21.12.06
The Psalms (5): Standing Amazed
Read: Psalm 30
As Christmas time approaches, the selection of films on the television becomes very predictable indeed. Like as not, over the next couple of weeks we’ll have films on we’ve seen a hundred times before, like The Sound of Music, or The Wizard of Oz. But there’s one film I personally never tire of watching – It’s a Wonderful Life with James Stewart. We all know the story – it’s a story of a great turnaround in the life of a going down businessman. We like it, not just because it’s a great story but because James Stewart is such a likeable guy that we want to see his life turned around. As human beings we love the great turnaround stories where good triumphs over evil. Psalm 30 is an example of the ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ theme in the Book of Psalms where we start off in a pit but we end on a pinnacle, we start off on a low, but end on a high. It is the third example of the genre of Psalms we are looking at – a Psalm of Thanksgiving. And I want to see three things about this turnaround Psalm tonight:
[A] The Problem
The problem is basically a restatement of a lament. Last week we looked at Psalm 13 which is a lament – a down time in the life of the Psalmist. There were two things bothering the writer of the Psalm, King David:
1. My Circumstances – in all likelihood the circumstances which were problematic to King David revolved around his health. In vs. 2 we read of God healing David, a sure sign that David needed to be healed from something serious. We don’t know what this illness was, but whatever it was the future looked bleak for David – as he saw it there was no hope. He uses a vast array of words to describe the future (or rather the lack of future) which lay ahead of him: the depths in vs. 1, Sheol (basically the grave) in vs. 3, the pit in vs. 3, my blood (or destruction as it is translated in the NIV) in vs. 10 and the dust in vs. 10. The future isn’t bright for King David – he sees only one outcome – his death. His circumstances aren’t very promising. No wonder he laments. What about you – can you see no other possible outcome than the darkest?
2. My Attitudes – the lament of the grave was bad enough, but it was as David opened his eyes to the attitudes both of others towards him and him towards everything and everyone else and to himself, which really concerned him. You see in this Psalm three attitudes which desperately concern David:
(a) God’s Attitude to Me – this is summed up in two words we find in vs. 5 and 6 – ‘his anger’ and ‘when you hid your face’. Given the situation the Psalmist is going through, he can only deduce that God is angry with him and that God is hiding his face from him – God is not favouring him. I don’t know about you, but I hate it when I know there is someone who is in a bad mood with me. But what if you feel that God is in a bad mood with you, angry with you and hiding his face from you? Does that not make you feel doubly bad?
(b) My Enemies’ Attitude to Me – in vs. 1 David’s enemies are watching every move he is making. During this time of sickness in David’s life, when his life seems to be in the balance, they are beginning to gloat and lord it over him. They seem to be getting the upper hand. They are winning and he is losing.
(c) My Attitude to Me – all these things have had a profound effect upon David’s self-assessment – they have totally removed any self-confidence he may have had. He is now a shivering wreck – in vs. 5 he talks of weeping, in vs. 7 he talks about himself as being dismayed (or disturbed); in vs. 11 he is wailing and wearing sackcloth - he is completely humiliated and defenceless. Any ego this man had has been destroyed and he is at the bottom of where it is possible for him to be as a human being.
Have you ever felt like this – that in a hard and distressing situation God has hidden His face from you so that the heavens are as brass and your prayers aren’t being heard – that you are having to face this trial without God’s help? You look at your enemies, those who laugh at your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the sin within you, and you hate the thought of them winning over you. You look into your own heart and you don’t see any joy – you see only deep mourning and inner turmoil. You’ve been through life’s mangle and you feel utterly crushed? Well, if that’s you, then you are here in this Psalm standing beside King David as you sing and pray it together.
