Psalms Lesson 31

Psalm 74:1-11

Turn to Psalm 74; we are continuing the national lament Psalms and therefore in Psalm 74 which is one of these kinds, we have the following things to look for: an address, lament, trust section, and petition, and possibly a final section. As you look at Psalm 74 quickly survey the terrain, it should be immediately obvious to you that it is a national lament Psalm. Can you tell why it would be a lament Psalm, forgetting whether it’s national or individual at the moment. Why isn’t it a praise Psalm, it’s either one or the other, it’s either a praise Psalm of some sort or a lament Psalm of some sort. What is it that makes you, when you look at this Psalm, think of it as a lament Psalm. [someone says something] Okay, there’s no resolution here. There’s just a question and it’s repeated throughout the whole Psalm; it’s a complaint. So the reason why it’s a lament Psalm is because it laments. It doesn’t praise, it laments.

Can you think why it’s a national lament Psalm and not an individual lament Psalm. It’s all about the congregation of Israel, in the plural, the sheep of the pasture, and so forth. Now that we’ve established it’s a national lament Psalm we should see the parts. Where do you think the address is? Then where do you think the lament ends and the address ends; remember the address can have an introductory petition inside itself. Can you see where the address stops and the lament begins. [someone says something] All right, verses 1 and 2, our first bid for the evening. Anybody else. [someone says something] You say it includes verse 3, why do you include verse 3? You think a summary starts in verse 4. Well, you mean the lament itself. All right, let’s add on verse 3 here and then look at verse 4, where does verse 4 start. Now verse 3 does have a lament in it but you see, verse 3 and verse 2 both begin with an imperative verb. Verse 2, “Remember,” it’s an imperative mood. What is the verb in verse 3, “Lift up thy feet,” we have some very interesting expressions in this Psalm, used of God, and I’m sure in your prayer groups if someone were to speak this way to God the rest of you would hold your breath, because we’ve got an idiom coming up tonight that just won’t quit. It’s one of the most hilarious addresses to God and an almost insulting way of addressing God that I’ve ever seen in the Psalms since I’ve worked with them.

Beginning in verse 4 with the lament, how far down in the Psalm do you think the lament extends. It’s quite marked at the end of the lament where it stops. Remember the lament is a complaint about the disasters and so on, and then it stops quickly. It stops at verse 11, notice the shift right here in verse 11 and 12, it’s very strong. Notice what’s happening. As we work with these form, the form of the Psalms, my objective in this series, I know some people have asked why don’t we just exegete verse by verse and cut the discussion, the reason I am not exegeting verse by verse at the start is because my experience has shown me that people sit out there thinking they’re getting the exegesis and they’re really not. And so this discussion is just to get your mind interacting with the text before we start.

Verse 11 is the end of the lament; do you see verse 12, what would you label verse 12 and following? Trust, now how far down does this trust section go? To the end of 17. Okay, let’s catch up here, verses 4-11; 12-17, and 18-23. Okay, see it’s pretty clear cut, the sections in this Psalm. This is a national lament Psalm and there are your pieces to the Psalm. That’s what the Psalm looks like when you break it down into its parts.

Now this Psalm, I’m going to give you the outline and then we’re going to discuss it just generally because it introduces us to a problem which we mentioned last time. In my outline I have simply taken these parts and summarized the thought. In this Psalm these parts are clear enough that they can hold into an outline form. So verses 1-3 I’ve just summarized the thought by saying: Israel asks God what purpose there can be to the disaster. That’s just a summary of the thought of these first three verses. You see. The first three verses have been set off because they’re the address.

The second part, verses 4-11, which is the lament, I’ve summarized that content by: Israel laments that the enemy has destroyed the temple and places of assembly. Please notice the word “temple” because when we discuss application to the believer today it’s going to become critical that we notice this. The third section, verses 12-17: Israel confidently reflects upon God’s past deliverances in history. Here’s your confidence section. And then verses 18-23, the last petition section: Israel petitions God to remember His covenant in light of the enemy’s blasphemy.

