Often when things go wrong, we have a tendency, most of us, to be angry with God or at least frustrated with Him. We believe that once we have given our lives to Jesus, we have the right to an easy life, with very little suffering. Not true!
It seems as though there was no way the psalmist would stray from the commands of God, he had seen too many answered prayers to ever do that. But when the criticism got to him and he was more than fed up with it, then He turned to The Lord.
Something in the verses today reminds me of the Ethiopian eunuch, who was reading the prophet Isaiah, in the days following Pentecost, and needed somebody to help him understand. The apostle Philip, miraculously, was in just the right place at the right time.
As we read these verses slowly we get the impression that David really did get excited about the scriptures. He was enthusiastic about what The Lord said about everything. His Bible was probably only the first 5 books of the Bible; The Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy).
While watching the sheep in the fields David had plenty of time to meditate on the messages he had heard at the synagogue. Did he actually accompany his family to the temple on the sabbath? Were the sheep taken into the barn for holy days, or just left to themselves?
There had been much shame in his family line when his maternal grandmother returned to Bethlehem having lost her husband and both her sons. The sons had broken Jewish tradition by taking Moabite wives, so as a foreigner, Ruth could have faced a lot of ridicule and rejection.
These first verses at the beginning of our study give us the feeling that David was watching other believers, and how they lived their lives. He came to the conclusion that those who follow the laws of God are blessed, and those who do not are not!
The closing verse of the whole book of psalms gives us a very short command. The noise of our natural world is much more varied than we think, and many things that do not have breath can be heard to make noise too, and seem to be praising the Lord.
When it is time to praise The Lord, it is not something we should be doing quietly according to the verses today! We are called to make a noise. For most of us, that is not something we can do without movement, and all of us are encouraged to dance.
The greatest thing God ever did was in creating His Son to be born for us and to die for us! Between those two events were 30 years of demonstrations of power and wise teaching. Whatever problems you are going through today, Jesus experienced similar things during His earthly life.