Psalms Lesson 30

Psalm 44:3-26

Psalm 44 is a national lament Psalm and national lament Psalms are very much like individual lament Psalms, you have a preliminary address, you have a lament, somewhere out here you have a trust section, you have a petition section, and then sometimes in a national lament Psalm you have a praise section, but not always. That’s the difference between the national lament Psalm and the individual lament Psalm. The Psalm before us we divided last week. The address was verses 1-8, the confidence section actually was verses 4-8, you can say the trust section was included within the address section; the lament, verses 9-19; the petition verses 20-26. That’s the structure of the Psalm.

Then we outlined the Psalm and we discovered in the original language the Psalm has what they call a ziggurat structure, it has the first section, verses 1-8 in your Bibles, which is ten lines in the Hebrew, and then we have verses 9-16 which in the Hebrew is eight lines and in the English; and then verses 17-22 which is six lines and the last four verses, four lines. So it’s ten, eight, six four and why this is that way is because this is the literary method that the writers of the Psalms would use when they wanted to emphasize that last part. So that should tell you immediately that the last verses, verses 23 through the end of this Psalm, verse 26, are very important verses because of this set with this pyramidal type structure.

Then last week we dealt with the first three verses, “We have heard with our ears, O God; our fathers have told us what work You did in their days, in times of old: [2] How Thou didst drive out the heathen with Thy hand, and plantedst them; how Thou didst afflict the people, and cast them out. [3] For they got not the land in possession by their own sword,” etc. The big point about verses 1-3, which are five lines in the Hebrew, so again operating in the ten line section it’s divided up into two five line sections, verses 1-3 and verses 4-8. And verses 1-3 emphasize the historical lessons that Israel has learned. Please notice that the basis of Israel’s confidence is in historic revelation… historic revelation.

Now do you see, and you should see, one of our favorite things around here is to develop the divine viewpoint framework. The divine viewpoint framework recognizes the structure of revelation, that it is grounded in historic events. We have the foundation of the divine viewpoint made up of the events between creation and the Noahic Covenant, Genesis 1-11, it includes the fall and the flood. These are actual historic events and they must be historic events or we don’t know anything about the God of history. Now God can write a book and put ideas in the book that we can learn and we can just learn the ideas, but after you’ve done this, what have you got? You’ve got a God of the book, which is fine, except you never really can be sure that the God of the book is also the same God that runs history. So the God of the Bible is a God who’s more than just the God of the Bible, He’s the God of history and He reveals Himself in history.

So you always want to learn to connect Bible doctrine with history. This must be made, and as you read verses like verses 1-3 you’ll notice that these people did not believe because they believed because they believed; they believed in historic revelation. And the great weakness in our own position is that Christian after Christian after Christian still has not linked up doctrine with history, still is living as though the doctrine is just kind of floating off in thin air some place. It is rooted in the historic facts and we have the only religion with a historic base because we have the only religion that can be shown to be true. All other religions are false. So in this situation it’s very, very critical that you as a Christian learn to think on the basis of historical facts. And you must learn how to take the foundation of the divine viewpoint framework and say look, here’s creation and if you believe in creation then we get divine viewpoint, if you do not believe in creation then we get human viewpoint. And that you can be able to handle a problem like this; we can say all right, there’s divine viewpoint and human viewpoint, human viewpoint is built on the hatred and repression of historic revelation; human viewpoint basically is a mental attitude of negative volition; human viewpoint is man’s attempt to destroy under Satan’s teaching, to destroy the evidences, and the evidences are history contained in history, and if you destroy the evidences of Christianity you can’t believe no matter how hard you want to believe, there’s no way. You can have an emotional experience, you can think you believe and just wash out completely. You have to recognize human viewpoint is built not on some intellectual system, it is built on moral revulsion over God showing Himself in history.

Divine viewpoint on the other hand is not afraid to look at history, it is not afraid to see creation, to see the fall, to see the flood, to see the covenant. Divine viewpoint has its eyes open to history; human viewpoint must exclude and destroy history, and the proof of this is that there’s only one nation on the face of this earth that ever had history and that was Israel. No other nation in civilization ever had any concept of history except Israel and those countries who have benefited from Israel. The only reason why America today has a concept of history is simply because of the influence of the Bible, and that’s all. Communism has a historic interest because Karl Marx stole it from the book of Revelation, he stole it from the book of Daniel through Hegel and so on.

So you have human viewpoint and divine viewpoint; whichever way you go it has tremendous repercussions. I want to emphasize this because later on we’ll drill, drill and drill on this thing. The divine viewpoint framework literature is going to drill on this thing so that you will be able to handle the divine viewpoint foundation and all the ramifications. Human viewpoint, if you start here, with this presuppositional hatred, which is a moral presupposition or disposition toward historic revelation, then it affects your view of God, He must eventually become an impersonal process. And that’s evolution, that’s Baalism, and that’s all the other religions. Hinduism is the same thing, your God has to become this; there’s no halfway house, you’ve got to become this. You may try to stave off the results but you can’t, you ultimately have to wind up with an impersonal process.

