Psalms Lesson 28

Psalm 135:7-21

This will be the last Psalm that we will work on as far as the individual descriptive praise Psalms are concerned. We may comment a little bit on Psalm 136 tonight but next week we’re going to shift into a new category, the national Psalms. So far the Psalms have been individual, and his location in history. Beginning next week we’ll shift completely out of this and go over to the national, when the nation itself comes to praise. When we get into this I will try to have some points, some of these national lament Psalms and some of the national declarative praise Psalms have been put to music by some very competent musicians and we’ll try to show you what can be done with some of these musically. But the national Psalms are not a category so rather than confuse you tonight I’ll just finish up Psalm 135 following the same outline that we have been working with and that is that a descriptive praise Psalm has three parts, a call to praise, a cause of praise and a conclusion and the conclusion is a variable thing.

We outlined Psalm 135; verses 1-3 the call to praise; verses 4-18 the causes for the praise; and the conclusion verses 19-21. We then outlined the Psalm, verses 1-3 as the priestly servants of Yahweh are called to praise Him. Then we summarized the content of verses 4-18, they are to praise Yahweh because He is absolutely sovereign over all. Therefore the content here, the content section, should show beyond the shadow of a doubt that Israel was monotheistic. That’s the big thing to notice in Psalm 135 and it’s an education for you because this will show you how they stated their monotheism. There’s an art to reading the Bible and people say well, Israel was not really monotheistic. There are two terms that are often thrown around in books and popular writings, one is called monolatry, that means they worship one God but it doesn’t mean they believe that only one God is there; many gods are there but they worship one of them. That’s called monolatry or other men call it henotheism, “heno” meaning from the Greek, one God. Those are two labels for what this is not, so if you see these labels remember that is NOT the case of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament is solidly monotheistic. The problem that we have in the 20^th century is the word “theism” because we have reserved the word G-o-d for one, the absolute God. In the ancient world that’s not the case, G-o-d is used promiscuously and without definition. Therefore we have a problem in talking about gods and God in the Old Testament. So Psalm 135 should teach you how His monotheistic claim is stated. Remember verses 1-3, this was the order to the Levites, basically, to do the praising, and specifically probably addressed to the Levite choir, who were in charge of the Tabernacle worship. And that we find from the phrases in verse 1, “O ye servants of the LORD,” general phrase; then verse 2, “You that stand in the house of the LORD,” and then verses 19-21, O House of Israel…, O house of Aaron…, O house of Levi, Bless the LORD.” So it’s emphasis on priestly-ness, which should tell us that as believer priests we do the worship.

This should also clue you to the fact that since every believer is a priest, that means that every believer can worship and therefore it also shows you that every believer does not need a stained glass “sanctuary” (quote, end quote) in which to do his worship. People have a thing about this but nevertheless, remember that some of the greatest worship has been done in history in caves, in prisons, in all sorts of places. If people can worship catacombs, in the middle of the coliseums to the accompaniment of the roar of lions, and to other un-worshipful atmospheres and situations, then why is it so impossible to worship in this building or other places; why is it that one needs a three million dollar cathedral before one can worship. You see, there’s something wrong with that mentality; because obviously it doesn’t account for the fact that four or five generations of Christians in the first century had no cathedrals and stained glass windows. One wonders how they ever got their worship finished…. But they managed to do quite well, in fact, a lot better than people in proceeding generations.

In verses 4-6 you recall the summary. This is a summary statement that Jehovah is absolutely sovereign. That is the summary statement; verses 4, 5 and 6. So a descriptive praise Psalm in the cause section has first a general statement and then it has an amplification of this general statement. Again the statement is there and then the amplification tells you what the composer meant when he gave his general statement. Which should therefore show you the tremendous loading up in the Bible of verses; the Bible emphasizes this. You have a general sentence, it’s just subject and predicate, and then you have a massive elaboration on the thing. And that should clue you to the fact that there’s tremendous content behind statements in God’s Word. We’re going to see some of that tonight.

