|
|
THE FATHER FULFILLS HIS PROMISE TO THE SONPsalm 89INTRODUCTION We elders meet each Friday morning for prayer. This past Friday we prayed for people we know who have recently entered hospice care, who are waiting to die. We talked about their suffering and we prayed for their faith. We prayed for those who are caring for them. One of the elders then shared how his grandfather when his eyesight failed at the age of 88 and so his driver’ license was taken away, killed himself. He could find no purpose to live. He lost all hope when he lost his ability to live independently. While most of us will not resort to suicide, yet all of us will be faced with hopeless conditions in the course of our lives or at the very least at the end of our lives. Things have happened to us or are going to happen to us that will extinguish all hope, all reason for going on. When these things happen we discover what we have based our life upon. The psalm we are considering this morning was written by a man in the midst of an apparently hopeless situation. Beginning in v. 38 of Psalm 89, he declares to God why he is so hopeless. While we don't know the particular historical setting we do know that the loss of hope is due to the nation being conquered. The king of Israel has been defeated and the nation has been plundered by an enemy. In vv. 46-48 he sums up his condition by saying this: “How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? How long will your wrath burn like fire? Remember how fleeting is my life. For what futility you have created all men! What man can live and not see death or save himself from the power of the grave?” All is dark and hopeless in his experience. Death, the great extinguisher of hope, leers at him and looms over him. Yet, that is not where the psalm begins. It begins with joyful praise. The first 37 verses of the Psalm are as full of joyful hope as the last 15 verses are full of despair. Ethan the Ezrahite, who wrote this psalm, aims to tell us how to have joyful hope even while we are despairing of all hope. He tells us how to have joy in the midst of grief. Again, as we have repeatedly seen in our study of the OT, this psalm is ultimately referring to Jesus. Verse 26 is quoted in Hebrews 1:6 in reference to Jesus being the Son of God. While the original writer, Ethan, wrote out of his own experience, the psalm's ultimate referent is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God whose crown was defiled in the dust (v. 39), who was the scorn of his neighbors (v. 41) and whose enemies rejoiced over him (v. 42) while he hung on the cross and endured God's wrath (v. 46). As Jesus said about his relationship to the OT, he only has fulfilled what this psalm describes. The opening 37 verses of this psalm are even more explosive when we look at the psalm that precedes it. As we saw this past Friday evening, psalm 88 is a prayer of utter despair. It is the prayer of our Lord Jesus while hanging upon the cross. The last word of the psalm is “darkness”. The only reality left to our Lord Christ upon that cross was the darkness of God’s eternal judgment. Just listen to how this sounds when we read the end of psalm 88 and the beginning of psalm 89. “Why, O Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me? From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death; I have suffered your terrors and am in despair. Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me. All day long they surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me. You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend. I will sing of the Lord’s great love forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations. I will declare that your love stands firm forever, that you established your faithfulness in heaven itself.” That sounds about as schizophrenic as you can possibly be, doesn’t it? Yet both of these psalms are the words of Jesus. Jesus experienced the deepest of all despair and the greatest loss of hope that any human could ever experience when he suffered and died on that cross. Yet in the midst of the despair, he never lost hope. He, like the psalmist in 89:1-37 found joyful hope by trusting in the faithful promise of God even while in the midst of the most hopeless situation any human has ever experienced. This morning we are going to observe 4 reasons in psalm 89 for why joy filled hope is only found by trusting God’s promise. MAIN POINT Joy filled hope is only found by trusting God’s faithful promise because…I. God has shown himself faithful in creation and salvation (vv. 1-13) The particular promise that the psalmist has fixed his trust in is recorded in vv. 3-4. He is repeating and paraphrasing a promise that God made to David, the king of Israel back in 2 Samuel 7. I know that some of you are familiar with that chapter and promise but I also know that there are many here who are not familiar with it and so I want to give you a brief overview of that chapter. David was the shepherd boy, the youngest of the seven sons of Jesse, who became the king of Israel by God’s appointment. After David had conquered all the enemies of Israel, beginning with Goliath, and was living at peace in the city he made the capital of the nation, Jerusalem, he said