The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Today on The Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we'll see that David's confidence is in God, who is his light and salvation. David knows God will protect and deliver him from his enemies. Although most of us aren't engaged in a literal battle, Psalm 27 offers much to learn about resting in God's promises and holding on to his unchanging, unfailing ways.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Our feelings can change from day to day, even from moment to moment, but God is a firm foundation and he never changes. We know we can put our trust in God because he is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Let's listen together as David turns to God for help, knowing that his unchanging God will answer. If you have your Bible handy, turn to Psalm 27.

Dr. James Boice: One of the things I try to do when I'm studying the Psalms is to categorize them. Scholars do that as well. I don't necessarily try to do it in scholarly terms, though sometimes I do, but I do try to get a handle on what the central tone or the central thrust of the psalm is. That gives you a way of fitting the different parts together and making sense of it as you study it. There's a great difficulty when we try to do that with the 27th Psalm.

We ask whether it's a psalm of confidence, a psalm that is written against the dark background of David's encircling enemies but expressing a quiet trust in God, or whether it is essentially a lament, a fervent cry for help by one who is in danger of being overrun by these same implacable foes. It's easy to understand why you have that problem. The first half of it breathes confidence in verses one through six.

It is a very encouraging thing to read. It makes it a very popular psalm; people have memorized portions of it. But then we come to the second half, beginning with verse seven, and here there's quite a different tone. Here David really seems to be crying out in the midst of great danger. He prays for God not to reject him or forsake him, but to be with him and preserve him. And we say, how do you hold those two parts together?

Anybody who is at all familiar with scholarship knows what the scholars do with that. You don't even have to have read the commentaries. They say, well, what you have here are two separate psalms that are rather awkwardly and ignorantly put together. It's wonderful how ignorant the biblical writers seem to be in the minds of many scholars, who I'm afraid only show how ignorant they are in the process. They point out the difference in tone; that's obvious. Everybody can see that.

They point out a change in the way it's written. The verbs in the first part are in the first or the third person, and then they are in the second person in the second part. But of course, that corresponds with the tone. It doesn't mean anything. If you're going to pray, you pray in the second person, but nevertheless, they say, oh, look at the big differences. I think what they overlook are the things that tie it together.

When you begin to analyze it all a little bit, you see how sophisticated some of this verse really is. For one thing, the themes that appear in part one appear again in part two. The enemies that are mentioned in part two, which he's praying about, appear as the background of part one. And David in part one asks that he might dwell in the house of the Lord to gaze upon the Lord and see his face, and that appears again in the second part.

So the theme is there throughout. I notice something else, too. I notice that the two main themes of part one—that is, confidence in God and a desire to see his face—occur again in part two but in inverse order. If you know anything about the Psalms, you know that that is a common technique. It's called chiasm, based on the Greek letter which we would write down as an X, so you get a reversal as you move through the psalm: 1-2 and then you get 2-1 in the second half, or ABBA.

And that's what you find here. What that suggests, I think perfectly evident to anybody who studies it carefully, is not only that the psalm is by the same writer but also that it was written at the same time and very carefully put together. So you look at it and you say, now, how are we to understand it? What do we do about these two moods: this mood of confidence and then this mood of petition? How can that be? How can you have the same kind of psalm talking about these two different moods?

Well, all you have to do is look into your own experience a little bit and ask yourself the question: Have I ever gone through that pattern? And if you know anything about yourself or you've lived any time at all with the Lord, you'll find yourself saying, yes, of course I have. Sometimes I feel absolutely confident in God, and then it would seem almost in the same breath I can find myself in danger and I'm calling out almost in despair, "God save me, I'm in trouble!"

Are those two incompatible? No, not at all. They're simply two expressions of what it means for us to be weak and sinful human beings, depending upon God and learning to depend on him more and more day by day. David was like that, and we are like it as well. You can think of biblical examples of that. I think of the example of Job. Job is a man who had enormous faith in God when everything was taken from him.