We said verses 4-5 and 6 are summary statements. Verse 4, “For the LORD has chosen Jacob unto Himself, and Israel for His peculiar treasure.” That emphasizes the election of God, the election or the sovereign choice. You might think of this in terms of your election; you’re “in Christ,” one of the things for which you can legitimately praise God is your election. God chose you, by name, not as a number, He didn’t shake a hat and your name dropped out. It’s a sovereign intelligent choice that God made about you personally. Every person in the universe has a name, astounding as it may seem every person has a name. We don’t know what our names are but the book of Revelation says in the future He will give you your name and when you receive your name then many of the trials that you had to experience in your life will all of a sudden make sense because you’ll see, since the name depicts your particular character and soul for all eternity, all of the pressures and the trials and everything else that God has dropped in your lap to build you for eternity will then fit together. And probably the giving out of the names will be the triggering device for the believer’s praise throughout eternity, that when you stand before the throne and your name is…that’s your name, all of a sudden you sit there and you look at it and look at it and now it all makes sense. So the name, the giving of each believer’s name is a very important aspect of your future destiny. So the choosing in verse 4 emphasizes God’s sovereignty in the area of election.

Then verse 5, all still part of the general sentence, “For I know that the LORD is great, and that our Lord is above all gods.” There is an excellent illustration of the use of G-o-d in the Old Testament. Sure they used the word G-o-d for things other than what we do, but that refers to what we would call anything above man. The word g-o-d was used in three ways in the Bible. It was used for God; it was used for angels, and sometimes it was used for men. So the word g-o-d is used for those three categories. So every time you come to the word “Elohim” you’re going to have to check the context to make sure what the usage is. And verse 5 is a statement of monotheism, not monolatry and not henotheism—monotheism, “I know that the Lord is great and He is great above all gods.” Well, if God is great above all gods then there’s only one God. We’ll get into that a little bit more in a moment.

Verse 6 is the superiority of the Lord in nature, “Whatsoever the LORD pleased, that did He in heaven, and in earth, in the seas, and all deep places.” Last week we had a discussion about all four of those areas, heaven, earth, seas and deep places because in the ancient world all of those places were places where God ruled. There was a god of heaven, Anu in the Mesopotamian area; the god of the sea was known as Yamm; the god of the deep places was [can’t understand word] or the god of death, the god of the deep, the god of the land, you had gods like Dagon, or gods of fertility and so on. So all these places in verse 6 are deliberate digs at human viewpoint religion, and you’d never read verse 6 and get that out of this if you weren’t first aware of the fact that in the ancient world every one of those four places was a place where a god ruled or many gods ruled. So you’ve got to catch what’s happening here or it will slip right by you when you read it and you’ll never get the joy and meaning out of this Psalm that the Holy Spirit intended you to have. You’ve got to see that verse 6 is an apologetic that is directed against the religions of the world. The Bible does not love everybody and love things that just happen to drop by. The Bible is not passive, it’s active and it challenges the environment and here is an active challenge to the human viewpoint culture of the time.

Then verse 7, the beginning of the amplification, and verse 7 is an amplification of verse 6, that Yahweh is sovereign in nature, and we said the picture of verse 7 is a picture of a thunderstorm, “He causes the clouds” literally “to ascend from the horizon,” the idea here picturing a growing cumulus and they would have seen this, remember most of their showers were caused by these real puffy cumulus type clouds, they look nice until you fly near them with an airplane and they’re not very nice then. But verse 7 is a picture of the cumulus as it grows and grows and builds up and finally becomes a thunderstorm. Notice too, “He brings the wind of His treasury.” Now the reason for that word “His” is again an apologetic against the ancient world because in many mythologies you would have the four winds and they would be gods or goddesses. And they had their own little deal going. Well, here is another flap at it; the treasuries from which the four winds come are also Yahweh’s.

Notice in this Psalm how God is addressed. What name does God have in this Psalm most? Elohim or Yahweh? Just scan the Psalm what name is He called by here? Elohim or Yahweh. Remember Yahweh comes over in the King James as LORD and Elohim, the Hebrew generic name for God comes over as God. What’s the name most used in this Psalm? Yahweh; Yahweh’s name links Him to Israel. If they had used Elohim that would have been acceptable in many cultures but to use Yahweh means the God of Israel. So you see every one of these statements is flak, flak, flak, flak, flak at the human viewpoint culture around. It’s stated to deliberately offend relativists. And this is the way we have to state the Word of God today. There is no other way of salvation outside of Jesus Christ; there is no other legitimate religion apart from Christianity. Now this goes completely to American culture and we as Americans are very highly susceptible to human viewpoint in this area, it’s part of our national fiber. Because we have freedom of religion in the country therefore the tendency is to say all religions are of equal value. That’s an illegitimate conclusion. But as Americans we have this built into our fiber, religious tolerance. Well you can tolerate the person believing what he wants to, but that’s different from saying I’m not going to evangelize them and I believe there’s only one answer in this area; two plus two can’t be four, five, six or seven. It’s got to be a number and it’s got to be definite. And if it isn’t we can just forget all of mathematics. It’s the same thing in religion, if one religion isn’t right then forget it because you’re not going to get the answer anywhere.