However, if you start with creation and you start with a God of creation, who is something other than the universal, and is personal, then you have a personal Creator. But please notice if you don’t have a literal creation you can’t have a personal Creator. Shame on believers who think they can have evolution and creation. They’re trying to mix the red and the green and it doesn’t mix. All right, man, what does it do to man? If you start with the human viewpoint basis man can be nothing more than a complex rock, that’s all, there’s no real difference between man and a rock and sure enough, Oriental religion is always basically this kind of thing, that man is not individually significant, he’s just like the rocks, and for this reason you’ve never had social compassion in the Orient except through Christianity. Man can’t be different from this simply because of this starting point, and this is the starting point of Hinduism.

Now if, on the other hand, we have a literal creation and a literal fall, then man will be something tremendous, he can have responsibility or volition; that is a possibility if we have creation and the fall. What about nature itself? If human viewpoint is correct nature is chaotic, it has no structure in it and it is unknowable, there’s no other conclusion you can come to, the cosmos basically must be unknowable if you start with this because you never can be sure that what you’re seeing out there really is there. On the Christian basis nature is controlled and knowable. That’s what kind of nature you have. Pity again the people that think that Christianity conflicts with the basis of science. Christianity is the basis of science.

Now suffering, and that’s the topic for tonight. If you start out with human viewpoint you are going to have a certain view of suffering, you’ve got to have this view of suffering no matter how intelligent you are, no matter how educated you are, it doesn’t make a particle of difference, you have to wind up with suffering. All right, suffering on the creation basis, on the divine viewpoint basis there’s another view of suffering. It is this question that Psalm 44 is concerned with. Psalm 44 is struggling to answer the problem of suffering. Psalm 44 was very critical because it was written at a critical time. After further study I’m convinced that Psalm 44 was written somewhere after 586 for reasons which we’ll go into in a moment.

Verses 4-8 is the section where the Psalmist, on behalf of the nation, expresses confidence to God. Verses 1-3 dealt with the historical past and verses 4-8 deal with the present. The whole vision shifts now into the present tense and here we have the Psalmist saying now look, our fathers trusted in You and we’re trusting in You the same way, except we’ve got a problem, but verses 4-8 do show the trust. “Thou art my King, O God” “O God” is used instead of “O Jehovah” because we’re in the second book of Psalms, the second book of Psalms is the book of Elohim Psalms. The first book is called the Psalms of Yahweh, because this is the Hebrew word used for God and then the second book uses the word “God” or Elohim. So this is the second book, the Elohim book, and anywhere God is pictured in this book it’s Elohim. “Thou art my King, O God; command deliverances for Jacob,” there’s the preliminary petition.

Verse 5, “Through Thee will we push down our enemies,” now the word “push down” means to gore, it is used of an oxen, and it is used of any trampling animal that just gores his opponent, bulls, etc. “…we will gore our enemies,” it just means to crush them, to trample them, “through Thy name we will tread them under, who rise up against us.” In other words, we’ll squash them, and this is what the Psalmist… this militant air of the Psalmist, you’ve got to see this because we’re going to make some very interesting applications when we come to the end of this Psalm, so please notice the language, the goring and the trampling, this is bloody language.

Verse 6, “For I will not trust in my bow, neither shall my sword save me,” in other words, verse 6 shows that he’s clearly trusting, the problem of the nation and notice the singular pronoun, “I,” why is the singular pronoun alternated with the plural pronoun. Why is there alteration between singular and plural in this Psalm? Because in the national lament Psalm you alternate between the historic Jacob, the psalmist who is writing it assumes the identity of the man Jacob and then he oscillates between the man Jacob and the nation Jacob. Jacob can be used for both, the individual Jacob and the tribe that comes forth out of Jacob. And it’s this oscillation back and forth that creates the switch between the singular and the plural pronoun. “I will not trust in my bow,” the country at large is trusting.

Verse 7, “But You have saved us from our enemies, and have put them to shame who hated us. [8] In God we have boasted all the day long, and praise Thy name forever, Selah.” Now that “Selah” is a word that’s debated, nobody really knows what it is, it’s some sort of marker that may have been used in the Jewish synagogue to mark the point where when they read the thing orally and they got to that marker they would put forth a blessing of God’s name. We know that happened later in the history of the synagogues but we don’t know exactly how that word got started, that marker. It’s some sort of marker, it doesn’t mean something, it just is a signal of something. And it’s not a word, “Selah” is just a transliteration, that’s what the Hebrew says, “Selah,” so the word doesn’t tell you anything. This is one of those case the translators didn’t know what to do so they just transliterated it. That’s always a safe way in language, if you can’t translate it transliterate it; that’s why we have the word “baptize.” Do you realize that the word “baptize” is not an English word, never part of the English language. The word baptize was used because people who believed in immersion and people who believed in sprinkling both translated the King James and they couldn’t come to an agreement so rather than say dip or sprinkle, they just said baptize and that just pushed the debate back. And that was a wise policy, no use getting the Presbyterians and the Baptists at each other’s throat.

