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Winter 2024 A King Forever and Ever Unit 2: Our God Reigns
This quarter explores the broad sweep of Scripture’s teaching regarding God’s reign—teaching that culminates in the proclamation of Jesus as the earthly exhibition of that kingdom. Beginning with key moments in the history of Jesus’ ancestors, this quarter highlights Jesus’ birth as the Son of David. The quarter then moves to a four-week study of psalms that extol the reign of God. The conclusion of the quarter provides a look at Jesus’ teachings on life in God’s kingdom.
Our God Reigns
The songbook of the ancient people of God, the Psalms, praises the reign of God. Through these songs, God’s people find comfort in the assurance of God’s reign (Psalm 10:12-18, lesson 6). He is the eternal and all-powerful King (Psalms 47, 93; see lesson 7), who is “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love” (103:8, lesson 8). As such, God’s people praise his righteous name for his powerful acts as ruler of an everlasting kingdom (145:10-21, lesson 9).
Lesson 6 The Lord Is King. Psalm 10:12-18
Psalms 9 and 10 were originally a single poem. It was split apart to serve separate purposes. Ancient Hebrew manuscripts count them as two psalms, while the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, counts them together as one. The entire poem falls into four roughly equally sized sections: Psalms 9:1-10; 9:11-20; 10:1-9; and 10:10-18. Each part contributes something to the overall picture as the poem moves toward a request for God’s help in a world of suffering and struggle. Psalms 9 and 10 form a partial acrostic as they use 17 letters of the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet, successively, as the lines progress. (A complete example of using all 22 letters to form the acrostic is Psalm 37.) It is unclear whether the incomplete nature of the acrostic of Psalms 9 and 10 was deliberate.
Lesson 7 The Lord Is Majestic. Psalm 93
How do we describe things we have never experienced? One way is to use our imaginations to compare what we have not experienced to what we have. We gain an approximate understanding of things we have not seen by likening them to things we have seen. So it is with this psalm. We have not directly seen the glory and power of God, but we can compare God’s glory and might to the glorious and powerful things we have experienced, knowing he surpasses them all. In a sense, our text is an exercise in imagination directed by God’s inspiration.
This psalm uses two literary devices extensively. One is personification. This convention uses images and descriptions of human life to describe God. This is personification not because God is an impersonal power, but because he is not confined to human characteristics, especially not physical human characteristics. Indeed, we have not seen God. But John’s Gospel reminds us that Jesus Christ, the divine, incarnate Son of God, revealed God through his real, tangible presence in the world (John 1:18). In Jesus, the Creator God has become not just near to us but one of us. In Jesus, God’s majesty and power became visible among real people in a real time and place. Only in Christ’s incarnation could we literally talk about, say, what God wears.
The other device used here is parallelism. This technique builds an image through repeating or nearly repeating one phrase or idea. Doing so strengthens the power of the description (consider especially Psalm 93:3, below). Understanding these features of Psalm 93 (and many others) allows us to join the worship and appreciate the beauty of Hebrew poetry, which is so different from our own and yet still powerful.
Lesson 8 The Lord Is Active. Psalm 103:1-14
The book of Psalms is often described as “ancient Israel’s hymnal.” Like hymnals today, the book of Psalms includes contributions by different authors and covers a wide span of time. The oldest psalm is by Moses (Psalm 90), and at least one psalm comes out of the setting of the captivity of God’s people in Babylon (Psalm 137). These chronological bookends are separated by some 900 years!
About half of the psalms are attributed to King David, known as the “sweet psalmist of Israel” (2 Samuel 23:1, KJV). Today’s passage is one of those psalms. While some psalms include a superscription that provides the setting (example: Psalm 51), there is no such background recorded for Psalm 103. It simply notes the association with David, who reigned about 1010–970 BC. The Psalter is traditionally seen as falling into five sub-books, their divisions being Psalms 1–41, 42–72, 73–89, 90–106, and 107–150. Psalm 103 is located within the fourth of those five. A broad brush look at the 17 chapters of this sub-book reveals the following:
* Psalms 90–100 speak of God’s role as king of the universe and ancient Israel’s role in announcing and celebrating his reign (examples: 93:1; 95:3; 96:6, 10; 97:1; 99:1). * Psalms 101–106 speak of the people’s responsibilities in various ways and tell Israel’s story in ways that challenge complacency. Psalms 103 (today’s text) and 104 fit within this grouping, as they encourage readers to continue being a community of praise.
Lesson 9 The Lord Is Righteous. Psalm 145:1, 10-21
Psalm 145, today’s text, is an acrostic. That means that each line, verse, or section starts with a word that begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which has 22 letters. There are nine psalms that are acrostic in nature, the other eight being Psalms 10, 25, 34, 37, 9–10, 111, 112, and 119. (Psalms 9 and 10 count as one because the acrostic spans both; see discussion in lesson 6.)
Other acrostics in the Bible are Proverbs 31:10-31 and the entire book of Lamentations. Regarding the latter, notice that chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5 have 22 verses each and that chapter 3 has 66 verses, which is a multiple of 22. A sharp eye will notice that Psalm 145 has only 21 verses. So why the mismatch with the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet? It comes down to an uncertainty in the ancient manuscripts. In most of those manuscripts, Psalm 145:13 lacks a line of text that would have included the absent Hebrew letter. This was noticed in antiquity, and the ancient Greek translation of the Bible, known as the Septuagint (translated at least 200 years before Christ), includes an extra line between verses 13 and 14;.
BIBLE STUDY
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January 8th – April 2nd, 2025
We all long for a full, rich, satisfying life. But how do we fill up the empty places in our souls? How can we quench our thirst for something deeper, more lasting, more meaningful?
This 13-week study urges you to take a fresh look at Jesus. Here is the opportunity to establish — or renew — your faith in the One who offers true meaning, true belonging, and true life.
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