The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Can you recall a time when you felt like you were sinking? A time when, unless help came quickly, you would drown in your troubles? As David tallies his problems and the wrongs done against him, his trials begin to sound very much like the sufferings of another, those of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Psalm 69 is a Messianic Psalm, and in it, the cries of David and Jesus intermingle. But while both of their situations seem desperate, neither is without hope. Turn in your Bible to Psalm 69 as we listen to David's lament and recognize how we are to react when called to suffer for righteousness' sake.

Dr. James Boice: When we were studying Psalm 68 together, our last psalm, I asked whether it should be considered a Messianic psalm—that is, a psalm that has explicit reference to Jesus Christ and is a prophecy of what He was going to do. That's not an easy question to answer. When we look at the Psalter as a whole, there are some psalms that are clearly Messianic. There are some that are doubtful.

Altogether, those that are clearly Messianic make up a very small proportion of the whole. Most of them are psalms that grow out of an historical situation and are limited to that, except to the extent that that situation is re-echoed in the lives of God's people in other ages and in other places. When you talk about Messianic psalms, that's not always so easy. Psalm 68 had some elements that seemed to be Messianic; it had others that were not. We tried to sort our way through that.

When we come to Psalm 69, which is what we're going to look at now, we don't have that problem because it's clearly about Jesus. Not every part of it. We're going to see that there are things in it that Jesus Himself could never have said. And yet a lot of it is. The reason we know that is because a lot of this psalm is quoted in the New Testament of Jesus Christ. We have the Holy Spirit's endorsement by the New Testament of a Messianic interpretation of at least large parts of the psalm.

Next to Psalm 22, which speaks of the crucifixion, and Psalm 110, which is the most quoted psalm of all the Psalter in the New Testament, this psalm is quoted most. It has only 36 verses, but seven of them are directly quoted, explicitly of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Other verses contain themes that are applied in a more general way to the life of Jesus Christ in the Gospels.

I have had occasion from time to time to talk about Arno C. Gaebelein's commentary on the psalms. I've said it's rather limited in its usefulness because it tries to find references to Jesus Christ or the future of Israel in virtually every psalm in the Psalter. I think that is grossly overdone. His comments are often unhelpful. But whenever Gaebelein gets around to talking about a psalm that really is Messianic, then he's very helpful.

In this particular case, he calls this a precious psalm. He says it begins with the cry of the one who bore our sins in His body, who suffered for our sake, and it ends with the glorious results of His atoning work. That really is accurate because that is what Psalm 69 is all about. These psalms all have their own historical setting. In this case, the setting is that of a man who is hurting; he's in deep trouble.

He's calling out to God from his troubles, asking God to help him. It's very important to recognize at the beginning that we have that kind of an historical setting and that it does apply to a literal man, whether David or some other, because there are sayings in the psalm that really can't apply to Jesus Christ. One clear example of that is verse 5. Here the psalmist says, "You know my folly, O God; my guilt is not hidden from you." Jesus Christ could never have said that.

There are other verses that He does say, some He quotes Himself explicitly. We have to keep those two things in mind. Let's ask the question whether David actually wrote it. The little title says that he did. I tend to take those as part of the canonical text and take them seriously. But there are some indications of the psalm that create problems. Verse 35 speaks about rebuilding the cities of Judah.

It's hard to relate that to the time of David. That sounds very much like something that was written after the destruction of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon when the Jews returned from the exile and were praying for God to rebuild the city. A lot of commentators look at that and say that's a clear indication it couldn't be by David. They begin to search around for somebody else who might have written the psalm.

One of their favorite selections is Jeremiah. That's somewhat arbitrary, but I think I know why they talk about Jeremiah. In verses 2 and 3, this writer, whoever he is, says that the waters have come up to his neck and he is sinking in the miry depths where there's no foothold. They just remember there's a little incident from Jeremiah's life where he was thrown into a cistern. That makes the association and they say it probably is Jeremiah. I don't think that has anything going for it at all.

Is it a psalm by David? It says it is. I take it at face value. What about verse 35 then? It seems the obvious answer is that that ending was simply put there by somebody else in order to relate the psalm of David to a later period in history and broaden its application. There's nothing wrong with that. Why then is it called a psalm of David? Because it is a psalm of David. All you have is an application at the end which broadens it.

