Psalm 115:3

Psalm 115:3

God does whatever please Him

The backdrop to this verse is, of course, the nature of who God is and where He dwells. Israel believed that their God was supreme over all the nations and that His dwelling place was upon the highest throne imaginable. If He was truly God, then there was no one or nothing greater than He, His dwelling place must be above the earth, above the heavens, above the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms. Their God was above all! 

By contrast, the gods of the nations were inferior, lesser beings who were subject to God’s will and who could not oppose Him and expect to succeed. Because He could do whatever pleased Him, the Israelites believed that their God had the right to give life and take it, to destroy nations, to appoint whomsoever He chose as ruler over any group of people. After all, it was God who sent the Flood, it was God who dispersed the nations after Babel, it was the God of Israel who gave them unprecedented and unlikely victories over innumerable enemies. 

Israel went so far as to believe that if they were overcome or destroyed by their foes, or if calamity came upon them as a nation, this too was God’s doing. The nations, on the other hand, would chide them and say that their God was impotent or disinterested or ineffectual, they would point to their own prosperity and success and claim that it was their gods who had granted them ascendency, in other words, their idols were more powerful and engaged in human affairs than the distant myth that was YAHWEH!

We need to remember that God is not mocked! (Galatians 6:7). In other words, He will not allow Himself to be ridiculed, nor treated with contempt, nor allow His commandments to be scornfully set aside. We are either for Him or against Him, there can be no half-way measures. If He is the God that we have described and that the Scriptures reveal to us, then He will do as He pleases, and we do well to submit to His will. 

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