He said with great faith in God, "Naked came I into the world, naked will I go from it. Blessed be the name of the Lord." What a magnificent statement for a man who has lost all of his possessions and all of his family. And yet when his health was gone, we find him sitting there in the ash heap in utter misery, pondering and wondering why it is that this sort of thing has come upon him. You see faith in God? Yes, he had that. He had it the whole way through, but at the same time he was puzzling over his condition.

Or again, I think of Elijah. Elijah there on Mount Carmel, demonstrating enormous faith in God, calling on God to send down fire from heaven and consume the sacrifice. For a few hours later he's off there in the desert praying that he might die, thoroughly exhausted emotionally as well as spiritually by the ordeal. Or perhaps very much to the point, I think of Peter. Peter in the boat, Jesus walking on the water.

He says to Jesus in faith, "Lord, if it's really you, bid me come to you on the water." And Peter gets out of that boat and starts walking toward Jesus across the Sea of Galilee. And then he looks at the waves and he gets his eyes off Jesus and he begins to sink. And in the next breath, he's saying, "Lord, help me, I'm sinking!" Now that's exactly what you have in the psalm.

David starts off, "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?" And then you find him saying, "Don't desert me, don't turn me over to the desire of my foes." Now we can learn from that. How do we outline it? Well, I think the best outline that I've seen is the one that's provided for us by the paragraph or stanza division in the New International Version.

I said that there are two parts to the psalm, but actually as I look at it, there are four. I want to tell you how I handle it so you can have that in mind as we go through it. And if you're making notes, you might want to make them under these categories. Verses one through three are a stanza, and I would call that the soul's confidence. It's what I've been talking about. David expresses his confidence in God in very moving language.

Then secondly, in verses four through six, we have him expressing his desire to dwell in the house of God so that he can gaze upon the beauty of the Lord. I'd call that the soul's desire, something different from what he's said in verses one through three. And then in verses seven through 12, the soul's petition. This is where he cries out to God to save him and help him.

Finally, in the last two verses, which come back in part to where he began, you have something which is like a prescription for the days ahead, and I would call that the soul's prescription. So there's a four-fold outline: the soul's confidence, the soul's desire, the soul's petition, and the soul's prescription. Now let's take them one at a time. First of all, we look at these verses that have to do with David's confidence.

And we see that there are two parts to that. First of all, his confidence is in God—that is, who God is—and then secondly, his confidence is in what God has done—that is, his experience of the God who has revealed himself in the ways that he has spoken about in the first verse. It's good to see that because one of the reasons many of us lack confidence is that we look for it in the wrong place.

Many people look for confidence in themselves. They say, well, I ought to be able to be strong enough to stand up against things. And that's all right as long as the opposition isn't overwhelming. But if the opposition gets greater than we are, and often it is, certainly in the world, well then we don't have any basis for confidence. As soon as we're shaken, as we often are, we find the ground on which we're standing to be most insecure.

Or some of us look for confidence in our feelings. We say, if I just feel good about it, well then it must be all right. But you see, that's a very insubstantial foundation as well. David knew better than that. He knew that to himself he was weak, he knew that feelings come and go, but he knew that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God is unchangeable and God is his stronghold.

Now he uses three images in talking about God. First of all, God is his light, secondly God is his salvation, and third, God is the stronghold of his life. There are many other things he could say about God, but these are significant, and especially over against the background of his enemies. Let me explain. This matter of light is interesting. We are accustomed to thinking of God in terms of light.

If most of us are asked to describe God, which of course we can't do, the thing that occurs most of all to our minds is light. We say, well, God is light because we read in the Bible he dwells in unapproachable light. That's not the same thing as saying he's light, but that's the way we begin to think about it. It comes somewhat as a surprise to us since we think that way to know that this is the only verse in the Old Testament in which the name "light" is specifically applied to God.

Now God is associated with light in other places. For example, Job speaks of heaven as being the abode of light, or Psalm 104 says that God wraps himself in light as with a garment. Or there are verses that say the Lord turns my darkness into light because God is obviously the source of light. Or Psalm 36:9 says, "In your light we see light." However, this psalm and this verse is the only place in the Old Testament in which God specifically is said to be light.

