The Bible Study Hour

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A person who is not very familiar with the Psalms, hasn't had an opportunity to study them, might suppose, I guess, that they're all very much alike. But as I've been privileged to study them carefully now for quite a few years, what impresses me perhaps most is how unique each of the Psalms is. Some are sad, some are happy, some deal with national defeats or victories. Others are quite personal.

Some deal with sin, some are songs of praise, some try to find the right way in confusing situations, and their structures vary, too. Some are long rehearsals of the acts of God in the past on behalf of his people. Some are very short, some are acrostics. We've seen some of those. Some are lyrical.

Psalm 114, that we're going to look at now, is a little masterpiece. Isaac Watts, who was a great poet and ought to know such things, called it an admirable little ode. Charles Haddon Spurgeon called it sublime. It's the second of the six Psalms that are called the Egyptian Hallel. I mentioned that a bit last week, Hallel means praise.

These Psalms are all praise songs and they're called the Egyptian Hallel because they're all supposed to deal in one way or another with the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. The first one is 113, and then they appear in sequence until 118. This Psalm that we're looking at is the only one that actually mentions the Exodus, but the others are appropriate.

And since this tradition goes back a long way, we're probably right in concluding that these were the Psalms that Jesus and the disciples sang in the Upper Room just before the arrest and crucifixion. We're told that they sang. This was the time of the year that Jews did that, and these are probably the Psalms. Now this one has a fresh, exuberant, lively note to it.

Eric Kidner, whom I've mentioned quite often because he's one of the best commentators on the Psalms, has done a little commentary for InterVarsity, which is quite handy if you're studying the Psalms yourself. He calls attention to this tone. Unlike some of the Psalms which rehearse the events of the Exodus, but do it in somewhat a plodding or a mechanical way.

Kidner says, "Here is the Exodus, not as a familiar item in Israel's Creed, but as an astonishing event, as startling as a clap of thunder, as shattering as an earthquake." Now I mentioned Isaac Watts. Isaac Watts liked this so much that he did his own little poem based on the Psalm. His poem is in six stanzas, and the first one goes like this: "When Israel freed from Pharaoh's hand led the proud tyrant and his land, the tribes with cheerful homage owned their king, and Judah was his throne."

Now, as anyone can see, just by looking at the Psalm, it falls into four matched stanzas like the verses of a hymn. Not all of the Psalms are that easy to divide up, but this one does. And these stanzas have very nice progressions. As far as the tone goes, it's a little bit like our hymn, "Onward, Christian Soldiers." It's kind of a marching type of hymn.

But here it's not the people of God who are marching. It's God himself who is marching before his people. And it's before him that the seas draw back and the mountains skip like rams, which is what the Psalm says. Now, each stanza is extraordinary in its own way. And the extraordinary thing about this first stanza is the way it portrays Judah as God's sanctuary and Israel as his dominion.

Now, at a certain period in Jewish history, Israel and Judah were used as names for the two separate divisions of the people. After the division of the nation in the days of Rehoboam following Solomon, Judah became the name of the kingdom in the south, and Israel became the name of the kingdom in the north. That is not what is being done here. These are two separate names for the same people of God because this is describing not a later period in history, but is describing the time of the Exodus.

So what it's saying is that this one people, known as Judah or Israel, is declared to be both God's sanctuary and God's kingdom. Now that was literally true, of course, and the reason was that God had come to dwell in the midst of them. When God came down upon Mount Sinai in the midst of his people, and then later in a symbolic way, in the presence of the Shekinah glory, dwelt within the camp in the most holy place of the Tabernacle and later the most holy place in the Temple of Jerusalem, God was literally among his people.

And so they became a sanctuary, a holy vessel in which God dwelt. Now, no nation has ever had that experience. Because God dwelt among them, they were not only a sanctuary, they were a dominion, a kingdom in the sense of it being a theocracy. That is a nation where God actually personally himself ruled. No nation has ever had that experience. Israel is unique in that respect. And yet, while it's true that no nation has ever had that experience, there is a people that has.

And that people is the church, and for the same reason. God comes to dwell among his people and does dwell in his people in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Now that's what Peter was thinking about when he wrote in his first letter words that are echoes of this Psalm, and certainly an echo of a verse from Exodus 19.

Back in Exodus 19, God had said of the people of Israel, "Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." Our Psalm is reflecting that, a sanctuary and a dominion, and this is what Peter picks up on and applies it to the church. He says, "But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light."