Now discussion about the Psalm, background. The historical date of the Psalm is not given in the superscription; we’re not given a hint. If this declaration is a total desolation of the temple then it can only be at one of two points in history, 167 BC or 588 BC; it can be only one of those two dates because those are the only two times the temple was totally destroyed; it was destroyed and burned other times, but if it is total we must pick between 588 BC, that is the beginning of the captivity or 167 BC when Antiochus Epiphanies came in and set up his images. So it’s one or the other. But as I warned you when we began the Psalm series, if you do not see an extensive heading on the Psalm don’t panic, just relax, the Holy Spirit hasn’t seen fit to give us historical details, so therefore all it tells us is a “Maschil of Asaph.” By the way, what is a Maschil? The verb form of that means to train or be skillful, we saw how David acted wisely, sachil, it means he acted wisely before Saul and he was successful because he acted wisely. That is, Saul failed to kill him five times in a row. So the timing of the Psalm we don’t know; it evidently was during some era of silence, when God was silent in history and there was no prophetic, high density prophetic word going on.

A second point about this Psalm is that this is one of the imprecatory Psalms. Let’s look at this word: imprecatory Psalms are Psalms that cry out with unusual violence for the damnation of God upon the enemies of God. The imprecatory Psalms; they are usually picked out by Bible critics so know the word because your opponents will know it. They are usually picked out by Bible critics to undermine the morality of the Old Testament, how can a God of the Bible condone this kind of praying, a praying that asks for damnation. We do not have time in this series on Psalms to deal with two other imprecatory Psalms that are more violent, but if you turn to Psalm 79 which is a sister Psalm of Psalm 74, both Psalm 74 and 79 are famous national lament Psalms, 79 is a little bit more violent. Verse 6, here is an imprecatory petition, “Pour out Thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known Thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon Thy name.” Verse 12, “And render unto our neighbors sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached Thee, O Lord.” In other words, they hit us once, hit them seven times. And it is a violent aggressive prayer petition that the liberal says is immoral. And as we work with the imprecatory Psalms we must cope with this problem.

Another even more famous imprecatory Psalm is Psalm 137; this is the one that everyone quotes but never knows where it is, and probably has never read it except they heard about it. Psalm 137, another one of the famous imprecatory Psalms; notice verse 7, “Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem, who said, Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation thereof. [8] O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be that rewards thee as thou hast served us. [9] Happy shall he be, that takes and dashes thy little ones against the stones.” And that’s the prayer that the babies may have their brains smashed as the soldiers walked into the city and just picked up the infants and slammed their heads against the stone walls, and that’s what the prayer is for, that this might be done to all the little children of Babylon.

So the prayer here is an imprecatory petition and a petition which is always a sign of fantastic judgment, and we are going to have to deal with this kind of petition, this type of thing in verse 9. But verse 9, Psalm 137, is the center of all of the imprecatory Psalms. It is a sentence, it is a call for God’s damnation upon those who are affiliated with Babylon.

Now we have to deal with why, so let’s start with the doctrine of suffering, just to review before we hit Psalm 74. On the human viewpoint basis, we’re dealing with evil and suffering, and on the human viewpoint basis, remember there are only three possible answers to evil that a person can give you. One, on the human viewpoint basis you can, like Mary Baker Patterson Glover Eddy, you can ignore evil, or at least you can tell your followers to ignore evil. So this is one possible solution, pretend the evil isn’t there, such as Mary Baker Eddy who would counsel her people not to receive medical help; it turns out Mary Baked Eddy had many shots of morphine in her later life just for pain, she had her teeth out, she wore glasses and all the rest, but nevertheless, her followers aren’t supposed to do that. But that is one possibility and that is to ignore evil.

The second possibility is to shirt your moral standards; in other words, just adjust; if this is evil by your standards just work your standard down so that it’s no longer evil by your standard; that’s the second thing you can do, faced with the problem of evil on a human viewpoint basis.

A third possibility and which most thinking people take is just simply accept the tension between what your conscience says should be and what your eyes say is. Just accept it, that’s one of the mysteries of the world, is that your conscience tells you it should be one way but your eyes tell you it’s another story completely.

That, basically are the three possibilities. All of it comes from the fact that on the human viewpoint basis evil is permanent. That’s the underlying presupposition of human viewpoint in this area, that evil is permanent, it was there, always has been there, always will be here. So that is the basis behind human viewpoint. This has led in some religions, such as Hinduism, to search for God beyond good and evil. You know, God is part of good and He’s part evil, part together.

