The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Israel is harassed and encircled. Enemies threaten on every side and yet the Lord is silent. Defeat appears imminent and the psalmist cries out to the Lord to do something about it.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. In the midst of Israel's looming defeat, Asaph calls on the Lord for judgment. But his desire for revenge is not for his own satisfaction. Let's join Dr. Boice as he examines Psalm 83 and uncovers the real motive behind Asaph's cry: that men will turn to the one true God and seek His name.

Dr. James Boice: Edmund Burke was an Irishman who served in the English House of Commons from 1766 to 1794. He was one of the most brilliant men of his day and he was well known for his keen mind and also for his very effective writing style. One of the things he wrote that he’s best known for is his reflections on the revolution in France, of which he was critical at a time when many in England were praising what was going on on the continent. He’s also known for another great essay in defense of American liberties called *On Conciliation with America*.

It's an interesting thing about Burke that the sentence that he is best known for having composed is something that doesn't appear in his writings. And yet he's credited with it by a number of different people, so undoubtedly it's genuine. What Burke said is this: "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Remember that?

Well, it's true, of course. We have many examples of it in history. One example that immediately comes to mind is the way the Western powers allowed Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler to rearm. Winston Churchill has recorded that well in the first volume of his history of the war called *The Gathering Storm*. We see something like that and we say, yeah, that really is reprehensible. We deplore when good men do nothing and allow evil to triumph.

But here's an even greater problem: how about when God does nothing? Certainly a lot of evil in the world. There are times when evil seems to go on from strength to strength and triumph, many times when it's directed against the people of God and when the people of God suffer from it. And when they cry out to God for deliverance and they say, God, help, don't remain silent, do something, and God does nothing.

It's a real problem, as I say, and that's the problem that this psalm is dealing with, Psalm 83. You see, it begins by saying to God, "O God, do not keep silent. Be not quiet, O God, be not still" when we are surrounded by our enemies.

Now, this is the last psalm of Asaph. Remember, we've been talking about his psalms for a time. He's a writer who in most of these psalms seems to be troubled by the wicked and he regularly calls on God to do something about it. Now, the psalms are not all the same, of course. Some of them are intensely personal. You can remember back over some of these psalms. You may recall that Psalm 50 is a very personal psalm. Others are wider in scope. They talk about the problem of evil in the world generally. And this psalm is in that latter category, though it deals particularly with the nations that had surrounded Israel at some point in their history.

This is what verses 2 through 8 describe. After asking God to speak up, what you find in verse 1, verses 2 through 8 continue this way: "See how your enemies are astir, how your foes rear their heads. With cunning they conspire against your people; they plot against those you cherish. 'Come,' they say, 'let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more.' With one mind they plot together; they form an alliance against you."

Now, it doesn't seem possible to find this actual conspiracy in what we know of Israel's history. But something like it is in 2 Chronicles 20 when Jehoshaphat was king. We're told in that chapter how a number of the nations to the east conspired against Israel. Edom, Moab, and Ammon were the ones. And God intervened and the way He did it was by causing these allies to fall out among themselves. So they ended up destroying themselves and there was a great deliverance.

There was even a prophet there, one in this line of Asaph, whose name was Jahaziel. And he's mentioned in that chapter as having uttered a prophecy that had to do with God's victory on behalf of Israel. Now, there's some people who assume that that's what this psalm is referring to and maybe that this man being a descendant of Asaph was even the actual author. But that's simply conjecture.

What is significant about the description of these enemies that we have here in the ongoing flow of the psalm is that they form an almost complete circle of entrapment around this small nation of Israel. For example, the Edomites are mentioned in verse 6, were descendants of Esau, the twin brother of Jacob, Abraham's grandson. The Ishmaelites also mentioned in that verse descended from Ishmael, Abraham's son by Hagar. The Hagrites in verse 6 were a tribe against whom the Transjordanian tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh fought at the time of the Jewish conquest of Palestine. And these people, plus the tribes of Moab, which is also mentioned in verse 6 and Ammon in verse 7, were situated to the east of the Jews' territory. So if you would move east, these are the people that you would find on that side.