So verse 7 refers to the Lordship of Jehovah in the earth. Now since we’re not going to go on with the types of individual lament Psalms I’m going to take time to elaborate this claim the Old Testament makes for Yahweh’s sovereignty in nature. So we’re going to elaborate verse 7 more than we did last week, with specifically pitting the theme that Yahweh is sovereign over all nature forces. The reason is that in the ancient world nature forces, or nature was conceived to be the divine and man was subject to nature. That is, until the Greeks started and after the Greeks then you have man and he’s over nature, for a while, with some hesitancy, but the idea is that generally the Greeks deified man’s ability to reason, whereas the ancient world didn’t do that at all, they just put man within the whole system of nature.

Now if that’s the case, then nature forces would tend to be worshiped. So you have idolatry that focuses on concrete nature forces, the sun, the moon, the stars of heaven, anything that strikes your fancy in nature as kind of outstanding. These would become gods and deities. Now therefore it’s very, very critical in that ancient context for the Old Testament saint to assert the deity of Yahweh over all nature forces. This is a primary claim of the Old Testament. It’s got to be made again and again and again and again because they’re constantly getting hit with human viewpoint, human viewpoint, human viewpoint, human viewpoint that’s trying to undermine the belief system at this point. So I want you to see that again and again Yahweh’s claim to be superior over all nature forces is there.

Now we’re going to go first to Psalm 29:10 where the most extreme statement of this is made, in a statement that is designed, again, to crush opposition. This claim is utterly antagonistic to every religious system of the ancient world. Just like if we articulate the gospel today it will be utterly antagonistic to every system that the unregenerate man comes up with. Verse 10, this is the classic picture of the extreme sovereignty of God over nature. “The Lord sits upon the flood, yea, the LORD sits King forever.” Now the word “flood” is the word for “flood” or deep, it is also repeated in verse 3, “The voice of the LORD is upon the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD is upon many waters.” Why do you suppose that the most awesome power in the ancient world viewed from their perspective, from their perspective, the most awesome power in nature was water? From the ancient man’s viewpoint, and thus if you can prove that Jehovah is over the water, then by deduction He’s over everything else. Why does water hold such a terror for the man of the ancient world?

[Someone says something] All right, you have a residual fear, a residual fear of another flood. Now we know that this residual fear was justified, because in other occasions there were minor floods, compared to Noah’s, but which would be very major today. For example, in Greek, Deukalion I think is the name, was supposedly one of the Kings in Greece at that point often scholars say this is the Noah story of the Greeks, it isn’t because they had a Noah’s story and it was before this point. This man apparently, around 1400 BC was a sole survivor when the Aegean’s flooded into the Grecian mainland. And it was a disaster, just wiped out a whole massive area. The Egyptians had very similar stories and we would interpret these stories from our perspective as simply a geophysical residue from the Noahic flood. It took centuries for the planet earth to recuperate from the flood and from time to time you’d have massive readjustment. If we believe continental drift was not slow but was very rapid and it was post-flood, then obviously you had terrific floods and over-running of the continents for centuries and centuries. So the ancient man had a lot of accumulated disaster experience with water. And to him this was the most disastrous thing that could ever be faced. So it is important for the ancient man that we have some control over water.

To get another idea of the fear of water turn to 2 Peter 3; even by Christ’s time the memory, the dreaded memory of the horror of dying by drowning, the horror of perhaps all of society being wiped out by a flood is still embedded in the mind of man. Lest you get too comfortable and think that this is not a real live possibility in our day, some day when you’re near an atlas that gives you the elevation of land, ask yourself how much of the United States would be above water if the Atlantic ocean increased it’s height by 200 feet. And then if you study the eastern seaboard it would be gone; this is the basis for the remark in the 1964 election by Barry Goldwater that nothing would be lost if that happened. The idea was that it would come up all the way to the Appalachian mountains; the whole eastern seaboard, think of the millions and millions of people that would be washed away. New York City would be clean for once. But you’d have a massive elimination by just a very little elevation in height. So still man is very susceptible to the problem of water.

