Psalms Lesson 22

Psalm 33:4-8

 

Turn to Psalms 33, this is an individual descriptive praise Psalm and you recall there are three parts to the individual descriptive praise; there’s the call, there’s the cause, and there’s the conclusion.  And the difference between descriptive praise and declarative praise is that declarative praise speaks of specific events and descriptive praise speaks of just the general truths or principles.  And we said also that you can see a progression in how the Old Testament arrived at truth.  You first have in the progression a lament, which is dealing with the situation.  So here a person views the problem; this is how revelation came to man and this is the process, five-step process that you want to always remember when you get into discussions about the Word of God, you get into areas of the origin of truth and so forth.

 

It starts out with a lament or a discussion of the problem; then God makes some historic revelation by and act of deliverance, He responds to the problem; then the psalmists turn around in declarative praise, and then you have wisdom, a development of wisdom because wisdom is produced by reflecting upon the historic revelation, and then finally you have the highest form of praise which is descriptive praise.  There is no higher form of praise than this in Scripture.  This is the kind of praise that we will be doing for all eternity, and this means that you ought to know what descriptive praise is because you’re going to be occupied with it for millions and millions of years.  And you’re going to get lots of practice in the future so you might as well anticipate coming events and if you are a Christian this is one of your coming events, and that is you will be in a situation of descriptive praise. 

 

Now Psalm 33, we broke down the outline and said that the first 3 verses refers to the call, and we summarized it by saying that the psalmist calls upon the righteous to praise with musical accomp­an­iment because it is fitting to do so.  You recall that this answers the question whether musical instruments should be used.  Of all the asinine questions to ask that seems to be it.  I never even heard of the question till I came to this place but apparently in this geographical location it’s a big issue with some people whether you should use a trombone or a guitar or a piano or something to praise God with.  I don’t know where that ever got started; I don’t know how it could because the Psalms are quite clear and here you not only have directions to use musical instruments but in verse 3 you have a direction to use them well.  With some of our musical instruments that’s a little impossible but nevertheless, we try.  And the command here is to have a good quality of musical accompaniment, and we showed how the music preexisted man because before man was created angels sang.  And the music that the angels sang is the same kind of music that we sing and the reason we know this is because in the book of Revelation both men and angels sing together, so it’s not some music that is piped in from galaxy 444 some place, it is music that is very much, and will be, familiar to humans because the angels who originally engaged in the musical process have the same form of communication.

 

Then in verse 4-19 we have the cause of the praise.  Now part of the cause of the praise is actually given in the last part of verse 1, “for praise is comely for the upright,” meaning it is beautiful for the upright, that refers to believers in Jesus Christ, and it means that praise is fitting.  This is why we have been created by regeneration and this is one of the purposes of being conformed to Christ, so that we will be praising God.  Remember you cannot praise God until you are first sure that He is what He claims to be.  So many of the downs and many of the ups in your life are divinely designed to show you that God is worthwhile, that He is indeed worthy to be praised.  So later on, you may not see it now, but the Bible tells you that “All things work together for good” and the good is to show you that God is worthy of your praise. 

 

In other words, it is a reverse of salvation; when we come to know God, God says I don’t want any of your works; I have provided for you on the cross.  All of your sins, past, present and future are wrapped up in one bundle and put on the cross and I have judged as the Father My Son for those sins.  And therefore there is not any sin that you will ever do, ever think of doing that has not been totally atoned for on the cross of Christ. If you’re going to be counseling in the Billy Graham crusade, you’d better get that down as to what Christ’s finished work applies to; it applies to ALL sins because you’ll have some person tripping down the aisle and the lot falls on you to straighten them out with all their confusion and you’ll have someone say I committed this big sin five years ago and that’s stopping me from being saved.  I could never become a Christian because I made this boo-boo it’s on my mind all the time.  No, that’s false, Christ took ALL sins, including the big boo-boos.  And He atoned for those also, so there will never be any sin at any point for which Christ has not totally provided.  So you’d better be clear about that because that is the only way a person in this kind of a confused, upset, nervous, depressed mental state because of their guilt, that’s the only way you could ever help them is to make clear to them the doctrine of the unlimited atonement of Christ and if you don’t know that doctrine there’s no way you can help that person.  So on salvation God says I’m not interested in all your human good, all your works or anything else, just forget it, My Son has done it all for you and you just accept grace and never mind all the rest of it, you just receive what I have done for you, period, and don’t insult Me by trying to pay back with some form of gimmicks or human good or something else.  That’s an insult to God.

