2 Samuel Lesson 76
David Praises God for Deliverance – 2 Samuel
22; Psalm 18
2 Samuel 22 is a very strange passage of Scripture, strange for several
reasons. It’s strange because it
describes an unknown Theophany or a God-appearance. Sometime in David’s life God appeared and
catastrophically affected the physical environment. Last week we defended the interpretation that
2 Samuel 22 was not just a poetic remembrance of
But that’s not the case, and we substantiated the interpretation through
many passages of Scripture that 2 Samuel 22 speaks indeed at some point in
David’s life where God revealed Himself to David. We suggested, though we were not dogmatic,
that the time came at 2 Samuel 5 just before David received the Davidic
Covenant, just after he had been crowned king of all the tribes, there was a
war; it began with the Philistines. God
delivered him twice in the middle of this war with the Philistines. But, in 1 Samuel 5 all you read is the
passion-less account of what went on; it would be like reading a history of
World War II versus reading 2 Samuel 22 which is like reading a personal diary,
it is passionate, it is personally involved.
So whereas 2 Samuel 5 seems to avoid undue attention to the catastrophe,
2 Samuel 22 relishes in it. What’s the
explanation for the difference? One is a
prose historic narrative, the other is a poetic narrative of personal devotion.
In chapter 22 we found it to be a Psalm;
furthermore we found it to be a declarative praise Psalm. We found the first four verses describe
David’s call to praise. In these four
verses he describes God’s character; he describes it in verse 4, “I constantly
call on Yahweh, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine
enemies,” and worthy to be praised is
Hebrew participle and this participle refers to God’s essence. It is a descriptive participle, “worthy to be
praised,” and I am constantly saved from my enemies.
Now the next great passage in this Psalm is
from verses 5-25, whereas verses 1-4 were a proclamation to praise, verses 5-15
deals with a report of a key deliverance in a day of need. It is a declarative praise Psalm, not a
descriptive praise Psalm. You recall the
difference; in a declarative praise Psalm you will always have a specific
historic event mentioned. In a
descriptive praise Psalm no specific event, just meditation on God’s character
from many, many events. That’s the
difference. Since this is a declarative
praise Psalm, it therefore is going to speak of some particular point in space
and time when God did something magnificent.
And so as a declarative praise Psalm it commemorates that point.
Verses 5-25 gives the report of that
deliverance. Now we’re going through,
for the sake of clarity, break this down into its parts; this section, verses
5-25… and if you don’t take notes the next best thing to do is to take a pencil
and lightly make a little line when we make these breaks in the Psalm and in
doing this it’ll train your eye so when you read the Psalm you’ll read it
right, you’ll learn to think when you hit these Psalms. Just don’t read them verse by verse, think how
the Psalm divides up into its parts.
Train yourself to read the Bible properly.
In this section we find, verses 5-7a, some of
these songs are often split in the middle of a verse, David cries to God in a
day of need. This is his address,
remember the report is a report of his cry, it’s a report that God hears, and
it’s a report of God’s answer. We always
have three parts, the cry, God hears, God saves. Always in declarative praise look for those
three parts, they’re there somewhere, you’ve just got to kind of dig around
until you recognize where they are in the Psalm. Look for them because that’s the Psalm’s
message and you’re not going to get the message of the Psalm until you find
where those parts are in the Psalm. We
have to learn to read the Psalms the way people to whom they were originally
read them, and they looked for these parts, it was just part of their lives,
they just looked for these sections. So
we must look for these sections.
Now in verses 5-7a we have the first of those
three parts, David cries to God, and he describes a situation, “When the waves
of death compassed me, the floods of ungodly men made me afraid; [6] The
sorrows of hell compassed me about; the snares of death went before me,” or
“confronted me; [7] In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried to my God:
and he did hear my voice out of his temple, and my cry did enter into his
ears.” The phrase, “when,” look for
that, in a declarative phrase Psalm when you see w-h-e-n, that is your tip-off
that right there you’re getting into the report section. Now it won’t always work but it’ll work on
enough of these Psalms so just watch for that word, “when,” and it’ll clue you
that he’s going to describe what his problem was.
Now it’s described poetically in verses 5-6, “the waves of death compassed me,
the floods of ungodly men made me afraid;” that is a description of the
Philistine advance in the
Now therefore it’s not unexpected that when the
Philistines start to move, they represent Satan in Scripture and his angelic
forces very often in this kind of thing, when they begin to move they are
moving against David who is a type of the Lord Jesus Christ. David is in the office of messiah, he’s the
anointed one as king. So you have a
revolt, not against David personally but against God and his office, and His
Law. So you have an outbreak of a
spiritual conflict, and it is not to be unexpected that God is going to come to
David’s rescue in a very, very dramatic and spiritual way, to show and to warn
men from this time forward that you don’t rebel against his king and get away with
it. Now the Philistines were people who
were the best soldiers in the ancient world at this time in history. They learned a lot from the Greeks; we don’t
know how they did, but they had a lot in common with the Greeks. What the
Philistines did and how they fought, if you’ve read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey will recognize the tactics are the same.