Now on the divine viewpoint, the divine viewpoint disagrees right here and therefore doesn’t bother with any of these three answers, because on the divine viewpoint basis evil is temporary, so because we start out with a different presupposition we’re going to deal with different answers, and this different starting point in the discussion comes because of history, and that is that we believe in a literal fall. And if you have a literal fall when the creature originally rebelled then evil has entered the universe by the creature’s volition. So therefore, this being the case, then on the divine viewpoint basis how do we face evil.

The first thing we say on the divine viewpoint scale, the divine viewpoint side of the fence, is that evil is compatible with a good God, providing the fall is true… providing the fall is literally true. If the fall isn’t true, then this is false. But if you have the existence of a historic fall, then you can say this. If you can’t, if the fall didn’t happen and the creature didn’t bring evil into existence by his own choice then we’ve got a problem here.

The second thing that we say is that because of this, the sovereign God uses evil for His purposes. Proverbs, “Thou hast created the wicked, even for the day of evil.” So God in His sovereignty uses evil for His purposes. This is why Satan probably is one of the most frustrated creatures who ever lived because he is constantly being used. God uses evil for His purposes.

Now let’s review the reasons why we suffer. Let’s look at the purposes on why people suffer. We have four reasons why the non-Christian suffers; six reasons why the Christian suffers. Why does the non-Christian suffer? The first reason, he suffers because he is responsible, through Adam, Genesis 2:17 for the origin of evil. This is the basic reason for all suffering, all men suffer because they share the penalty. God says, the day you eat thereof you’re going to die. So the suffering is just a carrying out of the sentence in Genesis 2:17, we ate so we die; we’re identified with Adam in that act.

The second reason why people suffer is because God removes some of His restraining grace due to continued rebellion. Now God has blocked or restrained the outworking of Genesis 2:17 by grace. We don’t experience the full potential of Genesis 2:17; God in His grace modifies it; weakens it, suppresses and restrains it. But with a creature who, on habitually negative volition continues to rebel against God and continues to rebel against the grace shown to him, then God simply, as a gentleman God says if you don’t want My grace then don’t take it. And so when God, so to speak, let’s the negative volition take over, and lets the creature rebel all he wants to or at least to a great degree, we find what we find in Romans 1 if you turn there for a moment. This is the basic law of [can’t understand word] and suffering. Romans 1 applies to believer and non-believer. This applies to both, both sides of the fence.

In Romans 1:21, “When they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful but became vain in their imaginations,” they became vain in their imaginations, “and their foolish heart was darkened.” Why, in verse 21? Because they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, and were not thankful. The sign of negative volition… repeat, the sign of negative volition in Romans 1 is NOT immorality. Please notice; the sign of negative volition is not immorality; the sign of negative volition is lack of thanksgiving to God. It is minus thankfulness. Please notice that; the immorality that crops up comes after this, not before it, after it. So the first point is a good, pious, righteous, moral lacking of giving of thanks. And that’s where the trouble begins; it does not begin at the point of immorality, it does not begin at the point of some flagrant sin. It begins further back than that, it begins simply with a rebelliousness against God, refusing to accept what He has set us up with, and therefore not thanksgiving.

Then verse 23, idolatry sets in, and then finally verse 24, “God gave them up,” what is giving up mean? That is point 2 up here, the person on negative volition is held in by the restraining hand of grace. Visualize yourself being supported by God’s hand of grace. Now, if that’s the case and we do not give thanks, God gives us up. So He removes His restraining hands of grace away from us; He removes them away from us and He gives us up. And so verse 24, “God gave them up to uncleanness.” So God removes the restraint on the sin nature so that these people can go sin all they want to. And if they want to, God lets them. This is where God is permissive. Verse 26, “For this cause God gave them up to their vile affections.” Verse 28, “God gave them over to a reprobate mind,” so it’s in the areas of social life and intellectual life. God says you don’t like My historic revelation then forget it, go think the way you want to think, if you don’t want to accept it, don’t. So the second reason why men suffer is that they go on negative volition against God’s restraining grace so God just cuts down the restraining grace, that’s all. That’s the second reason.

