The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Have you ever felt that your prayers weren't being answered and that God was slow in coming to the rescue? As David continues his plea for help, he goes a step further. David not only asks to be rescued from his enemies but also for the swift judgment of those who seek to do him harm. How do we as Christians relate to David's plea for vengeance in light of Jesus' teachings on forgiveness?

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast featuring Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. The key to understanding the righteousness of David's plea for judgment on his enemies is depending on knowing David's heart and just whom he is asking to bring about that judgment. Turn in your Bible to Psalm 69 as Dr. Boice makes clear that the reality of judgment and the seriousness of sin should draw us to the Savior.

Dr. James Boice: Last week we began a study of Psalm 69, and I pointed out as we began that if there is ever a Psalm in the Psalter that's Messianic, it's this one. Not all of them are. The number varies upon the way the interpreter sees the Psalms. Some find more references to Jesus Christ in the Psalms than others. Saint Augustine saw every Psalm as a reference to Jesus Christ. I suppose most commentators today, and I'm among them, would only name 20 or 30 as explicitly Messianic.

But nevertheless, among that relatively small number that are explicitly of Jesus Christ, this one stands out. You could hardly miss it because a number of its verses are quoted in the New Testament in reference to Jesus Christ. There are only 36 or 37 verses here, but seven of them are quoted in the New Testament as referring to Jesus Christ, and there are other places in the New Testament where the themes that appear in this Psalm are developed. So clearly, it's about him.

We began to look at it that way. I pointed out that on the surface, at least, in its historical setting, it's the Psalm of the Psalmist who is in trouble and he's calling out to God for help. And so the Messianic parts, the parts that refer to Jesus Christ, are secondary, as it were. I saw that we have to look at it in three different ways. We have to look at it in terms of David's experience. That's the way you understand it, the historical setting.

Secondly, you look at it for what it tells us about Jesus Christ. Although perhaps in David's mind it wasn't written explicitly about him, Jesus and others in the New Testament drew from the Psalm to explain what Christ went through. So we look at the Psalm for what it tells us about Jesus' suffering. And then finally, because we go through the same things ourselves, we say, what does it tell us about how we should go through suffering? Obviously, Jesus is our example. He suffered for us, leaving us an example. That's what Peter says, that we should follow in his steps.

So you want to say, how do we do that? Well, if we're going to go through suffering the way Jesus Christ did, it's going to have to be by his power because you and I certainly can't do that. Now, that's the way we began to look at it. I also last time gave you an introduction to the Psalm and an outline, and I pointed out that I'd come back to that outline in this particular study because it's a long Psalm and has a lot of parts, and it's a little hard to get that all down.

It begins, you may recall, in the first four verses with a lament on the part of the Psalmist and a plea to God for help, all wrapped together in those four verses. He's in trouble and he wants God to help him out. So the theme, indeed the themes of the Psalm, are set in that opening section. That's followed by a single verse that stands all by itself. It's an acknowledgment of the Psalmist's folly and his guilt. He's a foolish, ignorant man, and furthermore, he's guilty before God.

That's particularly striking in contrast to what he just said in the previous verses, because he said that his enemies are attacking him without a cause. He hasn't done anything to cause the kind of hostility he's getting from them, and we might expect him to say at that point, when he turns and begins to address God directly, "And you know, God, I really haven't done any of those things they're accusing me of." But he doesn't do that. Instead, he says before God, "I nevertheless am a very guilty man."

That is the heart and the mind of the godly. We want to live in a righteous way, as we can in this world, before other people, not wronging anyone, so that any persecution that comes to us is for the sake of righteousness, for the sake of our testimony to Jesus Christ. But when we stand before God, we don't claim to be sinless or free from guilt. We acknowledge our utter dependence upon him and anything we're able to do is utterly by his grace, certainly not by any merit.

Now, all of that occurs at the beginning. Now at this point, the Psalm begins to repeat, first the lament and then the appeal for help, and it does that two times over. Here's the outline: Verses 6 through 12 contain the first renewal of the lament. He's telling he's in trouble. That's what he did in the beginning. Now he says it again in verses 6 through 12. Then 13 through 18 contain the first renewal of his plea for help.

We saw when we looked at that that they don't merely repeat what he said in the first four verses. They do repeat it, that's the theme, but they introduce a new element. And so each time this comes around, it's carried to a higher note. In the second section of the Psalm, this is the section we're going to begin to look at now, verses 19 through 21 contain the second renewal of the lament, and verses 22 to 29 contain the second renewal of the plea.

