The Lord is my chosen portion

Calvin's commentary on Psalm 16:5-6. The full-text of the entire Psalm 16 can be found here:

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
 you hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance (Psalm 16:5-6).

David, by calling God the portion of his lot, and his inheritance, and his cup, protests that he is so fully satisfied with him alone, as neither to covet any thing besides him, nor to be excited by any depraved desires. Let us therefore learn, when God offers himself to us, to embrace him with the whole heart, and to seek in him only all the ingredients and the fullness of our happiness.

All the superstitions which have ever prevailed in the world have undoubtedly proceeded from this source, that superstitious men have not been contented with possessing God alone. But we do not actually possess him unless “he is the portion of our inheritance;” in other words, unless we are wholly devoted to him, so as no longer to have any desire unfaithfully to depart from him.

For this reason, God, when he upbraids the Jews who had wandered from him as apostates, with having run about after idols, addresses them thus, “Let them be thine inheritance, and thy portion.” By these words he shows, that if we do not reckon him alone an all-sufficient portion for us, and if we will have idols along with him, he gives place entirely to them, and lets them have the full possession of our hearts.

David here employs three metaphors; he first compares God to an inheritance; secondly, to a cup; and, thirdly, he represents him as He who defends and keeps him in possession of his inheritance. By the first metaphor he alludes to the heritages of the land of Canaan, which we know were divided among the Jews by divine appointment, and the law commanded every one to be content with the portion which had fallen to him. By the word cup is denoted either the revenue of his own proper inheritance, or by synecdoche, ordinary food by which life is sustained, seeing drink is a part of our nourishment. It is as if David had said, God is mine both in respect of property and enjoyment.

Nor is the third comparison superfluous. It often happens that rightful owners are put out of their possession because no one defends them. But while God has given himself to us for an inheritance, he has engaged to exercise his power in maintaining us in the safe enjoyment of a good so inconceivably great. It would be of little advantage to us to have once obtained him as ours, if he did not secure our possession of him against the assaults which Satan daily makes upon us.

God and Tragedy

Last Saturday 7 February went down in the Australian history not only as the hottest day on record, but also the darkest day. As of this very minute, 108 people dead and 750 homes and two towns wiped out. It is a national tragedy. The full coverage is here.

Let us pray for those who mourn the lost of their loved ones. We pray that "the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your [their] hearts and your [their] minds in Christ Jesus."

The Scots' Church family retreat to be held in Maryville, one of the severely affected towns, had to be cancelled as the camp site was burnt down. Interstate reinforcement have descended in Victoria to help identify victims as I write these words.

The temperature shows 46.5 degrees in the city, and up to more than 47 degrees in a few towns. It was also very windy. When I opened the window, the wind felt like the desert wind, the kind typically blew in Las Vegas desert. What was truly remarkable on that day was that the 46 plus degree temperature dropped to 20 degrees in a matter of hours. In fact, the Bureau of Metereology reported that the temperature dropped about 10 degrees in less than 15 minutes. In a nutshell, Saturday 12pm was unbearably hot at 46 degree, but Sunday 12pm was rainy and cold at 20 degree.

Imagine two different overseas tourists stopping over in Melbourne only for the day, one on Saturday and the other one on Sunday. They would have had a big disagreement over the weather. "What do you mean it's cold? It was so hot I can boil egg in 3 seconds on top of my head." "You're out of your mind. It was wet and cold I had to put another layer on. So much for a great summer day."

I don't know what good one can deduce out of this tragedy. But I am sure it is not a random, meaningless event brought about by the mother nature who ran amok. God allowed it. God did it for a reason that we would be hard pressed to find out. He is not accountable to us His creation, that's perhaps the most important lesson that Job learned from God when he complained to God about his darkest day in his life. His infinite wisdom is far deeper than ours.

A few things are certain, however.

1. God shows to the people of Australia that He alone is sovereign. He alone is omnipotent. He is the Lord of creation who is capable to control the weather, fire, wind, snow, water, etc. And that other things people hold onto and rely upon are fragile. In fact, those things are idols that cannot give us security on earth, let alone eternal security. God alone deserves our utmost reliance. This perhaps is the most recent national reminder to people of Australia that their lives, without God, have no certainties whatsoever.