Some outward symptoms of the second kind of suffering would be neurosis and psychosis in the mental attitude areas. It’s expressed in Galatians 6:7, “Be not deceived, God is not mocked, whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap.”

The third reason why unbelievers suffer, besides point 1 and 2, is they experience suffering because of close association with others who are suffering inside the divine institutions. So because they are associated inside the divine institutions, 2-5, because they are associated with others who are suffering, they suffer with them. Example: husbands who are spiritually out of it, causes his wife who may be spiritually more mature to suffer; visa versa, a man who is spiritually mature suffers if his wife is not also spiritually mature. It would apply to believer and unbeliever; a man who is married to an unbeliever, a woman who is married to an unbeliever. It would hold to a nation; the remnant always suffers with the nation. If this nation goes down we are going to suffer along with everybody else because we are in the same boat. The only way you can break this is get off the boat and go somewhere else; that’s what the Puritans did, they had enough of suffering for James and the rest of the clods that occupied the throne of England so they decided they’d cut out and they got out and that the reason, the Puritans got tired of suffering under the believer equivalent of point 3. I don’t know where we could go though.

The fourth reason for unbelievers to suffer is Matthew 25:41, that’s the eternal suffering of the rejection of the cross of Christ. And that is suffering in the Lake of Fire for all eternity; this is the worst of all possible sufferings. It is this suffering that is worse than any kind of suffering and all other suffering in life is trivial compared to this kind of eternal suffering. Therefore, you can take the most bloody, gory, horrible suffering that you can ever read about in any history book and figure that that doesn’t hold a candle to the suffering of hell. And that will give you a picture of hell. So point 4 is the fourth reason why unbelievers suffer.

Now why does the Christian suffer. The Christian suffers, point one, the same reason as the unbeliever; we too share in Adam’s guilt so we still bear physically dying bodies, we still live in a fallen world, so we suffer just like the non-Christian at this point, Genesis 2:17.

Point two, the Christian suffers in the same way the non-Christian in this area, in fact more intensively so; point two is intensified for the believer. The unbeliever can get away with more at point 2 than the Christian. Remember point 2, a person going on negative volition against God’s restraining grace, God just simply backs His grace off and lets the suffering take over, let’s the misery take over, let the corruption take over. He’s more concerned with His children than the bastards and so therefore His children suffer more, according to Hebrews 12:3-15, which teaches that God is more concerned for His children than bastards and because He is, therefore point 2 is more of a living reality with a believer than it is with an unbeliever. Other verses: 1 Corinthians 11:28-34, believers who are suffering sickness, death and mental depression over how they acted at communion.

Point 3 for the believer, same reason as the unbeliever; we suffer because we are in the same divine institution with others who suffer. We suffer because we are members of the same divine institution that others are suffering; point 3, same thing.

Point 4 is different, so starting now our points on the Christian suffering will differ. Point 4 for the Christian, we suffer because we are identified with Christ in Satan’s world; the fourth reason, we suffer because we are identified with Jesus Christ in the middle of Satan’s world, John 15:18-19, if the world hated Me it will hate you because you are identified with Me. We are identified with Jesus Christ in Satan’s world.

Point 5, we suffer in order to learn truth experientially; I’ll asterisk point 5 for a reason I’ll show you in a moment, I’ll asterisk point 4 also, because both point and 5 we share with Christ. It is undeserved suffering in the legal sense of the word. Point 4 and 5, you suffer and it has nothing to do with your personal sin. You can suffer in point 4 because you are identified with Christ in Satan’s world; it has nothing to do with your personal sin. Was Christ a sinner? No, but did He suffer under point 4. He sure did. So therefore, point four type suffering is not due to personal sin, it is due to identification with Christ in Satan’s world.

Point 5 we suffer in order to learn and this is the same kind of suffering Christ experienced in Hebrews 2, though He was a Son, yet He…[tape turns] … obedience through suffering. So this type suffering is not related to personal sin either. So here are two reasons for suffering that have nothing to do with personal sin, you haven’t done anything wrong; point 4 and 5, and the reference of point 5 would be Deuteronomy 8:2-5.