[B] The Answer
In our Scottish culture, we are desperately prone towards melancholy and depression. The glass is half empty, and if it’s half empty it might as well be altogether empty. That’s the way it is when it comes to our Christianity also – we tend to be fatalistic, always looking at the dark side – always living in the throes of our laments. But the message of the psalms of thanksgiving is that we simply aren’t allowed to stay in the bottom of the pit – circumstantially, emotionally or spiritually. It is not a godly thing to do to wear a continual grimace of pain – rather, as the American theologian John Piper says, we must fight for joy. After all, what does answer 1 of the shorter catechism tell us ‘man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever’? Brothers and sisters, I see very little enjoyment of God among us. And yet, that is what we must strive for. Not an attitude of ‘woe is me’, but an attitude of ‘worthy is God.’ So how then did the Psalmist claw his way out of the pit?
1. What I Did – there is a desperate seriousness about the attitude of David here – he’s not letting go, or adopting a fatalistic ‘in-shallah’ attitude. Rather he’s going to fight for faith. He perhaps doesn’t see a way ahead other than death, but he’s going to fight for what he can. And so he does two things: first, he prays. You see different words used to describe the prayers he makes – in vs. 8 he talks about calling to the Lord and crying for mercy to the Lord; vs. 9-10 are literally prayers he makes to the Lord and in vs. 2 he talks about calling out (literally crying out) to my God for help. Even though he feels as though God is angry with him and has hid his face from him, he’s not going to stop praying – he’s going to pester God until he gets an answer. He realises that the most important relationship in his life is the one he has with God and so he’s going to make sure that one’s right before anything else gets sorted in his life. So he’s going to clutch at the hand that smote him – He’s going back to God.
Secondly, he thinks. You see this from vs. 6-7 where we have David using his mind to think through why these horrible circumstances have come upon him in the first place. He’s not going to blame God and accuse God of being unjust, he’s going to look for something which God is trying to teach him. And he finds it as he begins to understand that he had been trusting far too much in his own strength and resources. After all, he’s a King – and so he trusts in the power of his armies, on his own talent and on his own native wisdom. He thinks Israel has become a strong nation because of his own power and goodness and not because God has been working powerfully through Him – and rather than attributing the glory to God, he’s been pinching some of it for himself. He has come to realise by being taken down low and having to rely upon God in the down times; that it is only by God’s grace that he has ever enjoyed any up times. The bad times and the good times are both the products of God’s graciousness – and so King David learns to give all the praise and glory to God and to keep none of it for himself. He’s going to start living for God in a keener fashion. Rather than moping, David begins hoping. He forces himself to pray and to think. Is that how we deal with the pit – do we force ourselves to pray, even when we don’t feel like it – and do we force ourselves to think through our circumstances asking the question, ‘what does God want me to learn through this?’
2. What God Did – however much we do to get ourselves out of the pit, we will never rise an inch unless God’s hand is underneath us. God is the only one who can raise us from the depths. And so we are told that in David’s life, God acted in a marvellous and miraculous way to change David’s life totally.
a. About My Circumstances – by God’s sheer grace and goodness, David finds that God changes his situation. In vs. 1 God lifts him up out of the depths. The picture here is of a deep dark well, and God lowers in a rope to which King David clings and God draws him out. God lifts him out of mortal situation. Then in vs. 2 God heals him – whatever the illness was, we don’t know, God heals him and gives him a new lease of life. No longer does David face the inevitability of his death, rather he has been healed and it is to him as though it were life from the dead.
b. About My Attitudes – no matter how much you pray, God may choose not to change your circumstances – He may choose to leave the tumour in there, He may choose not to take away the temptations you are facing from day to day – but just so that you can know that prayer changes things when you are in the bottom of the pit I want you to stand beside King David and notice that his cries to God changed him:
· God’s Attitude to Me – in vs. 5 King David talks about the favour, or the grace of God; again in vs. 7 he talks of a time, presumably the whole being brought up from the pit episode, of when the Lord favoured him. Whereas before, David could only see God’s anger, now he is able to see God’s favour and grace. And he begins to understand that whereas he may have felt God’s anger and hiddenness, the true reality is that God never stops being gracious and showing favour to His people. Temporarily it may look like God is angry, just like temporarily our parents got angry with us on account of our bad behaviour, but just like our parents loved us more than life itself, so the true reality is that God’s favour lasts a lifetime. It is hard, but to realise God’s grace to us, even when we are in the bottom of the pit, is a true mark of the child of God and it is what we pray for all those who are there at the moment – that more than their circumstances changing, they would know God’s smiling presence with them.
