Delight in the Lord
1 Thessalonians 1:8, Psalms 37:4–5
Before we get started we need to make sure we are
spiritually prepared to study the Word, spiritually prepared to worship through
the study of God’s Word. That means we need to be in right relationship with
God the Holy Spirit. Scripture uses various terms to define this. It talks
about walking by the Spirit, abiding in Christ, walking according to the truth
or being filled by the Spirit. Whenever we sin this relationship with God the
Holy Spirit, this on-going intimacy or fellowship with God is broken and when
we confess our sin Scripture says that God forgives us our sin and He cleanses
us from all unrighteousness. So we are restored to that relationship so that we
can continue to move forward in the Christian life. Before we begin we’ll have
a few moments of silent prayer to give you the opportunity to make sure that
you are ready and spiritually prepared to go forward in our study today. Let’s
bow our heads together in prayer and go to the Lord in prayer.
“Father, thank You for this opportunity that we can
come together to study Your Word and reflect upon these important truths. That
we can learn how to claim these promises and learn how to focus our thinking on
You and what You’ve provided for us and that we can learn how to trust You
consistently and to walk with You and continue to grow and mature. As we look
around us and we see so many different threatening things on the horizon in our
culture. We see opposition to Biblical truth, opposition to Biblical values. We
see disease. We see the threat of Ebola, the threat of plague, threats of war,
yet we know we can relax. We know we are not to take counsel of our fears. As
we’re learning in this passage, we are not to fret, to get all caught up with
the negatives and the opposition around us or with the unrighteousness that
seems to be so successful around us. Instead, we’re to put our focus upon You.
Now Father we pray that You will guide and direct our thinking today in this
lesson. In Christ’s name. Amen.”
We’re in Psalm 37. We’re looking at a very well known
promise reviewing the principle that the way to exercise the faith-rest drill
is to claim a promise. That’s the first step, which simply means we put our
mental fingers around this promise and grab hold of it. It may be a full
promise, one verse, two verses, or part of a verse, and we say, “Lord, this is
what You have said to do.” We can extrapolate this a little bit. It’s not just
simply claiming a promise. Sometimes it’s focusing on a command in Scripture
and we looked at this in the context of Psalm 37 where it begins, “Do not fret
because of evil doers.” I pointed out that this command not to fret is repeated
several times in the introduction. It is mentioned in verses 7 and 8, as well.
“Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way.” At the end, “Do not fret.
It only causes harm.”
So this is a command. Sometimes all we’re doing is
recognizing that we’re doing exactly what the Scripture says not to do and we
focus on that one command in order to orient our thinking and to orient the
direction of our life at that point. That’s part of the faith-rest drill. So we
claim a promise and then we think it through asking why is that true? That’s
important. It’s not just a matter of grabbing the promise but we need to engage
our thinking in relation to what we’re told to do and why we’re told to do it.
Many times in promises, God says to do something, and
as a result or alongside of that, He will do something else. That’s the
promissory part. For example, 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins …” That
is a statement. If we do that then you have the promise, “God is faithful and
just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” This
is clearly a promise that if we do what God says to do then He will do what He
has promised to do and to forgive us and to cleanse us. Every time we confess
sin, we are in essence following through on that promise and claiming that
promise.
So we think through the rationales. This involves the
Biblical process of meditation, which is thinking about what God has said and
why He has said it. This will bring to bear some of the things we taught and
some of the things we learned in, for example, the Bible Study
Methods class. It’s not just for pastors or Bible teachers or Sunday
School teachers. It’s for anyone who wants to learn how to dig beneath the
surface of the Word a little bit just in terms of your own personal study and
your own personal meditation. That’s the second step: Thinking through the
rationales embedded in the promise.
This leads us to firm conviction about the promise and
putting that into practice in our daily life. The promise we’re looking at is
in Psalm 37:4–5. It’s a wonderful passage. It’s a promise many people
use. We began looking at this last time. The promise reads, “Delight yourself
in the Lord.” There we have a command. It goes on, “And He shall give you the
desires of your heart.” That’s the result for those who have implemented the
command. So we have a command and then a promise.
Then in Psalm 37:5, another command, “Commit your way
to the Lord, Trust also in Him.” It’s a parallel statement, synonymous
parallelism in the second line and then we have the promise, “And He will bring
it to pass.” This is a two-fold verse. We’re just thinking it through in terms
of that second step, the meditation on this verse, thinking through the
embedded rationales.