So they gathered themselves and they are coming
against David; the typology of this whole thing is very important for on a
large scale it represents what happens in your life as a believer on a small
scale, and that is that daily we are besieged by the principalities and powers
of darkness, and therefore we must have adequate defenses. So let’s look at what David does when faced
with this kind of adversity. “The
sorrows of hell” he identifies this threat, “compassed me about; the snares of
death” and he was talking about his context of military situation,” and he was
talking about, in context, a military situation, he was going to die, you have
thousands and thousands of these Philistines pouring up here and he faces death
as a soldier on the front lines; it always amuses me to think that people think
that soldiers are militaristic; how people can argue that soldiers like to
fight wars, basically they like to win wars, not fight them and there’s a
difference. So when you read these
Psalms and you see David here, remember you’re reading the Psalms of a soldier
and he had to kill at times, but this Psalm at this point shows you that the
mental attitude, soldiers still have fear, and here in verse 6 he admits his
fear; in verse 5 he admits his fear.
In verse 7 he calls upon Yahweh and he cries to God, he’s not crying
to somebody else, he’s crying to God.
“In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried to my God,” and at the
end of verse 7 we have a new section, and this is one of the most spectacular
Psalms ever written. Beginning at verse
7, the last part of verse 7, on through the end of verse 16, he gives the most
spectacular answer to prayer that probably anyone ever had, apart from maybe
Joshua in the valley of Aijalon and when he got through praying and all of a
sudden the sun and moon stopped and nobody ever had that as an answer to prayer
since. But David had a fantastic answer
to prayer and we’re going to go through this with a fine tooth comb to give you
an accurate description of what this must have been like.
Verse 7b, God “did hear my voice,” now when you
see this in the Hebrew in any Psalm, the phrase “hear my voice” the word “hear”
doesn’t mean that God just heard. What
that means is that God heard and He answered, so David could tell down here
that God up in heaven had heard. There’s
no way we can tell down here apart from the doctrine of omniscience that God
hears unless He gives an empirical confirmation, that is an answer to
prayer. So everywhere in the Psalms you
read God hears, God heard me, or He hears my prayer, it’s just an idiom for He
answers my prayer. So, “He answered my
voice, out of his temple, and my cry did enter into his ears.” Now the word “temple” doesn’t mean the temple
at
Turn to Psalm 2 and you see a similar situation
of God’s hearing from His temple. This
Psalm may have been written along with 2 Samuel 22. In Psalm 2:1-3, this is a prophecy of Christ
but historically it’s the [can’t understand word] of the king, and he’s saying
“the heathen are raging, the people are imagining vainly, [2] The kings of the
earth set themselves,” this is poetic hyperbole here, and it’s talking
historically about a situation but it’s projecting it on to future times, the
Second Advent of Christ. Now verse 4,
here is where you have God laughing; maybe you never thought that God laughs. God has a sense of humor, here He has a sense
of righteous humor in verse 4, “He who continually sits in the heavens,”
participle, “He who continually sits in the heavens,” there’s the location of
His temple. Now what does this mean? It means that He is physically up… now don’t
come up with a smart answer that on a sphere, obviously “up” is in 360 degrees
along each great circle, I’ve had solid geometry and I’m well aware that the
planet is a sphere so you’re not enlightening me to tell me that. God is looked upon as up; the reason for
this, apparently, is because of spatial [can’t understand word] of the
universe, so that by looking up at any point off the globe of the earth you
basically are looking in the direction of God’s throne. Now this has certain implications,
incidentally, about the structure of the physical universe, but as these men
would pray, and we know this from the first century, it was often customary in
the early church that when the Christians would pray in public squares, they’d
have a meeting or something out in the public, evangelistic meeting, they would
hold up their hands, Tertullian says, when they prayed, and the reason for
holding their hands up was to show God that their hands were clean, that they
had been cleansed with the blood of Jesus Christ, that they were acceptable. And so this posture or stance is declaring
concretely a theological principle, that the early Christians thought just like
the Hebrews thought in the Old Testament, and that was they didn’t have a group
concept of God as some sort of philosophic absolute some place, rather He’s
there, and when God comes He’s going to come down from the sky, He’s that local
and that physical. So when He laughs in
verse 4, “The Lord shall have them in derision.” And [5] He’s going to “speak unto them in his
anger, and vex them in His great displeasure.”
Verse 6, “I have set My king upon My holy hill of Zion.” What I have decreed shall not be broken, and
no matter how hard you try you will forever be frustrated.
Now let’s turn back to 2 Samuel 22 and see what
happened when God, from heaven, answered David’s prayer. The temple is not Solomon’s temple, it wasn’t
built then, the temple is heaven itself.
