Borrowed Breath

01 · Outside with the psalmist

Psalm 104 starts with a man talking to himself. "Let my whole being bless the Lord!" Nobody else is in the room. He's preaching to himself.

Then he goes outside and starts noticing things. God wears light like a robe. God rides the clouds like a chariot. And then a line that would have sounded bold in his world: "You make the winds your messengers" (v. 4). The nations around Israel looked at the wind and the storm and the lightning and saw gods.¹ The psalmist looks at the same sky and says: those aren't gods. They're servants. The wind runs errands.

He watches wild donkeys drinking at the springs. Birds singing in the branches. Who are those birds even singing for? Most of us walk right past them. The psalmist looks at it all and says: that's God. That's just what God does. Nobody earned the rain.

He even looks at dinner that way. Bread, wine, olive oil (vv. 14–15). He sees the rain on the mountain, the grass, the grain, the hands that farmed it… and he puts God at the front of the line. Most of us look at the same loaf of bread and see a price tag.

Then comes a contrast that's easy to miss. Night falls, and verse 21 says, "The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God." Two verses later the sun comes up and "people go off to their work, to do their work until evening" (v. 23). The lions are seeking their food from God. The people just go to work. Nobody mentions God.²

It's almost like a check on us. The lions know where dinner comes from. We think it comes from the job. On Sunday I put the psalmist's point this way: "Don't forget that work is a gift." I know plenty of people who work as hard as humanly possible and barely scrape by. Sometimes someone works that hard, and then something happens and they lose everything. It was never all because of us.

02 · Everything is waiting on the breath

Then the psalm steps back and takes in the whole scene: "The earth is full of your creations!" (v. 24). The Hebrew word under "creations" is a word for property. One commentary puts it plainly: "the earth is full of your possessions."⁵ The lions, the goats, the badgers, the sea monster, the people sitting in traffic. All of it is God's.

I feel this more now that I have a mortgage payment. I can tell myself this land is my property. Technically I don't fully own it yet. And even if I did, somebody owned it before I was alive. Somebody claimed it a long time ago, when it was just woods and animals ran across it. Maybe in a hundred years that house won't even be there, and I won't even be a blip on that deed.

So often we think of ourselves as owners: owners of our own lives, of what we have, of what we can acquire. The psalm says we are receivers. Then it shows us how, in verses 27–30. Everything is waiting. Not standing-in-line waiting… leaning-forward waiting. Waiting on the breath of God.

We try to hold on to everything: the calendar, the outcomes, our kids, our health, the retirement plan. But as I said on Sunday, "you hold your breath for too long and what happens? You pass out." We were never meant to be the owners. We were meant to receive.

03 · Job swears by the God he's arguing with

Maybe you heard all that and thought: that's nice, Pastor, but I still have to work every day. I still have to make the payments. And some weeks I don't feel like praising the Lord with my breath, because of what has happened.

That's why I love that the Bible has Job in it. Job loses everything. Then his friends spend twenty-some chapters explaining that it must be his fault. Listen to how he answers them:

As God lives,
who rejected my legal claim,
the Almighty, who made me bitter,
as long as breath is in me
and God's breath is in my nostrils—
(Job 27:2–3)

"As God lives" is how you swore an oath.⁷ It's like swearing on the Bible in a courtroom. And Job swears by the very God he thinks is against him. One commentary says it well: "Job swears by the God who is punishing him."⁸

One more thing about the word "bitter." One commentator says Job "is not talking about bitter feelings but about the objective bitterness of the fate God has imposed on him."⁹ Job isn't confessing a bad attitude. He's saying what happened to him is bitter. Some of us need permission to say that out loud.

And notice verse 3: "God's breath is in my nostrils." Job knows whose breath it is, the same thing the psalmist knows. And he uses that breath to argue with God. He won't let go of God, even while he's accusing him.

So if you're angry at God right now, use the breath. It's his. He can take it. You can use it to sing, and you can use it to scream. Both count as talking to God.

04 · Not a landlord

If God owns it all, is God just a landlord, coming around for the rent? Not in this psalm. "Let the Lord's glory last forever! Let the Lord rejoice in all he has made!" (v. 31). The owner of everything isn't checking the books. He's enjoying it. He waters mountains no one thinks about. He puts birds in trees so they can sing.

And the psalmist, who has just admitted that every creature returns to dust, knows he's one of them. Here's what he does with that:

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God
while I'm still alive.
(Psalm 104:33)

"While I'm still alive." That's a man who knows the loan comes due, and decides what to spend it on. He doesn't skip over the hard things in life. He says, even in the middle of all of it, I have borrowed breath in my lungs, and that breath is God's.