No Comparison

Last Sunday morning I was reading from the psalms before we gathered for worship. I was following my ordinary plan for reading through the Bible this year and among the readings for that day was Psalm 77. The title my Bible gives to that Psalm is "In the Day of Trouble I Seek the Lord" and that title fairly accurately sums up the psalm. In the first nine verses we see that the psalmist is in some kind of trouble, and he wonders aloud what God is going to do about it. He wonders if he will ever again know God's favor, or said otherwise, God's kindness and blessing towards him. He wonders if God has forgotten him, or perhaps if God is so angry towards him that God has abandoned him.

But then there is a shift. The psalmist remembers what he knows to be true of God and begins to praise God for these things. He praises God for his mighty deeds in the past, and for the ways in which God's power has been revealed to the peoples of the world. And the psalmist asks this question in verse 13:

"What god is great like our God?"

That question froze me in my tracks. It is a question whose answer is obvious, in that there is absolutely no comparison between any other god in the world and the God of the Bible. What god? Absolutely no other god is great, or anything else, like the God of the Bible.

There are many gods in the world, although perhaps we rarely call them that. They are all the things that we bow down to and make priorities in our lives, at the expense of devoting ourselves to the God of the Bible. Hobbies, sports, families, jobs. These are just a few things that quickly come to mind that we might pursue with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, to borrow from Jesus in Mark 12:30. Addictions and dysfunctional emotions also find service as gods.

To all outward appearances our god may seem to be relatively good, or they might be things that everyone around us recognizes as bad, even harmful. We may have multiple gods, worshiping one at one particular moment and a different one at another moment. But the one thing they all share in common is that they lead us away from the One True God, the God revealed to Israel in the days of the Psalms and Old Testament, the God made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.

If you can look upon Jesus and see your Savior and your Lord, then you know, in a very personal way, the same God that the psalmist looks to in his prayer. And that God, in his mercy, frees us from all the false gods we worshiped in the past.

We will still struggle with sin, giving our attention, and at times even our devotion, to those gods, but our case is not hopeless. The grasp of Jesus on his children is firm and he promises that on the last day we will be with him. Every chain that every false god uses, even today, to hold us will be broken and we will rest, truly and deeply, in the arms of Jesus.

What god is great like our God? No god is, and for that we thank and praise the Lord Jesus Christ.