Psalms Lesson 11

Psalm 28:1-2

… the address, lament the petition, the praise, and the trust section wherever that may be. You can break down the verses however you want to, but if you’re coming out with some sort of an analysis 1a to 1c is one, then 2a to 2b is another, you’re being too nitpicky; the form doesn’t go that way. So just analyze the broad overall outline, see what you can do with Psalm 142 and we’ll discuss it after Christmas; that will give you enough time. Write down the five parts, where you find them in Psalm 142. The next section, on Psalm 142, if you would outline the Psalm. After you have analyzed the five parts, put these five parts together in some sort of a thought analysis, and you do this by just simply taking, say the first section and taking a sentence, subject and predicate, summarizing the thought of that section. That’s what I mean by an outline. And then, say for example, if you have one section, you might have: David prays for healing and safety, then obviously there would be two parts underneath, David prays for healing verses; David prays for safety verses. Just a standard outline form but if on your outline you would put a subject and a predicate so that you have a complete sentence that describes the thought. That’s the second question; the first question, identify the five parts, the second question is outline the Psalm. The third thing that you can answer is how does the truth of this Psalm apply to the Christian life. What is the spiritual application of the Psalm as you see it to the Christian life. I’d like you to answer those three things and put it on a sheet of paper.

Let’s look at Psalm 28. In Psalm 28 we get involved, this will be our last individual lament Psalm and from this point we’ll go into another kind of Psalm. In Psalm 28 we again have a Psalm of David, and therefore as is custom let’s stop and look at the Psalm and see if we can pick out the five parts. This Psalm is a little bit better organized than Psalm 26; where do you see some of the sections that we’ve been talking about. [someone says something] Okay, in Psalm 28 the address 1a; the lament, 1b. Anybody else. [someone says something] Part of verse 5 the lament. [someone says something] 2 and 3 petition. [someone says something] 6, 7 and 8 trust, praise. [someone says something] 7a trust. We’ll put them all down and then we’ll go through and see what we can make of it. This is a brainstorming session. We have a lot of storms but where are the brains. [someone says something] Extend the petition to include verse 4. We’re starting to get a form here now; watch this, as you start to get more of a feel for this Psalm you should begin to watch patterns begin to emerge in it. Let’s look at what we’ve got.

“Unto Thee will I cry, O LORD, my rock; be not silent to me, lest if Thou be silent to me, I become like those who go down into the pit. [2] Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle. [3] Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity, who speak peace to their neighbors, but mischief is in their hearts. [4] Give them according to their deeds,” and so forth. Verse 9, “Save thy people, and bless thine inheritance; feed them also, and lift them up forever.” Let’s start with the petition, that seems to be the most clear cut. If you look at the petition, obviously what is the first thing you look for when you’re looking for a petition? What kind of verb are you looking for? An imperative verb. Where in the Psalm do you see imperative verbs. I think we’ve listed them all here, I think we’ve got most of them, verses 2, 3, 4 and 9. Now this doesn’t always mean as we’ve seen in other Psalms that this religiously sets the limits for the petition but at least this is a good place to begin. You can’t very well have a petition if you don’t have somebody asking for something. You’ve got to have an imperative in the petition. So let’s stop and see if we can come up with something. The rule is in this analysis is try to get the sections sticking together as much as you can. You’re going to have one exception to the rule in this Psalm, it’s already up on the board and I think as you work with it a little you’ll see which one it is.

But let’s look at the petition. Verses 2, 3 and 4, certainly those verses fit together, just look at the cont, “Hear the voice,” there’s the first petition; “Draw me not away,” the second petition; the third petition in verse 4, “Give them according to their deeds.” So you’ve got three petitions in three verses, so that looks to me like that’s a pretty heavy candidate for the petition section, verses 2-4. However, verse 9 is clearly also a petition, obviously you’ve got imperatives in that verse repeated, so we’re going to have to say it looks like we’ve got kind of two petition sections in this psalm and this is something, as you read these psalms, as you analyze them, remember there’s nothing religious about the five form format; that’s just a tool to get you started. And when you begin to look at this Psalm and you begin to come across a structure like this, what’s our practice, when we see a defined exception to the rule? What should we do? What does that do for us?