All right, in verse 9 we come to the next section; this is the second section in the Psalm, Israel laments his defeat and humiliation before his enemies, verses 9-16. Now you’ve got the catch the force of this Psalm; this is one of the most forceful Psalms of suffering in all of God’s Word. I think if I ever teach the basic doctrines again, if we ever work with suffering this Psalm is going to be one of the keys because until verse 8 you have a nation that is perfectly trusting, perfectly trusting! But in verse 9 something radical is happening and that problem of suffering is a central problem in this Psalm and I know nowhere in Scripture, apart from Job, where the nature of suffering is presented so clearly.

Notice verse 9 beginning with an adversative, “But,” “But Thou hast cast off, and You’ve put us to shame, You don’t go forth with our armies. [10] You make us turn back from the enemy, and they who hate us spoils for themselves. [11] Thou hast given us like sheep appointed for slaughter, and has scattered us among the heathens. [12] Thou sellest thy people for nothing, and You don’t increase Your wealth by their price. [13] You make us a reproach to our neighbors, a scorn and a derision to them that are round about us. [14] You make us a byword among the heathen, a shaking of the head among the people. [15] My confusion is continually before me, and the shame of my face has covered me, [16] For the voice of him who reproaches and blasphemes, by reason of the enemy and avenger,” and so on.

All right, so these verses, verses 9-16 all are a lament; it is a compliant of the psalmist and it is mystifying to the psalmist because Psalm 44 is written at a very critical time in history when God is going to enlarge the doctrine of suffering and our understanding of it. And this time happened after 586 BC. What happened in 586 BC? The fifth degree of discipline occurred when Israel went into captivity in 586. In 586 according to the book of Ezekiel, the Kingdom of God came to an end operationally speaking. In other words, between 1440 and 586 you had the Kingdom of God operating. What do I mean by the Kingdom of God operating? I mean the fact that the Kingdom of God operated politically and socially so that you had positive volition on the part of the nation was rewarded with blessing; negative volition on the part of the nation was rewarded with cursing, you had a clear cut moral cause/effect operating in history. There are two chapters in the Old Testament that give you the framework of this moral cause/effect historically when the Kingdom of God was operating. Both were found in the Law. Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26; both those chapters in the Old Testament explain this moral cause/effect.

This is why the Jew, historically had a crisis experience in 586. Psalm 44 is written out of the crisis. All of a sudden, after some nine centuries of operating on this method, positive volition leading to blessing, negative volition leading to cursing, after operating this way for 900 years all of a sudden it no longer operated, and after 586 when people would go on positive volition they would not necessarily be blessed any longer. And this was a great problem, why is it that positive volition does not lead to automatic national blessing in this time interval. What has happened to the moral cause/effect. The Psalm is written at this point, it’s a complaint. It says we’ve done exactly what our fathers did. Who were the fathers in verses 2 and 3, what era of history is that? The conquest of the land; is that during the time of the operational Kingdom of God. So what they’re viewing, they’re coming out of a historical frame of reference that before always worked, now it doesn’t work. And Psalm 44 is their adjustment, why is it that we believe, we trust and we’re getting clobbered. That’s the complaint.

So we’re going to read through the details in these verses and pick up some of the pictures. What has happened here, does anybody know Daniel’s expression, Christ used the expression and Daniel develops it, that is used for the interval of history beginning in 586 and extending down to the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, the fourth in the time of the four kingdoms of Daniel. The times of the Gentiles; the times of the Gentiles began in 586. From 586 forward Israel will always be dependent on the Gentiles for her government. Today the modern nation Israel is dependent upon the UN, Israel was established by the United Nations. And it legally has no basis of its own; it’s established by a United Nations mandate. So the Jews, even to this day are in the land by permission of Gentiles. So when they returned in 586 who was the king that gave the Jews permission to go back to the land? Cyrus, so always, from 586 in time they have had to get permission of some Gentile authority. All right, this is typical.

Now what does this mean? It means effectively that Yahweh, who was their previous King, remember since 586 the Jews have had no king either, you look at the Jewish form of government, no king. Where’s their king, they haven’t got anybody to sit on the throne. There’s only one man who ever claimed to be king since 586 and they crucified Him. The Jews are not interested in having kings around any more. They have gone back into the flow of history. Now, Yahweh is no longer their king, a Gentile will be their king. Now in Scripture, we want to get the typology out of this, the Gentiles are typical of Satan and his work, so that from 586 forward you have this kind of a hierarchy, you have Yahweh far, far above, you have Satan, and then you have Israel. That’s the way it looks from 586 forward. Before that you had Yahweh, Israel, and then you had Satan off to the side and he could either come in and clobber Israel or Israel could clobber him. But that dispensation terminated in 586 so now God is over Satan and Satan is over Israel. And this changed situation is explained in the book of Zechariah and other books.

