Trusting God: Waiting on the Lord
1 Thessalonians 1:8
Right now we’re on an independent
study that is located within our passage we’re studying, 1 Thessalonians. When
I get into a side study via a particular book study, I always like to go back and
anchor it in the text of Scripture that we are studying. Too often, sometimes
in doctrinal studies, it’s as if we sort of lose our Scriptural foundation when
we start talking about doctrinal principles and theological concepts and forget
that these are derived from the Scripture.
We’ve been studying in 1
Thessalonians and we started a study on the faith-rest drill, understanding how
to walk by faith by claiming promises. We’ve been looking at a verse, in
particular, in Isaiah 40:31, “They that wait upon the Lord…” So we’re focusing
on waiting on the Lord this morning, leaning what that means to be able to
claim that promise a little more effectively.
1 Thessalonians 1:8 records Paul’s
praise for the Thessalonian believers that their
faith toward God had gone out, not only in Macedonia and Acacia but in all of
the Roman Empire. They have a reputation as a church and a congregation of
faith. We sometimes say today that a congregation is people who go to church,
who are involved in the church or religious activity but these were people who
were focused on their day-by-day walk with the Lord. They were trusting in the
Lord in order to make it through life, claiming promises.
Colossians 2:6 states, “As we
received Christ [by faith alone] we walk in Him.” Now that faith in Christ was
mediated through the Scriptures. We read promises such as Acts 16:31, “Believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” We claimed that as a promise
in the sense that we trusted in Christ and believed that we would have eternal
salvation.
Faith is always directed toward
Scripture. It is always directed toward some instruction in Scripture, some
command, some promise in Scripture. So 2 Corinthians 5:7 says, “We walk by
faith and not by sight.” In 3 John 3 John tells us that this is a walk
according to truth. So the truth is the Word of God. There’s always this
combination of faith toward God based on what He has revealed in His Word.
When we looked at the steps of the
faith-rest drill we talked about that first step which means to claim a
promise. It’s interesting that several years ago when I was in Kiev one year I
was teaching this as a series at Jim Myers’s church, The Word of God Church,
and we were translating the notes into Russian. This was about a month or so
before I was actually going there. The question came up, what does it mean to
claim a promise? How do you translate that into Russian?
We use that term idiomatically. It’s
transferred over from the concept of staking a claim. It’s like a miner would stake
a claim who has found a place that he wants to mine ore. That’s an idiomatic
sense of that term. It was interesting because when you say that to someone in
English, that we’re claiming a promise, we know what that means. Trying to
transfer that into another language led to some interesting discussions.
What we mean by claiming a promise
is that we’re basically holding God to His Word. He had stated something in His
Word that He’s going to do something. Many times it’s conditioned on something
we do, that if we wait on the Lord, then something will result from that. Also
if we confess our sins, something will result from that. And if we bring things
to Him in prayer, something will result in that.
We have these kinds of promises and
we’re holding God to that. We’re saying, “Okay, Lord. You said that if I
confess my sins, you’ll forgive me and I’ll be cleansed. If I wait upon you, I
will have strength and endurance. If, instead of being anxious, I bring my
request before you in prayer, then I will have peace of mind and tranquility of
soul.” So that is essentially what we mean when we say we are claiming a
promise. We are mixing our faith with the Word of God.
It is never just faith in faith.
It’s not just this idea that if we just trust or believe then something will
happen. We often hear people say that. That comes out of a religious background
in the culture but it’s sort of grown into an impersonal fatalism that says
that if we just believe, somehow faith can change reality. That is not what the
Bible teaches. That is the kind of faith that is emphasized in what is known as
the “health and wealth” gospel, the “prosperity” gospel, the “name it and claim
it” gospel which is popular in certain circles. That is not what the Bible says
about faith.
