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Welcome to 5 -Minute Bible, your daily guide for your daily reading. Today is May 12 and we'll be looking at Psalms 65 -67 and 69 -70.
Today we move through a remarkable collection of Psalms that celebrate the blessing, abundance, and worldwide reach of God's Kingdom, while also introducing a deep note of suffering and reproach.
Psalms 65 -67 portray creation flourishing under God's favor and the nations being gathered to Him in worship.
But Psalms 69 -70 suddenly brings us into affliction and rejection and urgent cries for deliverance.
And together, these Psalms remind us that God's Kingdom advances through both blessings and sufferings.
Psalm 65 celebrates God's abundant provision and sovereign care over creation.
He forgives sin, answers prayer, steals the roaring seas, and causes the earth to overflow with fruitfulness.
The entire created order seems to sing beneath His blessings. Psalm 66 calls all the earth to worship the
Lord for His mighty works. The psalm reflects honestly on teaching and affliction, and yet it declares that God uses those trials to bring
His people into a place of abundance and refinement. Psalm 67 widens the horizon even further.
The psalmist asks God to bless His people so that His salvation and His ways will be known throughout the nations.
The peoples of the earth are summoned into His joy because God rules the world righteously and with equity.
And then the tone shifts dramatically. Psalm 69 brings us into the anguish of the righteous sufferer.
David is overwhelmed by reproach and rejection and hostility. His zeal for God becomes the very reason why he is hated.
And then Psalm 70 continues that urgency with a desperate cry for swift deliverance.
The needy servant calls upon God to act quickly against evil and to preserve those who seek
Him. So as you read today, ask the following question. What does the advance of God's kingdom actually look like in a fallen world?
These psalms show us that God's kingdom brings blessing and restoration and joy to the earth. Yet, it also provokes hostility and suffering in a rebellious earth.
And in that way, the central pattern in these psalms is the tension between kingdom flourishing and kingdom opposition.
Psalms 65 -67 paint a vision that feels almost Edenic. God is forgiving sins.
The waters of the earth are flowing and they fill creation with abundance and calls the nations into worship beneath God's righteous reign.
And that's not a shrinking of the kingdom, it's an expanding of the kingdom. The blessings of God are moving outward from Israel to the ends of the earth and even creation itself is seeming to awaken beneath His rule.
But then Psalm 69 interrupts all of that celebration with the suffering.
The righteous servant is mocked and rejected and consumed with grief because of his devotion to God.
Psalm 70 intensifies the urgency, crying out for immediate help in the face of enemies and affliction.
And that tension is essential to understand because the kingdom of God truly is advancing, but it's advancing through conflict.
The same rain that renews the earth and provokes creation to begin singing also provokes the hatred of wicked men.
And this presses directly into our lives as well because Christians are often tempted towards naive triumphalism or defeatism, either falling on one side or the other.
But these psalms refuse both of those errors because God's kingdom is genuinely flourishing in history, and yet the righteous still suffer as the kingdom advances through the world.
These psalms converge powerfully in Jesus as well because Psalm 65 through 67 anticipates the worldwide blessings of Christ's kingdom.
Where forgiveness is here, worship and joy are spread outward to the nations all the way to the ends of the earth through the power of the gospel.
The vision of the earth rejoicing beneath God's reign will find its ultimate fulfillment in the global expansion of Jesus's kingdom that we are seeing happen now 2 ,000 years into it.
Yet Psalm 69 especially points us directly to Jesus because the New Testament repeatedly applies the psalm to him, zeal for your house has consumed me is fulfilled when
Christ cleanses the temple. The righteous suffer hated without cause becomes fully realized in Jesus who bears reproach and rejection and betrayal and mockery as he accomplishes redemption.
Psalm 70's desperate cry for deliverance also echoes through Christ's own humiliation as the obedient son entrusts himself fully to the father in the midst of pain and suffering.
And through that comes victory. And this is the pattern of the kingdom of God. And this is the pattern that God brings us through when we're in his kingdom.