Episode Transcript
WEBVTT
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Let's give our attention now to a
psalm. I'm taking a break for about
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a month, I suppose, from
first chronicles. Will hear Psalm forty four
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tonight. As we hear it,
let us here with humble ears and ears
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of faith, Psalm forty four,
a Maskul of the sons of Cora.
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Oh God, we have heard with
our ears. Our fathers have told us
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what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old, you,
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with your own hand, drove out
the nations, but them you planted,
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you afflicted the people's but them you
set free. For Not by their
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own sword did they win the land, nor by did their own nor did
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their own arms save them, but
your right hand and your arm and the
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light of your face, for you
delighted in them. You are my King
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O. God ordained salvation for Jacob. Through you we push down our foes.
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Through your name we tread thou down
those who rise up against us,
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for not in my own bow do
I trust, nor can my sword save
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me, but you have saved us
from our foes and have put to shame
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those who hate us. In God, we have boasted continually and we give
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thanks to your name forever but you
have rejected US and disgraced us and have
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not gone out with our armies,
and you have made us turned back from
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the foe, and those who hate
us have gotten spoil. You have made
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us like sheep for the slaughter and
have scattered US among the nations. You
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have sold your people for a trifle, demanding no high price for them.
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You have made us the taunt of
our neighbors, the derision and scorn of
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those around us. You have made
us a by word among the nations,
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a laughing stock among the people's all
day long, my disgrace is before me
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and shame has covered my face at
the sound of the Taunter and reviler,
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at the sight of the enemy and
the Avenger. All this has come upon
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us, though we have not forgotten
you and we have not been false to
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your covenant. Our heart has not
turned back, nor have our steps departed
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from your way. Yet you have
broken us in the place of jackals and
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covered us with the shadow of death. If we had forgotten the name of
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our God or spread out our hands
to a foreign god, would not God
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discover this, for he knows the
secrets of the heart? Yet, for
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your Sake, we are being we
are killed all the day long. We
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are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. Awake, why are you sleeping?
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A Lord, Rouse Yourself. Do
not reject US forever. Why do you
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hide your face? Why do you
forget our affliction and depression? For our
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soul is bowed down to the dust, our belly clings to the ground.
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Rise up, come to our help, redeem us for the stake of your
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steadfast love. May God bless his
word to us. Please be seated.
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Despite the perpetual news cycle we're always
in, can't seem to be freed of
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Americans are nevertheless optimists. We just
can't let that go. I don't think
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we. We just always seem to
find a way to or at least we
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feel the weight of optimism. There
is a pressure we have to be optimists,
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so sort of always be on the
up and up, even when things
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look very bleak, and sometimes,
I'm afraid, that kind of American optimism,
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if I can put it that way, gets transferred over to our our
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faith. There is, of course, a great optimism that we have in
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God, a hope that is unfading, ever secure. We have a God
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who promises things and never lies.
Who never changes, whose will is perfect.
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If anyone has reasons for hope,
it's Christians. It's those who've found
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their lives, or find their lives
in Jesus Christ and his work on the
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cross. But at the same time, Christians are also realists. We don't
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pretend things are ways in which they're
not. We see the world as it
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is. Martin Luther says, the
mark of a truth theologian is someone who
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calls a thing what it is,
who calls good good and evil evil.
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Sometimes this is a bit backwards from
the way it might seem, for we
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call the cross good and we call
riches evil and net nevertheless, there is
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this distinction that Christians are called to
make a really a realism, a realism
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that's based on what we see in
front of us and what God has promised
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to us. And what that means
is that in our Christian lives we will
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sometimes find ourselves, like the Psalmist, here singing a song of lament.
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A lament. Maybe you've not heard
that word before if you're little. A
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lament is a cry to God in
a moment of crisis. Kids, you
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have lamented before when, let's say
you're really, really hungry and dinner is
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about an hour late and you really
want to eat and you say, mom,
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I'm hungry, please feed me,
I'm so hungry. That's a lament.
