Faith at Midnight

[00:00:00] Heavenly Father, we confess that our minds are darkened by sin and distraction. Lord. We confess that our hearts are often full of desires that lead us astray. [00:00:14] Lord. We are prone to wander. We feel that constantly. [00:00:19] And so we feel more than ever. We know more than ever that we need you to pour out your spirit upon us, Lord, to open our eyes and ears, to soften our hearts, to receive your word in faith. [00:00:34] We pray that you would, as you do this, as you send forth your spirit with your word. We pray that you would overcome the weakness of the messenger. We pray this in Jesus Christ's glorious name. Amen. [00:00:46] Now the sermon text for this Evening is Psalm 77. [00:00:51] Psalm 77, the entire Psalm. [00:01:01] To the choirmaster. According to Jeduthun. A psalm of Asaph. [00:01:05] I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me. In the day of my trouble, I seek the Lord. In the night. My hand is stretched out without wearying. My soul refuses to be comforted. When I remember God, I moan. When I meditate, my spirit faints. Selah, you hold my eyelids open. I am so troubled that I cannot speak. I consider the days of old, the years long ago. I said, let me remember my song in the night. Let me meditate in my heart. [00:01:35] Then my spirit made a diligent search. [00:01:38] Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time has got? [00:01:47] Excuse me. Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion? Selah. [00:01:54] Then I said, I will appeal to this, to the years of the right hand of the Most High. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder all your work and meditate on your mighty deeds. [00:02:10] Your way, O God, is holy. What God is great, like our God. [00:02:15] You are the God who works wonders. You have made known your might among the peoples. [00:02:20] You with your arm redeemed your people, the children of Jacob and Joseph. Selah. When the waters saw you, O God. When the waters saw you, they were afraid indeed. The deep trembled, the clouds poured out water. The skies gave forth thunder. Your arrows flashed on every side. [00:02:36] The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind. Your lightnings lighted up the world. The earth trembled and shook. [00:02:43] Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters. Yet your footprints were unseen. [00:02:49] You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron. [00:02:54] Thus ends the reading of God's word. [00:03:04] Now Here in Psalm 77, Asaph wrote a Number of psalms in this section of the Psalter. [00:03:12] He's really opening his heart to us. [00:03:16] He's giving us a look at the turmoil within his soul that has been going on day after day, night after night. This is like a war within himself in which he's fought many battles again and again along these same themes. [00:03:32] And this is the kind of thing that comes naturally that you will experience inevitably at some time in your life as a believer. [00:03:39] If you do practice introspection, meaning if you do look within your own soul, if you do think carefully and seriously about your relationship to the Lord, the way your thoughts and desires and actions affect yourself and affect your relationship with the Lord, you will at times face really difficult introspection and battles, and you will have profound and painful questions about why the Lord is allowing certain things to happen to you, why the Lord has allowed this or that tragedy to befall you, to befall a family member. Why did you lose that important person in your life? [00:04:18] These things cause you great turmoil. [00:04:22] But a lot of people today try to avoid this sort of turmoil, this conflict, by filling their minds with distractions. [00:04:33] Many of us have heard the word content, used now to describe all kinds of media, music, movies, podcasts. [00:04:42] Everything you can imagine now that you can get on your phone, that you can listen to with earbuds will be called content. [00:04:50] And many people, particularly my generation and younger, follow so much of this content, fill their lives with so much of it. [00:04:57] They do it. They listen. They listen to it in the drive to work. They listen to it while they're working. [00:05:02] They listen to it at home and in the quiet of their homes. They may even listen to it in the shower or when they're going to bed at night. I know some people who almost never stop listening to content online, whether they mean to or not. Many people today end up with a lifestyle where they spend all their time consuming other people's thoughts and no time alone with their own thoughts. [00:05:28] They never take out and examine what's going on in their own hearts. But there are times in life where we absolutely have to take out and examine our thoughts and feelings, or we can be led astray by them. [00:05:40] They can steer us this way and that without us even realizing where they're taking us until it's too late. [00:05:46] Psalm 77 gives us an excellent pattern to follow for taking out and scrutinizing our thought life when it's most crucial to do so, and that's in a time of crisis. [00:05:56] You can feel the urgency of this psalm from the very first words, I cry aloud to God. Aloud to God. And he will hear me. [00:06:03] These repeated cries set the theme of the whole rest of the psalm. [00:06:08] But it's important to notice not only what he says here, but also what he doesn't say. Right. He says with confidence, the Lord