In my opinion, the way to study a psalm like this is to keep three points of reference in mind. First of all, David's situation, or that of another ancient writer. He's really speaking from a human situation and we can identify with it. Secondly, the person and work of Jesus Christ because it really is Messianic and it relates to Him. Thirdly, our own experiences and problems because the experiences of David parallel our own.

That's why we have them in the Psalter for our benefit. Not only that, they parallel things that Jesus Christ experienced. When we remember Jesus Christ, we begin to get a model in Him for how we should endure and how we should act when we go through the same kind of thing. When we think of David, we remind ourselves of how difficult life must have been for him.

King David. Everything must have been wonderful—wonderful to be a king. Well, it wasn't wonderful for David. Things were tough for him. It's even tough to be a president. Everybody is after the president. I sure wouldn't want to be any president. Here was David the King; he had a very hard time. So we want to keep that in mind. When we think of Jesus, He's enduring suffering and abuse, and that gives us an insight into His humanity, the kind of things He endured in the flesh for our sake.

We sometimes talk about Jesus in such an exalted way as the Son of God and the King and the Savior that we forget He was also a man. Here we have the kind of things that He suffered graphically illustrated in the psalm. Finally, we want to think about ourselves and our experiences and say when we go through these things, we want to go through them the way Jesus did and, for that matter, the way David did himself.

Here is a verse or two from the New Testament that really ought to be a theme and a reminder to us. It's from Hebrews 12: "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider Him who endured such opposition from sinful men so you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood."

The tone of the psalm is set in the first four verses. They contain two elements: a lament. We've talked in the past about the various genres of the psalms. Some are praise, some are thanksgiving, some are hymns, some are Messianic. Clearly, this one in its form at least is a lament. This man is in trouble and he's expressing his trouble. Out of that comes an appeal for help; he calls to God out of his trouble.

I wonder if you have ever felt like the psalmist does here. I'm sure you have. I know I have. Our word for it is overwhelmed. That's the way David is feeling. He's feeling overwhelmed if he's the one that's writing it. We feel overwhelmed with problems we can't seem to solve, with pressures we can't sustain, and demands on our time that we know that we can't meet.

Sometimes in situations like that, we feel that we can't even pray, or if when we do pray, God isn't really there to answer and help us. He seems to be distant and far away. David uses a lot of vivid images here. He talks about the waters coming up to his neck. He talks about sinking in the miry depths where there is no foothold. He talks about coming into deep waters where the floods engulf him.

He says that he's worn out calling for help and his throat is parched. Two things make this particularly bad for David. The first is all these things he is going through are not his fault. He's going through them innocently. He's got plenty of enemies, but he hasn't done anything to harm them. They're his enemies without cause. People are out to get him, but it's not because of his unrighteousness.

The second thing is that when he calls out to God, God doesn't seem to answer him. Have you ever gone through times like that? All of us have. Sometimes we get into trouble and it's our own fault. Most of the time it's our own fault, but not always. Sometimes, perhaps very often in some people's lives, when we call out to God we don't seem to get an answer.

It's not that God doesn't hear; He knows all things and hears all things. But we're asking for help and we don't seem to get the kind of help we think we need and certainly not the kind of help we're asking for. If that's the case, if you're going through a situation like that, remember that what you have to do is keep on praying. Here is David saying he prays and doesn't seem to get any answer, but notice he doesn't stop praying.

How do we know he keeps on praying? It's because we have the psalm. The psalm is an expression of his prayer. In the midst of the agony and the suffering that he's going through, he takes time to write this kind of thing down. I said a moment ago that you have to consider this psalm on three levels—David's life, Jesus Christ, and ourselves.

We've already looked at David and ourselves. Does this psalm tell us anything about Jesus' suffering? Let's begin just by asking the question whether Jesus could have prayed like this. Of course He could. Not only could He, He did. We have an example of it in the Garden of Gethsemane where in His deep agony He cried out to God, sweating as it were great drops of blood, asking God if it were possible that this cup would pass from Him.

He wasn't heard for a period of time. As we read those accounts in the Gospels, it seems that He went away, came back, went away, came back, went away, came back—probably about three hours by the account that we have. It was only at the end that the angels came and ministered to Him. There is another great passage in Hebrews 5:7-10: "During the days of Jesus' life on earth, He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save Him from death."