So he's introduced those two themes at the beginning, and he repeats them twice. Then when we get to verse 29, we have a similar thing that we found in verse 5, a little one-verse interjection that just kind of comes into the middle of it. And at that point, beginning with verse 30 and going on to the end, we have a formal conclusion in which the reader is invited to praise God along with the Psalmist. In other words, he's anticipating his deliverance, he knows that God's going to hear his prayer, and so he says, "Praise God along with me." Now, that's the way it operates.

Now we pick up at verse 19, which is this second renewal of the lament. But I want to say, as I did when we talked about the first renewal, that it introduces new elements. Each time around, though it's saying roughly the same thing, it says new things. And the first new element here is the writer's claim that God knows how he's being scorned. That's the second time in the Psalm he's said that God knows something. The first time in verse 5, he said God knows my folly and my guilt. "You know it, Lord."

And now he mentions that God knows something else, and what God knows is how he's being treated. Now, that's important because it's helpful for us in the Christian life to know that God knows. You see, often when you're going through something difficult in life, you have the feeling, and probably it's right, that nobody really knows what you're going through. You're hurting, but you're hurting deep inside, and people that look on don't really understand that.

If they say to you, "How are you doing?", what do you say? You say what most of us say, "Oh, I'm fine, thank you." Because that's really what they want to hear. If you're honest and you say, "I'm hurting, I've just had something terrible happen in my life," they say, "Oh, that's good," and they move on because they don't really want to hear about it. What do you do in a situation like that? Well, when we go through those times, and we do, it's a great comfort to the Christian to know that God knows.

I suppose that's the reason for the popularity of that hymn that was written back in the last century by Joseph Scriven. It was entitled, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." Now, as I look at it as an English major, it's not great poetry, and the musicians, I suppose if they look at it from the point of view of music, would say it's not great music. And yet it has commended itself to devout hearts ever since it was written now about 140 years ago.

Why? Because it's saying that you can bring everything to God and know that God knows. You know the way it goes: "What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer! O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer!" And this verse: "Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged; take it to the Lord in prayer. Can we find a friend so faithful who will all our sorrows share? Jesus knows our every weakness; take it to the Lord in prayer."

Devout hearts have understood that, and that is exactly what David is doing in the Psalm. Now, let me just say that if you are hurting, you need to remember, in case you doubt that God knows it, that Jesus Christ went through all those things before you. One of the meanings of his incarnation—not just that he became man so he could die, as important and central as that is—but one of the meanings of his incarnation is that he suffered temptation just as we do, according to the author of Hebrews. Not with sin, of course, but he went through all of those things.

One of the passages we often think about and talk about in Holy Week is the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, and you know the description there of the kind of things that Jesus endured. He was despised and rejected by men. You ever feel despised because of your stand for Jesus Christ, trying to do the right thing? You ever feel rejected? People here are rejected by their families who don't appreciate their Christianity and so practically force them out because of that.

A man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. None of us would want to really take that title to ourselves, a man of sorrow, a woman of sorrow, but many of us have real sorrows, and many are familiar with suffering. Many suffer a great deal physically, mentally, and psychologically, and all sorts of other ways. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. That's what Isaiah says was to be true of Jesus Christ, and it was. We know the accounts of the stories; that's what he went through.

Now, listen to the way the author of Hebrews takes that example as an encouragement for us: "Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in our time of need."

See, that's what David is doing. That's what we should do as well. He knew the comfort of knowing that God knows. Something should be said about verse 21, which is part of this section, because there are not many verses in the Old Testament that are quoted in the New Testament explicitly, and if a verse in the Old Testament or a couple of verses in the Old Testament is quoted more than once in the New Testament, that's very significant. Here we have something that's referred to in each of the Gospels, either directly or indirectly. It has to do with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Verse 21: "They put gall in my food and gave me vinegar for my thirst." Mentioned in Matthew, 27th chapter, and Mark, the 15th chapter, and Luke, the 23rd chapter, and John 19. The reference in John is most explicit. So when these observers were there and saw what happened at the time of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, they remembered this from the Old Testament, and they said, "Yes, that was written about him. He fulfilled it literally in those last hours of his earthly life before his death and resurrection."

Now, in verses 22 to 28, we have the second renewal of the plea for help. Now these also go beyond what was said earlier, and the way in which these verses go beyond what was said earlier is that they are actually a request for God's swift and utter judgment on the Psalmist's enemies. In other words, this is an imprecatory prayer. There are a number of them in the Psalms. Some Psalms are almost exclusively prayers for God's righteous judgment on the Psalmist's enemies, and this section is just like them.