Now, verse 7 mentions Gebal or Jabal, depending on how we pronounce that. It's not quite so certain what this is. It might be a tribal area that was south of the Dead Sea and therefore would have been linked with Edom, Ammon, Moab, and Amalek. The Amalekites who are mentioned in verse 7 also lived in that area. Or this town Gebal probably might be a Canaanite and Phoenician port about 20 miles north of modern Beirut. The Greeks had a name for it. It was called Byblos in Greek times. And the ancient site of what was Byblos is called today Jbeil, which is a variant of Gebal. It might be that that's where it was. If that's the case, well then we're talking about an enemy to the north.

Philistia was to the south, roughly today what we call the Gaza Strip, that is the southwest. Tyre was on that coast but also to the north. And then the last of these tribal or national powers that's mentioned is Assyria. Now, Assyria wasn't a strong power in the time of David if the psalm goes back that far, but it became a very formidable power later. Although it was to the east across the Great Arabian Desert, when the armies of Assyria attacked Israel, they always made their way north up the river valley, across what is called the Fertile Crescent, and then down into the Holy Land from the north.

So if you put all of this together, you have enemies on the east, the south, the west, and the north. It's a way of saying that the country is surrounded. Now, as far as we know, there was never a time in history when this precise alignment of enemies conspired against Israel. This is a large alliance, after all, if you could get all these people actually working together. And since we don't know of any time that was like that, what we probably have here is more or less a generalization of what seemed to be the picture.

It's kind of a way of saying that the Jews always seemed to be surrounded by their enemies. And if they weren't being attacked on the east, they were being attacked on the west, and if it didn't come from the south, it came from the north. Now, of course, that was true. That is what it meant to occupy that particular portion of land in history. And it is true today. Moreover, I think this is right to the point. It has been the condition of Israel down through the centuries, as many peoples and nations have lined up against this ancient people of God.

Just think of it a little bit. You go back to Egypt, that's where you have to begin because that was the birth of what we call antisemitism. The Jews had gone to Egypt as a small clan, but they had multiplied there in accordance with the promise that God had made to Abraham about 400 years before that. God had told Abraham, "I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. I will make your name great, you'll be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse, and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you." The last part, of course, refers to the Messiah. The earlier part refers to the way the Messiah was going to come, was going to come through this people that was going to be blessed by God.

Now, the way that happened when they were in Egypt is that God blessed them by multiplying them so they literally became like the sand on the seashore or the stars in the sky, which was another promise that God had given to Abraham. And here was Pharaoh looking on. Pharaoh was incited to fear by this large group of people growing there in the land, and so he was incited to hatred against them. He tried different kinds of oppression and abuse, and finally that extended even to the murder of all the young male children.

Well, the end of it, of course, was not the destruction of the Jews but the destruction of Egypt because God sent Moses and through him brought plagues upon the land by which the land itself was destroyed and eventually Pharaoh and his host were drowned in the Red Sea when they were trying to pursue the Jews who were being led out of it by Moses. So there you have the birth of this kind of persecution.

Now, it continued through their history. When the Assyrians attacked and overthrew the northern kingdom in 721 BC, the Jews were deported. The same thing happened in the south when Judah was overcome in 586 BC. We know from the 18th chapter of Acts that the Jews were expelled from Rome under the emperor Claudius in the time of the apostle Paul. It's how Paul met Aquila and Priscilla.

The Jews were persecuted during the Middle Ages. This was especially true at the time of the Crusades. You know, the Christian knights went off to drive the Moors out of the Holy Land, but it was a long way to the Holy Land and so along the way they sort of attacked anyone they found. The low point of the Crusades is when they overthrew Christian Constantinople, but along the way they killed a lot of Jews. Sort of saw them as the enemy.

The Jews were murdered in Germany, in France, in Italy, in England in the 15th and 16th centuries. All of this was repeated only with greater intensity. In the 15th century, 510 Jewish communities were exterminated in Europe. Many more were decimated. The Jews were driven out of Spain in 1492. You know, it's when Columbus discovered America. So all this was happening that way.