 

But when God comes to us it’s plus works; when we come to God, minus works but when God comes to us it’s works all the way.  All history is a sequence of one of His works after another to prove Himself worthy to us.  Now that’s interesting; our works do not commend us to God; we receive grace from God through Christ, minus works; all works.  But when God comes to us it’s works, He does not expect us to give Him a thing; He builds His case through history.  This is the meaning of history, it is His story, and God is in the process of proving Himself worthy of creature devotion, so that every knee, on earth and below the earth will one day have to worship. And that includes Satan.  That doesn’t mean universalism, that doesn’t mean all people are saved, it means even in hell people will be compelled to give praise and honor to the King of Kings; they will hate every minute of it and this is one of the things that is going to make hell hell, because for millions and millions of years people will be forced to give praise to a Savior they hate.  So there will be praise given to the King of Kings by every creature, including Satan himself.  So this is the goal and that’s why Psalms like Psalm 33 are so very, very critical, because they are the only place where you can get a fore view of what you are going to be doing for all eternity. 

 

So the first three verses are the call, now we get to the cause.  This section on the cause can be divided into three parts.  First, verses 4-19, that large section is the center of the Psalm and deals with the reasons why we are to praise God.  Then verses 4-5 is a summary of why we should praise God.  There’s your summary.  And then verses 6-12 is an expansion of part of the summary and verses 13-19 are an expansion of the other part of the summary.  So you’ve got one, as it were, one summary statement and the rest of the Psalm is just exegeting, defining, expanding, explaining and clarifying that summary statement.  So the summary statement is very critical and we’re going to look at that right now, verses 4-5; that is the summary statement.

 

Verse 4, “For the word of the LORD is right, and all His works are done in truth. [5] He loves righteousness and judgment; the earth is full of the goodness of the LORD.”  Now that represents the reasons; now that doesn’t particular send any of you because you do not understand what all those words mean.  And therefore the psalmist, when he wrote it, knew we wouldn’t understand all those words and so he took considerable pain to define these words, explain them and give illustrations.  So let’s look at the first verse, verse 4.  “For,” it starts out with “For,” “Because” and that’s your clue that now we’re going into another section of the Psalm and here he’s telling you why he called us to praise.  Here’s why he says, “Because the word of Jehovah is right.” 

 

Now the word “right” is “upright” and it is a synonym of the next word used in the last part of verse 4, truth.  Both the word “upright” and the word “truth” refer to reliability; actually the word “truth” in the Hebrew is pronounced like this: amen.  You never knew when you said “amen” at the end of a prayer you were saying a Hebrew word.  But “amen” is exactly the way the Hebrew word sounds.   And it means it is trustworthy, it is reliable and that is the view the Hebrews had of truth.  Their word for truth can be interchanged with reliability, dependableness.  So the word “truth” isn’t the narrow sense that we’ve gotten out of western tradition.  The Jew had a broad concept of truth, simply reliability.

 

Now this goes back to God’s character.  God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, God is omnipotent, God is omnipresent, God is immutable and God is eternal.  There are the attributes or characteristics of God in Scripture.  Now this particular verse, verse 4, has to do with God’s immutability, that is, His dependableness, that God is perfectly stable.  The idea of immutability does not mean that God never moves; it means that God’s character never changes.  It does not mean He is immobile, static, never is affected by history, and He never talks to man, and He’s never convinced by man to do something, to undertake a course of action; none of that.  That’s the wrong concept of immutability.  Immutability in Scripture means that God is true to His Word and when He tells you something then He is going to do it exactly the way He told you, no changes.  God will never go back on His word; we go back on our word, all of us do.  You can think back to the last time you went back on your word to somebody but as far as God is concerned, He has never and will never go back on His word, and therefore God actually becomes a picture of what it means to be a stable person made in His image.  Man is made in God’s image and if we are to be creatures as He designed us and stable creatures, then we will mimic His image and one of His images is stability.  And you can always tell what is wrong with Christians who are up and down, up and down, up and down, in this movement, in that movement, chafing all over this place, on this fad, on that fad and all the rest of it.  God doesn’t have that kind of stuff; God is stable to His Word, no gimmicks, no panaceas or anything like that.