· My Enemies’ Attitude to Me – in a phrase in vs. 1, by healing King David, God has not let his enemies gloat over him. In other words, it’s his enemies that have been defeated. God has been ultimately vindicated. And in the vindication of God has come the vindication of God has come the vindication of King David. And we must remember this, although our enemies gloat over us, just as they did over Jesus, they will not win because they have already been utterly defeated.
· My Attitude to Me – everything has changed about David’s attitude to himself – summed up in one word in vs. 11 – God has ‘turned’ everything – ‘turned’ the wailing into dancing, turned the sackcloth into cloths of joy. This word ‘turned’ is translated by the Greek word which is used to talk about conversion. It’s not as if David has adopted a new positive attitude to life or has begun to attend the ‘lamenter’s anonymous’ meeting – he hasn’t changed his attitude, God has changed it for him. God has changed him more than anything else.
We are not in the pit anymore – not in the pit physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually – David has learned the lesson God wanted to teach him; David has learned to start relying upon God and not upon himself. He’s learned to praise through pain and God has turned his cries of agony into cries of joy.
[C] The Thanks
God has changed everything – by His sovereign power and divine energy the Psalmist has a new lease of life and the whole focus of his life has changed. Nothing is the same. He has a new perspective on life and on God. He’s not going to waste his suffering; rather he is going to use it for his own spiritual growth and for the growth of others. Therefore, the psalmist resolves that he will do four things:
1. Learning – all the way throughout this psalm, we see the psalmist reflecting on the lessons he has learned throughout his suffering. For example, in vs. 6-7 he has learned that the reason for his prosperity and balance in the good times and the bad is solely down to the grace of God, and not his own abilities and resources. He’s learned new things about the viciousness of this world compared to the goodness of God; He’s learned about God’s sovereign power over everything that takes place in our lives and God’s determined loving commitment to us as His people. And now he’s not going to forget the lessons he has learned, but rather this new encounter with the reality of God in the bottom of the pit has changed him forever.
As most of you know, I used to be a very keen golfer. In my heyday, I would be looking to get better every round I played. Halfway round the course I would perhaps notice a slight glitch in my swing or my grip which was making me play a particular kind of shot. Maybe I was hitting the ball too far to the left and I noticed that it was because my stance wasn’t square to the hole or whatever. Anyway, I would make a mental note to change what was wrong about my swing – and for the rest of the round I would get the benefits from an improved technique. However, the next time I would go out, I had forgotten what I had learned on the round before – I had to re-learn it again – and more often than not, I was left wondering to myself why I was so stupid as not to learn the lesson the first time. But in this psalm, King David is determined that he’s going to learn the lesson the first time around. He wants to know God better and so he’ll take every opportunity of learning new things about Him and experiencing Him in new ways. What about you and me? Do we use every opportunity to learn new things about Christ? Do we see our sufferings as an opportunity to experience the grace of God in new ways? Learn from the laments!
2. Committing – twice in the text, in vs. 4 and 12 the verb ‘to give thanks’ or ‘to praise’ is used. In the original setting, this was a word which denoted the formal and public confession or acknowledgement of the dedication of the psalmist to God. It was when the Psalmist stood up and publicly acknowledged that he owed his deliverance to God, and furthermore, he had learned that he owed everything to God. We will come back to this act in a moment, but for now I want you to notice that according to the commentators on this passage, this meant in some sense relying upon and committing yourself to God in a new, deeper way. As Walter Brueggeman, who we have met before, said, “To thank I to make commitment.” The Psalmist is not only going to use the painful circumstances he has been through as an opportunity to learn new things about God, but also to commit himself in a new and more consecrated way to God.