Now in 2 Peter 3:5 notice that Peter wants to remind his generation, who has become uniformitarian in their outlook because apparently for 500 years before Christ, for at least five centuries the earth geophysically had been quite stable and these disasters are starting to face out of man’s memories. “And this they were willingly ignorant of, that by the Word of God the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of the water, and in the water, [6] whereby the world that then was being overflowed with water perished.” And Peter would say we don’t need to see water but fire, and so this is why he adds verse 7, “The heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word, are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment.” So really the modern man should fear fire because the heavens in some explosive way will disintegrate at the Second Coming of Christ and the people who will lose their lives and the civilizations that will topple will be due in some way to fire, not through water. But God has His planned weapon systems to be used in the future, just like in the past.

But our point tonight is to concentrate on the fear of water that has embedded itself into the memory of man, and to do this I’m going to take you through certain passages of Scripture that have to do with the Noahic Covenant as a stabilizing device. First we have to remember that the Noahic Covenant was given after the flood. A covenant had several components, it has certain parties, that is God here and here it would be all postdiluvian man. The covenant has legal terms. What are the legal terms of the Noahic Covenant. What does the covenant do, say, promise, obligate God, etc. There will never be a worldwide flood… a worldwide flood, it doesn’t say there won’t be partial floods. Whole continents can still go down as for example the story in Plato, the problem of the lost continent of Atlantis. So these situations are not eliminated by the Noahic Covenant. The only situation eliminated is a worldwide flood by the Noahic Covenant but God definitely promise the human race will not be terminated by water.

The sign of the Noahic Covenant, every covenant in the Bible has a signature. Since the Noahic Covenant has two parties, and the party that is on the active side is God and man is on the passive side, he receives, then God signs the treaty. What is God’s signature? The rainbow, so we have the rainbow. The rainbow meant a lot to the ancient man and this would be a beautiful illustration for those of you who have children, who tend to fear, to root them back and go back to the stability of the Noahic Covenant, to deal with their fear, that the ancient man had the fear that your children have; he had a tremendous fear that took centuries for him to forget… centuries. And the way that God dealt with a man’s fear was by a promise. And the rainbow was it. Then obviously every Biblical covenant has a sacrifice and Noah made the sacrifice picturing the fact that man cannot enter into relationship with God except there be blood shed for his sin. The only way a sinner can come into God’s presence is by that means so there was a sacrifice concluding and initiating the covenant.

Now let’s look at what happened as a result of the Noahic Covenant. The first thing, Peter said, was that there was a new heavens; the new heavens means after the flood that you have a new kind of climate. The meteorological regime has shifted so that there is now what we would call a seasonal climate, a highly variable climate, a climate with an atmosphere with vertical motion in it, and therefore precipitation. So you have clouds, etc. develop in the new heavens. Then we have the new earth; remember not only are the heavens different than they once were… before the flood there was no rain, there was a uniformly mild climate over the entire globe. Before the flood can anyone describe the kind of land surface? Can you think what the land surface of the ancient earth must have been like? [someone says relative flat] All right, there probably was some elevation, the hills and the mountains spoken of in Genesis 1, but you have the four rivers going across to water the globe and they all come out of Eden. And obviously the water has to circulate around and if it’s not circulating by precipitation it seems to up-well out of Eden; the source of the water is not precipitation, it’s from underneath. And for some reason gravity obviously must feed the water back down through the system somehow. How it recharges no one knows, we can’t even be sure exactly of the configuration. But this is the surface of the antediluvian world and it’s, by the way, this surface that was completely pulverized in the days of Noah and which produced much of our geological strata.

This early earth and it’s destruction are mentioned in Job 22:16. Job 22:16 is important for a number of reasons, one of which is that the earth is here called a foundation and when the Bible says God founded the earth, He founded the land, it doesn’t mean necessarily creation, it can mean the new earth that He founded. So Job 22:16 says, “Which were cut down of old times, whose foundation was overflown with a flood,” and here we have a reference to the Noahic flood, notice the memory is still on people’s mind at the time the book of Job was written. And they still looked back, this is something awesome, something fearful.

Now we come to the most interesting part of the Noahic Covenant and that is a series of verses in God’s Word that speak of a decree that God put into nature, and this decree is used in God’s Word to show the sovereignty and powerfulness of Jehovah. So I’m going to give you a chain list of references beginning with Job 26:8. Many commentators, in fact, most commentators take these references to refer to creation. I do not for several reasons and I’ll show you as we go along.

