we let Him out of our box. It's quite simple to see where my graphic goes. I know, I'm simplistic. But I meditated over this passage and let my imagination take over, so I'm still thankful for what I was able to create (and it's a whole lot better than most of what I did).

Let us look back at the verse: "Blessed are all who fear the LORD, who walk in His ways." I'm not going to get into what kind of 'blessing' I think God desires and provides for those who hold a right relationship with Him (again, listen to the sermon if you desire), but I will say that the 'walk in His ways" is a picture of our appropriate response. The psalmist is using walk God's path as a metaphor of responding to a right relationship with God. You can see my own picture of this.

I think when we contain God within our boundaries, we put ourselves ahead of Him. We say that we're more important. We become bigger than God. When we let God be God, we remove our box and serve the whole and true God, and our only response is surrender and humility toward Him. He is bigger, and much more important than us.

And that's that.