The Jews were being driven out of Spain. The only thing they could do was relocate to other nations. They went to Italy, Holland, Egypt, Turkey. But in most of those countries they weren't allowed to stay longer than a few weeks or months. And in others they were confined to a Jewish ghetto or a Jewish quarter. It happened in Venice and Rome. The word ghetto came from the area of Venice where the Jews were confined in those days.

Or if you want to come down to more modern times where you have that sad spectacle of what happened in Europe under Nazi Germany and the German powers where the Jews were regarded as an enemy and by estimates about six million of them were killed. In all of the annals of recorded history, there has never been a people so encircled by foes or persecuted as the Jews have been.

And yet surprisingly, miraculously, the Jews have thrived in accordance with God's promise to Abraham. In 1836, a world census indicated that there were then three million Jews living in many countries. But a century later in 1936, that original three million, in spite of persecutions during that century, above all in Russia, had increased to 16 million, an increase of 13 million in that 100 years. As I said, the Nazis killed more than six million Jews, but today there are more Jews in the world than before the Nazi era. The only explanation for that growth is that the hand of God has been upon this people to bless them.

When I ask the question, why has there been so much hatred? Well, the Egyptians feared and hated the Jews because of their numbers. The Europeans in the Middle Ages hated them because they were prosperous. They wouldn't let them do other kinds of business, so they went into banking and became rich and they were resented for that. They were hated because they were different. They were hated because of warped religious sentiments, warped Christian sentiments. Hitler hated them because they weren't of Aryan stock and because he needed an enemy to focus the hatreds and aggression of his people.

But you see, when you've said all of those things, you really haven't quite hit upon it. That really wouldn't explain this particular hatred. The real answer has to be found in God's words to the serpent way back in the Garden of Eden when He said, "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head and you will strike his heel." What God was promising to do was to send a Messiah and the Messiah would come through the Jews. And so Satan hated them because of that. And that is why he has stirred up the animosity of the world against these people, beginning in Egypt when they were trying to kill all the young male children, but also in the time of Herod, the time of Jesus Christ, when he tried to do the same thing, and even down to the time of Hitler. The fact that the Jews have not only survived but have prospered down through the centuries in spite of all that hatred and persecution is an evidence of God's grace and a great mystery and a miracle.

Now, that's kind of background. I want you to notice in the psalm after the description of this particular encirclement, you find at the end of verse 8 the word Selah, which means a pause. Now, it's not always able, we're not always able to tell exactly why a Selah occurs where it does in some of these psalms, but it's an appropriate place here. It's appropriate, you see, to reflect on the terrible persecutions of these ancient people before we go on to the second half, which tells us that they are praying for God to judge their enemies.

Now, the outline of this psalm is clear. Some of them it's a little hard to outline. This one's easy. It falls into two parts. First is the description of the encirclement, the danger, and then there's the second half, which is a prayer that God would judge their enemies. If you want to get fussy, you might want to separate out the first verse, which is a call to God not to be silent, and perhaps the last verse, which is somewhat of a conclusion. But at any rate, the general thrust of it is in terms of the problem and the prayer.

Now, it's this second part, the appeal to God to overthrow and destroy the enemies that bothers us, and the reason is obvious. It's because the prayer is vindictive and also because we've been taught to forgive. We're not supposed to pray that God will strike down in vengeance on our enemies and yet that's what this prayer is doing. Now, it's true that many times this is what we are praying in our hearts, but we think we're not supposed to do that. And so we come to something like that and this psalm and others that are like it, the psalms that are so vindictive really bother us.

Now, what are we to say about it? Well, I want to suggest a few things. I think there are things to be learned in each one. First of all, the first thing is an observation on the psalm itself and that is that God had intervened to destroy Israel's enemies in this way from time to time in the past. That's what the psalmist seems to be referring to as he moves on in his prayer. He's saying, in effect, God, you did it in the past and so we're looking for you to deliver us the same way now.

The two incidents referred to here, the first is a victory over Midian, this recorded in the Book of Judges. If you want to read it, you'll find it there in chapters 6 through 8. He's referring to this victory in verse 9 and then he amplifies on it in verse 11 where he mentions specifically four of the Midianite rulers: Oreb, Zeeb, Zebah, and Zalmunna, all of whom are mentioned there in Judges.

