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January 9/10, 2016
Jason Meyer | Psalms 18:1-19
I love you, O LORD, my strength.
The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised,
and I am saved from my enemies.
The cords of death encompassed me;
the torrents of destruction assailed me;
the cords of Sheol entangled me;
the snares of death confronted me.
In my distress I called upon the LORD;
to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.
Then the earth reeled and rocked;
the foundations also of the mountains trembled
and quaked, because he was angry.
Smoke went up from his nostrils,
and devouring fire from his mouth;
glowing coals flamed forth from him.
He bowed the heavens and came down;
thick darkness was under his feet.
He rode on a cherub and flew;
he came swiftly on the wings of the wind.
He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him,
thick clouds dark with water.
Out of the brightness before him
hailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds.
The LORD also thundered in the heavens,
and the Most High uttered his voice,
hailstones and coals of fire.
And he sent out his arrows and scattered them;
he flashed forth lightnings and routed them.
Then the channels of the sea were seen,
and the foundations of the world were laid bare
at your rebuke, O LORD,
at the blast of the breath of your nostrils.
He sent from on high, he took me;
he drew me out of many waters.
He rescued me from my strong enemy
and from those who hated me,
for they were too mighty for me.
They confronted me in the day of my calamity,
but the LORD was my support.
He brought me out into a broad place;
he rescued me, because he delighted in me.—Psalm 18:1–19
Introduction
I recently read something that sounded like another world. A man is describing something he experienced while working among the persecuted church in China.
Early one morning I was surprised to come out of my room and see a small group of men walking among the entire assembly of house-church leaders filling the courtyard. From a distance I could see that they were tearing some books into shreds and handing loose pages to those sitting on the ground. As I walked closer, I was shocked to realize they were tearing a Bible into pieces.
Noting his reaction, one of them hurried over to him to explain what was happening:
Only seven of the house church leaders at this conference own their own copy of the Bible. Some of us met last night and we decided that when the conference ended each leader would go home to his city, village, or farm with at least one book of the Bible. So that is what we are doing. We are asking each leader what books of the Bible they have not yet been able to teach, and we are giving them each at least one new book. (The Insanity of God, Nik Ripkin).
One of the things that Ripken noted is that people grow in their faith in prison according to what they bring into prison with them. You don’t magically become a different person in prison. Pastor John once said that I may be the pastor at Bethlehem for 30 years and spend half of my ministry in prison.
We don’t know what God has planned for America. I don’t have a detailed end-times scenario, but I want all of us to be so grounded in the fundamentals of the faith that we are ready for whatever will come. We don’t need to start tearing out pages from our pew Bibles in preparation. I want to prepare by having everyone at Bethlehem commit to having at least one book of the Bible memorized. This year we have set our sights on memorizing Philippians together. The worship folder insert explains an exciting way that we are doing it together. (And Crossway has generously given me permission to post parts of my forthcoming commentary on the Pastors Blog to help us understand the verses we are memorizing together).
My prayer has been that 2016 would be a breakthrough year for many of you in terms of reading, memorizing, and cherishing the Bible. I love the Bible so much. It is such a gift. I watch certain people geek out about certain things that they love—I want people at Bethlehem to geek out when it comes to the Bible. I have heard some new believers begin reading the Bible with zesto and then secretly begin to wonder whether or not they would get bored with the Bible—is it like a book that you read once and then you master it and can move on? Shouldn’t I slow down if this is a book that I am going to be reading for the rest of my life? You don’t master the Bible—you are mastered by it. Every time you read there is new light and new discoveries—like a holy treasure chest!
Psalm 18–19: A Structural Turning Point in Book 1 of the Psalms
Let me give you an example. When I first read the Psalms I used to read them to find a verse here or there that would stand out like a diamond. Then I began to realize that each Psalm has composition and structure—it moves, and it goes somewhere. Just this year I have begun to understand in a fresh way that these individual psalms have to be read together. They are stitched together in a way that makes each one become more wonderful when read together instead of on their own. There is movement—like a plot in the psalms
Today we have come to what I regard as the most wonderful movement of all in book 1 of the Psalms. You may remember that Psalms 1–2 was what I called the double doors of the Psalms—a psalm about the word of God and a psalm about the Son of God, the Messiah. Psalm 18 is a Messiah psalm and Psalm 19 is a word of God psalm
But wait there is more, it almost sounds like advertising—but I am not selling Oxi-Clean—there are wonders here to prize and cherish! These two psalms are major structural markers within book 1 of the Psalms. Several lines of evidence culminate to show this conclusively.
