Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Psalm 81 is a corporate praise song, but it also has some elements of prophetic warning.

We start out with a call to the musicians to play their instruments, their harps and

tambourines and trumpets, God likes it all. By the way, trumpets in that day weren't made of brass.

They were made of rams horns. You may have seen one. It's called a shofar. The musicians are

signaling the beginning of a feast so they can gather all the people together. The people

have come from all over Israel

to the religious headquarters of their nation, just like they do three times a year for these

feasts, because God has commanded them to keep these feasts as a means of remembering and

celebrating all he has done for them. The lyrics of the song recount God's rescue from Egypt,

his provision in the wilderness,

and his command to be faithful to him alone.

Then it recounts their rebellion, and it ends with God imploring his people to repent.

We see the words hear and listen repeated three times in this Psalm.

For all the noise God calls them to make with their instruments in the beginning,

he's more concerned with them hearing him and doing what he says.

Psalm 88 was written by a man named Himman, and he was in a dark place.

We've all been there, right?

He's freely expressing his emotion to God, and what I learned from this song more than anything is that God can handle our frustrations

and questions without being threatened one bit. First, Himman starts out by addressing Y'allay

as the God of my salvation. So he's marking out that he does have a relationship with God,

and he asks for God to be attentive to his prayer. It sounds like he's either actually close to death

...