Devotional Short Note on Psalm 146: God directed is the key in everyone’s life. The psalmist knows that and wants to praise the Lord with songs (146:1-2). It is not just a liturgical chant, knowing the words so well that one can dust off the clothes or do something else while singing. It is not playing a tape of people chanting while one goes through the motions of the cultic act. The psalmist says: “in my life” and “in my being” (146:2a,b). No one lives in partitions. Yet one can. No one exists with absentee attention, yet one can. The active persistence to focus on God and God only during worship is everyone’s challenge. It will remove superficiality from our actions.

Trusting in politicians is one of the great deceptions of our time. Or one trusts one’s father with so much respect that he almost takes the place of God. There is temporary help from fathers, politicians and leaders of the world, but long-term help is there none. Paradigm-shifts are human.

The Paradigm-shift comes when “his breath goes forth and he returns to dust” because “in that very day his thoughts perish” (146:4).

Real happiness is the person whose help is God and whose hope is in the Lord his God (146:5). The identity of God is that He made everything (146:6). He also keeps truth for ever (146:6). This is important in an age when they say that truth is relative and in shifting sands. Nothing is normative the Modernists were trying to say rejecting any form of norm including the Bible or laws of the Bible or rules of God. “I do it my way” they said and still do.

The oppressed that fears the Lord is taken care of in justice by God. The oppressor may succeed in a short term, but the wheel turns and come back with actions on him/her/itself. Organized Institutions of oppressions will face surprises down the line. God will feed the hungry and release the prisoners. There are countries who place people in long sentences of detention because they possess a Bible or left their Bible in a hotelroom. God is seeing this and justice is awaiting a moment of God’s display.

The Lord opens the eyes of the blind because Jesus Christ is the Lord and the Lordship agenda of Luke 4 included also this action. He raised up those who are bowed down. “The Lord loves the righteous” (146:8c). To shun away from rightful acts in one’s life is to walk a dangerous road. To approach the comfort zone of God is to seek righteousness and right doing and the love of God will embrace the person.

Strangers and foreigners are preserved, even migrants. Those who are fatherless and motherless through hardship and war-torn conflicts, will be upheld by the Lord. “And the way of the wicked he makes crooked” (146:9). God leaves the wicked to lead themselves to their own destruction if they so choose and persistent so, rejecting his calls for a change.

The day will come when the Lord will reign for ever, from heavenly Zion unto all generations (146:10).