Month: February 2017

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday.  Today is Fat Tuesday.  So, this is supposed to be the day that we celebrate and make merry because the next 40 days we are to be serious and morose.  Fat Tuesday is Fat because we are to enjoy the Fat of the land.  We are to take advantage of all that we have which we can enjoy.  Basically, it is a hedonistic festival.  When I read Psalm 59 I smile as I think of what David would have thought of Fat Tuesday.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, he knew how to have a good time.  But the relationship that we have with our God never changes.  So what makes us think that today we are to make merry and tomorrow we are to wear sackloth and ashes because that is what God wants.  No, it really isn’t, but maybe, just maybe it helps us to distinguish between the times and the seasons.

David’s primary concern, and probably his only concern in these psalms that begin with DO NOT DESTROY, is the preservation of his life.  So maybe I was wrong and it did mean: please don’t destroy ME.  In each of these psalms the context is King Saul looking to destroy him.  In each of these Psalms David is asking for God’s protection as the one that God has anointed is seeking his life.  And somehow in each of these psalms we end with a verse very similar to what we find here in vs.17: O my strength, I will sing praises to you, for you, O God, are my fortress, the God who shows me steadfast love.

Dick Barge is lying in a hospital bed tonight.  Not real sure the full extent of what is going on.  But this is what I pray for him this evening, that he is able to hear vs.17 even while he might be going through what David expresses in the verses before this.  Maybe we need to pray that God would deliver us from our enemies and our enemies happen to be medical conditions that seem to nag but don’t have a clear diagnosis.  Look at vs.14, does someone else hear this in their lives? “Each evening they come back, howling like dogs and prowling about the borough.”  But we can always come back with verses 16-17.  Sleep well my family knowing that God is our fortress and always has been through all the times in our lives.

For some reason when I read this psalm this scene comes to mind:

It is probably inappropriate for a pastor to place this scene on his blog, especially since there are two words which would be considered as not being the type of words I would use in my common speech.

But I think the reason I think of this clip is that the writer goes on a long list of things that he hopes God would do to his enemies.  The list almost goes to the point of being a bit silly, and maybe even exaggerated.  Listen to this list: break their teeth, tear out their fangs, make them vanish like water, let them wither like trampled grass, let them dissolve like a snail who dissolves into slime, and I want to add: We are the knights who say NEE.

That is quite a listing.  And he tops it off by saying that he looks forward to sitting on the edge of the wall and dipping his feet in the blood of his enemies as it flows by.  I guess we do all find our beach.  It keeps getting a bit sillier and sillier.  But doesn’t the last sentence really remind us of what we are feeling in those situations?  We want there to be a reward for the righteous, well, that is as long as we are the righteous.  We want our enemies to suffer and die and become slime, as long as our enemies are not ourselves.  But in the end, we know that God is the judge and even our desires and our wishes and our understanding of what is right and wrong can only be held up to the light of God’s kingdom.  Once we do that, well, then things probably change.

You have to love the context of this psalm.  There are directions: if you happen to find this, it isn’t junk so don’t destroy it.  I really feel like the directions are more for the psalm itself than for any individual.  We are not receiving a directive to “do not destroy”, but rather it is geared toward this psalm.  Keep this piece, it is special, even if I have spoken about this before.

Yes, just like yesterday’s psalm, this is a time when David was fleeing from Saul, and Saul went into a cave, right where David was, to relieve himself and David cut off a piece of his robe and showed it to him later.  I could have killed you, but I chose not to kill you.  It is psalm of protection where David asks God to have mercy on him.  The point of the psalm is that God does have mercy on him.  We know this because of the ending.  Look after the Selah at vs.7 when the psalm becomes decidedly upbeat.  Praise the Lord!  