to the prophet Nathan that he wanted to build a permanent temple in which God would be worshipped. For the previous 500 years God had been worshipped in a tent. So David wanted to make a more permanent “house” for the Lord’s worship. Nathan thought that was a good idea until God spoke to him. What the Lord told Nathan to tell David was that David was not going to build a house for God but that God would build a house for David. What the Lord meant was that one of David’s sons was going to rule over God’s people forever. He told David, “I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father and he will be my son… my love will never be taken away from him… Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.” It is this promise that is restated in vv. 3-4. All of the hope in this psalm is rooted in this promise God made to David. What the psalmist does in vv. 5-14 is to describe for us who it is that has made this promise. His point is to show us that we can trust this promise and thus be full of joyful hope because of who has made the promise. We have lots of trees in our yard and there are lots of trees in our neighbors' yards. As a result we have lots of leaves in our yard every fall. It is an overwhelming task to rake up all these leaves and so each fall I am not very hopeful that I will get them raked up by the time the city crews come to my street to pick up leaves. My dear little 8-year-old daughter, Jaimee often will tell me as I go to work in the last days of October that she is going to rake the leaves for me. I really appreciate her eagerness and helpfulness but her promise doesn’t dispel my gloom. However, if my 20 year old son Jordan tells me that he will rake the lawn, then my heart is free of gloom. Why is that? Both make the same promise but Jordan has the power to fulfill his promise while Jaimee does not yet possess adequate power to do what she says. In vv. 5-14 the author aims to convince us that the one who makes the promise is able to keep his promise because of who he is. In vv. 6-8 four rhetorical questions are asked, all expecting a negative answer. There is no one and nothing in all of creation that can be compared to Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. All being fears him and he fears no one and nothing. He is more awesome than all of creation. There is no one and nothing as mighty as he. In vv. 9-10 the psalmist reflects on God’s actions in saving Israel from the hostility of the nations. In the OT the nations that surround Israel and who threaten to destroy Israel are often compared to a raging sea. Verse 9 is a poetic description of how God rules over and quiets all the nations who oppose Israel. Chief among those opposing nations is Egypt, the nation who enslaved Israel for 400 years. Egypt is frequently called Rahab in the Psalms. God crushed Egypt through Moses sending upon them the ten plagues and ultimately he crushed the army of Pharaoh in the waters of the Red Sea. He then scattered all the kings who opposed Israel beginning with Og, king of Bashan and Sihon, king of the Ammorites. The God who promised that David’s son would rule on his throne forever is the same God who made Israel into a great nation and rescued them from powerful Egypt and gave them the land of Canaan for their home. The God who rules over the nations for the good of his people is the God who has promised that great David's greater Son would rule over the universe forever. In addition, this is the same God who owns the entire universe because he made it. He formed everything to the north and everything to the south. The mountains praise him because he made them. We all know how awesome creation is. It is awesome in its beauty and it is awesome in its power. Even in our technologically advanced culture we are regularly reminded that there are forces in this universe against which we cannot stand. Tornados, tsunamis, hurricanes, viruses, droughts, wildfires, avalanches, floods and more are regular reminders that we are not masters of the universe. We are not in charge. As v. 13 says it is God's arm that is endued with power, his hand that is strong and exalted. The argument of this psalm, indeed of the entire Bible is that if we know how awesome the creation is then we also know that the God who made it, who owns it and who rules over it is infinitely more majestic. He must be a God of eternal power. Thus if a God of eternal power makes a promise there is nothing that is able to keep him from fulfilling what he promises. As God says in Isaiah 43:13, "No one can deliver out of my hand. When I act, who can reverse it?" The God who is infinite in his power and who has displayed his power in acts of salvation and creation and providence has made the promise that one of David's sons will be established as king forever, therefore we can have hope. Joy filled hope is only found by trusting God’s faithful promise because… God has shown himself faithful in creation and salvation
