Psalm 94

Ben Linn preaching from Psalm 94

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SPEAKER_01 0:18

Our reading is from Psalm ninety-four. Okay. Our reading is from Psalm ninety-four, and it's page four hundred and ninety-eight in the church Bibles. The Lord will not forsake his people. O Lord, God of vengeance, O God of vengeance, shine forth. Rise up, O judge of the earth. Repay to the proud what they deserve. O Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exult? They pour out their arrogant words, all the evildoers boast. They crush your people, O Lord, and afflict your heritage. They kill the widow and the sojourner, and murder the fatherless. And they say, The Lord does not see, the God of Jacob does not perceive. Understand, O dullest of the people, who? When will you be wise? He who planted the ear does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see? He who disciplines the nations, does he not rebuke? He who teaches man knowledge, the Lord, knows the thoughts of man, that they are but abreast. Blessed is the man who you discipline the Lord, and whom you teach out of your law, to give him rest from days of trouble until a pit is dug for the wicked. For the Lord will not forsake his people, he will not abandon his heritage, for justice will return to the righteous, and all the upright in hearts will follow it. Who rises up for me against the wicked? Who stands up for me against evildoers? If the Lord had not been my help, my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence. When I thought, my footsteps, your steps of O Lord, help me up. When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul. Can wicked rulers be allied with you? Those who frame injustice by statute. They bind together against the life of the righteous and condemn the innocent to death. But the Lord has become my stronghold and my rock, my God the rock of my refuge. He will bring back on them their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness. The Lord our God will wipe them out. Amen.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Good morning. If you don't know me, my name is Ben, one of the leaders here at City Church. And we will be looking at that psalm that Tina read for us not that long ago. Psalm 94, it's up uh right before Psalm 95, is where I where I find it in the Bible. Um, if you don't have a Bible, we have a physical one or two over there, but uh you can always just Google Psalm 94 ESV. We're in the English Standard Version there, so the words will all match up. But back when I was a teenager, this was this was years ago, this was in an entirely different century, okay? Um I remember being on a car trip with my family. I was I was out on this car trip with my mom and my dad and my brothers, and we were driving at night, we were going along a two-lane road, kind of, you know, one lane in each direction. And, you know, it was dark and everything, but this car came up behind us very quickly, shot around us, made this kind of dodgy move to get around us, and was just going super fast, seemed kind of reckless, kind of unsafe. And then it was like he came around us, and then we didn't see him anymore. It's like he went around a corner and he was gone, right? And I remember the sentiment of my parents at the time when they when this came together was I hope the law catches up with him.

unknown 3:51

Right?