As such, we went back to Psalm 37:1. We saw that the
Hebrew text actually begins with the statement that this is a psalm of David
but it doesn’t give us any specifics about the original circumstances. There
are many times this would be true in David’s life. It’s not necessarily tied to
a specific situation. Now what would happen in terms of the
psalms—because they reflect a tremendous amount of thought and a
tremendous amount of skill in terms of writing the poetry involved—is,
for example, David would have found himself in some situation or some
circumstance and as he thought through that circumstance, certain doctrinal
principles and certain doctrinal rationales became clear to him. He focused his
attention away from the problem and on to the essence of God and the provision
of God. He thought through these various rationales we’ve talked about in terms
of the essence of God and the plan of God. Then, after the situation, he would
sit down and write out a psalm in terms of Biblical poetry in a way that could
be set to music and sung as a way of expressing praise to God or perhaps as a
way of teaching or instructing others as to how they could trust God in the
midst of difficult circumstances.
This particular psalm was written according to an
acrostic pattern based on the Hebrew alphabet, which tells us that it was
written as a teaching tool or an instructional tool. This was one of the ways
that Jews would memorize Scripture. Each verse begins with a word that begins
with the next letter of the alphabet. The first word in the Hebrew text would
begin with the letter aleph. The second verse would begin with a word that begins with
the second letter in the Hebrew alphabet, bet, and so on. There’s an alphabetic pattern
here, which would be used as a mnemonic function in order to help people
memorize the Scripture.
Throughout the psalms the whole concept of meditation
and just the structure of the psalms was designed to teach memory. This is
something that, sadly, I find is lost in the lives of many believers today.
They don’t have a regular pattern of Bible memory and learning Scripture. There
are many wonderful side effects to this. I think it enhances our memory. I
think that as we memorize Scripture and discipline our minds to do that, it
helps us in many other areas. For young children, it’s especially important. If
you have young children, from the time they are old enough to say their first
word, just read verses to them over and over again. Then get them to repeat
them. The more that you do this the more it gives them an opportunity when
there’s not much in their brains yet to absorb those verses.
My mother always told me that the first complete
sentence I ever said was 1 John 1:9. Later on it was John 3:16. I had these
verses memorized long before I was a believer. I had them memorized when I was
just two or three years of age. It’s important to do that. I remember that when
we had Sunday School at the church where I grew up and when I went off to Camp
Peniel, we would have these Bible memory challenges. We would memorize
Scripture. As a pastor I can’t tell you how many times verses that I may not
have thought, about or verses that as an adult I had not consciously memorized,
have been brought to mind (I believe by the Holy Spirit) when I’ve been
teaching, that I memorized as a kid. I remember the first few years I was a
pastor I would be teaching and how often that happened. I would be in the
middle of teaching something and suddenly a verse would come to mind that I had
memorized as a kid. The earlier we get into this pattern, the earlier you can
get your children or grandchildren to memorize Scripture, the better it will
be.
What in the world would happen to us if we ever find
ourselves in a situation where we don’t have access to the Bible, don’t have
access to the Word of God. Then we’re just left with whatever promises we have
in our souls. A few years ago, I remember reading a book by Howard Rutledge,
who was a Vietnam POW. He wrote a book called In the
Presence of Mine Enemies. He talked about how when they were in
prison at the Hanoi Hilton, the prisoners were trying to remember Bible verses.
One person would remember a snippet of this verse. Another person would
remember a little phrase of the verse. They created a code, using Morse code or
some other code, where they would tap things out and they would talk to each
other when they could. They gradually pieced together a tremendous number of
Biblical promises that were used to comfort them. It was because they had
stored verses in their souls. Some of those men didn’t have much or they might
just remember a little bit. It really emphasized the importance of preparation
and Bible memory.
So we began in Psalm 37:1 last time looking at this
phrase, “Do not fret.” The idea of do not fret is a word that means don’t be
angry. Don’t get all worked up. Don’t get all bent out of shape over something
that you have no control over. The focus here is on evildoers. They are the
unrighteous. I pointed out that this is like much of the wisdom literature.
There are a lot of similarities between Psalm 37 and some wisdom psalms and
especially Proverbs, contrasting the righteous and the unrighteous.
We went to Psalm 1 and we showed that contrast between
the righteous and the unrighteous last time. As the Psalms are written it’s not
written talking about the believer versus the unbeliever but the righteous
believer versus the unrighteous believer. It’s not necessarily saying that
those who are true, genuine believers act a certain way and those who are not
act another way. The concept of one who does righteousness is not a positional
concept because of imputed righteousness. It’s emphasizing experiential
righteousness.