II. God has shown himself faithful in satisfying his people with his presence (vv. 14-18) Verses 14-18 is a poetic description of the church, the visible expression of the kingdom of God on this earth. Verse 14 begins by stating that Yahweh, the God who made the heavens and the earth sits upon a throne. In other words, he is the great king over all the earth. His throne is founded upon righteousness and justice. In other words, God is right and always does right. In his being God is always delighted in and committed to what is ultimately good. He makes sure that everyone gets what they deserve in perfect justice. He is unfailingly committed to establishing a perfect world in which every person perfectly loves God and their neighbor as themselves. If God's throne was only characterized by his righteousness and his justice, that would not be good news for us. We all have violated God's righteous standards and come before this throne as guilty criminals. If God only dealt with the world in righteousness and justice then all of us would be summarily executed and thrown into hell. But notice that love and faithfulness go before the throne of God. God "does not deal with us as our sins deserve or reward us according to our iniquities." He has made a way to justly love criminals like us through the life and death of Jesus. Love and justice meet in the cross of Jesus Christ. God upholds his righteousness by punishing our sins in Christ and he demonstrates his love for all who trust in Christ by forgiving our sins and dwelling with us as our Father for the sake of Christ. It is the presence of God with his people that is described in vv. 15-17. These verses describe the outcome of what Peter says in his letter: "Christ died for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring you to God." God is the goal of the gospel. God has exercised his justice and his love in Christ so that he can have a people who have learned by his grace that he is better than the creation. There is a people whose glory and strength is God himself. There is a people who gladly submit to God's rule in this world. It is the church of Jesus. Rather than shrinking back from his righteousness we rejoice in it. Rather than promoting and rejoicing in our own name and reputation we promote and rejoice in the name and reputation of God himself. We have discovered through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the God of the universe who is full of steadfast love and faithfulness and who can be counted on to always do what is right. Our happiness is in him, not what he gives. Our glory and strength is not in our money or possessions or racial identity or socio-economic class or family or career or skills or retirement accounts but in God himself. If you are one of God's people who have learned to acclaim him and who walk in the light of his presence then when faced with hopeless conditions you are able to find joy in the midst of the grief because you know by experience that God himself is your glory and strength. You know that while all is darkness now, yet God will not forsake you and you will yet praise him again. Also you have the example of a multitude of God's people who have lost everything and yet have not lost hope because they have continued to rejoice in God even while bowed down with earthly grief and hardship. The existence of the church rejoicing in God alone whether living in the midst of affluence or in the midst of crushing poverty helps us not lose hope when all hope is gone. As you have heard me say on numerous occasions in the last five years since my oldest son's accident it is knowing this, that God is the goal of life, that is the only reason I yet stand before you as a Christian and a pastor. It is because God, in his infinite mercy, convinced me and also Jared, through the gospel of Christ that if I was loved by him that I could lose everything and yet lose nothing that enabled me and my family to stand in this storm. It is knowing that multitudes of God's people have suffered losses like this and yet continued rejoicing in God in the midst of the grief that has enabled us to persevere. It is in observing our dear friends Steve and Rita Wade rejoice in Christ even after their daughter was struck by lightning that we stand. It is in knowing how the great English preacher John Owens walked in the joy of God even while losing 10 of his 11 children before they turned five and then losing his only surviving daughter when she was 21 that we persist. It is in knowing families like our friends who have willingly left behind the comforts of the U.S. to live in the deprivation of Mongolia while still rejoicing in Christ that enables us to bear the grief. God has established his kingdom on this earth in his church and created a people who exult in him alone and so we can have hope. Joy filled hope is only found by trusting God’s faithful promise because… God has shown himself faithful in creation and salvation
