Psalms Lesson 25

Psalm 138:2-8

Psalm 138 is a declarative praise Psalm and we’ve gone back to this category because this was a Psalm that I gave to see if you could do an analysis in your own. As I said last week, it wasn’t such a great choice because Psalm 138 is a quite difficult Psalm to work on. And we broke Psalm 138 down; verses 1-3 we said David vows to praise Yahweh before the world’s false religions because Yahweh has revealed His name through His words and works. And then the second section was verses 4-5 and we entitled this section: all the kings of the earth will hear thereby and then they too will praise Yahweh because of His revelation and His name. And then part three, verses 6-7; because Yahweh is such a God, David has confidence that Yahweh can deliver him from danger. And finally the fourth part, verse 8 was a closing petition.

If you look carefully at Psalm 138:2, the verse we spent so much time on last week, that we might understand it and not just read over it for the sake of reading, remember that this verse had a tremendous message in the last clause and it’s a message which unfortunately the way it reads in the King James is a heresy because in the King James it says: “for You have magnified Your word above all Your name.” And the word “magnify” was the Hebrew “ow” and when this is used with the verb to magnify it always means to fight, it’s a military term and it means to oppose. So we have to spend considerable time in figuring out what is happening in verse 2 because something’s happening that’s very unusual and to leave it in the way the King James does, “For You hast magnified Thy word above all Thy name,” would read as though God opposed His own nature for the word “name” means God’s essence, that God’s Word opposed His essence.

And so because this phrase is an unusual one we had to work with it a little bit and down through church history men have been troubled with this phrase, as witnessed by the fact that the Septuagint and other translations, Jerome, and so on, have tried to fudge the text. Now when you study seriously in the Scriptures, from the standpoint of the original languages when you first learn how to do this the temptation always is when you come to a difficult section to fudge the text; this is always a natural temptation. But God’s Word was left in its present state by the Holy Spirit and we be best before we concern ourselves with how we can fudge our way through we had best just see if we can struggle with what the Holy Spirit has left us with and not try to second guess the Holy Spirit.

And so in doing this we then came across a tremendous message for we find that when it says “Thou hast magnified Thy word” it can mean “with Thy name” in the sense that we use “with” as an instrumental in English language. “Thy word by means of Thy name hast Thou magnified,” and that is a tremendous statement because what this means is that God’s nature is the means of vindicating His Word. So you have God’s essence, God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, immutable and eternal. God is all these things. Now if God is these things and He makes a promise to us, then His character stands behind His promise. And His promise will be brought to pass by the full strength of His nature and that is the meaning of verse 2, “Thou hast magnified Thy word” or promise “by means of Thy nature,” or “with Thy nature.”

Now there’s another way that “ow” can be interpreted and it’s not in conflict what I just said, it supplements it and that is “Thou hast magnified Thy word,” not with, but “on account of Thy name.” And there’s a similar principle involved here and that is that God is immutable; His character never changes, He is absolutely loyal to what He has said and so therefore God makes a promise and if He violates that promise and He doesn’t answer that promise then there’s something wrong with God’s nature and it breaks down His attributes. So one of the fantastic things about seeing the word “God” is the promise that is built upon God’s essence is in your prayer life.

And here’s the application: When you pray and you have a request to make, first of all, you’ll find that many of you are praying too generally, you do not know how to pray specifically. The petitions you make are so general you’re never going to see answers to them and if you saw an answer to them you couldn’t tell it was an answer to them. God make the sun shine tomorrow, we’ll, that’s a general petition and it’s not very specific and you’re never going to tell whether God answers it unless everything is black at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, there is no way you can tell whether God’s answered that petition; it is too general. And God never intends us to pray in generalities, He wants to be prayed to in specifics. So that’s the first thing about prayer.