Faith, in the sense we’re talking
about, is a faith that is directed toward the Word of God and specific
statements in the Word of God. To claim a promise, we have to understand the
promise. We talked about faith being comprised of two essential elements. The
first element is understanding. Classically in some theological systems, faith
was broken down into three categories or three components. First is the Latin
word notitia. Then you had assensus, which means
to agree with the principle and then they added fiducia
a term meaning faith.
Basically you’re defining faith by
itself, which shows redundancy. That’s not acceptable when you’re defining
something. You never define it by its own word. So essentially we showed that
faith is simply agreeing with God, believing that something is true, and being
convinced that something is true but it’s preceded by understanding it.
You have to understand the nature of
the promise. This is part of the second step of the faith-rest drill, which is thinking
through the doctrinal rationales embedded in the promise. Any statement,
especially an “if-then” statement, a compound sentence, has a structure to it.
It has a thought behind it. It’s grounded upon certain assumptions so as we
rehearse that in our mind, we need to focus on what’s embedded in the thought
structure of that particular promise. We have to come to understand what is
being said and why it is being said.
We think about a promise and this is
what I find very helpful when memorizing Scripture. Just think it through.
Write it down in various ways. Take a piece of paper and write it down. Someone
asked me the other day how I memorize Scripture. I’ve used lots of different
methods over the years. Sometimes I’ll write a verse down over and over again.
Sometimes I’ll take it and break it down into phrases and then look at each
phrase and see how they’re connected to each other. That’s sort of a rough
outline or a rough diagram.
There are many different ways we can
do that. Look the words up in a dictionary. Look up the English words to see
what they mean. If you have a concordance, you can look up the English words in
a concordance. For instance, a Strong’s concordance will have a number out at
the side. If you were to look up the word “wait” in a Strong’s concordance, you
would see to the right of that word “wait” a list of numbers. Some numbers are
in italics; those are the Old Testament Hebrew words. Some of those numbers are
in non-italics and that refers to the Greek words. That distinguishes between
Old and New Testament. You can then look that number up in the back of the
concordance and there’s a very, very basic rudimentary lexicon back there. So
you look the word up and it gives you, not really definitions for those Greek
or Hebrew words, but it basically lists the two or three way that word is
translated into English. This gives you some understanding of the background.
“Wait” is sometimes translated
“hope” in other passages and you can look up these other passages. This gives
you a better idea of what the word means. That’s something of what we’re going
to do some more of in this lesson. So we think through these doctrinal
rationales that are embedded in the promise.
This is what the Bible talks about in
the concept of meditation. As we think it through it in terms of identifying
those rationales, then we realize that the verse expresses certain conclusions.
It says that as a result of the fact that, for example, we confess our sins
then God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness. The conclusion from that is that if we’ve done that, we are
forgiven. There’s no reason to feel guilty or look back on the mistakes or to
focus on our failures that we have made. God has forgiven us and wiped the
slate clean so that we can go forward in the Christian life.
I want to go back and talk a minute
about what the Bible says about meditation. Actually in the Hebrew there are
several different words that are translated into English “meditate”. They are
basically synonyms and they all have the same sense of thinking things through
and maybe repeating the words out loud. One of the words is really interesting.
It has the idea of moaning and groaning literally. This sort of reflects the
idea that if you’re meditating on Scripture or memorizing it, you may be just
mumbling it or saying it to yourself over and over again. This is how that word
came to be applied to meditation.
Joshua 1:8 is a tremendous verse to
memorize. This was instruction given to Joshua as he was taking over the
leadership of the Israelites after the death of Moses. He’s told, “This book of
the Law shall not depart from your mouth but you shall meditate in it day and
night that you may observe to do all that is written in it.” Notice the
connection between mouth and meditation there. This is that idea of saying it
over and over again. That helps us to remember it and to memorize it. It’s that
idea that it should not depart from your mouth.
Day and night is a figure of speech
called a merism, which is where you take two
opposites such as hot and cold or east and west. You take these opposites that
indicate a totality of something so what the merism
means here, “day and night”, means something you should do continuously. You
shouldn’t just do it in the day or in the morning or night but throughout the
day you should recall these verses to memory.