You want a parallel to that? You have to go to the New Testament to find it. And in the New Testament, it's entirely in the writings of John. The Gospel of John takes that idea and applies it to Jesus Christ. It calls him the light who came into the world and the darkness didn't overcome it. And then in 1 John, the very beginning of the letter, John applies it to God the Father, saying God is light and in him is no darkness at all.

Now what does that mean, that term "light"? Well, in John's Gospel, it probably has to do with understanding because it is in Jesus Christ that we come to know God. So the light of God is seen in Jesus Christ. As we come to know him, we come to understand what God is like. So understanding is what's in view there. When you turn to 1 John and you read "God is light and in him is no darkness at all," and you put it against the background of the other things that are said in the chapter, that's speaking of purity or holiness because the background in the chapter is sin.

You ask the question, what does it mean here? Well, it could mean a number of things. When David says "My Lord is light," he could be thinking of illumination. God gives him understanding. He could be thinking of purity or holiness or joy or life or hope or I suppose many other things. But probably, because what he writes about in the next verse is the advance of evil men and the danger he's under, probably the light that he's thinking of is the light of some kind of deliverance from his foes.

In other words, God is going to see him through the present evil darkness. Peter Craigie is one of the good commentators on the Psalms, and that's the way he sees it. I think he's right. He says the psalmist is affirming that even in the darkness of the terrible threat of war, he has no fear, for God is the light that can dispel such darkness. And that's probably true.

Well, what does salvation mean? Salvation means deliverance. We usually think of it in terms of a deliverance from sin, but again, in this passage, it probably has to do with the deliverance from the danger in which he finds himself: the attack of evil men, his enemies, the armies round about. What does stronghold mean? Well, that is very much a military term.

A stronghold is a fortress, a refuge. It's where a man under attack will go with his armies in order to withstand an invasion. Jerusalem itself when it was walled was such a fortress. And so probably this is what he has in mind. Proverbs 18:10 has that same idea when it says "The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous run into it and they are safe."

Now that's what David is thinking about. But you know, even though that is probably the thrust of the psalm, and it's right that it should be because that's the particular danger he faced—and if he's speaking about confidence in God, it has to be in those terms—even though that's probably what it means here, those three terms do suggest and rightly suggest other things to us.

Because we're not surrounded by enemies, and yet God is still our light and our salvation and our stronghold, and we think spiritually and rightly so. When we say God is our light, what we mean is that we don't understand spiritual things at all and God gives us spiritual understanding. It's what his Holy Spirit does and what he's done through the scriptures. So we come to this book, and apart from the Holy Spirit we can't understand it.

But as we pray and ask God for illumination, the Holy Spirit, the light of God, shines into our hearts to give us understanding. So God becomes our light. He exposes our sin by doing so and draws us to Christ. When we talk about salvation, we do speak spiritually. We're not thinking here of armies, but we're saying that we have a great enemy in Satan and our sin is something that's hard to be overcome and Jesus Christ has done that for us.

He has delivered us; he is our Savior. And when we talk about a stronghold, well, we mean in all of the problems of life. God is someone we can go to and we can find him to be absolutely reliable and to protect us against our foes. John Stott in his commentary looks at it that way. He says the Lord is my light to guide me, my salvation to deliver me, and the stronghold of my life in whom I take refuge.

Now it's not only the character of God that David refers to here as the basis of his confidence, but it is also what God has done in the past. You see, when he says evil men advance against me to devour my flesh and when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall. The reason he's saying that is because God had done that in delivering him in past days.

He'd had some experience of God's deliverance. That would go way back in David's life. He said when he came to Saul in those early days, still a boy, and was faced with that great challenge of Goliath, he said, "Well, I was out with the sheep and they were attacked by a lion and then God gave me strength and I attacked the lion and I saved the sheep."

God was my stronghold, you see, and he's going to give me victory over Goliath as well. And he did have victory over Goliath, and he had many, many victories in those early days. Now you see, later on in life, when he has even more responsibility and the dangers are greater because his position is more exalted, he looks back to those days and he says God was faithful then, God is unchanging, God will be faithful now.

