The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): God's people occupy Jerusalem. David is king and the ark is in place. What happens next? Today on the Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we continue our study of Psalm 68. God is providing for his people and the holy city, but the day is coming when not only will God's people be gathered to Jerusalem, but all the nations of the earth will come there as well.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. While Psalm 68 is a call for all nations to come to the one true God, Dr. Boice reminds us that the power of the Lord must draw them. The nations must forsake gods of their own making and come to the God of Israel and the God of Calvary. Turn to Psalm 68 as we explore this great Psalm of military triumph and salvation.

Dr. James Boice: We're studying the 68th Psalm and we're halfway through it, which means that we studied verses 1 to 18 last time and we pick up with verse 19 today to go on to the end. Now, I want to begin with a question which might have been raised by the first part of the Psalm, but is particularly pertinent to the second. The question is simply this: is Psalm 68 Messianic? That is, does it prophesy something concerning the coming of Jesus Christ?

That's not such an easy question to answer. For one thing, the commentators are divided. If you go back to the ancient commentators, people like Saint Augustine and Martin Luther, to give just two examples, they'd give a very easy answer. They would say, "Yes, of course it is, because all the Psalms are Messianic." They go through any Psalm at all and they find it having to do with explicit promises concerning the coming of Jesus Christ.

I don't think all the Psalms are Messianic, and I think this is vastly overdone. As a result of which, when I turn to Saint Augustine—as helpful as he may be in other areas, and he certainly is the great mind of the early Middle Ages and the early church—I find, as far as an exposition of the Psalms is concerned, that he's practically useless. The same thing is almost true of Martin Luther. Imagine saying that of Martin Luther, but it doesn't seem to be the way into the Psalms.

Now, it's not just these ancient scholars that have done that; some modern ones have done it as well. Arno Gaebelein, one of the authors of the notes of the great Scofield Reference Bible, saw it the same way. He has a book on the Psalms and, again, virtually every Psalm he discusses is either a direct prophecy of the coming of Jesus Christ or of a future day of Messianic blessing.

I'll give you another example: a Bible scholar of a generation ago by the name of William Pettingill. He wrote a book called *Christ in the Psalms*. It is significant, however, that that book does not contain all the Psalms. He spoke of only 14 Psalms as Messianic on the basis of the fact that in those Psalms, a particular text is quoted in the New Testament of Jesus. So, you have New Testament endorsement for those particular Psalms as being Messianic.

It is to the point of what I'm discussing now that he does include Psalm 68 among those 14. He does it on the basis of that verse which Paul quotes in Ephesians 4:8. It's the 18th verse of the Psalm, which we looked at last time: "When you ascended on high, you led captives in your train; you received gifts from men." That's exactly what Paul quotes in Ephesians. He says it has to do with Jesus Christ, and so Pettingill is on very sound ground when he says that.

So, I ask the question again: what about Psalm 68? Is it Messianic? Well, last time when we were studying the first half, we saw what it ostensibly is about as the progress of God leading his people from Mount Sinai to Jerusalem. It begins in the first two stanzas, sort of a prologue, with telling the people of Israel to praise God, and then it begins to explain why. It's because God led them out from Sinai—the third stanza talks about that—to the promised land and directed the conquest over their enemies.

That's what the fourth stanza is all about. Finally, in the fifth stanza, you have what apparently is the coming of the ark into Jerusalem, sort of a great triumph to all that period of desert wandering and conquest that finally leads up to the Golden Age of David's rule when the ark actually came into the holy city. Now, on the surface at least, that doesn't have anything to do with Jesus Christ. That's a looking back at what God did in Israel.

So, you say, "Well, that's not really Messianic," and yet it's interesting, isn't it, that it's in that first section of the Psalm that verse 18 occurs? That is the one that the Apostle Paul picks up and applies explicitly to Jesus Christ. Now, that may be the answer. By that I mean there may be a turning point here. The first half is looking backward, but now you end that with a verse that has its ultimate fulfillment in the coming of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit and the imparting of spiritual gifts to his people for the blessing of the church, which is the way Paul handles that.

What that may be saying is that from this point on, where the Psalm actually begins to look ahead, it deals in a special way with that which is only fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ. Some of you may have an Anglican background, raised in the Church of England or the Episcopal Church. If you use the prayer book, you may know, if you know it well, that Psalm 68 is assigned to Whit Sunday in the Anglican prayer book, which associates it with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the importation of special gifts. So, in that tradition, that at least is the way the Psalm is handled.