And we say, "How is that possible? How do we, the members of the church, become God's sanctuary and dominion?" Well, we become his sanctuary and dominion because God dwells among us by the presence of his Holy Spirit. Now, let's just look at those two things a little bit. First of all, a royal priesthood. When we talk about priesthood, we're talking primarily about Jesus Christ. Jesus is the great high priest.

And he demonstrated his priesthood for us in two ways. One, by offering up himself upon the cross, where he became, as one of our hymns says, both the sacrifice and the one who offers the sacrifice. And then he also is our high priest in the sense that he intercedes for us in heaven before the throne of God. That is, he pleads for his people. He interprets our prayers aright. We pray, we don't know how to pray, we pray wrongly, but Jesus prays for us. He interprets them properly. And when you and I go astray, he prays for us that we'll learn from the experience and become strong.

One of the great examples of that and given to us no doubt entirely as an example is Jesus' prayer for Peter at the time of the arrest and crucifixion. Peter had boasted of how strong he was. He said to the Lord, "I don't know about the other disciples. They all may all forsake you, but I, Peter, am never going to do that. I love you, and I'll be faithful to you even unto death."

And Jesus explained to him that he was going to deny Jesus three times that very night before the cock crowed to signal the rising of the sun and the dawn. But he said something else. He said, "Satan has desired to sift you." This was a temptation from Satan. He was going to take Peter up and shake him around like that. Satan has desired to sift you, but he said, "I've prayed for you."

And so when your strengthened, another translation says, "When you're converted, when you're turned back again, strengthen your brethren." And of course, that's exactly what happened. Peter did deny the Lord that night three times. He wasn't even aware of what he was doing until Jesus turned around and looked at him, and suddenly, as the cock was crowing, Jesus was looking, he realized that he had done exactly what Jesus said he was going to do, and he was humiliated. And he went out and wept bitterly, we're told.

But although he fell, he didn't fall away. He stumbled, he didn't fall completely. And he rose up again because Jesus had interceded for him. Now, Jesus exercised the role of the high priest in doing that for us. Now, we too become a kingdom of priests. We're God's sanctuary if we're his people, and we fulfill our function in exactly the same way. We intercede for other people.

We pray for them. Do you do that? Do you pray for other people? Do you pray believing, expecting God to work in their lives? God promises to do it. We're told in the scripture that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. And that is true. We have that same task as well. And while we're thinking of Jesus Christ as a priest, not only interceding for his people, but giving himself for them, we're reminded that we also are to give ourselves to God as living sacrifices. Not as an atonement for sin.

You and I can't do that. Only the Holy One of God can do that, but we can give our bodies as a living sacrifice, which is what Paul says in the 12th chapter of Romans. So what we read here of the people of God in ancient times is true of the people of God today as well. So much for a sanctuary. How about a royal dominion? That is the rule of God in the midst of his people.

We're in danger of forgetting that today because even Christian people have a natural sinful desire to go their own way, and we don't want God to rule over us. And some branches of Christian theology today, there's even a deliberate attempt to divide the work of Jesus Christ as savior from his rule. And the argument goes that you can have Jesus Christ as your savior without having him as king. It's a false division.

You don't find that in the Bible because the Jesus that saves is the Jesus who's the king, he's the Lord. And so he comes to rule over us. You know it says that in the Book of Revelation in the fifth chapter. It says, "You have made them a kingdom of priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth."

And so we ask the question, "How do we reign, we who are his people?" How do we exercise this rule? And the answer is, we do it the same way Jesus Christ did. Jesus Christ exercises his rule over us by serving us. And we're to exercise that as well by serving other people. Our rule is found not in privilege, but in responsibility.

Now, that's what the first stanza does. You know, if it's the essence of poetry to say a great deal in a small space and in memorable language, then the second stanza is very exquisite poetry, as are all the stanzas of this particular hymn. The second stanza has only four lines like the others, but it captures in those four lines the whole of the desert experience after the people had left left Egypt in the days of Moses.

The first line refers to the parting of the Red Sea at the beginning of the journey, when the people were still being pursued by the Egyptians. As Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, a strong east wind began to blow. We're told about it in Exodus, the water was driven back, the ground became dry, and the people passed over. And after they passed over on the other side, the wind ceased, the waters came back, and the pursuing armies of the Egyptians were drowned. All that's captured in the first line.

The second line of the stanza refers to the driving back of the waters of the Jordan River so the people could pass over at the end of their wandering in the desert during those years, those 40 years. And then the last two lines refer to the trembling of the earth when God came down on Mount Sinai to give his people the law. So you have the beginning, the end, and the middle of the desert experience all in this stanza.