Job 26:8-10, “He binds up the waters in His thick clouds; and the could is not rent [torn] unto them,” that was not true from creation, so it was only true from Noah on. So it must therefore, in the context here, refer to what happened after Noah. [9] He holds back the face of His throne, and spreads His cloud upon it.” And notice verse 10, this is the key decree. “He has compassed the waters with a boundary, until the day and night come to an end.” Now if that were creation then we’d have a problem explaining global floods. So that is referring to the fact that God has set up the present earth/heaven system so there can’t be a repeat performance ever of the flood of Noah. And this is one of the great comforting things that the God of Israel promised the nations of the earth. Don’t fear, get rid of your mythological fears, of chaos and the watery Tiamut of the Babylonian religion, don’t worry about that, Apsu and the salt water goddess, don’t worry about the chaos, I have placed My decree upon the waters and they shall not violate My decree. So verse 10 speaks of a decree that is going to go on and on and on and on and on, which would prohibit a global flood.

In Job 38:8 we have the same decree mentioned. Again it’s closely in a creation context but that shouldn’t bother us, 2 Peter 3 mentions creation and the flood together. But in Job 38:8 we have another one of these passages, God asks Job, “Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it broke forth, as if it had issued out of the womb, [9] When I made the cloud its garment, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it, [10] And broke up for it My decreed place, and set bars and doors, [11] And said hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.” God encompasses and imprisons the sea. There are spiritual reasons and overtones to this which I’ll comment on as we go through here.

Psalm 74:17, again, these may not seem like very big deals, much of a big deal to you, but just keep in mind, try if you will, to empathize with a man in the ancient world who had this morbid overpowering fear of the flood. Josephus tells us this was one of the motivations for the building of the tower of Babel, is because man built a tower not just to worship God but he built a tower and he closed it with pitch on the outside that he could say if there ever was a flood I’ll crawl up on my tower and I’ll be safe from the water. Psalm 74:17 does not speak of the decree and the water but it says, “Thou hast set all the borders of the earth;” which would be by implication the coastline, “thou hast made summer and winter,” the seasons which would begin after the flood.

Then in Psalm 104:6-9, see how frequently this theme comes up in Scripture. The God who “covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. [7] At Thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of Thy thunder they hastened away.” Now the idea in verse 7 is the fact there was a tremendous noise at the end of the Noahic flood. Some of you probably have read Noah’s flood and never seen this, but there is a wind and a terrific noise that Scripture records happened after the flood. Keep the place and turn back to Genesis 8:1 and you’ll see a verse with a little notice that speaks of something that happened as the flood waters were going down.

This, by the way, is being used by some geologists in the creationist camp to explain wind blown deposits of earth. Vast deposits of earth, particularly visible in the Grand Canyon and elsewhere, they are wind deposited, and in Genesis 8:1 this fits. “But God remembered Noah and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark; and God made a wind to pass over the earth and the waters were assuaged.” There was a tremendous wind, we don’t know what caused the wind except it’s physically very probably if you an entire atmospheric readjustment for tremendous winds, and picked up soil and just threw it for thousands and thousands of miles; picked up boulders if we are to believer some of the geological evidence and just rolled them across the continent. It was this kind of wind as the waters went down. This is one reason, for example, why God had the ark, I believe, land on a mountain. Not only was it a mountain on which the ark could be sheltered from the wind, it was peculiarly shaped, but if he had landed the ark on the plains you’d have to think subjective to this tremendous bombardment of this wind. God looks after every detail. But this tremendous wind in Genesis 8:1 is called the “thunder” or “rebuke” in Psalm 104:7, it’s the thunder. Now how do we connect the word “thunder” and “wind?” Because these same nouns are used again for another particular act of God. Can anyone recall another titanic act of God in history that involved wind. The Red Sea, the east wind that blew all night. When the Psalmist go to sing of the Exodus experience they sing of it as God’s thundering over the waters. So therefore the wind that is given to us as the east wind that blew all night was not just a normal wind, it was a wind that was coupled with violent noise, awesome sounding. In fact, some have suggested that this is where Yahweh got His name from, that the Yah-weh was the fact that the earth itself groaned under the tremendous pressure and the men heard, as it were, in the noise of the wind the very name of the God of Israel, as if the wind spoke His name.

