Psalm 93

Ben Linn preaching from Psalm 93

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SPEAKER_01 0:18

Reading a Psalm ninety three. The Lord reigns, he is robed in majesty, the Lord is robed, he's put on strength as his belt. Yes, the world is established, it shall never be moved. Your throne is established from of old, you are from everlasting. The floods have lifted up, O Lord. The floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their roaring. Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord on the high is mighty. Your decrees are very trustworthy. Holiness breath befits your house, O Lord, forevermore. So read Scott's word.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Go ahead and have a seat. You can have your Bibles open to that passage that Rory just read for us, Psalm 93. If you pretty much open up any Bible, it's going to fall open to the Psalms. And if you don't have a physical Bible, you can always just Google it. And that is also a great possibility there. But welcome to City Church Dublin. My name's Ben. I'm the executive pastor here, and we will be taking a look at that Psalm here in just a bit. But I want to tell you, when I was a young man, and granted that was decades ago, I used to love to do DIY projects. Do it yourself, right? Something broke, I would fix it. Something around the house, yeah, fix that. Something working, not working right in the car, fix that. Don't know how to do it, no big deal. We'll figure it out. And uh even now, even today, 49 years old, I still find myself in that role a lot of the time. Somebody in my family, I won't mention his name, uh, lost a set of keys. Uh, and uh this past week I had to play locksmith. Lots of fun. Lots of fun. That went well enough, but you want you know, it doesn't always go that well. It doesn't always work out the way that we want them to. And in fact, especially in the days before there was a YouTube tutorial for every type of DIY project out there, uh, my uh projects tended to go through six stages, maybe six stages of grief. I don't know. But stage one was, you know, there's something that needs to be fixed. I think, and I have great confidence for no reason whatsoever. I have great confidence that I can do that. Number two, I'm gonna get into it, and I'm gonna find out this is actually a little more complicated, a little more difficult than I thought it would be, but uh, we'll get there. Phase three, I'm gonna realize, gosh, I'm I'm just really in over my head here, hadn't bargained for this, and I'm gonna be making multiple phone calls, I'm gonna be making multiple trips to hardware stores or auto parts or whatever like this, trying to find someone somewhere who knows how to do what I'm trying to do. Phase four, of course, is panic, little despair. Why, oh why, did I think I could actually do this? Phase five, after much uh difficulty, usually double the cost and double the time, uh, it's actually done, right? It's finished. We made it there in the end. But the important one is phase six, because phase six is see, I knew I could do it. The funny bit is, next time something breaks in the house, next time something needs to be done with one of the cars, I only remember phase six. I only remember the C I knew I could do it. And so that cycle just continues on for me all through the years of my life. Bottom line, we live in a world where stuff doesn't always go the way we'd like it to. Now, if we're talking about DIY projects or, you know, what I'd like to call shade tree mechanic work, uh, it's, you know, stuff doesn't go right with that. That's kind of lighthearted, mildly humbling, not a big deal. But you guys know this. We'll face much more difficult things in our life than that. That's what life is, right? This morning we're looking at a psalm that shows us something very important. That all of the difficulties that we'll face in this life, all of the hardship, all of the heartaches, all the real challenges out there, these are not a DIY project for us to figure out in isolation. All of these things, the psalmist calls them floods. We're not made to handle them ourselves. But what we'll see in Psalm 93 is that they pale in comparison to the Lord, the true and living God. And even though this Psalm is only five verses long, we're gonna see some deep encouragement for us in the context of life's floods. When they come and they will come, we'll need to cling to these truths. So let's let's have a look. Truth number one, quite simply, the Lord reigns. You don't have to dig very deep into this psalm to find it. It is the first phrase in the Psalm, verse one, there. It is the title, if you've got the ESV, that's what the publisher has made, the title of this psalm. It's a little obvious, a little on the nose, but uh stick with me here. Because this idea is woven throughout the psalm. Now, what do I mean when I say that the Lord reigns? Really see it in three different ways throughout the body of the Psalm here. Take a look at it here. The first way is supremacy. Okay, this is the idea of a king on a throne, and we see here that this is the highest throne. Verse 1 it says, the Lord reigns, he is robed in majesty. Verse 2, it says, Your throne is established from of old. The way of the world in that day, if you if you go back and read 1 Kings, 2 Kings in the Old Testament, you'll see some of this. But kings would rise and kings would fall. You know, royal houses, royal lines, raised up, snuffed out, put to the sword. Old king is dead, long live the king. But the Lord, his kingdom is eternal. It's not a kingdom that he had to win from someone else. It's not a kingdom that he's