Truth For Life

Bob Lepine: You've probably heard someone say love the sinner but hate the sin. But as Alistair Begg wraps up his study in Psalm 139, he points out why that's not always the right approach. We'll take a closer look at King David's prayer for divine vengeance and personal scrutiny today on Truth For Life Weekend.

Alistair Begg: If you remember when we began, we said that although this Psalm is attributed to David, there is no historic reference that allows us to pinpoint it with any accuracy. We mentioned that the closing section and the presence of these enemies in verses 19 and 20 probably provided for David the context for the way in which he then reflects on the security that is his in God.

And if you like, the presence of the enemies finds him retreating, or if you like, advancing into the security and provision and protection of God. "You know when I sit down, you know when I rise up. You hem me in." Not a word of constriction, but a word by way of protection.

And if the harsh reality of the wicked did give rise to the first 18 verses, to all that is contained there, then I think we can also say that the first 18 verses prepared the way for this closing section. In other words, when we read this closing section, we need to remember that David is not bloodthirsty.

That the one who writes the concluding verses is the same one who has written the first 18 verses, who has spoken of the intimacy and care and protection and provision of God. Now the reason that it's important for me to say that is because, if we are honest when we come to verse 19, it almost appears to be a discordant note.

There's no question that of the 24 verses in the Psalm, we would regard it as the most difficult. Because it seems on first reading to be a kind of abrupt intrusion, a strange intrusion, causing us, as we read our Bibles perhaps of the morning on our own and we're reading through Psalm 139, and as we perhaps even every so often read it out loud to ourselves so that it might stick in our minds and we come to verse 19 and we say to ourselves, we just stop and say, "Well, where in the world did that come from?"

Well, the answer is it came from verses 1 to 18. It is not an inappropriate interruption. And I hope to be able to show us this morning that it is because of the immensity of David's experience of the living and true God that he responds in the way that he does to the wicked.

God is so precious to him that he finds those who speak against God as intolerable. He finds, if you like, their revolt to be revolting. You see, when a person's world is full of God, then that person will actually long for the elimination of evil.

If you think about it this morning, you realize that any true believer longs for the day when evil will be destroyed, when sin will be no more, when God will complete what he has purposed from all of eternity. A reality that David had only the slightest hint of, and which we understand will be a reality in the new heaven and in the new earth.

It is because of the immensity of his love for God that he is so careful to respond to all that opposes God. These individuals, verse 19, are bloodthirsty, they are blasphemous, and they rise up against God. You've got to get this clear in your mind: David does not turn cantankerous in this final section.

It is because he has such an understanding of the magnificence of God, the indescribable God, the holy God, that everything that is antithetical to that God is a concern to him. Now to try and guide our way through this, I want to point out first of all that this is a prayer.

To whom does David direct these comments? If you look in your Bible, you will see that he is directing these comments to God. He has begun the Psalm, "O Lord, Yahweh, you have searched me and you know me." And he is still speaking to God and he's speaking to him, if you like, in prayer.

It is an imprecatory prayer. It is one of about 30 imprecatory Psalms in the book of Psalms. An imprecation is essentially a curse. And the cursing Psalms are there as an expression of the magnificent holiness of God and how all that opposes God will one day be destroyed.

What it is is a prayer, a prayer for divine vengeance. Now immediately people will find themselves embarrassed by this. Old Testament scholars throughout the ages are very, very tempted to do all kinds of things when you come to passages like this. Some will say, "Well, this was not David, this was somebody put this in here," and so on. It doesn't help anything at all. It's really quite stupid.

The fact of the matter is we are tempted then to play the Old Testament against the New Testament. So people come to this and they seek to get out of it, as it were, by saying, "Well, this is the Old Testament of course, and we know," wrongly, "that the Old Testament is obsolete. You don't find this stuff, do you, in the New Testament?" Well, yes, actually you do.

Now here we go. Matthew chapter 23. You can read the whole of Matthew 23, but we won't. Verse 29, this is Jesus speaking: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, 'If we'd lived in the days of our fathers,'" so on and so on. "Fill up then the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers! How are you to escape being sentenced to hell?" This is Jesus. This is New Testament.

Now if we turn it around the other way, we also need to understand this: that in both the Old Testament and in the New Testament, vengefulness is expressly forbidden. You see how we need a whole Bible to understand the Bible? So that people say, "Well, they did that kind of stuff in the Old Testament and it wasn't a problem at all." Well, listen to the book of Leviticus and chapter 19.