So we have then the connection between thunder and wind, and in Psalm 104, this is the end of the flood, “At Thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of Thy thunder they hastened away.” Very significant because in the ancient world the primary gods were gods of water. Again to catch the impact this would have, in the Babylonian cosmology, for example, you have Anu, the God of heaven, and I can’t think of the God of earth, but they come out of two other gods, a fresh water goddess and a salt water goddess, and in back of them is Tiamut, and this is just watery chaos. And I think the myth is actually recording the flood, the end of the flood as they remembered it in their history. And this would be the heavens and the earth as they emerge after the flood, for the myth personifies all this and makes the primary god watery chaos. See everything comes out of the watery chaos and this is what’s so tremendous about these Psalms, it’s no, no, no, no, there’s no watery chaos, Yahweh, God of Israel, crushes the waters. There is no need to fear this chaos.

Verse 7, At Thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of Thy thunder they hastened away. [8] They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which Thou has founded for them. [9] And Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over, that they turn not again to cover the earth.” Notice the word “again,” that they return never again to cover the earth. So the assurances are given here again.

Turn to Proverbs 8, we encounter it again in Proverbs 8 where we have a very difficult passage, very difficult passage but we won’t go into that except to say that verses 22-26 describe the generation of wisdom before creation. This is one of the most important passages for the grounding of philosophic thought in all of God’s Word. It is a very, very critical passage. Verses 22-26 deal with a generation of chokmah, before all creation. Then in verse 27 it refers to creation, “When He prepared the heavens, I was there; when He set a compass upon the face of the depth;” that’s creation, but verses 28-29 refer to the end of the flood, “When He established the clouds above,” there’s your clouds in the new heavens, “when He shut the fountains of the deep,” literally, that’s the end of the flood. [29] “When He gave to the sea its decree, that the waters should not pass His commandment; when He appointed the foundations of the land [earth],” in other words, the stability that God ordains for nature. [30] “The I was by Him, as one brought up with Him,” etc. etc. etc.

Then Isaiah 54:9, I hope as you go through this you get the idea that this is a very important theme, because it keeps popping up again and again and again, in book after book after book. Notice how God uses the covenant of Noah as a backdrop for His future promises. Here’s your empirical evidence behind God’s promises. “For this is as the waters of Noah unto Me,” what is? Promise to believers to bless them. My promise to you “is as the waters of Noah unto Me; for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be angry with thee, nor rebuke you,” meaning violate His elective grace. You see how the Noahic Covenant is being used as a framework to understand all future promises of God.

Jeremiah 5:22, this little trip through the Word should also warn you about people who say that such questions as the Noahic flood are trivial and we don’t waste our time with them. Would you say that Isaiah spent a great deal of time meditating in the theological significance of Noah’s flood and if it wasn’t a literal flood and it was just an idea not rooted in history, then Isaiah just wasted his time, because Isaiah’s whole argument is grounded on this; not only Isaiah but now here’s Jeremiah grounding his argument on the same thing. “Fear ye not me? Saith the LORD. Will ye not tremble at My presence, who have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it; and though its waves toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it.” There again the decree is staid to enforce God’s stability upon the waters of the earth.

Then we have Jeremiah 33:20 and 25, Jeremiah’s thinking back apparently both to creation and the post Noahic situation here. This is important because of the context, this is the New Covenant. “Thus saith the LORD, If ye can break My covenant of the day, and My covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season, [21] Then may also My covenant be broken with David, My servant.” Now the first time we have the word berith or covenant in the Bible is with Noah and remember Genesis 8:22, I promise you, berith, I promise you a covenant Israel that from this time forth, day and night shall not cease, etc. This all indicates, incidentally, that the earth was much more variable in the antediluvian period than now. Then verse 25, “Thus saith the LORD, If My covenant be not with day and night, and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth, [26] Then will I cast away the seed of Jacob, and David, my servant…”

See, it’s very important that throughout this mentality, you see the mentality, I’ve tried to spend time here to show you the mentality that takes all the promises of God and His covenants, the Abrahamic Covenant, the Law, the Davidic Covenant and the New Covenant, and all those covenants come out of the Noahic Covenant which is a geophysical covenant; it has to do with geophysical forces. And God says look, this is what I have done to the geophysical forces of the environment, now Israel I promise I will do this with you within that framework. So this sets the frame for Yahweh, the God of Israel.