 

So “the word of the Lord is upright,” it’s stable, “and all His works are done in truth.”  Notice the parallelism in verse 4, that “word” and “works” are used in parallel.  Now that shouldn’t be too strange.  How do you know any person?  If you’re going to come to know somebody, think about it for a moment, pick somebody you know, maybe it’s somebody you wish you didn’t know but pick somebody, maybe it’s somebody you love very much, maybe it’s somebody you can’t stand but just pick anybody that you know, you know enough about them so that you’re pretty well sure that your reaction to them is accurate.  And so you know certain things.  Now how do you know?  By word and by works.  Those are the only two ways you can ever know anyone.  Now it shouldn’t come as some great intellectual shock that when we say how does any man know God—the same way you know any other person, through what He says and what He does.  His words and His works. And so if His swords and His works are stable then guess what, simple deduction, God is stable.  If His words and works are not stable, then we cannot conclude that God is stable.  So in verse 4 we have one of the great statements and we’re going to go back to that statement, it’ll be amplified again and again throughout the text. 

 

Now verse 5, “He loves righteousness and judgment [justice]; the earth has become full of the goodness of the LORD.”  Now the word “He loves righteousness” is a Hebrew participle meaning continuous character and that is another description of His attribute.  This emphasizes not just His immutability but this emphasizes His justice and His righteousness.  He loves righteousness, it’s part of His continuing character to love righteousness.  And the Hebrew word for righteousness is a word, tsadaqa, and this means a standard, so the word righteous basically has behind it a standard and the standard in this case is God’s character, and when the Hebrew meant “He loved righteousness,” this righteousness here, the noun, the word in verse 5 does not refer to His attribute; now you can infer that He is a righteous God from the verse, but the noun here does not refer to His righteousness, it refers to the righteousness that’s done on earth.  And so what it’s saying is it’s as though He’s looking down from heaven and He loves the righteousness that mirrors His character to be done in history, in space and time on earth.  And that’s what it means, He’s got a vivid moment by moment interest in the ongoing of righteousness [not sure of word, may be: downstairs].  And of course, if He’s that kind of God then He Himself must be righteous, but don’t be confused, the righteousness here is a righteousness done by the creature, it is not the Creator’s character.

 

“He loves righteousness and judgment,” the word “judgment” mishpat means court verdict.  And this does not mean the standard, this means the application of the standard.  In other words, the court would apply the standard to given situations.  So judgment emphasizes how people are applying the standard.   We might use two synonyms and we have to be careful of this in our day because the words are shifted but the two words that best illustrate these two Hebrew words are the way we usually use the word “justice” and “law.”  That comes the closest, our word justice corresponds to the Old Testament use of the word righteousness; the Old Testament justice corresponds to the way we use the word law, making a judgment, where as the justice is the standards behind the law. 

 

“The earth has become full of His goodness,” now this is an interesting word because the word “goodness” is chesed, and that means His loyal love.  Remember the Hebrew has two words for love, ahav and chesed.  Can anyone give the illustration we gave.  [someone says in a marriage relationship before you’re married you have ahav love, after you’re married you have an obligation….]  The difference is that there is a covenant with the first one and there is no covenant for the second one.  Ahav love means a sovereign love, I choose to love, it is the individual’s choice to love or not love; ahav is very strongly related to volition and sovereignty, whether it’s God’s sovereignty or the creature’s volition, but we choose whom we love and we choose whom we don’t.  It’s choice, free choice.  The only people that haven’t caught onto that are people who are trying to force themselves in certain affairs on somebody else of the opposite sex and that violates freedom, and ahav respects freedom; I choose whom I will and I choose whom I won’t.  But chesed is not that at all; chesed love is I am loyal to an agreement which I have made with the person.  Ahav, I choose to love; chesed, I am loyal and faithful to an agreement.  And we use marriage, ahav is premarital, chesed is post-marital. 

 

Now it’s interesting then, that of the two words the word translated “goodness” in verse 5 is the one that means loyal to an agreement, and it “is full,” “the earth is full of” it, so that can’t be just His agreement with Israel.  Now can you think back, what do you suppose the Psalmist is looking at here?  It can’t be an agreement that God has made just with Israel, what is it?  [someone says something]  Okay, the covenant behind all covenants is the Noahic Covenant.  Now in the Noahic Covenant what did God promise, basically the sum form of the Noahic Covenant was what?   [someone says something]  Stability in the natural process, stability in the physical creation, and stability in society.  The means of establishing stability in the geophysical environment was the new heavens and the new earth that He created after the flood.  The earth’s surface was transformed and we’ll see how it was in this Psalm, and the heavens were changed after the flood.  So you have an entirely new atmospheric regime, an entirely new climatic regime, an entirely new system of oceans/earth interactions; oceanic currents, etc. have changed.  So you had a massive realignment and the new regime has a stability the old one didn’t have.  Whatever the pre-flood antediluvian earth system was it was not as geophysically stable as the present system. And if we knew more about it we could probably explain, as creationists, more about the fossil records.  But whatever the systems were that built up the present day fossil records it’s the result of the old heavens and the old earth and the instability in that system. 

