Don’t forget to brush your teeth. How many times have you heard that? Or said that? Whenever you meet someone who knows everything about history, who is particularly generous with sharing what they know, you very often find that person telling you implicitly or explicitly, to remember something. For some, remembering to swish the toothbrush in the mouth, just about every day, is nearly all they can remember. Life is busy. The year the capitol building was burned by the British must remain a mystery for a bit longer (it was 1814).
Psalm 105 is sometimes called an historical psalm (like Pss. 78, 106, and 136), which is a fine label for the short term. Recall that lyric poetry is never academically thorough like a philosophical treatise. Nor is lyrical poetry detail-oriented like a thick biography of a famous person. And neither is lyric poetry scientifically accurate like a multi-volume history. Lyric poetry is always governed by the poet’s emotional response to an idea or an experience. History is recounted to communicate something else, something about the poet’s feelings while, or because of, reflecting upon the history. This is why it is important to pay special attention to the six verses of Psalm 105 (1-6). We can be clear about this, that everything that happens in verses 7-42 is exactly what leads Bible scholars to call the Psalm, historical. It is the first six verses that really tell us what the poet is up to.
The psalmist is not consumed with remembering the past, nor with berating himself or others for poor recollection of the past. The poet is overcome with thankfulness and the fruit of thankfulness. There is a small marker in the Hebrew language that lengthens the sound of a verb and gives it a particular mood. It makes the verb energetic, just a little punchy. It makes the verb sound like a command. Here the poet commands the reader (or the singer) to give thanks, to call on the Lord, to sing to Him, to praise Him, to tell Him of His own wondrous works, and to seek the Lord and His presence, continually. The command to remember, which is what makes us think that some history is about to come, is the last command verb in this long chain.
There’s a troubled figure in the 1945 novel, Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh, who says, “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember” (24-25). The speaker is desperate, despondent, and hopeless. He is expecting the buried treasure, placed there by an earlier version of himself, to make him happy when he is sad. But he forgot to bury something in the happy place, so he shall never remember, and never be happy again. How foolish.Our poet is not like this. The poet never buried a treasure and, therefore, can never be the source of his own happiness. The source is God. And God didn’t bury a treasure, He is the treasure. If the poet were an historian he might begin with, perhaps, once upon a time. Instead, he begins with “Oh give thanks to the Lord, call upon His name” (Ps. 105:1). God is the great Storyteller and He is the great Story. Everything about Him, not merely what He has done, but also who He is, is worthy of receiving from us overwhelming thanks and praise. It is only when we sing to Him our praise that we properly understand His wondrous works in history. History is not the object of worship; He is the sole object of our worship and affection.
