“Feeding God” on Psalm 50 by Joe Ellis — August 4, 2024

Here is a 10,000 foot view of what is happening in Psalm 50. In this Psalm, God is having it out with His people. It's almost a courtroom scene, where God brings two charges against His people. One charge is against a group of His people who are acting in a way that is well-intentioned, but they’re missing the boat. The second charge is against a group of His people who are acting in a way that is not well-intentioned, and they’re missing the boat catastrophically. This is a courtroom scene, but with a difference — fire envelopes the judge, and darkening clouds and a raging storm fill the courthouse.

In reality, this is nothing like a courtroom, and is more like what the Israelites encountered on Mount Sinai — there was power, splendour, fire, and storm. God is confronting His people, and He is confronting His people with a great show of power. He is calling them to repent and renew a covenant, to restore themselves to right relationship with Him.

The Lord is bringing two charges against two groups of people who have missed the boat in two fairly significant ways. But here’s what I’ve been wrestling with — both ways of missing the boat seem to arise out of God’s silence. As I kept sitting with Psalm 50, I kept having this conversation with God: God, maybe if you always showed up like you showed up in the beginning of this Psalm (with glory, and splendour, and fire and storm and power), maybe if you showed up like that, your people would not have missed the boat so much.

So, what are the two different ways of missing the boat that God is calling out? The first way the people missed the boat is well-intentioned. In the Old Testament, God ordained for his people to offer animal sacrifices for a number of reasons: purification of sins, ratification of a covenant, offering thanksgiving. But never is the worshipper to imagine that they are offering God an animal sacrifice because He is hungry. The sacrificial system is not a BBQ for their God. Now, for those familiar with the religions surrounding Israel, this is an honest mistake. The gods of Mesopotamia, Cana and Egypt were hungry and that’s one reason the worshippers offered sacrifices to them. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods were described as swarming to a sacrifice like flies swarming to meat. In those other religions, a person offered the gods animal sacrifices because they were hungry. Apparently, this was the mindset of some of the worshippers in Israel — imagining that part of the reason they offered God sacrifices was because he was hungry. Notice what this suggests about God — a hungry god who needs to be fed comes across as a god who is impotent, passive, and perhaps lazy. If a god who needs his people to satisfy his most basic needs, he’s not much of a god — this view reverses the Creator—creature relationship. The creature becomes the caregiver for the Creator.

Perhaps you might read this and think, “Of course, we don’t need to feed God!” But I wonder if many of us feel like our works of service like mission work, evangelizing, or even attending church are in some way feeding God. We may feel that God is somehow dependent on you or me to do His work in the world that he is incapable of doing for himself? We might think that God needs us to praise him, or maintain or grow his church because he is hungry and can’t do these things himself?  This isn’t something that’s really taught explicitly, but seems to be born out of the experience of God’s seeming silence; Or of God not responding in ways that we had hoped; Or of God not fulfilling our expectations in how he should act in this world. So we begin to feel like if we’re going to save the church, create disciples, glorify God’s name, then it's really up to us. God’s not going to do it. He’s going to lie back and let us feed him. To that — in Psalm 50, God responds with: “I have no need of a bull from your stall or goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the insects in the fields are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?” God is saying, “I am not dependent on your action in this world to fulfill my purposes.”

The second charge that God brings against the people is very similar — It's essentially the flip side of the same coin. These are some people who have stopped trying to serve God. To them God says, “What right have you to recite my laws or take my covenant on your lips? You hate my instruction and cast my words behind you.” They have essentially tossed their Bibles aside and said, “What does it matter?” Notice that initially when they did this, God was silent. And apparently, they took God’s silence as, at best, Him not caring, or at worst, God tacitly agreeing with them. I wonder if these people who threw aside God’s Word, were just people who got tired of feeling like they needed to feed God? Did they just think, “I’m tired of feeding God, I’m going to feed myself. He certainly doesn’t care about me. Forget Him!”

And to that, God responds (in v.22), “Consider this, you who forget God, or I will tear you to pieces with no one to rescue you.” God responds with power and strength — a strong and terrifying rebuke to those who throw the Word of God aside and say, “Forget this!”

Yet as I prayed with this Psalm, I kept wondering, “Maybe God, maybe if You weren’t so silent, maybe if You showed up more often like you do in this Psalm — with Sinai power, fire, glory and storm, maybe Your people wouldn’t fluctuate between these two positions, on the one hand thinking ‘I need to feed God,’ or on the other hand thinking, ‘God just doesn’t care so I’m going to do what I want.’

And God responds to my desire for His power and might with the invitation to a meal. In Psalm 50, He invites His people to keep coming with their thank offerings —  this is an invitation to a worship service where a sacrifice was made to God, but worshippers are also invited to join Him in a meal of thanksgiving and praise.

In Christ Jesus, the Thank Offering continues. He became the sacrifice for all of us. In the Lord’s Supper, God calls us to return to Him. In the Lord’s Supper, we are reminded that we do not feed God with our sacrifices. Rather, in the Lord’s Supper we are brought anew to God’s sacrifice for us — and then God feed us with Himself.  As Jesus said in John 6:

48 “I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

If you feel as though you need to feed God with your sacrifices — Come, come to the table. Come and let Christ feed You. Let Christ feed you with Himself — He will nourish You; He will strengthen You; He will heal you from your sin.  Hear Jesus say to You,  “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”