We have to learn to do that. If we don't have confidence, it's because we haven't learned to do that. We haven't learned to focus on the character of God and we haven't sufficiently appreciated the deliverance that he's given in the past. If nothing else, you look back to the deliverance from sin: how God brought you out of darkness into light and reason that if he could do that, he can do anything and will because he's faithful to his promise.

So there you have the soul's confidence. Now in the second stanza, we have the soul's desire, and as David expresses it here, it is to do one thing. The way he puts it: "One thing I ask of the Lord, and this is it: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple."

Now when he talks about dwelling in the house of the Lord, that sounds an awful lot like Psalm 23. You know how Psalm 23 ends: "and dwell in the house of the Lord forever." In Psalm 23, the house of the Lord is heaven; undoubtedly that's what it's saying there. That is not the case here. When David talks about dwelling in the house of the Lord here, he's not talking about dwelling with God forever in heaven.

It's during the days of his earthly life. He wants to be in the actual temple that was there in Jerusalem. And he emphasizes it, you see. The words for "temple" occur there in a variety of ways throughout the stanza. It's what ties it together. Verse four: "the house of the Lord." The second part of that verse: "in his temple." Verse five: "in his dwelling." And then two times over, once in that verse and once in verse six, that is "tabernacle."

You see, he's ringing the changes on the Hebrew vocabulary that has to do with the house of God. Now I want to stop at that point and say, why does David have this single-minded obsession with the house of God, especially when we remember that the great temple of Solomon wasn't even built yet? Where the ark resided during these days, assuming this is fairly late on in David's reign, was a tent that he had constructed for it in Jerusalem.

This is where the ark was kept while they were waiting for Solomon and eventually for the temple to be built because God had given him a revelation that that would happen. Here he's just talking about a tent and the ark and the ministry that's connected with that. And yet nevertheless, you see, he says that's the one thing I desire, that I might dwell in the house of the Lord and dwell there all the days of my life.

Now it is true, of course, that it is not the building itself that he particularly desires; it's the presence of God, it's to gaze upon God in all his attributes. And yet, you see, he does say that it's at the temple. That's very significant. You have to think about that. Some commentators are so cautious at that point that they almost fall over each other to explain that David really didn't have in mind the temple at all.

That isn't the way he was thinking. What he was thinking of was worshiping God in spirit, and you can worship God anywhere at all. And they remind us that Jesus said the day is coming when you'll neither worship here in Samaria or in Jerusalem, but the true worshipers will worship my Father in spirit and in truth. And of course, all of that is absolutely true.

And yet, you see, he says this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. I want to see his beauty and seek him in the temple, and he's going to keep me safe in his dwelling, and he's going to shelter me in his tabernacle, and it's at his tabernacle that I will sacrifice with shouts of joy. Now what do you make of that?

Well, I find in a point like this that someone like C.S. Lewis, who has a great appreciation for literary images and moods because of his great study of literature—he was a genius at that—is probably more helpful than the theologians. You know, the theologians are helpful at times, so when they point out that we worship God in spirit and in truth and not in a building today, fine, all of that is true. I love theologians. But at this point, I think Lewis is more helpful.

You see, he makes a distinction between the way the ancients thought and the way we think, and it's worth reading if you have his book *Reflections on the Psalms*. The chapter is really a brilliant one. He says, you see, in our day we dissociate the spiritual from the physical. And we say, well, you know, there are the physical objects, but what really matters is God who stands behind them and is apart from them and all of that.

And he said, of course we think that way; we can't go back. But he said the ancients weren't like that. All of the ancients, the Greeks perhaps being an exception, but even not much in the case of the Greeks, more or less linked the spiritual with the physical. So much so that without any sense of a strain in their experience, they could almost express their longing for God in physical terms.