You shall meditate in it day and
night for a purpose. It’s not just a matter of learning verses. It’s not just
an academic exercise of getting this into our brain so we can recite Scripture.
It is for the purpose of observation, application, implementing into our
thought life and into our day-to-day life and what we do and how we do it. We
meditate day and night for the purpose that we may observe to do all that is
written in it. It’s not selective. It’s universal.
Then a promise was made. This
promise was originally made to Joshua. There’s an implication here that if we
do the same thing we will get the same results so we can apply this to
ourselves. This has a direct application to Joshua only because he is the one
to whom this promise is given. We see similar statements made at different
times to different people in the Old Testament so we can universalize this and
we’re justified in making an application to ourselves as well.
It goes on to say, “Then you shall
make your way prosperous and you shall have good success.” What the Scripture
means here must be understood in context; it’s that Joshua would be victorious
as he was going about God’s will to conquer the Canaanites. By application what
this is saying is that if we internalize the Word of God and apply it, then the
result is that we will be successful in doing that which God has commissioned
us to do.
In the New Testament in the church
age, God has commissioned us to be witnesses, to grow to spiritual maturity
first, and then to be witnesses to others and to serve the Lord in the local
church through serving one another, loving one another, praying for one
another, strengthening one another, and encouraging one another. These are the
kinds of promises that say that as we grow and mature we will be successful in
our spiritual life.
This is very similar to another
statement in Scripture that is a more universal application of meditation. This
is in Psalm 1:2, “His delight is in the Law of the Lord, and in His Law he
meditates day and night.” Now in both of these passages you have an emphasis on
meditating on the Law. For both David, who wrote Psalm 1, and for Joshua, Law
referred to the torah primarily. The word torah which we usually translate Law
has the root meaning of instruction. It’s talking about the instruction of the
Word of God. For David that would have included more than torah because there
were additional books that had been written by his time, even though the Old
Testament canon had not been completed. For us, the term Law of the Lord can
apply to all of Scripture.
If we look at the context of Psalm
1, it begins with a statement of blessedness or happiness related to a person
who is a believer walking with the Lord. Psalm 1:1 reads, “How blessed is the
man who does not walk in the council of the wickedness, nor stand in the path
of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers.” So when we come to Psalm 1:2 the
one who “delights in the Law” is the one who is not living in the world system.
He’s not living according to his sin nature. He’s not living in autonomy or
independence from God but he is living his spiritual life and walking in dependence
on the Lord.
There is an emphasis here on his
focus on the Word of God. He delights in it and he meditates on it day and
night. The results are given in Psalm 1:3, “He will be like a tree firmly planted
by streams of water which yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not
wither and in whatever he does, he prospers.” The results given in verse 3 are
parallel to the results given to Joshua in Joshua 1:8 which is the concept of
prosperity, success, and productivity. This does not mean that you will always
be materially successfully or necessarily financially successful in business
but it means you’ll be successful in your spiritual life. That which you do in
fulfilling the plan and purpose of God will be successful.
The contrast is given in terms of
the wicked and what happens to them in Psalm 1:4-5, “The wicked are not so.
They’re like chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not
stand in the judgment nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous for the Lord
knows the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked will perish.” We have
a great Psalm here to meditate on and to tell us the importance of focusing on
God’s Word and walking consistently with Him. The result of that is success,
prosperity, and happiness in contrast to the one who disobeys the Law.
The focus is meditating on the Word
with the idea of thinking something through over and over again so we come to
understand what is being taught and what is being said. In Psalm 119 the word
meditate is used several times. I’ve just picked one example from that in Psalm
119:15, “I will meditate on your precepts and contemplate your ways.”
