UNDERSTAND God’s LOVE towards ORPHANS and WIDOWS!
June 16 Bible
Reading: Psalms Chapters 68-71
UNDERSTAND God’s LOVE towards ORPHANS and WIDOWS!
"Sing to God, sing praises to His name;
extol Him who rides on the clouds, by His name Yah, and rejoice before Him. A
father of the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in His holy
habitation." (Psalms 68:4-5)
The above
passage is a call to praise God for His majesty and His care for the needy. “Yah” is an abbreviated form of Yahweh
(Hebrew), the personal name for the covenant God of Israel. The pronunciation
of this name was lost in history because the Israelites considered it too sacred to speak it aloud (see Exodus
3:14). David exhorts us that it is now time to sing praises to God and to clear
a way for the Lord in the deserts (Isaiah
40:3; 62:10). Our covenant-keeping
Jehovah is worthy of our endless praise!
Let us never
forget that our God, seated in His majestic seat in the highest heaven, is not
withdrawn from His creation. He is a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden
(Isaiah 1:17). He should be praised as a God of mercy and tender compassion as
He cares deeply for the afflicted and oppressed. He is not limited to clouds
and storms; He also meets the needs of the helpless. For all people, He is in His holy habitation, dispensing justice!
Although our
God dwells infinitely high in the clouds, yet He is intimately near to the
friendless and the dispossessed. Widows and orphans were particularly
vulnerable in ancient society and God had commanded Israel to care for them (see
Exodus 22:22; Deuteronomy 10:18; Ruth 4:14, 15). As the God of all grace, He
provides the warmth and fellowship of a happy home for the lonely, and as for those who have been unjustly condemned
to prison, God leads them into prosperity with shouts of joy.
Loneliness
comes when we forget about the One who is always with us as He had promised (see
Matt. 28:20b; Heb. 13:5b). He knows intimately the pain of separation as He
(God the Father) got separated through a distance from His only begotten Son
Jesus during His earthly sojourn, and totally separated from His Son when He
took upon Himself the sins of the whole world upon the cross at Calvary. God
cares for the orphans and widows in their loneliness. He cares for us and will
comfort us when we struggle in this life by filling us with a “peace that passes all understanding”
(Phil. 4:7).
As the children of this compassionate
heavenly Father, how then should we behave? We have to be cognizant of the fact that "whoever shuts his ears to the cry of
the poor will also cry himself and not be heard" (Prov 21:13). Orphans
and widows are close to the heart of God, and we should also reflect the same
attitude in our everyday lives as well.
"Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world." (James 1:27)