The sixth and last point why we suffer, and this has nothing to do, necessarily, with personal sin either. So of the six reasons why Christians suffer, only three have to do with personal sin; the other three are not related to personal sin. Point 6 is we suffer in order to produce a historical testimony before three classes of beings: first, angels, Ephesians 3:10, a historical testimony before angels. We suffer in order to produce a testimony before other believers, 2 Cor. 1:3-6. We suffer in order to produce a testimony before unbelievers, 1 Peter 2:12-20.

Those are reasons why we suffer. Now, let’s go back to Psalm 74. In the historical context of Psalm 74 they did not have the revelation that we have, so the man who wrote Psalm 74 did not have access to the revelation that we have and therefore did not have all the answers to suffering that we have. We don’t have all the answers to it either, we have some answers but not all answers to it, but he had less answers than we do because of the nature of progressive revelation. And to visualize the problem of Asaph or his followers, Asaph lived in David’s day, so probably if it was written late it had to be his follower, but Asaph’s problem was first he had learned moral cause and effect under the law of Moses. In other words, he had known if the nation sinned, he’d get clobbered, but if the nation confessed, they’d be restored. Illustration: the book of Judges. So the nation had learned a tight knit moral cause/effect that positive volition—blessing; negative volition—cursing. It had been beat into them, literally beat into them for three to four hundred years minimum before this Psalm was written. So they had it beat into them that there was a moral cause and effect in history. This, by the way, cured the Jew of ever making the mistake all other Gentiles do in thinking that God might be evil in Himself. But they had it beat into them.

But, along came later history and this cause/effect started to get very blurry, they couldn’t see it operating any more as clearly as they used to be able to, and here’s where they began to raise questions. There was a delay between crime and punishment; that is the problem. In other words, why don’t the bad people get clobbered right away, why is there a delay time? So the strict cause/effect relationship that had been observed earlier in history was not now working like it used to, so this led them to raise questions. And out of this period of history, therefore, if you’re thinking along the Biblical lines, what great mass of literature came when this came to be a problem. Can anyone think where this would lead you? What great kind of literature in the Old Testament started erupting at this time and the great themes, it’s all one body of theology, it’s all studied under one area: prophecy, because obviously if there’s a delay between crime and punishment, the ultimate answer is a final judgment in the future, a final future punishment. So this is why prophecy becomes very critical and why you have books like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Zachariah, toward the end of the Old Testament period, because the historical cause/effect is getting very wishy-washy and hard to see. So if they believe in a moral universe, the solution has to come out in the wash somewhere and so they postponed it into the future. And this is the rise of what we call eschatological literature, prophecy or eschatology.

Now Psalm 74 is written before the eschatological literature. And so the man that is writing Psalm 74 is still fighting with point 2, he hasn’t had point 3 and all the details revealed to him. So he’s a believer struggling with imperfect, incomplete revelation, just as we struggle with incomplete revelation, don’t think we’ve got the whole deal either. Christ is going to have a lot to say when He comes again, and when He rules in the millennium. There will be Bible classes every day and you’ll have some of the most fantastic teachers you’ll ever hope to hear. So we don’t have the whole story even today; we have sufficient for our own age. Let’s turn to Psalm 74 and look at the first three verses and we’ll exegete this with the background that I’ve given you.

The first word, obviously, is “O God, why,” now that should sound familiar to anybody whose done any counseling, why did this happen to me, and this is always the big issue in counseling. And in one way it’s sad in some cases, but in the overall it’s a healthy question because what it means is that the person basically does believe that God is good, so what purpose can a good God have with this mess. And please notice the Jew is not saying in verse 1, like the Hindu, well, so be it, we just passively accept it. There’s nothing passive about Psalm 74. Psalm 74 is the work of an agitated man, “O God, why have You cast us off forever? Why does Your anger smoke against the sheep of Thy pasture?” For what purpose is this. The word “forever” in verse 1 is the word that means long time, and the idea is that apparently God had cast them off in some way that it looked like it’s going to be a long time before God will ever get back to what He’s doing. So from his perspective it looks like a long time. “The sheep of His pasture” is an expression that Asaph uses that he apparently God from David. Asaph was a friend of David, and all Asaphic Psalms after this point have “the sheep of the pasture” in it and if you’ve been in a highly liturgical church some of the most beautiful liturgy that is written uses Asaphic Psalms in it. If you look at The Book of Common Prayer in the Episcopalian Church or in a Lutheran one, often times when you have the liturgical reading you’ll notice that they use Asaphic Psalms a lot and the reason is these expressions, “the sheep of His pasture,” the theme of Asaphic Psalms is that Israel is always likened to animals in some way.

