How God explains shielding
Here's a verse with four promises that give us security, if we look to the Lord and walk with Him
Where is my hope, in all this bad news?
For the LORD God is our sun and our shield. He gives us grace and glory. The LORD will withhold no good thing from those who do what is right.
Psalm 84:11 NLT
Summary
At a time of increasing difficulty and danger, here is God’s promise of favour for those sincerely trusting Him and walking with Him.
Good News
If we are sincere in our walk with God, loving Him for who He is, we have His protection to live under, and His light to live by.
Reflection
When things are looking dark, to look towards the Lord is to look into the sunrise. There’s no darkness with Him!
When things are looking difficult and threatening -- Covid-19 infections rising again, restrictions biting, the news media making much of the uncertainty -- we need something solid to hold on to.
Here in our verse are four reassuring promises, with a perfectly reasonable condition.
1. The LORD God is our sun — “brighter than the brilliance of a sunrise” as The Passion Translation puts it.
2. He is our shield — “wrapping Himself around me”, TPT.
3. He gives us grace and glory — favour and honour is an alternative rendering.
4. The LORD will withhold no good thing — to give us what we need, when we need it.
Now here’s the condition: this comes to “those who do what is right”. This is heart attitude, rather than whether we have ticked all the boxes: those who “walk along His paths with integrity”, TPT.
In the gospels, Jesus taught about the distinctive and different values that define the kingdom of God ruling in our hearts. At the end He warned that just mentally agreeing wasn’t a real response. We needed to take the truth of His teaching and be committed to live by it, building our lives on it.
To bring this out, He told a story about a wise man who built his house on a rocky crag, pointing out that storms and floods were certain to come, but only an immovable foundation provided the security needed to withstand them, Luke 6:46-49, Matthew 7:24-27
Later Jesus renamed Simon as Peter, the rock -- for all His impetuosity, he was going to grow into the model of hearing, adopting and living by the truth that was to be the mark of Jesus’ disciples, Matthew 16:18-19. This is the “those who do what is right” of our verse. Peter made mistakes, but he grew through them because his heart was rooted in Jesus and what He taught —in other words, he ‘got it’, and so he could draw on the spiritual rule and order of God operating. It works the same way for us.
We may be hearing bad news and seeing dangers — but are we shaken by them? Not if we are walking with God and seeking His rule and reign in our lives and circumstances.
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