Psalm 131 is one of the Psalms of Ascent. I like it very much. One day last week Psalm 131 was among the morning psalms. It seemed as if it might be encouraging to some of my friends, so I shared it in email messages to those friends. But as I pasted the text of the psalm into the body of the email, a warning from Microsoft advised me that the tone of the passage was not to its liking.
Rather than comparing his soul within him to a weaned child with its mother, Bill Gates thought it might be better simply to say, “I am very sensitive.” The arrogant oligarch of Seattle thinking he might better at understanding human experience than the sweet psalmist of Israel (2 Samuel 3:21).
But it is not just Gates’ pedestrian prose that it is the problem. The poetry of the psalm is not describing a sensitive person; it is painting a picture of the person who has found rest in Christ. Continue reading