Psalm 119 is a fascinating psalm to
read through and to think through. It is a psalm that extols the virtues and
the values of God’s Word and His revelation. The psalmist uses numerous
synonyms to express God’s Word. In fact, you can go through and see many of
these and identify these. He doesn’t just use words for Law but he uses
different terms. For example in verse 2 he says, “How blessed are those who
observe His testimonies.” In verse 3, “They walk in His ways.” Verse 4, “Ordain
your precepts.” Verse 5, “Keep your statutes.” Verse 6, “Commandments”. Verse
7, “Righteous judgments.” Verse 8, “Statutes.” So each verse says something
about God’s Word using these various synonyms to describe God’s revelation.
Psalm 119:15 is the one that says,
“I will meditate on your precepts and will contemplate your ways.” He’s
focusing not only on what God has revealed in terms of His precepts and in
terms of His instructions in the Law, but then he goes beyond that to think on
God’s ways. In Isaiah we’re told that God’s ways are not our ways. We only
learn of God’s ways through His Word so we need to spend time reflecting upon
God’s ways.
Psalm 119:48 says, “My eyes are
awake through the watches [at night] that I may meditate on your word.” He
stays up late in order to think about God’s Word. Sometime if you can’t sleep
at night, for one reason or another, it’s helpful just to think about God’s
Word and to reflect on those promises that you have memorized and stored in
your soul.
In Psalm 143:5 we read, “I remember
the days of old; I meditate on all your works.” In these previous verses I’ve
chosen, the focus was to meditate on God’s Word, on His precepts and learning
about His ways. Here the focus is on His works, what God had done. We can
reflect historically on how God has redeemed His people and upon how God gave
the Israelites victory over the Canaanites and the many other ways God has
delivered them. That would be part of His works. His works would also relate to
the creation, thinking about His works of creation and coming to understand
them, that they, in turn, might teach us something about our Creator. “I
remember the days of old; I meditate on all your works; I muse on the works of
your hands.”
We have three terms for intellectual
activity: remember, meditate, and to muse or contemplate. These are important
concepts in understanding the faith-rest drill. As I pointed out what’s
important in the faith-rest drill is to have Scriptures stored in your soul.
That means you need to memorize Scripture so that we can then claim those
promises.
This, I find, isn’t emphasized as
much today as it once was in churches. We are typical of many churches today in
our structure. We don’t have a Sunday school hour preceding the worship of the
church. I would hope that one day we might be able to expand to that. Many
Bible churches have done away with that hour. They will have their morning
worship service at the same time they have prep school for their kids but we
lose a certain format of training and teaching when we don’t have a Sunday
school time for both adults and children. It gives and provides a little more
time for instruction and training than you can just accomplish in just the hour
or so in a morning worship service.
In days gone by, churches would meet
for Sunday school hour and then a church service on Sunday morning. At night you’d
have a service. Often historically congregations would be taught new hymns at
night. They would be taught how to sing the different parts in the different
hymns so that the congregation was truly a part of the choir. Once they had
mastered this at night, and even though attendance may be lighter at night than
in the morning, that would provide a core group that would ground the
congregation in the morning when they would sing these new hymns.
Those would be some things that
would be accomplished. You would have the kids for a couple of hours instead of
just one hour. You can have little competitions. You can memorize the books of
the Bible. You can memorize Scripture and you just have more time to teach and
to learn and to be trained in ways that aren’t necessarily possible in just the
lecture format that we have during the morning worship service.
People are left on their own to
figure out how to memorize Scripture. Some people are good at it and some
people are not but we all need to do it. That’s one of the reasons I put
together the little book on promises and why I repeat promises over and over
again before classes so that if you hear them enough they will become embedded
in your own thinking and you will have memorized them. You need to plan your
life in such a way that you have time, maybe in the morning, maybe in the
evening, to set apart a time free of distractions and interruptions when you
can read through chapters of Scripture and focus on verses to memorize.
Just work on one or two verses a
week and at the end of a year you could have 104 verses memorized. At the end
of a couple of years you’d have over two hundred verses memorized. You’d be
well on your way to having a good reserve of promises that you can claim in
times of difficulty and times of trouble.