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It's a pleading, as saying I
need, I need this thing,
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I want this thing, I'm having
a bad time, a hard time,
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without this thing. Well, we
can lament for good reasons and for bad
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reasons, but here we have a
lament over some very serious things. This
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cry to God in a moment of
crisis. And what's unique about this psalm,
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we see other laments in the psalms, is that it's national, it's
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corporate. There are places where it
speaks in an individual way. So,
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for example, in verse for it
says you are my God, Oh king,
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or verse fifteen. All the day, all day long, my disgrace
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is before me and shame has covered
my face. Here is the picture of
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an individual person feeling the weight of
this distress that they're under, these hard
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times. But it's not just one
person. The context are the problem that
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these people are facing is that they, Israel's armies, have gone out.
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They've gone out to face some enemy. It doesn't say who it is here,
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but they've gone out to face an
enemy and you know what happened.
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They were defeated. We've been looking
at first chronicles right, and we've been
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focusing on these great victories David has
had. This psalm probably isn't from that
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period of time. David is going
out battle after battle after battle, and
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he's winning, winning, winning,
all, conquering all victory. It's going
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swimmingly well, but not here.
This describes an instance where the people of
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God march out to battle confidence in
the Lord, their God, and then
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when they get there they're destroyed.
They're destroyed and it seems like they're destroyed
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in a very strong way. Will
come to that. Will describe that in
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a moment. But that's the context
that we have here for this lament,
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this cry to God in a moment
of crisis. What I'd like to do
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is go through the Psalm, look
at its four parts and then draw your
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attention to a couple points of application. So the four parts of this psalm
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I'm going to call past, present, protest and plea. First there is
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a description of Israel's past, then
Israel's present, then there is a protest
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to God and then a plea to
God. Past, present, protest,
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plea. So first the past.
That's in verses one through eight. This
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is where the Psalm starts, and
it starts out on this very positive note,
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doesn't it? Oh God, we
have heard with our ears, our
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fathers have told us. This is
a good way to start, right.
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These are people that have grown up
and they say our fathers have taught us
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about God. They've told us the
stories. We know what you've done in
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the past and they described some of
those things, things that we read about
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in Joshua and judges, for example. I'm even further back than that,
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and they describe the PSALMIST describes it
in this way. With Your own hand,
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you drove out the nations, but
the people, your people, are
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fathers and mothers. You planted them, the Canaanites. They were afflicted people's
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verse two says. But to the
people of Israel, you set them free.
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You remember where? They were set
free from Egypt, bound in Egypt.
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And what did God? He God
do with a mighty hand and an
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outstretched arm, he set his people
free. He said to Pharaoh, let
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my people go, and Pharaoh resisted
with everything that was in him. He
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made his heart as strong as a
rock and said no no, no,
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I won't. He said to God
I won't, and God said you will,
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and he made him and his people
were set free. The people of
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Egypt were afflicted, but God's people
were set free. Israel didn't rise up
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when some kind of insurrection, beat
down their chains, kill some Egyptians and
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run out of town. No,
they walked out with bags of bread and
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food on their backs because God had
said go, you're free to go now.
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It was not even when they did
use swords, when they went into
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the land of Canaan, the people
of God recognize very much that it was
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not the sword that saved them,
but it was God, God's right hand,
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his arm, verse three says,
and the light of his face.
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What does that mean? How did
the light of God's Face Save Them?
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It's described in the parallel phrase right
after that. For you delighted in them.
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To talk about the light of God's
faces, to talk about his happiness.
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He was happy with his people,
he was pleased with them, he
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was shining on them, he delighted
in them, and so they were fine.
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Everything that God willed for them and
for their protection happened. And this
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is what this is how this is
what he did in the past. This
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is what their fathers had told them
about, and they knew this, and
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so there's this confession that results from
that. In verses for through seven,
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you are my king, our King, Oh God, or Dame Salvation for
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Jacob, it's through you, verse
five, that we push down our foes.