Now, we ought to pick up with verse 19. The first thing we notice is that there really is a major shift that occurs here. It's why it was so easy for me to divide the Psalm into two parts in order to study it. The shift is marked by the word "daily." If you do what I do in the study of the scripture, I just mark that. In this case, I drew a circle around it. It's the key word. Up to this point, the Psalm has been looking backward into the past as to what God has done for his people in the past, but now it moves into the present, dealing with things that happen in the present: a daily deliverance of the people.

It's going to go on from here to look to the future, which is the point at which it becomes explicitly Messianic. Now, following up on the first half of the Psalm, where are we at this point? Well, the people of God are now established in Zion, David is the king, and the ark is in the sanctuary. It seems to be the culmination of what God was doing with them as a nation. You ask the question: what are they to do now? The answer is twofold; it's what this next stanza begins with.

First of all, they are to praise God. Now, they were told to do that earlier; that's what the prologue says. We're going to find that it's also the way the Psalm ends. So, it begins by saying "Praise God" and it ends by saying "Praise God," but we haven't had a whole lot of that in the first half thus far. The stanzas that describe the departure from Sinai, and the one that describes the conquest, and the one that describes the moving of the ark into the holy city of Jerusalem, did not call upon anyone to praise God.

But now that's done, that's passed, and praise is the appropriate thing. You see, it's the way it always is in God's dealings with his people. God acts, his acts result in the salvation of his people, and then his people praise God for what he's done. Or at least they should. The Psalmist is calling upon the people to do it, and that has to be applied to us as well. I ask the question this way: has God acted in your life for your salvation? Aura Hogue was talking about it earlier, how God did that in her life.

If you're a Christian, God has done that in your life. Well, then, have you praised God for it? Are you praising him for it? Here's the whole Psalm calling upon the people of Israel to praise God for what he's done. If you say, "Well, as I think is right, that was only a foretaste of what God was going to do in Jesus Christ," the salvation from sin that we have in him is far greater than deliverance from the wilderness and the earthly enemies of the people and an enthronement in earthly Jerusalem.

Well, that is true, but in that case, you have an even greater obligation to praise God for it. So, when the Psalm begins by saying "Praise God" and it ends by saying "Praise God," that's directed to you and me. Are we doing it? We ought to; we should if we really know what God has done. That's the first thing. Now, the second thing is this: they are to continue to trust God. The sixth stanza says that as well.

Why? Well, because God has shown himself to be their Savior, and therefore they're to trust him to bear their daily burdens. You have that great verse there: "Our God is a God who saves." That's really the theme of the Bible. God is a God who saves. Some of the scholars say, "Well, what that's talking about there is protecting your life when you go into battle," because some of the verses that come next seem to have battle in mind. It may be that that's a partial reference.

But you see, it has to be more than that because even if you go into battle and you're delivered from death in the midst of the battle, sooner or later you're going to die. So, the salvation you need is a salvation that is far greater than that. It's an eternal salvation, a salvation from sin that's going to bring you into the presence of God eventually. Now, that's what it's talking about, and that is the theme.

Here's the question: God has delivered them in the past; does that mean that he's not going to deliver them in the present and the future? How about when they die? Is that going to be the end of it, or is God going to be their God in that time as well? Now, the Psalmist is saying, "Yes, God has saved them in the past, he saves them today, and he's going to save them in the future. Indeed, he's going to save them forever." That's our God. There's really no God like the God who has saved us through Jesus Christ.

That's a God who has saved us for eternal fellowship with him. It's a great cause for rejoicing. Now, the seventh stanza, which is verses 21 to 23, deals with the people's future victories. It's the place in the Psalm where the tenses of the verb turn from the past or the present to the future. Remember, the entire first half of it was in the past tense. The stanza we just looked at was present; it stresses "daily." But now it's beginning to look to the future.

The problem for most of us is that the victories that are described here are set down in such extreme and bloodthirsty language that they almost curdle our blood to read it. Which of us could really say this if we think about our enemies? How about plunging your feet in the blood of your foes? That's bad enough, but the next line gets even worse: "Well, the tongues of your dogs have their share."