Then it says He was heard because of His reverent submission. But He wasn't heard immediately. There was time before God answered. It continues: "Although He was a son, He learned obedience from what He suffered and, once made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him and He was designated by God to be a high priest in the order of Melchizedek."

These verses tell us that in His humanity, Jesus was not exempt from the kind of sufferings, disappointments, and struggles that you and I go through. But He didn't abandon Himself to despair. They tell us that what He did was cry out to God. He persisted in His prayer and at the end of that, God ministered to Him. He was heard because of His reverent submission.

The next verse, verse 5, is the one I mentioned earlier as a verse that Jesus Himself could never have prayed because it's the psalmist's brief confession of his folly and his sin or his transgression. If you think of it as David uttering the word, that in itself is not surprising. David wasn't a perfect man; he was a sinner. So it's not surprising that he should say to God, "You know my folly, O God; my guilt is not hidden from you."

The surprising thing is not that David says it but that he says it here at this point. What has he just said in the first four verses? What he's been protesting in the verses immediately before that is his innocence. He says, "They hate me without reason. Those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head. Many are my enemies without cause, those who seek to destroy me. I am forced to restore what I did not steal."

What would you expect David to say after a statement like that? You'd expect him to say, "And God, I really didn't steal it." Or maybe he would say, "And God, remember I really have not given them any cause to hate me." But instead, what David does is confess his folly and his sin. That's a real inversion. It might not seem to make sense, but the more spiritual you are and the better you know the Bible, the more sense it makes.

This really is the heart of a truly godly man. Here's a man who is trying to live before God in a way that honors God, and one way he does that is by giving his enemies no cause for offense. He does not want to act unrighteously, and he has not done it. Nevertheless, when he prays to God and he stands there in the light of the holiness of the one he worships, he knows perfectly well that he's a fool and a sinner.

Recognizing that he's a fool, he doesn't challenge God's wisdom: "God, how can you allow such a thing to go on in my life when I really haven't done anything?" He doesn't protest his perfect innocence. When he stands before God, he says, "God, I leave it in your hands. I'm asking for your help, but I'm still a fool. I don't understand why this is going on, but you're all-wise. And as far as sin goes, I haven't offended these people, but you know that I'm a sinner."

Each of these psalms has its own particular outline. Sometimes when we read them we're insensitive to that, but it's very helpful to figure out the outline if you can. The unique pattern of this psalm is to repeat first the lament and then the appeal for help found in verses 1 through 4. The theme is set in these first four verses. Here's a man in trouble, he's explaining his trouble, and he's calling to God to help him.

Those two ideas are repeated throughout the psalm. We have a first renewal of the lament in verses 6 through 12. Then we have a first renewal of the plea for help in verses 13 through 18. We have a second renewal of the lament in verses 19 through 21. We have a second renewal of the plea for help in verses 23 to 28. Then that is all followed by a one-verse interjection that's similar to verse 5—you have it in verse 29.

Then you have a conclusion at the end which parallels the introduction. We're going to go through it again because we're going to look at the first repetition of the lament and the appeal here in this study. Let's just look at verses 6 through 12. Sometimes you do get these things repeated in the psalms, but when you get a repetition it's not merely a repetition. It always goes a little bit beyond what was said before.

At the beginning he was uttering his lament that he's suffering and it's not his fault. But in these verses, verses 6 through 12, he's explaining why he's being unjustly attacked. They're attacking him for some reason. Here's the reason. It is verse 7, "for your sake." And verse 8, "because zeal for your house consumes me." If you do comparative studies, you'll find that last phrase is parallel to Jeremiah 15:15 where the prophet said that he suffered reproach for God's sake.

Even more to the point, it reminds us of Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount when He was talking about His own people suffering for righteousness' sake. He said, "Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And then He said, "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me."

The key words there are "because of righteousness" and "because of me." That's exactly what David is saying. The reason he's being persecuted is just because he takes his stand with God. He's standing for righteousness, and this is a very unrighteous world. When we think in terms of being persecuted, we ought to bear in mind that the only suffering that's worth anything in this spiritual battle is that which is for righteousness' sake.

I know a lot of Christians that are persecuted and they deserve it. If I were in the place of their neighbor, I'd persecute them myself. They're obnoxious. I think of a book that Joe Bayly wrote called The Gospel Blimp. A little facetious story about this group of Christians that get the idea that they want to evangelize the town. They raise money and think what we'll do is buy a blimp and we'll paint slogans on it like "Jesus Saves."