First, Psalm 2 refers to the hero of the psalms as the “King,” “Anointed,” and “Son.” This terminology does not appear at all in Psalms 3–17. These terms do not reappear until Psalm 18:50—“he gives his king great victories; he shows unfailing kindness to his anointed, to David and his descendants forever.” “King” and “anointed” now start popping up like popcorn—four times in the space of the next two psalms alone (Psalms 20:6, 9; 21:1, 7).
Second, kingship becomes the structural theme that ties together the next five psalms after 18/19. Psalms 20–24 are all psalms celebrating different aspects of kingship. In fact, the words “king” and “victory” appear together in the next two psalms after 18/19 (Psalms 20:5–6; 21:1, 5).
Third, we are going to witness something similar happening to terms for Law before and after Psalm 18/19. God’s Torah, law, testimonies, precepts, commands, and ordinances introduced in Psalm 19 now appear (Psalm 18:22; Psalms 19:7–9; 25:10; 34:11; 37:31; 40:8).
Fourth, something similar happens with other terms: “teaching,” “repenting,” and the theme of God as our “rock” (Psalms 18, 19; 27; 28; 31; 40)—these terms start popping up only after the King’s victory!
This book shines with structural glory that comes from God—God wrote a book—do you really expect it to be haphazard and poorly organized and in need of an editor?
Structure of Psalm 18
Now let's talk about the structure of Psalm 18. The Psalm is beautifully and carefully structured to begin and end on the same note of praise.
Celebration (vv. 1–3)
Salvation (vv. 4–19)
Explanation (vv. 20–30)
Salvation (vv. 31–45)
Celebration (vv. 46–50)
Outline:
Because the king is righteous and carefully keeps God’s word, therefore the God who is faithful to his word saves and vindicates his king, and therefore we praise God in Christ for these victories.
Main Point: Christians are called to celebrate the victories of Christ our King.
I love you, O LORD, my stength
The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised,
and I am saved from my enemies.
The main note here is what happens when all that God is becomes ours. God is rock, fortress, deliverer, refuge, shield, horn of salvation, and stronghold—worship is what happens when you put the pronoun “my” in front of them all! My rock! My fortress! My deliverer! My Rock in whom I take refuge! My shield! My horn of salvation! My stronghold! I call; He comes; I am saved!
All that God is and all that we need come together in a combustible, worshipful explosion! This dynamic is succinctly stated as a principle in Psalm 50:15.
Call upon me in the day of trouble—I will answer you and you will glorify me.
This whole psalm is a victory cheer—a celebration of salvation.
That same theme emerges again at the end. Praise to the rock—David exalts the God of his salvation.
The LORD lives, and blessed be my rock, and exalted be the God of my salvation.
David emphasizes this deliverance and rescue from all of his enemies and the rest he enjoys over them. His vows that this praise will extend to the nations:
For this I will praise you, O LORD, among the nations, and sing to your name.—Psalm 18:49
Now David shows that this Psalm is about him only as a picture of God’s faithfulness to his Messiah. David the anointed king is a partial fulfillment, but a fuller fulfillment awaits with David’s descendants:
Great salvation he brings to his king, and shows steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his offspring forever.—Psalm 18:50
This is explicitly and emphatically about the Messiah. That is where the superscription becomes so key. When did David experience this victory and rest?
Now when the king lived in his house and the LORD had given him rest from all his surrounding enemies.—2 Samuel 7:1
And I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover, the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.—2 Samuel 7:11–13
This point puts a sharp focus on salvation as something that is a future hope with the coming of the Messiah, not just a backwards glance at what God has done for David in the past. This leads to point 2: Salvation.
David pulls out all the stops with a poetic gallery of salvation scenes from Israel’s history. He paints the scene of Mt. Sinai in verses 7–11 (Exodus 19:16–20). God’s presence and power are terrifying: the earth quaked greatly, the mountain was wrapped in smoke, God descended upon it in fire (Exodus 19:18).
He uses verses 12–14 to paint the scene of God the warrior fighting for Israel in the book of Joshua, while verse 15 paints the picture of the parting of the Red Sea:
Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at your rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils.
The parallel passage shows how God equips his king for battle as a warrior arrayed with divine weapons and strength. The short sentences create the fast paced effect of a warrior in battle (“the speed and buoyancy of the poetry capture the excitement of attack and pursuit”—Kidner, Psalms, p. 95). David gives God the credit for all of his victories—it was God’s strength on display in the swift feet, the bronze bow, the shield of salvation, the secure footing for the battle.