at risk of losing to someone else. He's the highest ruler. Yes. None above, none beside, none before, and none after. Lucy agrees with me. Second way we see this is in the idea of strength. Verse 1, we see that the Lord is not only robed in majesty, but he has put on strength as his belt. Now, I go to the gym, right, and I've obviously gotten stronger, as you can clearly see. But I could never say that strength itself is my belt. Verse 4, it says, Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord on high is mighty. Now, in the mind of the psalmist, in this day and age, the psalm was written. The sea was this kind of mysterious, terrifying force, maybe the most powerful and fearsome in the world. And we know this in our day and age, right? We can think back, you know, a hundred years ago the Titanic sank, right? And this was this, you know, futuristic and uh technologically advanced vessel, and it was taken down by the mighty ocean. A hundred years later, we had a submersible go down to take a look at it, and the same thing happened, right? We know this. We know that the sea is mighty and terrible. But the psalmist reminds us here that the the Lord on high, this supreme ruler, is mightier still. So, um, supreme, strong, permanent. The third one that we see here is permanence. The Lord is eternal, it's not going anywhere. Verse 2 says, You are from everlasting. In fact, that's that's on the back of verse one that says, the world is established, it shall never be moved. Now, if we can take a step back to the 1990s, back uh my day there, uh, email forwards were a thing, and there was this email forward that was going around that was looking at, because the Star Wars you know reissues had just come out, and we got to see the Death Star blow up planet Alderon, right? And so, of course, email forwards have to take issue with things like this. And so it was going through all of these calculations to say, you know, what kind of energy would be required to actually destroy a planet. I actually got this email from an engineering student, and so I wrote back to him, I said, Thank you so much that you're studying engineering can protect us from this level of threat. He reminded me that Star Wars was fictional, so I guess he didn't get my irony there. But all of this to say the Earth is very permanent and immovable, but maybe not in the way that the psalmist would have thought about it. We look at it today and we know that the earth does move, right? 30 kilometers a second around the sun. We know that it moves. And all of our studies into the environment and ecosystems and stuff may make it feel like it's more fragile than the psalmist is giving it credit for. But there's a couple of things that we need to consider when we see a verse like this in Scripture. First of all, this is poetry, right? This isn't a scientific treatise. Just like the sea was the most fearsome thing in the psalmist's minds, the earth would probably felt like the most permanent. If you wanted to build something sturdy, something that was going to last, what did you do? You anchored it to bedrock, anchored it to the earth. But other than this, we need to make sure that we're not using the imperfect things of this world to try to understand a perfect God. Yeah, there's analogy, there's parallelism, there's typism, but nothing of this broken and inconsistent world is going to perfectly image a mighty and unchanging God. To do that would be like saying, oh, God is God is the judge of the whole earth, right? The Bible says this. But the earth is full of judges that are corrupt and imperfect. So if we try to image this back, we see, well, maybe God is imperfect and maybe God is corrupt and all of these things. No, that's not how it works. We can't image that way. The reason that we know that judges should not be corrupt is because God Himself is not corrupt. So the psalmist is taking what is in his mind the most permanent thing, the most permanent thing that he can see, and he's understanding something about God through it. As permanent as this world may seem, it's only a shadow. And by the way, verse 1 locks into verse 2 in such a way that it's very clear that the world is established, but only because God's throne is established. Now, the idea that the Lord reigns is a very powerful concept. In the ancient world, this would have been the proclamation when a new king ascended the throne or carried the day on the field of battle. The king reigns. Prophet Isaiah in chapter 52 uses this language to describe the Lord rescuing his people. I mean, you can imagine in the ancient days being held prisoner in a fortress of an enemy king, and you're chained to a wall, and you just can look out across this courtyard and see the standard, the flag of the enemy king there. But then you hear troops coming, and you see that flag get hauled down, and your own king's flag get lifted up there. And you can hear a messenger running down the hall to where you're being held captive and throwing open the door and saying, The king reigns. Think about all that that means. That's victory, that's freedom, that's life. Now take that idea and map it onto a God whose kingdom is eternal. A king who's always been on his throne, a king who will never not be on his throne. Now it's less a matter of something has changed, as if now and only now there's reason for hope. It's more like I need to remember that this king is on his throne, his everlasting throne. He is mighty, mightier than anything or anyone I can imagine in my life. And he is permanent, and his house is forevermore. Like we saw in Psalm 90 a few weeks ago, right? From everlasting to