Let me say, if that is only talking about a limited historical battle by the nation of Israel, then that is indeed pretty bloodthirsty. You might say, "Well, it was a different age, and they expressed themselves in a different way, and we don't do that kind of thing today; it was a violent time." That isn't a very good explanation. It might help a little bit until you remember that our times are equally violent, and we think we shouldn't talk that way.

Indeed, we shouldn't; we shouldn't wish that. If that's the case, well then, how are you to handle it? I want to suggest that this is the point where it really does get to be Messianic. It looks forward to the future, and what it's dealing with here, in the ultimate sense at least, is not merely a historical battle by Israel but the great and ultimate victory of God Almighty over his foes. In other words, it's beginning to look at this from a heavenly perspective and not an earthly perspective.

Our problem, you see, when we live within the historical mix of things, is that our motives are never pure and our cause is never entirely just. It may be relatively so. We talk about just war, for example, or just war theory. There is such a thing as that, relatively speaking, but because it's only relative, we don't dare talk in this kind of language. But when you're seeing it from God's point of view and you're thinking of it in terms of the victories of Jesus Christ over evil, then it is extreme, and it has to be.

Who would ever want to say in that perspective that we really don't want to see evil entirely destroyed—you know, just kind of put down a little bit? You can't say that; we want an utter victory for righteousness in the cause of Jesus Christ. I want to suggest here that probably a valuable way of looking at this is to think of it in terms of the description of the victory of God and God's people over earthly Babylon that's described in Revelation.

Babylon there is sort of a symbol for the secular, godless world powers that have always existed. You find it in Revelation 18 and 19. When Babylon falls, you get two different reactions. The 18th chapter contains the reaction of the kings of the earth and the world's merchants that have profited because of their merchandise with Babylon. They've gotten rich because of Babylon, just like people today get rich doing all sorts of evil things.

When Babylon falls in the 18th chapter, these merchants and the kings cry, "Woe, woe!" It's the worst possible thing they can imagine has happened. The whole financial structure has collapsed around their ears. It's like the Dow Jones plunged to 500 from 4,000. You can't think of anything worse than that. They're saying, "Woe, woe!" But you come to the next chapter, 19th chapter, and here the saints in heaven, and they're looking at it, and they're not saying, "Woe, woe!" They're rejoicing.

Here's what they say: they say, "Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are his judgments. He has condemned the great prostitute"—it's what's used for this world system—"who corrupted the earth by her adulteries. He has avenged on her the blood of his servants." Then they do it again; they say, "Hallelujah!" This is one of my favorite lines in all the Bible: "The smoke from her goes up forever and ever."

Now, that's the heavenly perspective. It would be wrong, I am sure, for us to rejoice over the fall of anybody in that kind of language for the reason I've just spelled out: we live in the historical mix of things, our cause is never entirely just. But it's not inappropriate in heaven. If you don't like that, well, you've got the book of Revelation to show you that it's not inappropriate in heaven. That is what the saints are going to do when evil is finally destroyed.

Now, there is in this stanza reference to God's people being brought from Bashan and from the depths of the sea, as our translation says, to rejoice in the destruction of their enemies. It's possible that that's not really the right translation. Some of the older versions express the idea of them being brought back to face judgment. If that's the case, what the Psalmist is saying here is something much like Amos says. We know it's a true thought because Amos says it anyway.

He's talking about this final judgment, and his whole point is that nobody's going to escape it; we're all going to have to face God sooner or later. Amos puts it in graphic language: "No one will get away, not one will escape. Though they dig down to the depths of the grave, from there my hand will take them. Though they climb up to the heavens, from there I will bring them down. Even though they hide themselves on the top of Mount Carmel, there I will hunt them down and seize them. Even though they hide from me at the bottom of the sea, there I will command my serpent to bite them."

So, Amos, in poetic but very graphic language, is saying in the day of God's judgment, nobody is going to escape. Now, whether that's what the Psalm is talking about here or not, I'm not sure. It can be translated different ways, but certainly the truth of that stands. The day of judgment is coming; the God of all the universe who always does right will do right, and evil will be punished. Now, that would be bad if it weren't that there is also salvation to come.

The next stanza begins to talk about that: verses 24 to 27. That's describing, on the surface, a procession that's making its way up the steep rising pathways to Jerusalem and its sanctuary. If this Psalm was written on the occasion of David bringing the ark up to Jerusalem, as it probably was, then this is a description of that—a fuller description than what we find less poetically in the historical books.