But the important thing as you will learn is that when we do pray to God we have a lever we can pull and the lever that we pull is His promise and behind the promise is [can’t understand word/s]. So in effect when we come to the Father with a petition we are saying God, You have to answer this because if You don’t answer it violates Your character. Now if you can design a petition, and by the way, this isn’t just thought up as you sit in a prayer group. You watch some of those who have worked with the tactical prayer groups, you notice that first of all, when they start their group off they do not think of petitions as they pray; many of them have spent an hour or two before the session, sometime during the week, to design the petition. Like you sit down and write a formal letter, you think how you’re going to word it, you think of the logic involved in it, and therefore even before they begin their prayer session have thought about specific petitions. Not only have they thought about specific petitions but they have thought why these petitions should be answered, and so they’ll have a specific petition here and then afterwards there’ll be some verses, or some theological doctrinal principles why God should answer that petition. Now this is true Biblical prayer and it’s miles away from what is usually encountered in fundamentalist Christian circles. It’s because we have not examined the Psalms for one reason, this is where a lot of this came out, when we started working with the Psalms a lot of people realized that we had something missing in our lives and that was the fact that we did not take God in a very personal way.

See, there’s a heresy in Christian circles. God is immutable; God is omniscient, and because God is immutable and God is omniscient it means that God knows the petition before I ask Him and therefore I do not have to ask Him. But asking God with a petition is not informing God, that’s true, God does know what you’re going to say, you’re not telling God something new when you make a petition to Him. What you are doing is you are coming to Him and trying to address His will, not His mind. You’re not adding a thing to God’s omniscience, He knows, yes, your prayer petition but God isn’t just one big computer with a mind, He’s a person with a volition. And so when you come to God in prayer you are addressing a volition, not just a mind. And that’s the difference; we are not talking to a super IBM machine. We are talking to a person who has a volition like ours, because we are mad in His image. And therefore when we make our prayer petition there’s an active choice or rejection involved on God’s end of the line. On our end we design the petition, on our end we may be wrong in the way we design the petition; on our end there may be a lot of things that are wrong but one thing, when we make a petition at our end of the conversation we have exercised our volition and on the other end of the line is God who has His volition that He exercises in response to ours. And I find that this is a very difficult… we have people that have been involved in the tactical prayer groups and still have resisted this and I sympathize because it takes time to let the Biblical truth leak down into your brain enough to purge out all of the non-Biblical material that’s gathered there. So this is the thing that you want to see about prayer, and when we come to these declarative praise Psalms, such as Psalm 138 you see this very much and we’re going to see it tremendously in verse 8.

Verse 2 we concluded last time and verse 3 was the last part of the introduction. Verses 1-3 we entitled David vows to praise Yahweh before the world’s false religions because Yahweh has revealed Himself. If it were not for verse 3 we wouldn’t know exactly that this was a declarative praise Psalm. What about verse 3 tells you it’s a declarative praise Psalm instead of a descriptive praise Psalm. [someone says something] All right, how do you separate and it’s important that you know what kind of a Psalm you’re looking at, how do you separate a descriptive praise Psalm from a declarative praise Psalm is that a declarative praise Psalm always refers to a point event in the life of the psalmist and he’s concerned with deliverance in that point event. But a descriptive praise Psalm is an abstraction from many events, and they’ve been all put together in the form of a principle. So a descriptive praise Psalm emphasizes a principle out of the historical revelation of God, whereas a declarative praise Psalm is a personal thanksgiving, a response to a point act of deliverance. And in verse 3 you’ve got a point act deliverance.

Verse 3, “In the day when I cried, You answered me, and You strengthened me with strength in my soul.” Now this is another verse that causes problems. We have a difficulty again in the text and as always with a difficulty there’s great reward for the believer who has the discipline and the patience to dig. And when we dig we’re going to find some treasure here because the last part of verse 3 says “You strengthened me with strength in my soul.” Now the problem here is the verb “strengthened.” It does not mean strengthened; it never has meant strengthened. This is a verb that the King James translators guessed on when they translated it. The Hebrew word translated “strengthened” seems to mean “cause to tremble,” and it is a rarely occurring word. In other words, this does not occur very often in the Old Testament, but when it does occur it always means “tremble” and by its etymology we know it means tremble. So if this verb means to tremble it can’t mean to strengthen.

All right, let’s look at verse 3 and say how do you suppose, “and you caused me to tremble with strength in my soul,” that seems to leave us up in the air, we still don’t know what that means. The Septuagint changed the rendering to another verb meaning to treat with much care. That’s just a case where the translators fudged to make the thing come out right and it’s not kosher; we can’t fudge to make the translation come out right. So we have to stick with it and see if we can derive the meaning from other uses.

