Day 268: Psalms 48-50 | Read The Bible In A Year | Bible Study with Commentary by Dr. Manny Arango

Welcome to the Bible Department podcast, powered by Arma. We are walking through the entire Bible in a year. You can go to the description or thebobledapartment.com to download a reading plan and join the journey. (reggae music) Family, welcome to day 268 here on the Bible Department podcast. Today we are looking at Psalms 48 through 50. It's gonna be incredible if you've already done the reading. Then you are ready to dive into this episode if you have not done the reading. Then you are not ready. You gotta stop the video, pause the audio, go read these three Psalms. I personally find reading the Psalms to not just be inspiring, not just be like an easy read, like a light read, but to be a fun, enjoyable read who doesn't like reading poetry. So, do the reading and then come on back if you've already done the reading. Like every day we're gonna dive into context clues, nerdy nuggets and then a timeless truth because the point of reading the Bible isn't just to read a history lesson, it's to apply it to our personal lives so that we can grow in our faith. So, no further ado, let's dive into some context.

As you know, if you've been rocking with us for the last several days, especially as we've been in book two of the Psalms, we have been looking at Psalms that have been written by the sons of Korah. And the first two Psalms that we've got today, Psalm 48 and Psalm 49 were written by the sons of Korah, right here on the title on Psalm 48. It says a song, a Psalm of the sons of Korah, same on Psalm 49 for the director of music of the sons of Korah, a Psalm. However, once we get to Psalm 50, okay? Once we get to Psalm 50, that is going to change. Once we get to Psalm 50, we have a Psalm of Asaf. So, the heading is gonna change, which is a contextual clue that we've been using to try to figure out what is going on in the actual Psalms. Is there context that we can use that will help bring the message of each individual Psalm to life, okay? Now, although Psalm 49 is the last Psalm of the sons of Korah that we're gonna get for right now, it is the last Psalm of Book 2 of the sons of Korah, okay? But the Psalms written by the sons of Korah will return in the third book of Psalms, and we are gonna get those in Psalm 84, 85, 87 and 88. So, we got four more Psalms written by the sons of Korah that we will get to when we get to book three of the Psalms, and Psalms has five books.

So, kind of, I'm saying that as context, but it's kind of a nerdy nugget, but just wanna give you context, okay? Now, Asaf was a leading Levite in David's reign, okay? So, we got a lot of context for Korah or the sons of Korah. You may not have a lot of context for Asaf, but if you need context, okay? Asaf was a leading Levite in David's reign who was appointed as David's chief musician. You can read all about this in first Chronicles chapter 16, verse five, and second Chronicles chapter five, verse 12. When David reformed Israel's worshiped and formed the Levitical choirs, okay, he appointed a man named Asaf. Asaf, along with King David, was one of the architects of this revolution, a worship revolution. Remember, prior to David implementing music, worship was simply service and sacrifice, okay? Worship met that you sacrifice an animal and that you served in the tabernacle or in the temple, sacrifice and service. David revolutionizes worship and that revolution is still felt to this day. He adds a third S, which we know as singing, okay? So worship up until David's time was sacrificed in service, but David revolutionizes worship and adds this new thing called singing and Asaf is right there at the foundation of this shift while David is king. Asaf, along with King David,

was one of the architects of this worship revolution that we are still a part of. Can you imagine going to church and there being no singing, right? Honestly, when we think about the word worship, we don't really think sacrifice and service. In the modern age, we really think singing. We think music and we think singing. And so that is all because of King David and his chief musician, Asaf, okay? So that's context for Psalm 5. We also read in Ezra chapter 2 verses 41 that Asaf's descendants formed a company of singers and composers in a similar way to the sons of Korah and played a part of Israel's, played a vital part in Ezra's rebuilding of Judaism in the second temple period. However, Judaism had to be completely reimagined because their temple had gotten destroyed in the exile and so Ezra not just rebuilt Jerusalem in the wake of coming back after exile, but also reimagined what Judaism would be and gave us a lot of people think that Ezra is the final editor of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. So as was a massive figure, he's definitely on the Mount Rushmore of Old Testament characters, but doesn't always get that kind of credit or that accolade because I don't think a lot of people know exactly how foundational and formational Ezra is in reconstructing and rebuilding Judaism as a whole after the people come back from exile. All right, let's dive into some nerdy nuggets, okay? Jerusalem 48 is a psalm that celebrates Yahweh's defense of Jerusalem, okay? So the main focal point is going to be Jerusalem as a city and Yahweh's ability to defend and protect Jerusalem. Jerusalem is going to be the city of God, okay? So that phrasing is going to get used over and over and over again, that Jerusalem is the city of God. Now, if we want to create like a kind of a subgenre of psalms, this would kind of be