If you want a literal, prosaic description of that, you find it in 2nd Samuel the 6th chapter, also in 1st Chronicles the 13th chapter and again in the 15th chapter. The first passage, that is the short one, 2nd Samuel 6:5, says David and the whole house of Israel were celebrating with all their might before the Lord with songs and with harps, lyres, tambourines, sistrums, and cymbals. The next text says the same thing, but they substitute the word "trumpets" for "sistrums" because nobody knows what a sistrum is.

I never saw a sistrum, at least to my knowledge, but anyway, the picture is clear. They got all these instruments and they're making a great hullabaloo as the ark comes up to Jerusalem. Now, that's the sort of thing that is described here, but in different language. It describes the tambourines and the singers and the musicians and all of that. Four of the tribes are mentioned: Benjamin, Judah, Zebulun, and Naphtali.

I don't know why only four, but the suggestion has been made that it's representative; probably that's the case. Benjamin and Judah were in the south when the kingdom split after the time of David, actually after Rehoboam. Benjamin and Judah constituted the southern kingdom, that was the kingdom of Judah. Then in the north, you had the other ten tribes, but way up in the north, the far area was Zebulun and Naphtali.

So, it's probably a case of two tribes from the south and two tribes from the north. You probably have a representation here, and it's saying in this day of great Messianic blessing, the same thing is going to happen in a fuller and more joyous fashion than what happened when David brought the ark up to Jerusalem. That was a great day; everybody was singing and rejoicing. But the day is coming when God is going to gather his people up to Jerusalem, and the joy in that day is going to be even greater still.

Now, that's what leads into the ninth stanza, which is the most explicitly Messianic of all. This stanza is in verses 28 to 31, and it comes before the epilogue, which is stanza 10. It's another climax, sort of the climax to this second section of the Psalm, just like stanza 5 was a climax to part one. What it describes is the gathering of the nations of the world to God's city.

You see, the previous stanza has described the tribes of Israel coming up to Jerusalem; now, you have a description of all the nations of the world coming. There are two special things to note about this. First of all, all the nations of the world are going to come, or at least representatives from all the various nations of the world. The Psalmist can't mention them all—he didn't even know them all—but he does mention some to give the idea.

He mentions Egypt explicitly—that was Israel's great neighbor to the southwest—and then he mentions Cush. Cush is Ethiopia, and that was probably the most remote and inaccessible of any nation known to the ancient Jews. They had other nations that they knew of that were also far away, like Syria and Assyria across the great desert and so forth, but that was more or less in the area of the world that they occupied.

So, that wasn't quite so far away. But Cush, Ethiopia, way up in the headwaters of the Nile, that was just about as remote as anything you could think of. So, here the Psalmist is describing people that are going to come from those nations. Some of this is done in metaphorical language. He talks about the "beast among the reeds." What is that? Well, it's probably a crocodile. I don't know what else it would be; maybe a hippopotamus, which means a water horse, a big animal that lives there in the reeds.

If that's the case, this is probably a poetic allusion to Egypt because that's where the crocodiles came from. But then he's got a phrase like this: "the herd of bulls with their calves, the calves of the nations." That must refer to the lesser nations. So, the Psalmist is saying here that in the day of great Messianic blessing, all the nations are going to come to the worship of the true God.

Now, this is the point at which you get what I referred to in the last study, and in several studies before that, as a right kind of biblical universalism. Universalism is a heresy as it's usually expressed. The kind that you get on the campuses today, even evangelical schools, people just can't believe that anybody's going to be lost, somehow everybody's going to be saved. That's a wrong kind and a heretical kind of universalism; it's not that.

But there is a right kind of biblical universalism, which is this: that the offer of salvation is for all, and all may come, and all nations in one way or another are going to be gathered toward the kingdom of God in the final days. All nations may come, but the one they have to come to is the God of Israel. You see, that's the difference. When we talk about universalism today, or when people talk about religion today, they sort of express it this way: they say, "Well, everybody's idea about God is equally valid."

You know, you have your idea and I have my idea, and so your God is fine and that God is fine and all of that. That's patently absurd. It's not absurd, I suppose, to say there's no God and therefore I'm not going to follow God. But if you acknowledge that there is a God, then God is what God is. We may not know what he's like, but he's like something; he's not like just anything at all.

