The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Aging is inevitable, and in today's culture, old age is not always well regarded. At that stage of David's life, we find him reminiscing on thoughts from his past. He remembers God's faithfulness and asks, what can I do for God with this strength that remains? It's a great pattern to follow as we come into our golden years as well.

Guest (Male): Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Many people equate their older years with retirement and use them as a time of rest and relaxation. But that wasn't David's perspective. Let's join Dr. Boice as he examines Psalm 71. We'll discover what may well be our most important responsibility as we walk beside David in this important stage of his life's journey.

Dr. James Boice: It's a very interesting thing about this second book of the Psalter that almost all of the Psalms in it have titles, title lines that tell us generally who the author is and also sometimes tell us something about the Psalm. Now Psalm 71 doesn't have a title line. There's only one other Psalm in the second book of the Psalter that does it, and that is Psalm 43, which seems to belong together with Psalm 42.

You probably can't remember back to when we were studying that, but the Psalms have the same refrain. The 42nd Psalm is longer. The refrain is repeated twice. It only occurs once in Psalm 43, but there's a pattern that would seem to indicate that the Psalms at one time belonged together. Now because of that and since the first Psalm is identified as a Psalm of David, most people assume that Psalm 43 has been detached but is a Psalm of David too.

Now on the same kind of thinking, according to the same kind of thinking, there are people who would argue that Psalm 71 that we're looking at now belongs with Psalm 70, was detached from it, and that because Psalm 70 is by David, Psalm 71 is too. I don't know about that kind of arguing, but there is a lot of evidence that this 71st Psalm is by David, whether or not it's identified as that. For one thing, there are a lot of phrases in it that occur in the other Davidic Psalms.

You can find that yourself. You just read through it phrases like rock of refuge, my rock and my refuge, my enemies, be not far from me, oh God, come quickly, oh my God, to help me, and so on. And there's this other interesting feature, and that is that the first three verses are taken directly from Psalm 31, which is identified as being a Psalm of David. Since we're coming near the end of this second book of the Psalter, and since it is going to say when we get to the very end, this concludes the prayers of David, the son of Jesse, it would certainly be appropriate if a Psalm from David in his old age were included in the Psalter at exactly this point.

There's other evidence for that too. I'm going to assume Davidic authorship in this study, even though it doesn't explicitly claim to be by David. But it really doesn't make any difference because essentially it's a Psalm of an older saint who's reflecting on a lifetime of God's faithfulness, and it's in the Psalter for our benefit because sooner or later, if God spares us, we're all going to become old. And this is a pattern for how to do it graciously and fulfilling what God has given us to do as long as he gives us breath to do it.

Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher, said, we have here the prayer of the aged believer who in holy confidence of faith, strengthened by a long and remarkable experience, pleads against his enemies and asks further blessings for himself. Now when we're studying these Psalms, I like to get their outline clear because in most cases, this is helpful. The Psalms flow along from idea to idea. They develop, they build, and we sometimes miss that because we treat them more or less as containing isolated verses.

It's very hard to do that with this Psalm. If you study the various commentators on it, you find that they give all kinds of outlines. None of them really agree. I mention people like Leupold and Tate and Kidner in these studies. Leupold divides it into two parts. Tate divides it into five parts. Kidner has six sections, which is the way the New International Version seems to divide it up, but his six sections don't correspond to the NIV's six sections.

So if you're trying to get that kind of an outline, it's difficult. What do you do with that? Do you sort of flip a coin and pick one or the other? I think the fact that it's hard to get an outline is significant because what's important here are the ideas, and they're repeated. They kind of come back again and again. Maybe you noticed that when I was reading it earlier. Something that is said early in the Psalm is mentioned later on in the Psalm, and it sort of goes back and forth.

It strikes me that that is probably the way you tend to think as you get older. You tend to reminisce on ideas and they keep coming back again and again. You don't always have a clear progressive outline. I want to make very clear that this sermon that I'm going to give has a very clear progressive outline, even if the Psalm doesn't. But nevertheless, it strikes me that's probably what is happening in the Psalm as a reflection of that.