Now in verse 8 we have a total exhaustion of the Hebrew vocabulary of
synonyms for shake; three verbs are used, one is repeated, for shake, to
tremble, to quiver, the guy has exhausted the language, his known language to
get across to us that something mighty is happening at this point. “Then the earth shook and trembled; the
foundations of heaven moved and shook, because He was angry.” This shaking, this trembling, is some sort of
earthquake phenomenon, it doesn’t give us where it was on the Richter scale but
it was an earthquake phenomenon. One of
the words is used, ra-ash, and is
used several other places; one place is Judges 5, that referred to Mount Sinai,
and in Judges 5 it is a literal event, it is not poetic exaggeration of some
inward mystical experience; it is an outward historic catastrophe.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a real earthquake,
but it is a very awesome feeling, because in an earthquake, psychologically I
think it disturbs you more than any other type phenomena. In a tornado, or hurricane, or a flood you’ve
got the ground, you’ve got some place on which you can get on firm ground, in a
flood you can go to higher ground in a flood, in a hurricane or tornado you can
get down low, but here you are in the middle of an earthquake and all of a
sudden the ground itself starts shaking, and the building shakes and it’s a
very awful feeling. Maybe it won’t hurt
you but the point remains that psychologically you won’t forget one once you’ve
been through it because it’s very destabilizing to you when you know there is
no place that you can stand. Now this is
a theological principle that’s going to be taught here in this passage. God has a reason for hitting David with an
earthquake; and hitting enemies with an earthquake, and He does this
often.
In Judges 5:4, the song of Deborah, at the time
when God went forth from Sinai, “when you went out of Seir, when you marched
out of the field of
Now 2 Samuel 22, after the earth shakes and
trembles David reports something else happened, “the foundations of heaven,”
now this is a hapax legomenon that is suspicious in light of the way this verse
reads in Psalm 18. The way this verse
reads in Psalm 18, it says “foundations of the hills,” or the mountains, and it
looks like a better reading and there is a manuscript problem here, so we’d
best take that as “the foundations of the earth,” in other words,
parallelism. “The earth shook, the
foundations of the mountains moved and shook, because He was angry.” Now don’t you see how he ties it
together. Think again of the earthquake,
and think of us all sitting here swaying; an earthquake is an awesome
thing. So to say, as he does here, this
is happening “because Yahweh is angry.”
You see how he’s relating the character and essence of God as the
Creator to the physical nature?
Verse 9 he describes some things further here,
“There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured:
coals were kindled by it.” Now there are
other passages in the Bible that show us more of this. Turn to 1 Chronicles 16:30, this is a passage
that’s parallel in the sense that we have David, when he sets up the hymnic
worship on Mount Zion he makes a theological statement, that as we go on this
evening this will come out more and more and more in all these cross references
and I want you to visualize this physically; this is not poetic
exaggeration. He says, “Fear before Him,
all the earth; the world also shall be stable, and it shall not be moved [that
it be not moved.]”
Now in the Messianic passages of the Bible the
thing that is always looked forward to by all the prophets is there will be a
time when there will be no more shaking of the earth. There will be a time of peace, geophysical
peace, not just peace in the heart, external geophysical peace. It shows you that nature is involved in this
thing and the point is, when you go back to God’s essence, God’s essence says
that God is no part of nature. You have
creation down here and God is trying to teach man a principle, that God alone
is the Creator, man is part of nature, and therefore creation has nothing in
itself that is enduring. That’s why God
is insisting here of shaking something.
We say so and so is all shook up, we’re using that allegorically. But this isn’t allegorical, what you’re
looking at here is something literal.
And it is done frequently in history in ancient times, it will be done
in the future to convey graphically to men that there will be no more
self-sufficiency in nature, there’s nothing sufficient in nature, nature just
by itself tumbles and is confused and is shaken.
Turn to Psalm 97, one of the great praise
Psalms, this may have been written by David about the same time. It’s a time looking forward to the
millennium, God reigns, “let the earth rejoice,” you see why the earth rejoices. Don’t look on this as just poetry, it’s not
to say oh, that’s sweet, the earth rejoices, let’s drop that in this little
poem, that’s not the way this Psalm is constructed. “Let the earth rejoice” means let the earth
rejoice because it’s not going to be shook up any more, and then he gives you
an example in verses 2-5, “Clouds and darkness are round about him;
righteousness and justice are the habitation of his throne. [3] AA fire goes
before him, and burns his enemies round about. [4] His lightnings lightened the
world; the earth saw, and trembled. [5] The hills melted like wax at the
presence of the LORD, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth.” So you see the tremendous catastrophe; that’s
what we’re looking at when we come back to 2 Samuel 22, there is a theology
behind this violence that we’re observing; it’s violence with a purpose. [8] “Then the earth shook and trembled; the
foundations of heaven moved and shook, because He was angry. [[9] There went up a smoke out of His
nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured; coals were kindled by it.
Verse 10 describes the lowering of the clouds as we saw in Judges 5,
“He bowed the heavens also, and came down; and darkness was under his
feet.” Now these passages have presented
scholars with a mystery. We can date
David at 1000 BC. Let’s make a little
time line, David’s here, Christ is here, and we’re over here in 1974. Here’s the problem; what was going on back
here that you have all this literature of catastrophe. Can we point to any extra-biblical materials,
not just the Bible, but other ancient material that would testify to this. And when you answer this question you have to
go to the writings of men like Immanuel Velikovsky who has amassed a bunch of
this material and I’ll just give you a couple, those of you who are skeptical
about taking the Bible literally. Here
are some evidences that this kind of violence wracked the earth in the first
and second millennium. There are tremendous
fallouts from this.
One of the evidences is this: all ancient civilizations
had the mathematical tool to perfectly build calendars, yet there is not one
calendar that endures until the year 600 BC, and the question is why, with all
the mathematical tools that these civilizations couldn’t they get a calendar
together before 600 BC? Why was it that
it took this long to get a calendar to endure.