So you have them always ruled, through Satan operating in the world system. This is why when Jesus Christ comes there’s a contest of who’s going to be the God of this world, and who is it that takes Christ up on a high place and shows him his kingdom? Satan. And Jesus didn’t say they’re not yours, Jesus response to Satan says that Satan was in charge of the kingdom. So Satan begins to rule in a real way at this point. So Satan has a high degree of control, which means therefore that the old-fashioned moral cause and effect is now in trouble. Now you have positive volition that sometimes is blessed and sometimes is not. So sometimes now you have positive volition in Satan’s world leads to a counterattack by Satan. And sometimes it leads to a great and fierce struggle.

And Psalm 44 was written on the eve of this shift, so let’s go through these verses, beginning with verse 9. “You have cast us off, You have put us to shame, and You go not forth with our armies.” “Go not forth” is the verb yatsah, it is imperfect with the Hebrew negative, lo, and lo, when lo is used with an imperfect verb it always means by principle, in other words, an ongoing principle, You don’t go out with us any more. Yahweh is not going out with the armies any more, they’re used to the holy war, they’re used to having victory; Yahweh is not going out as a principle any more with them. What’s going on?

Verse 10, “You make us to turn back from the enemy, and they who hate us spoil us,” again God is embarrassing them, and this is in exact conflict with the Mosaic promises of blessing. Verse 11, “Thou hast given us like sheep for slaughter, and You scattered us among the heathen.” And then verse 12 is a very pathetic way of putting it, “You sell your people for nothing, and You do not increase your wealth by their price.” What it means is that in the battles they are slaughtered; it means that they have no gain, they don’t even cause casualties on the other side. The other side doesn’t have to spend any lives in suppressing them. They say what is happening, this didn’t used to happen, why is this now happening to us.

Verse 13, their testimony goes down, “You make us a reproach to our neighbors, a scorn and a derision to those who are round about us.” In other words, people laugh at them. Look at verse 14, “You make us a byword …a shaking of the head among the peoples,” people pity them, they have no testimony. So verse 15, the subjective effect, very poignantly put forth in the Psalm because now what is the Psalmist doing, he’s coming back as an individual; he’s shifted from the plural back to the singular and now he depicts himself as Jacob; look at me, “My confusion is always before me, and the same of my face has covered me. [16] For the voice of him that reproaches and blasphemes, by reason of the enemy and avenger.” This is what causes his shame. Why, why, why O Lord, are we falling, why don’t we have the victory we used to?

All right, that’s the lament, verses 9-16. The next section is verses 17-22, Israel protests that he has committed no known sin. Now pay careful attention because this Psalm Paul is going quote in the classic New Testament passage on suffering. So you’re going to have a little background and a little benefit for understanding Romans. Verse 17, “All this is come upon us; and yet we have not forgotten Thee,” now I might warn you that verse 17 and 18 are absolutely unique in the Old Testament. This claim in this verse just doesn’t occur; it occurs in close form sometimes a little bit in Isaiah 52 and 53, and Psalm 22 referring to Christ. But here’s the innocence of the nation. “All this is come upon us, and we haven’t forgotten Thee, and neither have we dealt falsely with Your covenant,” Your berith, the Mosaic Covenant. We haven’t broken the covenantal treaty, [18] “Our heart hasn’t turned back, neither have our steps declined from Your way.” All these things are true, we have proclaimed our loyalty, we’re on positive volition. What is happening to us?

Verse 19, “You have broken in the place of dragons,” literally it’s the jackals, the desert birds, “and You have covered us with the shadow of death.” This is the suffering that they’ve experienced, probably the picture of the death marches that they used to have to make out into the wilderness. Verse 20 is the plea for illumination, “If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our hands to a strange God, [21] Shall not God search this out? For He knows the secrets of the heart.” In other words, where have I sinned to cause this suffering to come upon me? Where have I sinned, and it’s the trust, still trusting here in verse 21, that God will search him out and bring to his conscious mind any occurrence of sin.

And then verse 22, the passage that Paul quotes in Romans, “Yea, for Thy sake we have been killed all the day long; we have become counted as sheep for the slaughter.” This is a picture of unmerited suffering that’s going on. Now we’re going to back to Romans and pick that up but I want to go through the Psalm to complete the thought.

So let’s pass on to verses 23-26, the last section. This is the petition section, verses 22 forward. Israel petitions God to take notice of his desperate situation and save him. Verse 23, “Awake, why sleepest Thou, O Lord? Arise, cast us not off forever. [24] Wherefore hidest Thou thy face, and forget our affliction and our oppression? [25] For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly cleaves unto the earth. [26] Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies’ sake.” In other words, you see the frantic need here, why are You sleeping, O Lord, why is it that You don’t hear us, something has gone wrong, something has changed in history.

Now before we go any further, I want to point out something to you. Next time you hear criticism of the Bible, next time you hear somebody say well, these poor naïve Jews, they thought there was a moral purpose in the universe but we more modern people know there is no moral cause and effect in the universe so we don’t believe that. We have become of intellectual age, we’ve given up the childish things that have gone before, it’s the old-fashioned Hebrews that had the idea of a moral universe. Why does this passage, this Psalm argue against that. If someone were to come to you and say oh, look at that, the Bible teaches a moral universe, we know today there’s no such thing as a moral universe, look at Hitler, look at all these people that get away with what they get away with; now it’s just simply not true that the universe is morally cause and effect like this and the Jews were just naïve people that thought it was, but we’re more mature. How does Psalm 44 refute that. Anybody see how to use Psalm 44?