Many of us have had experiences where we were
surrounded by people who were unrighteous. These are gossips and maligners.
Some of them are Christians. We have faced this even among friends or
co-workers where we have been unjustly attacked. It seems like the person who
commits these sins and commits these attacks on us, succeeds. They reap rewards
because of their unethical conduct. So often, this can cause us to get involved
in a lot of mental attitude sins, anger, resentment, revenge, vindictiveness,
and other things. That’s what this is talking about: don’t get upset.
We can extrapolate this beyond a personal environment
to talk about what’s going on in the world around us. There is so much
legislative injustice in our world today as we see our culture drift more and more
away from the historic values of the Judeo-Christian worldview that established
this country and the U.S. Constitution. We have to be honest. We live in a
world now where the culture dominated by the urban centers of the West Coast
and the East Coast and many of the urban areas in the middle of the country
where there is much more of a liberal antinomian mentality. People just come
together in large cities and they do not want to follow any historic norms and
standards. They want to get away with whatever kind of immorality appeals to
their particular sin nature.
Yet many of us want to have a constitutional,
conservative government and the reality is that it’s going to be very difficult
for a truly constitutional conservative government to rule a culture where the
people desire a liberal, antinomian way of life. So we’re constantly going to
be presented with this. We just can’t spend our lives getting all bent out of
shape about all of the injustices and unrighteousnesses that goes on around us.
We can spend hours and hours, and I know many of us do, reading various
websites and reading the articles that detail what is going on in our culture.
I think it’s very important to be informed, but I think we need to be careful.
It puts our focus on what’s going on us around us that’s wrong, rather than
putting our focus on the Lord and what God is doing in our lives in our
environment.
That’s the context here. It’s saying not to get all
wrapped up in what the evildoer is doing. Don’t make that the focal point of
your thinking and don’t let it get you out of fellowship where you stay out of
fellowship and you’re constantly in a state of agitation. There’s a parallel
here in terms of the second line, “Don’t fret and don’t be jealous or be
envious.” This second line indicates the fact that in the first line you’re
being affected because you’re seeing the unbeliever get away with something and
in the second line; now you want to be like the unbeliever and get away with it
as well. So we’re told by the parallelism not to let the operation of the
rebellious believer or the unbeliever, the one who is unjust and unrighteous,
cause problems in your spiritual life.
Why? Because there is eventually going to be judgment.
We need to keep our ideas and our focus on the end game. One of the problems we
face as believers as we think through this issue of being surrounded by
injustice or being surrounded by an unfair situation, whether it’s real or it’s
perceived, the issue is how we respond. It’s our internal focus. There are two
different kinds of assaults we get from the evildoer. One is an overt assault,
when you know that someone is specifically attacking you. It’s out in the open.
Someone is making a case against you or spreading malicious rumors against you
or someone has betrayed you; whether it’s a spouse, whether it’s a child
whether it’s a close friend. I think many of us have gone through circumstances
where we have been deeply hurt by someone who under the guise of righteousness
has betrayed us or treated us wrongly.
Then we have a covert assault. Covert assaults are
assaults we’re not aware of. This takes place when someone does something
behind our back. Maybe we find out about it later. Maybe we don’t but it’s not
out in the open. We need to learn how to deal with this situation. Sometimes
it’s just the general situation related to culture; sometimes it has to do with
a specific, individual problem. The real problem that bothers us—and
bothers believers who are walking with the Lord and are righteous—is that
we have a sense of the way things ought to be. A lot of unbelievers have this
but because of the fact they have calloused themselves in terms of their own
unrighteousness and in their own suppression of truth in unrighteousness,
they’re not as easily reminded of this as believers are. They’re not as
sensitive to it.
What we find as we look around, we see people who are
perhaps living out of wedlock, living together and haven’t gotten married or they’re
involved in overt sins that are perverted or they’re involved in unethical
conduct in their business and yet they seem to be quite successful. As churches
we can look around and see that there are many churches in America and many
churches just in Houston here that seem to be quite successful. They’re quite
large. They attract thousands and thousands of people and yet their doctrine is
perverted. Their methodology is perverted. They have pandered to the culture
and they are preaching a false gospel. If they’re not preaching a false gospel,
they’ve watered it down so much to where it becomes an impotent gospel and
they’re not emphasizing truth at all. In many cases they have succumbed to
heresy and they’re no longer teaching the Bible at all. They’re teaching some
sort of false system of spirituality. It’s easy to look at them and wonder how
in the world they can be so successful and apparently so blessed when they’re
not even teaching the truth.