Let me read it: "May the table set before them become a snare; may it become retribution and a trap. May their eyes be darkened so they cannot see, and their backs be bent forever. Pour out your wrath on them; let your fierce anger overtake them. May their place be deserted; let there be no one to dwell in their tents. For they persecuted those you wound and talk about the pain of those you hurt. Charge them with crime upon crime; do not let them share in your salvation. May they be blotted out of the book of life and not be listed with the righteous."

As I read that, you understand, I'm sure, you catch the flavor of how that's moving. Those verses are building in intensity. They start off and David's just upset with what they're doing. He wants some kind of judgment on all this evil, but as they go on and on, he ends up saying in explicit words that he wants them to be blotted out of the book of life. In other words, he wants them to suffer in hell and to do that forever.

We naturally pull back from that sort of thing, and rightly, because Jesus taught us to forgive our enemies, not to curse those who curse us. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay," says the Lord. And yet we come to verses like this and we say, "Well, now, how do you handle them?" We've looked at some of that before because this isn't the first time we've come across sections like this in the Psalms. One thing we saw is that although David prays for God to execute judgment on his enemies, he's asking God to do it and he doesn't take it into his own hands to do it himself.

Mostly that's where we get in trouble. If we think somebody deserves something, we want to get out there and see that they get it. And David doesn't do that. You see, in that sense, what he is acknowledging is simply the truth of the way things are in the universe. God is the judge and God will judge. The God of all the universe will do right. So instead of setting himself against God or trying to detach himself somehow from what God is doing, he says wickedness carried to its extreme deserves the judgment of God and will surely receive it.

We don't talk about that much today because that's one of those things people don't like. They get all upset and we kind of trim down our message. But you have to remember that in the Bible, God teaches us that he is going to judge sin. And continuing in sin without repentance and coming to Christ as Savior means loss of eternal life. It's there; it's very clear. Second thing that we ought to really notice about this is that it is David, the anointed one of God, who was speaking.

In other words, when he had enemies, they were enemies that were attacking the kingdom that God had set up through David and his line. None of us are in quite that position, and so it's always tempered by that. And yet at the same time, when we think of these sayings, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," and "Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing," we have to say, we have to go very, very slow the way we think through these things ourselves.

Alexander MacLaren was a good biblical scholar, a Scotsman who certainly believed in the judgment of God, but these things troubled him so much that he wrote this: "It is impossible to bring such utterances into harmony with the teachings of Jesus, and the attempt to vindicate them ignores plain facts and does violence to plain words. It is better far to let them stand as a monument of the earlier stage of God's progressive revelation and discern clearly the advance which Christian ethics has made on them."

There's something to that, but I'm not entirely satisfied with that because the whole of the Scripture is given to us for our instruction. And here is a section that is saying, "God, I need help, and the way I need help is for you to judge my enemies." Don't you ever feel that you need help? You need God to intervene. And that's exactly what God is saying. Now let me point out that this section is used by Paul in Romans.

In the 12th chapter of Romans, not quoting from here, Paul says, "Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written, 'It's mine to avenge; I will repay,' says the Lord." He does that in verse 19. So we're not to take vengeance into our own hands. Paul is very clear about that. But just because we're not to take vengeance into our own hands doesn't mean that we're not to desire that righteousness be established, the will of God be done, and sin be punished.

And Paul, the very one who says in that chapter, "Don't take revenge," quotes verses 22 and 23 of this Psalm as a prophecy of a judicial blinding of the majority of the people of Israel because of their rejection of Jesus Christ. Although we have to be very careful how we handle that, and it is difficult because we always want to intrude ourselves into the picture and not leave it up to God, at the same time, there's a balance here.

And we don't want to do what so many people in our culture are doing and say simply, "Well, you know, everybody does their thing and we all make mistakes and it really doesn't matter in the end." It does matter; it matters desperately. And it's recognizing the reality of judgment and the seriousness of sin that ought to draw us to the Savior. I mentioned Paul and his use of these verses in Romans, and the unique aspect of his teaching there is that unbelief will cause even the blessings that God has given us to become curses.

That is something that works against our spiritual well-being. He's writing about Israel; that's his illustration. He gives a lot of examples in the ninth chapter. He says they have a lot of spiritual advantages: the adoption of sons, the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises, the patriarchs. Those are wonderful things. But he also says that these, if they are received in unbelief, become—and I'm using his own words—a snare, a trap, a stumbling block, and retribution if people continue in their unregenerate state.

That's an important point, and it's a point we need to consider strongly in the church. The things that God has given us in the church are blessings. God gives us blessings; we have many of them. But if we don't allow those blessings to cause us to turn from our sin and embrace Jesus Christ in faith, even those things that are blessings to us become curses. Now, I'm drawing that from Malachi.