everlasting, all the way forward and all the way back. You are God. So that means for us, whatever our circumstances, the Lord reigns. We're not waiting for a king to storm the castle and set us free. We find ourselves in overwhelming circumstances, floods, as we'll see in the next point. It doesn't change the fact that he is the one on his throne. He's robed in strength, he's everlasting, he's above all rule, all rulers. Our role is to trust that he is big enough to reign over all the circumstances of his life, of our lives. And we'll see in a bit, his reign is a good reign even when we don't understand. So our first point was the Lord reigns. Very simple. The second truth that we'll see is floods will come. Now, notice I didn't say floods might come. Floods come to some people. Just floods come. It's a universal, it's true whether you're a follower of Jesus or not. It's treated by the psalmist as a sure thing. You take a look at verse 3. What's it say? It says, The floods have lifted up, O Lord. The floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their roaring. Notice that this verse has both kind of past and present tense in it. The floods have lifted up. This is past tense, but it doesn't mean that it's necessarily over. It says the floods lift up their roaring. Same idea, but in present tense, meaning it happens, it is happening, it has happened, it happens regularly. Like I said, floods will come. To keep with the water analogy, you can imagine waves crashing against the shore, the beach. One wave rolls in, crashes, spreads out, got this moment of calm, streams back out, and then another wave takes its place. Now, of course, some days are gentler and some days are more violent, but the waves, they never really do stop, do they? Now, when I was five years old, little guy, um, I jumped in a pool. I thought I could swim. Found myself in a big mess. Very quickly, I couldn't touch the bottom, I couldn't get my head above. I tried to call out for help. All that came out was bubbles. I was terrified. And someone, I don't even know who it was, saw me struggling and pulled me out of the water. Even though I was only in the water for a short period of time, it scarred me, literally. Years after this, I was afraid of the pool, I was afraid of the water. So when the psalmist thinks of the floods as a place of great terror, I get it. What better way to think about the hardships of our lives? When we find ourselves under pressure, what words do we use, right? I'm drowning, right? Drowning in debt, drowning in grief, drowning in work, drowning in regret. For overwhelmed, we might find ourselves in over our heads. And of course, if I make Doreen angry, I might be in hot water. But this idea of floods is well expressed here even to our 21st century ears. Have you have you found yourself there? Have you grown weary? Have you been in loss, in pain, sorrow, and uncertainty? Have you felt alone, unseen, suffering in mind or body, stuck in shame, hurt by another. I know I'm not even scratching the surface of the different floods that are out there, possibly for yourself right here, right now. The thing is, the psalmist doesn't shy away from it. Even in this jubilant, triumphant psalm, the Lord reigns, right here in the middle. We see floods have lifted up. Why do we see this? Why does he do this? I think that the presence of a God who reigns, a God who's so big, so strong, and so mighty, disappointed we didn't sing that song this morning. It doesn't erase the impact of these storms of life. I think we can sometimes wrap ourselves in Christian words and feel like, you know what, there's nothing going on here. I have faith. This shouldn't bother me. Or my favorite, you know, worry. That's a sin. Now Jesus said, in the world we will have troubles. He didn't say, go ahead and turn a blind eye, pretend those troubles aren't there. We can see that so clearly in these Psalms. So many Psalms refuse to sugarcoat the lament, the difficulty, the flood. But just as much as we can think the fact that the Lord rains mean that the floods don't count, we can also start to think that the fact that those floods are there might mean that the Lord doesn't rain. Maybe he doesn't see, maybe he doesn't care, maybe he's not able to do anything about it. And that's where our third point becomes so important, wrapping up this psalm. Our third truth to take on board is the Lord's reign is good. Now, maybe you've heard this objection to Christianity. It goes like this the existence of evil in the world means one of two things. Either God is okay letting it happen, meaning he isn't good but evil, or he's just not able to stop it, which means he's not all powerful. Well, as we've already covered, the Lord reigns. He has all the strength, all the authority from everlasting to everlasting. So it's not that he can't do anything about it. But this final point today shows us that he can't be complicit in that evil. He's not okay with it. He's not evil himself. There must be a third option in that discussion. Take a look at verse 5. It says, Your decrees are very trustworthy. Holiness befits your house, O Lord, forevermore. This points us to a God who is good, a God who can be believed. The psalmist talks about the Lord's decrees. This is pointing to God's word, to God's promises. And I'll tell you, I'll spoil it for you. God doesn't promise that we'll escape and avoid all the floods of life. I'd love to stand up here this morning and tell you if you just have enough faith, you'll always be healthy, wealthy, and wise. But that's just not what we see in Scripture. We live in a broken, fallen world. We suffer because of