"You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord."

So in other words, in the Old Testament, love for our enemies is not an option; it is an obligation. That's the first thing. Notice that this is a prayer. He's not standing on a rooftop shouting at people. He is not up in a position of exalted kingship saying, "Look at all these wretched people down there." That is not what he's doing.

In fact, I've thought long about it. I wonder: was he standing up? Was he sitting down when he wrote this? Did he write it and then lie down on his bed? Did he lie on his bed and say, "O Lord, you've searched me and you know me. You know when I'm lying down," and so on? Was he still lying on his bed when he says, "O God, oh that you would slay the wicked. Oh that you would bring this to an end?"

First of all, it's a prayer. Secondly, it's not a program. It's not a program for David to implement. He, like us, is longing for a day when wickedness will be destroyed. The first Psalm, remember? "Blessed is the man who doesn't walk in the counsel of the ungodly or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord."

By nature, we are that person, no delight in God, no interest at all. You remember how the Psalm ends? "As for the wicked, they are not so. They're like the chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous."

David understands this. That's how he began his book of Psalms. This is not a program for David to go out and implement. I won't take time to turn you to it, but if you're interested, you can go back and check. And you'll find a number of occasions when we studied in 1st and 2nd Samuel, David consistently refused to take matters into his own hands. Do you remember in the cave and his friends said, "Take him out now, you can kill him now"? David says, "I'm not going to do that. I will not do that. I will not take matters into my own hands."

David realizes that he is not driven by spite or vindictiveness or by a desire to get even. He is driven by a zeal for God. He's God's king, and as a result, his enemies were not simply private enemies; they were enemies of God. Remember again when we studied in 1st and 2nd Samuel we said, "Well, why would the king then exercise such punishment on those who were opposed to him?" and the answer is because they were opposed to God Almighty. He was God's king, and therefore their opposition to him was an opposition to God.

The fact is that David sees evil and he sees how evil evil is, and so he hates it as he says here in verse 22 with a complete hatred. The challenge for us, isn't it, is that it's hard for us to give voice to that kind of expression of divine purity without it actually being mixed with an agenda of personal venom and animosity. There is a perversity about our souls that while at the same time saying "I absolutely despise and hate that," and something in your mind going, "I wonder what it would be like to do that. I wonder what that would be like."

We have to be very honest, don't we? It's a prayer; it's not a program. Thirdly, in dealing with it, it reveals our predicament or our problem. Our problem to which I've already alluded. Because if we are honest as I say within ourselves, we're hesitant to pray in that way. And not just because this was the prayer of God's king and we are not God's king, but because we actually find this kind of confrontation to be distasteful.

And yet I was helped by just a sentence from Dick Lucas this week where he said in passing in a talk that he gave in the '80s: "It's never wise to dismiss from the Bible things we find difficult or distasteful." It's never wise for us to seek to dismiss from the Bible the things we find difficult or distasteful. These are not aberrations; these are part of the living word of God.

So then what is our predicament? Twofold. Number one, we are confused in our thinking. Confused in our thinking. You say, "Well, you can speak for yourself in this regard." Okay, then I am confused, easily confused in my thinking. Because we have grown very comfortable with the idea of "love the sinner, hate the sin." And David doesn't seem to be doing that. Now, he actually hates the sinner.

"I would like that you, God, got rid of them, that you destroyed them. They are malicious in their intent. They take your name in vain. They blaspheme you. I loathe them. I hate them. I count them my enemies." Now, there is truth to this, isn't there? That we do love the sinner and we hate the sin. We could think of ways in which that would be immediately applied. But it is easy to overstress that notion, to make that notion say something that it doesn't mean.

Listen to John Stott: "Evil is not something abstract. It exists in the hearts and ways of evildoers. So when the judgment of God falls, it will fall on evildoers, not upon evil in abstract." So David recognizes this. He realizes that he lives in a world in which evil abounds. He's not speaking about evil as a construct of an idea. No, because evil reveals itself in the hearts and lives of each of us.

And so again, our confused thinking has to be brought underneath the jurisdiction of the Bible. The Bible will help us out in every case. So for example, John chapter 3 and verse 16. Everybody knows it, right? "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting or eternal life." That's John 3:16.