We should sit on it, put it off to the side and leave it there and say when we get done with this Psalm we’re going to have to come up with an explanation of why it is we’ve got that odd character there. So this is the advantage, if you didn’t know what the Psalm was supposed to be like you would never find the exception. But you see, when you interpret Scripture the emphasis of the Scripture is betrayed by these little exceptions. And this is why it’s necessary for you to know what the normal situation is so that when you read along you’ll be watching for the abnormal and when you look at the abnormal, then that’s the Holy Spirit’s signal to hey, look at this, look at this, there’s a special point here. So we’ve got one of those abnormalities in this Psalm and it turns out it’s going to be very critical for the interpretation of this Psalm. So let’s just sit on that for a while and let’s see if we can order up some of these other categories.

Let’s take the lament problem. Do we have any really healthy candidates by way of verses for the lament section in this Psalm. 1d is sort of a lament but it’s doesn’t seem to go too far; verse 5 could be, but that really isn’t it either. And we’ve going to have another problem, in this particular individual lament Psalm there doesn’t appear to be too much lament going on. And this is something that we’re going to have to face. So let’s just say we don’t really know where the lament is, and let’s just hold that for a while.

Now let’s go to the address; we all agree that the address is given in verse 1; now obviously the address starts in verse 1 but what I’m talking about is how far along it goes, whether it’s just 1a, whether some of you think it’s 1a and b, some of you think it drops down into verse 2. Let me throw this question out because this is a good way, maybe this will prepare you to work with Psalm 142, here is one criteria to distinguish between a petition that’s inside the address and a petition that’s in the regular petition section. Now you see the address says “Unto Thee will I cry … be not silent to me” and so on. Sometimes you’ll get kind of a weak petition inside the address section. The way to distinguish the address from the petition section is that the address usually doesn’t go anywhere. In other words, it’s just a flat statement, I come to God because of something, but you don’t have any details developed. In other words, you don’t have any details of his request developed in the address. It’s just “I call unto Thee,” “Be gracious unto me,” those are petitions but they are general petitions. You have to go to the actual petition section to find the content of the specific prayer request. So on that basis, let’s say the address is verse 1, this is general, “Unto Thee will I cry, O LORD, my rock; be not silent to me, lest, if Thou be silent to me, I become like them who go down into the pit.” There is a weak lament in here, the last part of verse 1 is a weak lament and it’s kind of tucked in the address. And that we’re going to have to star and we’re going to have star this divided petition. There’s two things about this Psalm we’re going to have to watch for as we interpret it: why isn’t there a lament when there should be in this kind of a Psalm, and the second thing, why is it that the petition section is twisted like this.

All right, the praise section, we’ve got verse 1 here, verses 2-4 here, now what about verse 5, it seems to have gotten left out in the running. What would be some views of verse 5? [someone says something] All right, he’s trusting the Lord to wipe them out. Verse 5 is a trust section, so let’s set up verse 5 as trust, “Because they regard not the works of the LORD, nor the operation of His hands, He will destroy them, and not build them up.” He expresses confidence that his request will be answered.

Now do any of you have any dissent on verses 6-8 being the praise section? Does everyone see why verses 6-8 are considered in the praise section. Let me ask this, what do you see about this that marks verses 6-8 off from what has preceded. Can you name some characteristics, as you look at verses 6, 7 and 8 that would set this passage of the Psalm apart from what has gone before. [someone says something] Okay, you have this alternating person, you have future tenses. Anybody else. [someone says something] He doesn’t talk about evil or wickedness, he just talks about the Lord’s greatness. And what specifically is said in verse 7? Doesn’t that sound like prayer was answered?