From vs.7 following we find David praising God unabashedly for the entirety of the psalm.  So, when we face times that we know are going to be difficult and then we receive an unexpected deliverance, I hope we can’t help but praise the Lord.  People, we ought to be post vs.7 people.  We know that God has delivered us even if we are still in the cave waiting for King Saul to finish relieving himself so that we can show him that we had cut off a hem of his robe and not harmed him.  God has delivered us and given us salvation.  What more do we need in order to have a post vs.7 life?  I love that phrase.  We need to be post vs.7 Christians.  Let’s make that our theme.

Have  you ever had a life experience which is impossible to forget and it has shaped so much of who you are today?  That certainly happened to David.  The time that he was in Gath was one of those experiences.  Remember when we mentioned in Psalm 34 when he was before Abimelech and pretended that he was crazy?  The context is I Samuel 21:10 and really all of I Samuel 20.  Oh, hey, I’m sorry about writing this today and not posting it yesterday.  It doesn’t happen often, but this is now twice in 56 days, that’s surprising.

Look at vs.8 and it does seem a bit out of context unless you are the person below.

But David can’t seem to forget that experience in Gath and it has shaped his words in that he speaks about his enemies and asks God, again, to take care of them in a not so nice way.  But at least he ends the Psalm on a nice note as he looks forward to being able to walk in the light of God which will provide him life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMXoWe2ztE

There are a couple different verses in this psalm that bring thoughts to my mind.  The first is vs.6 which brings the above song to mind.  I’ll fly away reminds us that we are able to be at rest when we are in the arms of the Lord.  There is a desire to be able to have wings like a dove for the sole purpose of being able to fly away from our problems and our adversaries.

You learn pretty quickly, however, that flying away from your problems just makes those problems more ominous and more dire.  Sticking your head in the sand just gets you a sunburned back side, which is never fun.  The song, more than the psalm, reminds us that we have a promise of eternal life once this life is over.  That is a comforting, healthy thought.  

When I read vs.22 it reminds me a number of scriptures that tell us to cast our burden upon the Lord.  Check out these Scriptures and I think you will be surprised how often it is used.

Psalm 55:22,  Isaiah 41:13,  Matthew 6:25,  Matthew 11:28-29,  

Philippians 4:6-7,  1 Peter 5:7

It is a very, very common image of casting our burdens upon the Lord.  I know that I have used the image of casting our burdens at the foot of the cross and Jesus will take them up.  There is a confidence that we have as believers that God will sustain us.  We are able to cast our sin upon Jesus, and he will forgive us of them.  Throwing our burdens, our sins, our problems, our fears, our anxieties, anything which separates us from God allows us to be sustained with the promise that God will take all of these things and handle them.  I’ve got to say, that feels pretty good.

Context:  I Samuel 26:1.

Once again David finds himself, according to the prescript, in a setting where people are telling Saul where he can be found in order to capture or kill him.  It does not make him happy and the psalm reflects the fact that he is disgruntled over this recent event.  His psalm, his prayer, is one of deliverance.  He asks God to save him from his current predicament.  He puts his enemies in a light where they are basically pagans looking not just to get after him, but disrespecting God at the same time.  Not a bad strategy.  

I sense a bit of reverse psychology when David states triumphantly that God has (I think we can probably read this as will) upheld his life and helped him and will repay those who seek him with nothing less than death.  If this were to happen then God would be showing his faithfulness to David.  

God, if you heal my mother then I will offer up my child to you.  This was a prayer that a frantic son prayed as his mother was dying from the complications of a stroke.  His mother died and now he was terrified that God was going to repay him for his prayer.  Pastor, will God be angry with me and will he curse my son?  I know I was in Southern Italy, but this could have happened anywhere.  Sometimes we simply make deals with God.  At no time is this a good idea.  God doesn’t need our deals.  God just wants our devotion and our time and our love and our very life.  He has given us everything, we don’t need to make a deal with God.  Come on David, God doesn’t have to kill your enemies in order to prove His steadfast love.  

