God of Joyful Presence
Psa
21:6 Surely
you have granted him eternal blessings and made him glad with the
joy of your presence.
There
are two bad attitudes expressed within the human race. The first is
to deny the existence of the Lord (that's the atheist), and the second
is to attribute to Him wrong or bad attributes. It is the latter one
we want to deal with here. There are many people, and this really
does include Christians, who have a negative view of God. They see
Him as a hard God (Lk 19:21)
or a harsh God (Mal 3:13).
They are contemptuous about God (Mal 1:6) by the way they live, indicating
they believe He is an absent Lord, and they're glad.
Wrong
understanding of God is very common and it may be that we have such
attitudes because of the things that happened to us before we came
to know Him, things that harmed or hurt us, things that came from
a fallen world, or things that came through our own sinful foolishness,
and because of that sinful foolishness, we never (then) turned to
the Lord for help. Thus we had a bad view of life and subsequently
(and subconsciously) of God. We even attribute the way we think to
the way we think God thinks. We are not charitable and so we cannot
understand God being charitable. We are not forgiving so we find it
difficult to believe that God is forgiving. We expect people to work
to achieve acceptance, so we believe God wants us to work to achieve
His acceptance. In all these ways, we have wrong ideas!
The
truth is displayed here by David and it needs thinking about. First
of all he says, Surely you have granted
him eternal blessings, referring to himself. Eternal
blessings? Yes, things from heaven that are unlimited in their
life. If we give a Christmas present it normally has a limited life
and may be broken or thrown away within months or years. The good
things that God gives, do not have a ‘shelf life', they go on and
on and on and on. They are eternal because they come from an eternal
God. Because of who they were, Israel
were automatically blessed as God's covenant
people (Deut 33:29 & Psa 33:12). Blessing, goodness from God,
was part of the package of their relationship with the Lord. Many
times in the Old and New Testaments we come across the words, “Blessed
is the man who ….” e.g. Psa 89:15 –
“Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you, who walk in
the light of your presence”. To be blessed means to have
received all the goodness of God, and that comes over in Scripture
many times as we just said. Many times the Bible tells us we can receive
this goodness that makes us happy, and the Psa 85 quote tells us that
we will be really happy when we walk in the light of God's presence,
and that has echoes of our verse above - glad
with the joy of your presence.
These
verses tell us that it is a wonderful thing to be in the Lord's presence,
a joyful thing. We sometimes use C.S.Lewis's book ‘The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe' to illustrate spiritual truths, with Aslan the Lion
picturing Jesus. When three of the children first hear Aslan's name
mentioned, they each have lovely thoughts and feelings, even though
they don't know who he is yet. Lewis understood this truth we see
in this verse, that actually knowing God, being in His presence, even
thinking about His presence when you have a right understanding, is
a most wonderfully joyful thing. Why? Because He is love, He is utterly
good, and so it's a lovely thing to be in the presence of such a Being
- well it is if you have turned your heart to love and goodness and
towards Him – then it will be THE most wonderful thing possible –
this ‘being in His presence'!