SPEAKER_02 3:51

I hope, I hope, I hope someone gets him there. All right. So we continued on our way and he was kind of out of sight, out of mind, but got to a spot where the road kind of opened up and you could see, you know, a few miles up the way, and sure enough, you could see up there there's some there's some flashing lights, right? Like a like an emergency vehicle. Like, okay, someone got him, right? Well, not exactly. Um the uh the driver there seems to have gotten a cow, right? He ran into a cow because he was going fast and got himself into an accident there. Police officer who was there on the scene with him wasn't there issuing a citation, he was responding to a pretty serious collision. Now, I don't remember, I have no idea honestly what happened to that driver. I don't remember what it looked like or anything like that. But I have to think when my parents said, you know, I hope someone gets him, that they weren't thinking, gosh, I hope that he gets into some major collision with livestock. They they they wanted him to, of course, be held accountable, you know, maybe slowed down, maybe make the roads that little bit safer. But not necessarily that he would fall into some life-threatening calamity there. And that's really the sense that I get from today's psalm reading through it, Psalm 94 here. The psalmist isn't here, you know, sort of crying out for blood for the evildoers to suffer. And there's certainly examples of that in the Psalms. If you've read any Psalms, you'll know there are these imprecatory Psalms, that's what they call them, where they're really crying out. Psalm 10 says, Lord, break the arm of the wicked and the evildoer. Psalm 58 says, break the teeth in their mouth. Psalm 69 says, Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, let them not be enrolled among the righteous. Psalm 83 says, Let them be put to shame and dismayed forever, let them perish in disgrace. Those are just a few examples. There's other imprecatory psalms out there, but gives you an idea. This psalm that we're looking at here today doesn't really go into that. It has some very similar themes. There's wickedness, there's injustice, but it doesn't really go there. Psalmist isn't so much crying out for their destruction as he is just for justice. For the protection of the innocent, for God to intervene. Not necessarily for reckless drivers to have violent collisions with livestock, but for them to be slowed down and hopefully prevent tragedy on the highways. This psalm, I gotta be a little bit uh Bible nerdy for a minute here, just to explain the structure of the psalm here. It's got a structure in it called a chiasm. Chiasm is very common in Hebrew writing and poetry like this. It's chi, like the letter X in the Greek alphabet there. So the psalm kind of works from both ends and focuses in on the middle, like X marks the spot. So you have a section up at the top that will be echoed or amplified or answered in a section down at the bottom. And then another section here that's here, you know, kind of working our way in until we get to that to that central point there. That's kind of the main idea of the psalm. It's like it's like pulling apart nesting dolls, you know, those Russian nesting dolls, until you get down to the to the last one. And that's what it is. This psalm has seven different sections in it, so we're gonna be looking at one and seven, and then two and six, and then three and five, and then finally section four. So if that's uh on Final Jeopardy or something, what's the Hebrew uh structure there? It's chiasm. Mark always says that uh Hebrew comics, stand-up comics are the worst because they have their punchline in the middle instead of at the end. But the first thing we're gonna look at this morning is what I will call the wake-up call. We'll see it in the first three and the last two verses of this psalm. Verse one says, Oh God of vengeance, oh God of vengeance, shine forth. Now, vengeance might seem a little bit out of place, considering what I was just talking about, but this isn't vengeance like we would think about today. It's not like God is saying, You did this to me, now I'm gonna do this to you. God's not John Wick, okay? God is a God of vengeance, like we see in the book of Deuteronomy, where it says, vengeance belongs to the Lord, not to us. He's gonna be the one to execute justice. It's more like more like a righteous judge, like we'll see in the next verse, less like the punisher, I guess. But this idea of injustices that need to be set right is gonna be a theme throughout the psalm. And the psalmist is opening up with this reminder that God must act for righteousness. Verse 2 says, Rise up, O Judge of the earth, repay to the proud what they deserve. God of vengeance, judge of the earth. The psalmist uh continues to appeal to God in this light. Rise up, shine forth, calling God to take action, to end his apparent silence on the matter, up until now. It's a wake-up call, right? Wake up, God. You need to do something here. Now, I don't read this like, you know, some kind of demanding or entitled or some kind of suggestion that God has somehow been negligent. It's more like the psalmist is looking at the world and seeing there's injustice and there's wickedness and there's bad stuff going on, but I also know that God is a God of justice. How do these how do these go together? How do these work out? And so he says in verse 3, Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exalt? Now, exalt here just kind of means to to rejoice or to triumph. How long will these wicked people uh be winning? But the psalmist is just saying, Lord, you're aware of this situation, you're aware of the problem. When will you rise up? When will you shine forth? When will you take your place as judge of all the earth and put a stop to it? But when we go to the second half of this point, we see a very different picture looking at the same issue. It puts the idea of a wake-up call on the other foot, so to speak. If you take a look at verse 22, it says, The Lord has become my stronghold, and my God, the rock of my refuge. Now, do you think the psalmist means that up until now God wasn't, his refuge wasn't a stronghold? Of course not. More like the psalmist has had kind of his own wake-up call in the midst of this. The thing about a refuge or a stronghold, when you think about those images that are often used to describe God, a refuge and a stronghold do you no good unless you actually are inside of them. And so there's there's there's many times in our lives where we know that God's there, but we