These two pictures of God’s saving strength together anticipate what the powerful Son of David would do in Isaiah 11:
And he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,
and faithfulness the belt of his loins.—Isaiah 11:4–5
In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.—Isaiah 11:10
Verses 15–16 of Isaiah 11 highlight a greater Exodus (seven channels—not just one):
And [he] will wave his hand over the River
with his scorching breath,
and strike it into seven channels,
and he will lead people across in sandals.
And there will be a highway from Assyria
for the remnant that remains of his people,
as there was for Israel
when they came up from the land of Egypt.
The Messianic focus helps us tremendously as we read Psalm 18:20–30 about David and the Messiah—not about our righteousness.
3. Explanation (vv. 20–30)
The LORD dealt with me according to my righteousness;
according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me.
For I have kept the ways of the LORD,
and have not wickedly departed from my God.
For all his rules were before me,
and his statutes I did not put away from me.
I was blameless before him,
and I kept myself from my guilt.
So the LORD has rewarded me according to my righteousness,
according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.
With the merciful you show yourself merciful;
with the blameless man you show yourself blameless;
with the purified you show yourself pure;
and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.
For you save a humble people,
but the haughty eyes you bring down.
For it is you who light my lamp;
the LORD my God lightens my darkness.
For by you I can run against a troop,
and by my God I can leap over a wall.
This God—his way is perfect;
the word of the LORD proves true;
he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.—Psalm 19:20–30
This text offers the foundational ground for why God saves his King: The king keeps God’s word and God is faithful to his word. The King trusted and obeyed God’s word and God was faithful to fulfill his word.
This is where Psalm 18 stretches far beyond the borders of David’s life. David can partially fulfill this Psalm in that he proved to be a faithful king, while Saul was an unfaithful king.
In fact, David was the gold standard or the measuring stick for all other Israelite kings. But there was one glaring exception. 1 Kings states it!
David did what was right in the eyes of the LORD and did not turn aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.—1 Kings 15:5
David broke the tenth commandment (coveted another man’s wife), then he broke the seventh commandment (committed adultery), then the sixth commandment (had Uriah killed). In actual fact, he broke all of them—his actions dishonored his parents (fifth commandment), he stole what did not belong to him (eighth commandment), he lied many times along the way (the ninth commandment), and he certainly brought dishonor upon the name of God and put other idols before God (commandments 1–3).
There is no “except” clause in the life of Jesus. He was sinless. He was like us in every way yet without sin! And yet behold the power of God in using this mess in David’s life to fulfill his unstoppable purposes. When David comes up in the genealogy of Jesus it says: “And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah” (Matthew 1:6). Dear friends, God is not handcuffed in any way by our mess—he ruled and reigned over all this mess in the world as he brought Jesus into the world. He reigns over your mess too.
Jesus’ righteousness is the only hope for the world—because there is none righteous—not even one. That is why 2 Corinthians 5:21 is the heart of the gospel:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
We are saved by works—by the works of Jesus! God designed salvation in such a way that Jesus is the only way. But the prerequisite to coming to him as our all in all—is confessing that we have nothing to offer—nothing in our hands we bring.
This is our only hope—God does not give us what we deserve. We are blessed as we are clothed in the righteousness of the Messiah. This is the heart of the gospel as substitution: God gives Jesus what we deserve and he gives us what Jesus deserves.
We stand on Christ the solid rock—he is the solid ground—the broad place. Look at what of the most under-appreciated image of salvation in the previous section: “He brought me out into a broad place” (Psalm 18:19). The broad place is a contrast with a narrow place—the danger of walking on an edge and slipping and falling off a cliff. The Christian life is not a moral performance on a balance beam in the Olympics where we are trying not to fall so that we can be awarded the gold medal. Jesus has already won the victory. He has the gold medal of righteousness and we share in his victory.
We have to reach the place as Christians where we have an identity in someone else’s victory. I heard people do that last week when they talked about the Vikings/Packers game and shout joyfully saying, “We won.” I look at them and say “what do you mean ‘we''?” You didn’t tackle anyone or kick any field goals! They have an identity in the victory of another. That is the gospel. Celebrate the victory of our King.
Conclusion
I don’t want us to take for granted what we do together here corporately in our commitment to the word of God and the praises of God. We have talked about the word—let’s not forget about the power of praise. Here was the most moving story of all in the book I quoted from at the beginning of the sermon (The Insanity of God).