III. God has shown himself faithful in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (vv. 19-37) Verses 19-37 form the center of this psalm and give the ultimate foundation upon which joy filled hope is built. Here we are shown God's trustworthiness as we see how God has kept his promise to David in the sending of Jesus as the Son of David whose throne endures forever. The promises made here to David were never fulfilled in David or in any of his sons. David and all of his sons who reigned upon the throne of literal, physical Israel stand only as shadows and types of the one who was to come, to whom all these promises refer. The history of David and the succeeding kings of Israel is not a history of unmitigated success. Rather it is a history of one failure after another and of God's judgment upon corrupt David and his sons. David himself was oppressed by enemies, including his own son Absalom. His son Solomon while establishing the rule of Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Tigris and Euphrates was also opposed by enemies whom he never conquered. God did take his love from Solomon and then took away more than half of the kingdom of Israel from his son Rehoboam. The long sad history of Israel's kings finally ends with God sending the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem and to capture the last son of David to rule in Jerusalem, Zedekiah. Zedekiah, the last king of Israel, watched as his children were executed and then his eyes were gouged out and he was taken to live as a prisoner in Babylon until the day he died. The prophet Ezekiel describes the end of the Davidic dynasty but then shows that the promise God made in this psalm was not over but yet to be fulfilled. Ezekiel 21:25-27 says, “O profane and wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, whose time of punishment has reached its climax, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Take off the turban, remove the crown.... A ruin! A ruin! I will make it a ruin! It will not be restored until he comes to whom it rightfully belongs, to him I will give it.” This one who was yet to come when Ezekiel prophesied is the Lord Jesus Christ. The NT makes clear from beginning to end that Jesus Christ is the son of David whom God promised in 2 Samuel 7 and in dozens of other places in the OT, including this psalm. It would take several sermons to show how each of the things said here about David and his son are fulfilled in and by Jesus. So I am going to simply point out a couple so that you can see how this works and can do some more study on your own. In vv. 19-20 we are told that God is the one who chose David to be king of Israel. If you remember the story, David was the least likely person to be the king of Israel. God sent Samuel to the house of Jesse in Bethlehem to anoint one of Jesse's seven sons as the king to replace the failed king Saul. Samuel, if you will remember wanted to pick each of the first six sons of Jessed because he was impressed with each one. However, God rejected the six older brothers of David who was the youngest and only a shepherd boy. There was no human characteristic about David to recommend him as the next king of Israel. He was not looking to be the king. He did not choose to be the king but God chose him and then God strengthened him for the work and God exalted him in the eyes of all Israel through the slaying of Goliath. There was nothing remarkable about Jesus. He was the oldest son of a poor couple living in the small and backward town of Nazareth. When Philip informed Nathan that he had found the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth; Nathan responded with the common knowledge of his day, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" No one, not even his mother and father knew during those thirty years Jesus grew up in Nazareth that this was the Messiah, the Son of David, the one who would rule on David's throne forever. Peter says in his letter that God chose Jesus to be his Messiah before the creation of the world. God the Father chose God the Son to come to earth and to take on human flesh and to be the Messiah, the anointed one. As Jesus testified throughout his three year ministry he was sent by God. At the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist God strengthened Jesus to be his king by sending the Holy Spirit upon him. He exalted Jesus by his victory over the devil in the desert and then by his conquest of every evil spirit and disease and even death itself as he cast out demons, healed diseases and even raised people from the dead. He exalted him ultimately by his own resurrection. How are vv. 22-25 fulfilled in Christ? It certainly does not appear in the account of his betrayal, arrest, trial, torture and death that "no wicked man will oppress him" and that God "will crush his foes before him." Right now it does not appear that he has universal rule over all the earth as v. 25 seems to imply. The NT answers these questions first by pointing to the resurrection of Jesus and his ascension to the right hand of God where he now is waiting for his enemies to be made the footstool of his feet. The NT also refers to the present rule of Christ over the nations as evidenced by the establishment of the church among all the nations of the world and finally by describing what will happen when Christ comes again to overthrow all the kingdoms of this world and to establish his eternal kingdom in the new heavens and the new earth. The passages in the NT that describe these realities are too numerous to mention. I would draw your attention to the first Christian sermon ever preached as recorded in Acts 2. Peter, as he proclaims the gospel to the crowd of Jewish people gathered in Jerusalem from all over the Roman Empire