For many of us living in the modern world, the very idea of idolatry may sound a bit quaint; who, for example, has a little statue of a fertility goddess sitting in their living room? But every culture in every age has its own form of idolatry. In Psalm 135, we may not be able to relate to the psalmist’s description of handmade statues of silver and gold, but we should pay attention to the warning that follows: “Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them” (vs. 8). Here, we’ll explore in practical terms what idolatry might mean in our high-tech Information Age.

How patient of a person would you say you are? More specifically, when we pray to God for help, how patiently do you wait for a response? And what does it mean to be “patient,” anyway? Psalm 40 opens with the declaration, “I waited patiently for the LORD” (vs. 1). Those words can make it sound like the psalmist is walking through life with calm and confidence, unperturbed by the troubles that press in from every side. But as we’ve already seen throughout our study of the Psalms, the biblical picture is more complicated than that.

Telling family stories can be what some have called a “performance of identity”: no matter how many times the stories have been told, retelling them reminds of who we are as a family. Something similar might be said about Psalms 135 and 136. Some parts of the history recited there may be unfamiliar to us, such as the references to kings named Sihon and Og. But the stories would have been familiar to the people assembled to worship, giving them yet one more reason to say, “His love endures forever.”

Verse 13 of Psalm 27, as we’ve seen, is ambiguous and open-ended. And one of the reasons I want to leave it that way is because that open-endedness, that lack of resolution, is a better reflection of how life actually is. We need communities that don’t try to prematurely pin happy endings on every story of suffering. So imagine this: what would happen if congregations were to sing the whole of Psalm 27 together? Would those congregations become places where it was safer for people to admit when they were struggling to find their confidence in God?

Psalms 135 and 136 have to be read together; they’re like two sides of the same poetic coin. Together, they form a tribute to the faithful love of God—a theme that’s especially obvious in Psalm 136. That psalm reads like a liturgical call and response, in which a worship leader would call out a piece of Israel’s history, a reminder of God’s goodness to his people, and the congregation responds in unison, “His love endures forever.” We may sometimes struggle to be faithful to our own promises to love, but faithful love is intrinsic to God’s very nature.

At some point in your early education, a teacher probably told you that sentence fragments were unacceptable. Your sentences needed to express complete thoughts and end with a period. And Bible translators try to do the same as they work with the original languages in which the books of the Bible were written. But verse 13 of Psalm 27 is notoriously difficult to translate, because it’s a fragment that trails off, leaving the psalmist’s thought incomplete. Should we try to complete the psalmist’s thought, or leave it open-ended? I believe there’s virtue in the latter…

One of the most definitive—and to the disciples, frightening!—demonstrations of Jesus’ power was his ability to calm a raging storm at sea merely by rebuking the wind and waves. They had not yet fully understood who Jesus was, and the miracle left them asking, “Who is this guy?” But I also wonder whether they knew and remembered the words of the psalmist, in which God is described as the one “who stilled the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, and the turmoil of the nations” (Psalm 65:7).

Those who have taken introductory survey courses in psychology may be aware of two classic sets of experiments, one using a “visual cliff” and the other a mother’s “still face.” Both shed light on how important a mother or father’s facial expressions are to a child who can’t yet speak. And to me, that recognition deepens the sense of lament when the poet who wrote Psalm 27 complains that God has hidden his face.