Daily Meditations

Psalm 148:12 All people should praise the Lord! The call to “Praise the Lord” now goes out to every man, woman and child on the planet. We are all encouraged to bring our offerings of praise and to offer them gladly, to our Creator, to the One who is in control of our individual and corporate fates, who made us and who regulates the day we will be born and the day we will leave planet earth. There is only one kind of person who will fulfil this requirement, it is the one who acknowledges and believes that there is only one, true God; that YAHWEH of the Bible is the supreme Being in the universe and therefore is the only God who is worthy of our praise and obeisance. That belief surpasses the requirements of religions and faiths around the world, it is fundamental to the security and longevity of mankind, without this God and our allegiance to Him, the human race has no chance of survival and will collapse upon itself and eventually be destroyed. Only this God can save us, only He has t...

Psalm 148:11 All rulers should praise Him The emphasis of the Psalm shifts subtly and significantly. Now that the praises that the Lord is due have been ascribed to all created things, now that we have seen that they do His bidding and thus they glorify their Maker, it’s time to think “human” again. If all of the listed elements, forces and creatures are willing to “Praise the Lord” and in so doing contribute to the health and prosperity of the planet, what about men? In particular those men and women who owe Him the most for they have risen to thrones and position of power and wealth in the world, surely these people owe the Lord God the greatest honour and respect? Sadly, and I barely need to enforce this point, they are the ones who seem least likely to give the Lord glory for what they have achieved or for the honour and prestige that have been granted to them. Kings, princes and rulers on earth are exhorted to praise the One who exalted them, and they are also ordered to encourage...

Psalm 148:10 Creatures praise their Creator Our survey of the created world now embraces living creatures, a number of them are lIsted here,  “wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds .” Once again, we are being reminded that songs of praise emanate from these creatures and join with all other natural objects and forces in giving glory to the Lord. It’s so easy to listen to the sounds that all animals make and to break them down by function; “Oh, that deer is calling for its mate, or, that cow is mooing because it is hungry.” But how do we know? I have studied birds for over 50 years and listened to many explanations of bird song. According to scientists, warblers migrate to the UK and sing their beautiful melodies to attract their mates in spring. That theory held out until the same species were tracked into deep African jungles where they spend the winter months, and it was discovered that they sing identical songs outside of the breeding season. Why does a s...

Psalm 148:9 Mountains and hills and trees  The psalmist is growing in excitement as He surveys the earth and embraces the notion that the created world praises the Lord. We’ve already looked at some of the aspects of the created world whose function is to represent the Lord and in so doing to gain Him glory and praise. We’ve visited the ocean depths and pondered the weather! Now we are to lift up our eyes to the mountains and hills, and then to survey the trees that cover the earth from the mighty cedars to orchards and fruit plantations planted by men. All of these gloriously beautiful and dramatic additions to creation have one primary objective and that is to  “Praise the Lord. ” We, as a human race have taken all of the natural wonders and turned them to our benefit and forced them to serve us. It would be a crazy world where we were unable to use wood for construction or to pick apples, pears, oranges and the rest, from our fruit trees. But, in so doing we should learn fi...

Psalm 148:8 The elements do His bidding! This verse gives us a clue as to the nature of the praise that is offered to the Lord by elemental forces and the inanimate objects that are the fundamental building blocks for the created world. The writer lists a number of weather features and then explains that “They  do His bidding .” Literally this means that they obey His Word. In Psalm 147:15 we read,  “He sends His command to the earth; His Word runs swiftly.”  We need to realise that what gives God the greatest glory, what please Him above all else is that we “ do His bidding.” It’s time to forget about climate change and focus on the One who guides and administers the weather, in this instance – lightning and hail, snow and clouds and stormy winds. If we take the Word of God literally, and I see no reason why we should not, then it clearly declares that all of these forces are controlled from above, that nothing is left to chance, the weather patterns across the world are...

Psalm 148:7 Looking beneath the surface! Well, we’ve enjoyed eavesdropping on the praises of the angels and the heavenly bodies, the waters and all inanimate objects in creation, now it’s time to take a dip into the oceans! The sphere of life that is explored here is the ocean depths and the psalmist calls out songs of praise from the creatures that inhabit these dark, secret places. In Genesis 1:21 we read, “ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds  …” In Psalm 74:13-14 we saw that the primeval, chaotic waters were depicted as a many-headed monster that the creator God overcame, He is the same Lord who parted the Red Sea to make a path through for the Israelites as they fled from Egypt. The Bible suggests that these waters were all part of God’s creative purposes and that it was He who placed living creatures within them. What cannot be argued is that the oceans and seas al...