 

All right, that’s the physical loyalty and God is faithful to it and the sign of it is the rainbow.  And that rainbow, don’t you take this as some sort of trivial Sunday School lesson, the rainbow is a powerful illustration of the physical loyalty to God because the rainbow cannot form except under certain meteorological conditions.  First you have to have droplets in the air, I think it’s 1/50th of an inch and second you have to have a system where these droplets are falling through, when they’re that big they fall, and you have to get them up to a certain diameter and when they get to the diameter where they begin to fall through free air they also happen to break the light optically into various force.  Now it just turns out that those preconditions must be satisfied and they can’t be satisfied except by the kind of atmosphere that God made after the flood.  So the rainbow, though it may strike you as a simple little Sunday School story is actually very much related to the antediluvian world. And the psalmists explains this later in a verse we’ll touch on tonight. So this rainbow, when you see the rainbow, if you’re thinking divine viewpoint you say “thank you Father,” because every time you see a rainbow that is a visual reminder that He intends you to know.  Those of you who are teaching Sunday School, don’t ever overlook those kinds of illustrations; these are natural illustrations that God has intended that every member of the human race know cold; every child should be raised that when he sees a rainbow, Noahic Covenant.  And I mean it.  A child should be taught to identify things that are happening in the physical environ­ment with things that God has said about the physical environment. 

 

That’s enough for the physical, we’re still concerned with the praise, “the goodness” or the loyal love of the chesed of God has filled the earth.  What the emphasis is on this Psalm is society and the means by which God secures stability in society is what?  What happens with the Noahic Covenant?  Government, there are actually two things in the Noahic Covenant that secure stability in society; it’s the fourth divine institution and the fifth divine institution.  The fourth divine institution is the power of judicial authority, that means the right to take life, or capital punish­ment, which no one likes.  Therefore anyone who hates capital punishment is against the Word of God, because judicial authority has been given by God to the human race to preserve the human race; it’s not the other way around, don’t you ever… I hope I never hear any of you say well I’m against capital punishment because it’s subhuman.  It’s not subhuman at all, if you didn’t have capital punishment or the threat thereof, as far as God is concerned you wouldn’t have a government worth, and no government has ever existed that didn’t use capital punishment. 

 

So judicial authority is God-given right to the state to life; obviously it has to be done in a righteous fashion, but God is the one who designates it and it was not so before the flood. For hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of human years the human race tried it without capital punishment; so there’s already been a historical experiment use to disprove that anti-capital punishment crowd.  We’ve had hundreds and hundreds years, centuries of human history to show that that system does not work.

 

The other thing that God has given as a divine institution is diversity, racial diversity.  Now this is not a pitch for segregation; you cannot build a case for segregation out of this.  The fifth divine institution means this basically, that you have groups of people across the face of the earth that are broken up like holds in a ship.  In naval architecture when you design a ship with holds in it, if you have the holds in the hull in one area this hold floods but the whole ship doesn’t go down, and so you design these compartments inside the hull of a ship to save it and to make it stable.  Now God has designed diversity this way.  Paul refers to this in Acts 17 and so therefore racial diversity becomes a means of stability until the Second Advent of Christ, and at the Second Advent of Christ, Christ will take over but until that, it is God’s will for nationalism, not internationalism.  Internationalism is satanic before Christ returns.  So any time the UN and all the rest of it, that is satanic and it is a religious panacea and if you don’t believe me…

 

I lived in New York City and I’ve been around the UN building many, many times and if you don’t believe what I’m saying you just walk in.  First of all, you read on the left side, Isaiah 2:4, “We shall beat our weapons into plowshares” and so on, which immediately tells you they didn’t read what they carved because in context that doesn’t mean disarmament now, that means disarmament when Christ returns.  And then you walk in further and you find the guards who politely tell you we do not permit praying in the name of Christ in this building.  And sometimes if you try it they will not so politely tell you.  Then you walk on further and you will see a great statue to Zeus, so obviously you see, the Christians do not have permission to pray in Christ’s name but we all have to go by this statute of one of the greatest gods of the world. Don’t tell me the United Nations is religiously neutral because it isn’t. 

