Building on the Foundation

In the midst of working on several other projects, I came across something that needed a little more study. It’s perfectly demonstrated in the 8th Psalm, and since it’s time to cover that one anyway, I figured we might as well go over it while we’re at it.  The new thing I’m learning about is called a chiasm, a prominent Hebrew literary mechanism used throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament. Paul, being the Hebrew of Hebrews that he was, utilized the chiastic structure quite a lot in his writings.  Psalm 8 is a perfect example of a chiasm. It’s a beautiful Psalm anyway, but with the added layer of the chiasm, it just gets even more beautiful!  Psalm 8 also corresponds quite nicely to the Last Great Day, that eighth day of the feast. In fact, out of the Psalms we have covered, this one probably lines up even more than the others do with their corresponding Holy Day, so take note of that as we go along. To start out, we’ll read through the Psalm, then, once we ha...

We have two Psalms left in this series, but that's not the end of our journey through the Psalms. We have another one hundred and forty two psalms to go once we finish with these first eight, and I fully intend to make it through them all by the time I finish. As I said in my first post on the Psalms, the Psalms are some of my favorite writings in the Bible. They are full of prophecy, poetry, pain, courage, worship, and love, with many of them being written by a man who God said was a man after His own heart. A man who loved God with everything he had and followed Him clear to the end because of that utter devotion. We are blessed that God preserved his writings for us today because there is much that we need to learn from them. I'm under no illusion that I am bringing you everything contained in these Psalms, but perhaps there will be one thing that you did not see before that is brought to light by my thoughts.  The seventh Psalm nicely corresponds to the first day of the Fea...

  The title of this commentary poses a question uniquely for American readers, for Thanksgiving would appear to be a uniquely American holiday. Yet we may also observe that, as a harvest festival, it has parallels throughout the world, for nearly every nation, culture, and religion on earth celebrates harvest festivals. Almighty God, too, has His harvest festivals: the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. The Feast of Unleavened Bread marks the beginning of the barley harvest, as we’ve seen previously , and the Feast of Pentecost is “the firstfruits of wheat harvest” (Ex. 34:22). The Feast of Tabernacles, on the other hand, marks the end of harvesting: “Also on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the fruit of the land, you shall keep the feast of the LORD for seven days” (Lev. 23:39). For this reason, the Feast of Tabernacles is also described as “the Feast of Ingathering at the end [lit. “turning”] of the y...