Uniting Church SA eNews Reflection 3/3/2026
Rock of our Salvation
At my church, Christ Church Uniting in Wayville, we’re following through the lectionary Psalms for Lent, making them the focus of our Lenten study and Sunday services. This Sunday (Lent 3) is Psalm 95, starting with the familiar call to worship:
“O come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!”
The first seven verses have the psalmist doing just that, singing God’s praises:
“For the LORD is a great God and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.”
The final four verses have a change of voice, however; now it is God himself speaking through the psalmist, reminding the people of their past deviation from the covenant, described in Exodus 17, the infamous “Water from the Rock” incident:
“Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.”
Then there are words which will have your eyes popping out even if you’ve read them many times before:
“For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.’ Therefore in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
A God who loathes as well as loves, and swears terrible oaths of punishment in his anger! Yet such behaviour is completely consistent with the picture of God the psalmist paints initially, as a mighty God-King above all god-kings; creator and ruler of the world who then, naturally, judges it uncompromisingly.
Jesus to the rescue, however! Psalm 95 is a perfect example, in fact, of our critical need to interpret all scripture through the lens of the Gospel, the radically new conception of God, and God’s kingdom, that Jesus presents.
Jesus’ God is not a controlling, judging super-king, but a loving, divine parent – the father in the parable of the prodigal son is a beautiful picture of such a God. Like a good parent – the best possible parent! – God gives us our life and our freedom, knowing full well we’ll probably just squander it and end up on skid row; then when we finally come to our senses and come back grovelling to them, God ignores all that and throws a big party to celebrate our return. Behaviour quite unlike the God in the psalm, you’d have to concur!
So, no, the Israelites didn’t wander around in the wilderness for forty years because God was punishing them, even if that was the understanding of later commentators. Rather their misadventure was the natural consequence of their own folly – just like it happens to us all the time! Disunity, backbiting, distrust, selfishness – this was the real content of their disregard of the covenant. God didn’t need to punish them, they punished themselves! This is the real sense in which God is the “rock of our salvation”: God saves us not from our enemies, nor indeed from God’s own terrible judgement, but from ourselves!
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay
