Now That's More Like It

Psalm 16

Just reading Psalm 16 brings to mind "That's more like the Jesus I know" when I think about what and how Jesus might pray.

O my soul, thou hast said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord: my well doing extendeth not to thee,

Psalm 16:2 GNV

The good things I do aren't an extension of human me, but is rather what you Father extend to me. I can't do it without you. Lord, I cannot live as a human, I cannot do well meaning things without you. In claiming “that is the Jesus I know" stops me in my tracks in my thinking. As a very human Job questioned, "Shall I receive good and not receive evil too"? David, the man after God's own heart, wrote this great psalm as well as the several psalms of deep struggle and uncertainty. Yes, we know Jesus was God in the flesh, but He was just that, in the flesh. He is called the new Adam. He came to face all that man faces as a man. So thinking "that's the Jesus I know" says more that I know so little of Jesus if that is indeed what I know of "the Jesus I know". The bottom line then becomes a reality, that I don't really know Him. Paul, near the end of his life, says, "That I may know Him" (Philippians 3). Now mind you this is the same man who said just after he came to truly know Jesus Christ that he spent three years learning one on one from Jesus Christ alone in the desert, yet yet decades later he writes "that I may know Him”, my desire is still to know Him. There was always so much more for Paul to learn of Jesus after all the many years that finally brought Paul to Rome. It makes me realize and wonder, will I ever really know Him?

Yes, I can read this psalm with even the prophecy that his human body would not suffer corruption and that is a very truthful part of who Jesus is, but that thought, that thinking falls far short of who all Jesus is. Let me reread and celebrate that this is indeed the Jesus I know, one who could have prayed this psalm without hesitation, but let me also acknowledge it falls far short of all He is and how He lived as a man on rhis earth amongst us.

P.S. One great blessed thought is:

Dearly beloved, now are we the sons of God, but yet it is not made manifest what we shall be: and we know that when he shall be made manifest, we shall be like him: for we shall see him as he is.

1 John 3:2 GNV

Oh to finally see Him as He is!