Day 4 | Charly Adams
The first thing that stuck out to me here was the titles of the two psalms. Psalm 7 starts "the erring one" while Psalm 8 starts "to the Overseer." (As always, I'm using Young's Literal Translation if you're not seeing what I'm seeing.) It's striking that one of these starts by referring to himself and the other to God and yet both place him on some level below or subservient to God. As I worked through both psalms, I started to see that in the different situations, David still showed a respect and awe for God that permeated his beliefs.
Psalm 7:11 "God is a righteous judge" in the context of David calling for guidance shows the awe and respect. Psalm 8:3 "For I see Thy heavens, a work of Thy fingers, Moon and stars that Thou didst establish" really gets at the awe that he's experience that something that is immense to us could be so small to God.
On a different note, the second half of Psalm 7:11 "and He is not angry at all times" is something important to remember. I feel like we as a New Testament people start to look at the Old Testament God as a different, angry, vindictive God. Here we see that, yeah, the Old Testament folk acknowledge God could be angry in his judgement, but wasn't always. It's important to remember for us living our lives that God's judgement of situations results in what is necessary to clean up the mess or encourage the behavior, a little like a parent.