Dimitri was a Russian believer who was persecuted for his faith. Dmitri was the only believer among fifteen hundred hardened criminals. He said that his isolation from the Body of Christ was more difficult than even the physical torture. And there was much of that. Still, his tormentors were unable to break him. Dmitri pointed to two reasons for his strength in the face of torture. There were two spiritual habits that he had learned from his father, disciplines that Dmitri had taken with him into prison. Without these two disciplines, Dmitri insisted, his faith would not have survived. For seventeen years in prison, every morning at daybreak, Dmitri would stand at attention by his bed. As was his custom, he would face the east, raise his arms in praise to God, and then he would sing a HeartSong to Jesus. The reaction of the other prisoners was predictable. Dmitri recounted the laughter, the cursing, the jeers. The other prisoners banged metal cups against the iron bars in angry protest. They threw food and sometimes human waste to try to shut him up and extinguish the only true light shining in that dark place every morning at dawn.
There was another discipline too, another custom that Dmitri told me about. Whenever he found a scrap of paper in the prison, he would sneak it back to his cell. There he would pull out a stub of a pencil or a tiny piece of charcoal that he had saved, and he would write on that scrap of paper, as tiny as he could, all the Bible verses and scriptural stories or songs that he could remember. When the scrap was completely filled, he would walk to the corner of his little jail cell where there was a concrete pillar…It dripped water so there was moisture that he could use..Dmitri would take the paper fragment, reach as high as he possibly could, and stick it on that damp pillar as a praise offering to God.
Of course, whenever one of his jailors spotted a piece of paper on the pillar, he would come into his cell, take it down, read it, beat Dmitri severely, and threaten him with death. Still, Dmitri refused to stop his two disciplines.
Every day, he rose at dawn to sing his song. And every time he found a scrap of paper, he filled it with Scripture and praise. This went on year after year. His guards tried to make him stop …He remained faithful. He was overwhelmed one day by a special gift from God’s hand. In the prison yard, he found a whole sheet of paper. And God, Dmitri said, had laid a pencil beside it. Dmitri went on, ‘I rushed back to my jail cell and I wrote every Scripture reference, every Bible verse, every story, and every song I could recall.’ I knew that it was probably foolish, Dmitri told me, “but I couldn’t help myself. I filled both sides of the paper with as much of the Bible as I could. I reached up and stuck the entire sheet of paper on that wet concrete pillar. Then I stood and looked at it: to me it seemed like the greatest offering I could give Jesus from my prison cell. Of course, my jailor saw it. I was beaten and punished. I was threatened with execution.
Dmitri was dragged from his cell. As he was dragged down the corridor in the center of the prison, the strangest thing happened. Before they reached the door leading to the courtyard—before stepping out into the place of execution—fifteen hundred hardened criminals stood at attention by their beds. They faced the east and they began to sing. Dmitri told me that it sounded to him like the greatest choir in all of human history. Fifteen hundred criminals raised their arms and began to sing the HeartSong that they had heard Dmitri sing to Jesus every morning for all those years.
Dmitri’s jailers instantly released their hold on his arms and stepped away from him in terror. One of them demanded to know, “Who are you?” Dmitri straightened his back and stood as tall and as proud as he could. He responded: “I am a son of the Living God, and Jesus is His name!” The guards returned him to his cell. Sometime later, Dmitri was released and he returned to his family.
Later the author said: “Brother Dmitri, would you do something for me? I asked. I hesitated to continue, but his eyes moved me forward: “Would you sing that song for me?” Dmitri pushed himself up from the table. He stared into my eyes for three or four seconds. Those seconds felt like an eternity to me. He turned slowly toward the east. He stiffened his back to stand at attention. He lifted his arms and began to sing. I don’t know Russian, so I didn’t understand a single word of his song. But I didn’t need to. The words probably didn’t matter. As Dmitri raised his arms and his voice in praise and sang that song that he had sung every morning in prison for seventeen years, the tears began to flow down both of our faces. Only then did I begin to grasp the meaning of worship and the importance of HeartSongs. (See chapter 19, The Insanity of God, by Nik Ripken).
Would you sing with me (this song is in English so you can know the words)? Let us sing to the King. Tell him that He is your king.
Closing Song: "You Are My King (Amazing Love)"
Sermon Discussion Questions
Outline
Main Point: Christians are called to celebrate the victories of Christ our King.
Discussion Questions
Application Questions
Prayer Focus
Pray for a grace to experience new and fresh power with the Word and praise in 2016. Sing to the King!