don't come to him in that way. And so it's almost like this, the psalmist has awakened to this idea that he needs to go to God and to entrust himself, to surround himself with the Lord's protection. The psalm ends with this idea of he will bring back on them their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness. The Lord God will wipe them out. And this is just a statement of confidence in God's justice. God's justice, God's awareness of the situation, and his ability to deal with it. Now, you'll notice, and we'll we'll see it all through the psalm here, the question of how long, from verse 3, how long, O Lord, it goes unanswered. And we can we can presume that the circumstances, we'll see more of the circumstances as we go here, but they haven't changed either. So we don't have we don't have any any relief from the circumstances, and we don't have any sense of when relief might be coming. So the question becomes, what's changed? The psalmist has a very different tone. We've gone from a very kind of desperate pleading tone in the first three verses, and now we're kind of faithfully assured. It's almost like the the psalm is the psalmist is is seeing the situation differently, even though nothing's changed. He's got a different perspective on it. So looking at any situation in life, we can look at it from many different perspectives. But if we're looking at it from the perspective of one who is aligned with and loved by God, it's necessarily gonna look different, right? We just need to wake up to that perspective sometimes. When we're seeing something that doesn't quite look right, we gotta bring it to the Lord. And I'll tell you, God isn't put off by our questions. He's not damaged by them, he's not thrown off by our our lack of understanding. It's to be expected. We don't know what he's doing, and he's not hurt by being questioned. But by bringing the conversation to him, we're acknowledging that he's the one who has the ability and the prerogative to work in each situation. We're we're we're worshiping, we're we're opening our hearts and our minds to his leading. It's like we're saying, Lord, I know you alone have the answers. I know you alone will make good of this situation. Teach me your ways that I might walk in them. Wake me up to your truth. So that's our wake-up call. Next, we're gonna look at the the next section. Here is the problem. Starting with verse 4, the psalmist is reading off the indictment of these wicked people. If the Lord is the judge of all the earth, the psalmist has placed himself in the role of the prosecutor. He's got the charges all ready to be read out here. So let's take a look here. Verse 4, it says that they are they're they're pouring out their arrogant words and they're boasting. Now, I remember years ago somebody said to me, you know, you can't see someone's heart. You don't know what they're thinking, you don't know what they're what they're actually meaning when they're when they're doing things in the world. Only God can see that, right? Only God, only you and God know what's really in your heart. But the thing is we've got this hole in the front of our head that kind of reveals it. If you've heard the old saying, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. It's kind of rubbish, right, if you think about it here. Because Jesus says in the Gospels, he says that the mouth speaks out of the abundance or the overflow of the heart. So what words come out, they're reflecting what's in the heart. So the wicked are speaking arrogant words here, they're speaking boastful words, they're making themselves seem mighty. And like we'll see in verse 7, they're making God seem small or far off. Verse 5, it says, They're crushing the Lord's people and afflicting his heritage. Here, the psalmist is saying, you know, God, these are your people. What good is it to be God's people if the wicked people are crushing and afflicting them? He's saying, Lord, your people are suffering. Your heritage, the good working of your grace, is afflicted. Verse 6 says, they're killing the widow and the sojourner, murdering the fatherless. If there's any kind of demographics in scripture, uh, especially in the Old Testament, that the that the Lord calls us to protect, it's these three, right? At least these three, right? The widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, sojourner is an immigrant or somebody from another place. Psalm 146 says, the Lord watches over the sojourner and upholds the widow and the fatherless. Psalm 68 says he's a father of the fatherless and a protector of widows. So this charge, verse 6, particularly shocking. These people who speak so boastfully and crush and afflict the Lord's people, are also destroying the most vulnerable. Verse 7 kind of reveals where this is all coming from, because they're the the last charge against them here is that they're saying the Lord doesn't see, the God of Jacob does not perceive. And this brings us around to what makes this all seem possible to these wicked people. You know, we're far more likely to do the wrong thing if we don't think we'll get caught. I remember hearing a story of a Christian leader who got caught up in some scandal, you know, one of the big three, right? Money, sex, or power. And he got, he got in deep and it and it cost him big time, and he wound up doing time and these sort of things. Somebody was interviewing him, and they said to him, you know, Pastor, whatever, when did you stop loving Jesus? When did that go away for you? And he says, I never stopped loving Jesus. He says, I stopped fearing Jesus. Now, when we talk about the fear of the Lord in Scripture, it's not like terror, I'm sitting here scared of what God might do. But it's more like respect. It's more like caring what God has to say. It's more like you want to think about fear of the Lord, living your life as if God's in the room right there with you. These people that the psalmist is reading out their charges on, uh, they're not fearing the Lord. They live with no fear of the Lord. But if we look at the other half of this point, we can see some very comforting truths in light of what's just been charged. I'm just gonna read verses 16 to 19 because there's such great assurance and such great truth for us to cling to. Verse 16, who rises up against, who rises up for me against the wicked? Who stands up for me against evildoers? If the Lord had not been my help, my soul would soon have been, soon have lived in the in the land of silence. When I thought my foot slips, your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up. When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul. Who stands between the Lord's people and the wicked? The Lord Himself. But it's verse 20 that points to the to the greatest comfort in this section, I think. Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who frame injustice by statute? There's a verse in Romans 8. Romans 8 is a great chapter in the New Testament with a lot of great truths of assurance. And there's a verse in there that says, If God is for us, who can be against us? Beautiful. Verse 20 is kind of the opposite side of that. It's basically saying, if God is against you, how can you hope to prevail? It's a beautiful resolution that flies in the face of uh verse 7's idea that God doesn't see. God not only uh sees, he rises up against. God not only perceives, he perceives and pres and preserves his people against. God is not only aware, he is aligned against. So where this point started out looking like the evildoer is a problem for God, it's really looking like God is gonna be a problem for the evildoer. Now, we're used to a world in which every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you take a clean cloth and put it up against something dirty, right? The dirty thing's gonna get a little cleaner, the the cloth is gonna get a little dirty. But God doesn't work like that. God's not affected by it. God isn't isn't made dirty by reaching into the dirty situations of the world. The presence of bad actors in the world doesn't put off God's designs. In fact, we see again and again through scripture, God uses the bad stuff to work out his good plans. Got an example of this in the latter chapters of Genesis, if you wanted to check that out. There's a fellow called Joseph, and he has some bad stuff happen to him. He's betrayed by his brothers, sold into slavery, shipped off to some foreign country. Pretty awful stuff happens to him. But in the process of all of that, the Lord allows him to do some pretty magnificent things. At the end of the narrative, Genesis chapter 50, great, great line here. He's reconciled to his brothers and he's able to say to them, You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. Imagine being able to say that. That same God is at work in view of the psalmist, and he's at work in our world today as well. So the call is for us to remember this. When we're facing down unjust situations, when we find ourselves in and under pressure, let's remember the Lord is on it. If he's good and he is, he simply cannot be allied with evildoers. And if God is against them, they just can't stand. Will we hang on? Will we trust him to work out the situation for good? Will we endure trusting his timing even when it doesn't quite match up to our own? We've seen the wake-up call now, we've seen the problem, now it's time for a call to action. Take a look at verse 8. Understand, oh dullest of the people, fools, when will you be wise? Peter and I were laughing this week. It's fun when the psalmist calls people dull or stupid. Psalm 92 calls people stupid. It's great stuff. But who's he calling dull here? This comes right after the description of the people who live as if God can't see, God's not aware. He's talking to the talking about the evildoers here, talking to them. So this shade, it's well deserved. He who planted the ear, does he not hear? This is verse 9. He who formed the eye, does he not see? You think God doesn't see? God invented seeing. You think God hasn't heard? God invented hearing. All of the intricate features of our sensory organs, eyes and ears, and all of this, the one that put that all together. He's aware of your wicked deeds. And for that matter, verse 10 if God is able to discipline entire nations, surely he can discipline you. You think you can get one over on the Almighty, but he has been there. He has seen that. He knows what's going on. He knows that your thoughts aren't as smart as you think they are. That's verse 11. It reminds me of those posts online. I give myself away a little bit here. I love to read those articles where they summarize these kind of posts where, you know, one person might be up in arms saying, you don't know what you're talking about. And somebody else, you know, that they're talking to is actually like, yeah, no, I'm actually an expert in this area. You know, you don't you don't get this film, you don't know what it's really about. And the other person's like, well, actually, I wrote the screenplay. So uh, you know, or you you don't know anything about this scientific thing because you you you I read this article in a scientific journal, and the other person's like, well, I actually wrote that article. So you know, this is like the evildoer saying, you know, God doesn't know, God doesn't see, and God's saying, Yeah, I kind of see everything, so you know. But just as much as there's caution to the evildoer in here, the other half of this point speaks comfort to the righteous. Verse 14, for the Lord will not forsake his people, he will not abandon his heritage. This has the idea that God is not unaware. He's not forgotten his people. This is answering the concern that we saw in verse 5. Going on, verse 15 says, For justice will return to the righteous, and all the upright in heart will follow it. The idea that justice will return to the righteous might sound like karma, might sound like, you know, what my parents used to say, oh, you know, what goes around comes around. But make no mistake, this is not some random chance events of the universe. This is the Lord's work. Injustice tips the scales, puts things out of balance. And the Lord works to restore that balance. And whoever you are, wherever you're coming from this morning, we like that idea. It appeals to us, the idea of justice being done, people not getting away with stuff. I think that's what that last phrase is talking about, that all the upright in heart will follow it. It's like in the book of Isaiah, in chapter 52, it is, it says that all the ends of the all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God a day, someday. Now notice I said someday. I didn't say necessarily this day, and we have to balance this out in our minds. On the one hand, we have this this sure and certain hope that the Lord will have the last word, that he will set things right. But on the other hand, we have to hold on to this hope, even while letting go of our own time scale. God will do it, count on that, cling to that. But also remember, like we saw with Joseph just a minute ago, God's doing things that we won't understand in the here and now. Whatever it is, we