will hear me. [00:06:16] But he doesn't say here whether the Lord will answer him. [00:06:20] And it's not because the Lord doesn't answer his people. It's because at this point in his life and in this psalm, he wants you to feel the tension that he was under. [00:06:30] He wants you to appreciate the fact that at this time in his life, Answers felt very far away from him. [00:06:37] He felt very distant. And that's why, as the psalm goes on, he asks such difficult questions. [00:06:43] Verses 2 through 4 describe the Psalmist's pain in excruciating detail so you can vividly picture his posture in these battles, day after day and night after night. In the day of my trouble, I seek the Lord. In the night, my hand is stretched out without wearying. My soul refuses to be comforted. When I remember God, I moan. When I meditate, my spirit faints. You hold my eyelids open. I'm so troubled that I cannot speak. You can almost see him in your mind's eye, can't you? [00:07:10] That's such a detailed description. [00:07:13] Everything about his experience is miserable. It's like it's shouting out to him that God has abandoned him, that he has no reason for hope. [00:07:21] Worse than that, he feels as though God himself is actually tightening the screws. [00:07:27] He feels that God is adding to his suffering intentionally. [00:07:31] You hold my eyelids open, he says. [00:07:34] I'm sure many of you know the trouble with sleeplessness is whatever stress, whatever pressure, whatever issue is causing is making it hard for you to sleep, then often increases your stress throughout the next day. And then those issues become worse, and then it's even harder for you to sleep the time after that. And it becomes a kind of vicious cycle that you feel like you can never escape. [00:07:56] That's some of what Asaph is going through here. And we don't know exactly what is driving this distress here, just like we don't know what Paul's thorn in the flesh was in Second Corinthians. [00:08:10] I think that's intentional, to make it more applicable to a wide variety of situations that believers go through wherever they live, whatever time they live. [00:08:19] But whatever was keeping Asaph up at night, clearly it must have been a grievous thing, right? The language that he uses here, particularly when he says his soul refuses to be comforted. [00:08:32] That brings to mind something like Genesis 37:35, where Jacob has just learned that his favorite son Joseph has gone missing and is presumably dead. [00:08:43] In Genesis 37:35 says all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him. But he refused to be comforted and said, no, I shall go down to Sheol to my son. Mourning Thus, his father wept for him. [00:08:58] So whatever Asaph's grief was, it was something on that level. [00:09:03] It was something like losing a beloved child. [00:09:08] Now, of course, it's not just his bodily experience that's intense. His thoughts are even more tormented than his body. [00:09:16] That's what is driving all this. He keeps applying himself to consider the things of God, but it doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. He uses so many words for meditation, for reflection, for remembering the things of God. Like, I cry aloud to God, I seek the Lord. I remember God. I consider the days of old. My spirit made a diligent search. [00:09:35] It almost starts to feel redundant. He's just. He's repeating himself in different ways again and again and again and again. [00:09:41] But the reason he does that is to make you feel what it's like to go through this, right? To make you feel what it's like to just keep throwing yourself back, to keep applying yourself to seeking the Lord in prayer, in worship, in searching the Scriptures. [00:10:02] It can feel endless and so difficult before you start to get anything or you feel like you're getting anything out of it. He's showing it's an arduous process to seek peace and contentment in this kind of situation. [00:10:14] But it's so important to notice that as much pain as he is in, he doesn't give up. [00:10:21] He keeps going back at it. He does not cease to cry out to God. Robert Godfrey has said he tried to count how many questions there are in the Psalms, and he came up with a number of about 170 total questions in the Psalms. [00:10:38] So that's, on average, more than one question per Psalm. [00:10:42] Now, of course, some psalms have a lot of questions and some don't have any. But still, the fact that there's on average more than one psalm or more questions per psalm shows that this is an important feature of the Psalms. And with the Holy Spirit being the author behind the human authors, of course, and with these psalms being designed to be sung out loud by God's people in worship, as we already did this evening and as we'll do later again, that means that the Lord is actually teaching his people to ask him these kinds of questions. [00:11:17] It feels impious to us. It feels unspiritual, arrogant. [00:11:21] And it would be if God did not invite us. But he does. The Holy Spirit wrote through Asaph verses 7 through 9. Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger, shut up his compassion? [00:11:42] Right. God wanted his people to sing that at him, as we will later this evening. [00:11:48] Now, you might wonder, doesn't the Lord punish people elsewhere for questioning Him? [00:11:52] So what makes the questions of, for example, the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness, what makes their questions grumbling and complaining and these questions acceptable? [00:12:03] Well, if you go back and read the questions they asked there in the wilderness, you will see they are very different. [00:12:10] Exodus 17:3 says, the people grumbled against Moses and said what? Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst? [00:12:20] It's sort of like asking the question, when did you stop beating your wife? [00:12:24] It's a leading question. That's really an accusation. It's not seeking honest answers, right? They've already come to their conclusion, which is that God has betrayed them and abandoned them. They're not looking for answers. They're just throwing accusations around at Moses with the Psalms. On the other hand, I'm convinced it is actually worse to suppress these kind of questions. If they are as I think they are from Asaph, they are humble, sincere, and they're really looking for the Lord to show Himself to be who the Scriptures claim that he is. [00:12:58] Just on the face of it, of course, it's ridiculous to suppress these questions, because of course the Lord knows your thoughts. [00:13:05] You can't hide your doubts from Him. [00:13:09] But if you deny these doubts and shove them down, they will grow over time as roots of bitterness that entwine around your heart and poison your life with the Lord. [00:13:20] It is much worse to grumble and complain to others about the Lord than to speak to him directly and honestly in prayer. [00:13:29] This is also one of the many reasons it's really worthwhile for us to sing the Psalms in our worship. Even leaving aside contemporary Christian music, which often is quite superficial, you won't find many classic hymns that are this brutally honest about what it's like to face these wars, these battles in your soul in a time of trial and suffering. [00:13:54] As we come to verses 8 and 9, we're approaching the turning point of the psalm. Like with many psalms, there's a turning point around the Middle. [00:14:03] So think of the first question in verse eight. Has his steadfast love forever ceased? [00:14:08] This is one of those questions that, if you take it seriously, is answered as soon as you ask it, right? His steadfast love wouldn't really be steadfast love if it ceased. [00:14:21] So Asaph is. He's leading his soul with these questions. These questions are rooted in a knowledge of the Scriptures, and he's leading his soul in the right direction. [00:14:31] He's suffering so much that he has to sort of prove it to himself. He has to work himself up to the answers that he needs. [00:14:39] And as he comes to the middle of the Psalm, he prepares himself for this turning point. You can sense his growing determination. But there's also still tension and grief here. At first, when he turns to his thoughts, to the days of old, as he calls, only reminds him of God's wonderful covenant promises, of the great things he did in the past. [00:14:59] And these promises seem to him to have failed now. So it only causes him more pain. [00:15:04] Verse 11 is famously difficult to interpret, but a more straightforward translation would be, this pierces me, the years of the right hand of the Most high. [00:15:15] And there the years of the right hand of the most high refers to the times when God was showing his strength so powerfully, so publicly, so overtly. [00:15:27] And he's saying remembering those times, those displays of God's power, causes him more pain because he wants to see that now, where is that power? [00:15:40] The contrast between his situation and those times makes his situation seem even worse. And this is a large part, I think, of why believers often give up on serious prayer and reflection on the Scriptures. If you only pray or listen to sermons casually or superficially, and you don't get the emotional impact you want right away, if you don't get an obvious solution to your problem you have, you won't feel like you got much out of it at all. You'll feel, this is worthless, there's no point in this. You give up. [00:16:13] But the more you begin to see the whole picture of Scripture, how the Bible is one grand story from beginning to end, of God saving his people from their sins, you and your particular problems fade into the background for a little while. [00:16:32] You come to a point where you forget yourself. [00:16:36] And it's actually a beautiful thing. Your life, your situation seems smaller the more you spend time, the more you invest yourself in knowing the Lord and what he's done in times past. [00:16:48] If there's one thing you remember from this sermon, beloved, let it be this. [00:16:52] Notice how often asaph is used the first person throughout this psalm, meaning he's talking about himself. He's using words like I, me, and mine. That's the first person. [00:17:02] He uses it in every one of the first six verses. [00:17:06] Then it fades for a bit in 7 through 9. [00:17:09] Then it comes back in 10 through 12. Now he's talking more about we and us and ours. So he's. He's moving into the background a little bit more. [00:17:19] But then after verse 12, it disappears for the rest of the psalm. [00:17:25] He never mentions himself again after that point. [00:17:31] Right. It's like he's left himself behind. He's lost sight of himself as he beholds the majesty of his God. [00:17:43] Your way, O God, is holy. What God is great, like our God. You are the God who works wonders. You have made known your might among the peoples. You with your arm redeemed your people, the children of Jacob and Joseph. Right? He's turned now towards seeing that he's not the main character. [00:18:02] He doesn't matter as much as he thinks he does. The Lord is the hero of the story. It's the Lord's victory that matters. [00:18:11] Now, these lines are alluding to what is usually called the song of Moses in Exodus 15 that we read earlier this evening. This was the song the Israelites sang to celebrate God's great victory against Pharaoh at the Red Sea. So clearly, that is one of these times where God showed his right arm most powerfully. [00:18:29] Listen to the similarities with Psalm 77, starting in verse 11. Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome and glorious deeds, doing wonders? You stretched out your right hand, the earth swallowed them. You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed. You have guided them by your strength to your holy abode. The peoples have heard, they tremble. Pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia. And then it goes on to describe how all of the nations are responding and trembling because the Lord has done this for his people. [00:19:03] So you can hear the connections. I wonder if there's. This was the song that Asaph was remembering in the night, as Psalm 77 says. [00:19:10] He must have thought of at least part of it, because there seem to be so many parallels here. [00:19:16] And this was such a famous song among the Jews. [00:19:19] Now, verses 16 through 18 take a bit of a strange turn away from the Red Sea. If you read those verses, you'll notice it talks a lot about lightning, like a great storm. [00:19:29] And that doesn't quite sound like the Red Sea, because, of course, the ground that they walk through in the middle of the Red Sea was what it was dry. So it doesn't sound like there's a great thunderstorm going on at that time. [00:19:42] I think what Asaph is doing here is he's actually combining imagery from the Red Sea and Noah's flood, and he's doing this. He's kind of poetically merging these two great events in the history of God's people in order to show us the similarities, to show how God worked in both of these famous events. [00:20:05] In both events, God brings his chosen people focused through a mediator, Noah in the flood, Moses in the Red Sea, through waters that would certainly kill them, right? When you think about it, they're both leaving behind wicked societies that had oppressed them, that had tormented them, that had afflicted them with violence, both known as family and the Israelites. [00:20:30] But once they're in the midst of the waters, what's really the greater threat to them? [00:20:37] Well, at that point, you would be a lot more concerned about the giant walls of water on either side of you, right? Or if. Or if you're a member of Noah's family, you'd be a lot more concerned about the storm around you than about the people you left behind. [00:20:50] So in both these events, God is bringing his people through his own wrath against sin. [00:20:57] And at the same time, God saved both the Israelites and Noah's family by his strong right arm. He condemned and drowned the wicked society that had oppressed them, that had made them miserable for so long. [00:21:11] Now, remember, Asaph himself had not experienced either of these events. He was not there for either of these things. [00:21:19] He lived hundreds of years later. But they held power for him because they reveal to him something about God's character, about who he is, and about how committed he is to saving those who belong to him. [00:21:34] They showed him. First, God does not lack the power to save his people. All the forces of nature are as nothing to him, right? [00:21:43] He can expand or restrain or throw back all the waters of the ocean and the seas completely at his will. [00:21:51] Secondly, God will not allow evil against him or his people to go unpunished. He won't just wink at it and sweep it under the rug. [00:22:00] And third, God will always save some of his choosing from his own wrath. [00:22:06] In this way, God's own character revealed here is the answer to Asaph's pained questions. [00:22:15] They don't directly answer what Asaph is. What God is doing. In Asaph's situation, God doesn't explain to him all the details of here's why I'm putting you through this and that. [00:22:25] But in God himself, Asaph finds the answer that he really needs. [00:22:33] He finds that God is too invested in his people to abandon them to anything less than their enemies, to anything less than. Than their sins, to anything less than the devil himself. It's unthinkable that God would let them drown after he's already brought them through so much. [00:22:53] The last two verses seem at first to be less dramatic and interesting than the previous section, but they really tie together the psalm's whole main point. [00:23:00] Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters, yet your footprints were unseen. [00:23:06] And why would he say unseen? [00:23:09] Wasn't there a huge pillar of cloud and fire that seems pretty visible, right? [00:23:15] The point is that although the Israelites saw these displays of God's power and the path he carved for them through the sea, they never saw him at any time. [00:23:25] He was always invisible to them. [00:23:28] So it still required faith for them to see the signs of God's power as what they were and to trust that he was saving them, because they never sensed the Lord directly. His point of contact with his people was through his mediators, through Noah in the flood, through Moses at the Red Sea. They spoke for him and