So as a result, the way to study it is not to say in this particular case, what is the outline, how does it flow, but rather what are the chief ideas. That seems to me when we do that, it has four main subjects. First of all, old age and its problems. Now the author, David presumably, doesn't even state that at the beginning. He doesn't get around to it till about a third of the way through, but nevertheless, that's the perspective from which he's writing. So you start there: old age and its problems.

And then secondly, how the past looks from the perspective of old age. When you get old, you look back, what do you see? A lot of the Psalm has to do with that. Thirdly, how about the future? Thinking of the future in terms of things that are yet to be done. And then finally, fourth subject: praise from one who has lived long enough to have observed God's righteousness and his faithful ways. So more or less, that's what we're dealing with.

So let's look at what the Psalm has to say about old age and its problems first of all. It's not fun to be old, especially in America. I suppose it's never fun to be old, but at least there have been cultures in the history of the world where old age has been highly regarded. People looked up to the aged. They were the source of wisdom. In cultures where information is largely passed on by oral tradition, the aged were important because they were the ones who had the memories of things past.

They handed that on down to the children. And when the wisdom of the culture or the community was summed up in that kind of historical remembrance, well, the old age, the people who were old, were the source of that wisdom. But you see, it doesn't work that way in our culture today. Our information, such as it is, is passed on in mechanical ways. And so old age is not regarded. What we want to do is live forever. And so ours is a culture that glorifies youth.

People try to be young as long as possible. They spend thousands of dollars for facelifts and other kinds of lifts so they look young. And there are many, many aged people go around dressed like teenagers because they want to keep up this cult of the young. Well, David didn't have the problems that we do, but he did have problems. And the problems that he talks about here in his old age are more significant than our problems with old age because they are universal. They're the kind of things that older people experience in any culture at all.

Now let me suggest what some of them are. First of all, the weakness or the loss of former strength or abilities. You see, that's one of the problems of getting old. You begin to lose your strength. You just don't have the energy you did when you were young. And your skills begin to go too. You're not quite as quick at things. Your memory isn't quite as good and other things besides. But I can't remember what those other things are.

Let me give you a quotation from John Wesley's journal. You know, he was the great Methodist evangelist and he lived to be 98 years old, born in 1703, he lived to 1791. He kept a diary throughout his life, almost all of it. And here's what he wrote down for the 28th of June 1789: "Sunday, 28th. This day I enter on my 86th year. I now find I grow old. One, my sight is decayed so that I cannot read a small print unless in a strong light." Have very strong lights up here. "Number two, my strength is decayed so that I walk much slower than I did some years since. Three, my memory of names, whether of persons or places, is decayed till I stop a little to recollect them. What I should be afraid of is if I took thought for the morrow that my body should weigh down my mind and create either stubbornness by the decrease of my understanding or peevishness by the increase of bodily infirmities. But thou shalt answer for me, O Lord my God."

Now many of us can echo that, especially those who are a bit older. We can't hear as well as we used to hear. We can't see as well as we used to see. We can't remember things as well as we used to remember them. But of course we're older, we have a lot more to remember, gets harder. And we don't even sleep very well. We find ourselves waking up, sometimes getting up two or three times throughout the night. That's what David is thinking about when he says, you've got it there in verse nine, "Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone."

So one obvious, universal problem of old age is declining strength and abilities. There's more. Second thing he's concerned about is a continuation of troubles, particularly enemies in his case. You see, the second major problem of getting old is that the problems you had when you were younger don't go away. They're still with you. David had enemies when he was young. He had enemies when he was old. He had enemies all through his life. You know, it's hard to read a Psalm identified as a Psalm by David and not find him talking about his enemies.

And here at the very end, you find the same thing as well. "My enemies speak against me; those who wait to kill me conspire together" (verse 10). Marvin Tate, whom I mentioned a moment ago, says the speaker might have expected mature age to bring exemption from such attacks, but such is not the case. The enemies of the king were present as much at the end of his life as at the beginning. Well, that's the same with us. Whatever problems you've had all along, you're very likely to continue to have.

