Psalm 32

From Psalm 32, NIV Bible,
“You are my hiding place;
You will protect me from trouble
And surround me with songs of deliverance.'
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“Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous,
sing, all you who are upright in heart."

I love the psalms. When people have been threatening to kill me, kill my dog, or kill my family, I have turned to the psalms for comfort. They were written by David facing all the armies of his enemies and those who were supposedly friends who betrayed him. I am amused that House of Thrones is so popular but it’s really just historic deviance and divide and conquer.
I just read a history of Armenia and that poor kingdom was under attack from either the Greek Christians or Muslems every few years all the while there was internal strife.
 Israel was an attractive e nation along the trade routes.  Armies passed through going each way.  Empires one after another attempted and succeeded in subjugate it.
Canada is a young country that has not known invasions but increasingly our immigrants come from regions where war was a constant.  Of Scottish/Irish  heritage we’d known peace within the British empire for hundreds of years with minor conflicts compared to the later great war.
In Moscow a few years ago I met with a uniform supplier for the Russian army. He said war was big business  and that Europeans had wars every 50 years on average.  All of the nations of the ‘Security Council’ are principal arms dealers and major war concerns. The purpose of the United Nations was to cement the gains and ensure the Allied Empire would remain in charge thereafter.  The “cold war’, was really not so much a war but an ‘arms race’ that culminated in Detente and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The competition between ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’ was won with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The American model was a model of decentralization, freedom and meritocracy.  The communist model was central control, totalitarian and fear based. It resulted in the ‘mediocrity’ that haunts all socialist countries.  Stalin said that socialism was communism. Marxist socialism was a dyadic (beugeoisie/proletariat, with the aim of continual warfare till the lowest common denominator , the proletariat ruled.  By contrast there was a Scottish socialist model based on triadic principles of three class society which gave rise to the Union movement.  All economies are a mixture of capitalism and socialism.  Historically the collective agreed to serve in those areas where profit was least likely immediate so less attractive to the capitalist investor.  NAZI was socialism and called itself the National Socialist Party.  Ironically today given the propaganda and disinformation the average person does not recognize ‘central’ control as the hallmark of socialism and dictatorship. Yet Lenin, revered socialist, insisted on ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Even in the church there is the central control of the Catholic contrasted with the regional control of presbytery.  The pendulum swings. In Canada we are facing more dictatorship.  Pierre Trudeau threatened the country’s citizens collectively bringing on martial law against all for the action of an few individuals.  The French have historically swung from their love of monarchy or Napoleonic Empire dictatorship to their bloody French Revolution and radicalism.  In almost all the colonies of the French there have been persistent war left for generations while British colonies by comparison have been relatively stable.  As Canada has become ruled by Quebec dictatorship following the increasing reduction in ‘eligible’ political candidacy, first ‘fluent french speakers’ and now pro abortionist only we have become a centralized oligarchy.
The natural appeal of dictatorship is the ‘benign dictator’ is the most appealing efficient government yet ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ with Canada increasingly corrupt as a nation, perhaps more corrupt than ever. The Charbonneau Enquiry essentially showed that the Eastern Mafia and Biker Gangs controlled the building of Quebec and naturally as Quebec dominates Canada    the influence of corruption spreads through the nation. Not that western Canada is still “Canada the good’ , once the ‘bread basket of the world’, it’s agricultural achievement today is it’s production of marijuana.
The legal/political byzantine squabbling at the top which each corporation trying to get special deals and own the law makers who are themselves seeking special retirement havens like the world renown Canadian Senate, the best of all Old Age Pension deals for the ‘good friend’ of the wheeling dealing central socialist government, it all seems to the common man like a brawl going on in the sky between gods and goddesses of ancient greece and rome.  These Gods and Goddessess aren’t called Mars and Venus but rather Walmart, Pfizer, de Havilland, Nike, etc.  Meanwhile the Hillary Clinton debate wages to the south and Brexit has escaped from the centralized authority and cancerous bureaucracy of Brussels.  It remains to be seen if England will survive this encounter with the Germans.  The Communist experiment in Babylon fell as has the Islamic Babylon tumbled before Desert Spring.  The struggle remains in the West and China.  Always the Borg meets Captain Picard.
In the midst of all this apparent deceit, corruption and greed, divisiveness and empire, it’s good to turn to the Lord.  The psalms are a comfort.
“You are my hiding place,
You will protect me from trouble.
And surround me with songs of deliverance."
When I attended Regent College Dr. James Houston taught courses on spirituality which we were truly blessed to attend year after year.  He taught that reading all the psalms day after day till they are finished would help one to feel ‘anointed’.  There’s a recurrent theme being lost and found over and over again.  It’s the story of David.
David’s heir was Jesus.
Hallelujah.