Let’s see if we can be more specific, let’s tie this down to the praise section and say okay, we’ve got verse 1; we’ve got verses 2, 3 and 4; we’ve got verse 5; we’ve got verse 6, 7 and 8 as praise; what kind of praise is this, is this a vow that he’s going to praise or is this a declarative praise meaning that he has already received the answer. [someone answers] Declarative praise. Okay, now you remember the other Psalms weren’t this way, that’s why this is a good Psalm to balance off the rest of the ones we’ve been looking with; remember the other ones said I will praise the Lord, so on and so on. But here he is doing it because God has already answered the prayers.

Now let’s see if we can tie this together as far as an outline is concerned. We’ve got the parts, we’ve got verse 1; we’ve got verses 2-4; we’ve got verse 5; we’ve got verses 6-8; and we’ve got verse 9. Our form analysis has caused us to split the Psalm up in this fashion. Now can you see ways of tying some of these sections together into a coherent outline of the thought of this Psalm. This turns out there’s one key and I was a hymnic class of hymnic literature and the whole class worked on this thing for about two or three hours and when we set the final point of the key out, it was very obvious, but don’t worry if you don’t get it. [someone says something] Okay, he has suggested the reason to explain why there’s no lament in here, and that is, do you remember another Psalm where we had the petition, it was up early, and we said that conveys urgency. It’s the same thing here, we’ve got the address, immediately going into petition, no time for extended lament, just immediately into the petition.

All right, this would explain why there’s no lament, but be careful, it’s all right to say how these Psalms apply to the Christian life and we have to do that, but in the initial interpretation… we can use that as insight, but in the initial interpretation, don’t forget, this is before Pentecost inside a Hebrew culture and the Psalm must be interpreted in the times in which it was written. So before we make our application to the Christian life we’ve got to first handle the Psalm back in it’s own age, in it’s own time in history. So let’s go back and keep there, and we can keep in mind these spiritual principles because they can be used as tools. [someone says something] Okay, David is running from his enemies? All right, he’s obviously under some sort of pressure, it’s not another person, it’s a group of people, it’s an urgent situation. Can any of you see where we might divide the Psalm? If you were outlining it, here are five divisions, so to speak, but can we rope these together in any major division. Do you see any major cut as you read through the Psalm where you could make a major cut.

[someone says something] Okay, at the end of verse 4, because before verse 4 all of what precedes verse 4 is his difficulty, everything coming after verse 4, verse 5 and following is the solution to the problem. So there’s one obvious break in the Psalm. Now we could, looking at verse 4 and 5, as you watch the transition, this was pointed out earlier, but if you look at what’s happening as you cross from verse 4 to verse 5, besides just this, the whole content, there’s a grammatical point and that grammatical point, if you see it, will give you the key to breaking the Psalm up from the rest of it. I’ll give you a hint; the same grammatical shift that occurs between verses 4 and 5 also occurs between verses 8 and 9. Does anybody see what the shift is between verses 4 and 5, and the same kind of shift between 8 and 9? [someone says something] In verse 9, are you saying verse 9 is not a petition? [no, I’m saying…can’t hear] There is a shift though, it’s a very subtle shift; not always is this grammatical tool or device that I’m about to show you, not always is this a valid system of outlining, it just turns out in this Psalm it provides the key place.

[someone says something] Going from the imperative to another mood, and then back to the imperative; all right, that’s one grammatical shift. You go from, say an imperative mood here to indicative mood; you go from an indicative mood over here back to an imperative. That’s good, I didn’t have that in mind. [someone says something] Okay, look at the person, first, second and third person; what are verses 1-4? It’s some first in it, but what is it too; it’s second, see, he’s addressed it to God, so all of this is second person. He’s talking to God. What happens at verse 5? Who’s he talking to in verse 5? First, second or third, is he talking to himself, is he talking to somebody, or about something. He’s talking about the Lord, so let’s just hold off on this. In verse 9 what happens, first, second or third? The second. Now in this interval, in this section, in verses 5-8 he’s talking about the Lord and in verse 6 he says “Blessed be the LORD,” he’s praising the Lord, but who would he be praising the Lord but in the congregation, in the group of the people that are listening. All right, so this is talking about the Lord in the third person.