2. God shows us that our life is like a vapor, and without God that brevity of life is lived in vain. The ridiculous amount of wealth and asset we amass over the years in the end amount to nothing in the absence of God. Jesus once called a rich man who did the same "Fool!" I was reading these verses this morning, and was reminded of the futility of running after things of this world:

"And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him,'Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God" (Luke 12:19-21)

3. For those who are God's purchased people, His promise in Romans 8:28 applied on Saturday. "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." We do not know what good can be drawn out of it, as I wrote above. And I don't want to pretend I know. But I know two things for certain:

a. God does not have to account for what He did or allowed to happened. He didn't have to answer it verbally. But He did not sit around doing nothing. He came in the midst of us, suffered with us emotionally and physically on the cross. Not only He showed solidarity to us human, but through His death and resurrection He gave us hope beyond death. He who experienced first hand the pain we feel as human shows us the way that death is not the ultimate thing. It does not have the final say. Jesus does. And in Him, we have the strength to carry on. In Him, we have hope beyond death.

b. This tragedy, to those whose lives are spared by God to see their loved ones gone, provides the loudest and clearest opportunity for them to acknowledge in the middle of this otherwise unbearable sadness that Christ is enough. Christ in sufficient. In Him alone one finds refuge, solace, and comfort. The happy times we have don't give us that perspective; on the contrary that blurs our devotion between God or Mammon. If we praise God when we get a promotion, pass an exam with flying colors, have a successful surgery, restore a broken relationship, it is easy for us to savor merely the blessings of God, but not God himself. Only difficult times provide the crystal clear opportunity to say with the Asaph

"Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever"(Psalm 73:25-26).

Photo above courtesy of The Age

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,

the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

~ Psalm 139:13-16

Pastor Steven Cole cited the following amazing facts and stats from Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence [Ballentine Books], pp. 23-25) about our God-knitted body:

Consider the miracle of the human body: Every second more than 100,000 chemical reactions take place in your brain. It has 10 billion nerve cells to record what you see and hear. That information comes to your brain through the miracle of the eye, which has 100 million receptor cells (rods and cones) in each eye. Your retina also has four other layers of nerve cells. Altogether the system makes the equivalent of 10 billion calculations a second before an image even gets to the optic nerve.

Once it reaches your brain, the cerebral cortex has more than a dozen separate vision centers in which to process it. Your tear ducts supply a bacteria-fighting fluid to protect your eyes from infection. The tears that fight irritants differ from the tears of sadness, which contain 24percent more proteins. That’s not to mention the miracle of the ear and how it translates sound waves into meaningful speech and sounds; or of touch, taste, and smell.

Part of your brain regulates voluntary matters, such as muscle coordination and thought processes. Other parts of the brain control involuntary processes, such as digestion, glandular secretions, the rate at which your heart beats, etc. How did it accidentally happen that your body could speed up your heart rate to the proper speed to meet increased oxygen demand when you exercise and slow it down when that need is met?

One square inch of your skin has about 625 sweat glands, 19 feet of blood vessels, and 19,000 sensory cells. Working in coordination with your brain, it maintains your body at a steady 98.6 degrees under all weather conditions.

Your stomach has 35 millionglands which secrete the right amounts of juices to allow your body to digest food and convert it
into stored energy for your muscles. To avoid digesting itself, your stomach produces a new lining every three days. Your body is an efficient machine: to ride a bicycle for an hour at ten miles per hour requires only 350 calories, the energy equivalent of only three table-spoons of gasoline.

You have more than 200 bones, each shaped for its function, connected intricately to one another through lubricated joints that cannot be perfectly duplicated by modern science. More than 500 muscles connect to these bones. Some obey willful commands; others perform their duty in response to unconscious commands from the brain. They all work together to keep us alive. The heart muscle itself beats over 103,000 times each day, pumping your blood cells a distance of 168 million miles.

Coupled with that, your lungs automatically breathe in the right amount of life-giving oxygen (about 438 cubic feet each day),
which just happens to be mixed in the right proportions (about 20% oxygen, 80% nitrogen) in our atmosphere. Each of the other vital organs and glands in your body works in complex conjunction with the others to sustain life, which science can’t explain or create.

A single human chromosome (DNA molecule) contains 20 billion bits of information . . . Twenty billion bits are the equivalent of about three billion letters. If there are approximately six letters in an average word, the information content of a human chromosome corresponds to about 500 million words. If there are about 300 words on an ordinary page of printed type, this corresponds to about two million pages. If a typical book contains 500 such pages, the information content of a single human chromosome corresponds to some 4,000 volumes.

Psalm 139