Psalms 118:14
“The Lord is my strength and song, And He has become my salvation.”
Psalm 118 is one of the Hallel Psalms, which will be used for Thanksgiving. The psalmist begins the psalms by thanking God for His love and mercy over his life. The reason for His thanksgiving is that the Lord has seen him through various situations like the distress, and danger of a man, or Nation. He has learned through it all that it is better to trust God than to put confidence in mere men or powerful princes.
The psalmist emphasizes three times the Nations surrounding him. He even symbolizes them surrounding him like bees and like thornbush. We do understand when one or two bees are chasing someone, there is usually a direction that person can run to get away. But a swarm of bees is intense and overwhelming. When bees are swarming after a person and have him surrounded, there is no direction he can go to get away from them. The psalmist says all nations were like this as they surrounded him. It was deadly.
Secondly, the nations had surrounded the psalmist like thorns, their firm but thin brambles would surely prick and sting the one surrounded.
Both bees and thorns make us immovable and helpless. The psalmist goes on to say that they were quenched by the fire. We don’t use “quench” for a slow put-off of something. When a raging fire engulfs bees and thornbush, it is quickly consumed. So are the nations which surrounded the psalmist. We can also see the psalmist’s confidence in the Lord is continuous because he says repeatedly “In the name of the Lord, I will destroy them”. He is confident that his God will protect and enable him always to overcome (past, present, or future).
Therefore, the psalmist proclaims ‘The Lord is my strength and song’ and through it all he has experienced that ‘the Lord has become his salvation’.
Let us sit back and reflect on the situations where we were swarmed and cornered by our situations and remember how we were enabled to overcome those situations by the grace of God. He is the same God yesterday, today, and forever. If God could find a psalmist to show His greatness as he trusted God, we too can be vessels of mercy that can be filled with the richness of His glory (Romans 9:23). May He alone be our strength, song, and salvation always.
Blessed Day ahead.