And this is why when we come to verse 7 in Psalm 135 this was not said in just a vacuum, this was not some sentimental musician just strumming this out because it sounded nice to sing it over and over and over again. This was grounded on a thorough understanding that Yahweh, the God of Israel and He alone had charge of nature forces.

Then it goes on in verse 8 of the Psalm, it goes on further, from verses 8-14, and here we have God’s sovereignty not in nature, but in Israel’s history. But please notice the order, first you have to have a sovereign God in the geophysical environment, and after that you can have a sovereign God in human history. But you’ve got to root your God and His promises solidly into the universe. And after you’ve done that then you can talk about God doing this and God doing that, etc. This is what is wrong with Christians who have little faith, and this is where it is absurd for Christians to say well, we don’t bother with the issue of creation/evolution, we just go on to the deep things of the Word of God. Well if that’s the case, where do you ever ground God’s promises? Where’s your ground? If God is going to promise a future resurrection, isn’t that going to refer to something physical; if it really means He’s going to do something in history doesn’t He have to operate through the physical environment? So if you don’t have a God that’s big enough to operate through the physical environment you don’t have a God big enough to keep any promise. The Hebrew knew this; this is why in verse 7, he puts that first, and after that then he goes on and deals with the outcome.

Verse 8, “Who smote the first-born of Egypt, both of man and beast.” That makes sense now because he first established the existence of the right kind of God. I like that phrase, “both of man and beast” because you notice the miraculous-ness of it. Can you imagine it, can you imagine God aiming the missiles and aiming the bugs and everything else that He used in the plagues of Egypt so they would just hit the first-born? Now as much as we talk here of Immanuel Velikovsky and his work, one of the most hilarious and sad points of his work is the fact that when he comes to something like this he has to say, though I believe that the Bible refers to catastrophes in history, certainly the first-born of animals and men were not the only ones killed in the Egyptian plague because if it were that, it would have been a miracle. And so that clearly shows that Immanuel Velikovsky is not articulating his theories out of preference for fundamentalist supernaturalism. But the point there is it forces us to say this is miraculous. But why is it unreasonable? Suppose we had a David Hume here tonight and said miracles by definition are impossible. David Hume could only start with verse 8, and the Jew would have said yes, but you didn’t read verse 7, start earlier and read verse 7 and if you grant us the truth of verse 7 you’ve got to grant us the truth of verse 8.

Verse 8, “Who smote the first-born of Egypt, both of man and beast; [9] Who sent tokes [signs] and wonders into the midst of thee, O Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his servants.” Why the emphasis on Pharaoh? Anybody have an idea of why this particular Psalm is really kind of lauding it and saying ha-ha over Pharaoh? Pharaoh was Horus incarnate; if you’ve ever seen these pictures in Egyptian art you’ll see Pharaoh standing up sometimes and from the neck down he’s a human, from the neck up it’s a bird, the falcon. And that is a picture of Horus, it’s saying Pharaoh is Horus incarnate. And then, “Who smote great nations, and slew mighty kings.” Verse 8 and 9 are obviously the Exodus; verses 10-12 refer to the conquest of the land. Verse 11, “Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan, and all the kingdoms of Canaan, [12] And gave their land for an heritage, an heritage unto Israel, His people.” So there is a historic thing.

By the way, does this tell you now why in the Old Testament it’s very important to include the book of the Exodus and the book of Joshua. If you didn’t have the historic books of the Exodus and Joshua could this Psalm have been written, if you had no record of the history? You see why the record of the history is very critical for worship? Because it’s the history record that gives the memory. How can you worship God if you don’t know what He’s done. If there’s no historical memory, this is what Dr. Albright says about Israel, of all the civilizations on earth there has never been a society or civilization that has had the historical memory of the nation Israel. Does this Psalm tell you something, why history was so important to them? It was the only place they could get to know God.

Verse 13-14 now look into the future, see the extrapolation that goes on here. It looks into the past and now verse 13 comes up to the future, “Thy name, O LORD, endures forever, and Thy memorial, O LORD, throughout all generations.” And then it says, [14] “For the LORD will judge His people, and He will repent Himself concerning His servants.” Now our connotation of the word “judge” is bad, God’s going to judge us, but the word “judge” doesn’t mean that, it means judge in the sense of the book of Judges, deliver, He will enforce righteousness and justice; he will judge His people, He will bring them out of their unjust bondage, that’s the flavor of the word. And it’s future, meaning that this Psalm was probably written in what era of history, if they’re looking forward to God coming to judge His people. Now we don’t want to pin it down, we can’t even pin it down by a century but can you kind of hit a bracket on this in history; when do you think this Psalm was [can’t understand word].