Then we'll fly that blimp around the city. And so they do. Bayly describes how the neighbors take that pretty good-humoredly. They don't really like that overhead, but it's not really causing much problem and nothing happens. Nobody is really evangelized. The Christians who bought the blimp have a lot of investment in this project and decide they really should use it to drop leaflets or tracts that tell them the gospel.

So for a period of time, this thing is flying over, dropping garbage into everybody's backyard. The people still take that pretty well until the Christians decide they might as well equip it with sound. They begin to deliver gospel messages from the air by sound at a decibel level that makes it impossible for anybody to escape the gospel witness. At that point, the persecution begins.

They say they have to expect persecution for righteousness' sake. What Bayly says, of course, is that they're not being persecuted for righteousness' sake at all; they're being persecuted because they're a nuisance, because they're disturbing the public peace. They deserve the persecution. Now, that is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the kind of persecution that comes to the godly because they stand for righteousness.

Two lines in this section are explicitly identified with Jesus in the New Testament. The first is the first half of verse 9: "Zeal for your house consumes me." You find that in John 2:17. John tells us that the disciples remembered this verse and applied it to Jesus on that occasion when He cleansed the temple. Zeal for your house consumes me; that's exactly what's happening with Jesus Christ.

The second section of this that is quoted in the New Testament is the second half of verse 9: "The insults of those who insult you fall on me." Paul applies this to Jesus in Romans 15:3. Paul's point there is that Jesus became an example for us in His behavior, the way He handled the insults that were dumped upon Him because He stood for righteousness Himself.

You and I ought to behave like Jesus Christ. And if we suffer as Jesus Christ did, then especially we should behave like Jesus Christ. With that in mind, you want to go back to this first portion of the psalm and look at it in terms of the experience of Jesus Christ. We want to say: what do we learn from these verses about the kind of things that Jesus must have endured for the sake of the gospel?

Go back to the first section, verse 4 particularly, and you find this reference to enemies. The psalmist had a lot of enemies, and Jesus did too. Since this is referred to Jesus, there can't be any doubt about this application. When you read the Gospels, you can understand exactly what happened. He had all kinds of enemies, above all those who were in positions of power and authority—those who had been looked up to before Jesus Christ came.

Before Jesus Christ came, these leaders of the people were rather highly regarded. After all, they were the ministers, the judges, the politicians, and everybody courted them. Along comes Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ really is righteous. When they looked at Jesus on the one hand and then they looked at these men to whom they had looked with such approbation before, there was an enormous difference.

These men now began to look like sinners and they didn't like it. They became His enemies and they hated Him. Without cause in Him. The cause was in themselves that they were sinners, but that was the reason; they hated Him for righteousness' sake. Verse 8 talks about His brothers. "I'm a stranger to my brothers." Well, that probably applies to David as the author, but it also applies to Jesus Christ.

We know He had brothers and sisters. There were at least six in the family. After Jesus was born of Mary, she conceived by the miracle of the work of the Holy Spirit, but after that, they had a normal marriage and there were a lot of children. We have the names of four sons, at least two daughters. So you have this great big family, seven counting Jesus.

In a family, even when people are on their good behavior, you get a lot of friction. If you've got somebody in the family that's trying to be good, it creates even more friction. It's hard to live with near-perfection. Imagine trying to live with utter perfection, which was the case with Jesus Christ. There was certainly a lot of tension in that household. It makes you admire Mary a lot more than you did before. Somehow she held it all together.

As we read the Gospels, we begin to learn something about His brothers. They thought as very secular men. They knew that Jesus was special and they were aware that He had miraculous powers, and they said to Him on one occasion, "No sense standing here in the country doing your miracles. What you need to do is go up to Jerusalem and do it and get some attention."

They probably thought that if He captured attention and became somebody important, they'd come along; they'd be the brothers and they'd get positions of power too. They were thinking like the advertising agency and they were looking for political favors. Jesus had to turn that down. His brothers didn't understand Him. He endured a lot of hostility from them.

Do you have any trouble in your family? Do you have brothers, sisters, father, mother, cousins, whatever it may be that really don't think very much of you because you're a Christian? Jesus Christ went through the same thing. Verse 11 talks about Jesus being a byword to the people—that is, a proverb. We don't know what the particular proverb was, but we can easily imagine it.