One of the things I’m doing in this
series of lessons is to give us some ideas of how to claim promises and how to
think through those promises. Last time we started on Isaiah 40:31 looking at various
aspects in that verse. It’s a great promise. Many of us have memorized this.
You’ve heard me recite it many times. “But they who wait upon the Lord shall
renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall
run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
This is from a tremendous chapter in
the book of the prophet, Isaiah. If we look at the context we see there’s a
contrast here. The verse begins with the word “but” and that contrasts human
strength and human ability with the ability or strength that comes from God.
The contrast is with the youths who faint in Isaiah 40:30, “Even the youths
shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall.” There’s a
contrast between those who wait on the Lord who may not be young or vigorous
and may not have much strength in themselves but unlike the youth that is full
of energy and enthusiasm and motivation and optimism and is strong physically
and mentally, the believer who is trusting in the Lord, no matter what his physical
circumstances may be, has an edge. He is superior to the youth that is trusting
in his own ability and his own strength.
That was one of the first things I
noted last time, that human ability is limited. The second thing we see here is
this emphasis on waiting on the Lord. We saw the Hebrew word here is the word qavah
which primarily has the meaning of hopeful expectation. It’s not just waiting.
Think about the times you are waiting. Perhaps you’ve been called in for an IRS
audit. You have to sit out in the waiting room and you have no idea when
they’re going to call you in. Or some of us have gone down to challenge our
property taxes at the Harris County Appraisal District. We have to go out there
and take a number and you wait and wait and you wait. There’s not really a
hopeful expectation in either of those scenarios. There’s just waiting.
That’s not the idea here. It’s not
just waiting for waiting sake. It’s waiting with a hopeful expectation and a
positive anticipation of how God is going to work in our life. That’s the idea
of waiting here. I pointed out last time that in older lexica in Hebrew based
on previous studies the idea was thought to relate to the weaving of a rope.
That’s pretty much been debunked now. In current lexicons that weren’t
available in the early 20th century, the idea for this word is
really that of confident expectation, much like the Greek word ELPIS and has that
emphasis on waiting expectantly for something.
It is often used in parallelism with
the word hope. For example, we looked at Psalm 39:7, “And now Lord, what do I
wait for…” That’s the word qavah and it’s parallel to the
last part of the verse, “My hope is in you.” This brings out the hopeful
optimism that is present in the word wait. It’s not simply being patient and
just sitting somewhere not knowing what will happen. There’s this positive
expectation of something that is going to take place, that no matter how long
it might be, God will intervene. He will intervene from His grace and from His
justice. He will give us His aid that we need for whatever the circumstance
might be.
When you’re studying through a
passage, it’s helpful to think about a word and to look that word up, as I
pointed out. You can look it up in a Strong’s concordance or with computer
programs we have today. It’s easy to do these kinds of searches in the original
language. You can use programs like Logos, Bible Works, Accordance, Bible
Search and things of this nature. There are some online places you can go as
well. All you have to do is do a right click with your mouse on the word and
you get the option to search the Hebrew word. They’ve sort of hidden or
embedded a Hebrew text behind the English text so this allows you to search
through these words. The English word wait might translate two or three
different Hebrew words or two or three different Greek words. This way you can
focus your search just on the word here.
Another verse that parallels hope
and wait is Psalm 130:5, “I wait for the Lord and in His Word I do hope.” We
see that the focal point for wait and for hope is in God’s Word. It’s always in
God’s Word. It’s important for us to understand that when we are in spiritual
combat what we should use is the Word of God. When Jesus was being tested by
Satan in the wilderness He didn’t give Satan a theological dissertation. He did
not describe the various abstract principles derived from Scripture. He quoted
Scripture verbatim in terms of its application.
Now that doesn’t mean there’s not a
place for understanding the doctrinal rationales that are there because that’s
embedded there. Jesus is using the Scripture itself, showing the importance of
Scripture. That’s why Psalm 130:5 says it’s in God’s Word that we hope. I
keep coming back to that. One of the things that’s gotten a little off-balance
is something I hear in people’s language. We need to think about how we use the
term “doctrine”. Doctrine is a very important word. It refers to instruction or
teaching and it talks about the instruction of Scripture not only in terms of
abstract theology but it takes it all the way through to application.