And it took that long apparently because the earth itself was
periodically wracked in violent spasms.
It would explain too why modern science did not arrive until this
time. The reason why was that nature was
too chaotic, it hadn’t settled down. We
have been brought up in a society and a civilization that has not seen violence
in nature on a global scale.
So our view of nature is a warped view; we are
a generation that has viewed the earth as passive, it’s quiet, it’s run quietly
and peacefully day to day laws. We have
never had to live in a totally chaotic environment, when the earth did shake,
when the cities would be destroyed, and when violent hordes of men would go
from one civilization to another destroyed in these massive type of
campaigns. This explains much of ancient
history that where you have these great invasions it was simply that the walls
of the cities were destroyed by the earthquakes, it left all the defenses of a
country prostate and open before the enemy, and so you’d have men who were the
professional scavengers go about. Can
you imagine what would happen today if we had a global catastrophe. All our modern weapons would fail, very few
modern weapons would… because pipelines would be broken, petroleum could not be
transmitted. Most modern machines
operate on petroleum.
This shows why in the latter days in the book
of Revelation it appears that the battles will be fought with primitive
weapons. I’ve often wondered why these
primitive weapons are there. My own
thinking about it is that the catastrophes of the tribulation are so violent
that they simply reduce modern weaponry to inefficiency, the only way men can
fight in the latter days will be by ancient methods that are dependable, that
do not depend on sophisticated electronic equipment, do not depend upon
pipelines and so on. These things are
highly vulnerable to geophysical disturbances.
Our cities are highly vulnerable, all we need is one great earthquake to
break the water mains and we have had it as cities. Society and our civilization, even our wells,
if you have a well in your backyard it’d be ruptured by an earthquake. Now in that kind of a situation how do people
survive; they scrounge, they get violent, they go like packs of dogs and men
become animals in this kind of thing.
Now we haven’t seen that, thank the Lord, in our country, but as you
read the Psalms, think, we have grown up never knowing this kind of
violence. Never. We have nothing in our experience with which
to compare this and we have built our whole civilization on sophisticated
electronic and petroleum type things that are going to be destroyed in these
kinds of phenomenon.
Now what are some other evidences beside the evidence
of calendars; there’s some more spectacular evidence. Some of you now of a place called Stonehenge
in England, this is where these giant monoliths are constructed in a great
circle, nobody knows to this day exactly what was going on and they’re up on
these pillars. And apparently ancient
men were so concerned to develop that they developed… some of these stones
weight 50 tons a piece, they were quarried in a place 35 miles away, now what
made these people quarry stones at 50 tons a piece and drag them 35 miles and
set them in this peculiar order. It was
thought that this is some sort of an astronomical calendar system, a sort of
computer based on the stars. And recent
work has showed that Stonehenge was arranged four different times, these stones
removed, and apparently as the heavens were changing above them, which means
the earth was shifting violently under it, they would have to realign these
great monoliths to keep up with these catastrophes that were happening. The ancient men were deeply afraid. Why 50 ton stones? That’s the only kind of structure you can
build that will survive terrestrial type shocks of this order. The reason why we have pyramids, for example,
may well be simply because that is the most stable structure archeologically
against these kind of shocks. So the
giant character of ancient civilizations and their construction testify that
these people were afraid of something like this.
In Herodotus there’s a passage that’s very,
very strange and scholars think oh well, Herodotus is just exaggerating. But Herodotus was the first historian of the
west, and he went down into Egypt and got a lot of background and [can’t
understand word] from the Egyptians, and one of the strangest parts of
Herodotus’ history is in book 2, section 142, and he quotes the Egyptian
priests as telling him this: (quote) “Four times in this period, so they told
me, the sun rose contrary to his custom; two times the sun rose where he now
sets, and two times the sun set where he now rises.” The claim is that the sun at least two times
in history has risen in the west and has set in the east. And that can only spell an obvious massive
dislocation of this planet. Now they can
say the Egyptians were wrong, but the testimony they were not wrong was found in
the tomb of Senmut, Senmut was the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, and when he
died had his assistant paint charts on his tomb. These charts were charts of the
constellations. And the strange thing is
that neither of these charts fit the present constellations at that latitude
and longitude. One chart appears to be
upside down, north is down here and south is up here; it’s completely wrong,
and this is unheard of in Egyptian art, because all the other charts have north
at the top. And the men who discovered
this can’t understand why it is; the only explanation apparently is that that’s
the way the heavens were, that’s what Herodotus is trying to tell us and modern
man in his arrogance says no Herodotus doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But the interesting thing is the second
chart; this one is north all right, west, south and east, all the compass fits,
but the constellations don’t fit for that latitude and longitude, which means
at least during his day the constellations were not in their present form. So obviously you have two completely
different regimes of the earth going on here.
Another evidence, these people had certain
clocks that measured the solstice, this is the longest and shortest day of the
year. It turns out that the longest and
shortest day is different for different longitudes and also latitude because of
the inclination. The longest and
shortest days do not fit in most ancient clocks. The interesting thing is that
they’re off by the same figure, depending on latitude. For example, the sun clock at Babylon was
found indicates that the city of Babylon was 2˝ degrees longitude north of its
present position. Now did the city of
Babylon get moved 2˝ degrees of longitude?
