Yesterday I preached from Psalm 43. In that sermon, I talked about the need for us to read this Psalm consistently, to preach it to ourselves with repetition. Take a minute to read it. There are some great phrases here. Think on the ones that jump out at you.
By reading this over and over and thinking deeply about the phrasing, you are pressing the very character of God into your soul. This is the gift of the Psalms, cherish them, pray them.
Psalm 43::
Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause
against an ungodly people,
from the deceitful and unjust man
deliver me!
For you are the God in whom I take refuge;
why have you rejected me?
Why do I go about mourning
because of the oppression of the enemy?
Send out your light and your truth;
let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy hill
and to your dwelling!
Then I will go to the altar of God,
to God my exceeding joy,
and I will praise you with the lyre,
O God, my God.
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God.
Psalm 34:15-22
Psalm 34:15-22
B.
“The eyes of the Lord are toward the
righteous and his ears toward their cry.
The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory
of them from the earth. When the
righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their
troubles. The lord is near to the
brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers
him out of them all. He keeps all
his bones; not one of them are broken.
Affliction will slay that wicked, and those who hate the righteous will
be condemned. The Lord redeems the
life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.”
There are many evils in the
world. So much that it is
impossible for a man to live his life without the afflictions that come from
the conflict, selfishness, instability, and mischief of his own doing and that
of others. We are threatened to be
tricked, cheated, oppressed, and misused everywhere we turn. Affliction produces sorrow, and
everywhere I go, I see men suffering from the sorrow that afflicts them from
merely being a participant in this fallen state of affairs. Every man, whether believer or not, has
untold sorrow from the years of suffering that he has endured in this life. The difference in Jesus Christ is that
the righteous have the attention of the Lord in heaven, and His ear is always
poised to hear their cries, waiting in anticipation to drench them in an
abundance of love, mercy, and deliverance. The face of the Lord, though, is against those who do evil,
and they stand to be cut off by the one who has the power to cut them off—to be
salted with fire.
Now,
the mistake I usually make—the manner in which I am most easily deceived—is
concerning what differentiates a righteous man from a wicked man. (Even in the interpretation and
application of the word of God we must be diligently sober-minded and
accountable to others. For it is
when the truth threatens evil by comforting the righteous that the righteous
are most threatened by evil to be deceived in their endeavors to rightly divide
the truth.) The bible says that
the ‘redeemed’ of the Lord, His servants, are those who take refuge in Him
specifically because they are unrighteous, and God has said that all those who
call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Therefore, the righteous are not the strong and the
wise but are the ones who look to God for their wisdom and strength. Righteous men are only characterized by
righteous deeds if they have made a habit of crying out to the Lord for their
help in the midst of all the wickedness and affliction that causes them
sorrow. It is only the broken-hearted
that God draws near to because it is only the broken-hearted who draw near to
God. God only saves the crushed in
spirit because it is the crushed in spirit who have no faith in themselves.
The
wicked man, though, refuses God’s help, whether from stubbornness of pride or
ignorance of evil, dismissing God’s authority to dictate what is good and His
power to save from what is evil.
Either way, if affliction does not break him, it will consume him in the
end. Affliction serves as evidence
that the existence of good is only the appearance of good, and where evil
exists, no good can exist at all.
In other words, our heart desires what is good, but that desire is
frustrated by the evil that exists because the good that has been
abandoned. To be righteous is only
to acknowledge this reality and turn to God for help and salvation from a
wicked world that will soon be cut off because it is full of evil. Wicked men are the ones who pretend
that the good they find is the only good that exists because it is what they
think they want. However, when
they find it is fruitless to defeat evil or stand up to their sorrow, to
continue to cling to such shadows prove that they do not love goodness at all,
but darkness, because their deeds are
evil.
The
righteous who are ‘being’ saved are not saved from the presence of affliction,
only that they will not be consumed by it, just as we are not saved from the
presence of sin, but only its power to destroy us. In all cases for the righteous, sorrow leads us to the
Righteous Comforter—The Spirit of the Living God—who identifies us in our
hearts, prevailing over our sorrow, to be alive in Christ. Our joy is our hope, not our
righteousness. Do not mistake
righteousness for being infallible.
For, anyone who believes this will not be led to sorrow but overtaken by
despair, thinking that God has abandoned him. We must believe that all our unrighteousness leads us to a
righteous God, and we must be led to Him if we are to overcome, so that in our
learned hatred for what is evil, we may be a source of refuge and light to
those who still live with deep sorrow.