Sometimes the way people use the
words “Bible doctrine” it’s almost as if it’s some kind of a code word that
focuses more on the abstract doctrines that are taught than the Bible. One of
the flaws we have seen from that approach is people who know a whole lot of
doctrine and principles and rationales but they are abysmally ignorant about
the Bible. If you don’t know the Bible along with your theology, you don’t know
squat. You have to know the Bible. That’s the foundation. We have to be become
much more biblically literate in Scripture. We have to read through the Bible
again and again and again.
We have to know the events of
Scripture. That’s what gives us the ability to be self-sustaining because we
can understand what has happened in people’s lives in the Bible. We can
rehearse those stories, those episodes, and those events in the Old and New
Testaments. We can derive comfort and strength from parallel circumstances and
situations. We have to know the Bible. The focus of our faith is always from
the Word and these principles derived from the Word. They’re not separated from
the Word. Too often we know abstract principles but the anchor to the Word has
often been slipped so we just have this free floating principle that we’re
trusting in.
How is that different from just
having a philosophy? That’s a question we need to ask. A lot of people hold to
different philosophies of life but we hold to a relationship with God that is
mediated through His word. That’s what’s emphasized again and again.
Another set of verses that are
helpful in understanding the word wait are found in Psalm 25:3-5. Turn back
with me to the 25th Psalm and we will think through these verses.
This is a psalm of David. It’s always helpful when we look at promises to look
at the context. David begins with addressing God as Yahweh, focusing upon God
as the covenant God of Israel. David is saying he lifts up his soul and in God
he trusts. He asks not to be ashamed and not to let his enemies exult over him.
What we see in this psalm is that
David is going directly to the Lord in prayer. We see that he pleads with the
Lord on the basis that he trusts in God and that he asks God to somehow
intervene in his life so his trusting God will not be a source of embarrassment
and will instead vindicate David’s trust and God will give him victory over his
enemies. He is initially praying to God to give him victory that he might not
be ashamed but he goes on to apply this to a broader spectrum of anyone who is
a believer and trusting in God.
Psalm 25:3, “Indeed let no one who
waits on you be ashamed.” There’s our word qavah.
He’s asking that God not fail anyone who is putting their trust in Him because
that would be an embarrassment. They would be ashamed. They would be brought to
a position of failure in their life and this would bring dishonor to God’s
glory. That’s the embedded rationale that’s here. He’s saying, “God we’re to
glorify You. If You don’t support us and vindicate us on the basis of Your
Word, then you’re not going to be glorified. In fact we will be embarrassed and
ashamed and this will bring dishonor to You.”
Instead of being ashamed, in
contrast, he says, “Let those be ashamed who deal treacherously without cause.”
This is the enemy. We don’t really know who the enemy is when he’s first
mentioned in verse 2 but in verse 3 we learn that this is someone who has
treated David or the Davidic house treacherously. He has been betrayed. I think
in a lot of the psalms a specific incident is indicated but in psalms like this
where no specific incident is identified it allows us to universalize these
principles in terms of application.
As we look at this, we recognize
that he’s dealing with the fact that someone has betrayed him. We’re all faced
with that at some time or another in our life. We’ve been taken advantage of.
We’ve been lied to. We've had a friend betray us, and someone who as not been
honest with us. Maybe it’s been an employer or an employee; someone may have
stolen from us. All of these different situations fit within the category of
someone who has dealt treacherously with us without cause. David is praying
that God would not cause him or any believer who has trusted in Him to be ashamed,
but instead those who have dealt wrongly with us are the ones that should be
dealt with in justice. So we are those who wait upon the Lord. That’s how he’s
characterizing a believer.
In Psalm 25:4 he says, “Show me Your
ways.” So in this period while he is waiting on the Lord we are to be taught
and we are to learn of God. He says, “Show me your ways; teach me your paths.”