The word occurs in the Song of Songs 6:5 so let’s turn there. Now this is a love song and if I translated these passages literally this church would have an X-rating. Don’t worry, we’re going to; for that reason I’m against X-ratings because who rate things with X have only one thing in mind, they’re some prude that has a few problems with sex and we can have films and books and all the rest of it in our society that advocate murder and they get GP ratings; that’s ridiculous. The whole rating system is an outgrowth of some weirdoes sex preoccupation and that’s how we have movie ratings. And of course it doesn’t mean anything, it just means that everybody is going to go see the X-ratings whereas if they’d just left them alone nobody would know about it. But ratings are one of the most stupid things that have ever come down the pipe and when you hear people wanting to rate movies, look out. Some of the most gross anti-Biblical films have GP ratings. One of the most anti-Biblical films of the 60’s was 2001, A Space Odyssey. There was no sex in that; absolutely none, and it was the most profoundly anti-Biblical film made in the entire decade because it was taking evolution out to its logical conclusion. They knew exactly what they were doing when they constructed that film and it’s a beautiful illustration of the stupidity of ratings.

And yet Christians get high and dry every time somebody mentions something about ratings. The latest one is I was called, Is Lubbock Bible Church going to join in to keep the TV stations from running X-rated films. No, you can turn your TV set off, for crying out loud, is it going to involve the government coming around telling what can and can’t be shown; that’s freedom. That TV station has a right to show whatever they want to show. They can show whatever they want to, you have the freedom not to look at it—exercise it. That’s the way it is in a capitalist environment. Christians can make their waves felt by not buying the product, that’s how you pressure somebody. You get the government where they allow this and they won’t allow that, do you know what they’re going to start tomorrow? They’re going to keep the gospel off. You’re going to create a monster with having the government interfere with TV programming; you just keep the government out of the TV programming. I’ll take whatever they dish out for the right that when I get up on TV I have the right to say what I want to. But this business of censorship is a two-edged sword and a lot of believers haven’t woken up to that, that the very people that advocate censorship toward one thing are going to have it come back on their heads tomorrow.

To get back to the Song of Solomon which would not be allowed on any TV program, or the Christians would raise Cain about it, nevertheless the Holy Spirit didn’t raise Cain about it, the Holy Spirit put it in the sacred canon of Scripture because He wanted people to know the divine viewpoint of sex, and at points in here it’s very explicit. These are one of the verbs where it’s going to describe a ceiling one has in the area of sex and you ought to understand this because you’ll never understand Psalm 138 or David if you don’t. This is going to be a way you can study David’s soul and appreciate what kind of a man it was that was the second king of Israel.

Song of Songs 6:4 is the context, “Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners. [5] Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me.” The word “overcome” is the same verb used in Psalm 138 and it means cause to tremble. “…thy hair as a flock of goats that appear from Gilead.” Now that’s the Oriental imagery. It wouldn’t be much of a compliment and say your hair looks like the hair of a goat; she would be very offended if you did that today but when we get into here I’ll explain the idiom so you can understand what it is. Verse 6, “Thy teeth are like as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing….” And that’s not a dental examination and it’s not there to compare teeth to stupidity or something, it’s a bona fide idiom in the original language. But the point in verse 5 which is the critical one for tonight is the eyes of the lover “have overcome” this person, and it means cause to tremble and it is talking about the physiological response to anticipation of sex. It’s talking about a physiological thing that a person feels in their body, that is the trembling, it is an anticipatory trembling and that’s the verb, and that’s what it means in the Song of Solomon.

Turning back to Psalm 138 what does it mean? In Psalm 138 “You have caused me to tremble with strength in my soul” means David is responding to God’s love like in Song of Songs the lover is responding to the other love in this relationship. And the point is that David has a physiological response; it excites David so deeply that he is moved physically by what God has done for him. That’s what this verse is and that shows you that David was a man of emotions and David wasn’t afraid of expressing his emotions but when we mention emotions we have to immediately understand that David was a man who was a strong believer and he had a wonderful way of enjoying his emotions.