And here's the way Lewis says it. Their longing to go up to Jerusalem and appear before the presence of God is like a physical thirst—the 42nd Psalm speaks of that. From Jerusalem, the presence of God flashes out in perfect beauty—the 50th Psalm speaks of that. Lacking that encounter with him, their souls are parched like a waterless countryside. They crave to be satisfied with the pleasures of his house. Only there can they be at ease like a bird in a nest—Psalm 84. One day of those places is better than a lifetime spent elsewhere—Psalm 10.

Well, we live in a different time, of course, and we are quite different people, and we can't duplicate the kind of virtual physical experience of the presence of God in his temple that the people had. But I think there is some area in which we do have an experience of that. Let me put it like this. Isn't there something of the presence of God to be experienced in a church where we traditionally worship that is not to be experienced in exactly the same way somewhere else?

I don't find many people saying that today because that kind of runs against the spirit of the way we think and it sounds like we glorify a building, and of course I'm not doing that at all. But if you think about it, I just ask you to search your experience, not necessarily your experience of worshiping here, but where you grew up, wherever it may be.

Wasn't there something or isn't there something about the actual physical place in which you worship and the things you see and touch that have something to do with an experience of the presence of God? There's something to be said for the physical singing of the hymns along with other people; that doesn't happen when you're by yourself. There's something for sitting in the pews, even when they're hard, but they're the same ones. You tend to sit in the same place, you see. There's something significant about that kind of behavior.

Looking to the pulpit, looking at the Bible that is being taught from, and of course tasting of the sacrament, the Lord's Supper, which Jesus himself gave us, recognizing that it's as we handle the bread and feed upon it and taste the wine that we experience something that we don't in any other way. I would say the very atmosphere of the place, all those things you see, become almost a sacrament as God uses them to communicate something of his presence with us.

Now I recognize that there's a delicate balance here. We are not Jews worshiping at the temple, but at the same time, I think we don't want to underestimate the actual value of worshiping in a place of worship with God's people. I am surprised to find, and yet probably should not be, that the Puritans didn't have this kind of difficulty.

The Puritans quite naturally thought of places of worship as being where God is particularly revealed. Richard Sibbes, one of the great Puritans, said, "Particular visible churches under visible pastors now are God's tabernacle." Now if that's true, even in some sense, we should obviously obey what the Bible says when it says don't forsake the worship of God by joining together. And so that's what we want to do.

So we have there the soul's confidence and we have the soul's desire, and I'm suggesting that that has some real relevance to us today. Now in verses seven through 12, we have what I'm calling the soul's prayer. There is a change here and this is where it occurs, from those verbs that are speaking in the third person of God to the second person in which David is calling out to him.

The lines shorten somewhat in this half. These are fierce petitions. The mood changes from confidence to earnest entreaty. You can hear it as we read: "Hear my voice when I call, O Lord; be merciful to me and answer me. My heart says of you, 'Seek his face!' Your face, Lord, I will seek. Do not hide your face from me, do not turn your servant away in anger; you have been my helper. Do not reject me or forsake me, O God my Savior."

In this half of the psalm, the verse that probably jumps out in most people's minds is verse 10, and for some people, that would be the key verse in the entire psalm: "Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me." One of my friends, a psychiatrist, tells me that she often uses that verse in her own counseling because in her experience as she works with people, she finds so many of her patients who have had a bad family experience and who feel rejected by their parents somewhere in the past.

They've looked for something in their parents and haven't found it. In some cases, particularly so today and probably increasingly so, instead of finding what we need in our parents, people are finding that they actually experience the opposite; they've been abused. She says that she uses this psalm to teach her patients that God does not abandon us like an earthly sinful parent or our friends.

If we take that verse as the key to what we find in this passage, what we find David saying is that God is like a good father or a good mother to him. In other words, everything that you would expect to find from a parent he finds in God. Let me put the question that way: what is it that we look to receive from a parent? Well, we look to be accepted or received by a parent, not rejected.

We look to our parents to hear us, especially when we're children, listen to us and respond as we try to communicate our thoughts. We look to a parent for teaching—sometimes reluctantly, but reluctantly or not, we expect to get teaching from our parents—and we look to a parent for protection. Now if you look at these verses, you'll find that that's exactly what David is talking about. Each one of those things I've mentioned we find here in verses seven through 12.