Verse 2, “Remember Thy congregation,” see, here’s your introductory petition, and notice the bargaining going on in verse 2, remember we kept saying the “Jew-ing” God principle we discovered in the Psalms, look at what’s happening here. “Remember Thy congregation, which You have purchased of old time;” the word “rod” should be tribe, the word can mean either one in the Hebrew and it’s translators choice but here “tribe” makes more sense, that is the family of Jacob, “the tribe of Thine inheritance, which Thou hast redeemed; this Mount Zion, wherein Thou hast dwelt.” So that shows you at least it’s by the time of David because God didn’t dwell in Mount Zion until David’s time.

So verse 2 is implying that God has got them thus far, now God if You’ve got us this far and we’re facing a problem now, You’re going to look kind of goofy if You don’t get us through this problem; You got us through this problem, You got us through this problem, You got us through that problem, now what’s the deal over here, how come You’re not getting us through this one. So the implication is that God would not be true to His character if He didn’t attention to this petition. Do you see this Jew-ing. In all due regard to the whole thing you can understand why the Jew has this in His character; after all, He was arguing with God for fourteen centuries. So here you have these strong petitions that were made, very strong petitions.

Now verse 3 is one of these expressions that is just frankly absolutely audacious, “Lift up Your feet unto the perpetual desolations,” now “lift up your feet” is a Hebrew idiom which means NOTICE, that’s the way it should be translated. In other words, move it, let’s go, let’s go, “Lift up your feet” means to get moving, we could use another expression which you can guess to translate this and that exactly fits the idiom, exactly. So if you want to think daringly just go ahead, that’s exactly what is meant here in verse 3. And that’s what I mean by a very audacious imperative verb. Now just think of addressing God this way, can you imagine what would happen in a prayer meeting if you got up and said something like this, I mean the phrase you’re all thinking of. Can you imagine that. That’d just crack the prayer meeting… they would be speaking in tongues after you got through with that. But this is the kind of petition you see that you get, the real life petitions of the psalmist, that these psalmists meant business, they had an argument and they wanted answers to it.

“Lift up your feet unto the perpetual desolations,” it literally in the Hebrew means the desolation forever, in other words, what they sang is God, come on, get over here and walk through these things. Now we’re going to see a very graphic picture of what the desolations are in a moment but they’re saying God, move it and get over here, and You walk through the desolations, just watch this, look at this mess. Just walk with it, with Your own feet, right through it. And that’s what the call is, that God would experientially do it. Now isn’t it interesting we know God did in the person of Jesus Christ, didn’t He. Didn’t God come into touch with sin at the cross, for three hours, He bore every single sin that every single creature ever has or ever will do. He did move it, He didn’t move it in exactly the way the Psalmist perhaps thought in his humanity here, while he was thinking out of a limited perspective, but God did answer this prayer. The Holy Spirit was moving in this man’s life so that the result of his prayer petition was answered, in a way in which I’m sure Asaph himself would have just shut his mouth to think that he had said this, and then all of a sudden Christ dies on the cross. You wonder what Asaph, after saying this in verse 3, would have thought if he had to sit there and watch Christ suffer for three hours on the cross.

“Lift up Your feet, and walk through the desolations; all that the enemy has done wickedly in the sanctuary,” now this is the temple, this is a word for the temple, the “sanctuary,” the place of holiness. And therefore verse 3 tells us that the problem behind Psalm 74 was the destruction of the temple. Now whether it was the first temple or the second temple is a matter of debate but it was destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which was the center of worship. So the complaint is not a personal one; please notice this or you’re never going to get the clear picture on these imprecatory Psalms.