sin. Sometimes our own sin. Sometimes the sin of someone else, and sometimes just sin in general. But the gospel, the good news of the Bible is that Jesus came to defeat sin. Amen? We still live in a world that is stained and corrupted by sin. But we live here while he's building his church. We live here while he's calling a people to himself, and we live here while he is saving sinners. We live in this broken world, but we live here while we are serving with him on his mission in his world. Can you see why this verse is so important to this psalm? Yes, the Lord reigns. Yes, the floods will come, but how do those two ideas come together in a God whose reign is good? A God whose decrees are trustworthy, a God whose house is built up with holiness, righteousness, justice. If you want to see what I mean, we can take the discussion out of the heavenly and out of the eternal and just look around our world. There are lots of people in this world who are mighty in one way or the other. People who are strong physically or politically or financially, people with strong followings, people who control, people who influence. But are they good? You don't have to look too far in our world to find examples of strong people in this world using their strength selfishly, harmfully, wickedly. Strength does not equal virtue. But God is trustworthy. The word that's trustworthy there is amen. It's a great one there. All his promises are yes and amen. The way for us to apply this verse is simply hold on to it. There will be floods in life. Some of those will ask us to doubt that God is reigning. Some of them will ask us to doubt that God's reign is good. We've had those conversations with people. I believe God is good. I just don't know that He's good to me. We have to preach the gospel to ourselves. That means if we're not familiar, we need to be consuming it. We need to be in God's word. We need to be taking it on board. That means if we if we if we struggle to believe it, we need to petition the Lord in prayer. Help us, O Father. Help us to take it on. And we need to do this all in the context of Christian community. We're not called Isolation to salvation and new life. We're called to a new community where we can walk together and encourage one another. Now, again, I don't want you to hear me wrongly. I don't want to communicate the wrong thing here. The fact that the Lord reigns and the fact that his reign is good does not mean that the floods of life aren't going to hurt. It doesn't mean we won't struggle and suffer, weep, and question everything sometimes. The Lord Himself shows us that much. The night before Jesus was crucified, he wasn't hanging out saying, tomorrow's going to be a pain. But the Lord reigns. I'm going to be all right in it. Not a big deal. No, what did he say? Matthew 26, he said, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. In other words, the floods have come up and I feel like I'm drowning. Luke records that he was in agony, crying out to God to be excused from the cross. If the Lord himself isn't pretending that the floods aren't a thing, neither should we. But notice what Jesus was doing in that moment. He was praying. He was bringing his situation, he was bringing his pain to the Father. He was also in community, in fellowship with his guys there. There's a lot of things that Jesus did in his earthly ministry that we can't. Never raised anyone from the dead or never fed 5,000 people, all of those things. I can pray. I can bring my pain and floods to the Lord, and I can do that in community. I can do that with other brothers and sisters there. Do you sometimes find it hard to be in prayer when times are difficult? Do you shy away from community? Does your Bible go untouched? I think that happens to a lot of us. Let me encourage you in this. Psalm 34 says, the Lord is near to the brokenhearted. If that's you this morning, he's right there. Don't give up on prayer. Don't give up on being with those who would pray with you and for you. If you're in the midst of floods this morning, the prayer team will be down front after the service, as will the elders. Promised that Christians would have the very presence of God dwelling with them at all times. So on our floods, in our overwhelmed and drowning moments, we have a resource. Old Testament believers didn't. The spirit of the one who calmed and even walked over the floods of this world, the spirit of the one who is robed in strength and majesty and yet set aside all of that to live and die for his people? The spirit of the one who lived the perfect life we couldn't, so we could dwell in his holy house, O Lord, forevermore. Remember, I started out this morning talking about do-it-yourself projects? The floods of life are not a do-it-yourself project. Something that we need to muster up enough gumption to get through. They're not something that we squint at and kind of pretend they're not there. As we go through the floods of life, let's go through them with God Himself right there with us. Let's put our trust in Him and affirm together that the Lord reigns. Let me pray. Lord God, you are with us in the floods. You are with us by your Spirit. You are with us through your word and you are with us in your people. May we not lose sight of that. All the floods of our lives, Lord. May we be able to say to those floods, the Lord reigns, and his reign is good. Thank you for this psalm, Lord. Thank you for our opportunity to look at it together. I pray, Lord, that it would be an encouragement to someone in here as much as it's been an encouragement to me this week. I thank you, Lord. I pray this in Jesus' name.

unknown 26:26

Amen.