[someone says something] It has to be after when…. After Saul, okay, it could be around Saul’s time when you had the Philistines oppressing. That’s one area of history. Another area of history far after David would be when? [someone says something] All right, or even before when the Assyrians started to gain control, more and more control, so let’s say around 750 BC all the way down to 586 BC. Why do we know that 586 is a terminus ad quem, that is a point after which it couldn’t have been written? What is it about the Psalm that tells you this? [someone says something] Okay, what happened to the temple in 586 BC? It got zapped. So we’ve got two points of history, probably this occurred in this last era, somewhere in there, but the Holy Spirit hasn’t preserved any more finer point so we’re stuck with that.

Now if verse 7 amplified verse 6, and if verses 8-14 amplify verse 4, then verses 15-18 must amplify verse 5. See the argument? Verses 15, 16, 17 and 18 is now a full scale attack upon the deities; notice how beautifully logically this Psalm flows. It starts with God’s sovereignty in nature; then God’s sovereignty in history, and now it comes to the idol. It’s just like the Psalmist and the choir has been saying God did this, God did this, our God did this, our God did this, no idols, what have you been doing. You see, it’s a magnificent sarcasm here. And it would have been all out of place had verses 15, 16, 17 and 18 been put first. These verses are put last, after the magnificent picture of God working in His sovereignty throughout nature, and history, and now let’s turn to the idols, the Psalmist is saying, let’s see what they’ve done.

Verse 15, “The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.” In our own generation it would be the works of men’s brain and their false concepts. [16] “They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; [17] They have ears, but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths.” And that’s also the connotation they don’t speak means they don’t reveal, the idol never talks to them, he never tells them anything. And notice the fact, and here’s a very important point, be sure you get this point. Verses 14 15, 16 and 17, in order to be a valid argument, had to have been defended in history because these could have been easily refuted. A priest of Baal could have said no, our god talks, come on down, we’ll show you. And the Jews would not have been naïve enough, because most of them were interested in Baal anyway. The very fact that verses 14-17 could be made and gotten away with shows you there was a felt difference between the God of Israel and the gods of the heathen nations at this critical point of verbal revelation. This was a tremendous difference that was defensible on the basis of empirical evidence in that day and age.

Like, for example, the resurrection of Christ was a claim that any nitwit in Jerusalem could have disproved in ten minutes; all that would have had to have been done was for them to lead an investigating party and say there’s the tomb, open it, and look. Any nitwit could have disproved the resurrection of Jesus Christ but nobody did it. And we know certain individual political parties, from the Gospels were definitely interested in disproving it. So down through history Christianity, God in the Old Testament, God in the New Testament, has doled out to us gracious amounts of empirical evidence and our opposition has never dealt with those and can’t.

Finally the conclusion to this section, verse 18, “They that make them are like unto them; so is everyone that trusts in them.” You know what that is? That’s the ultimate in sarcasm because can you imagine a man who has a mouth but can’t speak. That would be a person who’s dumb. A person who has eyes and can’t see is blind. And a person who has ears and can’t hear is deaf. And a person who has no breath in their mouth is what? Dead. Do you catch the sarcasm of verse 18. It’s just beautifully stated. And can you imagine, they sang this; this was in their hymnal, they had sarcastic hymns they sang. Probably had some believers going you Levites, God’s going to deal with you, you can’t have sarcasm and be filled with the Spirit.

Verses 19-21, “Bless the LORD, O house of Israel,” in other words, now verse 19 comes along and says see, here’s the argument, now priests, go ahead, go to it! See, there’s a defiance in this last point, it says we’ve given you the argument, go ahead, make it loud, so loud the whole Mediterranean coast can hear this. There’s an aggressiveness in all this. Turn up the volume, let them all hear it. That’s the spirit behind this. Verse 21, “Blessed be the LORD out of Zion,” see how it concludes, “which dwells at Jerusalem.” That’s the temple; Zion in here is a term that is used of the temple itself, the temple located on Zion, which by the way shows you, it eliminates that other time gap between Saul and David, so it definitely would argue this Psalm is late.

“…which dwells at Jerusalem. Praise ye the LORD.” Hallelujah!

That will be the end of the individual Psalms and next week we’ll start with the national Psalms.