acted for him. God has always worked this way. Since he is invisible, he uses signs and mediators to reveal himself. [00:23:58] Now, brothers and sisters, who is anointed to be our mediator? [00:24:04] Of course, it's not a trick question. [00:24:06] It is the one mediator between man and God, the man Christ Jesus. [00:24:11] He is the one who has passed through the flood waters of God's wrath on our behalf. You know, there's this interesting reference in, in Luke 12 where Jesus is turning towards Jerusalem and he's thinking about what he's going to undergo. And he says to his disciples, I have a baptism. I'm going to be baptized with. And I'm eager until it is accomplished. [00:24:33] Right? Isn't that interesting? Because he doesn't get wet on the cross. So what is he talking about? [00:24:38] He's using there the idea of baptism as a symbol of God's wrath being poured out on him, that he's going to be drowned on the cross. [00:24:53] Jesus Christ is the one who has conquered death and risen. He has passed through, come out to the other side. And he's at the Father's right hand, where he works as our sympathetic high priest, who knows our weaknesses better than we do ourselves. He has been through trials worse than Asaph, worse than Asaph. He has been through trials and tribulations worse than you have been. [00:25:17] As he is at the Father's right hand now, however, that means he is hidden from us. He's invisible for the time being. Sometimes you may feel he is very close, and other times you may wonder if he will answer you at all. [00:25:30] You need to realize, though, that when you are closest to despair, looking to yourself and your own experiences will not lift you out of that swamp. Brothers and sisters, if your assurance of salvation is built only or primarily on events in your life, if you think of what a great testimony you have, if you think of particular times that God works so powerfully in your life, that can be a good encouragement for you. Absolutely. [00:25:54] But if that's the only or the main thing you have, then there's a very good chance you will come through to times of trial and suffering where those memories seem faded and distant, where you wonder, have I just been telling that story so many times that I was exaggerating it a little bit at a time? [00:26:13] Was it really as good as I remember? [00:26:16] Because the Lord feels so far away right now. [00:26:21] So earlier I mentioned that there are those who don't do any introspection, no soul searching at all, because they fill their lives with distractions. That's true. But there's also a ditch on the other side of the road, which is you can get lost in introspection and soul searching and never come out of yourself. [00:26:38] But you need to come out beloved. Because ultimately the only dependable foundation for your faith is outside of yourself. [00:26:47] It's not in your own experiences. It's what God has done to save his people in real history, in real space and time that you and I weren't there for, but is more important and more powerful than our own lives. [00:27:00] It is through the hearing of the Scriptures preached, through taking the Lord's Supper and through prayer that you are carried away from yourself for a time to transcend your problems, your trials, and sit in the blessed presence of your Savior, Jesus Christ. [00:27:16] Putting your faith in Christ is not an irrational or blind leap. You put your faith in him because you know who he is through the great and awesome works he has done. You see his character in the way he lived his life and the way he died his death for you, in the way you see him caring for his disciples, his worthless, faithless disciples who abandoned him. [00:27:39] And still he prayed for them. And still he loved them. [00:27:43] Even on the cross, he loves the he shows grace to the thief next to him and promises him, you will be with me in Paradise. He cares for his mother right these things, they show you the heart of our Savior. And it's unbelievable that any man ever such existed. [00:28:02] This Savior is so powerful and so good and his priesthood so effective, that even if you have just a mustard seed worth of faith in him, it is enough. [00:28:13] Even if your faith is much weaker than Asaph's here in this psalm, he will surely save you from drowning in the wrath of God. Beloved, this is why Hebrews 12 says, after having gone through all the great examples of faith in chapter 11. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. [00:28:48] Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. [00:28:55] Keeping your eyes fixed on Christ is the only way to live the Christian life. Well, beloved, the reason you need Christ preached to you every week is so you get this understanding into your bones, so that it sinks down into your heart, into your soul, and you'll be prepared for the day of trouble. [00:29:13] Let us pray. [00:29:17] Our great God, we know there's none like you in all the earth. [00:29:22] Lord. Truly those who worship idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. [00:29:29] Your deeds of old stun and amaze us in times of trial, of suffering, and of our greatest distress and loss on the earth. Lord, we ask you, drive us to yourself, make our hearts yearn for you above all things and in all things. Teach us to wait patiently for your deliverance, to see your face shining upon us and your countenance lifted upon us, giving us peace at the end of all things. And we pray this in Jesus Christ's glorious name. [00:29:58] Amen.