 

So nationalism is God’s desire at this time in history. That doesn’t mean that every Christian is a warmonger or something.  All it means is that we respect the boundaries of national sovereignty and wherever you have strong national sovereignty you will have peace.  Any time the boundaries of national sovereignty are destroyed you will have instability.  Now this is an outworking and this is what the word “goodness” means in verse 5.  “…the earth is full of the goodness or the LORD,” that means the fourth and fifth divine institutions operating under the Noahic Covenant.  And the Psalm will amplify these. 

Let’s go to verses 6-12 and that’s the amplification of verse 4 and then verses 13 and following amplification of verse 5.  Verse 6, “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. [7] He gathers the waters of the sea together as an heap; he lays up the depth in storehouses.”  Let’s stop there, verses 6 and 7 together.  Notice in verse 6 first that we have a parallelism.  Learn to watch for parallelisms, particularly in the Psalms.  “By the word of the LORD,” what is the parallel in the last part of verse 6 to “word of the LORD?”  The “breath of His mouth.”  Now here’s something that’ll knock you flat, the word “breath” equals in the Hebrew ruach, which equals spirit.  Now, here is one of those rare points in the Old Testament that gives you a chance to see how in the Jewish mind “spirit” was identified with “breath” which was identified with “words.” 

 

Now I have a point in underlining this because the charismatic movement today has lost this Biblical truth and as a result they are making disastrous mistakes because they have divided the concept of spirit from the concept of words; the Jews never did this, obviously.  What have I told you over and over again in the Proverbs series, they thought in terms of the concrete, the immediate, the easy to see things, nothing esoteric here at all.  How do you make words come out of your mouth; try it without breathing.  You can’t, there’s no way you can make the word come out without air coming out of your mouth; put you hand in front of your mouth while you’re talking, you’ll hear these puffs of air coming out, that’s the breath. Can you, therefore, separate word and breath?  You can’t, can you.  All right then, you can’t separate spirit and the word either.  Proverbs 1:23, Wisdom says “I will pour out my spirit upon you, and make known to you my words.” 

 

So the phrase in the Bible, when it says God pours out His spirit doesn’t mean he’s [Clough makes sound like he’s breathing out] like this, it means that He is speaking; it means that He’s revealing Himself and adding to Scripture.  So therefore these prophecies that you read and are thrown around by certain people in the charismatic circles, “I will pour out My spirit in the latter days,” these poor people don’t realize what they’re saying because you know what that really means?  Can anybody guess just on the basis of the analogy?  “I will pour out My spirit in the latter days.”  Now the “latter days” in that context aren’t ours.  [someone says something]  Added revelation, “I will pour out My spirit” is a prediction that the canon of Scripture is going to be opened and there will be authoritative prophets speaking infallibly and once again you will have progressive revelation.  Now you see what’s so ridiculous, oh, God’s pouring out His spirit in the latter days and this is supposed to be the modern charismatic movement.  Nonsense.  If God is pouring out His spirit in these days the corollary is we should have Scripture being written.  If God is pouring out His Spirit it means God is adding to His Word.  The Spirit that God pours out is the same Spirit you’re looking at when you look at the pages of your Bible. That’s the Spirit of God.  So just look at these simple concepts.  That was just a footnote on verse 6.

 

“By the word of the LORD were the heavens made,” the “heavens” notice, is in parallel here with “the host of them.”  Let’s look at this, “heavens and the armies of the heavens,” the “host” is a word which is the King James way of saying army, “the army of the heavens.”  Now when we look at both of these together we see they are connected with the word “made,” and there are two words used in the creation narrative, actually three but two we’ll work on, “made” and “create.”  Now the word “made” emphasizes the picture of the assembling of the pieces.  The verb to “create” doesn’t look at the assembling, it just looks at the start and the beginning of the action.  It skips completely over all the details.  Barah or create means I start, boom, and now I’m finished.  And it doesn’t look at the intermediate steps.  The word asah or make means all the intermediate steps.  Now if the psalmist is going to use “made” that verb in connection with these two nouns, what is he emphasizing about God’s character.  If he used the verb “create,” God created, that is He designed, boom it was done, he’d be emphasizing God’s sovereign plan. But by using a different verb, “made,” he’s emphasizing God’s power; he’s looking at the tremendous energy that God is expending in formulating and working on it.  So this verse is underscoring the power of God’s Word.  “By His word the heavens were assembled,” or put together.


