We’ve made it! We have spent all of this month leaning into Psalm 23, a short psalm with only 6 verses, but a psalm rich in imagery and meaning. It describes a God who cares for us, provides for us, and returns us to life. A God who give us space to acknowledge the enemies and shadows we experience while also drawing us towards the grace, love, and blessings that are in our face. And today, today wraps it all up, brings it all together. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
When I hear those words, I can just picture forever as a perfect back patio morning, drinking an iced coffee, reading a book, where the neighbor you absolutely love talking to and spending time with always comes by to check on you. Goodness and mercy always with us and we are home, not just today or tomorrow but the length of forever, as the Hebrew poetically puts it. The Hebrew actually adds another layer to the opening sentence of this verse too. You may have commonly heard it as, “goodness and mercy shall follow” but the meaning of the Hebrew, the force of the original word, is better conveyed in another way. “Your beauty and love chase after me,” or as another translation puts it, “Yes, goodness and faithful love will pursue me.” We are hunted by grace, we are hounded by grace. A hymn written in the 1800s talks about the love that will not let us go. Here at the end of this psalm, we have yet another strong, visceral image of God’s presence of how God connects with us. And while the poetry of the more traditional version moves me in one way, these newer translations that better reflect the heart of the Hebrew, chasing, hunting, pursuing, it was a revelation to me. To have goodness and mercy, to have beauty and love tracking us down. It is one thing to know God loves us. But I feel like it is another to picture God doggedly pursuing us, to have to accept that not only are we worthy of love, but we are worth pursuing? Because there are a lot of ways we run from love, beauty, goodness, and mercy. There are so many ways we hide, self-sabotage, or numb or avoid. And God pursues us still. God always has.
Genesis 3
“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?””
Lost sheep parable – Luke and Matthew
Romans 8 – nothing can separate us
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[k] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
You are worthy of being pursed by goodness.
You are worthy of being chased by beauty.
You are a child of God, fearfully and wonderfully made, and worthy of being wrapped and swaddled in mercy.
It doesn’t matter what you have or haven’t done.
It doesn’t matter how perfect or imperfect you feel you are.
It doesn’t matter, the size of your bank account, the title of your job, single, married, divorced, widowed, it doesn’t matter.
To God, you are lovable and worthy of being pursued by grace. God pursues you, just as you are.
And for me, that is the best good news in the world. Psalm 23 starts great, follows through with hard realities and hope, and ends with the best thing of all. God’s beauty and love chase after us, chases after you, every day of you life.