Obviously not, what has happened is the earth has moved since that clock
was installed. The clock has not moved,
it has never been tampered with, it is carved in a rock that’s insitu. So since we know the ancients were sufficient
to design clocks that were accurate we have to accept the fact that something
is going on here.
We notice something else, that the ancient
temples, after about 600 BC, are all oriented east; before 600 BC most of them
are oriented east-northeast. Why in
600-700 BC did they start building temples oriented toward a different
way. The best explanation is because the
sun rose in a different place; the temples of most religions of the Orient
always focused to the place where the sun rises first, the first light is seen.
And when these temples was built the first light was seen there, not here,
indicating again the earth has shifted.
We find water clocks, one at Karnak, these water clocks would be the
amount of time it takes water… this is, by the way, they measured the longest
day in Joshua 10, every once in a while someone will say ha-ha, that couldn’t
have happened because they couldn’t have told whether… if they told time by the
sun and the sun stopped you can’t tell time; wrong, they had other alternate
ways of telling time, one was by water clocks.
In Karnak the water clocks are all consistently off by 52 degrees of
latitude. In other words, the temple at
Karnak is dislocated.
So what does all this say? It says that we have evidence after evidence
after evidence for he who is willing to open his eyes, that we have had in the past,
in the near past, the human race corporately has faced tremendous types of
disaster. This is what David is talking
about here. When I say that God put the
fear of God in the people at Sinai, He did it so very, very graphically. When you see the sun start changing it’s
place you know somebody big is around.
Verse 11, “And he rode upon a cherub, and did
fly: and he was seen upon the wings of the wind.” Now this involves us with something that we
have seen in the study of Hebrews. Turn
to Psalm 104:3 for a brief review of angels.
You recall in this passage, angels are tied to natural phenomenon, two
in particular, wind and fire. And in
this Psalm, verse 4, we’ll look at verse 4 first then we’ll look at verse
3. In verse 4, “Who makes his angels spirits,”
makes is a participle that means this is not one event, this means it is a rule
and it is principle by which God reigns
in the physical universe. “He constantly
makes His angels spirits,” or wind, it’s ruach,
and that’s the Hebrew word both for spirit and wind, and it’s not talking about
He’s using the wind for His angels, because angels is malak or messengers, it’s not talking about that, it’s the
opposite, it’s saying that He turns His malak,
which is His angels, into ruach, into
wind. And when I was in the Hebrews
study I gave you some Qumran materials where this is a common belief in the
first century that angels could transform in front of you, they would appear as
people, and then they could transform into fire, they could transform as wind. So angels can appear as inanimate physical
phenomenon. Notice it says He makes “His
ministers a flaming fire.” Wind and
fire, this is why the Holy Spirit on Pentecost is associated with wind and
fire; the wind and the fire that was present on Pentecost was probably part of
the Holy Spirit showing Himself, that the third person of the Godhead, when He
actually showed Himself, showed Himself in a physical form. [3, “Who lays the beams of His chambers in
the waters; who makes the clouds His chariot; who walks upon the wings of the
wind.”]
While we’re here let’s catch up on a few verses
because these are going to come up in the Psalm that we’re studying, and then
we’ll go back. Let’s look at verse 5-8,
“Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed
forever. [6] Who covered it with the
deep,” there’s the flood of Noah, as with a garment; the waters stood above the
mountains. [7] At Thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of Thy thunder they
hastened away.” Now there are two words
here to look at; one is “rebuke” the other “thunder,” you’re going to see those
reappear so let’s look at what they mean.
Again, this is not just poetic imagery; the rebuke and the thunder of
verse 7 is a description of wind and I’ll prove it in just a minute. But remember those two words, keep them
in your mind because we’ll see them
again. “At thy rebuke they,” the waters
from Noah’s flood, “fled,” that means they dropped down, the waters
lowered. Verse 8, “They go up by the
mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which Thou hast found for
them.”
Now turn to Genesis 8:1 and you’ll see the
historic narrative of what happened.
Psalm 104 the poetry, Genesis 8 the prose. When you go from poetry to prose things
change a little bit, even though you’re talking about the same thing. What does Genesis 8:1 say? After the flood, what did God do? “And God remembered Noah, and every living
thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a ruach,” a spirit or “a wind to pass over
the earth, and the waters subsided.” Now
I want you to notice something. We have an event called the flood; we have
another one, the Red Sea crossing. In
the flood, Psalm 104 speaks of a rebuke; Genesis 8 speaks of a wind. Exodus 14 speaks of a wind, and Psalm 106
speaks of a rebuke. Do you notice the
rule on interpreting Scripture? When in
poetry you pick up the word “rebuke” and “thunder” these men are not using
imagery, that is their way of expressing a monstrous wind, a wind that howls, a
wind that made a tremendous noise and roar.
People who have been near tornadoes will testify that the only sound
they can approximate to a tornado is the sound like a freight train, a
tremendous roaring noise and that roar that is heard around a tornado is simply
because of friction around the vortex of this storm. Now you can imagine what God used, this
global wind after the flood, was a rebuke.