On 4th April 1860 Andrew Bonar’s little boy, also called Andrew, was buried after dying a few days before. Andrew Bonar wrote in his diary for that day “This is the day of our dear little boy’s funeral. I do feel to-day that I love my Lord more than ever, even for what of His ways I see, and the gracious love I can discover already in them.” How hard it must have been for Andrew Bonar, and yet on the day he laid his own son to rest he could write, “I love my Lord more than ever”. That is rather an extreme example – but an example that really took place! In the darkness of bereavement, Bonar was able to put his hand into God’s hand and know God’s comfort and grace. Bonar came to know God in new ways and through the death of little Andrew came to commit himself more devotedly to God. I would be terrified at the thought of those same circumstances happening to any of us, but if they did, would they push us towards God or push us away? Does serious illness push us away from God or towards Him? King David, after having realised that the only reason he had been able to cope with the problems he was facing was because of the grace of God sustaining and upholding him, pushed himself closer to God. With this ‘giving thanks’ he was publicly and personally committing himself to God in a new and deeper way. Are we brave enough and courageous enough for that?
3. Praising – the Psalm is literally bracketed by praise and thanksgiving. In vs. 1 and vs. 12 David vows to give thanks to the Lord and to give Him all the glory for the deliverance of his life. He was in the pit – but God worked a miracle and now David is standing free – and for that deliverance, David is going to exalt the Lord (vs. 1) and give Him thanks for ever (vs. 12). David now lives no longer for himself but for God. What an example that is – that after answered prayer for deliverance David’s life is changed and he will now live for God praising Him in new, vibrant and exciting ways! What about us? We have a greater deliverance to praise God for altogether – the deliverance and salvation God has won for us through Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary – a salvation which means that no longer are we destined for a sinner’s eternity in hell, but we have the promise of eternal life with Him in glory. We have the glorious Gospel, the good news of a free salvation through Jesus Christ. Will we praise and give Him thanks? Well I’m sure we will, but one sure way we can is to be present as often as we can when the church gathers together to publicly praise Him – every Lord’s Day morning and evening this congregation gathers together to publicly worship Him for the salvation He has won for us through Jesus Christ. Will you join with us as we praise and exalt Him?
4. Speaking – in vs. 4 David is exhorting and encouraging others to sing to the Lord – he has obviously spoken to these fellow saints, these people who are favoured of the Lord and to whom God is committed in loving relationship – in other words His people – he has spoken to them of his deliverance from the pit and now encourages them to join him in praising God together. David doesn’t keep silent about his deliverance from the pit – he tells others about the way God has worked in his life, not in order to draw attention to Himself, but in order that they may also join him in glorifying God. Artur Weiser, commentator on this psalm has written, “He who behaves in an egotistic, individualistic manner, keeping for himself what has been granted him by God and persisting in the personal enjoyment of things does not display true faith. For what is ultimately at stake for faith is always the cause of God and not that of man.” David had to keep speaking because he was passionate that others should come to know the amazingness of the God of miraculous deliverances.
What about you tonight? In Christ, God has done amazing things for you. He has taken you out of the pit of the despair of sin’s guilt and given you a new heart. He has changed everything in your life and has given you the promise of eternity with Him. And now, what will you do with what you know about this God of deliverance? Will you keep it in to yourself and tell no-one so that no-one else will experience this God too and give Him glory, or will you be as the Psalmist – that Psalmist who began in the pit but ends on the pinnacle – will you be like Him and encourage other Christians, and tell non-Christians to trust in this faithful God of steadfast love and mercy. That’s the challenge of Psalm 30. AMEN