I can't say in my case that's entirely true. Some of the problems I had when I was younger are gone, but a lot of them continue, enough to be a problem. I suppose the most serious personal problem I have is continuing to sustain the various ministries that I'm engaged in financially. And those problems never seem to go away. You heard from Diana Frazier this morning about the Bible Study Hour. She didn't talk about the financial difficulties. The radio is always struggling to pay its bills. We're always behind on that.

We're trying to get into the daily market because we think that is the best way to move ahead and get on a sound financial footing. People give, prop it up, board members are very generous and so on, but it always seems to be a struggle. And there are times in the course of the year when we get so far behind I come back from speaking somewhere and I think we're just going to have to shut down the ministry because we can't continue on that basis.

City Center Academy is another burden, a far smaller budget. It was a relatively small school, but it has to be made up every year. And that's a problem. It's unending. Anybody who works with a school, as George McFarland does and others, knows that that's always the case. You're just always laboring to try to find the necessary money. And the same thing is true of Tenth Presbyterian Church. People here give very generously, and it's the strength of this church that sustains the other ministries in one way or another, but we have our financial crises from time to time.

We had one last summer. You know the trustees speak about it from time to time. And when it happens, when it gets acute, we begin to lose staff, we have to cut back ministries, there are things we can't do that we would like to do. That sort of thing continues. I sometimes wish that somebody would come along and just take all those burdens off, you know, say that's not your problem anymore, but nevertheless it continues to be. And not only is it a problem, we even get letters—Diana Frazier can comment on that—that come in and people say, "You know, your problem is that you're not really seeking the will of God. If you were following the will of God, well, you wouldn't be in debt."

Well, maybe they're not listening to the will of God because if they gave, we wouldn't be in debt. I don't know how that operates, but it's not quite as simple as that. And the point I'm making is that those problems continue. Well, they're not always financial problems. Some people have family problems. You know, they're difficult people, and unless they've killed everybody else off in the family, the family has to deal with that.

I know one woman who has an octogenarian mother who's in a home, who has been a burden for her for decades. Very, very difficult. This woman takes care of her mother and does it very well, faithfully, without any benefit to herself at all. You'd think the mother would be grateful, but she isn't. She's as difficult now as she ever was. She doesn't even get senile and begin to forget. She always remembers the bad things, brings them up. Doesn't even die. It goes on and on. I suppose she's approaching 90 about now.

E.M. Forster, the British novelist, had a mother like that. She lived to her late 90s, and he took care of her all that time. She was making his life difficult, and she didn't die until he was 66. He had a rebirth of freedom at that age and went on to write some good things. Well, people have problems like that. Some have health problems, and they don't get better. Some people live with chronic ailments that are just with them year after year.

You say, "Oh Lord, wouldn't it be good if I could just be free of that?" But you're not free of that, and those things continue to linger into old age. You see, and the problem is made more difficult, even if the problem itself is not difficult, by the fact that we have less energy to deal with it. We just can't cope with it. We're not even as resilient in dealing with it when we're old as we are when we're young. So that's the second thing.

There's also a third thing David seems to mention here, and that's being alone and having no one to help. That's a third thing that bothered him. He didn't have anybody to shoulder his burdens. In fact, his enemies seemed to recognize it because that's the way he gets into it (verse 11). The enemies say, "God has forsaken him; pursue him and seize him, for no one will rescue him." He doesn't have any defenders. Nobody's on his side. He's just an old man. Everybody's waiting for him to die, get out of the way so they can take over.

And so David is very aware of being alone. Maybe that's the case with you, especially if you're old enough. In earlier years you had friends who stood by you, co-workers, you shared the burdens, but now you're older you don't have people like that anymore. So failing weakness, continuing problems, and no one to help. That's very serious indeed. That's what David's describing. Now he begins to look around from that perspective.