We have these situations that occur where we see apparent
success of an injustice all around us. It’s hard for us. You also can look at
people who are working at a job. They work hard. They’re ethical. They get
there early. They leave late. Yet there are others who use their personalities
to manipulate and they gossip to get ahead and they seem to advance. So our
response is to become concerned. On the one hand we can become angry about it
and on the other hand we can become envious. In terms of human viewpoint these
are the two broad categories of that response. We can respond with mental
attitude sins or we can respond with the idea that if you can’t beat them, join
them. There’s a temptation to compromise on doctrine, to compromise on your
personal policies or to compromise on your philosophy of life.
Now this is really going to get difficult for a lot of
people. I don’t know what the situation will be when this is aired but right
now in Houston we have had this ongoing situation in city government since last
spring. I’m recording this in mid-October and since last spring there’s been an
attempt to change the Houston equal-rights ordinance of having the same civil
rights and equal rights for those who are gay, lesbian, and transgender even to
the point of mandating that buildings have restrooms and dressing areas in gyms
that will be open to anyone who thinks they are the opposite sex. It’s an
assault on Biblical values and it’s an assault on the Bible and any religious
system that holds absolutes in the area of sexuality, including Islam and
Orthodox Judaism.
People who have made decisions that they do not
believe that homosexuality is right or that the sexual deviants are right are
put in compromising positions in their jobs. Now they’re being forced by city
government to institute policy and enforce policy in the workplace that
violates their personal belief. This works now because we’ve created a culture
based on secularism where about 99.9% of Christians have bifurcated their
souls. They have one set of values that work in civil society and then they operate
on another set of values when they’re alone or when they’re in their private
life. What that really means is that at an epistemological level they’ve
already committed to the fact that there are two sets of operational values,
one set of values that works at the workplace and another their personal
values. They’re saying, “Of course, I can’t take my personal values to the
workplace because then I’ll be fired.”
I actually know of at least one person in this
congregation who was fired from a job because of his stand on homosexuality. If
you’re so committed to your paycheck that you won’t stand up against these
unethical practices that are being handed down from the human resource
departments at Exxon or at city government or whatever, then you have committed
your life to secularism and a pagan worldview. You're already becoming a
failure in your Christian life.
The values you believe on Sunday morning that you
espouse from the Bible must be the values that dictate your behavior 24/7 at
the workplace. If you don’t do that, then you’ve already compromised and you’re
living a life of compromise. This has been so subtle and this is one of the
reasons that Christians have very little impact on the culture anymore is
because epistemologically they’ve already lost the battle twenty or thirty
years ago.
We have to be careful. We can’t get involved in a
human viewpoint rationale that leads us to compromise. We say, “After all it’s
my job. That’s what I have to do to take care of my family and to pay the
bills.” We have to stand up. After thirty years of assault on employees it’s
almost impossible to reverse this process. I remember back in the late 1980s
when I had a man in my church who was an employee of what was then Southwestern
Bell. All the employees had to go through sensitivity training and then the
next year all the employees had to go through basically what is a visual-guided
imagery course which was nothing more than New Age metaphysics. Everyone had to
do that and if you didn’t do it then you would lose your job. Most Christians
didn’t take a stand because they didn’t want to lose their jobs. This is the
kind of incrementalism that has taken place in the world around us and
basically rendered most Christians ineffective and out-of-fellowship most of
the time.
Remember in 1 John the issue of being out of
fellowship was doctrine. It wasn’t practice. It wasn’t sin. The primary issue
John is talking about is that if you had a wrong view of the person and work of
Christ, then you were out of fellowship. We tend to think that getting out of
fellowship is only the result of committing a sin. If you have a compromised
doctrine at the core of your thinking then you’re never going to go anywhere in
your Christian life. Going to church and learning the Bible becomes just a
waste of time until you straighten out your value system. It’s a value system
that you’re implementing one hundred percent 24/7 around the clock. So we can’t
compromise on moral issues or on ethical issues.
Our personal life policy needs to govern everything.
This is the assault that’s taking place right now. What is happening from the
liberal left is that there’s an assault on Biblical Judeo-Christian values.
They’re saying that religion needs to be confined to the pulpit. It needs to be
confined and restricted to Sunday morning but it can’t leak out of the church
and impact anything else that’s going on. That is the devil’s world. We have to
decide, are we going to live as a result of this outside pressure from the
world and compromise with it or are we going to stand firm against it? This
impacts everyone.
If you’re a police officer, if you’re in the military,
if you are in any kind of work for the federal government then you’re being
asked to implement and validate policies that are contrary to God’s Word.
