My Soul Shall Makes It's Boast In The Lord!

2     My soul shall make its boast in the Lord;
     The humble shall hear of it and be glad.

What should be the object of our testimony? So often when testimony time comes in church we hear testimony concern what God has done for us and the focus of that testimony is all about what God has done for me. Inadvertently, perhaps, the center of the testimony ends up being the believer and his experience of God rather than God himself. I'm not sure that this is what should be happening. This is not the way David gave testimony, nor is it the way others in the Bible gave theirs. Jeremiah, for instance, in Jeremiah 9:23-24 said:

23 Thus says the Lord:
     “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom,
     Let not the mighty man glory in his might,
     Nor let the rich man glory in his riches;
24     But let him who glories glory in this,
     That he understands and knows Me,
     That I am the Lord, exercising lovingkindness, 
     judgment, and righteousness in the earth.
     For in these I delight,” says the Lord.

Our glorying, even innocently, ought not be in ourselves or in any other thing that is about us, it ought to center in and about our Lord and abut Who He is. David knew this and practiced it!

Now, at the time this Psalm was written, he was in a where he should not have been and he knew that he was in trouble. Remember that this Psalm was written when he was feigning madness down in enemy territory before Abimelech (Achish - see 1 Samuel 21) in Gath to escape Saul. The Psalm is an acrostic Psalm (like Psalm 25) in which each verse starts with different letter of the Hebrew alphabet (with the exception that there does not seem to one for the letter "waw" , it seems to have been dropped or lost, after verse 5).

God had delivered him from danger and even from his own foolishness. David's focus in these entire first 10 verses is to call on the congregation to praise the Lord for delivering him and for His goodness to His people.[1] He does this by asking the people to focus, not on the effect of the deliverance, but on the character of the God Who did the delivering.

This is an important difference, especially in our day and age! So much of Christianity is only about God in token. When say "praise the Lord and then move on to "Me, Me, Me!" We are a function of our consumer age. Our "praise to God more about how He has satisfied us well and how He has made us full and well pleased than it is about Who He is and what His attributes are. This is truly pitiful.

Note the verbs: bless, boast, magnify, exalt just in first three verses. The name “Lord” (YAHWEH) is used sixteen times in the psalm.[2] All this points to David's focus on the person of God and not so much on his own experience. He is more concerned with the God who delivered him than he is with that he got delivered.

Now, don't get me wrong, this is not to say that he wasn't grateful, overjoyed that he had been delivered! I am certain that he was. But that was vastly overshadowed by the fact that all that was to his benefit was done by the God of universe! Somewhere in his experience down there in Philistia David realized this and that contrast changed his perspective and whereas he was once filled with fear, he became filled with the kind of courage only God can give someone. Not bald, human bravado; but true confidence in that God will provide and care and see to his well-being.

This is what David is testifying to - the realization anew that he serves the kind of God, the character and Person of a God that has made that kind of transformation in his life. He had lost that perspective. That fall in his mind and heart is allowed him to flee to Gath and feign madness. It was what allowed him to indulge in all of that nonsense and foolishness in the first place. But now, Oh! But now God, Yahweh - the One true and Living God has revealed Himself anew and afresh and has shown Himself to David!

Is it any wonder that this kind of praise is forced from his lips? Would it not be forced from yours and mine?

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[1] Ryrie, C. C. (1995). Ryrie study Bible: New American Standard Bible, 1995 update. Includes indexes. (Expanded ed.) (859). Chicago: Moody Press.

[2] Wiersbe, W. W. (2004). Be worshipful (1st ed.) (131). Colorado Springs, Colo.: Cook Communications Ministries.