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Through your name we tread down those
who rise up against us. It's
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not our bows, it's not our
swords that save us, it's you,
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are God, and for that,
in Verse Eight, we have boasted continually
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and we give thanks to your name. We're all taught that boasting is a
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bad thing, and that's true when
we're boasting in ourselves, but when we
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boast in God, when we say
and we have confidence in his strength,
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there's no false pride in that.
The problem with boasting is we're often exaggerating
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our achievements beyond what we really should. We're not humbling ourselves according to the
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way we ought. But in God
there's no need to humble God. There's
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no need to chasing him a little
bit and not let him get him too
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puffed up, because he's God,
he's perfect, he's good, he's glorious
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in all things, and for that
they are proud and they give thanks to
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him for his name. So that's
the past. That's who they know God
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is. That's their experience of God, partly through the stories of their fathers.
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Now we come to the present.
In Verses Nine through sixteen. What
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the plea this lamentous saying about the
presence is that the present is very different
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from the past. You rescued our
fathers, but us, you've rejected US
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and disgraced us. Instead of going
out with our armies and conquering all these
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people, we feel like sheep being
led to the slaughter we don't feel like
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a great and power for army working
in the name of the Lord, but
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we feel like little lambs walking to
the slaughterhouse ready to be killed. Lambs
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don't are not powerful. They don't
have armor and defenses and swords. Their
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lambs sheep. This is how they
feel and they are in some ways experiencing
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this. The armies have gotten the
better of them. Verse Ten. They
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have got and the spoil. They've
won the war. Their enemies have won
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the war against them, or the
battle against them, and have taken away
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their things. Verse Twelve describes the
magnitude of this by saying you've sold your
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people for a trifle, demanding no
high price to them. For them.
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It's as though this enemy army has
overtaken God's people, and it wasn't even
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hard. There was the Israel can't
even say, well, at least they
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took a lot of casualties, at
least they lot used a lot of equipment.
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You've sold your people for a triple. You didn't even demand a high
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price for us, and because of
that, now there's this shame attached to
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us. Not only did we die
in battle, not only have our armies
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been routed, not only have our
things been taken from us, but now
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there's this shame, and not just
internally, but real shame among the nations.
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Verse Fourteen says you have made us
a by word among the people's a
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by word is is like a little
phrase, a little short phrase that describes
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something larger. So you know.
Well, we all know about Israel.
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Right like. That's all you would
have to say to know about how embarrassing
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these people are, how shameful and
weak they are. All you have to
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do is is mentioned them a laughing
stock among the people's. Perhaps in your
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bibles you have a little superscript to
there. That points you down toward the
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bottom, and it says Hebrew as
shaking of the head. That is kind
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of yeah, I can't believe those
guys. What fools trusting in Yahway.
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And look at what happened to them. They got destroyed. We wasted them,
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we blew them out of the water. What a joke, what a
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joke of a people, what a
joke of a nation? That's how that's
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what they were hearing from their enemies, the enemies that God was supposed to
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be protecting them from. And so
now the instead of feeling confident and proud
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and happy, Verse Fifteen and Sixteen
says that, at the sound of the
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Taunter and reviler, every time I
see an enemy, every time I see
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the avenger, I filled with disgrace. All the day long, shame has
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covered my face. So that's the
present situation, very different from the past.
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In the past you've taken care of
us, you've fought for us,
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but in the present you've left us
out in the open. We feel as
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though you've simply led us to die. Where are you? Well, that's
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then comes the protest. In verses
Seventeen through twenty two. The protest of
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essentially says what did we do?
DID WE DO ANYTHING WRONG? No,
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we didn't. We kept your covenant, we didn't commit adulter our idolatry.
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We didn't open our hands to false
God's we didn't forget your name. You
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know the secrets of our hearts.
We've done the things that were Sparta supposed
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to do, whether that's in a
legal sense, being false to your covenant,
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or in the imagery of walking a
straight path. We stayed the course.