And the first place he looks is to the past. And what he finds there is that God is faithful. You see, he has no one to help him, no one human perhaps, but he does have God. And as he looks to the past, he remembers one of the great things you can do in old age: you can remember that God is faithful and has been with him all along. He notices several things about the past. First of all, that God has been with him from his youth and even before that. He says in verses five and six, "For you have been my hope, O Sovereign Lord, my confidence since my youth. From birth I have relied on you; you brought me forth from my mother's womb."

Well, what that means is that he knows, he remembers that he had learned to trust God from his childhood. And we know that because of David's story that we have in the Old Testament. He was a man of God even before he was a man. When he was just a boy out taking care of the sheep, the youngest of his father Jesse's sons, he was a godly man. That's where he learned to commune with God and undoubtedly some of the richness of the Psalms that he later wrote came out of that experience of his youth. And he says, "I remember that."

We would say here's a person who became a Christian when he was still a child. But what David says here is you can press back even before that, even before he can remember, because he was sure because of his later experience that God had been faithful to him even when he was so young he couldn't remember. And maybe you can say that if you've been a Christian a long time or if you know anything about the past, things that have been told you by your parents. You can say God was faithful to me even then.

I want to say that if you have known the Lord from childhood, then you're very fortunate because you're able to draw on those resources, those memories, as you grow older. Spurgeon wrote, "They are highly favored who can, like David, Samuel, Josiah, Timothy, and others say, 'You have been my trust from my youth.'" Here's an historical testimony. Do you know the name of Polycarp? He was one of the martyrs of the early church. He was killed in the arena on February 22nd, the year 156 AD.

He was an old man. He was highly regarded in the city, but the test of faithfulness to the empire in those days was burning incense to Caesar. It was a form of worshipping Caesar as Lord. And what the person had to say was Kurios Kaisar, Caesar is Lord. The Christians wouldn't do it. Well, somebody brought up Polycarp's name, challenged it in the court, and the magistrates had to deal with it. They knew he was harmless, but instead of doing what was right, they did what magistrates do: they went by the law.

And so this man was going to be executed. And as they were taking him in the cart to the amphitheater where he would have the choice either of offering the incense or being thrown to the lions, they were trying to dissuade him. They said, "Come on now, what harm is there in throwing a little incense on the altar and saying Caesar is Lord?" But here's what Polycarp answered: "For 86 years I have been Christ's slave, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my king who saved me?"

Well, you see, despite his age and undoubtedly his physical weakness, Polycarp was strong. In fact, he was never stronger than he was when he made that testimony because he looked back over 86 years of his life and he said, "Jesus Christ, my Lord, has been faithful to me all that time." And so he was able to be faithful to him even in the extremity. Well, there's a second thing David says as he looks at the past.

And that concerns himself. The first concerns God: God is faithful. Now he says of himself that he has become a portent to many (verse 7). A portent. Now it's hard to define that. It's a difficult Hebrew word to define and they do the best they can with portent, but it's also difficult because it can have either a bad sense or a good sense. If it has a good sense, it would refer to God's marvelous protecting care of David during all those years. And people would say something like this: "Look how God has protected and blessed David." He'd be a portent in that sense.

Or on the other hand, it could be a bad sense. And in that case, people would say something like, "Has anybody ever suffered as much as David?" You see how the word would be used. Now I think in the context, it's probably to be taken in a good sense because David's speaking about the faithfulness of God, keeping him all those years. But probably the bad sense isn't missing entirely either because it's in the suffering and the difficulties that God kept him.

One of the commentators says it's best to understand it as applying to his whole wonderful life of trials and blessings, perils and deliverances, such as did not ordinarily fall to the lot of man. Now David was a portent in that sense. His whole life was a testimony to what God can do in the life of an individual in blessings and in trials, you see, whatever the circumstances were. And that, of course, is why we have so much of the life of David in the Old Testament. It's told in very great length.

So David looks to the past and that's what he sees. He sees that God has been faithful and that God has worked in him to make him somewhat of a portent, to stand out as a testimony to the faithfulness of God before other people. Now, third part: he looks ahead. I suppose there are people who in their old age only look back and do so bitterly. They look back to the past and imagine it to be better than the present. They think only of the deprivations of old age, so they get sour and miserable. We know people like that.