So here it turns out if we just use this grammatical device it sorts the Psalm neatly into three sharp categories. So in my outline, this is how I have arranged it. Verses 1-4 is the address to Yahweh; verses 5-8 the address to the congregation; and verse 9, the address to Yahweh again. Now let’s break these large sections down a little bit further. Verses 1 we said is the address so we could say verse 1 is David turns to Yahweh, and you could add on whatever details you wanted to, such as David turns to Yahweh to ask deliverance from the dying or something, but here you have David turning; the psalmist has turned, that’s his faith technique applied in the middle of his situation in life; he turns from the problem to the Lord. That’s what an address always is.

Then verses 2-4 we have David praying, and you could just say David prays for three things; there’s three verses, verse 2, 3 and 4, and so those are the three parts to his prayer request. So he prays for three things, and that forms the content of his address to Yahweh. Now let’s come down to verses 5-8, the address to the congregation. Verse 5, remember that was a trust section, so we’ll hold that off and keep the division. Remember we made this division earlier when we did the form analysis, and so notice how the form analysis is preserved inside the main outline. And that form analysis will help you outline the details of the Psalm. So here, verse 5, we could say is David prophesies future destruction upon the wicked. It’s actually a trust, confidence, or you could look upon it as a prophecy. And verses 6-8 David’s praise. And then verse 9 is the petition to Yahweh again.

We’ll probably get through the first section and partway into the second. So let’s look at verses 1-4, the address to Jehovah. Verse 1, the first part of this David turns to Yahweh. What have I told you about the Hebrew verbs that are translated as future tenses in your King James? Generally they are imperfects and a Hebrew imperfect can be translated as future, it can be translated also as present, and in the present it can be habitual, usually in poetry it can be a habitual present. Now if you wanted to say, “Unto the Lord I cry right this moment,” it would have been perfect tense because I’m doing it at this point in time, but it isn’t the perfect tense. This is the future or the imperfect and that means habitual. And so what he is saying, “Unto Thee I cry, O LORD,” in other words, it’s my habit to cry. Now this doesn’t subtract any urgency from the Psalm, remember we said it’s an urgent request; we still maintain the urgency and we’ll show you that later, but in the address he comes to God and he says “Unto Thee do I cry, O LORD.” He’s essentially defending himself that as a believer, habitually in any and every problem, including the one I face right this moment, but as a general rule, a modus operandi in my life, “I cry unto Thee, O LORD.”

Now in the King James I notice they have a semicolon after the word “rock.” This, unfortunately leaves the next verb without a subject and this is not an imperative, this is an imperfect. And so it’s far better to put the semicolon after the word “LORD,” just for your information the Hebrew didn’t have semicolons, that’s the addition of the English. So don’t feel reticent about doing this. So the first line would read, “Unto Thee do I cry, O LORD;” and then he turns around and says, “my rock, be not silent to me.” Now this word, “rock” is obviously there, if we have parallelism and the verb “cry” and the verb “be not silent,” if these two things are somewhat semi-parallel, then obviously “my rock” must be a synonym for the Lord. Well how is the Lord a rock, and do you suppose if we studied the word “rock” just a little bit we might come up with the central thought of the whole Psalm, namely that it’s a characteristic of Jehovah that’s very like a rock that David notices and he’s giving praise for.

Well, it turns out that this particular word, if you looked it up in, say Young’s Concordance or Strong’s Concordance, and you look at it and it has a little Hebrew thing here and it would be tsur, kind of a “ts” sound, tsur and this noun is used in very important places. This happens to be the national image of Jehovah. Turn back to Deuteronomy 32:4 in the Song of Moses. This was a national hymn and apparently Moses had intended that every citizen of the nation memorize and be able to sing this hymn. It was a hymn that outlined Israel’s history; it was a hymn that preserved within it all the mechanics of history.

So in Deuteronomy 32:4 is the word tsur, “He is the Rock! His work is perfect, for all His ways are judgment, a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is He.” So the picture of “Rock,” based on this national song that sets the flavor of the word from this point forward in the Old Testament, means that he’s praising God and stressing the immutability of God. [tape turns] So that all of God’s love, God’s righteousness, God’s justice, all of His promises that come out of all of this, all of that is held up by the fact that our God is an immutable God; He is the same yesterday, today, and forever; He does not change and therefore when He promises you something as a believer those promises are valid a thousand years from now, a thousand years ago, and today.

