God’s Word for You
Psalm 77:10-15 You redeemed your people
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, October 29, 2022
10 Then I said, “This is my grief:
The right hand of the Most High has changed.”
11 I will remember the deeds of the LORD.
Yes, I will remember your wonders from long ago.
12 I will meditate on all your work,
and ponder all your deeds.
God is the governor and ruler of the world. Bible writers often talk about God’s “right hand” as the way that he shows his authority on earth. “If I settle on the far side of the sea,” David says in Psalm 139, “even there your hand will guide me; your right hand will hold me fast” (Psalm 139:9-10). And the prophet says: “He thunders and the waters in the heavens roar. He makes storm clouds rise from the ends of the earth” (Jeremiah 10:13). But here the powerful right hand of the Lord has “changed.” In what way? The Lord had proclaimed himself to Moses: “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7). It seemed to Asaph, the writer, that the Lord’s patience with his people had finally come to an end. Idolatry, unbelief, questioning the word of the Lord. What deeper sins could Israel commit? This is why the Lord’s hand had changed from Israel’s defender to Israel’s punisher.
Yet, Asaph says: “I will remember, I will meditate, I will ponder.” His faith is not gone, even if his happiness has been crushed and his hope is ground down into the dust of grief. He knows about the ancient deeds of the Lord; some of them are not so ancient that the people had no knowledge of God’s protection and blessing at all. Who in all of Israel didn’t know about David’s victory over the giant, the way he defeated the king’s enemies when he was the greatest captain in Saul’s army, and how he had led Israel to their victory over the Ammonites—all the while giving full credit and glory to God? Again and again David turned the hearts and voices of the people to praise God for what he had done: “Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who trust in you” (Psalm 9:10). “You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing” (Psalm 16:2). And he taught the people to pray: “Forgive my hidden faults. Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me” (Psalm 19:12). Asaph himself took David’s prayer, “For the sake of your name, O Lord, forgive my iniquity” (Psalm 25:11) and quoted it in a psalm of his own: “Deliver us and forgive our sins for your name’s sake” (Psalm 79:9).
O, for a king who taught his people to fear, love, and trust in God above all things! What a blessing to the nation! What better truth to ponder and to meditate upon! How miserable the nation must be whose leaders twist the word of God into something for their own advantage on the one hand or ignore the very existence of God on the other.
13 O God, your way is done in holiness.
What god is as great as God?
14 You are the God who does wonders.
You display your power among the peoples.
15 With your arm you redeemed your people,
the descendants of Jacob and Joseph.
Before Asaph turns to the great event of Israel’s past, the exodus from Egypt and the miracles God performed for his people, he dwells on the nature of God himself.
“Your way is done in holiness.” Everything God does is done in holiness and perfection in the same way that everything done by man is done while he breathes air or while his heart pumps blood. Asaph asks poetically, “What god is as great as God?,” but he knows that there will always be those human beings whose hearts walk the line between faith and idolatry. So Asaph makes the contrast more sharply: “You are the God who does wonders.” Wonders or miracles are those signs God performs to make his majesty known or to confirm his revealed word. As Jesus said: “If I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20). Miracles come from God’s omnipotence because they transcend the physical laws of the universe (which God made), and therefore he must be a willing part of their occurrence.
We see one of the Bible’s best examples of this by reading Psalm 33:7: “He gathers the water of the sea into a heap. He puts the depths [of the sea] into storehouses,” and comparing it with Psalm 78:13: “He split the sea and let them cross through it. He made the water stand like a wall.” The usual way of things is that God stores water in the seas, rivers, lakes, and of course in the sky (“the storehouses”), but he can part of the waters to allow his people to be rescued from bondage. Then Jesus showed his divinity in a completely unique way by ignoring the physical properties of water and just walking on top of it as if the stormy swells were nothing but hills covered in grass (John 6:19). Surely here was “the God who does wonders.”
Then Asaph turns to the account of the exodus: “You redeemed your people.” But Asaph does this with his own heart beating in his chest. He never forgets the northern tribes, and he has a special affection for the whole nation, “Jacob and Joseph.” Since he lived in the time of David and Solomon, he would be aware of the unrest between tribes (especially King Saul’s tribe of Benjamin versus David’s Judah), but he would never know about the division of the kingdom and the eventual loss of the northern tribes. It would be Obadiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah who would ache the most, at least in their writings, for those tribes.
“You redeemed your people.” The redemption of sinners from the punishment for their sins is all the work of Christ in a single sentence. He removed our debt by paying it himself. Our confession illustrates this: “If one pays a debt for one’s friend, the debtor is freed by the merit of another as though it were his own. Thus the merits of Christ are bestowed on us so that when we believe in him we are accounted righteous by our trust in Christ’s merits as though we had merits of our own” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession). And this was the confession of the ancient church in lock step with the Holy Scriptures as well: “Jesus was prepared for this very thing, so that when he appeared he might redeem our hearts (which had already been paid over to death and given over to the lawlessness of error) from darkness, and that by his word he might make a covenant with us. For it is written how the Father commanded him to make ready for him a holy people redeemed from darkness” (Epistle of Barnabas 14:5-6).
He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and the power of the devil, not with gold or silver but with his holy, precious blood and with his innocent suffering and death (Small Catechism, Second Article).
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.