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We've kept on the PAT on the
on the path. Essentially, another
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way to put what they're saying is
they're saying if we had sinned, if
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we had put up idols or forgotten
that you are our God, we could
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understand why this was happening, but
we haven't done that, so we don't
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understand. We are being killed all
the day long. And then again this
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phrase. We are regarded as sheep
to be slaughtered. That's the protest.
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And then, finally, the plea. The plead to God is to help.
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They describe God as though he were
sleeping, unaware of what was going
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on. Wake up, help me, Lord, wake up. Why are
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you sleeping? Rouse yourself now.
Of course they don't believe that God is
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actually sleeping. God never sleeps,
he never slumbers, he always knows what's
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going on. But they're saying this
is a descriptive way to say, don't
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leave us alone, don't reject US
forever, as they as it goes on
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to say. It's put in a
second way. Instead of a sleeping image,
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a face, a facial image is
used. Remember, before, the
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light of his face shined upon his
people, and that's why they were victorious.
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Well, the flip side of that
is hiding the face. Twenty four
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says, why do you hide your
face? Why have you turned away from
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us? You have maybe experienced this
body language says as much in the ancient
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world as it does today. When
somebody turns your back on you, when
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someone turns their face away from you, it's a kind of rejection. As
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what we mean by that, and
that's what they mean here. Why do
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you forget our affliction and oppression?
The situation is bad, they plead one
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more time. In Verse Twenty Five
describes a situation of being near to death.
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You remember God's curse on Adam.
I'm from dust, you were made
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to dust. You shall return.
Well, Verse Twenty Five for our soul
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is bowed down to the dust.
Our belly clings to the ground. We're
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not standing up with strength and confidence, we're clinging to the ground. We
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are near the dust. We are
almost dead. Rise up, verse Twenty
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Six, Rise Up, come to
our help, redeem us for the sake
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of your steadfast love. They plead
for deliverance. So this is the psalm.
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This is one example. There are
others in the psalms of what we
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might call a godly lament. How
do people here we have an example of
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the people of God, inspired by
the Holy Spirit, lamenting, crying out
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to God in a moment of crisis. We have the press, the past,
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the present, the protest and the
plea. Well, what shall we
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make of all of this? I
think there's a lot we can say,
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but let me mention two things.
First, there is a permission to pray
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here. There is a permission to
pray here. We have, in God's
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inspired and holy word, permission to
be realists, to look at our situations
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and feel desperate and to express the
desperation that we feel to God. God
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gives us permission in these words and
even gives us words to use that we
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might pray to him and cry out
to him in our desperation to express our
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feelings and our difficulties. Now,
this permission to pray is not permission to
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feel desperate and hate God. It's
not permission to feel desperate and judge God
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or to reject God. We know
that. Jesus, when he washed the
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disciple's feet, you remember what he
did. He washed their feet, and
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I believe it was Peter who said
no, no, no, you shouldn't
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wash my feet, Lord, and
he says no, I must wash your
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feet and you, likewise must also
wash feet, he says, as a
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servant greater than the master, were
called to follow him. Are we not
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in service to him? The same
is true of our suffering, of our
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persecutions. Jesus suffered and we are
called to suffer in his name. This
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is a reality of our lives.
This is something that God indeed calls us
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to and in that just as Jesus
felt desperate, even bleeding straat drops of
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blood, as he prayed to God
before he went to the cross, feeling
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that desperation, if you could take
this cup of me, please do.
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We who also follow in his steps
and suffer, will find ourselves, like
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our Lord feeling desperate. But what
do we do? Did Jesus turn away
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from God and say, forget you, I'm going to do my own thing
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now. No, he didn't do
that. He called out to God,
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he pled to God, he prayed
to God, he lamented to God.
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Jesus didn't reject God, nor did
he hate him. He didn't say,
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I hate that you're doing this to
me, you're wrong for doing this to
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me. Jesus didn't stand over in
a judgment over his father. What did
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he say? Not My will,
but yours be done. Brothers and sisters,
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this is what we do when we
follow in the steps of our Lord.