The imprecatory Psalms are not asking God to damn your personal enemies, just because they happen to be your enemies. The imprecatory Psalms are a call to God to damn His enemies, that’s what the imprecatory Psalm is about, damn His enemies. And there’s a reason for it if you think back to history. What proof do you ever have that God is a good God unless He does damn evil. So the call behind the imprecatory Psalms is not an immoral call, like the liberal always says, it’s a very moral call because in your discussions, if you get in an imprecatory Psalm just point out to the person that if the imprecatory Psalm remains unanswered, then all morals go out the window. If the imprecatory Psalms are not answered, we have no morals, we have no good God, we have no righteous God, we have no God that enforces morality upon the creation. So the imprecatory Psalms have a very moral purpose behind them. And verse 3 centers on the lost temple.

Verses 1-3 the address; verses 4-11, “Thine enemies roar in the midst of Thy congregations; they set up their ensigns [banners] for signs.” This is an amplification of the lament of the situation and this describes what they are doing. The “roar” apparently referred to group worship, “Thine enemies roar in the midst of Thy congregations,” it isn’t congregations in the sense of people, it is place of meeting and would refer both to the temple and to areas around the country they would have set aside for worship, sort of like synagogues, though the proper synagogue didn’t come until the exile later; it’s just places of assembly; everywhere we go where we used to worship Jehovah, now our enemies are there worshiping their gods in the same place. “Thine enemies roar in the midst of Thy meeting places; and they’ve set their signs for signs,” the word “ensign” is the Hebrew word for sign and it refers here to the fact that sign is often used for the ordinances of worship. And what the enemy has done is that they have come in, not only destroyed the temple, but now in that place, that same piece of real estate, they are having assembly worship with heathen rituals. So they have set their ordinances for ordinances, so this is adding salt to the wound, theologically.

The King James reads, “A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees.” The best way of handling verse 5, it’s a very difficult verse, is the way most modern translations handle it, and they read: “It seems as if one is lifting up axes upon thick trees.” The “lifting up” is a Hebrew participle, and it means is in the process of lifting up. This is a process of lifting up, and it’s a sign that whatever is happening is visually before the eyes of the psalmist. He had seen this taking place right in front of him. It’s a motion picture thing, they’re actually chopping up the wood that’s around the temple is what they’re doing here. “They have lifted up axes upon the thick trees,” literally a thicket of trees, it’s the idea of lumber crews that used to go up into the Lebanon area to get the lumber for the temple, they had an area, they didn’t do selective cutting like we do. The crews here used to go directly into the forest and just strip everything out. In other words they cut a swathe through the woods, through the thicket of woods, and so the idea here is that they’re destroying the temple just like the lumber crews destroyed the Lebanese forests, just like they went in there and they just bulldozed it out, and he says this is the way it looks; it just looks like this Lord and that’s Your temple that’s being bulldozed.

Verse 6, “But now they break,” this is present tense, “now they are breaking down the carved work thereof at once with axes and hammers.” The picture of the enemy destroying the temple of God. Verse 7, “They have cast fire into Thy sanctuary; they have defiled by casting down the selling place of Thy name to the ground.” They burn the sanctuary down according to verse 7, according to verse 7 it has become smashed all the way down to the ground, there’s not a piece of the temple left. Verse 8, “They said in their hearts, Let us destroy them together. They have burned up all the meeting places,” it’s the same word used in verse 4, translated here inconsistently as synagogues, “meeting places of God in the land.” Okay, so they’ve gone not only in the temple but they have also gone to the other places all throughout the land of Israel. So it shows you this is a national full scale invasion that’s happening here, everything is being smashed.

Now verses 10-11, the closing introductory petition, this petition is sort of scattered throughout and by the way, you might observe this, when you see these petitions scattering through all sections of the Psalm when you know there should be a petition section down at the end, that’s a sign or urgency. The fact that we’ve already seen a petition, a preliminary petition in verse 2, verse 3, now we see another preliminary position in verses 10, verse 11, it’s a sign of urgency, that the man can’t wait to get to the petition section proper, he’s got to keep asking this.

