Visions of Grandeur

He will call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him.  I will satisfy him with a long life, and show him My salvation. Psalm 91:15-16  NASB

Show – How will God “show” His salvation to the man who calls on Him?  If you read this verse from the perspective of a Christian evangelical, you might assume that David is speaking about forgiveness and a gate pass to Heaven when the Messiah is revealed.  Of course, that’s anachronistic.  David isn’t writing about “Jesus.”  He’s writing about rescue and honor in the public arena of the tenth century BCE.  As we’ve discovered, his use of rare words pushes us to rethink God’s intimate connection with rescue and the ongoing action of satisfying.  Now we need to notice the verb tense in this final thought.

The verb is the common rāʾâ, “to see, to inspect.”  It is also an imperfect like śābēaʿ (satisfy).  That means the revelation of salvation is not a static event.  It’s a continuous unfolding, a journey with God through life.  Even though the noun “salvation” is yĕšûʿâ, which happens to be the name of the Messiah, the verb tells us that this is not a claim about a particular person.  It’s about the entire process of divine revelation.  What God is going to show us is His continual interaction on behalf of humanity.

And how, precisely, is this going to be accomplished?  In human history!  From Abraham to Moses, from Moses to Samuel, from Ruth to David, God shows up.  Even when He isn’t visible, His engineering is perceived after the fact.  Maimonides once commented that prophecy is like seeing something happen in a rear-view mirror.  After it’s over you know what it was.  Well, the divine poet David is basically saying the same thing.  It’s not just prophecy that is understood retrospectively.  It’s life itself!  We get the picture after it’s finished.  Oswald Chambers wrote that after we die God will pull back the curtain and we will see that all those pin-hole instances of His fleeting presence were really a glorious tapestry of divine involvement with us.  We just didn’t notice most of the time.

God “will show” us His sufficiency, His deliverance from straits, His prodding us toward freedom.  All contained in the word yāšaʿ.  “That which is wide connotes freedom from distress and the ability to pursue one’s own objectives. To move from distress to safety requires deliverance. Generally the deliverance must come from somewhere outside the party oppressed. In the ot the kinds of distress, both national and individual, include enemies, natural catastrophies [sic], such as plague or famine, and sickness. The one who brings deliverance is known as the ‘savior.’” ^[1]  The apostolic writers reflected this idea every time they quoted the prophets.  God saves—continuously.  The fact that I woke up today is evidence of His faithfulness.  The rest is history.

Topical Index:  rāʾâ, to see, yĕšûʿâ, salvation, Psalm 91:15-16

^[1] Hartley, J. E. (1999). 929 יָשַׁע. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 414). Chicago: Moody Press.