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When we suffer, is he suffered. The Servant is not greater than
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the master. We go to God. We have permission to pray, permission
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to open up our hearts and say, Lord, this is hard, this
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is really, really hard. But
we go to him. We don't go
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to ourselves, we don't go somewhere
else, we don't find our salvation away
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from him. We don't hate God, we don't get angry at him,
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we don't judge him. We say
I don't understand it, but it's for
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your sake that I am being killed. It is for your sake that these
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things happen. So please save me, please help me according to your will.
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When we come, when we face
our suffering, we must not lose
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heart in God. We cry out
to him and it's to him that we
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cry. Too often it's really hard
to see that what's going on. A
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lot of times we think, will
God, I can deal with my suffering,
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assuming I can know what this is
all about. I if you tell
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me what's going on here, then
okay, I'll I'll believe you for that
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and we'll go forward. God doesn't
always give that to us. He doesn't
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always tell us what's going on and
why it's going on. You remember job.
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Did job know what was going on
in the Court of Heaven when Satan
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came to accuse him and God allowed
these things to fall upon him? Did
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job know all that was going on
and how we would be blessed by what
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happened? Did job know the end
of the story and how he would be
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blessed exceedingly and beyond what he even
had before? No, he didn't know
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any of that. And yet he
was called to be faithful to God,
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and job was. Remember, let
me remind you of some of the things
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he said. Job On twenty one, he says, naked I came from
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my mother's Womb and naked I shall
return. Yahwig gave, Yah weigh gave
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and Yah wit has taken away.
Blessed be the name of Yahway, who
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are we to go to God and
say, I don't think your calculus is
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right on this one. If things
should be another way? God gives,
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God takes away. Blessed be the
name of God. Job To ten.
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Job's wife comes to him and tries
to tell him to do exactly the opposite
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of what I've said. She says
just give up on God, curse him
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and and die, and job says
to her, you speak is one of
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the foolish women would speak. Shall
we receive good from God and shall we
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not receive evil. And then scripture
comments on job. What job just says
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they're again, job says to his
wife, shall we receive good from God
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and shall we not receive evil,
and then scripture comments and the Holy Spirit
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says in all this, job did
not sin with his lips. This is
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a way of God's. I'm giving
his approbation of saying this is how you
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should talk, this is how you
should think. When we face these difficult
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times, we cry out to God, even as job did, but we
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do not turn away from him and
we can express the desperation of our hearts,
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our grief, our sadness, are
not an inability to understand what's going
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on, but we do not say
I curse God. The cry of the
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Christian is the cry of job.
You are the Lord and I will take
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whatever you give. So this is
a one application of on this psalm.
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We have permission to pray, we
have permission to cry out to God,
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but as we do so, we
do not reject our Lord in suffering,
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but instead we cling to him,
we plead with him and we find comfort
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in his promises. The end of
the Psalm says, come to our help,
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redeem us for the sake of your
stead fast love. And that brings
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us to the second point of application
in my final point, and that's this.
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This lament teaches us that our hope
is in God and in God alone.
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This is a godly prayer. This
is a Christian prayer because it doesn't
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go elsewhere. It goes to God
and go to him alone, and for
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good reason, reasons that we can
find in the psalm itself. We can
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find in the minds of the people
that are praying this. One reason that
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we hope in God and him alone
is because he's sovereign. As I've not
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to just repeat the point, but
this is what job is saying, isn't
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it? He's saying God is sovereign
over both the good and evil, the
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calamity that comes upon us, as
well as other things. This is what
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Isaiah forty five says. A God
says I form light and create darkness,
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I make wellbeing and create calamity.
I am Yahway, who does all these
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things. God is sovereign. We
have in some ways, no choice about
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to submit to him. He is
king and we should UN bow our hearts
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before him. But that's also why
our hope is in him. What kind
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of foolish person would go elsewhere?