Now to head off at the pass any illegitimate application of what I’ve just said, hear me out. When we go through the diagram that we draw indicating Christian maturity, we start out with positive volition, it leads to an enlightenment of the Holy Spirit in the soul which leads to an increase in the divine viewpoint framework in the mentality of the soul which leads to an experientially love with God and with people, and finally to fulfillment. Now in this situation where there is a genuine love of God there is a submission to His authority. That is the difference between a person who has Christ fully in His heart, and every person has Christ fully in his heart in the sense of indwelling, but here I’m trying to say what Ephesians 3 is saying, Christ is relaxed in the heart, that is, you have a mature believer. In this situation, when you reach this stage there is a tremendous submission to God’s authority.

Now let’s contrast a believer who is mature with a believer who should be mature but is involved in compound carnality and the two stages, love over here, hate over here in compound carnality; when you have compound carnality you have a rejection of God’s authority in the life of that believer, there’s a hatred and a resentment to God’s rightful authority and it is expressed toward everything, anyone who happens to remind that believer of God’s authority, usually it’s against the pastor or against some other Christian person in a leadership position. They have some excuse but that’s basically it, it’s a compound carnal believer who is violating the authority of God and takes that out against other believers.

Now a person who is a mature believer, he’s bows to the authority of the Word of God and to him there’s a joy in submission to God’s authority. When we come over to a believer in compound carnality there’s negative attitude to authority but since the human person was made in the image of God he must bow to some authority and so he bows to pseudo authority and that pseudo authority can be his emotions. Saul was a man who bowed to his emotions. So here we have a king who bowed, in the case of Saul, we have a king who bows to the pseudo authority of his emotions. That is, when he’s involved in a situation he just kind of sits there and see how he feels. And then he proceeds to judge, to evaluate, to run his life on the basis of how he feels. And there’s a believer who is in deep trouble because they are in bondage to their own emotional pattern and it is a very dangerous thing.

However, a believer who submits to God still has emotion but now the emotions are under control and can be enjoyed. The emotions do not dominate, the emotions are enjoyed. So the believer can sit down and emote and have a wonderful feeling and relax and be happy. You can’t truly be happy without your emotions; you can’t fully be a person without your emotions. And here is a believer who is well-oriented, who has a firm grasp of the authority of God expressed in His Word and he can let his emotions go, so to speak, because they have been trained and disciplined to stay in the groove. The other believer can’t allow his emotions to go, it’s like a record. Over here you have a record and the needle stays in the track, and you can enjoy the message and so you sit there and you can listen to this message and enjoy it because the needle stays in the groove. Here is a believer and the record is all messed up and so he just gets static, the needle is jumping from track to track and it’s on full volume, and that’s the way it sounds because his emotions are jumping from groove to groove and that’s all he gets a lot of noise. His emotions are working, yes, but it’s very tragic and this person is a very sad individual because he can’t enjoy life; he can’t let his emotions go, he either has to act like a stoic and suppress them or if he lets them go he gets grrr-grrr-grrr as the needle jumps across the track. But the believer who has the needle in the groove can enjoy it.

And this verse tells us that David was a man who was mature and could emote in response to what God had done. God had done a wonderful thing in his life. And David was not embarrassed to admit that he emoted that he experienced a physiological response to what God had done. And “You caused me to tremble,” what was it? Because of the tremendous strength that God had shown in his soul, probably referring to the establishment of the Davidic dynasty. David is almost overcome in the good sense by his emotional response to God. It was a tremendous thing here and this is actually a measure of a believer. You know this is one of the ways you can tell a mature believer; you can tell how they enjoy the Lord.

How many Christian groups have you been in where the conversation could last over 60 minutes on some major topic of great significance. What usually happens in the Christian groups, oh did you hear what so and so wore to church on Sunday, or did you know that so and so didn’t shake hands with so and so as they went out the door, or did you know this or did you know that, all these profound items for discussion. You can always tell the spiritual temperature of a Christian group by asking this question: how much are these people enjoying the Word for the Word’s sake, not just talking about I’ve got a burden I’d like to share with you, nothing like that, though it is very important to share the word. I’m talking about a relaxed environment that goes on by the hour where we can have an open discussion. When you see that you are talking about mature believers and if you do not see that and all you hear in the conversation is about who went to church and how many people came forward on the 51^st verse of Just as I Am or something else, then you are looking at a group of spiritual morons and it’s a very sad commentary on Christianity. Here’s a very practical measure of Christian maturity. Do people enjoy it, deeply.