Men were there, they lived through the thing, and they’re telling us,
look, we know that you people in the 20th century don’t experience
this but we’re trying to tell you to the limits of our vocabulary what happened
back then, it was terrifying, it was horrible, and they describe it as a rebuke
and a thundering.
Now let’s finish up this section in 2 Samuel
22, God, verse 11, “rode upon a cherub,” that is a high angel, the cherubs are
the angels that guard God’s presence.
Now we’d sure like to ask David, what David are you talking about
here? But apparently whatever this
Theophany was, he believed that God’s presence was seen, probably it was in a
fiery form, and the presence was surrounded with a violent, violent, violent
wind, and this roar he calls in one place, verse 11, the wings of the wind,”
but he uses that synonymously with the angelic title, “cherub.” So here again you have the angels appearing
as violent physical phenomenon. “And He
rode upon a cherub, and did fly; and He was seen upon the wings of the
wind.” Probably that word is fly, the
text is bad at this point. Here’s what
the word “fly” and here’s what the word “seen” looks like; see the difference,
some of you can’t even see the difference.
If you have good eyes you’ll notice there’s a difference in that
character, that’s all the difference it is and it’s obvious that the text may
have gotten bad here. Psalm 18 at this
point has “He did fly,” and it makes a lot more sense. He rode upon a cherub and He flew on the
wings of the wind.
Verse 12, “And He made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters, and
thick clouds of the skies.” Wouldn’t it
be beautiful if someone with a little artistic talent could paint this
Theophany? Imagine the most violent
picture you could paint. Verse 13,
“Through the brightness before him were coals of fire kindled.” Whatever this awesome fire was, it ignited forests,
it ignited homes, it ignited, it apparently caused volcanic eruptions. This is the power of God. Needless to say David was probably quite
impressed.
Verse 14, here’s your word “thunder,” that’s
why I was trying to prepare you from Psalm 104, in verse 14 “The LORD thundered
from heaven, and the most High uttered his voice,” or His noise. Verse 15, “And he sent out arrows, and
scattered them; lightning, and discomfited them. [16] And the channels of the sea
appeared,” or the channels of water appeared, “the foundations of the world
were discovered, at the rebuking” there’s the other word, “at the rebuking of
the LORD, at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” Now “the breath of His nostrils” is a poetic
way for wind, and what David is saying here, when I saw this Theophany it was
the most powerful wind I’ve ever seen; the wind was electrically charged,
probably, in some way, it was fire and light associated with it, the word
“brightness” in verse 13 is some sort of an optical phenomenon that we would
call probably an electrical type phenomenon associated with it. “The channels
of the sea appeared” in verse 16, it should be “the channels of water” and it
was the beds of the streams, it’s talking about the streams throughout Israel,
he says the wind was so fantastic it just picked up the water and lifted it
right out of the bed, and you could just look down there and see the bottom of
the river, just as clear as could be.
God did it once at the Red Sea and He did it in Noah’s flood, and
apparently He did it hear again, a tremendously violent wind just picked up
water.
No charge for this but this is very easy to
occur and some of you who have summer homes on the edge of the water, just let
me give you a bit of advice. The most
dangerous place to build a home is on the edge of shallow water; if you’re
going to build somewhere on the edge of a lake pick the deepest part of the
lake, don’t pick the shallow part. The
reason for it is that when you get wind across a shallow area the water can’t
recirculate and you have this friction force that transfers energy from the
wind down into that water, it will pick that water up and just take it right
on, every single time. The worst, most
dangerous place to be is in shallow water, not deep water. The deeper it is the safer you are because
you have a return flow.
Now at this point we’re talking about shallow
streams and here’s a cross section of this thing, these streams are just picked
up, just flooded all over the place, all the streams were empty, that’s what
he’s saying, “the channels of the waters,” not the sea, “the channels of the
waters appeared, the stream beds were empty, I could look at them he said. So this again gives you a connotation of the
violence. “The foundations of the world
were discovered,” now again at this point he’s talking about the violence, I am
not sure what that means. It’s one of
these hapax legomenon, it’s a hard verse to interpret, I’ve struggled with it
and I still don’t know what it means.
“The foundations of the world were discovered [laid bare], at the
rebuking of the LORD, at the wind from His nostrils.”
Now I want to conclude by pointing you to
something by way of application. In
verses 7-16 we have seen how God answered a man’s prayer. It wasn’t an accident God answered it this
way because God wanted to tell us something about what kind of a God He
is. This isn’t the last time He did
this. When God speaks to us He wants us
to understand something about His character.
When you speak of God, particularly you speak of nature, we refer to the
creation, fall and flood. If you want to
gain your doctrine about what nature is like you must know those events of
Scripture. Use those events to fill out
your mind and soul with the concept of God, and this will fortify you to see
what God is and how He works.
In Leviticus 26 you have the principles that
were used in David’s time, so if you go there I’ll show you the regime that God
operated under. God is King; a king is
going to reign over his realm, and God reigns over men and He reigns over
nature, and in Leviticus 26 it says very clearly at point after point, how He
will curse men. Now He curses Israel in
a specific way, He curses us as Gentiles in a general way. But in verse 6, talking about the blessing,
he says, “And I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down and none shall make you
afraid; and I will rid evil beasts out of the land,” in other words, He has
some sort of means of working in the area of zoology. If you look at the cursings, however, verse
16, here he works in physiology, he is going to do something to the
population’s physical bodies, “I will even appoint over you terror,
consumption, and the burning fever, that shall consume the eyes, and cause
sorrow of heart; and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat
it.” That includes agricultural
reversals and disasters.
