Abundant in power: A reflection on Psalm 147
This post is the next in my 2023 Lenten series, where we’re following Jesus into the wilderness on his journey to his death and rising, and looking at places in our hearts and our broken world that are in need of resurrection and renewal. You can see the posts in the series so far right here. I’m glad to be on the pilgrimage with you.
A few weeks ago, the Book of Common Prayer had us in the early chapters of Exodus, where Moses and Aaron continue to come before Pharaoh, telling him that their God commands him to let his people go. Pharaoh, as you already know, refuses, and so God brings plagues upon his kingdom so that “you shall know know that I am the Lord” (Ex. 7, among others). I can’t decide if it’s the plague of frogs in every nook and cranny (I am afraid of any and all amphibians and reptiles.) or the one where dust would cover your skin (The mere thought of being that dirty is raising my heart rate.) and then turn into boils (I have a pain tolerance of 0—even after giving birth four times.) that is more likely to have done me in. Well, actually, maybe it would have been the gnats.
The stories of God’s action on behalf of his people recorded in Exodus—the Passover, the parting of the Red Sea, the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, Moses on the mountain of the Lord—have a strong grip on my imagination regarding his omnipotence on display. And I think that’s good and right. After all, God says to Moses, “But for this purpose I have raised [Pharaoh] up, to show you my power; so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth” (Ex. 9:16). This is what God’s power can accomplish, and he wants us to know it.
In my lifetime, I have witnessed only a handful of events (that I can discern, anyway) that I would call a concentrated, swift, decisive act of God’s power—and at the time those were painful and bewildering as much as they were wonder-filled. What am I to make of the other thousands of days of my life where there was no clear evidence of the miraculous?
I came to adulthood in the Don’t Waste Your Life!, Do Great Things for God!, Pray Big Prayers Destined to Fail without God’s Intervention! era. My generation was discipled by this movement to believe that seismic was sacred, that gradual was emaciated and laking in God’s power (and, obviously, in personal faith). I wonder if what would be considered “waste” and what qualified as a “great thing” or “God’s intervention” was much more formed by the vision of the American Dream as that the Kingdom of God.
Often, Big Answers to Impossible Prayers! and a Successive Train of Great Things! are what we expect his power to look like in our own lives. Or perhaps more accurately, that’s what we wish it would look like. I want God to be in the earthquake or the mighty wind or the raging fire, not the still small voice. I want displays of power that split my life into a “before” and an “after.” I want something obvious, some swift action, something flashy that can bolster my faith without requiring me to slow my pace. I think we sometimes fool ourselves into believing that these un-missable mighty acts will enable us to have life-long confidence in his goodness, favor, strength, love, sovereignty. But I’m afraid Israel’s wandering in the desert just on the heels of the plagues and miracles would warn us otherwise.
God’s power isn’t all seas parting in a matter of hours and death angels passing over in a night. Sometimes his power is forty years of daily manna in the desert, without even once forgetting to provide a double portion on the day before the Sabbath (Ex. 16).
In God’s kindness, the psalter assigned Psalm 147 on the same day that the frogs showed up in our Old Testament reading. After all the longing, praise, fury, possibility, hatred, beauty, lament, hope, anguish, blessing, cursing, remembrance, angst, confusion, and joy that the psalms record, Psalm 147 is part of the crescendo of victory that concludes the recorded songs of Israel.
Psalm 147:5 proclaims: “Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.” But the mighty acts of power recalled by the psalmist look quite different in Psalm 147 than in Exodus.
Here, God’s power is shown in steady, sustained, steadfast action:
Healing and binding up (v. 3)
Naming (v. 4)
Lifting up (v. 6)
Preparing (v. 8)
Growing (v. 8)
Taking pleasure (v. 11)
Strengthening (v. 13)
Blessing (v. 13)
Making peace (v. 14)
Filling (v. 14)
Sometimes God acts swiftly, decisively, in ways that we would call miraculous, as we see in Exodus or in Jesus’s miracles in the Gospels, or his glorious death and bursting from the tomb. But even these are not isolated displays of power. They are evidences of his continuous power, directed toward us from before time began, as Paul says in Eph. 1. This power has sustained his people and the cosmos throughout the long years. To me, this is no less miraculous.
His power is so often displayed in ways that require us to wait on the Lord, to be still and know that he is God, and it is his power alone that gives us eyes to seek him amid all the things within us and outside us that would avert our eyes, that we might notice his face shining on us. We are invited into an intimate revelation of his power—to “prepare a sacrifice before him and watch,” day after day after day (Ps. 5).
That we could somehow journey from death into life, darkness into light, that we could be transformed into the image of Christ, that we could desire to love God and our neighbor and not just ourselves, that we could learn to receive with joy, confidence, and hope a kingdom that is right now hidden from our eyes…is nothing short of a miracle borne by the inexpressible, never-stopping power of God. The slow work of God is no less miraculous. Perhaps it just requires that you abide in the presence of Jesus long enough to notice it.
Lord, in your mercy, renew us that we would recognize your power at work in and among us. Give us “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of you, having the eyes of our hearts enlightened, that we may know what is the hope to which you have called us, what are the riches of your glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of your power toward us who believe, according to the working of your great might that you worked in Christ when you raised him from the dead and seated him at your right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1).