So tsur was a national image. Tracing it a little further, this song was the Song of Moses; this set the pace. If you turn to 2 Samuel 22, which is a Song of David, 2 Samuel 22 is Psalm 18, the two passages are identical; 2 Samuel 22 is Psalm 18. And in 2 Samuel 22:2 how does David speak of Jehovah; notice the context also, verse 1, “And David spoke unto the LORD the words of this song in the day that the LORD had delivered him out of the hand of all his enemies, and out of the hand of Saul.” Verse 2, “And he said, The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer, [3] The God of my rock, in Him will I trust,” there it is, tsur, so you see rock imagery of Jehovah.

Do any of you have enough geography of Israel that you could think of where in Israel these rocks might have been that David literally saw and were comparing to Jehovah? [someone says something] All right, south of Jerusalem, south and east of Jerusalem, they are known since 1947 for a very definite reason, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in these caves, and the caves are all along the… Jerusalem is up here and right along here you have these rocks, and they’re cliffs, the Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden in the rocks because obviously the caves were the place that people ran to when the land was being invaded by enemies. Now do you see the imagery that David has of Jehovah. We run to you Jehovah, as we run to those caves and hide when the enemy armies come in. Armies were… it was almost impossible to dislodge people that were in these caves; I mean how could you dislodge them, if they had enough food; the only thing you could do is starve them out because the point is, they’d just roll rocks down on you and everything else.

One of the great fortresses, the fortress of Masada was one of these rocks and it took Roman legions, they had thousands and thousands of casualties, and they went years and years before they dislodged these die-hard fanatic Jews off of the top of Masada, and they had a well, and they just lasted and lasted and lasted, every time the soldiers would come up they’d just roll some more rocks down, they had plenty up there. They just couldn’t be dislodged but finally they dislodged them by just sheer numbers.

But the idea is that these are the rocks that David sees. You see, what I’m trying to do for you here is to get you away from thinking of abstractly about this. When the man wrote this song, he was thinking of a rock that he could go out there and look at; he’s saying Jehovah, You’re my rock just like those. It was that real and that physical, so that there was real communication, there was a real description of God’s being.

Turn back to Psalm 28 “Unto thee will I cry, O LORD; my rock, be not silent to me, lest if Thou do be silent to me” and the word is different, this second word “silent” means immobile, it sounds odd that he would say this using the rock imagery, but the point of the second verb, “be silent” is the idea that God won’t make a move in history, He’ll just let things kind of rock along the way they are. “If you be silent to me,” David says, “I will become like them that are going down to the pit,” “are going down” is a Hebrew participle. Now this has led some commentators to believe that Psalm 28 was sung by David in the middle of a battle. I’m not sue this interpretation is correct, we don’t have any historical control on it because the Psalm heading doesn’t tell us. By the way, Psalm 142 that I’ve given you for an assignment, you’ll be pleased to see it has a heading on it and the heading gives you a key when the Psalm happened, and if you look at the heading of Psalm 142 I can give you a hint that the situation of Psalm 142 is covered in 2 Samuel 22 and 24. And when you study Psalm 142 you might just read 2 Samuel 22 and 24 to give you the historical background so you’ll understand why Psalm 142 was written. But Psalm 142, unlike this one, gives us information.

Now Psalm 28 doesn’t tell us anything, it just says it’s a Psalm of David, well big deal. There is one hint inside the Psalm, though, when this did happen in David’s life. Have you spotted it; there’s one word in the Psalm that tells us; it describes David’s person and that word tells us, at least some… it narrows down the area of his life. [someone says something] Actually that’s the second one, verse 2, “I lift up my hands toward Thy holy oracle,” that had to be after the tabernacle had come into Jerusalem, although not necessarily, in one sense somebody could argue that he went down to where the ark was and did it. There’s a more definitive one; in verse 8 the word “anointed.” Verse 8 proves that David was king at this time. So this at least narrows it down to the time after he was coronated.