So, every week, I think you know this, I choose another psalm in order to use it for the Call to Worship for the first service.  Sometimes it is hard to find appropriate words for a call to worship within some of the psalms.  This is such a psalm.  There are other psalms which are easy and you can choose a whole selection of words from a psalm.  But here pretty much the only words you could use for a call to worship are found in vs.6.  Can you imagine reading together for a call to worship: “God will scatter the bones of the ungodly”.  Not something that is uplifting or which you would want to triumphantly proclaim.

So, in these situations what can we get out of a psalm where the author just seems to be lifting up bad things?  Well, sometimes you have just been wronged in life and you just want to say: “They have all fallen away, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.”  But as we say these words, and this is the challenge, in the midst of our anger or frustration or sadness, it is hard to turn these words on us.  It is so much easier to say: some people do this.  

How often do we think of “those evildoers” (vs.4) as being us?  How often do we take the accusations that we want to hurl at others and turn them to us and ask the question: “Do we do that?”  So, before you read this psalm, or maybe go back and read it again, and think of the times that we have said in our hearts: “There is no God”, “We are corrupt”, “We commit abominable acts”, “We do evil”, “We have fallen away”, “We are perverse”, “We have no knowledge”, “We are evildoers”, “We eat up God’s people”.  

Today, don’t turn your eyes on someone else or think of someone else as you read this Scripture.  Think of those times that we have fallen prey to that which is written in this psalm as a perpetrator of these acts, and not the victim.  That makes this psalm a lot more difficult, but so much more valuable.

What a terribly brutal, scary story.  Go ahead and read I Samuel 22 and you will find the context for this Psalm.  David, before he was king, fled from Saul, who was the king at the time.  Saul absolutely felt threatened by David but David was gathering quite a following.  In I Samuel 22 we read that he gathers a whole bunch of people, but all of them were needy in some way.  Saul gets word from Doeg, who is an Edomite, of an alliance between the priests of God and David.  Now, keep in mind that Doeg is not even one of the God’s chosen people from the branch of Jacob or Israel.  Edomites came from Jacob’s brother, Esau.  Isn’t it interesting that Saul chose to surround himself with those who were outside of God’s plans and God’s family and gathered his counsel from them?  David, on the other hand, was surrounded by his family and by the priests of the Lord.  These very priests paid the price for their alliance with David as Doeg slaughters them because of Saul’s fury.  Eighty-five priests were killed on that day.  Outside of Moscow there is a killing field where during the Soviet times Orthodox priests were killed by communist forces.  Here is an article on the spot.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/world/europe/08butovo.html

It reminds me of this story in I Samuel of which the title indicates this psalm was written in memory.

There is an anger at the beginning of this psalm which is not difficult to identify.  It is a righteous anger, but anger nonetheless.  You can imagine David’s state of mind as he is writing this psalm.  He feel responsible for the killing of these priests because it was due to their collusion with him that they are killed.  If they had not helped him, they would still be alive.  You can hear his anger as he states: “But God will break you down forever; he will snatch and tear you from your tent; he will uproot you from the land of the living.”

But he also snaps out of this anger and at the very end of this psalm he removes is anger and his discouragement and is able to focus on the fact that God is on his side.  As Romans tells us, if God is for us, who can be against us?  He ends by giving thanks to God, even in the midst of a terrible tragedy, even in the midst of feeling as if a genocide was your own fault.  But God is still good, even in the midst of this.

There is a very specific Scripture which matches this Psalm.  You can find it in II Samuel 11.  I remember well using this Scripture when Bill Clinton was unfaithful and speaking about what it means when our ruler is found to be morally lacking.  Of course, we are all morally lacking, but what does it mean when our President, or our pastor, or our teacher, or whatever position in society you may want to lift up.  How do we handle the unfaithfulness of people to God in a very visible, hard to argue manner?  David paid the price.  He continued to rule, but he paid a price, a very steep price.  We read about his state of mind in this psalm.  