So, our task, if there is a God, is to find out what that God is like so that we might worship the true God, not a God of our imagination. He has to be something. The question is, who is he? Who is the true God? Now, it's true that one religion will say, "This is the true God," and another religion will say, "No, this is the true God." But the question is, which is the true God?

You see, it's not just a question of everything being equally valid. What we say in Christianity, the biblical religion from the beginning, is that this God is unknowable to us because he's the great God that he is, unless he reveals himself. But as a matter of fact, that's exactly what he's done. Left to ourselves, we can say, "There must be a God," and that's sound thinking. How did this world get here? How did things get to be so complex?

How do we have the qualities that we have as human beings, which transcend the mere bodies in which we live? It must be a God who gave us all of that, but we don't know who he is. We look at nature: he must be powerful. You look at a sunset, you say, "Maybe he has a sense of beauty," but then you see a hurricane and you say, "Destructive as well." But you see, you can't get much beyond that. But God reveals himself.

We ought to expect that. You see, if God has made us wanting to relate to one another as we do—everybody wants to share with somebody else and be known and be loved and so forth—well, then we must have gotten that quality from God. That means it's in God, so God must be like that himself. But you say, "How has he revealed himself? Where has he spoken?" The Bible says he's done that in the Bible, and he's done that in history, he's done that in Jesus Christ; he's made himself known.

Our claim is that this is the true God. Now, anybody can come. Matter of fact, all are invited to come. According to this Psalm, the prophecy is in the last days they will come from every area of the world. But you see, the point is, the God to which they come is the true God who was the God of Israel, the God of Sinai and the God of Calvary. That's what we hold out to the world.

We speak against this kind of false sentimental relativism that says, "Well, that's your opinion, that's my opinion," and so forth. That may be your opinion; if your opinion's right, then I ought to abandon my opinion and follow your opinion, you see. But it's not opinions we want; it's the truth that we want. Christianity says this God is revealed, and he's revealed definitively in the Bible.

Now, there's a second thing we notice here, and that is that not only will all the nations come, but it is the power of God that's going to draw them. The verse says, verse 28, "Summon your power, O God; show us your strength, O God, as you have done before." Now, that's sound biblical theology because that's just an Old Testament expression of what we found in the New Testament.

Jesus says nobody comes to me unless the Father draw him. Anybody may come, whoever will may come, is what Jesus said. But he also said nobody comes unless the Father does the work of drawing. Now, the Psalmist is saying the same thing: this God, the God of Israel, is for all the world. That's not exclusively a Jewish possession because God is the God of the world; he made the world, he made all the nations.

But you see, if they're going to come, it's going to be by the power of God who draws them, and that exactly is going to happen. That's what happens today when we preach the gospel. It's not because we're persuasive; it's because the power of God operates through the teaching of his word to draw people. Now, if we believe that, if we really believed it, we would pray for it more than we do in our evangelism.

We sometimes think we can just go through the motions and everything will be all right, but you see, you can go through the motions and nothing happens; you need God actually to bless what you're doing. That is why as we preach, we pray; as we teach, we pray; as we serve, we pray because we want God to be active in what we do to the glory of his own name.

Now, we come to the end; this is the final stanza, the epilogue. This is one in which the kingdoms of the earth, which now have come to God in the last stanza, are called upon to praise God: verses 32 to 35. "Sing to God, O kingdoms of the earth, sing praise to the Lord, to him who rides the ancient skies above, who thunders with a mighty voice. Proclaim the power of God, whose majesty is over Israel, whose power is in the skies. You are awesome, O God, in your sanctuary; the God of Israel gives power and strength to his people."

Now, at this point, it's worth thinking back to the prologue. You recall, if you were with us last time, we were studying that in the prologue, the people of Israel were called upon to praise God. They're to think back to what he did in delivering them from Egypt and appearing in Sinai and leading them out and bringing them into their own land. They're to praise God.

But now we come to the end, and you see how it has moved. It has moved from being simply an appeal to Israel to praise God now to an appeal to all the nations of the world to praise God because Israel's God is the true God, and the religion that is being talked about in the Psalm is truly universal. I want to say something in closing by going back to what I said at the beginning of the previous study.