In verse 19 he talks about climatological
control, do you see how King Yahweh is King over all, over all gods, because
remember in the ancient world nature forces were gods, but Yahweh reigns over
nature forces. Verse 20, “And your strength shall be spent in vain; for your
land shall not yield her increase,” now this is the chemical fertilization of
plants in the farmlands, plus the bacterial action; plants grow because
bacteria have an effect above certain temperatures. This is why cotton, for example, has to be
planted at certain temperatures and so on.
And it’s grounded on the assumption that bacteria are going to work
today like they worked yesterday. But
God is saying in verse 20, don’t count on it because I can turn them off, and
you can plant your cotton at the right time and temperature, and water it and
it won’t grow because I happen to control the bacteria involved also. And you
can read through this, point after point after point, God, Yahweh the King,
reigns over all nature. Now I’ve done
this in Leviticus 26 and I’ve stopped at this point in Psalm 18 or 2 Samuel 22
because it gives us a good breaking point to come over and conclude with one
startling application for us today in our age.
Turn to Matthew 24, we believe our Lord Jesus
Christ is not just a Jewish carpenter; our Lord Jesus Christ is Yahweh; Yahweh
Jesus. And if Yahweh in the Old
Testament was King over nature, what does that tell you about our Lord Jesus
Christ? He’s King over nature. And the Lord Jesus Christ manifested this at
points in His earthly ministry. He only
did it very briefly to show people.
Remember out in the boat on the Sea of Galilee, He was surrounded with a
storm and it says He rebuked the waves, and instantly it says in the Greek,
instantly the waves stopped. And the
people were amazed. Can you imagine, out
on water and suddenly all the energy that’s in the surface of this turbulent
water just flattens right out. How did
that happen? Because Jesus is Yahweh,
He’s that God that we have met, the violent God of the Old Testament is also
Jesus.
And so when we read in Matthew 24, at the end
Christ is asked, what is it going to be like when He comes back again, and He
tells in verse 7 to watch for certain geophysical phenomenon. He says, “For nation shall rise against
nation; and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines, and
pestilences, and earthquakes, in various places. [8] All these are the beginning
of sorrows.” But this is not the end…
this is not the end yet, this is just the beginning of the sorrows, and the
beginning is when we have these famines and earthquakes; the beginning actually
started in the book of Acts, after the Jews rejected you start having the
famines and the earthquakes that have been periodic throughout the Church
Age. And Jesus says we will experience
these in a minor way, “in various places.”
Now he said don’t get shook because the end isn’t yet.
However, in the same chapter, when you reach
verse 21, the tone changes, now we are not to expect a famine here and there,
but now we are to experience increasing geophysical disaster, “For then shall
be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this
time, nor, nor ever shall be.” Now, we
all have been brought up, as I’ve tried to stress tonight again and again, in a
period of quiet geophysically. We can’t
even conceive the kind of violence that David saw in 2 Samuel 22, leave alone
the kind of violence that Noah saw in the day of a global flood, in the day
when entire mountain chains were changing rapidly, with all due apologies to
uniformitarian geologists. When all of
this violence was going on, just that is beyond our conception, but when Jesus
Christ warns us in verse 21 that the violence that this planet will endure when
He returns is greater than even the flood.
By the end of the seven years of tribulation there won’t be a uniformitarian
left, for they will have graphically had proven before their eyes empirically
catastrophism, violence such as the world has never seen.
Now when you see 2 Samuel 22 and you look at
this, and take it literally it’s violence, but when you hit Jesus’ words here
and He says that’s nothing, that’s NOTHING, so you had earthquakes and
mountains split open and so the Lord in the past sent a wind that picked up
sheets of water out of their beds and threw them around, that’s nothing, wait
until I come back. That’s what Christ is
saying in verse 21. Let’s continue, in
verse 29, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be
darkened, and the moon shall not give its light, and the stars” or “light”
literally, “shall from heaven,” what is that obviously talking about? It is talking about a catastrophe that
envelops at least the solar system, something violent in outer space masks the
sun’s rays so the moon is not seen and the sun is not seen. And “the stars shall fall from heaven” is
talking about meteor showers. The earth
once again will be enveloped in a cloud of thick darkness, and the heavens will
again be lowered, and the only light will be will be the sparks as these
meteors fly through, the sun will not be there, so solar power won’t work at
this point. “…and the powers of the
heavens shall be shaken,” Jesus says. In
other words, the great physical laws of planetary motion, these very laws are
going to be shaken. Simultaneous with
the battle in the angelic realm there will be a collapse of geophysical order,
that is how close angels in the Bible are related to nature.