The text in Exodus that describes God coming down has it like this: "Mount Sinai was covered with smoke because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like the smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently, and the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder." It says in Hebrews that the site was so terrifying that even Moses trembled.

So that's what the psalmist is thinking of and reflecting here. Now, he asks the question at that point, "What could possibly have caused such disturbances in the natural order? The water of the Red Sea to be driven back, the Jordan River to part, the mountains to tremble?" That's what the next stanza of the Psalm asks, and it does it brilliantly.

"Why was it, O Sea, that you fled, O Jordan, that you turned back, you mountains that you skipped like rams, you hills like lambs?" In our English translation, those lines are all joined in one long interrogative sentence, but in the Hebrew, there are four short, independent, teasing questions. I say teasing because the author knows the answer, and he knows that we know the answer, but he's withholding the answer for dramatic effect.

This is the point in our study to notice that at no place in the Psalm up until now has the name of God been mentioned. If you look at your English translation, you'll find that in verse two, you do have the words, "Judah became God's sanctuary." That word "God" isn't actually in the Hebrew text. It's just that the translators feel that in English English usage, you can't have a pronoun without a clear antecedent, so early in the composition, you you have to establish who the antecedent is. And they've added the word "God," but in the Hebrew, it just says "his."

So you haven't even had the mention of God, G-O-D, up to this point. You certainly haven't had the name of God, that is, Jehovah or Yahweh. And yet here in the third stanza, for the first time, it comes in. The answer is this: It was because of the presence of the Lord that the mountains trembled and the seas parted. It was at the presence of the God of Jacob. He it is who brought his people out of Egypt, if you go back to verse one. He it is who turned the rock into a pool, and the hard rock into springs of water, verse eight.

Now, that's the climax of the Psalm. It begins by talking about the Exodus. It describes the effects of the desert wandering. It says, "Who could possibly have caused all this?" And it says, "It's our God. Our God is the one who did it. Nothing stood in his way." Now, we need to take that and just apply it to our situation.

And notice that there's something very much like it in the New Testament, though it's not poetical in the same sense. What I'm thinking of is the eighth chapter of Romans where Paul is asking almost the same question. You see, in the Psalm, the psalmist asks, "What was the cause of the parting of the waters?" And the answer is, "Nothing could stand in the way of God."

And now in Romans 8, Paul says much the same thing. Let me just read these words. He asks a question, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" And then he begins to give the answer. "He who did not spare his son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also along with him graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It's God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus who died, more than that, who was raised to life is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?" As it's written, "For your sake we face death all day long. We're considered as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Sometimes Christians are accused of being unrealistic about life, as if we didn't face up to life's hardships. Somehow we avoid the difficulties and we live in sort of a never, never make-believe kind of world. It may be true of some Christians, but it certainly wasn't true of Paul. Paul knew what life was all about. He suffered a great many hardships in his obedience in taking the gospel to the difficult areas of the world. And what you find him doing in this chapter is not pretending that difficulties don't exist, but rather acknowledging them all.

He brings them all out as it were. He lines them up. He says, "Here they are. This is the kind of thing you face as Christians." But he says, "None of that, none of those difficulties is capable of standing against the love and the power of our God." Just look at those he mentions in the middle. He talks about trouble. That's the first circumstance that might be thought to withstand God and separate a Christian from his love. In the Greek language that he uses, the word is tribulation. It has to do with being pressed down or crushed by life. There are people who experience this.

There are people who have been abused as children. There are people who lose their job or deprived of a husband or a wife, sometimes by serious illness or by death. Paul says that no tribulation, however great it may be, and he recognizes that these troubles are real, is able to thwart God. The second thing he mentions is hardship. This has a slightly different idea. The word has to do with a narrow space or territory. So it has to do not with being pressed down, but being hemmed in.

And he says, "Some of us experience that." Take a man, for example, who's in a dead-end job. He's in his 40s. Things are not going real well with his company. He doesn't see any real possibility of promotion, and he's getting to the age where it's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to have lateral advancement. In the meantime, he has a wife and children to support. There's a mortgage, and he just doesn't see any way of making things better. He's just going to have to carry on with his grinding along with it in this hard space year after year.

Or take a woman in her 30s. She has two or three children. They make tremendous demands upon her. She has to survive on a rather tight budget. She knows there's no immediate change in her future besides the circle of school and supermarket and babysitters and all of that. She has all the marks of a confined life, hemmed in. You say, "How are you going to triumph in circumstances like that?" It's to realize that God has fixed his love upon you, and that nothing is ever going to separate you from that love. And even though you're in narrow straits now, one day your horizons are going to be as wide as the universe, because you're a child of the king, and you're going to rule with Jesus Christ in heaven. Nothing is ever going to deprive any one of us who knows Christ as savior from that destiny.

