A month ago, reading through the songs, I saw, I read Psalm 85, and as I read that, I thought, that's the text for the next community service, Psalm 85. The 80s, the Psalms, and the 80s deal with a lot of guys' mighty act in the lives of his people, the older covenant of people of Israel, how he called them out to be his own, brought them into the promised land, and took them down in Egypt and back and so forth, they rehearsed the mighty acts of God. Then we get to Psalm 85, and we read this. You see this for the director of music, so Doug, this for you. You notice this, oh, the sons of Korah, which is of course where we get to turn Koral music. No, it's not. Come on, folks. If you're going to fall asleep way little while, it's got nothing to do with Koral music. Korah was an interesting character, and the last thing we know about Korah is that he disobeyed God and Moses, and God put him to death in a rather violent way, but this is for the sons, of course, his kids from that to be okay. The thing I like best about Korah is his mother had my favorite name in the entire Bible. His mother's name was Oholybama. I'm not making it up. Her name was Oholybama, which I think must be what his dad said when he first saw, he said, Holy Bama, look at that one. It's in Hebrew, okay? It's there. It's in Hebrew. If you got a better explanation of why you'd name a girl, Oholybama, I'd love to hear it. This is for the sons of Korah. Of the sons of Korah, it's a song, which means of course it is a song meant to be used in corporate worship. Verse 1, you showed favor to your land, O Lord. You restored the fortunes of Jacob. You forgave the iniquity of your people and covered all their sins. Say la. You set aside all your wrath and turned from your fierce anger. Restore us again, O God, our Savior, and put away your displeasure toward us. Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger through all generations? Will you not revive us again that your people may rejoice in you? Show us your unfailing love, O Lord, and grant us your salvation. I will listen to what God the Lord will say. He promises peace to his people, his saints, but let them not return to folly. Surely his salvation is near those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Love and faithfulness meet together, righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven. Lord will indeed give what is good, and our land will yield his harvest. Righteousness goes before him, prepares the way for his steps. Much pray. Father, I am, as always, I'm just reminded of how good you are to us to give us your word and have it preserved for us down to the ages. That you raised up, holy men and women, and some not so holy. They were your chosen people throughout the ages, and you inspired them to receive your words and to have them transmitted down into clay tablets and leather scrolls. And now for us on the pages of our Bible. Thank you for your word. Your word is truth. And pray, Father, that you would use this word now to mold us and to shape us, to break us where we're stiff-necked, and to heal us where we've been broken. To use this word to shake us up and rattle our cages if you need to, pour out the oil of grace into our wounds by the same word. Lord, that you would use this written word to point us to the living word. His name is Jesus. His name I pray. Amen. I mean, say something to you about how we as reformed people, I mean, we're here to the doctrines of the Reformation. How we as reformed people approach the study of any passage in the Bible. A PCA Church, that's the Presbyterian Church in America. All over this country, if you go to a PCA Church, we will look different. We will sound different. We will sing and worship differently. We will do it in different languages. One thing you can be absolutely sure of if you go into any PCA Church in this country. The guy up here behind the pulpit or the lectern does believe the Bible to be God's word. And he will preach it as faithless he can from God's text to God's people. Now, what we do when we look at any past scripture, we ask some very basic questions. We want to know who wrote it? Who's the original author? Why did he write the document? To whom did he write? What was the context? Was he in a king's palace? Was he in a dungeon? Was he an exile? Was life good for the people at the time? Was life in dire extremity at the time? We want to know those kinds of things. When a when did he write? Well, language did he use? It's almost always either Hebrew or Greek. There's a few places, there are a few places in Ezra and Daniel. We'll get to those in Daniel shortly. They're written in Arabic, but overwhelmingly written in Hebrew and Greek. And that makes a difference. Was it before Christ? Was it after Christ? And then those are the big picture questions we ask. Then we look at the nuts and bolts questions of grammar, and structure, and syntax, and so forth. And we ask all those questions just trying to get at why did the original writer, if you write this, if you get this, you are ahead of 99% of evangelical Christians who don't know what I'm telling you. This is where we start to understand the text of the Bible. We