Je L'Invoquerai Toute Ma Vie — The Cup of Salvation

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Psalm Has Come Back

Le read this psalm two weeks ago without choosing it. On the tenth of August, James Smith preached from Psalm 116:4 — and the note that morning was about these very two verses, where love and the ear are joined in a single sentence.

Fourteen days later the psalm arrives on its own, and she opens at the beginning of it.

This keeps happening. Exodus 33:14 came back on the second of August. Psalm 139 came back on the fifteenth. Psalm 16:11 came back on the twenty-first, the day the sale went through. Nobody is arranging the returns.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Psalm Opens With a Bare Verb

There is a small oddity in the Hebrew of verse 1 that translations have to smooth over. The psalm opens with one word: I love.

No object is stated. Not I love the Lord — simply I love, and then the reason: because the Lord hears my voice. Translators supply the Lord because the sense requires it, and they are right to. But the bare verb is worth pausing on.

The psalm begins with a man so full of it that he says the verb before he says the name. J'aime. The way a person answers when asked how they are and the first word out is not an explanation.

And note the grammar of the reason. He does not say I love the Lord, therefore He hears me. He says the reverse. The hearing came first; the love is the answer to it. Which is 1 John's order exactly: we love Him because He first loved us.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — A Lifetime Decided by One Answer

Le's phrase for verse 2 is with confidence, and the psalm shows exactly where that confidence came from.

This is not a man who has always found prayer easy. Two verses on, we learn where he was standing when he prayed: the pains of death surrounded me... I found trouble and sorrow. He was not being devotional. He was drowning.

And the prayer he prayed was five words. O Lord, I implore You, deliver my soul. That is the verse Smith preached on the tenth of August — and his observation was that the prayer of faith is generally short, and always to the point.

So verse 2 is the conclusion of an experiment. He was in trouble. He called. He was heard. And on the strength of that single result he commits the rest of his life: je l'invoquerai toute ma vie.

That is what confidence actually is. Not a mood, not a temperament. A settled expectation based on something that already happened. The same shape as Hebrews 11 three weeks ago: faith is the evidence — a case built from testimony that was actually given.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — He Asks What to Give and Answers by Taking

The question in verse 12 is the natural one after a rescue. What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits toward me?

And the answer is startling. He does not offer anything. He takes something. I will take up the cup of salvation. J'élèverai la coupe des délivrances.

Asked what he can give back, the psalmist replies by receiving more. Which sounds like an evasion until you consider the alternative. Any gift he offered would have to be made of something already given. The only thing a rescued man has that the Rescuer does not is his willingness to keep receiving.

And this is exactly the yoke of bondage Paul warned against yesterday — the attempt to settle by performance an account that was never a debt. The psalmist declines the transaction entirely. He takes the cup, and calls again.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Who Else Sang This Psalm

Now something worth knowing about where this psalm was used.

Psalms 113 to 118 form the Hallel — the group of psalms sung at Passover. They were part of the meal, sung around the table, and the last of them closed the evening.

Then read Matthew's sentence about the Last Supper. "And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives."

That hymn is traditionally understood to be the close of the Hallel. Which means Jesus very likely sang this psalm on the night before He died — including the words I will take up the cup of salvation, on the night He took a cup and said this is My blood of the new covenant.

And including verse 15, which nobody at that table could have understood yet: precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.

And then they went out to the Mount of Olives — to Gethsemane. The oil press.

Le has spent the last three mornings parked at a lagar de azeite. Yesterday's entry was about fruit growing on trees; the day before, about the press. This morning the psalm she opened is the one He sang on the way there. Nobody arranged that either.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Loosed, and Still a Servant

The last verse holds two things that look like opposites. I am Your servant — twice, insisted on — and You have loosed my bonds. Tu as détaché mes liens.

The bonds are cut and the service continues. He is not free from the Lord. He is free in Him — which is the same distinction Paul was drawing yesterday between two yokes.

And there is a detail behind it. In the Law, a freed servant who loved his master could choose to stay. The freedom was real, and so was the staying. A man whose bonds have been cut and who calls himself a servant anyway is not describing captivity. He is describing love with the door open.