Okay, verse 1, “Unto Thee I cry habitually, O LORD; my rock,” don’t be silent to me because if you are I’m going to become like them that go down to the pit, which is an idiom for death. [someone says something] It could be, the only thing is verse 8 is intimately connected with verses 6, 7 and 8, and when you tie in that it would eliminate Saul because the immediate context is he was helped and then he abstracts the principle and says the Lord protects His anointed. In sense what he’s saying is the Lord protects the office, the one who happens to be in the office. [someone says something] He was considered after Samuel anointed him, except the way the word is generally used he’s functioning as a king. Although he was anointed he didn’t seem to brag on the title. Saul was the anointed one, so to speak, then.

Let’s go on to verses 2, 3 and 4. These are the petitions and there are three petitions that he has. Verse 2 is a very important petition to help you in your prayer life because in verse 2 we’re face to face with this thing that we’ve hit again and again in these Psalms. The central feature of most of these Psalms is that you have a Jew trying to “Jew” God out of something. And we use that term delicately, I don’t mean to be flippant about God’s character, but that’s the only way I have of getting across the point that these men have a kind of handle on God, that God has promised and they insist on holding God to His promise. Some of you in your tactical prayer groups are doing a very wise thing, and that is when you list your requests, you’re putting verses after the request, so that when you come to God with that petition, you come to God and say God you have to answer this petition because of this verse which says…. Now that is applying in your prayer life now the same principle that’s being applied here in the Psalms where you have a handle, so to speak, on God. That is why knowing the written Word is so important; that is God’s contract to you as a believer. He signed His name to it; now hold Him to His contract.

Verse 2, “Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward Thy holy oracle.” Now literally in the Hebrew this is a most interesting construction and it’s only used of the tabernacle; it’s used only twelve times in the thousands and thousands of time the possibility occurs in the Old Testament. Here’s what it looks like, “to the oracle of the holy,” it’s an adjective, and then the noun understood, “place.” “The oracle of the holy place.” Now this should tie neatly in what we dealt with Sunday night in that where did God speak from? He spoke from the ark. Now let’s trace the history for a moment to appreciate this.

Turn back to Numbers 7:89, “Now when Moses was gone into the tabernacle of the congregation to speak with Him, then he heard the voice of one speaking unto him from off the mercy seat that was on the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim, and He spoke unto him.” That is how God spoke to Moses, face to face. Moses would walk into the holy place, the Shekinah glory would be there and a voice would come out of it, and Moses would converse face to face with God. At other times Moses would gather the elders in front of the tent and the pillar of fire would come and God would speak on a face to face basis.

Now go to Numbers 27:21 you have God withdrawing. No longer does He speak in such a spectacular way, he speaks through an intermediary now. Moses will die and the Lord says put Joshua there. Joshua, in Numbers 27:21, “he shall stand before Eleazar the priest, who shall ask counsel of him after the judgment of the Urim before the LORD. At his word they shall go out and at his word they shall come in.” Now you see, Joshua does not have the entrée that Moses had; Moses could talk face to face, not Joshua. Joshua had to stay underneath the high priest; Joshua had to get the messages passed back and forth with the high priest. The other way Joshua could get orders was by a direct appearance of Jesus Christ as the angel of Jehovah. So there are two ways that God spoke to Joshua; his normal way through the Urim and the Thummim of the high priest, which is kind of a cloth that he had on his garment and the other way was by a direct spectacular appearance. Then finally in 1 Samuel God is going to turn more and more away from the ark and more and more toward the prophets so that ultimately in Israel His voice will be heard through the prophets, not through the ark.