ask those kinds of questions. I ask, I don't know the only one, but I'm probably fairly unusual. I ask, what's the flow of the passage? Where does it start? Where does it take us? What are the sights and sounds and features along the way? I want to know about the flow of the passage. Psalm 85 starts, it's a snapshot, if you will, of God's people and how He works in their lives. It shows us a lot about who God is, and it shows us about ourselves as well. It is in a way a microcosm of redemptive history. Even more, it's the prayer of a man who loves his country. He loves his people, and they're going through a very dark time, and he prays for the day when God will restore them, when God will again smile upon them, when God will again pour out his favor upon them. And so as we sit here, nine years and one day from the darkest chapter in American history in my lifetime, and probably most of yours, I thought how fitting and how appropriate that we look at this text as we come around the table of the Lord. You remember back what you were doing September 11th, 2001? Of course you do, if you're old enough. You remember where you were and what you were doing when you first got the news. And we cried out to God. Where is God? He's God abandoned us. How could this have happened? We cried out to God and our elected leaders stood on the steps of the Capitol and joined hands together saying God bless America. And churches were filled to overflowing in the week's following September 11th, 2001. The fires had barely gone out at ground zero and at the Pentagon. And then the smoldering wreckage of Flight 93 in that field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, fires were barely extinguished. Our elected leaders began to fight amongst themselves again, point the fingers of blame, talk about whose fault it was. Do you know the three weeks after 9-11, church attendance was right back where it had been pre 9-11, and there it has stayed or perhaps diminished ever since. We have forgotten, just like they did. Just like God's old covenant people, things were good, they forgot all about God. Things got bad, they cried out to God. We got a lot to learn from this psalmist. We don't know who it was, wrote the psalm. Something was David, we don't really know. We're not even sure what the historical setting is. We just know it was a dark time, the life of the people, and the psalmist is crying out for God to restore their blessings. So let's look and see what we may be clear about something folks. The United States of America is not the new covenant people, the people of God corresponding to the old covenant of Israel. We're not. The church is the new covenant people of God. The church is the new covenant counterpart to old covenant of Israel. But the church in America, a land blessed beyond all others, the church in America can learn a lot from Psalm 85. So the first thing I want us to see Psalm 85 is that they are in the people, they are in covenant with him. See that in verse one, you showed favor to your land, O Lord. You restored the fortunes of Jacob. You forget the iniquity of your people and covered all their sins, and they use that word Salah. They're God's people, they're bound to him in covenant. Now if you've come here for your link at the time you know this or if you're listed on the internet, you may be aware of it. A covenant is a promise, yes, it can be a treaty, yes, but it's an oath. In fact, it's a binding oath between two and more people. Marriage is a covenant. If you ever sign a real estate transaction, you'll see the word covenant in their life. You sign up for a mortgage, you'll see the word covenant. But in the Bible, a covenant is a binding oath, it's a blood oath. You did it in the internet lightly and you sure didn't get out of it lightly. And they are God's covenant people. They've been, they're called the sheep of this pasture. I was reminding our kind of Christian school kids about a little week ago. That sounds very nice and part of the pun. Sounds pastoral and tranquil and idyllic. Think about that. Sheep, you ever been around sheep? They're not the rocket scientists of the animal community. I don't, they're kind of cute from a distance, but if you ever get up close to them, it's not a great compliment when God calls us the sheep of this pasture. But sheep we are, we're his unique people. They were his unique older covenant people. And they have been ever since Abraham left his home in early Caldys, which is in modern-day Iraq. And it followed this strange God to this land of the promises, promised land. God had called Abraham out and said to him, Genesis 12, verses 1 through 3, the Lord had said to Abram, leave your country, your people and your father's household, and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. I will make your name great. And you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and who recurses you. I will curse and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. And God had blessed them. And against all odds had made of Abram a great nation. From one older man and his almost as old wife, childless into their 70s and even under their 80s against all odds. God