Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you!
Psalm 67:3
pre·scient /ˈpreSH(ē)ənt/
adjective: having or showing knowledge of events before they take place.
Have you ever had a feeling something was going to happen and it did? Have you had a dream and then seen it play out in your waking life?
Prescience, precognition, and premonitions are considered by some to be proven psychic abilities that give accurate predictions of the future. Others (myself included) believe they are more likely coincidences or self-fulfilling prophesies.
At the same time, I believe the Bible encourages us to practice what might be called “Prescient Praise.” Prescient praise means praising God for something that hasn’t even happened yet – but you know it will. It means trusting in God’s promises with such surety that in your mind the promised future event has already taken place.
Psalm 67 begins with what sounds like an expression of what the psalmist only hopes will happen: “May God be gracious to us and bless us” (v.1). By the end of the Psalm, that hope has changed to certainty: “God, our God, shall bless us” (v.6b). And that certainty of God’s blessing in the future is what causes the psalmist to exclaim, “Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you” (v.3)!
How can you and I move from a faith that sometimes feels like wishful thinking to a faith that’s grounded in the certainty that “God, our God, shall bless us”? How did the psalmist do it? How did he move from mere hope to confident boldness?
The psalmist’s rock-solid faith about the future is based, not on a feeling that everything will somehow work out, but on the fact of God’s care and provision in the past. The same is true for us. If God has blessed us in the past, we can be confident He shall continue to do so in the future. And God has blessed us all our lives with everything we need. As the psalmist writes in verse 6, “The earth has yielded its increase” in the past, and therefore, “God, our God shall bless us” in the future. In Christ we have all we need, both for this life and for the life to come.
If we need any proof of God’s faithfulness, just look at Jesus. Look at what God has already done for you by sending His Son to earth, sacrificing Him for the forgiveness of your sin, and raising Him from the dead. Then you can know that as God has blessed you in Christ, He shall continue to take care of all your needs. As Paul writes, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things” (Rom. 8:32)?
God has been faithful to us, because that’s who He is. God’s faithfulness to His people will never come to an end. In Christ, we can predict the future – and praise Him for it! We can be confident of God’s blessings in our lives – past, present and future – and in that confidence, we can practice prescient praise.