I know that the LORD is great, that our Lord is greater than all gods. (Psalm 135:5, NIV)
Over the years, golf telecasts have featured a number of memorable “calls.” Verne Lundquist had two such calls. One was at the 1986 Masters when Jack rolled in a putt on seventeen on Sunday: “Maybe…YES SIR!” Nineteen years later, at sixteen, Verne was there when Tiger, from off the green, chipped up the slope sideways to the hole and watched as his ball with the Nike swoosh lingered on the lip before dropping for a birdie: “Here it comes…OH MY GOODNESS…OH WOW…In your life have you seen anything like that?”
Tiger was also the subject of a call on Saturday of the 2001 Players at the famous island green seventeenth hole when Gary Koch called his 60-foot downhill putt from the fringe: “Johnny, that’s better than most…. It is better than most… BETTER THAN MOST!”
For many, the title of Better Than Most would be sufficiently satisfying. As God’s people, though, we do not need to settle for Better Than Most, because our God is Better Than All.
In the Old Testament, the Israelites, at times, were surrounded by the Canaanites, the Moabites, the Ammonites, and the Philistines and their respective gods—Baal, Chemosh, Milcom, and Dagon. Yet they chose Yahweh. Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, having heard about everything God had done for Moses and the Israelites, including delivering them out of Egypt, proclaimed: “Now I know that the LORD is greater than all the other gods” (Exodus 18:11).
We know God is the greatest when we look at his creation, read the Scriptures, and reflect on our own relationship with him.In today’s world, there is a vast array of gods that people have chosen to worship. Some are deities such as Buddha, Allah, Shiva, and Akal Murat. Other folks have chosen money, power, success, work, drugs, alcohol—you name it—as their idol. As Christians, we have chosen to worship the greatest of all.
It would be folly for me to try to explain how it is that we can say that God is the greatest, because it is incomprehensible. In Psalm 145, David wrote: “Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom” (v. 3). But while God’s greatness may be unfathomable, he has revealed parts of himself to us through his word. Qualities like loving, merciful, patient, faithful, powerful, creative, forgiving, full of wisdom, and good come to mind, but this certainly cannot be deemed to be a complete and total description of the characteristics that cause us to call him the greatest. But we still know he is the greatest when we look at his creation, read the Scriptures, and reflect on our own relationship with him.
The psalmist in today’s psalm tells us that we must praise him and sing praise to his name. Chris Tomlin urges us to sing his praise so that others might see how great our God is:
And my heart will sing
How great is our God, sing with me
How great is our God, and all will see
How great, how great is our God
We do not need to settle for something better than most when we can have the one who is Better Than All.
—
Mark “Ole” Olson
February 24, 2021
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.