There is a synonymous parallelism there where the “show me” is paralleled to
“teach” and “your ways” is paralleled to “your paths”. Here the prayer is that
the Lord would instruct David how to live and how to walk with the Lord.
This is further developed in Psalm
25:5, “Lead me in Your truth and teach me.” The focal point of how we learn God’s
ways and God’s paths or are taught by God is in that first line of verse 5.
It’s in the truth of God’s Word. We take that and apply it to what the New
Testament says that we’re to walk in the light and walk in the truth. Then this
is the same thing as walking by the Spirit where to always focus on the word of
God. That is what we have to learn.
When we are walking in the truth,
when we are walking by faith, there are two aspects to that. There’s an active
aspect and a passive aspect. The active aspect tells us there’s something we
should do in obedience in relation to the promise. For example in 1 John 1:9 we
are to confess our sins. That’s what we should do. We should admit or
acknowledge our sins to God the Father. So we do something. In Joshua 1:8 what
do we do? We meditate. We carve out time in our schedule to reflect and read
and to think through God’s Word. These are the things that we do.
Then there’s a passive side to the
faith-rest drill where after we do what God says to do, we relax and wait on
Him and He will bring about the consequences. Think about the battle of
Jericho. They were told to do something. They had to trust God in doing what He
told them to do. They were to walk around the city each day in silence. They
were to walk around the city outside the walls and then go back to their camp.
They weren’t to engage in battle. They weren’t to respond to any of the
catcalls from the inhabitants of Jericho from the walls. They just walked
around the city each day in silence. Then the last time they walked around it
seven times, blew their horn, yelled, and the walls came down. Their focus was
to do what God said to do. Then they were to wait and rest upon God to do what
He promised to do, which was to give them victory. In that event we see both
the active sense as well as the passive sense.
The claim there in verse 5 is to be
led in God’s truth and taught by God. Then there is an explanation, “For You
are the God of my salvation.” Is this talking about salvation in terms of
justification or is this talking about salvation in terms of deliverance from
David’s trials and from those who have betrayed him and have opposed him? I
would suggest this is not talking about justification salvation. This is
talking about deliverance from the trials and testing David is going through.
In fact, most of the time in the Old Testament, the word salvation does not
refer to salvation from sin and eternity and the lake of fire. It’s talking
more in terms of deliverance from some sort of trauma and some sort of attack
or situation in this life. Mostly it’s some sort of situation in the here and
now.
David says, “For You are the God of
my salvation and on You I wait [qavah], in You I hope all the
day.” There’s a confident expectation that God is going to intervene in the
negative consequences of our life. He is the One who is going to provide for
us. Let’s go to another verse, Psalm 25:21. At the end of this psalm David
prays, “Let integrity and uprightness preserve me.” He’s really focusing on the
character of God. He knows that God is the One who’s going to preserve him. The
Hebrew word here for preserve is a synonym for the word salvation. Here again
we see that his focus is on deliverance from his current crisis or calamity.
He’s not talking about spiritual deliverance from the penalty of sin. He’s
talking about survival in the midst of the current crisis.
He focuses on the character of God.
That’s one of the things we see so often in the psalms. The psalmist rehearses
the character and attributes of God and is calling upon God to intervene in his
life and preserve him because of who God is, because of His character. He
focuses here on the integrity and righteousness of God as the source of his
deliverance. He continues to say that he waits expectantly on God’s
intervention.
Another psalm we see where the word
wait is used is in Psalm 27:14, “Wait on the Lord.” It’s a command, an
exhortation. “Wait on the Lord. Be of good courage and He shall strengthen your
heart.” That is, strengthen your soul; to edify us; to give us courage in the
midst of crises; to give us strength to handle difficult circumstances and what
seem to be oppressing circumstances. David ends, “Wait, I say, upon the Lord.”