There is nowhere else to go. If
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God is sovereign over these things,
if he is the one that makes one
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army win and another army lose,
does it make sense that Israel would turn
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elsewhere, would turn to another God
that night? Don't do that. They
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don't say, well, God's rejected
us, so let's try molech see how
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he does. Know, they go
to their God because he is sovereign,
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also because he's powerful. Remember,
throughout this psalm it says again and again
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that he alone is powerful to save, that he alone can bring from bring
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about salvaytion verse, for you are
my king, Oh God, ordained salvation
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for Jacob. And finally, our
hope is in him and in him alone,
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because no other God as powerful and
as sovereign as he is. And
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there is no other God, but
no other God has made promises to his
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people, has given and made expressed
covenant with them. Redeem us for the
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sake of your steadfast love. The
Christian goes to the Lord in lament in
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their difficult trials and circumstances, not
just because God is sovereign, which he
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is, not just because God is
powerful, which he is, but also
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because of God's promises and the character
that is attached to those promises. When
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they say redeem us for the stake
of your steadfast love, they very much
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have in mind the promises that God
has made to Adam and eve in the
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garden that stay, that a son
would be born who would crush the head
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of the serpent, to Abraham,
that God would make out of him a
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great multitude and a people, a
bigger than more infinite than the stars and
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the skies. A good promise to
remember when you see people around you dying.
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God has promised these things. Perhaps
they are also remembering God's promises to
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David, but he would establish his
kingdom and his throne forever. The remembering
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God's character, that it's attached to
these promises, his steadfast love. And
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that's why Paul, as we saw
this morning in Romans Chapter Eight, draws
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our attention to this psalm, this
psalm in particular, because when we face
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distress and sword and famine, when
we face a pressures against governments and our
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physical bodies and our sins and all
the things that we face trials and difficulties
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under, we feel like sheep being
led to the slaughter. We feel like
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we're being killed all the day long, and in some ways we are.
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Christians has suffered, sometimes in the
thousands, persecution, hard trials, when
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they have done no good, no
wrong against God, but instead have confessed
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his name and been true to his
word. But Paul quotes these these UN
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these verses, which remind us of
the whole of this psalm, to say
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what he says there and what we
heard in God's word this morning that nothing
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can separate us from the love of
God, in Christ Jesus, Our Lord,
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and that's what they say here too, in Verse Twenty Six. Redeem
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us, rescue us by US back
from the evil one. For the sake
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of your steadfast love. We have
confidence in God because of his love,
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because of his promises, because of
his power, because of his sovereignty,
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because God is God. This is
what job felt, isn't it? This
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is the great words that God overwhelmed
him with, that God is God and
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we are not. And so when
we're feeling like our trials are killing us,
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and brothers and sisters, even when
our trials do kill us, we
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don't despair. We don't despair because
God has given us Jesus, who didn't
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just go to the garden and suffer, he didn't just go to the Cross
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and suffer, he didn't just die, he didn't just lay in the grave,
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but he rose again from the dead. Didn't he any promises that we
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will to God takes care of us
and often does rescue us in this life,
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but our hope is not ultimately in
this life, is it? It's
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in the hope to come, even
as Abraham hoped in that heavenly city,
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so we too are hoping in God's
judgment. Revelation pictures the martyrs under the
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throne of God, crying out God, God, when will you have your
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vengeance? When will justice be done? And he says it will be done.
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The day is coming, the day
of the Lord. So I'll finished
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by reading these verses from James Chapter
Five, verses ten and eleven, where
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we're pointed to the steadfastness of job
as an example of suffering and patience.
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Brothers, take the prophets who spoke
in the name of the Lord. Behold,
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we consider these blessed. Who remains
steadfast? You have heard of the
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steadfastness of job and you have seen
the purpose of the Lord. How The
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Lord Is Compassionate and merciful, whether
we are in times of great joy and
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celebration for the goodness of God or
whether we are enduring the evils of the
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Lord, to use Biblical language.
There we have our eyes on God who,
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as James Says, is compassionate,
is merciful, as Paul says,
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is full of love, who is, the Psalmist says, has steadfast love.
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We keep our eyes on the Lord
in all of our prayers, in
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the good times and bad, because
he is good, because his promises are
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sure and made sure in Jesus Christ. So let us pray