Now today in the 20th century we have a far greater view of what the heavens really mean materially than anybody could have in the ancient world.  And when you think of the millions of light years expanse of space, God, His Word, the same Word that you hold in your lap, that was breathed out by Him is the same Word that made the heavens.  Keep this identity because this is going to be the spiritual lesson that comes off of Psalm 33.  The psalmist does not distinguish in his mind between the promise of God verbally made in the Scripture and the word that was spoken in Genesis 1. 

 

Let’s to back so you can see the picture the psalmist is consciously thinking of. There’s a couple of verses you should look at, Genesis 1:6, “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”  There’s the word “say.”  Then verse 7, “And God made … and it was so.”  So you see God saying “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,” well if you put quote marks beginning with “Let” and ending the quote with “waters,” so you’ve bracketed that with quotation, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,” now you’ve got that bracketed in quotes, now what you have bracketed in quotes is the Word of God.  That is the Word of God, that’s what God said, God said words, God said that!  So what this verse is saying, an immediate response to that the heavens were assembled.  That is the power of God’s Word; one verse, think of that!  One verse, one sentence assembled the universe.  In other words the idea is that here you have the heavens and all the host of them, that include all the stars, all the planets, all the galaxies, etc. and God said a sentence, verse 6, and after He said it was done.  And you can just see, well, we’ve done that, let’s move on to another sentence.  Now that’s a magnificent picture of the power of the Word of God that Scripture gives. 

 

It’s this power of the Word that this man is looking at.  “…all the host of them” refers, the army of heaven, refers to two things.  The army of heaven refers to stars actually, and moons, stars being bodies that possess energy of their own, illuminate in the visible spectrum, and the moon obviously doesn’t, reflective bodies, but these are all classified together, material celestial bodies and the other meaning of the word “army” is angels.  Now in the Scripture, in Genesis, apparently these words do not pull apart.  This is the way the word “host of the heavens” looks, there are two meanings in this word; there are two meanings coming out of this word.  But in many Scriptures of the Old Testament the two are plugged together so you see the same noun and it means two different things.  In other places in God’s Word they’re pulled apart so you can see them, but then they’re carefully put together again.  What does this suggest then, about the nature of angels, if they’re so closely identified with the celestial bodies.  I think there’s several things we can say here about the nature of angels.  First, stars in Genesis 1 are called light-bearers.  And that means that God first made light, on the first day, then it was the fourth day that He made the bodies bearing the light.  And light, of course, is a picture of energy.  And angels have to do, in some form, they’re very analogous to what we would call physical electrical heat forms of energy.  They’re not identical but they’re very closely related in Scripture.  Let me show you.

 

Turn to Psalm 104:4; whenever angels appear these forms of energy are also in the immediate physical environment.  When God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai remember there was thunderings, there was quaking, there was vast forms of terrestrial energy being expended, there was light energy visible, lightening, you had electrical energy, you had all these forms of energy present and then the New Testament says God spoke to Moses through angels.  Now here in Psalm 104, “Who makes His angels spirits, His ministers a flaming fire.”  It’s talking about literal fire, and there again the nature of angels are closely related to what we call physical forms of energy.  Now don’t ask me for any further elaboration, all I am doing is observing the way the New Testament and Old Testament hook these two together.

 

Psalm 148:2, notice in Psalm 148:2 how you have the angels spoken of in a very unspectacular way, look at the listing, verse 1, “Praise ye the LORD.  Praise ye the LORD from the heavens; praise Him in the heights. [2] Praise ye Him, all His angels; praise ye Him, all His hosts.  [3] Praise ye Him, sun and moon; praise Him, all ye stars of light. [4] Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that are above the heavens.”  Now in that phrase you have all the things that are in heaven; notice how the angels are interchanged and in close association with the sun, the moon and the stars.  So there again you have the same close correlation. 

 

Now people have often said there must be life on other planets, why is there such a large universe and only the planet earth have life as we know it.  The answer to the question appears to be from Scripture is that the universe is filled with angels, there’s life there, though of a dimension of which we know nothing.  The life is there and they are personal beings speaking in language and singing in music. And they do occupy space and they are filling the universe, so it’s not true that the planet earth is the only place where there is intelligent life; the universe is filled with intelligent life, and these people of the Bible explain it.  You need not, if you want an image of how this works you don’t have to go any further to what you usually see at Christmas.  What are the shepherds seeing, they’re out in their fields and all of a sudden it says the heavens opened and there was a chorus of angels.  Now every time this occurs in Scripture you don’t get the impression that the angels came down in rockets and boom, there they were, they came out from some place.  The picture in the Bible is that they were there all the time, doing what they were doing, and suddenly it’s as though God takes a shield and He rips it away and says see, don’t you see what’s here with you.  And then after we look at it He covers it over again and we can’t see it. 