It is a psalm that has a song taken from it which back in the old day was incredibly popular.

I’ll never forget singing this song around campfires.  When we served in Italy one of the churches where we pastored had a booklet of songs with all of these older praise songs.  You know, As the Deer, Shine Jesus Shine, these kinds of songs that we would sing around the campfire.  Boy, they would belt them out.  To this day I can’t hear any of these songs without the Italian first coming to mind and then I struggle for the words in English.  

But this Psalm does elicit an incredible amount of thought and material for the writer.  It is perfectly suited for Lent.  We find David fully recognizing his sin and asking for forgiveness and asking for his heart to be created clean again.  The Psalm begins with an appeal for mercy.  It then transition to a recognition that if David received mercy and forgiveness then he would be able to teach others what not to do.  

Remember yesterday when we talked about sacrifice and that which is acceptable to God.  Today we find that out.  Again, it is within a context of one being found guilty in sin that they cannot escape.  What is the sacrifice that God requires and that is pleasing to the Lord.  Yesterday we saw that it was thanksgiving.  Today?  We can look at vs.17 and hopefully understand the context from which David is writing.  The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit.  That is what the Lord requires.

Let’s talk about that for a bit.  A broken Spirit, what does that look like?  Someone who has been beaten down their entire life has a broken spirit.  I can assure you that this is not what the psalmist is describing.  Someone who has experienced a traumatic life event could have a broken spirit which is difficult to overcome.  That is not what the author is describing here.  A broken spirit is what is needed in relationship to our interaction with God.  Think about the actions that David took to not only commit adultery with Bathsheba but then to try to cover it by murdering her husband.  It is an action taken by someone who feel entitled and who feels like they can get away with anything.

David’s actions are the opposite of a broken spirit.  David’s actions are those of someone who thinks they are untouchable, and that God basically doesn’t exist.  Or, even worse, if God does exist then He exists at my pleasure and for my purposes.  David knew God existed, but probably thought that God existed merely for the purpose of furthering David’s cause and not God’s own kingdom.  A broken spirit is one that recognizes our desires and our wishes and our wants are subject to God’s plans.  That is hard to bring into the equation when your whole life God has seemed to present before you all that you want.  That was David’s experience.  In this psalm he has a broken spirit because he recognizes that it is for God’s glory that he moves and has his being.  That would be a good lesson for us.

We heard that every civilization at one time has sacrifice as a part of their system of thought.  The sacrifice of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is unique in that this sacrifice is actually God incarnate, the one who was given for our sins.  Normally a sacrifice is an animal, that which is life in order to make right something that we have made wrong.  But it is not normally God himself who says: “I will be the sacrifice, it will be enough.”

In this psalm we read the author state that the people of Israel were giving perfectly fine sacrifices.  This is even though in other parts of Scripture we read the type of sacrifices that the Lord requires is different from the rams and goats that are mentioned in this psalm.  Wait, I don’t want to give it away, that’s coming next week.  Let’s at least once again look at Micah 6:8 where we read what the Lord requires.  This verse is set within the context of a sacrifice.  Walk humbly with the Lord is much more important than to give an unblemished ram.  The sacrifice that the Lord requires, even if we do give perfectly good ones, is to pursue His kingdom.  vs.8 states that God is happy with the sacrifices that we make.  But there is more to it than that.

God is happy when we fast.  But there is more to it than that.  God is happy when we give chocolate up for Lent, but there is more to it than that.  God is happy when we decide to abstain from television, but there is more to it than that.  Vs.23 really brings this entire psalm together.  Read it and take it to heart: “Those who bring thanksgiving as their sacrifice, honor me.”  Thanksgiving, the greatest honor that God can receive from us.  Because it is in the act of giving thanks that we recognize who we are and who God is.  There is nothing that puts life in perspective better than thanksgiving.  We can give thanks because of God’s presence and God’s blessings.  God loves thanksgiving because He then knows that we understand Him.