Now in verse 4 we have the next section, verses 4-5. The kings of the earth will hear and they too will praise Yahweh because of His words and His essence. Okay, “All the kings of the earth shall praise Thee, O LORD, when they hear the words of Thy mouth. [5] Yea, they shall sing in the ways of the LORD; for great is the glory of the LORD.” Now can anyone suggest anything about verses 4-5 as to the New Testament. Do you see anything about those two verses that would suggest something in the New Testament, a forward look. Remember we said these Psalms can be prophetic in the sense that they talk about David’s life but they point to something greater. [someone says something] Okay, in the book of Revelation at the culmination of history what is going to happen? Everyone bows their knee, even Satan himself. That’s not universalism, we’re not teaching salvation of all, we’re saying that all men will praise, some will have to have their knees bent and others will bend them voluntarily but all will be on their knees praising the Lord Jesus Christ. Now verses 4-5, though applicable in David’s day, are fulfilled far from David’s day. They point forward in history. And here is one of those cases in the Old Testament where you begin to get this forward look.

And by the way, this also shows the missionary emphasis in the Old Testament that Israel was not sent out to the nations such as in the Church Age but the nations were commanded to come to Israel and learn from Israel because it says these kings are not going to do it until “they hear the words of Thy mouth.” Now where are they going to “hear the words of Thy mouth?” What other verse have we covered in this Psalm that would show how these kings might here “the words of Thy mouth?” What other verse has this world global viewpoint? The last part of verse 1, the heathen gods, remember where David was going to do the praising? He was going to do it in defiance of the Gods of the nations, I go before Baal of Canaan, I go before Dagon of Philistia, I go before whatever the gods are in such and such a country, and there I praise. Now it doesn’t mean that David literally has to geographically go to that point, though David may have visited these countries. It means that in the face of the emissaries, in the face of the tremendous international commerce, etc. David would praise Jehovah over and above these. This would be the dogmatism of the Old Testament. Remember I said this is the John 14:6 of the Old Testament, that Israel knew that she was right and all nations wrong.

Now verse 5, “They shall sing in the ways of the LORD,” notice it says they shall sing “in” the ways of the Lord, it means that their hymns will be doctrinal in that the hymns will be sung in line with the ways of God. Some of the hymns in our hymn book are emotional in the bad sense of the word; they are basing everything on how I feel. How you feel has nothing to do with it, it is the facts behind Christianity that is everything; the fact of the resurrection, the fact of the death of Christ, whether you feel it or not is irrelevant. So here when we’re talking about singing in the ways of the Lord, he is intending that the kings not only hear the Word as in verse 4 but by the time verse 5 occurs the kings will have joined in a system of divine viewpoint worship, singing “in the ways of the LORD.” “…for great is the glory of the LORD,” and that means glory is the manifestation of God in history.

Now verses 4-5 look forward to what’s going to happen when he does verses 1-3; verses 1-3 are a vow to praise. When David praises in fulfillment of his vow, then the kings of the earth, verses 4-5 will know this. Now can anyone suggest how, before Christ comes, before He comes, in our generation, how does David fulfill the role of the first 5 verses of this Psalm. How does Christ fulfill and parallel David’s life. If David is a type of Christ and if his life is a fore view of what is going to happen, Messiah, down the line, then how does Christ’s life parallel in this age what David is doing back here? Jesus Christ must be praising to fill out verses 1-3. How is Jesus Christ praising today, His Father? Through the body of the Church, through our lips and through our writings. Wherever you find believers, in whatever religious group, but wherever you find them, you find Christ praising Him. An illustration of this, in the canon was the book of Revelation. The book of Revelation is a revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ to the Church; there He praises God by revealing Himself and the Church carries that out into the world and then verses 4-5 are being fulfilled partially today as men and women respond to the gospel message. So verses 4-5 have a principle involved that is carried out even today.