Malachi, the last of the Old Testament prophets, lived in bad days. The people who were led by their priests were very far from God. And so when God sent Malachi with his message of reproof, calling for correction, turning from sin and faith, they objected self-righteously. They asked questions like this: God says, "You don't love me." They say, "What do you mean, we don't love you?" They say, "How have we despised your name? How have we wearied you? How are we to return? How do we rob you? What have we said against you?" Very self-righteous attitude.

Malachi says at that point from God, "If you do not listen, and if you do not set your heart to honor my name, I will send a curse upon you and I will curse your blessings. Yes, I have already cursed them because you have not set your heart to honor me." You see, that's where it comes home to us. If what God is saying in Malachi and repeated in the book of Romans from the pen of the Apostle Paul in application to the Jews is true, that their blessings will become curses if they don't allow them to lead God to lead and work through them to lead them to Jesus Christ, then the same thing is obviously true for us in the church.

Let me give you some examples. These are just strictly church blessings. Baptism, first of all, one of the sacraments. Baptism is an outward sign of an inward spiritual union with Jesus Christ and it's meant to strengthen our faith. When we find ourselves somewhere along the line wondering about our past, it's the kind of thing where by we can say, "Yes, I was identified with Jesus Christ." That's what baptism signifies and I belong to him.

But if you don't have true faith in Jesus Christ, if it's not the reality that is dominating your life and filling your heart, then the outward sign, the sign of baptism, becomes a curse to you. Because what happens and has happened so often in the church is that people trust that for their salvation. You say to them, "Are you saved?" "Oh yes, I'm saved. I've been baptized." "You're not living for Jesus Christ." "Doesn't matter. I've been baptized." The thing that is supposed to be a blessing actually becomes a hindrance, and it is true for many allegedly Christian people.

How about the Lord's Supper? That's a great blessing to the church, meant to be repeated again and again, remembering by that means the Lord's death until he comes. But for large branches of the church, the Lord's Supper is taught as if it's somehow mechanically a means of grace. So the grace of God is just imparted along with the elements. You eat the elements and drink the wine, then automatically you partake of the grace of God. And so some people begin to depend on that.

"Why are you saved?" "I'm saved because I take communion" or "because I go to mass." But that's just a sign, it's just a symbol of the reality. What it points to is union with Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ has become a part of you, as real a part of you as eating bread and having it become part of your body or drinking the wine. So if you're trusting the sacrament for your salvation, that which is meant to be good and to strengthen you becomes a curse.

How about material possessions? I suppose I don't have to elaborate on this. Money and material goods are a blessing from God. When we receive them, we should thank him for them. He has blessed us, and he's blessed us abundantly. But you know as well as I do that they're a mixed blessing, and very easy for possessions to draw us away from God. So we spend all our time with our possessions and we have very little time for him. So the very thing that is the blessing of God upon us actually becomes a curse.

One more example, and I want to give an illustration. The Lord's Day, when we worship on Sunday. Isn't it wonderful that God has not kept us, as it were, at the grinding wheel seven days a week? God has said, "The seventh day is a day in which you shall rest, and everyone should rest." That's a wonderful thing. In the past, Christians have had that and observed it and used it and loved it. A day where we go apart from our secular concerns and worship God.

But what happens, of course, is that today, if it's not made into a day of work, which it is in very many places, it becomes a day for the kind of occupations that have nothing whatever to do with God and, in some cases, simply a debauch, which is what many people do on the weekends until they somehow have to pull themselves together in order to go to work on Monday morning.

Let me give you the illustration. We all know the date of December 7, 1941. That's when the Air Force of Japan bombed the American Navy at Pearl Harbor. It brought the United States into the Second World War and it altered the course of history. It was a great tragedy for the United States. It virtually at least for a time wiped out the Pacific fleet and it claimed 2,403 young lives.

The bombing took place on a Sunday morning, which is what December 7th was. What really wasn't known at the time—it was discovered afterwards when the war was over and General Douglas MacArthur set translators to work on the archives of the Japanese military—is that several years before the commencement of the war, the Japanese had sent professors to the United States to study our national character and to see where we would be most vulnerable to an unprovoked attack.

And the recommendation, which appeared in the archives and was translated in those postwar days, was this: "The United States would be most vulnerable on a Sunday morning following a Friday on which both the army and navy had a payday." In other words, they'd get their money and they'd go off and have a binge, and of course that is exactly what December 7th was.