can trust that he's working it out for good. This is this is obviously easier said than done a lot of the time. But that's why we have to keep coming back to it. That's why we have to keep reminding ourselves, hanging on to it, bring our own hearts and minds before God and let him hold up our often sagging hopes. Just because something is true doesn't mean it's gonna be easy. But just because something's hard, it doesn't mean it's hopeless. Step one, trust and obey. Step two, see step one. It's not easy, but it's simple. That's our call to action. Final point this morning is our resolution. How does it all resolve? And I mean that like, you know, the last note of a song. You ever hear a song that's not quite, you know, resolve like da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That's a resolution there, right? But it's also something that we can resolve to do. And what we can do here, what we can resolve here, is to come before the Lord and let him speak into our thinking. Read verse 12 here. It says, Blessed is the man whom you discipline, O Lord, and whom you teach out of your law. Verse 13, to give him rest from days of trouble until a pit is dug for the wicked. Now, verse 12 talks about discipline and instruction and law, and we'll look at that in a sec, but what is the end result here? Where are we going with this? Notice this, it's it's it's rest. It's not vindication, it's not being proved right, it's not seeing the downfall of our enemies or even the scales being brought back into balance. It's rest. Rest from days of trouble until a pit is dug for the wicked. As we've seen before, this resolution, this rest, it isn't about a change in the circumstances. Otherwise, it might say to give him rest from days of trouble after a pit is dug for the wicked. This is talking about rest even while the wicked are still up to their old tricks. I mean, obviously rest will come after they're dealt with, but rest even before that? That seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? How can that be? Well, the original hearers of this psalm certainly had the comfort and the future hope that we've been talking about. The Lord will sort it all out. The Lord will make it all right. And that is, of course, a powerful thing. We can hold on to that. But just like the clickbait guy says, but wait, there's more. Remember, this is the Old Testament. This is before the ministry of Jesus on earth, before the cross, before the resurrection, before the giving of the Holy Spirit. If you're a follower of Jesus this morning, you have a greater hope, a greater comfort, greater rest. Because God's own spirit dwells within you. God is present with you in your time of distress. Also helps us with verse 12. Blessed is the man whom you what now? Discipline? Teach from your law? Why would the Lord need to discipline and teach his law to his own people? To the righteous, to the ones living that blessed life? Well, this points us to the fact that even the righteous don't always get it right. They don't always act or speak or think in a way that meets God's standards, God's perfect, holy standards. So what separates them from the wicked? Is it just that the wicked are that bit worse? You know, both the righteous and the wicked are lawbreakers, but the wicked are just that bit more obvious about it and more noticeable? No. The entire Old Testament, which we're in right now, the Old Testament is looking ahead. It's looking ahead to God's promised salvation, God's promised savior. So the question of righteous and wicked isn't one of behavior, it's a question of faith, just like it is today. Old Testament believers exercise their faith by living out the covenant, right? Things like law observance and temple rites and holy days and circumcision. But even they didn't do everything perfectly, just like we don't do everything perfectly. But God's grace sets aside these perfect demands of the law, purchase perfect demands of righteousness, and they free up the believer to be disciplined lovingly, to learn and grow into that identity. That's how just an Old Testament example here, King David, who did a lot of terrible things in his life, still able to be called a man after God's own heart. And so much more so for us today. We have what the what the psalmist could only wonder about, could only speculate about. We have the story of Jesus, Son of God, who paid for all of those sins on the cross. We have the Holy Spirit teaching and convicting and growing us in our faith, growing us in the Lord, even in even in our failings and our shortcomings. We have confidence that God is not allied against us like we saw in verse 20. We have confidence that God will not pay us back according to what we deserve, like we saw in verse 2. We have confidence that God will not bring our iniquity on us like we saw in verse 23. Instead, like verse 12 says, we are blessed. Even though we need that discipline and instruction. Instead, we have the offer of rest even under pressure. And as Paul writes in the New Testament, this is not of ourselves, it's the gift of God. So applying this then means that the wicked, the evildoer from our psalm is also not beyond God's grace. Maybe that's why the psalmist isn't particularly concerned with praying for their downfall. This prefigures the the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount when he says, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Or from the cross, when he was talking about people who were actively crucifying him. He said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Let's allow this grace-filled thinking to come out of us. No, it's not natural for us, it's not instinctive, but it's the gospel. It's the good news, it's the power of God unto salvation for this broken world. May we rest in the Lord's discipline and instruction to bring this good news to those around us. Let me pray. Father God, we do thank you for this morning. We thank you for your word. Thank you that we can rest in you even while the world around us is full of injustices, difficulties, stresses, and pressures. Because we know we have confidence that you are the one who will make it all right. Lord, may we uh uh lean into that identity that you have given us. May we see it and may we experience it as we go forward. Thank you for your kindness towards us. And we pray for those around us who do not yet know you, Lord. May they come to be blessed by you as well. In Jesus' name.

unknown 32:41

Amen.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

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