 

You see this in Kings, it’s the same thing with Elisha.  Elisha is trapped with an army, the army encompasses the city, his servant gets nervous and what does Elisha say, Lord, open his eyes so that he can see who else is here besides us and them.  So the Lord pulls the curtain aside and the guy looks outside, and angels all around.  And then after he is comforted by the fact that they’re there then they’re covered over again.  But in this dispensation, this point in world history, God does not see fit to reveal these beings to us in a direct way, but they are here, they are here in this room, they’re here everywhere; the universe is filled with them.  And this is why many scholars down through church history say that the Church Age has gone on for 19 centuries because oftentimes they have made the equation that the Church or the body of Christ will not be complete until we have a one on one situation, where there will have been a believer in the body of Christ for every angel in the universe.  And this explains why this has been so far one of the longest dispensations going, because it’s taking time to save out individual personalities from the stream of human history that will equal in number of the angels or at least the number of the fallen angels.  This theory has been put forward several times in history and it sounds quite logical.

 

Back to Psalm 33, “By the word of the LORD were the heavens assembled, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.”  This means the angels themselves were assembled and are creatures. 

 

Now verse 7, “He gathers the waters of the sea together as an heap; He lays up the depths in storehouses.”  Now these are translated present because they are participles in the Hebrew.  Let’s go first to a participle; a participle in Hebrew can be two different kinds; it can be a noun form or it can be a verbal use, noun use or verbal use.  When a participle is used verbally it refers to a motion that goes on and on and on and on, it’s the motion picture tense, he was continually doing this.   But at other times, a noun use refers to an abiding character, that means a character that goes on and on marked by a point act. Example: God is called the One who is the creating one.  The Jew would not say God is the Creator like we do; the Jew would say God is the Creating One and he refers to a point act but God’s eternally abiding character is marked with a point act; just like you’ve got indelible… somebody comes along, a little kid for example, he goes into a backyard and his mother and father told him don’t go so that’s why he’s there, and he gets indelible paint all over him, just plastered with this paint, no way you can get it off, so he’s marked with it.  All right, he has an abiding character but he got the paint in just a split second.  All right, this is the same picture of this participle.  God is the Creating One, it doesn’t mean He’s continually creating but His character is marked by one thing that He did at a point in time.  

 

So that’s the noun use and there is the noun use in verse 7.  He is the gathering one of the seas and He is the laying up one, so it refers to God’s character as the One who did something.  Now we’ve got to find out, what is it that He is doing in verse 7.  “He gathers the waters of the sea together as an heap,” it means He collects them.  The word “gather” is the word “collect,” and that is the word used for His work on the third day of creation.  The earth was covered with water and He raised the continents up, lowered the seas, so all the waters gathered together in the oceans of the antediluvian world.  So this is a picture of the work on the third day.  “He gathered the waters of the sea together as an heap, and He laid up the depths in storehouses.”  Remember, this is a point act, not a continuing process. 

 

The “storehouses” are not known for sure but in the antediluvian world the earth was not like it presently is.  If you had a picture of the globe it would not look like the globe looks today; in the antediluvian world you have the globe and instead of having 1/5th land mass, every deduction we can make in Scripture means that the seas on the antediluvian world were more like lakes.  And there was a point where the Garden of Eden, and we don’t know where that point was, some suggest it might be on the same form of the globe where Jerusalem now is, that you have a place in Eden and that some way the water came out from Eden in four rivers that went across the globe, and they watered the globe.  Now it doesn’t take too much of a scientist to realize you’ve got a problem here because you’ve got to have a feedback for the water.  This water apparently drains down into the sea, because remember, the globe had to be watered this way because it didn’t rain.  Before the flood there was no rain so the earth had to have a surface drainage system, and out from Eden the water flowed.  That is meant to be taken literally because in the book of Revelation what happens in the new universe?  Waters come out of the New Jerusalem and water the earth.  So God’s original design for the earth was that these waters come out and that they water the earth and that people get their water from Eden, and man was excluded from this.  Remember, the angel threw him out of the Garden of Eden, so for hundreds of years the antediluvian civilization got their water from Eden, but they couldn’t go to the fountain of the waters.  They could only receive the waters by secondary results.  And that, by the way, how water eventually came to be used in salvation. 