Now when we come to Psalm 28 we have preserved an ancient way of talking about the ark. This title does not mean in David’s time God spoke this way; He could have, we’re not arguing He couldn’t have, but what we are saying is that by 1000 BC most of the communication of God was through prophets. Can you name two prophets who lived in David’s time with whom David had intimate contact and who kind of guided him? Nathan was one and Samuel was the other. So these were the mouthpieces of God when He stopped working directly through the ark: Samuel and Nathan. The prophet is a very important men because they have become the mouthpieces of God. Question? [someone says something] Yes, the loss of this, the mouthpiece moving from the oracle of the holy place over to the prophets is simply a result of the nation losing their own spiritual intimacy with the Lord. But this one of those cursings turned to blessing because out of all this, if that hadn’t occurred you wouldn’t have had such a clear testimony of the person of Christ and His office. So this is one of those mysterious ways God works in history. You could always ask what would happen if Adam hadn’t have fallen; then God couldn’t have shown His love through the cross of Christ dying for the sins that were started by Adam. It was the same thing here; man sins, the nation turns away, God sets up a secondary mode of worship but the secondary mode of worship turns out to be the thing that glorifies Christ and makes it even clearer.

[someone says something] Scholars are very ambiguous about it because the Word of God is ambiguous about it. It appears that the Urim and the Thummim was something like… the only thing I can think of, pictures that they show of it is one of these things they used to wear in New England when your hands were cold, that had something in the front, you just stick your hands in there. And the priest had this thing that he’d stick his hands in and there are two opinions what happened. One says that he had two rocks in there, one representing six tribes and the other six tribes, and he would reach in, sort of like dice, he’d reach in after praying for it and pull out one and it was a yes or no answer. We know whatever the Urim and Thummim was it only gave yes/no answers. The second idea is that the high priest had on his garment special stones, each stone representing a tribe and that when God would speak one of these stones would light with the reflected glory and he would read off from that what it was. But it was something that the high priest did and it was lost in history, it disappeared along with the ark. Nobody knows where the ark is, nobody knows what happened to the Urim and Thummim, they just disappeared from history. We don’t have any archeological evidence of it either.

This phraseology in verse 2, I want to summarize it because we don’t have much time, verse 2 is important for your prayer life because in verse 2 David is saying this to God. Look God, I want you to hear my voice because I am now using the authorized means of prayer. Even though God would not speak out from the ark, as late as Solomon’s era men were to still pray toward the temple because God had His name there, God had his testimony there. And so whether God spoke from there or not, men still were to address God in the temple, or in David’s day in the tabernacle, regardless of how poor things had become. So the claim that is made in verse 2 is simply, God you have to hear me because I’m doing it the way You said. Now you see, that’s again this same mentality that you have to capture, and that is hold God to the terms of His Word.

Now I want to conclude by turning to the New Testament where the same mentality is present.

1 John 5:14-15, “And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” And the Greek would suggest at this point “that if we ask anything according to His will, while we are asking He is already hearing,” there’s a quickness about this verse. [15] “And we know that if He is hearing us, whatever we are asking, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him.” So in verse 14 you see the same kind of mentality that if you do according to the instructions of the Word, then you have all the right in the world to demand an answer, and expect one.

Any questions. [someone says something] Okay, but then it gets involved in the problem… there’s two things that enter in here, and that is first when, “this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” The point there is that you have to separate the petition and the motive behind the petition in that every prayer we make is made in partial ignorance. We’re never, because we’re finite people, we’re never going to perfectly understand God’s plan so whatever petitions we make are always shrouded at the boundary zone of ignorance. Yet even with that the way it is, when we are locked onto the target the Holy Spirit gives a confidence in that prayer. The Holy Spirit can give an inner confidence to you subjectively while you’re praying that this is in God’s will and therefore you can expect the answer, even though the answer may not appear itself, there’s a subjective certainty the answer will appear. That’s one way.

The other way is that like David, you can come to God, not knowing exactly how to design your petition, but then pray as specifically as you can but don’t pray more specifically than you can. In other words, you know enough from the Word of God to know pretty much whether you’re in the ball park or not in the request. Well, you pray as far as you can be confident that you’re praying a good request. Now there are some requests that you can’t be more specific because you have no information; all you can say is God, on the basis of your Word, from what I see, this is how it should be and I request that. And sometimes you can’t go beyond that because you just don’t have enough information and it’s stupid to go beyond it because you’re just beating your gums. You just pray as far as you can in the details.