Now verse 6-7, the next part, here we have a situation that most of you picked up when you analyzed this. What kind of praise do you pick up here? Up to this point it is declarative praise Psalm and has declarative praise in it; what do you pick up at verses 6-7. How would you describe the contents of verse 6-7. Remember what I said the difference between descriptive and declarative; declarative praise is talking about a point event and descriptive praise is talking about a principle. So which of the two kinds of praises do you find in verses 6-7? Descriptive praise, because here you’re talking about principles of God’s character.

Now verses 6-7 are related in the Hebrew. Verse 6 is what we call a kiy-im situation, in the Hebrew verse 6 starts out with this Hebrew word, kiy and verse 7 starts out with this Hebrew word, “im” and a kiy-im combination means that you have a general principle and a specific application. So verse 6 is a general principle, verse 7 is a specific application. Verse 6, “Though the LORD be high, yet has He respect unto the lowly; but the proud He knows afar off.” And then the application, but let’s look at verse 6 first, the principle. “Though the LORD be high, He sees the lowly,” it’s a simple Hebrew verb to see, it means He pays attention to, He sees. “He sees the lowly,” now from your doctrinal background who are the lowly? Let’s not leave it there, who are the “lowly.” What other adjective can you use to describe a person who would be classified as “lowly?” [someone says humble] Okay, now behind all the descriptions what theological principle is operating?

[someone says something] Okay, a humble submission to the Lord and the person who is in humble submission to the Lord can receive what? Grace. Remember James, submit unto the Lord and resist the devil, now that’s a two-fold verse there because you have two sides, you have “submit” and you have “resist.” If you think about it this way, the believer, when he comes to his relationship in James 4 with the Lord, he is a female, that’s why the church is always a feminine noun in the New Testament, he receives, he responds to God’s love, but when he comes t fighting a spiritual battle, the believer is a male; he’s the aggressor and here he opposes Satan. Now, when you are carnal and you are out of it, these things crisscross and reverse and now you resist, you take a masculine attitude toward God Himself and you submit to Satan and take a very feminine attitude toward the Christian life. The roles are completely crisscrossed. And when we do this we resist grace and we submit to human good. See that’s the opposition that’s going on here; either we are receiving grace or we are rejecting it, there is no neutrality at this point. An unbeliever is rejecting God’s grace shown to him in Jesus Christ on the cross or he bows his knee and accepts it. And same with the believer as far as provisions for living the Christian life.

So the “lowly” here, the person who is characterized [can’t understand words] this is an important word, I’m spending time on this because for next week I’d like you to read 1 Samuel 2 and we’ll approach Hannah’s song, this time from the standpoint of the Psalms rather than from the standpoint of a historical book. But it occurs there too. “Though the LORD is high, He has respect unto the grace receiver.” To the “grace receiver; but the proud,” this is the one where the roles are reversed, the grace resister; “the grace resister He knows afar off.” Now this is one of the reasons why David was a great man and Saul was a miserable believer.

Just look at these two roles for a minute and think of this; the grace receiver and the grace rejecter. Here’s David, here’s Saul. Saul was a moral man, he was a man who lived up to any of the moral standards in any community. There’s Saul with all of his human good; moral people have the most difficult time with grace because moral people tend to be very proud of themselves, I am righteous. Now we’re not knocking moral standards but let’s get it in perspective. Saul was a grace rejecter who finally met the sin unto death because he rejected over and over the grace of God because he was confident in his own human good. David knew he didn’t have any human good, he was an open man. David was not a perfect man, he was fully conscious of his imperfections and that was what made David a tremendous believer because he just sat there and drank up grace by the ton. He knew he was thirsty in this department, he knew he had to have grace in order to move and this is why David is a much, much better believer than Saul. And yet often times in fundamentalist circles we have 99% Sauls and 1% Davids in all of our proud moral righteous behavior patterns. So here’s the difference and there’s the principle.