The most important is the matter of acceptance: "Do not hide your face from me, do not turn your servant away in anger. You have been my helper. Do not reject me or forsake me, O God my Savior." You see, human beings are fallible, but the Lord is not. Human beings are not reliable, but God is. And so we can know that he's always going to accept us.

Isn't that good? Isn't that good to know? You see, left to ourselves and on the basis of our own thinking, we would see it the other way around. We would say, well, our parents are like us and we're their flesh and blood, and if we have weaknesses, they have weaknesses. Some of our weaknesses we've inherited from them. If anybody ought to understand us and accept us, it's our parents.

But God, God is the holy God, he is the holy Other. We're not like him. He is holy, we are sinful. He is wise, we are foolish. We would say the parent should accept us but God should not. And actually, it's the other way around. Parents let us down like all other human beings, but God never does because of who God is and what he's done. You see, God has redeemed us in Jesus Christ. That has become the foundation of our acceptance, and it's a foundation that God himself laid down.

So when we come to him, we come to him as a God who has already expressed the basis and has made us one with Jesus Christ and has invited us into his presence, removing the veil that kept us from it. And so we come confidently, knowing that we can come. Spurgeon said on one occasion, "Our relations will be the last to desert us, but even if the milk of human kindness should dry up even from their breast, there is a Father who never forgets."

And he says in another place, "Some of the greatest saints have been cast out by their families." Now it may be that that has been your experience. Many have had good families, and if you have, you're thankful for it. But there are many who have not, and especially in our day, there are people who have not had that great privilege.

If that's the case, you can't change that; that's an experience of life. You can't recreate the past, but you can turn to God, who you will find to be everything your parents were not. And if you say to yourself, well, yes, but I was never accepted and that's why I have the problems I have, know that God accepts you in Jesus Christ and he will work in you to overcome whatever those problems may be. It's a great thing, you see. You can say, "Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me." And indeed, if you've come to him through faith in Jesus Christ, he already has.

Well, secondly, we want to be heard. And David is talking about that at the beginning: "Hear my voice when I call, O Lord; be merciful to me and answer me." And we know that God does, because at the end he expresses his confidence once again. It's interesting the way a child will come to a parent and want to be heard. You think back to your past and you realize that's one of the things you wanted when you were growing up: somebody to listen to you.

One of the sad things is that so many parents don't listen. But where a parent will do that, a child has a gift that is just greater than many, many other things. My father was a doctor, and as many doctors are, he was very busy. I didn't have many opportunities to talk with him in a significant way as I was growing up, but my mother was in the home and I had many opportunities to talk to her.

One of the great memories of my childhood is sitting with my mother, working through things, and she trying very hard to explain things to help me in my own understanding. That's a great gift, you see. But I recognize that not everybody has that, and parents do fail their children at that point, and that may be your experience.

But if it is, you see, you have a God who stands ready to hear, who invites you to come, who tells you to pour out your request before him, and who promises an answer even before you pray. Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened unto you, is what Jesus taught. And Jesus spoke on behalf of the Father.

How about guidance? We need that too, don't we? Especially as children, we don't know the way to go. Sometimes we think we do and then we get into all kinds of trouble. But we do need guidance and a good parent provides it. David says that's what God does as well. You see verse 11: "Teach me your way, Lord; lead me in a straight path because of my oppressors."

Isn't it interesting that he's talking about teaching so often? If you've been here in previous Sundays as we've talked about this, you'll have remembered that we have seen it before. In Psalm 25, he's praying for teaching: "Teach me your paths, guide me in your truth, teach me." And later in the same psalm, he says, "Yes, that's what God is going to do." And when we get to Psalm 26, he says, "Yes, and God has done it."

But you see, now you get to Psalm 27 and he's asking for it again. It's because we always need to learn, and in this school of faith we're always children. And God always remains our Father. Are you puzzled about the way you should go? Do you face difficulties in your life? And you say, I really don't know which way to turn. Here I've got a problem at work, I don't know what to do about it. And I have a problem in my relationships and I don't know what to do about it.