All right, point 1, Psalm 44 cites historic evidence that at one time there was a moral cause/effect that they sensed in history. And furthermore, still part of the first point, furthermore they were aware of history when it was in moral cause and effect operating. The Jews were not stupid. When the history didn’t work the way the covenant said they knew it didn’t work the way the covenant said it. Foolishness that the Jews were naïve and thought the universe was moral when it wasn’t. If the universe wasn’t morally operating, in other words, if they weren’t climatologically, economically blessed when they were on positive volition, and economically and climatologically cursed when they were on negative volition, if that wasn’t the case, then they would have reacted like this before. Why did the Jews go on for ten centuries believing in a moral universe, and then when history went against them they immediately questioned. They themselves immediately questioned the moral background and operation of history. They were the first people to question this. If we had time I could take you into the Mesopotamian text and show you that the Jewish questions raised in Psalm 44 are reflected immediately in Assyrian text; this is the time of the prologue of the despairing servant, for example, in Assyria. So immediately the Jews raised the question, the morality has gone out of the universe, what’s happened. Why didn’t they raise the question before? If these are the kind of people the Jews are, they would have raised this question before. The reason the Jew never raised the question before because it wasn’t a question; the universe was operating morally, so that’s your answer. I have used this a number of times in discussion, Psalm 44 and other Psalms like this, and inevitably you get back this kind of response, they never even knew that the Bible in the Old Testament recognized the difference. See, these critics have just heard an idea from somebody who read it somewhere written by somebody who read it somewhere else who read it somewhere else by somebody who read it in the Bible. It’s about the 5^th or 6^th hand and they have not studied the Scriptures themselves and that’s where you get all this garbage from, somebody repeating somebody else’s vomit.

So the Bible, then, gives evidence that there was a shift in history and the Jew immediately caught it; he caught it immediately, something is wrong. So now he pleads. And notice verse 24 and 25, it’s the most pathetic picture of suffering, “why do You hide Your face … our soul is bowed down to the dust and our belly sticks to the earth,” it’s a picture of somebody crawling in the dust, the lowest, most humiliating form of prone position, crawling in the dirt, that’s the sorrow, that’s the suffering. What has happened.

Now let’s come to Romans 8 and see what has happened. See if you can follow this, this is going to be kind of hard to follow Paul’s use of this Psalm here but if you can just see it it will resolve the areas of your own personal suffering, a tremendous insight that the Holy Spirit gave Paul when he used this here. Romans 8 is discussing suffering. How does Romans 8 start? The suffering passage begins at verse 18, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed for us,” literally. All right, “the sufferings of this present time.” Notice again verse 19, “For the earnest expectation of the creation waits” present tense, in the present time, “for the manifestation of the sons of God.”

Notice in verse 24, “For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen is not hope,” what does Paul mean in verse 24? What does he mean relative to the present-ness or past-ness or future-ness of suffering. What is he saying in verse 24, “For we have been saved by hope but hope that is seen is not hope.” Read on further, look at verse 25, what is Paul doing. “If we hope for that which we see not, we do with patience wait for it.” Doesn’t that tell you that the suffering Paul is talking about is going on and will go on for some time? Hasn’t Paul submerged himself in the mentality of Psalm 44 and said yes, Psalm 44 is the way the universe is now running. The universe does not seem to be running with this beautiful moral cause and effect that we used to enjoy in the Old Testament times. The universe doesn’t run that way, the righteous get crunched, and Paul knew it because he got it a couple of times. The righteous get crunched, they always experience decay in their body in a fallen world. He says the suffering is going on and the hope is not yet seen, we have not yet seen the hope, that is, the hope for the end of the suffering. What is this, it looks like it’s so theological we forget the practical. What’s the hope? Hope for the end of the suffering, that’s what the hope is for. So all the frustrations, all the sorrows, all the pressures, all of this stuff, the hope is that this will stop sometime. Stop if God, stop it! And so he says the suffering goes on and on and on and on and on.

Now, in verse 36, here is where he brings Psalm 44 into his letter. “As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” He read Psalm 44 and he was aware that Psalm 44 raised the problem of suffering. Now, he is saying here that we, he’s identifying the Christians with the “we” of Psalm 44, that the Christians are in the middle of a suffering situation that goes on and on and on and on and on. But, and here’s the radical answer, Paul smashes back with Psalm 44, Paul has an answer, the psalmist of Psalm 44 did not have an answer; Paul has an answer. But be careful because it’s an answer and it’s not an answer at the same time. It answers Psalm 44 partially but not fully, but it is an answer because in verse 37, immediately following the quotation from Psalm 44, submerging ourselves, remember, in the historical mind of the Jew, think of it, in 586, why are we getting crunched, think of the great anti-Semitic persecution; the Jews slaughtered out of the thousands, and out of this mentality Paul quotes Psalm 44 and then he says, verse 36, no, no, see the word “Nay.”