He repeats this concept in Psalm
37:34, “Wait on the Lord and keep His way.” Here we see the passive idea of
waiting and the active idea of keeping His way, which is being obedient to the
Lord. “Wait upon the Lord and keep His way and He shall exalt you to inherit
the land. When the wicked are cut off you shall see it.” When we look at Psalm
37:9 we see this concept of inheriting the land, owning the land, possessing
the land. Psalm 37:34 commands us to wait upon the Lord and to keep His way.
Israel was not to enjoy the blessings of the land unless they were to obey the
Lord.
The psalmist is saying when we wait
on the Lord in obedience, the result is that God is the One who will give
victory and ownership and possession of the land. That means the wicked will be
cut off and not have an inheritance or possession in the land. It also
indicates that waiting on the Lord is something that has a long-term focus.
It’s not something we’re going to wait this year, next year, and maybe three
years from now and we will see the end result. It may be that the end result
does not come for generations or centuries. This is certainly true of Israel’s
full and final possession of the land.
In terms of waiting on the Lord, we
need to develop a long-term vision. It might not bring about complete judicial
resolution in this life. It may wait until the final judgment of God. So the
emphasis is on the fact that God is the one who ultimately brings the blessing
and ultimately exalts them to inherit the land.
Looking back at Psalm 37:9, David
also uses the concept of waiting on the Lord there and he says something
interesting in that verse. “Evil doers will be cut off but those who wait for
the Lord will inherit the land.” Now in that context beginning in verse 7 he’s
talking about the passive part of waiting patiently for the Lord and not
fretting. If someone seems to be very successful and to have gotten away with
whatever they’ve gotten away with such as lying and cheating and stealing and
frauds, whatever it may be, don’t let that overwhelm you.
Sometimes we get that way when we
think about politics and politicians. They won’t get away with their misdeeds.
“Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, who carries out wicked
schemes.” We are to cease from anger, forsake wrath, and not fret or worry
because it leads only to evil doings. Our natural response sometimes when
someone has taken advantage of us, cheated us, and stolen from us, is that we
react in anger and wrath. That compounds the problem by doing something is
wrong and criminal and destructive.
We have a similar statement in
Matthew 5:5 where Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount says, “Blessed are the meek
for they shall inherit the earth.” That word meek is a misunderstood word. It
has the idea of authority orientation. Those who are oriented to the authority
of God and are obedient to God are the ones who will inherit the land and the
coming Kingdom. Those are the ones who will have and enjoy an inheritance.
That’s parallel with what David is saying here. Don’t respond to evil with evil
but remain obedient or under the authority of God and the result is that you
will inherit the land.
This is the same thing that Jesus is
saying. The word that is translated earth in Matthew 5:5 is really the word
that should be translated land indicating a promise of the land for Israel.
Remember Matthew 5:5 is still in the context of Jesus offering the Kingdom and
bringing it in for Israel at that time.
Then in Psalm 52:9, just to wrap up
with one last verse, “I will praise you forever because You have done it and in
the presence of your saints I will wait on Your name for it is good.” The idea
of waiting on God’s name indicates a focus on God’s character. The name is
often that which relates to the character of God. This becomes a source of
comfort for us, and strength. We’re reminded of the character qualities of God,
the essence box of God: His righteousness, the standard of God’s character and
justice, the application of that standard to His creatures and His eternal love
for us.
He is eternal life. He knows all things.
He is present to everything in His creation, which is His omniscience and
omnipresence. He’s omnipotent. He’s able to do that which He desires to do. He
is true in all that He does which is veracity and He is immutable. We can focus
on some basic characteristics of His character as His integrity, His
righteousness, justice, love, and truth. These are part of His character and
that becomes the foundation of why we wait on Him because we know that He is a
righteous God. We know He loves us. We know the way He deals with us is
perfectly just and on the basis of truth. Therefore we can wait upon the Lord.
This is our challenge from Isaiah
40:31 that we can claim and relax and wait upon Him in obedience. We’ll come
back and talk about the verse and these principles some more the next time.