You may recall that I pointed out, as we introduced Psalm 68, that it's a Psalm of military triumph, and I illustrated it by the way it has appealed to strong military leaders. The Huguenots loved the Psalm; it was their Psalm. They had it in a French version they used to sing it in their battles. It was sort of like their Battle Hymn of the Republic or the Marine Corps anthem, but here it was one of the great Psalms in the Old Testament, and they were victorious many times as a result of that.

Not only did the Huguenots love it, Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, loved it. So did Oliver Cromwell from the Puritan period in England. It's very easy to understand how these military people engaged in battles of that nature were attracted to the Psalm. It talks about God rising up to overcome his enemies. So, if you think your cause is just and you see your enemies as opposed not merely to you but God, that's a very fitting Psalm. I don't question at all their wisdom in using it.

But what I want to point out is this: I can't help observing, as we look back now having studied the Psalm, that in the final analysis, none of those military efforts was an unqualified success at least in the long run. How about the Huguenots? It's true that Henry of Navarre had several major campaigns and was successful, and that the Huguenots were able to stave off the onslaught of their enemies for a long, long time.

But eventually, the Edict of Nantes was revoked, thousands of the French Protestant Christians were murdered, and the rest were driven into exile to the benefit of the nations that received them, like England and Scotland and Holland and Northern Ireland, and to the impoverishment of France. Take the case of Charlemagne. He had some success in reviving what they called the Holy Roman Empire, but it wasn't in any sense an equivalent to the ancient Roman Empire.

Even though he had victory over the Moors, who were regarded as the great ruthless enemies of Christianity, in a very short while these Moors triumphed. They swept across North Africa, through the Near East, and eventually even into Europe. Even the Crusades, for all their great piety and effort, were unable to drive them out or defeat them utterly. How about Cromwell? Cromwell was an unusual leader. Some, though not all, would regard the period of Puritan ascendancy in England as a good thing.

But even if it was a good thing, it was only a short while after Cromwell's death that England turned from its immediate Puritan past, brought Charles II back to the throne, and re-established the monarchy. You see, the point I'm making is not to lessen any appreciation of any of the victories or accomplishments of any of these great leaders, but simply to say that we need to be reminded that the goal of the church of God in this age is not military triumphs, however noble or highly motivated they may be, any more than our methodology is to be the world's methodology.

Our commission is not to win military battles, but to preach the gospel of salvation by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ, and to do it throughout the whole world, leaving the conquest of the world by the truth of the gospel to Jesus Christ. The reason for that is obvious: it's Jesus who is the king. We're not in the business of setting up an earthly king. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Our allegiance is to him. He's in complete control of all things. He will reign in power, and before him one day every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father, Philippians 2:10 and 11.

So, I can conclude by saying, what's our response to that? What should it be? Obedience, of course. He's the king, kings command, we owe him allegiance. He's King Jesus, yes. But how about praise? You see, Psalm 68 is a praise Psalm among other things, and this is how it ends. The very last words are: "Praise be to God." So, let's do it.

Even though we don't see all things subjected to the Lord Jesus Christ as yet, one day they will be. Even though we don't see it yet, we can praise him and remember that even though we may suffer discouragements now, and even though now at times we may be defeated, we can nevertheless press on steadily in faith, knowing that Jesus is on the throne and that one day everyone will bow before him. We can be encouraged, and we ought to be encouraging one another as we look forward to that day.

Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for a Psalm like this from so long ago and from a culture so very, very different from our own, but which nevertheless, because it flows out of the heart of people who knew you and loved you and anticipated your glorious reign upon earth, also speaks to us. Because that's exactly what we do. We live in turbulent times, we see evil on every hand, we see your reign over the kingdoms of this world flouted by those who even laugh at religion to the peril of their souls, and we long to see the Lord Jesus Christ on the throne.

He is on the throne, we just don't see him ruling all things. But here we're told that one day he will. He will do it in power, evil will be subjected, the righteous will be lifted up. Our Father, encourage us by that. So, as we fight our battles, what really seem to us at times to be very little battles day by day—battles at work, battles in the home, battles with people that we come up against all the time—help us to do the right thing and to stand for Jesus Christ in obedience to him, knowing that nothing that is done in the name of Christ will ever be overlooked and that it's in those little things above all that great glory is given to his name. So, bless us as we try to glorify our Lord that way. 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. 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.