Now, this is the victory that took place under Gideon. And it's striking because it was accomplished by so few. If you know the story of Gideon, you'll know that the Midianites had been oppressing the people during this time in their history and God had raised up Gideon, one of the judges through whom He was going to drive the Midianites out and deliver the people from the oppression. So Gideon raised an army, thought he had to do, he got 32,000 men and then down in the valley where all these Midianites, there were more of them than they could number. They had 900 chariots, that was just the chariots, sort of the vanguard and then you had all these soldiers. And Gideon thought to himself, well, it certainly will require the help of God if we're going to drive them out and with only 32,000 men.

And so he brought the matter to God and God said, no, that's far too many. And so Gideon said, what shall I do? And God said, tell everyone who's afraid to go home. So Gideon fearfully turned to the troops and said, everyone who's afraid go home. 22,000 left, about the right proportion. And he was left with 10,000. So he said, wow, God, you really going to have to do something now. And God said, yes, the first thing we're going to do is whittle that down even further.

Well, they went through a little exercise as a result of which there were only 300. And God said, now I got something I can work with. So what they did was surround the camp of the Midianites by night. Each of these 300 men had a lamp that was hidden by a clay pot and they had a trumpet. And then on a signal from Gideon, they suddenly broke the clay pot which exposed the light and they blew the trumpets and they shouted at the top of their voice, "A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!" And the soldiers woke up in the middle of the night. They were so startled they thought they were surrounded by an enormous army. They drew their swords; they began to fight anybody who was near them. The only people that were near them were themselves and so they slaughtered many of their own men and they were routed and so the deliverance came. Now, that's what the psalmist is referring to. He's saying, do it again.

The second victory is the victory over Sisera, which is also recorded in Judges, the chapters right before the ones I mentioned. You find it in chapters 4 and 5. Now, the people were being harassed by Sisera's armies. He had a very large army and God raised up as an Israelite commander a man named Barak. Barak defeated his army, had 10,000 troops on this occasion. In the rout, Sisera had to flee. He abandoned his chariot, he ran on foot. He was exhausted. He finally came to the tent of a man whose name was Heber and his wife was Jael. And because he was exhausted, he asked if he could go in to rest. And so they said, fine.

He came in and while he was sleeping, Jael, Heber's wife, took a tent peg and a mallet. And she went to where he was sleeping and she took the peg and the mallet and drove the peg through his head into the ground so he died. And it was a great victory and it's celebrated in the Song of Deborah, which is what really occupies Judges 5. That particular song ends this way and it's the sort of thing that the psalmist here is thinking about. Very last verse of the Song of Deborah says, "So may all your enemies perish, O Lord, but may they who love you be like the sun when it shines in all its strength."

Now, that's what the psalmist is referring to. He's saying, Lord, you did it in the past. You delivered us when we were surrounded by enemies, when conditions were hard. It's consistent with your nature and with your plan, and so I appeal to you to do it again. Now, that's not what we would pray necessarily, but we can well understand how a people who have been persecuted and surrounded and harassed for all of the many centuries of their existence might pray that way. And if we're honest, we have to say wouldn't we perhaps pray for the destruction of our enemies too in such circumstances? So that's the first thing we have to notice.

Now, the second thing we should notice is the way the psalm handles its desire for judgment on these enemies. And what you have to notice is that it doesn't speak of them so much as the Jews' enemies as it does the enemies of God. Now, with that in mind, if you look back in the psalm, you'll see that that is patently true. Notice verse 2, "your enemies, your foes." That is the enemies and foes of God. Even when it mentions the people themselves as it does in verse 3, it is "your people" and "those you cherish." When the plots of the enemies are mentioned as they are in verse 5, it says these plots are "against you," that is against God. And in verse 12, the enemies of Israel are cited for trying to steal their land, but again, these lands are called "the pasture lands of God."

Well, you see in every case what the psalmist is concerned about is God's name, God's people, and God's plans. Now, that makes a tremendous difference when you say something like this. You see, if what you're thinking about only is yourself and the fact that people have been difficult with you, then if you call out for judgment, what you're really asking for is revenge. They got me; I want somebody to get them. God, we need your help.