Verse 30, we don’t know what this is going to
be like, but we just have this word from Jesus, And then shall appear the sing
of the Son of man in heaven;” now whatever this sign is it’s a slow approach
type thing, the earth will be turning on its axis, it will be enveloped in this
thick darkness, the sun and the moon will be dimmed, it’s just as though it’s a
stage performance and the lights in the room are turned out and as the sun and
moon are dimmed, people will look up, they’ll naturally want to look up as
people always do when the clouds in the skies are dark to find light, and the
only light will be the light of the sign of the coming of the Son of man, and
the light will be recognizable in some way.
We don’t know how or what form this light takes but in some way when men
look up they will know that somehow this is connected with Jesus Christ for
their reaction is given in verse 30, “and then shall all the tribes,” “all the
tribes,” that means it is a globally observed phenomena, it must occur
obviously over more than a 24 hour interval, it occurs as Christ must approach
the earth, and as He comes closer and closer, “all the nations of the earth
will mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven
with power and great glory.”
So in the middle of all of this titanic
catastrophe, clouds, dust, fire, wind, earthquakes, men look up, they will see
the Son of man coming. Now you couldn’t
ask for a more spectacular return; there will be no theological debate about
Christ’s Second Advent, liberalism will be put out of business. And then in verse 31 He describes His angels
and their work. [“And He shall send His
angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together His
elect from the four winds, from one of heaven to the other.”]
Now here’s an interesting thing; David’s
phenomena in 2 Samuel was part of a Psalm.
Do you remember how we started tonight?
That was an answer to a prayer that David prayed. David prayed first to God, and then came the
phenomenon; first it was the cry, O God help me, and then God answered out of
His holy temple and the earth shook. Now
if you want to see the prayer that launches Matthew 24 it’s given in Revelation
6:10. The Tribulation is an answer to
prayer. Just think how this cuts across
the grain of how all of us have been educated.
Think of it from the earliest time you were in school, and you learned
about scientific law and how we, as puny little men sit back and we look at
this tremendous cosmic machine… now realize what you’re reading here, what
you’re reading here cuts across the grain of everything you’ve been
taught. What this is saying is that
there will be men and women like you in the Tribulation, who are going to
suffer and suffer for Christ’s sake, and they’re going to launch out with these
prayers; those prayers are going to completely destroy the whole cosmic
machine.
Here’s the prayer, Revelation 6:10, “And they
cried with a loud voice,” these are the people who are still praying before
God’s throne, they’ve been killed, they’ve been martyred for Christ’s sake, by
the beast and the false prophet, and the whole banking and economic system of
the Tribulation that crushes believers, and they’ve been crushed and they’ve
been killed, they’ve lost their loved ones, and when they get in heaven they
continue their prayer, and the prayers they pray are the imprecatory Psalms,
damn them God, those Psalms are legitimate and these are the prayers that will
one day be prayed, “And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord,
holy and true, do You not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the
earth? [11] And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said
unto them,” and the picture that John sees these saints, they’re just puny
little men but they’re talking to the God of creation, and they says “How
long,” and apparently the angels say just a minute, keep your prayers, keep
praying because your answer is going to come shortly, in the meantime we’ll
give you these white robes, verse 11, “and it was said unto them that they
should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also and their
brethren, that should be killed as they were,” let the slaughter go on for a
little longer, more of your people that you love in Christ in the Tribulation,
these are tribulation saints, more of those people must die, the time is
not yet.
But then in verse 12, “And I beheld, when he
had opened the sixth seal and, lo,” what do we read? “there was a great
earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became
like blood; [13] And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig
tree cast her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.” That’s the answer to that prayer that’s
prayed, “O Lord, how long,” how long, how long, how long. And God says just a
little bit longer, until finally the eleventh hour comes, that’s the hour, and
now that prayer is answered. You
couldn’t ask for a more spectacular answer to prayer. And 2 Samuel 22 was just a little Sunday
School picnic, adumbration of this gigantic collapse of the physical universe
because men pray.
Just something to conclude on, if you take
earthquakes and you take tidal waves and hurricanes and you look at the 20th
century you notice something most interesting.
From 1900-1949 we experienced globally 8 major earthquakes; we
experienced 8 major floods and tidal waves, these are not just local floods,
these are real major type floods, the Ganges, that kind of thing, we had 17
killer hurricanes. From 1950-1963, using
that same ratio, we should have had only 2 major earthquakes, we should have
had only two major floods and tidal waves, and we should have had only five
killer hurricanes. In this last decade,
instead, we have had 10 major earthquakes, we have had 12 major floods and
tidal waves, and we have had 19 killer hurricanes. Geophysically the 20th century,
and this can be statistically shown, is becoming geophysically more
violent.
We are living in an age, not of social violence
but of natural violence; nature is becoming more violent. And when you see these natural disasters this
should challenge you to think divine viewpoint.
Nature isn’t disconnected from what you’re going right now. When you look out and you see all these
processes that you’ve been taught all your life are just physical, chemical,
biological processes, totally divorced from you because you’re just a puny
littler biological machine that evolved into existence, if you will understand
from the Bible that cosmic machine that we see all around us was built for us
to rule and we blew it, and when Jesus Christ comes back it’s like He snatches
the whole machine, puts it together, remolds it and puts it once again under
our feet. We are related to that
machine; natural and cosmic disasters will increase, and they will increase
until the time of the return of our Lord.
I hope as we studied 2 Samuel 22 tonight you’ll think about these things.