People began to invent slang phrases for dealing with people they don't like. A generation or so ago when students were on campus and they went to a Bible study, people called them Holy Joes. Those are old-fashioned today, but today we speak about the radical right or religious nuts. That's sort of a proverb. That's what they did with Jesus; they had their slang words for Him. He suffered that.

We're told in verse 12 that the rulers spoke against Him, those that sit in the gate. That's a phrase that you find throughout the Old Testament of those who were the elders of the people, the leaders. They sat in the gate, and when issues had to be decided, they brought it to the elders. A person who sat in the gate was highly regarded, but it was these people who were speaking against Jesus because He was a threat to them.

Finally, in verse 12, there's even a reference to the drunkards. "I was the song of the drunkards." Solomon reminds us in the Proverbs that fools make a mock of sin, but here are fools making a mock of righteousness, even Jesus Christ. In His lifetime, Jesus endured all kinds of insults for our sake. On one occasion when Jesus showed that in their attempts to kill Him, they were just doing what their fathers had done to the prophets, they got angry.

They accused Him of being illegitimate. They must have heard rumors of the fact that He was born relatively early in the relationship between Mary and Joseph, and so they're suggesting He must have been conceived out of wedlock. They say to Him, "At least we're not illegitimate children." Jesus, of course, knew His true birth. He took the insult calmly, but He reminded them of their ancestry.

He said, "You're the sons of your father who is the devil." The devil's a murderer from the beginning and you're going about trying to kill me. You see how they were insulting Him. When He cast out demons, they said He does it by the power of the devil. When He was hanging on the cross, they mocked Him with His claims. They said, "Here's a man who said He's the Son of God. Come on down from the cross if you think you're really the Son of God, then we'll believe on you."

Even in His acute suffering, dying there in agony upon the cross, they were making fun of Him. If there was ever an example of one who was willing to bear the worst scorn, hostility, persecution, and suffering the world could inflict for the sake of righteousness and for our salvation, it was Jesus Christ. He becomes an example to us of just that.

The next section, verses 13 through 18, are a renewal of the psalmist's plea for help. A lot of the themes that you find in the first four verses reoccur here. He refers again to the mire and the danger of sinking. He talks about deep waters and the flood. There's one new image there; it's the image of a pit, and its mouth is about to close over the psalmist.

It's referring to a cistern often because the cisterns were deep. They had a stone they'd put over the top to kind of protect it. So if you have an image here of a man in a pit and it's about to close its mouth over him, that's just an image of being buried alive. He says that's what he's going through. There's a new idea in this stanza. It talks about David as God's servant, and therefore of Jesus as well.

It makes us think of the servant psalms in Isaiah. All of that points to Jesus as the servant of God. He said, "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many." So what you have here is not something that is directly quoted in the New Testament about Jesus Christ, but the theme certainly finds its fulfillment in Him.

This is the point at which we want to stop. In all of this, Jesus is to be an example for us. We have been told by Jesus that if we seek to please God, we will be hated by the world because we're not of the world, but we're to bear suffering for His sake, in order that by our conduct people might be won to the Savior. The only point I end with is this: although that is a great privilege and a challenge, it's something that you and I in ourselves cannot do.

It's not in us naturally to turn the cheek, to return good for evil, to endure suffering patiently. What is in our hearts is the natural human instinct to fight back. David isn't fighting back, and the reason David isn't fighting back is that he is responding in the spirit of the Master who would claim him. If you and I are going to live for Jesus Christ, we're going to have to be close to Jesus Christ.

We're going to have to live His life in His spirit and do it day by day, because it's in situations just like this that He's glorified and people come to see His grace and trust Him for salvation. Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for what we have been able to study here in the first half of this great Messianic psalm. There are so many things here that apply to us.

We see in the life of David things that are reflected in our own experience, but we also see Jesus Christ enduring similar suffering for the sake of our salvation. In our suffering, the way we endure it, we're able by your grace to point people to Jesus who showed us how to go through such times. We pray that you give us grace to do that, and so take whatever happens to us this week or next week, any time where the world would retaliate with hatred. Give us grace to take that situation, turn it over to you, and live in a way that actually brings glory to your name. For we pray in the name of our Savior, even Jesus. Amen.

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