In the early days, Americans took that day as a blessing from God and they used it and were thankful for it. But that day of national blessing had become by the time of Pearl Harbor a day of national hangover, and the judgment of God was a result. He changed the former blessing into a curse. God isn't mocked. And so when we come to passages like this, we have to remember that the judgment of God will in time surely be meted out to sinners even though that is not a task that is entrusted to us. We forget a truth like that at our peril.

Now we come to the end. I mentioned verse 29. It's a brief interjection. It corresponds to verse 5 in the first part of the Psalm, but it's quite different. The first one-verse section was a confession of sin. The Psalmist was acknowledging his foolishness. Here it's quite different. In this verse, David seems merely to reiterate his profound pain and once again call on God to help him. In other words, what you have in verse 29 is a one-verse summary of everything that's gone before. "I'm in trouble," he tells God, and he asks God to help him. That seems to draw the main body of the Psalm to a close and it prepares us for the very different material, the praise material that comes at the end, beginning with verse 30.

There's a great deal of sorrow and tragedy in this life. A person would have to be blind not to see it. But for the Christian, tragedy and suffering, however acute they may be and however frequent situations like this may come into our lives—for the Christian, tragedy and suffering is never the final word. Final word is always victory and praise, and so this is the way in which the Psalm ends, even though it's been dealing with the tragedy all along.

In this case, the Psalmist first voices his praise to God and then he calls on heaven and earth, the seas, and all that move in them to praise God also. I said when I introduced this last time that the very last section contains something that it seems probably impossible that David wrote. It talks about God rebuilding the cities of Judah. I'm sure you noticed that there in verse 35: "God will save Zion and rebuild the cities of Judah. Then people will settle there and possess it."

That doesn't seem appropriate for the time of David because Jerusalem and Judah were occupied, seemed to have been thriving. It seems more appropriate to a period after the Babylonian conquest where the people were taken away and the cities were destroyed and there was prayer for the reconstruction. I suggested that what is probably the case here is that a later poet added on the final phrase in order to broaden what was David's Psalm for a later contemporary audience.

If that's the right approach to it, then verse 33 really is the ending of the Psalm, at least as David wrote it. And it's appropriate, isn't it? Because what it says is this: "The Lord hears the needy and does not despise his captive people." I wish I could stress that and plant that upon your heart, that that really is true. There are times in life when it doesn't seem that God hears us. But what the Psalm is telling us is that God does.

And not only does he hear us, he strengthens us and keeps us. Think of Jesus Christ himself praying in the Garden of Gethsemane before his arrest and crucifixion. He prayed with great cries, and it seemed for a long time during the prayer that God didn't hear him, and even at the end, although he was praying if it were possible that the cup might be removed from him, God did not remove the cup.

But what God did was send angels to strengthen him, and Jesus went through the suffering in the power of his Father to his glory as well. That's what you and I are called to do, and you can be assured that this will be your case also. Whatever cross you're given, whatever cross you may be bearing at the present time, tell God about it. You have a friend in Jesus, and you'll find that not only will he hear—you can know that he hears—and he'll strengthen you, and you can also know that you will certainly praise him for that strength and for his deliverance one day.

Our Father, we thank you for this Psalm and for the practical way it speaks to the kinds of problems that we go through, each of us in various ways throughout our lives. We rejoice in the fact that you hear us. We rejoice in the fact that you're sovereign, that you have control of all these things; they don't come into our lives by accident. We rejoice that you're all-powerful, that you're able to strengthen your people as they go through trials, and then that the final word is not a word of discouragement and despair but rather a word of thanksgiving and praise. And we look forward to that day when we will praise you even as we try to do now as a great God of glory who has saved us in Jesus Christ and whom we love. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to this message from The Bible Study Hour, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is a coalition of pastors, scholars, and churchmen who hold to the historic creeds and confessions of the reformed faith and who proclaim biblical doctrine in order to foster a reformed awakening in today's church.

To learn more about the Alliance, visit AllianceNet.org. And while you're there, visit our online store, Reformed Resources, where you can find messages and books from Dr. Boice and other outstanding teachers and theologians. Or ask for a free Reformed Resources catalog by calling 1-800-488-1888.

Please take the time to write to us and share how The Bible Study Hour has impacted you. We'd love to hear from you and pray for you. Our address is 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. Please consider giving financially to help keep The Bible Study Hour impacting people for decades to come. You can do so at our website, AllianceNet.org, over the phone at 1-800-488-1888, or send a check to 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. For Canadian gifts, mail those to 237 Rouge Hills Drive, Scarborough, Ontario, M1C 2Y9.

Thanks for your continued prayer and support and for listening to The Bible Study Hour, preparing you to think and act biblically.