had made of Abram a great nation. In fact, he really made Abram two great nations. But one was the nation of the child of the promise. The other half brothers have been at odds and have been at war with the half brothers and virtually everybody else ever since. God had made Abrams chosen to send us into the favored nation and the terrors of the ancient Near East because he used them to bless the nations who were friendly to them and he used them to punish and discipline and curse the nations that were unfriend to them. You could ask the Egyptians. You could ask the ones who lost their first born sons the night of the first Passover. You could ask the ones who lost loved ones to serve the Egyptian army when they at Pharaoh's command went pursuing the people of Israel across the sea floor of the Red Sea before the waters closed back over them and drowned countless thousands of them. God bless the nations who blessed them. He cursed the nations who cursed them. He brought his people into Canaan. A land flowing with milk and honey. A land that was fruitful and productive and good. A land that had a mccosha on every corner and all you had to do was just drive up on your donkey and hand you a bottle of wine and then ripe figs and you just went home and ate him. That's what it says in the original Hebrew. You have to trust me on that. It was a land that just produced for them. Every man sat under the shade of his own fig tree and drank his own wine. That was the land of Canaan, the land of the promise. A blessed Abraham, Abraham not because he was such a righteous man. He wasn't always but inspired the fact that he could be a very unrighteous and very holy man. He blessed Abraham not because of his righteousness and faithless but because of his faith. And if you don't know, if you only know one Old Testament verse, make it this one, Genesis 15-6. And Abram believed the Lord and he credited it to him as righteousness. Abraham believed God and God said, on that basis, I will make you justified in my sight. Justification by faith is not something Paul made up. It's there throughout the Scripture and it's how Abraham became Abraham. It's how he was made right before God. Let me say something to you if you're listening to him this morning and this is the first time you ever heard this. You don't become a Christian when you get good enough. When you really get rid of those besetting life-long habitual sins, when you can finally leave them aside enough, then you all clean up and you go to God. You wait to do that and you'll die in your sins. We go to God in faith believing that he's willing to forgive us because of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. You come to him in faith, not in righteousness and holiness. You're not. Neither am I. We're almost full of two kinds of people. We're all sinners. Some of us know it, some of us don't. Those of us who know it, you know, willing to come humbly and in faith to Christ, receive the payment he's made on the cross for our sins. That's how you're made right in God's size. Not because you're good enough because you're not and you never will be. Neither will I. Neither was Abraham. But he believed God and got credited to him as righteousness. That was under what we call the Old Recovenant. It's made manifest in what we call the New Covenant, which is what we celebrate here this morning around this table. That's spelled out the terms of that Old Recovenant. Most succinctly summarized in the Exodus 20, we call it the Ten Commandments. You can go there and read all the shouts and shout-outs. That's spelled out the terms of his covenant right there. And they are God's old covenant people, the people of Israel. One of only two nations in history ever founded upon a covenant. There have been two nations in the history of the world founded by and upon a covenant. You know what they are? One is old covenant to Israel. The other is the one you're living in right now. I didn't know this. You'd know this if you were in my Wednesday night class. I didn't know this though studying for this class. I found out that the Declaration of Independence isn't covenant. It's covenant between the people of this country and God Almighty. And that's why it's signed. I never thought to ask the question. Why do those 56 signers sign the document? They signed it and put their lives at risk. So these we pledge our lives, fortunes and our sacred honor. They put their lives at risk. Why do they do that? Why do they just write the document and post it? Because it's a covenant. The covenant has to be ratified. And on behalf of all the people of the colonies, those 56 men elected to represent them. I'm trying to find that document. Two covenant nations in the history of the world. If you're a Christian living in this country, you're part of both. And I noticed something. I noticed something after reading through this. One thing they taught us in seminary. When all else fails, read the text. So after reading the text over a number of times, I noticed something that didn't hit me at first. And that is that there's a significant shift in this Psalm. Verses 1 through 7 are written almost exclusively in the second