This whole Psalm is talking about God’s grace. You remember I said at the beginning in verse 2, when we talk about “Thy name” it’s a manifestation of revelation of God’s character. What is His character? His character is verse 6, that’s the kind of name He has, grace is His name. And you’re only know the name of God as you know how to receive it and you receive and submit to grace. So, “Though the LORD be high, yet He has respect to the grace receiver, but the grace rejecter He knows afar off.” That is an idiom and it’s a Hebrew thought very literally, when a person is afar off, unless you have a telescope you can’t see them, it was just another way of saying God’s staying away from that person, he stinks. And there are passage after passage in the Old Testament that deal with the stink and the stench of people who reject God’s grace.

Now verse 7 is a specific application of verse 6, where David takes the principle of verse 6 and applies it to his life. “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, Thou wilt revive me; Thou shalt stretch forth Thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and Thy right hand shall save me.” Now the word “trouble” is a word which means to pinch or to narrow in or restrict and it’s talking about the pressures of life. So “though I walk in the middle of pressure, You will cause me to live,” You will bring me into a status of living. This, obviously at this point referred to physical deliverance; it could also refer to spiritual deliverance as he will cause us to stay in fellowship. “You will stretch forth your hand against the wrath of my enemies,” and that is a principle of deliverance in Scripture you always want to see. There is no salvation in God’s Word ever apart from judgment on something. You cannot get liberated from something without that something being smashed.

So with the doctrine of salvation comes the doctrine of judgment and you can’t separate one from the other. It is analogous in some sense to the modern Marxist/Leninists who would argue that contemporary society could not be saved without violent revolution. Why? Because the present capitalist system must be smashed before the dictatorship of the proletariat can arise. So you have to have one smashed in order to save the other. And the Christian message is exactly the same way; you must smash Satan and his system in order that Christ and His system prevail. There is no neutrality, one must be crushed and the other must become victorious. So here this is why, in the context of this, it’s not a violation of the love of God in verse 7 for David to say thank You God because you smashed my enemies.

Who were the enemies in the New Testament era that correspond to the physical enemies of David in the Old Testament era? Just so we’re clear and we don’t go out and slug somebody in the face the first thing after Bible class. Principalities and powers and the rulers of darkness, Ephesians 6. So we pray the same kind of thing, and this is why the imprecatory Psalms are in Scripture. These horrible Psalms people say, well eventually we’ll get into the imprecatory Psalms where there are prayers that God would take the babies, the young babies in these cities and pick up the baby by his feet and swing him around like a baseball bat and smash his head against the wall. That’s what enemy soldiers did when they moved into an area, and it was a quick way of killing and that way they wouldn’t get their swords all dirty, etc. That was the way they slaughtered people and in the imprecatory Psalms there are prayers made that God would do this. Now you’re going to say oh, that’s so horrible. No it isn’t, IF you understand the context and the context, insofar as it applies to us today, is that we are to do the same thing with Satan and his demonic forces. They don’t have physical brains but you can conceive of them that way, picking them up by the feet and smashing them against the wall. And that’s exactly the imprecatory Psalm type mentality.

“…and Thy right hand shall save me.” “Thy right hand” is an expression in the Old Testament that looks forward to Messiah. The right hand, why do you suppose the right hand has a Messianic tone, just think first anthropomorphically, just visualize in a simple every day situation, what do you do with the right hand (most people, there are some south paws). What do most people do with their right hand? Everything, right, just about. Particularly was this used in military warfare; the left hand held a shield and didn’t do anything, it was defensive. The soldier held his shield with his left and with his right he had his spear or he had his sword and that was his offense. And so it was always the right hand that did the action. Now that’s why the right hand visualizing God as a soldier. Every time you see this here, “the right hand of Jehovah,” the idea is that He has a sword in it and He’s going to do something with His right hand. And so eventually He did something in history and that was through Jesus Christ. This is why Christ today is seated at the Father’s right hand.

Now finally verse 8, and this is a closing petition, as we’ve said these Psalms often end in a petition, “May the LORD perfect that which concerns me. Thy mercy, O LORD, may it be forever; forsake not the works of Thine own hands.” I want to ask a question here and see if you picked something up during the Psalm series. Why, in the light of everything that has gone before in this Psalm do we bother to have this petition? Why do you think it was necessary for David to make this petition, after he had all the assurance of verse 2, verse 3, and He knew God was this kind of God, verse 6, he knew that God had respect to the grace receiver, he knew that God did not have respect to the grace rejecter, he knew that if he walked in the midst of trouble God would revive him, why did he close with the petition.