They don't look to the future very much, probably because they're afraid to do it. Looking to the future means that you're going to die. They don't want to do that. But David isn't afraid. David looks to the future, and he's not morbid. He's not looking to the future and saying, "Well, I wonder how many years I have left." He's not doing that at all. He's looking to the future in terms of the work that God has yet for him to do. He knew that if God has left him in this life, however old he is, it's for a purpose.

And so there's something for him to do. And instead of looking around mournfully, he's looking around to see what he can do for God. Now what he talks here is testifying to coming generations about God. And this leads him to say this (verses 17 and 18): "Since my youth, O God, you have taught me, and to this day I declare your marvelous deeds. Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, O God, until I declare your power to the next generation, your might to all who are to come."

Someone has said that the Christian church is only one generation away from extinction. What they mean by that, of course, is that we have to testify to the work of Christ so that the next generation believes. That, of course, is true. But in the context of this Psalm, the unique thing that David is saying is that older people have a unique capacity of testifying to the young. I wonder if you ever noticed that. How grandfathers and grandmothers can relate to the grandchildren sometimes a lot better, and certainly they have more time to do it than the parents can.

The parents are so busy, you know, and they're handling things and they're doing it all right, but there's a special bond there. The secular world has noticed that because one of the phenomena of recent times is that they will establish nursing care for children in nursing homes for older people because the older people are there and look in on the children and will show an interest in them, and the children like that. They look up to the older people.

We've done it here at Tenth Presbyterian Church in the sense that we bring older people into the Sunday school, not to have the whole burden of teaching the lessons or maintaining discipline or whatever it may be, but often to help out or to hear the verses that the children have to recite or listen to whatever else they might have to do. The children look up to the older people, and they like it. You see, that as a phenomenon recognized by the secular world, but it is biblical.

And probably that is what David is talking about here. At any rate, he knows that if he's still around, it's so he can bear a witness, and the people he chiefly has in mind are the new generation, the generation yet to come. Now that brings us to the final point, and that is the present. You see, David from the perspective of old age looks to the past and then he looks to the future and back and forth, and now he also thinks about the present.

And what he says about the present is that what he has to do, that is, to bear witness to the faithfulness of God, he is going to do. And so he does in the Psalm. He bears witness to God right now. Now two things he praises God for. The first is his righteousness (verses 19 to 21). And then finally, his faithfulness (verses 22 to 24). Now this word righteousness is used in different ways in the Bible. The way we know it best is how it's used in the New Testament chiefly of that divine righteousness which is imputed to us by God on the basis of the work of Christ.

We're justified because Christ has taken our sin to himself and we have received his righteousness as a gift of God. That's imputed righteousness. But that's not the way the word is normally used in the Old Testament, certainly not in the Psalms characteristically. The way the word righteousness is used in the Psalms is that it has to do with God's right dealings, to the fact that everything he does is just, that you can't fault him for anything.

And so David, as he looks back, says, "Yes, that is what I have found true of God. God's ways are always right. I haven't always understood them. But everything God does is right." And so that's what I am going to testify to. God is just or righteous, so he can be trusted. And it's the part of wisdom to conform one's life to his standards. You see, when we're young we fight against them. We think that isn't right, there must be a better way to do things. But as you get old, you find out that all God's ways are right.

And then finally, the thing we've mentioned all along: God's faithfulness (verses 22 to 24). In a certain sense, the entire Psalm has been about God's faithfulness: his faithfulness in the past, that's a testimony; his faithfulness in the future, that's faith; and now he's talking about God's faithfulness in the present. It's the last and chief thing David wants to declare to those who are to come. He wants them to know that our God is a faithful God, a God who can always be trusted. And that's why we sing about it: "Great is thy faithfulness, O God my father, there is no shadow of turning with thee; thou changest not, thy compassions, they fail not; as thou hast been, thou forever wilt be."

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