person. He addressed the Psalmist and addresses God. He says, you and you're 16 times. He says, oh Lord, and oh God, our Savior. Two God, three more times. Total of 19 times he addresses, or cries out to God in the second person. And then at verse 8, there's a shift. And he moves to the third person. It's all he and him and his. And he refers to him as God the Lord. It does that total of 10 times. So there's a shift from the second person to the third. You say, well, that's great. You seminary geeks. So what? I'm glad you asked that question. In this church, as you know, we utilize a blended form of worship. We do some things that are traditional. We do some things that are contemporary. When we sing that way, that's how we know that in any given song, we know that at least 50% of you are probably ticked off at us. Why do we do that? Well, we do it for a lot of reasons. Here's one key reason. Contemporary music tends to be. This is not always true, but as generalization, contemporary music tends to be written in the second person. It's intimate. It's written to father, Lord, reign in me, reign in your power over all my dreams in my darkest hour. You are the Lord of all I am. So once you reign in me again, that's typical contemporary music. It tends to be written to God and it's sung to God in an intimate second person way. Older music, more traditional hymns, tend to be now, not always, but tend to be written in the third person. They tend to be written about God. What we didn't sing this morning in the wonderful cross when I surveyed the wondrous cross on which the prince of glory died. When I reach his gain, I count but loss and poor contempt on all my pride. See from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love, flow mingled down. Did air such love and sorrow meet or thorns compose so rich a crown? It's the third person. It's about God. So which is better? Yes. They're both great. They're both essential. It's all made in five right here. It's a great example of both. Now, as soon as I say that to you'll notice that we're going to do something a little bit that'll be an exception to the rule. And now it's your wear that you notice as we sing that there are songs that don't conform to that pattern, but overall that tends to be true of the contemporary and traditional. We need them both. We don't know what it means. We're pretty sure it's a musical term. And some of the commentators think it means, okay, now we're going to go acapella. Something, no, that means that's when the instrumentation kicks in. Some think it calls for a trumpet blast. Some think it calls for a repeat. My favorite suggestion on what say a lot of means comes from a rabbi who suggests it means you modulate up half a step. Nothing new under the sun. The way we do that would take a song up on a step or a half step. They did it too in the temple. It's a universal thing. Say, Lord, it's a musical term. And remember that the Psalms are the hymnal of God's older covenant people. They're in covenant with Him, but they're estranged from Him. Will you be angry with us forever, verse five? Will you prolong your anger through all generations? Will you not revive us again that your people may rejoice in you? Again, we don't know exactly what point in the nation's history took place. This took place, but we know it's a dark, dark time. It's a dark, dark chapter in their history. And again, I would just say for our context, context echoes 9-11, a dark time. And you remember these words are the lyrics to a song. The Psalmist is singing the blues. He's singing the blues. I think that's one of the reasons why the Psalms are so universally about. We resonate with them. Everybody who's old enough to know what it means has a dark, peered in your life, a deep valley, a dark night of the soul. Well, we just long for daylight. I think it's why the music that's associated with the Mississippi Delta, we call the blues, I guess why I say universal, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and BB King. It's what was characteristic of the black spirituals, what we call it so-called Negro spirituals of the pre-civil war era. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Sweet little Jesus boy, they didn't know who you was. See, we resonate with those. Even 150 years later, we have never known anything like slavery captivity. But we resonate with those because it's universal. It's bad, but there's a better day coming. It's dark now, but the daylight's coming. It's Friday, but Sunday is coming. Fanny Crosby wrote Blessed Assurance. That song has such authenticity with us because Fanny Crosby was born blind. So when she talks about the heavenly visions she sees, she can do that with credibility. It's not superficial fluff. When Horatio Spoffer wrote the hymn, known variously, as it is well in my soul, or when peace like a river, when he wrote that song, his story was this. His only son had died at the age of four. In 1871, most of everything Horatio Spoffer had owned was wiped out in the Great Chicago Fire. Two years later, knowing that his family really needed a rest, but he sent his wife and four daughters. He was going to take everybody across