John 3:36: "The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him." So simultaneously, God's wrath is revealed against all sin and his love is extended in the person of his Son to those who are in rebellion against him.

The challenge for us, the predicament for us, is that we are so easily confused in the way we think. We pay too much attention to clichés, often generated by well-meaning people, but not really true to the unfolding story of the Bible. We're confused in our thinking, but here's what I think is even more devastating, and I struggled with this all week: we are compromised in our living. My bigger problem with this Psalm is not intellectual; it's moral.

You see, because if God's king, David, who writes this, sees how evil evil is, we fail to. We fail to see how evil evil is. And as a result of that, we recoil from God's judgment. "Why would he ever do this? Why would he ever respond in this way?" Because he is absolutely holy. He is of purer eyes than to look upon evil. And so David says, "These folks blaspheme your name. They use it as a curse. They are opposed to you at every point."

We've grown accustomed to disgrace, haven't we? The fact is evangelical Christianity, if we are very honest as we must be, evangelical Christianity is weak when it comes to the matter of moral outrage. "Oh," you say, "now wait a minute. There's tremendous moral outrage. The people are greatly concerned about matters of public morality." But it is relatively easy for us to stand as it were on the bridgehead and deal with matters of public morality.

It's fascinating that at this point in history, both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, people are making a career out of apologizing for things that they had nothing at all to do with 200 and 300 years ago. So we've become adept at being able to ask for forgiveness for things we never did while failing to ask for forgiveness for the things I did 20 minutes ago. That's what I mean about the compromise that is there in moral terms.

It's what James is addressing: "Out of your mouth comes blessings and cursings, brothers and sisters, these things should not be." In other words, you're radically different. But are we? It's a prayer. It's not a program. We have a problem. And finally, this is to be our posture. Verses 23 and 24.

David is calling upon God to deal with the wicked, and now he submits himself to divine scrutiny. He doesn't confine his attack to the evil around him; he faces up to what is within him. When we began, we quoted from the introductory prayer to the communion service in the Anglican prayer book: "Almighty God, before whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden."

You see what he's doing? He's actually concluding as he began. "Lord, you searched me, you know me. Lord, you know how I hate those who are opposed to you. Before I close this all off," he says, "I want you to search me. Try me. Check for grievous ways in me. Lead me in the way of everlasting." What he's acknowledging is what we must acknowledge: that our hearts and in our hearts are the seeds of appalling evil.

McCheyne, he said that he considered that the seeds of every sin known to man clearly dwelt in his own heart. When Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up and his train filled the temple, when he saw God as God is, then he saw himself as he is. Quite staggering, isn't it? The prophet of God. He said, "Woe is me. Woe is me."

Fascinatingly, he'd been doing the woes before he got to this one. You can do this for homework, but in chapter 5 he says, "Woe to those who do this." In verse 11, "Woe to those who do this." In verse 18, "Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, woe to those who call evil good and good evil, woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and valiant men in mixing strong drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of his right." His prophetic voice sounds out with great clarity.

And then he says, "Woe is me! For I am lost. I am a man of unclean lips. I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." Isaiah was arguably the greatest preacher of his day, of his generation. Everyone listened to him. And yet before the bright, intense intensity of the revelation of God in all of his holiness, what did he discover? He discovered that it was precisely in the area of his strengths and his gifts that he was deeply sinful. Isaiah got it. David gets it. I hope we get it too.

Bob Lepine: You're listening to Truth For Life Weekend with Alistair Begg. Today's message wraps up a brief series called The God Who Knows Me, and if you'd like to relisten to or share these encouraging messages from Psalm 139, you'll find the complete study on our website at truthforlife.org. All of Alistair's teaching is free to stream or download.

While you're on the website, I want to encourage you to check out the book we are currently recommending. It's titled How to Teach Kids Theology: Deep Truths for Growing Faith. This is a great resource that'll help you share what you know about God and the Bible in a way that's easy for children to understand without oversimplifying it. To find out more about the book How to Teach Kids Theology: Deep Truths for Growing Faith, visit our website at truthforlife.org.

I'm Bob Lepine. Thanks for taking time out of your weekend to study the Bible with us. Next weekend we'll begin a series called A Light in the Darkness. Join us to learn how you can confidently point others to Jesus. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth For Life, where the learning is for living.