Paul mentions persecutions. Again, the word has to do with relentless attempts to do harm. Not many of us suffer outright obvious persecutions today, but there are always persecutions of one kind or another if you're actually standing for Jesus Christ. We can be sure of two things, that persecutions are a normal response to any forthright Christian witness, and that we'll experience them to the extent that we actually do stand for Jesus.

He said, "In this world you will have trouble." But he added, "Take heart, I have overcome the world." Can anything stand before Jesus Christ? The answer is, "No, he's the King of kings, the Lord of glory." Fourth thing Paul mentions is famine. We don't know much of this today, those of us in the West, but it's a terrible thing. Paul tells us that even that can't separate us from Christ.

How about nakedness, the next thing he mentions? Usually, when we think of nakedness today, we think of it being associated with sex or with pornographic material. That's not what it meant in the ancient world. Nakedness in the ancient world had to do with poverty, somebody so poor they didn't even have clothes to wear. It's a corresponding term to famine, and it refers to economic hard times. A lot of people undergo that today.

How about danger, the next thing he mentions? Dangers are of various types, but here he's thinking of dangers that come to you just because you're Christians. Christians have been arrested, tried, imprisoned. They've been attacked, beaten, sometimes even killed. And that leads to the last thing. He mentions sword. This pushes violence implied in the earlier terms to their furthest extremity.

Organizations that deal with international violations of human rights say that today, it's hard to believe, but today, as many as 600,000 Christians are killed every year because of their faith, because they're Christians. It's happening in North Africa right now in large numbers, as well as in other portions of the world. It does happen.

But you see, if God is our protector, then we can be sure that we are loved by him and kept by him even in that. You see, even in North America, liberated, liberal, enlightened as we imagine ourselves to be, if God were not for us, protecting us, we would soon be cut off. It's only the Lord's Providence that averts those injuries.

So, in view of all those things that come into our lives, things that the psalmist recognized in the case of Israel and that we recognize today in our own experience, but also on the basis of the biblical writing, we say, "How can it be that nothing can ever separate us from God's love?" And it's because God is invincible.

When God advances, all things flee before him. And so we can face these things and say, "Make way for our God. Make way, troubles for our God. Make way, persecutions for our God. Make way, tribulations for our God, hardships, dangers, famine, and even sword." Because our God will be exalted, and our God loves his people, and our God cares for his people, and he cares for us.

I have just one thought that comes from the ending of the Psalm. Notice at the very end of the Psalm how the last verse speaks of the earth trembling before the approach of God. "Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob." Does the earth do that? Yes, it has. The Psalm describes it. But the astonishing thing is that not that the earth trembles, the earth has no reason to tremble, but that human beings who do have reason to tremble before God refuse to do it.

We all face judgment at the hands of a righteous God if our sin has not been atoned for by the blood of Jesus Christ. And yet people who stand before God in their sin, apart from that atonement, certainly facing the wrath and judgment of God, refuse to tremble and go on throughout life as if everything's all right, saying, "Peace, peace, everything's okay."

And so the folly of man is revealed to be very great. And the reminder of the trembling of the earth is a great reminder that we should bow before our God. Have you done that? If you're not done that, this is the time. Don't put it off. You say, "Well, you know, I've lived 30 years, 40 years, I've lived 70 years. Everything's gone all right with me."

Yeah, but one day you have to stand before God. The Bible says it's a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God. Remember what it says in Psalm 2. It's talking to the nations there, those who have stood against God. And it says this, "Kiss the son, that is, Jesus, lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for his wrath can flare up in a moment." That wrath is coming, but he offers us salvation right now. Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for this Psalm and the opportunity we've had to study it today.

We would ask that you would use it in a powerful way in our lives, for those who are Christians, as an encouragement, because we do face the difficulties of life that Paul mentioned so graphically in Romans 8. And we need to be reminded that these things give way before you. And that you do move through difficult circumstances on behalf of your people. Grant that many might see that, believe it, and experience it even this coming week.

And then too, the Psalm speaks of trembling, and we're reminded of those who refuse to do it. We pray for those who have not yet committed themselves to Jesus Christ, who are not yet looking to him as their savior. We pray that you might give them a measure of that inward trembling before thoughts of your wrath and judgment, which are intended not for their harm, but for their good. So they might turn from sin and find salvation in the savior, where alone it can be found. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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