“He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.” (Psalm 112:7)
There are many reasons for which we can praise God. The psalms are replete with different motives for which we can dedicate to Him our gratitude. In God we can find different attributes for which He is worthy of that we exalt and praise Him. With good reason the psalmist tells us: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments" (Psalm 111:10). It is the wise who fear God because the rewards that one receives for obeying Him are infinite and incomparable. Personally I cannot conceive another way of living because God has given me so much and I have so much to be grateful to him for that the only thing that I can give him is my complete obedience and surrender. I can identify with each of the reasons that the psalmist mentions for praising God. One of them is God's care about which Psalm 111 speaks to us. While we walk in the will of God we can live assured and confident that He is caring for our lives. God protects us from all evil and He is our refuge in all time; we can live assured and protected under his care.
While we stay focused on God's Word and we follow Him we can be sure that we will never slip because God offers us His hand to support us at all times. The bad new cannot affect us because we can trust that God is in control of all the things that surround and affect us. In Psalm 112 we can find this certainty that God is the one that keeps us firm and well while we live a life in fear of Him, obeying and following the purposes He has for our lives. That's why we can praise God for the safety that He offers us. We can praise God for his great mercy because although we have failed Him and sometimes we have not walked under the fear God, He forgives us and gives us another opportunity: “O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: because his mercy endureth forever” (Psalm 118:1).
For all these reasons and many more we can praise God and be grateful to him for how He has dealt with us. To think that all these qualities belong to the one and only God for God is one. At this time the majority of the people believed in several gods and idols, but Israel always believed in only one God because time after time He showed his power to with them by means of all these qualities for which today we are grateful to him. If it is the wise that fear God, then it is fools who worship idols because God is the only one that we need to live a full life. Idols are simply human creations. Once we have had an encounter with the real God we do not need anything else because He really satisfies all our needs. Anything that occupies first place in our hearts that is not God becomes an idol for us because God requires that we live in complete fear and reverence towards Him. God has to be first in our hearts and nothing more can take his place. Let's not put our confidence in temporal things but put all our life in His hands so we can live with a firm and trusting heart in Him.
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