[someone says something] All right, here comes that tremendously personal thing about the Old Testament, that thing that is so hard to grasp living in the 20^th century. The psalmist knew God was that kind of God but he never saw it as an automatic thing; he always saw it as God do it, yes. An illustration from the Gospels; do you remember what Mary’s response was when the Holy Spirit came and said she would bear Christ, and He said you are a virgin girl and you will bear Jesus Christ. What did Mary say back to the announcement, the angel? So be it. She gave her assent and she said yes Lord, do it. Now God had already announced that He was going to do it, why then did Mary say yes, do it? Because whenever God works with us He works with responsible creatures and God is a gentleman and He will never force or work with us mechanically. Yes, God would do what He says He’s going to do in Psalm 138 but He wants David to [can’t understand word] it and that’s the trick in the Christian life. There’s got to be a personal response on our part. We had a discussion a couple of weeks ago about this problem of prayer; well I don’t see why we should pray, why is it necessary to pray. It’s not necessary to pray, as I said at the beginning that God might know it, He already does know it, it’s necessary to pray because we have a personal relationship, not a mechanical relationship. God is a personal God in Scripture. You’ll always see this element come out over and over.

Are there any questions on this Psalm. [someone says something about the literal interpretation of the Bible and the King James version] Literal interpretation of the original text and we try to get the best translation possible. The King James is a good translation, it’s just that at times the vocabulary is bad, for two reasons, there’s Old English and we can’t understand it, and then secondly when they translated it it was by guesswork a lot of times because the translators who did the King James followed a tradition that was developed by Jerome and even back in the Septuagint. They didn’t approach the manuscripts independently, they said well let’s peak and see what the other translators did, and they carried forward a tradition of translation, which by the way, even modern translations do. The RSV does the same thing, there’s a game here that is played where you have the translators peak to see how the translators did before, if they’d just approach the text freshly the Hebrew text, and translate out of that they’d be far more accurate.

Question? [someone says something] Yea, the babies who have not reached the age of accountability would not be held responsible but in the Old Testament when God declared a society unredeemable, which He did on several occasions, Sodom and Gomorrah, the original gay cities, these were places which were declared to be out of bound spiritually speaking and by that it means that the Holy Spirit, and it’s hard to understand this but the Holy Spirit looked at the hearts of the men in that community and said that the sin had progressed to such an extent that they had shut themselves off from grace. Now we don’t dare do that, that’s the prerogative of the Holy Spirit, and we can’t go up to somebody and arbitrarily say hey, you’re beyond salvation, there’s no hope for you. That is not left up to us in the Church Age. But in the Tribulation it happens again because those who receive the mark of the beast are rendered unsavable.

[something else said] The babies, though they had not reached the age of accountability were part of a society that had reached a state of unredemption. The babies might have been saved because they were not held accountable, but the point is that the society was so corrupt they would never have had a clear presentation of the issue. [something else said] If you want to look at it that way.

Next time we want to back to the descriptive praise Psalm because Psalm 138 was just kind of an assignment to work on. Remember the three categories and for next week read 1 Samuel 1-10, Hannah’s song. We already covered it the evening service in the Samuel series but now I want to go back and handle that passage again from the standpoint of it being a psalm and I’m taking you to this so you’ll realize that all the Psalms are not in the book of Psalms. There are Psalms in the rest of the whole Old Testament, there are Psalms in the New Testament. Luke 3 is a Psalm. So read 1 Samuel 2:1-10 and see if you can isolate the three parts of a descriptive praise Psalm. Part 1, the call to praise; part 2, the cause of praise; part 3 the conclusion. And just keep in mind Hannah took three years to write that psalm so see what kind of a good job Hannah did and see if you were there when Hannah finally presented her psalm you could say Hannah, you did a good job and I understand what you did, you have some background to do it and you can appreciate what this Jewish mother did and all that she had by way of preparation.