Psalm 107

Opening:

“HITHER, come hither and hearken awhile, Odysseus, far-famed king! No sailor ever has passed this way but has paused to hear us sing. Our song is sweeter than honey, and he that can hear it knows What he never had learnt from another, and has joy before he goes. We know what the heroes bore at Troy in the ten long years of strife. We know what happens in all the world, and the secret things of life.”

Some of us will recall, from our school, this song of the Sirens from Homer’s “Odyssey” the song that wooed sailors to their own demise, the song that Odysseus longed to hear. Like Odysseus, we often long for songs from the sirens of sin that threaten to wreck our ships. Yet unlike Odysseus, who belongs to the myths of man, our deliverance comes neither from our cleverness nor crews but from our LORD as Psalm 107 so brilliantly portrays with the four wonderful portraits of our LORD’s eternal, redemptive, and sovereign love for us humans. I can hardly think of a Psalm that puts our LORD’s delight in “teaching sinners the way” (Ps. 25:8) on full display as this one does.

As we progress through this Psalm together this morning, we should read it with anticipation, the anticipation of the Israelite of old, the anticipation of our own time of the present, and finally, the anticipation of how this love will be manifested in the future.

Immediately, the Psalmist reminds us of the LORD’s goodness and His hesed, the covenantal love for His people. The original ancient hearers of these words likely would have been met with a profound mystery of how people from all nations would come to call on the name of the LORD. Yet, they no doubt would have been reminded of the words of Zechariah 2:11 “ many nations shall join themselves to the Lord… and [they] shall be [his] people” and no doubt we remember when are LORD declared, “And people will come from east and west, and from north and south, and recline at table in the kingdom of God” (Lk 13:29–Re 21:13). Therefore, on this side of the mystery not only we know how this came to be but the depths of the truths the Psalmist writes of.