Eventually you have to make a decision whether your spiritual life is more
important than having a job. This is a major problem for a lot of people. I
understand that sometimes it takes a long time to get to this place in your
personal life and it may take you a while to disengage simply because of
decisions that have already been made. If you’re in the military—and I
think about people I know who are in the chaplaincy—and get into a
situation where more and more things are being put upon you as a chaplain that
run counter to your belief about the Word of God. You may not be in a position
to just immediately change your job. It may take you two or three years. You
may be close to retirement. You may have to take a hit in terms of staying in your
job three or four more years to finish that retirement.
You didn’t get to the place where you are overnight
and you’re not going to get out of it overnight either. It’s really easy for us
to tell you that you just need to quit being an employee there, but the reality
you do still need to pay your bills and do other things. You have to figure out
a strategy to disengage before you can make those kinds of decisions. The first
step is realizing that maybe you’re in a position where you need to disengage.
We need to make sure that our responses to the world around us are not
motivated by our sin nature—they’re not motivated by anger; they’re not
motivated by a desire to be secure in our job or our finances. That means we’re
looking to our job, our career, and our finances as a source of security and
not to the Word of God.
We have to not be “envious of the workers of
iniquity.”
Now this last phrase is an interesting phrase. It’s
translated in some translations as “those who do evil”. The term evil here actually
represents those who are engaged in policies and practices that are hostile to
the Word of God. The word that’s translated evil is the Hebrew word avlah from
the word avel
which is the word for sin or iniquity and the word can refer to someone who’s a
criminal, someone who’s a sinner or to those who live their lives with no
reference whatsoever to God or to righteousness or to morality. It has sort of
an abstract sense of those who are oppressing believers, those who are hostile
to God, or those who are atheists. It has a broad range of meanings and
basically it relates to anyone who is living their life apart from God and
apart from divine absolutes.
We’re not supposed to be envious of them. Why? The why
question is answered in Psalm 37:2: “For they shall soon be cut down like the
grass, and wither as the green herb.” This is imagery, which is often used in
Scripture. Isaiah talks about the grass withering and the flowers fading. We
have these various images throughout Scripture. Grass is something that is
temporary. It doesn’t last long. In Israel you have two rainy seasons. One is
in the spring. One is in the late fall. In between you have a dry season. So
when the early rains come, which are the spring rains, then everything flowers,
the grasses come out, and there’s plenty of food and forage for all of the
animals. But then as the summer heat develops and the sun is high in the sky
and the temperatures go up into the mid or upper 90s, there’s no rain. For
three or four months there’s no rain and the grass will wither. The plants will
die. That’s what this picture is. This is something that is temporary. It
appears initially at first that the plant or the person has been very
successful. He’s flourishing. He’s fruitful. He’s productive.
In terms of not lasting, we have to put our
perspective on eternity. We get our mindset out of the idea that life consists
of just a couple of decades or a few years. Often we look at someone and we
say, “Oh, they’re flourishing. They’re doing so well. Look at how evil they
are.” In our world today when we’re so transient, it looks like they’re very
successful. We don’t necessarily see how God will correct that or bring divine
discipline into their lives. Many times we don’t see things that are happening
that are outside of our vision. We see someone at work that’s being successful
because of unethical practices. He may change jobs and go somewhere else.
Sooner or later it may catch up with him and we have no way of seeing that. We
don’t know what’s happening in his personal life or at home. We just have to
put our attention on the Lord.
The promise is that eventually there will be justice
in every situation. Sometimes we may see some of it in this life. I know many
of us pray, “Lord, I just want to watch. I just want to see you eventually
bring them to justice.” In many cases in this life that is all the blessing
they will ever get. If they’re Christians in the church age they may end up
with a complete loss of everything except their salvation at the Judgment Seat
of Christ. But there is accountability eventually for everyone. That’s the
principle of verse 2.
It’s a reminder to us that the reason we should not be
upset about the evildoer is because eventually they’re going to get what they deserve.
We should not be envious of those who treat God lightly, the workers of
iniquity, because eventually they will be cut down and whatever prosperity they
have will be destroyed. The solution for us is the beginning of this great
section of promises that we have starting in Psalm 37:3, “Trust in the Lord,
and do good; Dwell in the land and feed on His faithfulness.”
There are a couple of things that we ought to
understand about this. First of all, we have three imperatives here. Trust,
dwell, and feed. There’s a progression there. Trust has to do with belief, with
confidence in God. Dwell has to be understood in terms of the land promises of
God in the Old Testament but it would have application to us as church age
believers. Feed on His faithfulness is a very important and interesting imagery.