Trans-Atlantic voyage over to England at the last minute, something came up with business where he had to cancel and stay back. They sent his family on ahead. He probably know the story. Trans-Atlantic crossing, ship sank. His four daughters drowned. His wife survived in which she got to England. She wired back a cable just saved alone. And so Horatio Spoffer came across the Atlantic. He went across originally to help DL Moody with his evangelistic campaign. And as he sailed alone across the Atlantic, he asked the captain to let him know where was the spot where his family ship had gone down. And that's the spot at which he wrote, when peace like a river attended my way or sorrows like sea billows roll. Whatever my lot, that has taught me to say it as well, is well with my soul. So he could write that because he'd been there. He'd been down in the valley, he'd been down in the depths. So he could talk about it as well, no matter what, no matter what. Coming forward a few years, Irish band YouTube, most popular and probably the most important rock band in the last 30 years. Those boys all grew up in Ireland at the time when the process and the Catholics were bombing one another. They grew up in a torn apart by so-called religious civil war. I like their music, I'll tell you. I listen to it quite a bit. Think what you will of me. I've been a fan of theirs since a long time ago since a youth group kid in about 1970 or 1980s. You really gotta hear this band. I started listening to him and said, this is not fluff. These guys have something to say. They're all four professing Christians too, by the way. They're not paragons of virtue. They're not Sunday school kids, but they profess Christ and they understand grace. They have a song called 40 and they usually close their concerts with the song called 40 and the chorus goes like this, how long to sing this song? How long to sing this song? How long? How long? How long? How long to sing this song? You say what? It's only took them a long time to write that one. I stayed up late, burning them up and I wrote that song, didn't they? Careful. You know what? It's called 40. It's the song 40 folks. They needed one more song to fill out an album. And while in their studio they said, let's put some 40 to music. How long, oh lord, how long? How long will you forget your people? How long will you be angry with us? How long until you restore us? And that's how they close their concerts. I've seen them once. I said, oh, I am 1987, the tour for the album Joshua Tree, which most people consider their best album. And they closed at the Orange Bowl and you might remember the Orange Bowl or you'll remember the Orange Bowl. They closed the concert with 40 and I'm telling you folks, that crowd of 75,000, 80,000 set whatever the Orange Bowl holds plus forcing. They sat there singing that chorus for minutes after the band left the stage until the lights came up and everybody had to go home. Why? Because it resonates with everybody. How long? How long? We sing this song. Do we sing it in a new land? So the song was asked, will you not revive us again that your people may rejoice in you? Show us your unfailing love of Lord. Grant us your salvation. Your people want to rejoice in you again, Lord. Do you ever pray that? Lord, David said in Psalm 51, one of his most famous cries of the soul, created me a pure heart of God and I knew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation. Grant me a willing spirit. This is to me. Do you ever pray that? Lord, restore to me the joy of your salvation? Some of you need to. Just saying. Some of you can use to pray that prayer. Lord, it's been so good and now it's been so long. Restore to me the joy. Restore to me the joy of your salvation. If that's where you are right now, more of you are than you would have met on Sunday morning. This is for you. This is for you. God's people, His older covenant people are in covenant with Him. They're estranged from Him. They're reconciled to Him. Verse 9, surely a salvation is near those who fear Him. There's glory made dwell in our land. Love and faithfulness meet together, righteousness and peace kiss each other. I'm going to take exception with the NIV at this point, our church Bible. Will they translate love and faithfulness meet together? I like the word truth better. The Hebrew word that's used there is the word MF and it's almost always translated truth. I'm not sure quite why the transators in the NIV translate faithless. I mean they know what they're doing. It was a knowledgeable choice that word meets truth. I think it's better translated loving kindness and truth have met together. Righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Four qualities, loving kindness, truth, righteousness and peace. I think of them as the four points on the compass. I think of them as pointing the way to the outer limits of God's relationship with His people. His loving kindness is central to His character. It's what's caused him to bring the universe into existence, to create a world like this that would be so fruitful and abundant. In life sustenance, what caused him to create man and woman in his own image and to