This week we want to share with you a devotion written by J.D. Walt entitled, “How the Psalms Work More like Orange Juice Concentrate than Simply Orange” J.D. Walt is the Executive Director of Seedbed.com. We hope this devotion encourages your faith.
CONSIDER THIS
Growing up, we didn’t have the present-day luxury of bottled juices such as Simply Orange. We actually got those little cans out of the freezer, often thawing them overnight, and mixed the contents with water to make our orange juice. The cans contained an ingredient known as concentrate, a thick, syrupy, profoundly orange substance. I used to love prying the lid off early before breakfast and sneaking a small spoonful of the stuff into my mouth. It produced a bit of a mouth-explosion effect of goodness. But who could take more than a spoonful? The taste vividly remains with me.
That’s what the Psalms are like and how they work. They gather up all of the glorious details from Scripture of the character of God and all of the dastardly depths of the human condition and combine them into a powerful concentrate. We can only take about a spoonful at a time. And that’s okay, because over time they mingle with the water that is our lives and result in something unexpectedly good. At times the concentrate is so strong that it’s bitter; at other times it tastes pleasantly sweet.
Song 90 gives us a massively concentrated contrast between the incomprehensible infiniteness of God and the frail finiteness of human beings:
Before the mountains came to be,
or earth sprang from Your word;
From everlasting to the same,
You, only You, are God.
You turn men back to dust and say,
“Return, O sons of men”;
For dust we are, to dust return;
we go to dust again.
We need this concentrated reminder. As for me, “dust, dust, dust, dust. You, only You, are God.”
Something about actually singing these songs brings out the fullness of their taste. And, yes, it is a bit of an acquired taste. It will take time. Just sing this one today.
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