"Feed on His faithfulness" is probably not the correct translation.
So we are to trust in the Lord. That word for trust is
the Hebrew word batach.
It means to trust, to rely upon something, to feel safe or secure, to put
confidence in something, and to totally rely upon something, be totally
dependent upon something. Somewhere along the line people got the idea this was
a wrestling term and it had to do with some sort of a body slam on a mat. I’ve
looked at this for probably thirty years. There’s no indication that has
anything to do with this word. There’s an Arabic cognate that has the idea of
throwing something to the ground but that meaning, according to all the major
Hebrew lexicons or sources is not found in any Hebrew usage anywhere. Instead,
this word is very important because it has the idea of placing a confidence in
someone. It’s an assured reliance. It’s the idea that you feel very secure,
totally secure, in someone being able to do what they claim to do. The emphasis
is on the security of that trust and the idea of safety in that reliance upon
the person you are trusting.
We trust in the Lord and it brings to bear ideas of
being confident in Yahweh. Trust in Him. Feel secure and safe in Him and do good.
That is, do that which is good. We are to trust in Yahweh, and as a result we
are to do good. The word there is tov, which often has to do with doing that
which God says to do. Tov is an interesting word. It can borderline on an ethical
standard like righteousness. Many people read righteousness into the word good
but tov really
is a word having to do with something fitting a plan. For example, in the
creation week, when God is creating, at the end of each day He would see
everything and say it was good. That means it was according to His plan. He had
a blueprint. Day one He did the first stage and at the end, He said it was
good; it was according to plan. When He finished, He said it was very good. It
doesn’t mean it was righteous.
If you want to import the meaning of righteousness to
the core meaning of tov you have a little problem when you get to Genesis 2. In Genesis
2, God used the same word when He said it’s not good for man to be alone. If
good has the sense of ethical righteousness, then it would be unethical and
unrighteous for man to be alone. That just doesn’t fit. There’s nothing immoral
or unethical or unrighteous about being single. It’s not according to God’s
plan, though. It’s not His ideal. His ideal is for man and woman to come together
as a union in marriage but there’s nothing wrong, unethical, or immoral, or
unrighteous about being single. But if tov has an ethical sense, then that’s where you
end up. We have to be very careful with these kinds of words.
The idea is that we are to do good. That is, we are to
live according to God’s plan. God’s plan, of course, is righteous but that’s
not the sense here. He’s not saying to be righteous. He’s saying to live
according to God’s plan, which, of course, would be living in accordance with
God’s Word. Another thought on trusting in the Lord is that this word is found
in passages like Isaiah 12:2, “Behold, God is my salvation. I will trust and
not be afraid for the Lord is my strength and my song. He also has become my
salvation.” So that’s also another great promise. I will trust and not be
afraid is juxtaposing fear with faith. Isaiah 26:4 says, “Trust in the Lord
forever, for in Yahweh the Lord is everlasting strength.”
Jeremiah 17:5 says, “Cursed is the man who trusts in
man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the Lord.” So these
are very important passages for understanding these important distinctions,
these very important promises which we have from the Scripture. Jeremiah
17:6–7 is talking about the person who trusts in man. “His confidence is
in man, for he shall be like a shrub in the desert. He will not see when good
comes but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, the salt places
which is not inhabited.” Notice there’s an imagery of that dwelling in the
land, just as we have here in Psalm 37:3. We are to trust in the Lord. The
result in Jeremiah 17:8 then is “For he shall be like a tree planted by the
waters, which spreads out its roots by the river.” This is imagery very similar
to what we saw of the righteous man who puts his roots like a well-watered tree
in Psalm 1. The focus here is on the fact that God gives us security and
stability. We trust in the Lord and we do good.
Another thing we see here in Psalm 37:3 is the command
to dwell in the land. The land for an Israelite in the Old Testament is the
place where God promised blessing to Abraham and his descendants, so it has to
do with being in a position of obedience. This would be comparable to the
Church Age believer living and walking by God the Holy Spirit. We are to live
where God wants us in light of our position in Christ. That would be the
application for us.
