AP

Psalm 107:2-3  Let the redeemed of the LORD tell their story those he redeemed from the hand of the foe, those he gathered from the lands, from east and west, from north and south.

The Psalmist gives us a good reminder here of four important things:

Firstly, that we are “redeemed by the ‘the LORD’” – our being ‘bought back’ from the slavery of sin to rejoin God’s family is not something we achieve or earn by our own efforts, but is the sovereign work of our good God alone.  Something we can add to this, that would not have been known as a historical fact by the Psalmist, is that the ‘redemption price’ was nothing less than the sacrificial blood of his own dearly beloved Son, on a cruel cross!

Secondly, the Psalmist reminds us that we are part of a vast company of people from every corner of the globe, ‘gathered from’ many different lands, from ‘east, west, north and south’.  How amazing it is that, at the time of writing, God’s Covenant People, Israel, would have thought of Covenant Grace, as only having application to themselves, whereas we can see that we are part of global Christianity that embraces “persons from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9), “red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight; Jesus died for all (‘all without distinction’ not ‘all without exception’) the children of the world” (Pr Clarence Herbert Woolston).

Thirdly, death was not part of the Creation that God declared as ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31), but has been the No. 1 Enemy of our sinful world, and this ‘foe’ was defeated when Jesus rose from the dead and left the tomb empty; as the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corintians 15: 54-57: “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.  Where, O death, is your victory?  Where, O death, is your sting?  The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.  But thanks be to God!  He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

And fourthly, the Psalmist reminds us that if we have experienced all this for ourselves, it is our responsibility to ‘tell the story’ to a lost world.  In English grammar we only have a ‘second person imperative’ form of a verb, so we have to translate the Hebrew (and Greek) third person imperative as ‘let the (redeemed of the LORD) tell’, but it is just as much a command as the second person imperative.

Do we apply all this faithfully in the outworking of God’s work in us in Christ, as we witness for him to our lost world?

– Bruce Chritian