“No” we’re not like the people in Psalm 44, something different has happened to us, because “in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who has loved us.” Now how are we conquerors? How can Paul identify the Christian in verse 36 with the conqueror in verse 37. And I might add, those of you who don’t have Greek, the Greek is very strong on the conqueror here, because the “more than” is huper, it’s an intensifier that is prefixed to the verb and it means strongly conqueror, it doesn’t’ mean just conquer, you know, in the sense you beat them 15 to 14. This means to bomb, 1000 to 1, a shut out, that’s huper conqueror, “more than conquerors through Him that loved us.”

Now we’ve got to figure out what relevancy does Paul’s answer have to the problem of Psalm 44. Psalm 44 depicts historical suffering; it’s primarily physical suffering, it’s primarily political, social suffering. Now when in verse 37 Paul says “no,” we are not like the sheep that are killed all the day long, we are not exactly in that situation, because “we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” Now how are we conquerors through Him that loved us? He develops it in verse 38-39. “I have become persuaded,” that’s a perfect tense in the verb, the perfect tense in the verb, past time, Paul thought about it and though about it and though about it, Paul studied Psalm 44, he had years and years of studying the Old Testament.

Don’t think that the Holy Spirit, when He inspired the New Testament, had Paul sit there and bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, like a computer and he just wrote it down. That’s not the way the Holy Spirit worked in Paul’s life. The Holy Spirit worked through Bible studying Paul’s life. Romans wasn’t written because Paul saw the message written in neon light on the ceiling. Romans was written out of his own thought, and so he says I have thought about this. The word, “I have become persuaded” means I have given much thought to this problem. I have given much thought to this problem, because after all, what about Paul’s life tells you that it was a problem for him too. Can you think of anything in Paul’s life where he had personal contact with suffering? What about early in his life, before he became a Christian. What did he do, what was his hobby? His hobby was getting rid of Christians. All right, when Paul got rid of other Christians and now he became a Christian what do you suppose that must have done to him, thinking, my God, what have I done. Just think of the tremendous effect this had on Paul, how did God allow this. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we could talk to Paul one of the things that he’d say, if we could ask him and say Paul, what were some things that you thought about as you became a Christian, and I’m sure one thought that must have come to his mind was how can a moral God have allowed me to slaughter those Christians? How could He ever permit it, me, to slaughter them, by the hundreds; how did He let me go on like that. He stopped me but He didn’t stop me before I’d already done it quite a bit. So Paul had personal things that caused tremendous guilt in Paul’s soul and this must have driven him to think, think, think, think, think on this. He had to think, not only for himself but for those whom he killed.

Verse 38, “For I am persuaded,” that means I have thought about it and thought about it and I came to a point where I finally got it clear, and now the perfect tense means the results continue, in other words, I was benefited, I am now benefited because it took time for me to think, think, think, think, think until I arrived at a decision and then boom, now I have stability in my Christian life because at least that problem I have resolved. All right, so he says, “I have become persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor thing present, nor things to come, [39] Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.” Now, point, on the end of verse 39 where is the love of God associated; it’s in the sphere, the Greek en plus the locative, “in the sphere of Christ,” please notice that. If you have the whole world, there’s darkness and sorrow and misery and the love of Christ is not shed abroad, this love of Christ is not shed abroad except locally, in this spot, and in that circle the love of Christ.

What his answer to the situation is going to be this: yes, the world is going on as Psalm 44 pictured, there is no clear moral cause and effect in the world, in the world at large there is no moral cause/effect in the world at large. However, there is an area of a sphere where the moral cause and effect still operates. We’ll get into that in a minute but just look at the love of Christ, here is the sphere which is in the world, but we are, once we are locked into this thing we are under that shield. This reasoning, in verses 36, 37, 38 and 39 is the theology behind Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good,” to the world? No, “to them that are the called.” Do you see what Paul’s doing here, he’s not saying, he’s not resolving Psalm 44 and saying everything is nice for the whole world. He says I resolve it only with the body of Christ, with the elect; and in that sphere we have an answer; outside of the sphere we don’t; in that sphere we have at least this, that death… now verses 38-39 look carefully because this is a divine viewpoint analysis of the causes of suffering. You look at this because when you suffer here are the causes why you suffer, here are the agencies involved: death, that is brought about from the fall, the curse; life, life itself can be sorrowful, people wish to die and they can’t die, why do I go on living? “Death, life, angels, principalities, powers,” what are those? Notice of all the things, death and life are only two, “angels, principalities and powers” are three, “things present” means the situation of the present time, or situations “to come.” Verse 39, “Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,” this is a reference against the mythology of the ancient east, again it’s a demonic type thing, the gods of the heights, the gods of the depths, “nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”

So the first solution that he works out to the problem of Psalm 44 is that there is a link between the God who loves Paul, the God who loves us as Christians, and us in the middle of the suffering. Now that is part of Psalm 44 because what was the objection? God, it appears that You don’t love us, You’ve abandoned us. You’ve abandoned us in this chaos of history, everything is going on and we’re getting creamed, where are You. And Paul says well, He is here and He loves us. Now that’s fine theoretically, but now the question is, how is God’s love shown to us in the middle of suffering. Verses 37, 38 and 39 have only to do with the fact it is shown, but it doesn’t tell you where you can find it in the middle of the sorrow and the suffering and the pressures.