What does it mean to “feed on His faithfulness”? I
want you to notice a couple of things here. First of all, it says to feed on
“His” faithfulness. The word His is the 3rd person singular pronoun
and it’s not found in the Hebrew text at all. There’s just an imperative word
for feed and then there’s a word that deals with righteousness in terms of
God’s faithfulness, which is the word emunah in the Hebrew, and has to do with
steadfastness or faithfulness or integrity. So the command there is the word ra’ah, which
has the idea of shepherding, leading, or even feeding, as a shepherd would lead
his flocks to pasture. So this is a command that you are to feed, and then
what? The idea here is probably not feeding on God’s faithfulness because
there’s no 3rd person singular pronoun there but it would be the
idea of cultivating your own integrity, your own righteousness. Dwell in the
land where God has placed you and grow and learn in terms of your own
experiential righteousness and your own integrity. That fits the pattern. First
you trust in the Lord, which is a synonymous parallel to dwelling the land.
Then the result of trusting in the Lord is to do good, to follow out God’s plan.
So that would fit the parallel with feeding or cultivating your own
righteousness, your own integrity. This is part of the promise. We’re to focus
on our own spiritual life and our own spiritual growth.
Now we come to Psalm 37:4–5, “Delight yourself
also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your
way to the Lord, Trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.” Notice in
the first line you have the imperative “delight” yourself in Yahweh. He is the
focus of our joy. The second line gives the result. The result of your
delighting in the Lord is that He will give you the desires of your heart.
Verse 5 gives another command, “Commit your way to the Lord.” And then a
parallel to that, “Trust also in Him.” There’s our word batach again, gaining confidence in Him.
The result is He will bring it to pass. So both verses emphasize God’s answer
to prayer but prayer grows out of a life where we are delighting in the Lord
and we are committing our way to Him.
Let’s look at some of the information here related to
the verbiage. The word delight here is in what the Hebrew calls the hithpael
stem. Hebrew verbs have different what they call stems. Each one has a
different nuance. Usually the hithpael is a reflexive, causative stem. That means you’re doing
something to yourself, causing something to happen to yourself. The meaning of
a word, for example in the qal or the piel stem, has a completely different meaning from what’s in the hithpael stem.
Usage is important here.
The word here has to do with taking delight or joy in
something. Our joy is in the Lord. So often we get distracted in life. Our real
pleasures come from the people around us or our pleasures come from things that
we have, hobbies we enjoy, activities we enjoy and what this is saying is that
our number one priority needs to be in the Lord. We need to delight in the
Lord. We need to take real joy in what the Lord takes joy in. We need to focus
upon Him and upon His Word. Instead of being preoccupied with our self, we need
to be occupied with the Lord and the things of the Lord. If we’re too busy to
listen to three or four hours of Bible teaching each and every week, we’re too
busy. We have to straighten out our life and figure out a way to put our
priorities right. You spend time doing what you want to do. We’re all that way.
When you look and evaluate your life, you eat what you want to eat and not what
you think you ought to eat or wish you ought to eat. We do what we want to do.
You look at how you spend your time. That tells you what you really want to do.
If you’re not spending your time in the Word and you’re not spending your time
focused on the things of the Lord, then that really isn’t a priority to you, no
matter what you say. You need to have a long talk with yourself and refocus. We
need to focus upon the Lord.
This word, delight, is used in passages such as Job
22:26, “For then you will delight in the Almighty and lift up your face to
God.” The idea of lifting up your face to God has to do with prayer. So in both
places we have an environment, a context, talking about the importance of
prayer and communication with God. So delighting in the Lord isn’t just a
matter of reading your Bible or studying or listening to the pastor teach the
Word, but it moves forward into that ongoing relationship with the Lord. It is
enjoying our fellowship.
Too often we’ve had people who’ve gotten the idea from
the phrase “in fellowship” that all I have to do is confess my sin and I’m in
fellowship. That’s a misunderstanding of what that means. To be in fellowship
means to enjoy fellowship, to be involved in a relationship with God, to be
moving forward in that relationship with God. It’s an active concept, not a
static or passive concept. We need to recognize that we are actively walking by
the Holy Spirit, abiding in Christ, and other terms that are used. They give a
dynamic to fellowship that we use when we just use that phrase “in fellowship”.
Too many people have really hurt their spiritual life by not understanding
that.
Part of delighting in the Lord, of course, is
delighting in God’s Word and God’s will. The only way we can know God’s will is
to know God’s Word. When we look at other promises, for example, that are very
much parallel to this, we look at the fact that if we delight ourselves in the
Lord that He’ll give us the desires of our heart, that word desire is the word mish’alah in
the Hebrew. The first part of the word forms a noun with the suffix at the end
has to do with making it a genitive. Sha’al is the center of it and that means to
ask something. He’s going to give us the requests of our heart.
