Thoughts on Psalm 104

Today’s reading: Psalm 104; Luke 16

Psalm 104 puts me in mind of the end of Job and is a helpful reminder to me of just how self-centered I can so easily be in my thinking.

Job and his friends operated under the assumption that the universe worked according to a strict and minute principal of justice, such that if you lived well, good things would happen, and if you lived unrighteously, bad things would happen to you. As a result, when terrible things happened to Job, his friends assumed he must have sinned in equal measure to this “punishment,” and Job, knowing his innocence, began to assume that God must not be just. God’s response to Job is not to explain to him why bad things happen to good people, but to take him on a tour of the cosmos, giving him a glimpse into the world and cosmos that He created and maintains, moment by moment, and challenging him to try running the universe as he so clearly thinks God should be running it. While this is not the entirety of God’s point to Job, one aspect of it is that there are flora and fauna God supports and sustains that will never have any interaction with human beings, so things happening across the universe necessarily can’t all be based on blessing for good human behavior and cursing for bad human behavior.

Even knowing this, I still struggle feeling this way at times. When things are going poorly in some area(s) of my life, I think, “Why, God? What did I do to deserve this?” Or when I pray about something going on and God doesn’t answer that prayer for healing, resolution, etc., my mind goes to, “What did I or they do to deserve you not answering?”

But how incredibly narrow of a view of the world is this?? How arrogant and self-focused am I to assume that everything happening in proximity to myself must necessarily have me as the root, the cause, or the focus? 

I need reminders, like Psalm 104, that this world is so much bigger than myself, and that this universe is so much bigger than this world. God has created and imbued humanity with a special significance, but that does not mean, by any stretch, that all the rest of creation, moment by moment, needs to be bent around blessing or cursing each individual one of us based on our personal performance.

All of creation sings of God’s glory and might, and I, while highly valued in His sight, am only one tiny tiny portion of that incredible and immense creation.