for the feast of Pentecost makes plain that though Jesus was killed by them according to God's predetermined plan, yet God raised him from the dead, "for it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him." He goes on to explain that God has set Jesus on the throne of his father David by raising him from the dead. He concludes his sermon by declaring, "let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ." Right now God is subduing the enemies of Jesus by the word of his gospel, making sinners willing to trust Christ and eager to obey him through faith. Yet there is a final day coming when Jesus returns and God will crush all who have resisted him and have refused to flee to Christ as Savior. The enemies of Christ will then meet him as their judge and perish. The fact that Jesus Christ is right now sitting at the right hand of God and that his throne, his reign will endure forever, like the sun before God is the ground of all hope and joy in the universe. Evil will not have the final say. Death will not swallow up life. The world is not going to continue in its rebellion forever. Whatever conditions of despair have come upon you, if you belong to Christ, then you are secure because God the Father made a covenant with David's son that will never fail. The troubles and trials of this life do not have the final word. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the great Son of David, is seated upon his throne forever and God's steadfast love is pledged to him and his children forever. Joy filled hope is only found by trusting God’s faithful promise because… God has shown himself faithful in creation and salvation
IV. God has shown himself faithful by filling this world with disappointment (vv. 38-51) Where is the hope in these last 15 verses? I want to suggest to you that the hope is to be found in who is the subject of all the verbs. Notice as we read down through these verses what the psalmist knows and what Jesus knew while he endured his suffering. The subject of all the verbs is "you", which is referring to Yahweh, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Read a few of the verses.). The universal testimony of the Scriptures is that no matter who or what may be the immediate cause of the troubles and difficulties of our lives the ultimate cause is God himself. He sends trouble to us on purpose for good reasons. It was the unequivocal testimony of Jesus throughout his life that it was God's will and purpose that he be betrayed, tortured and killed. He told the people that "The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many." On another occasion he told his disciples, "We are going up to Jerusalem and everything written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. He will be handed over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him and kill him." In that same sermon I referred to earlier Peter said to the crowd which killed Jesus, "This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and predetermined plan and you with the help of wicked men put him to death…" A few chapter's later the disciples said to God in prayer, "Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen." I don't have time right now to work out how it is possible for God to ordain that men do evil and yet he is not guilty of evil but they are. The point that you must see is that just as God had a great and glorious purpose in sending this trouble upon his son so he has great and glorious purposes for sending trouble to us. On many occasions when people have heard about what happened to our oldest son Jared, people have said to me, "I'm so sorry. We just don't know why God permits these things to happen." Every time I have told these well meaning people that is simply not true. God has told us in dozens of places why he sends trouble to us; why he puts us in dark and difficult circumstances. In the year following Jared's accident I preached through ten of those passages. But you can see the basic purpose even in this psalm. What have the difficulties in the psalmist's life caused him to do? He has gone to God and sought salvation from him. It is the purpose of God in all of the trouble that he sends to us that we discover he is what we need. He is our only hope. He alone is our Rock and our salvation. The fact that this psalmist prayed even though overcome by the most extreme of difficulties and the fact that Jesus prayed while upon that cross shows us that God aims to disappointment us in this life so that we will seek him and rely upon him and find our salvation in him alone. I urge you today to make it your life's work to believe the promise of eternal life that is held out to you in the person of Jesus Christ. God is willing to accept all who come to him alone for salvation from sin and death and hell. Do not refuse him because the Father is determined to crush the enemies of his son. Yet he will forgive and bless with his presence forever all who humbly trust that Jesus by his life, death and resurrection has secured all of God's promises. Do not delay. Trust him today. Joy filled hope is only found by trusting God’s faithful promise because… God has shown himself faithful in creation and salvation
© Copyright 2007 John Swanson.
|