 

Then at the creation, God took these seas, evidently if we cut one of them apart it would look like this, they were in a lowland area, and you have the waters draining into them; well obviously the waters can’t forever drain in unless you have a drain in the bottom to drain them out.  And part of the antediluvian system on the earth was that these lakes had some sort of a drain system where the waters would come percolate back down through the earth and there’d be just tremendous reservoirs of water.  And these are the “storehouses.”  So verse 7 refers to both the surface waters and the waters that were underground.


Now why am I going into all this detail? Because it is these storehouses that broke on the day of the flood; it only rained forty days and probably only two inches of rain fell, 2-3 inches of rain so not much water came down in the form of rain.  What happened was that the earth’s surface ruptured down to the very core and these things split up and water just came gushing forth with tremendous force; it must have been a frightening thing to watch.  Now some creationists have felt that these storehouses left scars on the surface of the earth which we know today, and identify if you take a map of the world, here’s Asia, here’s the North American continent, South America down here, there are what we call trenches in the sea, one is down the east side of Asia and the west side of the Americas, and then there’s the mid-Atlantic trench, and there are about four of these, and some have suspected that what we are calling these trenches are the residual scars of the four great rivers that flowed out of Egypt.  This can’t be proven but it’s logical to suppose that the scars of the previous system of watering the earth must be somewhere and must be interpreted so we can make sense of what’s going on.

 

So these are the “storehouses” and the point of verse 6-7 is that our Lord, and notice the word is not “God,” it is “Lord.”  The Hebrew God, the God of Israel, is the one who assembled all the heavens, all the host of them, “He gathered the waters of the sea together as an heap,” speaking of the antediluvian world.” 


Now verse 8, “Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all the inhabitants of the earth stand in awe of Him.”  Notice the word… well it isn’t here, it should be “for.”  They stuck it in verse 9, all right.  Verse 8 is a repeat of the call to praise.  You notice verses 1, 2 and 3 was imperative, do this, do this, do this because, verse 4-7.  Now verse 8 is another one of those, kind of a call to praise stuck in the middle of the cause to praise section.  “Let all the earth fear” or respect the authority.  Now you must get this point.  Respect the authority of who?  Of… not God, it is not Elohim here, it is Yahweh, and that is the God of Israel.  Here you have the magnificent missionary mandate of the Old Testament.  Don’t ever think that the Jew was provincial and he was only concerned with salvation inside the boundaries of the nation Israel.  He was concerned with what was going on in the world.  And his basis for concern was the doctrine that you see in Psalm 33.  Psalm 33 under­lies the missionary mandate to Israel to be a witness in all the nations.  Here’s the basis for missionary activity in the Old Testament, that the nation Israel was not to be just ingrown on itself but it was to have an outreach to all the nations of the earth because only the God of Israel was the God that was real.  All the other gods were wrong.  This should strike you as highly offensive, verse 8. 

 

Verse 8 is just like John 14:6 is in the New Testament.  “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by Me.”  That’s what Jesus Christ said.  No man comes except by me.  Now verse 8 is essentially saying the same thing, Jehovah is the way, the truth and the life, and all the earth must come to God through Him.  That’s what verse 8 is saying, so here you have the missionary mandates enforced in the Old Testament and then you have the insistence on our God is the Creator.

 

May I suggest that tying this together, it is because Israel had the prior conviction that the God she worshiped in her Bible was the God of the universe that gave her, at least the prophets and the spiritually alive people, it gave them the conviction, the peace, and the stability to move out.  May I also make an application, that if we Christians who are the people with the Bible in our day do not have the same conviction of the truths of Psalm 33, that our Lord Jesus Christ is the God of the universe, who designed the galaxies by His Word and who is the Creator, then may I suggest that we too will never have a strong missionary or evangelistic outreach; there’s no way we can do it.  The only way is to be really certain in the depths of your soul that you really honestly believe on the basis of all the evidence that the Lord Jesus Christ is this God.  If He’s something else to you and if He’s just a human teacher, or He’s kind of a semi-god or something like that in your thinking, you’d best sit down and study, study, study, and pray, pray, pray until you get straightened out, and forget any form of evangelism until you get that issue straight.  But if you do have the issue straight it makes all the difference in the world.

 

Next week we’ll pick it up at the end of verse 8.