All right, he has listed for us where this love may be found empirically. The first thing, verse 26, though we cannot see this, this is one of Paul’s answers to Psalm 44, “the Holy Spirit is,” present tense, “praying for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Now the Holy Spirit helps us with prayer, but this verse 26 is not talking about the Holy Spirit helping you with your prayer life. This is talking about the Holy Spirit making intercession for us with incommunicable, to us, petitions. In other words, we can’t tune in on the telephone line and listen what the Holy Spirit in us is talking to the Father. Now it’d be a most interesting conversation. But the Holy Spirit in verse 26 is making intercession for your sanctification. Now look at that; that’s the one who’s praying for your sanctification. Now you don’t have to dictate to the Holy Spirit how to sanctify you, He’s doing the job as outlined in verse 26. That’s what this verse is talking about, it doesn’t say “infirmities,” it says “our weakness,” singular, our flesh, and He is constantly making intercession for us; we can’t tune in. But that is the source. So immediately we have some rationality in the system.

The Holy Spirit is in control of suffering. Furthermore, the suffering does not come randomly. In other words, Psalm 44 it looked like the suffering would come randomly, just chance. No, Paul says, the actual suffering is being maneuvered by the Holy Spirit. The suffering itself appears to be in direct answer to these petitions the Holy Spirit is making for us. Now this should give you at least one good reason to give thanks in everything, because it tells you that your suffering is an answer to the petition of the Holy Spirit in some way. Now you can’t tell what the petition of the Holy Spirit was because it said it can’t be uttered, but the Holy Spirit was in on it. Now the Holy Spirit doesn’t start suffering, the fall started suffering, that’s the origin of evil, but once evil is initiated then God uses it under His sovereignty and so here we have the Holy Spirit using… notice verse 27, “He that searches the heart,” that shows you the Holy Spirit is praying from what location? He’s praying from your heart, that’s the indwelling Holy Spirit that came to indwell you at the time you received Christ. And that is the person who is making the prayer. He searches the heart. If the Holy Spirit wasn’t in your heart, what’s Christ searching your heart for here? He’s searching your heart so He knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for saints according to the will of God. He knows exactly what petitions fit and I’m happy about that, because if I got in the operation I’d screw it. So don’t worry about how God is going to sanctify you, this verse you should claim, trusting the Holy Spirit to take of that department.

And then verse 28 is logically put in, that’s why “we know that all things work together,” and the “all things” in context is what? What’s the theme of this section of the Bible? Suffering, so that “all things” emphasizes suffering, all bad things. Now the tendency always is in verse 28, oh yea, all good things work together for good. That’s not what it says, in fact, if you were to translate it, really the context means all bad things work together for good. All miserable things work together for good, all pressures work together for good, all suffering works together for good, all life works together for good, all principalities, powers and angels works together for good. Even the demon powers work together for good, they don’t like it but they work together for good. See, that’s what Romans 8:28 says. It must infuriate Satan; Satan must be one of the most frustrated individuals in the universe because no matter what he pulls off it turns out, huh, goofed again. Everything, everything he does is under the sovereign control of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is sitting there, go ahead, doing exactly what I asked for. So this is the tremendous confidence that we have, that Satan is a defeated foe. And then verse 29, 30 and 31, this is Paul’s famous predestination passage which we can’t go into because of time, but notice, that takes it back to eternity; that grounds it theologically and philosophically in eternity.

And then verse 33 and 34, “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?” Now this emphasizes the kind of suffering and the area of victory. Paul nowhere in Romans 8 promises the Christian freedom from historical suffering in a blanket way; there’s no promise in here of that; if there was we’d have some problems why thousands and thousand of believers have been martyred. He is not promising freedom from historical suffering in general, but he is promising freedom from some suffering. Now what is the kind of suffering that he promises victory over. One is in verse 33, ” Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect ones?” In other words, this is an accusation of guilt against the believer; that is suffering that we can master now, we do not have to wait for the Second Advent of Christ, that is not a future thing, that is something happening and can be defeated right now. “Who dares to lay anything to the charge of God’s elect.” Now why is it, do you suppose, that the guiltlessness of the Christian is something that does not have to wait until the future. What historic event has occurred that makes this present now? You’ve got the finished work of Jesus Christ; the finished work of Jesus Christ is a public historic act. Now Christ has not come to finish the rest of the work, has He? He has not come to set up His world government to solve the other problem of suffering.

