Psalm 24,25,26

Psalm 24

God owns everything, because God made everything. First he made the seas. Then he made the dry land. In verse 4 "clean hands and a pure heart" means righteous. It means God has forgiven these people. Our hearts are inside us. Only God sees inside us. Only he knows if we are clean inside. The Jews believed that God was their king. They believed that he went everywhere with the ark. They carried the ark through the gates. This was a picture to the Jews. It was a picture of God as king of Jerusalem. The psalm calls God "the king of glory" 4 times.

Psalm 25

When two people agree, we say that they have made an agreement. Another word for agreement is covenant. This is the word that Christians use for the agreement between God and his people.

There were 2 sides to the covenant: God's side and the Jews' side. God promised to take care of the Jews if they continued to love him and be his servants. God kept his side of the covenant but the Jews didn't. So God said, that there must be a new covenant. This happened when Jesus came to the earth. Jesus made the new covenant with his body and his blood. (Jesus said, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood". Luke 22:20)

Psalm 26

Only God can make us whole and righteous (blameless). We become right with God, or honest to God, when we become Christians. We ask God to excuse us and we promise to become his people. We ask God to forgive us and he does.

Washing of hands was to show that they had not done murder. We find the same idea in verse 6 - here, it is not murder, but anything that is wrong.

In verse 9 - David means that when he dies he does not want to be with sinners. He wants to be free, he wants to be with God in heaven, not with sinners. The flat place in verse 12 is a safe place.