Verse 9, “We see not our signs; there is no more any prophet, neither is there among us any that knows how long.” Now this is why this Psalm is so difficult, because if this is during the captivity it would seem that they had the prophecy of Jeremiah of the seventy years, so that seems like an unlikely question. However, if you say it’s the Maccabean period, then you have the prophecy of Daniel which also tells you how long. So therefore, it may be written during the time of Asaph who outlived David and may have lived down to the sacking of the temple by Thutmose III who came into the land after Solomon died. And that is a possibility that this is under prophetic hyperbole exaggerating the sacking of the temple by the Egyptian Pharaoh. All right, “We see not our signs,” and at that time there weren’t too many prophets there, “We see not our signs; there is no more any prophet,” if that was the time period then Nathan would have died, and Samuel would have been dead. “Neither is there among us any one” participle “who knows how long.”

Now do any of you notice anything about verse 9 that would be of apologetic importance. Does anyone see something about what verse 9 is saying, that you might remember and put away somewhere for discussion some time. [someone says something] All right, usually you see the critic always says well, the prophets, you know, they kind of made this kind of stuff up, but the matter of the fact is the people, at least the pious people in the nation knew when there was prophecy happening and they knew when it wasn’t happening. It wasn’t something they made up; they knew when they were on the hotline. And they knew when the line was dead, and this is one of those verses in the Bible that shows you their consciousness of the lack of revelation. They had a very definite awareness that something was funny, something was wrong. So you see that if it’s the same kind… if the person who wrote verse 9 is the person who was already there when the prophecy was happening, they obviously with the same mentality can distinguish between the two times. Verse 9 is a very important verse because it shows you these people were not naïve idiots in Bible times, they knew when there was hot prophecy and when there wasn’t. And notice the last part of verse 9, “There’s none among us that knows how long,” they were used to getting definite specific answers in their prophecy, not just vague things like Nostradamus or something like that. It wasn’t just vague stuff, it was key specific events.

Verse 10, “O God, how long shall the adversary reproach?” The same word that’s used in 1 Samuel for Goliath, cursing God, “how long shall the adversary reproach? Shall the enemy blaspheme Thy name forever?” You see verse 10 is not dealing with individual enemies, it is dealing with God’s enemies. The Psalm is an extension of holy war.

Now verse 11 is a petition that is just as audacious as the petition in verse 3, this is absolutely audacious. “Why do You withdraw Your hand, Your right hand even? Pluck it out of Your bosom.” Now the word “bosom” referred… it was used in many different contexts in Scripture but the context here is a fold in the front of the garment of the person, and it would be the equivalent today of a pocket. So what this petition actually says is God, will You get Your hands out of Your pocket. Do you see what I mean by an audacious petition. Can you imagine going into a prayer meeting, God, get Your hand out of Your pocket, let’s see some answers. That is what this Psalm is saying; this is how these people expressed themselves. You see how foreign a lot of this pious lingo is that you pick up in Christian circles. And when you really connect with the Word of God what comes forth. It’s really interesting.

So much for tonight, next week we’ll start verse 12 but I want to close with a little application here. It seems to me that Israel suffered from a problem that fundamentalism suffers from. And it just dawned on me while I was working with this Psalm because I’ve been trying to deal with the problem of the enemies in these Psalms ever since I started this. Do you notice what the problem here is? The temple was thought to be by many Israelites off limits to the enemy; the temple was thought to be impregnable by the ruling parties of Israel. No Philistine could possibly come to the temple, why? God’s Shekinah glory is in the temple, that’s God’s temple, you don’t touch God’s temple, God will blast you if you touch His temple. So it is not possible for the enemies of God to destroy God’s temple.

Now fundamentalism has the same little cliché, mainly what is the temple in our age. Three uses of the word temple: the universal church, that’s one use of the word temple; the local church, 1 Cor. 3, and the individual body, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Some fundamentals get the idea well, the individual body is the temple of God, therefore the enemies of God cannot destroy the temple. Now that’s just the same fallacious reasoning that’s shown here in the Old Testament. Of course, the enemies came right in and burned and destroyed the temple, blasphemed the name. I’m referring, of course, to demonic influence on believers. So here you have it played out for you in the whole Old Testament system. The enemies came in and just literally burned the thing to the ground, but under God’s sovereign… under God’s sovereign will how is this not a permanent loss. Because the temple, according to Ezekiel 44-48 will be everlasting. God rebuilds His temple, there will always be a temple and the temple will never be permanently destroyed, but it can be temporarily burned. And so let’s not repeat the same theological mistake that Israel repeated in the Old Testament.