extend to them a second chance after the fall is what caused him to call out Abram, or the Caldys and make of him a great nation, to send prophets to warn them and to send to redeem them. And truth is also integral to who and what God is. Truth is what caused God to create a universe that runs on natural laws that speak to us truthly about who and what God is. It's what caused him to give his people his law, his divine special revelation. It's what caused him to give us his written word in the page of the Bible and to send his son to be the living word who would cry out, I am the truth. Righteousness is essential to his character. That's why he says, I the Lord you got him holy and you're to be holy too. You're to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The Lord will establish you as his holy people and peace. Peace is another key aspect of God's character. That's why whenever God appears in the Old Northern New Testament, whether it's in some sort of direct form, form of the angel of the Lord or Jesus after the resurrection, more often than not, his first words are peace. Peace be with you. Peace. It's what Jesus promises because I was going to give them his peace not like the world gives it fragile and uncertain and transient, conditional. The peace that endures and Paul prays will have the peace that goes beyond understanding. If you can picture these four compass points as the north, south, east and the west of God's love for his people and it's pretty easy to picture the cross as that which connects all four points of that compass. What that compass is where they meet in the middle and loving kindness and truth have met and righteousness and peace have kissed and it echoes what Paul said to the Ephesians that you might know how wide and how long, how high and how deep is the love of Christ. They're in covenant with him. They're estranged from him. They reconcile to him and they're transformed by him. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth and righteousness looks down from heaven. The Lord will indeed give what is good and our land will yield as harvest. Righteousness goes before him and prepares the way for his steps. God extends his grace. We respond with faithfulness. That's how it's supposed to be. We love because he first loved us. That's the stimulus in response folks. He didn't love us because we're good. He didn't love us because we're faithful. He didn't love us because we're obedient. He loved us to inspire the fact that we're none of those things. We become faithful and we become righteous and we become obedience in response to his love and his mercy and his grace. When we forget that, that's the gospel. We forget it. That's legalism. It's absolutely deadly. It's toxic waste to the soul and churches are filled with people who are default drive legalists because they don't understand the grace of God. He loves us not because of who we are but in spite of what we are. He calls us to be what he wants us to be. William Shakespeare, and I did not know this till a little over a year ago. I guess it was less than a year ago when my good friend, our good friend, Geron Bars was here in a pre-sports missions conference. The next one's coming up in a month. And Geron told us that William Shakespeare was a community venture. I'll go Christian. I didn't know that. But you do see those themes coming through and he's writing. In 1600 he wrote the merchant of Venice. There's this scene in the merchant of Venice in Portia, says the Shylock. The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as a gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed. It blessed him that gives and him that takes to his mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes the throned monarch better than his crown. His scepter shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty, where endeth sit the dread in fear of kings. But mercy is above this scepter's sway. It is enthroned in the hearts of kings. It is an attribute of God himself and earthly power doth then show like gods when mercy seasons justice. Psalm 85 is a foreshadowing of the time when God's mercy and his justice met in a horrible place outside Jerusalem, where the strangest and most wonderful man who ever lived hung on a cross and suffered and died that we might be made right in God's eyes. We might come together around his table and remember and celebrate Newtonian sacrifice of Christ. Let's pray together. Our Father, these are things that are deep and mysterious and frankly beyond us comprehend. Lord, my prayer this morning is that we would have just a glimpse into the wonderful truths of the scripture, the story of your redemption, your people, old covenant, new covenant. We get just an echo or a murmur of the glories to which this point that would be reminded again, Lord. Reminded. Have your goodness in your mercy.
Thank you for being with us today. We receive now the Lord of benediction. And may the God of peace who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep equipped you with everything good for doing his will. And may he work in us, what is pleasing to him through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.