So you see, look, you’ve got a whole spectrum of suffering, you’ve got historical suffering, you’ve got political suffering, you’ve got disease, you’ve got all these things and over here you’ve got the suffering of the Spirit. Now that is the area that is now cleared; that is the area over which the Christian can obtain freedom. That freedom makes this possible to take. If God had left us without any area, then we couldn’t take the rest of it. What Paul is promising here is a freedom from the sense of guilt, grounded on the past work of Jesus Christ. That part of sanctification is available. “Who is he that charges,” in other words, there’s no one who can charge. Now in the Greek it says “God is the One who did the justifying,” all right, can anyone here explain justification. [someone answers just-as-if-I’d never sinned] No, because if you had never sinned it would be like Adam in innocence; I know this is in our hymnals, everywhere in Christian circles, all over the place, but technically it’s not right and I want to show you why.

Turn to Deuteronomy 25:1, if you are really thinking and if you are personally struggling with this problem it should hit you like a ton of bricks, it’s one of the most powerful doctrines of the Christian faith. “If there be a controversy between men, and they come unto judgment, the judges may judge, and they may justify the righteous and condemn the wicked.” Now there’s the judge, is the judge making the innocent person innocent? Is he making the innocent person innocent? No. What’s he doing then? He’s declaring… declaring, the judge declares legal fact, doesn’t he. What happened if it’s not legal fact and the judge declares it? Mistrial. The judge must declare what is legally factual. If the judge judges the innocent to be innocent of a particular crime, that means that that person has not done the crime, literally has not done the crime. Right? If the person did the crime the judge could justify if he wants to but it’s not valid. This means the person has not just done the crime but he has been positively… he’s been obedient. It’s not the lack of good works either, there’s a positive thing here. It’s not just the lack of negative either, he has been obedient to the Mosaic Law in context here.

All right, now, question, how can this work for you and for me since we know we’re sinners. How can the Father declare us righteous when we’re not? What’s happening here? The doctrine I’m looking for here is the imputation or crediting… crediting of Christ’s plus R to us. Here’s a believer, Jesus Christ dies on the cross and His absolute righteousness is transferred to our account; at the split second the Son transfers His righteousness to our account the Father then immediately declares us absolutely righteousness.

Now another point, if Christ had not historically lived His life perfectly and if Christ had not historically died, would there be a historical righteousness? Do you see why Jesus Christ had to historically live, because the righteousness must be a righteousness that actually occurred in history; it wouldn’t be any good for God to say hey, you’re justified with this little package of righteousness, I’ve been saving it for all eternity. That isn’t the way it works. The judge must judge historic acts, so we have to have historic acts transferred to our account. Where are we going to get historical action that can be transferred to our account so we can participate in righteous history? Jesus Christ’s life, so therefore, because Christ lived His life we share in actual righteous history and when God sees the believer He sees the believer behind Christ’s righteous act of history. So it’s a historical righteousness that is credited to our account legally. And once the justification occurs, the law of double jeopardy says you can’t be tried twice for the same crime. All right, then justification includes eternal security. You can’t be hauled back into court for the same trial.

So there’s justification, so turn back to Romans 8:33, this is the area over which we obtain freedom from suffering in the present hour. We can have our spirits cleansed that we can know that we are perfectly acceptable with the Father. The most powerful form of freedom man can ever have; you can chain a man and you can beat him to a pulp but if he’s free in his spirit you can never kill him; you never can turn him away. And so God starts from the inside out and here is the titanic truth of justification. “God is the One,” he says in verse 33, and never forget it, God, not somebody else, “God is the One who does the justifying,” he’s your judge, there’s no higher judge. And so verse 33 is really saying “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect,” in other words, who’s trying to haul you into court again? You can’t be hauled into a court with a judge of higher jurisdiction than God; that’s the point, because the Greeks have not emphasized the verb at the end of verse 33; the Greek is emphasizing the noun at the end of verse 33, it’s God, not somebody else.

Suppose it was somebody else. I want you to see this point. Suppose it was Michael, the archangel, and Michael said okay, you’re right, and he justifies you and Satan came along and said no, you’re not justified, you’re guilty, you committed this sin, you committed that sin, you committed all these sins, and so you see, Michael was wrong, and so I’m going to appeal the case to a higher court. All right, this verse is saying your case already went to the highest court in the universe and has been cleared. Do you read me on what justification is? Do you see why this caused the Reformation, why this exploded like a bomb across Europe? When men get hold of something like this, my case has gone to the highest court in the universe and can never be appealed again, that’s what it’s talking about.

And then verse 34 we don’t have time to expand but Paul’s answer to Psalm 44 is this, that there is some area of history that we do have final declared freedom and that is in the area of the spirit, the area of the conscience. My conscience can be free; my body is not always free, my body is full of corruption. I die. Your body is not free, you’re going to die some day, you’re going to struggle and struggle to get off your death bed and you never can make it because you’re bound to the fallen body and you’re bound, and you’re not free. But you’re free some place, you’re free in your spirit. Paul says that’s enough for right now, and that’s enough to enable me now to give thanks because all the other things don’t count if I’ve got that freedom; freedom of the conscience, my soul is free.