July 21 – Thoughts on Psalm 29-30 & Acts 23:1-15

I have two girls driving home from CHIC, a triennial youth discipleship conference for my denomination, as I write this.  So reading today’s passage seemed a little more than coincidence.  You see, one of my favorite memories is my ride home from CHIC in 1988.  We were driving in a coach bus late at night across the plains of the Midwest.  It was so flat that I could see for miles and while everyone else slept, I prayed, heeding a call to prayer I’d received that last week.  And as I prayed, I watched a thunderstorm sweep across the sky.  There is little as majestic as a full-blown thunderstorm strolling across a Nebraska, filled with thunder and lightning.

Ps. 29 is a beautiful poem likening God to that thunderstorm.  And the word to which the Psalmist keeps returning is, “Glory!”  Four times he uses this word, the last on the lips of all of God’s people.  But he also uses words like, “powerful”, “majestic”, “splendor”.  Just like I couldn’t sit in my bus and not contemplate the might of God, so the Psalmist couldn’t watch the storm pass without words like these.  We worship a BIG God, and as incarnate and intimate as He may be through Jesus Christ, He is also a God of majesty.

And interestingly, after this Psalm-long description of God’s majesty, the call is not to fear, or to wish God’s powerful wrath upon our enemies, but it’s a call to remember that this God, this powerful, majestic, BIG God, is the source of our strength and peace.  We are not strong because we are right, or because we rage and protest the loudest, or because we are more “put together” than others.  We are strong because we follow a BIG God.  It is He who has our backs, “who’s got this situation covered”, whose majesty and splendor will work through us to accomplish His will.  And because of this, we can have peace.  This is the good news of following a BIG God.