But if on the other hand you're thinking about God, His name and His purposes, then what you're really doing is leaving the matter in God's hands. You're calling for judgment, but that's something that God Himself will do. You're trusting Him to work it out and you can trust Him, you know, because God says that He's not indifferent. We often quote this verse from Deuteronomy: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. It's meaning we shouldn't be vindictive, that we should just leave it to God. But that is also a promise that God will judge. And so when we approach things that way, we can say, God, it's really in your hands. It reminds me of a man who was being attacked and who was in the habit of saying when things were difficult for him in prayer, he said to God, "O Lord, they're attacking your property." You see, when you can say that, then you really can approach things in quite a different way.

Well, here's the final observation on the way the psalm handles these encircling dangers and the need for God's intervention and judgment, and it's the most important of all. It's the way the psalm ends. It's calling for judgment, that's true, but notice it ends by stating that the purpose for this judgment is "so that men will seek your name, O Lord," verse 16. Or if you look at the last verse, verse 18, it's this: "Let them know that you, whose name is the Lord, that you alone are the Most High over all the earth."

In other words, although the psalmist is desiring judgment which will bring the deliverance of his people, which he wants, the ultimate desire of the psalmist is that his enemies, all people everywhere for that matter, might actually come to know and obey the true God. Now, that's why you and I don't rush to calls for judgment. It's why we don't do it today. We know that the judgment's going to come. Jesus talked about it more than anybody. He's going to return, as we say in our creed, to judge the quick and the dead. There will be an accounting. All evil will be judged and the good will be rewarded. But we don't pray for that. We don't want that to come before God's own time and the reason we don't pray for it to come before God's own time is that today is the day of grace.

What if that judgment had come before God in grace had worked in your heart to bring you to faith in Jesus Christ? You would perish in the judgment. God has postponed it, not counting time the way we count time, in order that in His own way and His own time He might bring to Himself an innumerable company of those who have repented of their sin and have come to place their faith in Jesus Christ as their savior. When God has gathered all of those to Himself, then the end will come. Our task today is not to pray for judgment, but to pray for the lost and to present a gospel to them.

And let me end with one last thought. I want you to go back to the beginning of the psalm. And as you look at that verse, I want to remind you of the greatest non-answer to that prayer in all of history. Verse 1 says, "O God, do not keep silent. Be not quiet, O God, be not still." Many centuries after this was written, the Son of God was in the Garden of Gethsemane and he was crying unto the Lord that this cup which he was about to drink might pass from him.

And he prayed for a long time and he didn't get an answer. At the end of that, the angels came and ministered to him, but God did not intervene to take away the cup. And shortly after that he was hanging on the cross. And one of the things he said when he was hanging on the cross was this: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" God did not intervene to destroy Jesus' enemies or save him from the cross. God, as it were, turned His back upon His Son that he might die there in agony.

Yet, you see, we look back on that and we say thank God that God did not answer a prayer to deliver Jesus, because it's by his death in the silence of God as he died that you and I have been delivered from our sin. It's because of that that we have a gospel. So we don't call for judgment. We say this God who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God who is all-wise and the God who does all things well.

If we were there at the time of the crucifixion, we wouldn't have understood, just as the disciples did not understand why that was happening. They just thought it was all over. When things come into our lives that are bad, we don't understand that either. We say why is this happening? We don't know the answer to that. But God does. And we look back to the cross and we say not only does God know what He's doing, what He does is good and it's meant for our good and it's given us the gospel. And we have the opportunity to tell people about it. Are you going to do it? You have a gospel and not a judgment to proclaim. Let's pray.

Father, we're thankful for this psalm, a psalm that's removed from us in time and even in experience because it deals with an ancient people and circumstances that are so different in many ways from our own. And yet it tells us something about your character and nature and how you operate in history and why you do what you do and why you don't always do what we would like to have you do. And it draws our minds up to enlarge our thoughts of you and to deepen our trust in you as the God who does all things well. Father, since we know you to be that kind of God, give us the power and the strength and compassion actually to tell other people about you, that they might be drawn by your grace and so find salvation in Jesus Christ. We pray in His name, Amen.

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