Scriptural text: Psalm 107:1-9, 39-43
A call for praise with thanksgiving (Psalm 107:1).
The psalm opens with a typical call to praise. All those who have been redeemed from trouble and exile by the Lord are summoned and called upon to give thanks to God. God’s people should thank Him because He is good and His loyal love endures forever. The second reason that the psalmist gives for why we should “give thanks to the Lord” is “because His mercy endureth for ever.” In other words, the Lord’s compassion and loving-kindness will last forever and never end.
Reasons for praise (Psalm 107:2-3).
“Let the redeemed of the Lord say so.” Whatever others may think or say, the redeemed have overwhelming reasons for declaring the goodness of the Lord. Theirs is a peculiar redemption, and for if they ought to render peculiar praise. “Whom he hath redeemed from the hands of the enemy.” Snatched by superior power away from the fierce oppressions, they are bound above all men to praise to adore the Lord, their Liberator. Their’s is a divine redemption, “he hath redeemed” them, and no one else has done it. His own unaided arm has wrought out their deliverance.
And gathered them out of the land, from the east, and from the west, from the north, and from the south. Gatherings follow upon redeeming. The captives of old were restored to their own land from every quarter of the earth, and even from beyond the sea, for the word translated south is really the sea. No matter what divides, the Lord will gather his own unto one body, and first on earth by “One Lord, one faith, and one baptism, and then in heaven by one common bliss they shall be known to be the one people of the One God. What a glorious Shepherd must, he who thus collects the blood bought flock from the remotest regions, guides them through countless perils, and at last makes them to lie down in the green pastures of Paradise.
A time of despair (Psalm 107:4-5).
They wandered in the wilderness on their return from Babylon after 70 years of Babylonian captivity; or, when God was conducting them again to their own land. The word “wilderness” in the Scriptures means a desolate, barren, uninhabited region, usually desolate of trees, of springs, and of water-courses. In a solitary way-Rather, in a “waste” way; a land that was desolate and uncultivated. They found no city to dwell in-in their journeyings. This was true between Babylon and Palestine; a wide, barren, desolate waste.
As the psalmist continued to describe God’s people journey back to their homeland from Babylon “Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them.”They were in danger of perishing from hunger in their return home through the dry and barren deserts.
A time of deliverance (Psalm 107:6-9).
In “their distresses” God’s people did what the Apostle James encouraged believers to do (see James 5:13): “they cried unto the Lord in their trouble.” When troubles seem to be more than we can stand, that’s a time to pray and cry out unto the Lord. In response to their cries for help, the Lord answered and “delivered them out of their distresses.”
As part of His answer to their cry for help in their times of trouble in the desert wilderness, God “led them forth by the right way.”God was leading them in “the right way” so “that they might go to a city of habitation.” The “city of habitation ” or where His people would dwell was Jerusalem.