Well, that's right, you and I aren't up to those things. But you ask God; God will lead you in the way that you should go. He delights to do it, to lead you in that way. Trust not in your own understanding, it says in Proverbs, but lean on God and he will make your paths straight. Well, David is saying the same thing here: "Lead me in a straight path."

And then finally, we need protection. And of course that brings us back to the theme we've been seeing all along. Here you have the enemies in the background in parts one and two; they emerge again here in part three. And he says, "I really do need protection from my enemies. That's why I'm praying, protect me." What do you think of a father who wouldn't protect his child when his child is in danger?

You'd say, well, that's not a very good father. But God is a good father, and if we expect protection from an earthly father or an earthly mother, we certainly are going to find that in God. You see, that brings us to where we come at the very end, the thing I call the soul's prescription. It's two verses, verses 13 and 14. Verse 13 actually gets back to that point of confidence with which it began.

"I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." He means not in the land of the hereafter—he's not talking about eternal life there—it's the land of the living, that is those who are physically alive. "I'm going to see the goodness of God right here" is what he's saying. And so you see, having gotten everything straight in his life, having reminded himself of who God is and what God has done, and having expressed his desire, which is to know God more fully and gaze upon the beauty of his perfection, and then having poured out his request before him, he comes back and says, "Yes, and I'm still confident."

Why? Because I've done those things, you see. If I hadn't gone into the house of the Lord and I hadn't sought him and I hadn't prayed and I hadn't laid my request before him, well, I wouldn't be confident; I'd be all shaken up. But I've done it, and I am confident. And he's saying, is he not, that I recommend the same thing to you. If you find yourself shaken, well, here's a prescription for it.

And yet there's one thing more. You come to the very end and what David says in verse 14 is this: "Wait for the Lord." And then in case we miss it, he repeats it again: "Be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord." You see, that's why I call it a prescription. It is true that God is going to deliver us from enemies and he's going to provide teaching and he's going to receive us and he's going to answer, but it is also true that he doesn't always do that right away.

You say to yourself, well, why doesn't he do it right away? I don't have the answer; I don't know the mind of God. I don't know why he doesn't do it right away, but I do know that God's timings are not our timings and he has purposes in his delays. We see examples of that in scripture, and if he's delaying to answer you in some particular way, he has a purpose in that also.

Now you say, well, what should I do? God's not answering. Should I give up? Oh no, no, that's not the idea at all. What David said is you need to learn to wait for him: wait on the Lord. You see, that's reasonable. If some wealthy person had promised to give you a very valuable gift, you'd wait for it, I would think. If you were in danger and there were some powerful person, a king perhaps, that had said he was coming to your aid, you'd wait for him to come.

Well, it's the same way with God. God is an equally generous benefactor, in fact more so, and he's an equally powerful king, in fact more so, and he can be counted upon to give and he can be counted upon to come, indeed he can be counted upon for everything, everything at all. It's a privilege as well as a duty to wait on him, and yet how little true waiting most of us really do.

Let's pray. Our Father, when we study these psalms, we realize again and again that we're getting to depths of the experience of the soul with God which again and again go beyond our own experience. And yet the problems that lie behind the experience are our problems because human experience is all the same from generation to generation.

We have doubts and questions and enemies and failings and all of that, and it was true for David and for all the other saints and for us as well. And so we need to learn. And we would pray that you would teach us from what David learned, just as in the first place you taught him. Help us to see you as a parent who can be trusted to be absolutely reliable, to answer, to teach, to defend.

Give us grace to seek your face so we don't merely find ourselves saying, "Oh yes, God must be like that," but then turn away and mind our own business, forgetting that you're there. Help us to see the value of joining together with others in fellowship in those churches where you're worshiped, and so profit from that. And help us also to learn what it means to wait. Perhaps the most difficult lesson of all.

David said, "I will yet see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." And we will also. We thank you for it. In Jesus' name. Amen.

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