a Zion psalm that Jerusalem is really going to be known as Zion as the place where God dwells. And so I would say that this is a good Zion psalm. The first few verses highlight this in a big way, especially from verse four to four to verse eight. And so we get this idea especially, so we get this tension, okay? I'll kind of map it out for us and kind of explain what I just read and why I read these verses. There's this kind of idea, okay, that psalm 48 starting in verse four, okay? You can see this idea highlighted that this is a Zion psalm. Verse four says, "When the kings joined forces, when they advanced together, they saw her and were astounded. They fled in terror, trembling, seized them, their pain like that of a woman in labor. You destroyed them like ships of tarshish, shattered by an east wind as we have heard. So we have seen in the city of the Lord almighty in the city of our God, God makes her secure forever." Okay? So there's this idea. It's this Zionist principle that Jerusalem is the city of our God. Okay? It's the city of the Lord almighty. And since God dwells in the city, the dwelling of the Lord in the city is the defense of the city. Okay? Now, I'm going to kind of, this is also going to be a timeless truth, but we'll kind of introduce the idea here is that the people are singing this and this is true. Okay? Obviously the Bible's true. Okay? True, however, what's happening with this Psalm is that the people have too much faith,

too much confidence in the fact that Jerusalem can never be conquered. So what's going to happen when the Babylonians finally do see Jerusalem and do conquer it is that God stopped dwelling there because of the people's sins. And so this idea needed to be held in tension and it was not held in tension. They just kind of went from a religious idea, which is, hey, God established a covenant with us and if we're faithful to that covenant, God will dwell in our city and because God dwells in our city, it'll be defended to it doesn't matter what we do to what I would say. That's a religious idea. They then move to a superstitious idea and superstition begins to say, you know, it's almost like luck, it's no matter what happens, God is going to defend it. And once they move from religion to superstition, they begin to realize that no, God can stop dwelling here that the same way that God chose to dwell, God can chose to not dwell. And if he doesn't dwell, the city will be sieged and will fall and that's exactly what happened in history. Okay? So we have to take this Psalm, we have to take the idea of the ideal that's being sung about, which by the way, we always have to do that with music. We're singing about ideas, but we have to hold them in tension. Yes, the song says, God will heal, right? But sometimes God doesn't heal. So what is the whole truth? The whole truth is God is a healer, regardless of if you personally get healed. And even if you're not healed, that doesn't mean that he's not a healer. And I know that can be hard for people. We like to make extreme statements about reality, but the truth of the matter is that truth is typically found in the middle,

not in the extreme statement. So this is an example where the people are singing something about God that is true, but they've taken it out of tension. I'll talk about this in our timeless truth, that this concept right here that we see in Psalm 48, it's not incorrect, but it is incomplete. And sometimes when we have an incomplete truth, it can be just as harmful as an incorrect truth. Family, the weight is over. My brand new book, "Crushing Chaos" is out now and available everywhere books are sold. Literally today, I walked into a Barnes and Noble and I signed a bunch of copies at a physical location. So you can grab this book at a physical Barnes and Noble or you can go to a books a million, or Amazon, or anywhere books are sold and grab a copy. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective, if you understand that the beauty of scripture is actually knowing it in context, then you'll love this book. And if there's any chaos in your personal life, I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this book is gonna be a New York Times bestseller. I really do. I think we wrote a good one. I think you should get a copy today. All right, back to the episode. All right, let's go to Psalm 49 is a wisdom psalm.

You probably noticed that immediately, okay? That it sounds a lot like Ecclesiastes. Wisdom psalms are a whole genre of psalms, okay? Wisdom psalms can carry the themes and the language of wisdom literature. So books like Song of Songs, Joe Proverbs Ecclesiastes. Wisdom psalms are songs that teach, okay? So the song is teaching a lesson. And these songs give lessons to those who sing them. The lessons of wisdom, such as the fear of Yahweh, how to live in excellence, how to live in harmony with God's creation, and the contrast between the wise and the foolish life or lifestyle. Okay, this particular wisdom psalm focuses on a very similar theme to that of Ecclesiastes. Its instruction is a warning about the vanity of life, how fleeting life is. And the vanity of life that chases after glory and wealth but not wisdom. That is the big, big theme of Psalm 49. That if you chase after glory and wealth but not wisdom, then you'll be no different than the beast that perishes. This can be seen in the repeated stance of verses 12 in verse 20. Verse 12 and 20 say this. I'll read it out of my Bible. Verse 12, people, despite their wealth, do not endure. They are like the beasts that perish.

And then verse 20 says people that have wealth but lack of understanding are like the beasts that perish. Okay, that the psalm is really like wisdom and the wisdom literature is trying to communicate how important understanding really is, how important it is to attain wisdom and that money and wealth and glory cannot be compared to the real wealth and the real glory that comes with being a wise person. The message is really clear. Glory and wealth do not matter in the end. In the end, a human that strives only for those things dies just like any other animal. His riches and glory do not follow him in death. They do not matter at that point. Rich and poor, they die the same. True wisdom then is to look to God, the only one that may ransom my soul from the power of shield. Okay, what does God have the power to do? Ransom our souls from the power of shield. Only he can do that. Wealth cannot do that, riches cannot do that. Whatever glory you amassed while you were on this earth cannot do that. Okay, it says this in verse 15, "But God will redeem me from the realm of the dead. He will surely take me to himself." That's being contrasted, right? To a person who had a phenomenal life on earth was very wealthy, but then God did not redeem them

