Psalms 119:134 - Extorsion Redemption

This is the Truth Network. That was talked about in that chapter would be the fear of the Lord. Boy, I mean, you can clearly see that in this verse. It's just absolutely wonderful.

It's in the pay section. This is verse 134. You know, this is the idea of the presence of God. And what a cool verse this is.

Verse 134 in English says, deliver me from the oppression of man, so will I keep thy precepts. And that word deliver has to do with the presence of God, the face of God. And, you know, very cool that this is the word redeem. And as far as I'm surprised, actually, that they didn't translate it that way because it's usually translated redeem. So that idea of Jesus redeeming, especially from the Psalmist's point of view, the way he redeemed Israel from the Egyptian oppression, right?

This is very closely, obviously, related to what he's talking about here. And it's really cool that if you think about, from my standpoint, when God told Moses that, you know, to go tell Pharaoh to let you go, to do what? To keep a precept. In other words, they were supposed to go keep a feast out in the wilderness to God. And that is, again, a meeting with God. He was asking that they would be delivered, right? Or redeemed so that they could go and worship God out in the wilderness.

And I don't know if you ever thought about that, but what a cool question to ask to be redeemed so that, right? Because as people oppress us, they take our time in so many different ways, or they take our money, or they take our resources, however they go about it. But when they are in that position, it's really cool that God is in a position to deliver us from that kind of oppression.

And turning to him, realizing that, right, it's the Lord that's going to save our bacon, just like he saved the Israelites in that situation. So, I was thinking about, you know, where have I experienced this kind of slavery? Because that word oppression has to do with extortion, with being lied to, treated, you know, essentially held hostage in so many different ways. And so for me, when that happened in my life, and it happened a lot when I was in the car business, is that Chrysler or Chrysler Financial, some combination of the two, they would discover all these projects, or they actually scheme, there's no doubt in my mind, they schemed in order to hold the dealer's hostage to certain things. Like, you know, we will give you a big amount of money back if you order so many cars, because their problem was usually they had too much inventory and they needed to move cars, they needed to get them off their lots, because they're paying interest on those, and the quicker that they could turn their money, you know, obviously the more profitable they could be, and the whole idea was to get dealers to take as many cars as possible. And by loading you up in inventory, if you're a dealer, I don't think a lot of people realize that kind of pressure that puts on the dealer, in that now you're, like we were, always paying floor plan interest on all those cars. And so if you have a $3 million inventory, you can imagine the amount of money you've got to fork out every single month because you've taken all these cars. So what they would do is they would offer you reduced interest, they would offer you a certain amount of money back, they were all sort of essentially extortion schemes, which a lot of them were actually illegal, but it didn't change the fact that Chrysler would put these on you, and the scheme was to get you to take more cars than you needed so that essentially you ended up footing the bill for Chrysler for their inventory problems because you could only sell so many cars in a given month, and if you had an inventory, you know, of 700 cars and you were only selling 100 a month, I mean, you're going to end up paying the interest on all those cars for all that time. Now the result of that slavery, that you would be involved in, would be that you had to work, work, work to sell cars because you had to get them off your lot and sometimes to take really low profit margins, which Chrysler could care less about, but the idea was that you were desperate to move cars because if you didn't, you were out of business, you couldn't afford to continue to pay the interest, but they didn't care. Their idea was that if you were going to be competitive and keep your prices at a way that you could compete with your fellow dealers, you needed the lower interest rate or you needed the money back or you needed the rebate or whatever it was that they were doing in order for you to stay competitive and to be able to maintain a certain volume of new car sales. The bottom line was that guess what that did to, you know, extended hours, all the anguish and in so many different ways, I was definitely under the oppression of man for all those years in the car business and that's why I'm so perfectly, amazingly grateful really that God gave me this wonderful, wonderful calling into radio where I don't have that oppression anymore, I don't have the nightmares that are involved with it and I literally had nightmares for years because God knew that my heart just wasn't made for that kind of oppression and it caused me not to be able to have my times with him that I would like to have had still he made a way where there seemed to be no way and I'm so amazingly grateful that he did deliver me and it was him that delivered me from the oppression of man and I see it so clearly that I could go out into the wilderness and have feasts all the time, man, I mean it's just absolutely wonderful that we can have these feasts under the Lord, these times with him, right, every time we take communion we are having a feast with God. So Lord, deliver us from the oppression of man so that we may keep your precepts.