Today’s Psalms talk about praising God and praising God publicly:
Psa 9:14 Save me so I can praise you publicly at Jerusalem’s gates, so I can rejoice that you have rescued me.
Have you ever had someone bail you out of trouble? Maybe a co-worker remembered something you forgot, or a classmate stuck up for you when you were getting bullied..or just some generally bad time we may have been going through and someone shows up to save the day. When that happens, we are quick to thank that person.
This Psalms echoes that same appeal, David is saying Lord please help me out here, and once You do, I’ll never let anyone forget it.
That is actually what we should be doing as Christians, publicly praising Jesus for bailing us out of eternal punishment.
We know that the penalty for sin is death, a sentence to hell…and none of us are without sin, so that means that we are all headed down below…who can rescue us from that? Who intercedes on our behalf? Christ does. IF Christ didn’t come and bear the brunt of all our sins on the cross, we would be in a way worse off situation that David is going through here.
David is being chased by his enemies, but the worst thing that can happen to David is a death in an earthly sense. Once David dies, he isn’t really dealing with his enemies. Once we die, we have two places we can go, heaven or hell and because of our sins, we would otherwise be destined to go to hell but Jesus came into the world and became that sin, died and then rose on the 3rd day so that our sins would be taken away, we are in essence given a “get out of jail free card” through Christ’s work on the cross, and that calls for some serious public praise for Jesus just like the Psalms is saying, so I can praise you publicly and rejoice that Jesus has rescued us.
We should always keep that in mind in our daily lives, sure folks will mock us and call Christians cults who believe in fairy tales, the secular world loves to bag on Christianity – but the secular world is fading away, those folks who mock don’t matter – they are gonna die like the rest of us, but those of us who declare Christ as King and live by that, will live forever and be spared that eternal punishment because He intervenes on our behalf.