from the realm of the dead. And that leads us to the last psalm, Psalm 50. Okay, this psalm is very similar in theme to actually things that we see in the prophets. How sacrifice and religious rituals are useless for those who do not live accordingly. So the Psalm begins with an image of Yahweh. He's appearing and this is, we're gonna get a lot of Deuteronomy language here, okay? So let's go to verse four. Yahweh appears, okay? There's essentially a Theophany right here at the beginning of the Psalm. And then verse four hits, "He summons the heavens above and the earth "that he may judge his people." Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why do we have the heavens and the earth? Well, remember in Deuteronomy, when the people of Israel signed a Suzer and Vassal treaty with Yahweh, the witnesses of that treaty was the heavens and the earth. That's right. So the implication is clear. The witnesses from the Deuteronomy treaty, the covenant that the people of Israel make with God, those witnesses are back. Those witnesses return at this moment when Yahweh will call his people to account. And here's the question that the witnesses want to know.

Have they followed the terms and the conditions of the treaty that they made with Yahweh? That is why this language is here, okay? In the presence of the original witnesses, Yahweh testifies against Israel. And the test is the sacrifices and rituals that the treaty called them to fulfill. The test is not whether or not they do them, but whether they do them for the reason they were instructed to as a sign they were keeping the treaty. This is why there are allusions to the 10 commandments throughout the Psalm, okay? Verse seven, verses 18 to 20 are all a call back to the 10 commandments. Are they keeping the treaty as they sacrifice? Big, big, big question, okay? We can even get some timeless truths out of that. But here's our big timeless truth for the day, is this idea and I want to put it under the banner of incomplete versus incorrect. There's a lot of times where I hear things in church and what I think to myself is that's not incorrect, but it is incomplete, incomplete versus incorrect. So we've already touched on this earlier, but Psalm 48 verse eight says this, "As we have heard, so we have seen in the city of the Lord Almighty and Jerusalem, in the city of our God, God makes her secure forever." And then we get a little say law, okay? Verse eight, God makes her secure forever, okay?

And say law means pause. Think about that, meditate on it, consider it. And I would say that the people actually don't meditate on it, they don't consider it, they don't pause, they don't think, they don't dwell on that. They just sing it and had they meditated on it, they would have realized, yes, yep. You know what, in the city of the Lord Almighty and the city of our God, he makes her secure, for sure. Unless we rebel against the covenant, and unless we force him out, and unless we lose his presence and his power, and in that case, then yeah, Jerusalem can fall and we're gonna go off and eggs out, which is exactly what happened in human history. So a lot of times I think we create theology in church that is not incorrect, it's simply incomplete. An incomplete, biblical, theological, or even philosophical ideas have the power to do real damage. And so I want you to think, are there things in my life that are not incorrect, but they're definitely incomplete. Whenever I come across people who come from the word of faith movement, who believe in like hardcore, like if you have enough faith, anything can happen and anyone can be healed and anything can be attained, I'm like, man, that's not incorrect, but it's incomplete because there are people throughout the Bible who had a great faith who still suffered.

And so it's just incorrect, it's not incorrect, but it is certainly incomplete. And I think tension's hard for all of us, but if there's anything that I want you to get by watching and listening to this podcast every day, is that I hope I talk about holding two truths or holding multiple truths in tension quite often. And I talk about it a lot because honestly, when you read the entirety of the Bible, not just cherry pick your favorite verses, but when you read the entirety of the Bible, it becomes really, really, really clear that we have to hold multiple truths in tension if we're gonna engage with the Bible in a meaningful way. And that's not just true for the sons of Koro or for Asaph. That's true for you and I forever. Like we are gonna forever have to hold multiple truths in tension with one another because the Bible has multiple truths that we're gonna have to hold in tension. The Bible says that suffering is inevitable, but the Bible also says that God will rescue you from suffering. So which one is it? Well, sometimes it's, You've got to hold multiple truths in tension if you're going to live a life of wisdom. And I think since our middle Psalm today, Psalm 49 was a psalm of wisdom. It's good for our timeless truth to be one

that inspires and motivates us towards wisdom. All right, tomorrow we've got day 269. We're going to be in Psalms 51 to 53. It's going to be great. I've been loving our trek through book two of the Psalms. I'll be right here tomorrow. I hope that you're on a streak. If you are, I'm so proud of you. If you're not, come on, what are you doing? Let's go. Let's get on a streak. Let's start to rack up. Win after win after win after win after win. Guess what? You make it a part of your daily routine. You'll look up in a couple of weeks and you'll realize, wow, I'm on like a 30, 40, 50 day streak. All right, I'll see you tomorrow. I love you so much. Peace. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. If this episode was helpful, how about you leave a comment, share with a friend, and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. To learn more about the show, head to thebibledepartment.com. We'll see you right back here tomorrow. [MUSIC PLAYING] (clicking) [BLANK_AUDIO]