God’s Buffet of Provision

It feels like the news cycle has been particularly wild since I happened to start preaching through Psalm 8 in mid-January. Busyness has a way of making us forget where we really are. This Psalm from King David seeks to help remind us of how things really are.

Here’s a problem I often run into. I see for a moment where God’s working and how he’s working, but I struggle to hold onto what He is doing. This is especially true when my attention is pulled to and fro with the craziness I face and we all face in life.

Just take a moment to read through Psalm 8 — we can all use it right now.

Psalm 8 says we’re at a sort of all-you-can-eat buffet. Imagine you go to a Sunday brunch and it has all kinds of wonderful things out there for you to eat. There’s an omelet station, there’s magnificent hash browns, there’s some wonderful sausage and there’s this lovely display of beautifully iced donuts that just look so delicious and call to you.

Now, a lot of times, if you go to a place with that kind of setup, say, just for Sunday brunch, they also have a menu. Say you go in, you survey the buffet, you see all these things and you say, “Waiter, could I have a menu, please? I’d like to, order off the menu.”

Now, what might very well happen is the waiter would say, “Well, you can if you’d like, but you know, most everything on that menu… it’s out there on that buffet. And unlike the menu, the brunch is only $12.95. If you order off the menu, it’s going to be at least that for just one or two items. I recommend you take the buffet.”

In a restaurant, we’d rarely insist on sticking to the menu — we’d listen to the waiter. But, in life, I keep looking for the menu with the “better options.”

We look at the beauty of what God’s given us, everything we need, and ask for the menu. God didn’t just create what we needed to barely stay alive. No, God made this majestic world so we could do much more than just hang on for a few years.

He gives more than just a beautiful world, too: He gives us eternal life in His presence, the best thing we could possibly receive. Yet, we look at the buffet and we see all the beauty of it and say, “I’d like to see the menu and see if I can see something else I’d like instead.”

So often that’s what I do.

I think as David was going over this, that’s where he was seeking to move from. To see what God was doing rather than keep seeking something different, he imagined was what he really needed.

When I’m focusing on my lack, I look at how I can muster up what I really want. Or how my boss can fix my situation. Or how the politician I like right now can fix it. So much of our news cycle is how our favored politicians — either side of the aisle fits — are going to finally stand up for what we need, after all!

What God wants is for me to be fixated on the provision that He provides and on Him, the one who provides it. Not on all those other things. That’s why Psalm 8 ends where it begins: focusing on sheer wonder at God. We need to focus on God.

If you’re at that buffet, you need to focus on the person showing you around it and, and what he or she’s showing you, not on what might not be there. And when we’re reading the Bible, what it’s calling us to do over and over again is focus on God and what He’s doing for us.

He’s not going to hold dangling on the slighted thread of life, like we’ve seen with horror Hamas has done with its hostages. No, God is the one who’s going to give us the only true nourishment, the only true hope that will bring us to genuine life.

“Lord, our Lord, how magnificent is your name?” His name is key. Even when I can’t see how everything is going to work out just now, Scripture tells me of the One behind that name, and the very majestic creation David considers in Psalm 8 is a sign of who He is.

If that is who He is, we can count on His promises even when we’re not quite sure where things are going right now. And when the world feels like it is moving at a million miles a minute and we’re not quite sure where it’s headed, that’s precisely what we need.