This doesn’t mean that God’s going to give us just everything
we want. He’s not just some kind of Santa Claus in the sky. We have to look at
passages such as 1 John 5:14–15 where John says, “Now this is the
confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will,
He hears use.” See, if we delight in the Lord, we’re going to learn God’s will,
and we’re going to think God’s way. As a result of that, what we ask of Him is
going to be in accordance with His will and His way. We’re going to be thinking
in terms of divine viewpoint.
We need to think in terms of His word. John 15:7 says,
“If you abide in Me and My words abide in you …” So those words have to abiding
in us and then Jesus said, “Ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.”
The precondition for answered prayer is that we’re praying according to God’s
will and we know God’s will. The only way we can know God’s will is to
understand His Word and what He has given to us, and what He has provided for
us. So what we see here is a very important principle. As part of delighting in
the Lord, we need to understand exactly what His will is.
Then we come to Psalm 37:5, which develops the thought
even further. “Commit your way to the Lord, Trust also in Him, and He will do
it.” This is a very important word at the beginning: commit. The English word
for commit has a different nuance than the Hebrew word for commit. The English
word for commit has the idea in its third meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary is the idea of
transferring something for safekeeping to someone else. But generally the
English word for commit has ideas that aren’t part of the Hebrew word.
The Hebrew word for commit is galal. It means to roll something. It
has that idea of rolling something over on to somebody else, that is,
entrusting something to them or handing something over to someone for
safekeeping. Surrendering something to someone else so they can provide for it
or take care of it is the idea. It’s parallel to the idea of “casting our cares
upon Him because He cares for us”.
The word there for “your way” is the path of your
life. This is the course of your life. It brings into focus what we often find
in wisdom literature is what direction is your life going to take. Are you
following God and God’s plan for your life and your ultimate destiny in His plan,
or are you living your life according to your own way? Proverbs 16:25 says
“There’s a way that seems right to man but the end thereof is death.” We are to
commit our way and commit our life to the Lord. That means to entrust it to
Him, which is what comes up in the second line there, which says for us to
trust in Him [batach].
So the words “commit” and “trust” there are parallel whereas the English words
“commit” and “trust” are not the same thing.
It’s a problem for people giving the gospel. They say
you need to commit your life to Christ, but in English the word commit is not a
synonym for trust. That’s not a good way to explain the gospel. The Bible says
we’re to believe in Jesus Christ as our Savior. This “commit” is an awkward
term. It should have the idea of casting your way to the Lord or rolling your
life over to the Lord, something like that. Find another word besides commit to
emphasize this idea of trust. This is developed in passages such as Isaiah
26:3–4 which says, “You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is
stayed on You, because he trusts in You. Trust in the Lord forever, for in
Yahweh, the Lord, is everlasting strength.”
So an emphasis that we have here is on the
faithfulness of God. A passage where we see this developed is in Psalm 37:25,
“I have been young and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken.”
What he means by that is that even if your life is lost for whatever reason,
like your health is lost, God has not deserted us. God always takes care of us.
Maybe not in the way we think or hope that He would, but God never deserts us.
In verse 26, “He’s ever merciful and lends and his descendants are blessed.”
This is the person who is righteous, who lives the right kind of way.
Generally this is true. Wisdom literature is not
promises but here it’s stating a general truth. That’s what wisdom literature
is. Lamentations 3:22–23 is another favorite promise dealing with the
faithfulness of God. “Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed because
His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great is Thy
faithfulness.” Other passages we can go to, for example, Isaiah 30:15–19
is another great passage on the strength of God. In our own passage if we look
at Psalm 37:28, “For the Lord loves justice and does not forsake His saints.
They are preserved forever.” In contrast to the unrighteous who are blown away,
the Lord loves justice and does not forsake His saints. They are preserved
forever, but the descendants of the wicked will be cut off. “The righteous
shall inherit the land.” The focus there is on inheritance, not upon salvation
or justification. God is the One who takes care of the righteous. This is
David’s conclusion in Psalm 37:39, “But the salvation of the righteous is from
the Lord. He is their strength in time of trouble, and the Lord shall help them
and deliver them. He shall deliver them from the wicked and save them because
they trust in Him.” Let’s close in prayer.
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to study these
things this morning, to be reminded of these great promises and your
faithfulness and trustworthiness that our confidence and security and safety
should be totally put in Your hands. And that we are not to be compromised by
the world’s system that we’re not to be envious of those in the world, but that
we’re to take a firm stand against the trends of the age and the influence of
the cosmic system, no matter what it may entail. Otherwise, it presents a
tremendous danger to our spiritual life and the health of our soul. Father, we
pray that You’ll give us the courage of our convictions. In Christ’s name.
Amen.”