The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): It's a psalm of thanksgiving for the deliverance of God's people. In the case of the Israelites, it was a psalm of thanks for their release from captivity and his leading them from their distress to a city where they could settle. But the psalm also has an amazing parallel to another group of the dispossessed.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. The pilgrims who landed in America on December 11, 1620, were a homeless people who had suffered much for their faith and who had survived both sickness and the perils of the sea on a stormy voyage across the icy Atlantic. Let's join Dr. Boice as he examines Psalm 107 and compares the suffering of the pilgrims with that of the Israelites as they return from Babylon, who found joy and thanksgiving in arriving at a place to call home.

Dr. James Boice: It might seem a bit strange to anyone who knows anything about the English Puritans or the pilgrims that came to this country that I would call Psalm 107 the Pilgrims' Psalm. Not because the Puritans as a whole or the pilgrims in particular didn't know it and cherish it and use it a great deal, but because they loved all the other psalms too.

As a matter of fact, they loved the whole Bible. They really were people of the Book. They lived in it, they memorized it, they taught it, and they tried to live by it all the time. Yet that's not the whole story. If you know anything about the pilgrims themselves, their struggles as they experienced persecution in England and their hardships as they tried to relocate, and then finally their long dangerous journey across the ocean to come to this country, you're aware perhaps that this psalm more than any other portion of the Bible aptly describes all that they went through.

We look at it and we say, "Well, I wonder if the pilgrims themselves made that association." There's very good reason to think that they did. William Bradford wrote an account of the founding of Plymouth Plantation that has that title, *Of Plymouth Plantation*. In one passage, probably the best-known passage in that entire study of those early years, he quotes this psalm as applying to what they had gone through.

Let me just read what Bradford wrote: "May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say, our fathers were Englishmen who came over this great ocean and were ready to perish in this wilderness, but they cried unto the Lord and he heard their voice and looked on their adversity. Let them therefore praise the Lord because he is good and his mercies endure forever. Yes, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord show how he hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor.

When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them, let them confess before the Lord his loving kindness and his wonderful works before the sons of men." Almost everything in that quotation comes from scripture. The last portion of it particularly comes directly from Psalm 107.

There may be even more to it than this. The pilgrims came ashore on Monday, December 11, 1620, after having spent the previous day, which was Sunday, the Sabbath, worshipping God on board the Mayflower. It's perhaps not stretching our imagination too much to think that the subject of their meditation and study on that day was this psalm. Now in its own setting, Psalm 107 is not about the pilgrims, of course.

It has to do with the Jews and the deliverance that they had experienced in having been brought back from their exile in Babylon. That fact makes this psalm and the two preceding ones go together. They form a bit of a trilogy. It's been a month now since we were studying the earlier psalms, but if you can think back to those studies, you may recall that Psalm 105 is talking about God's faithfulness to Israel from the time of his covenant with Abraham until their entrance into the Promised Land.

The next psalm, Psalm 106, talks about the unfaithfulness of Israel during more or less the same timeframe but extended slightly up to and including their exile to Babylon. Now here in this psalm, Psalm 107, we have praise to God for his deliverance of them from that same exile. So the psalm was known by the Jews and was loved by them. It was known by the Puritans and was loved by them.

By the pilgrims who came to this country, it's also a psalm that has been loved and used and cherished by God's people down through all the generations to our own time. I was talking with one member of our congregation at the early service today. He said he was so glad I was beginning to preach on Psalm 107 because it's one of his favorites and he has memorized it all.

Well, there's a challenge for you in case you're interested. There's a lot of repetition though. It's not quite as hard as it seems. It's a worthwhile psalm to memorize. It has three parts. It has an opening, a call to give thanks to God, verses 1 to 3. Then it has the main body of the psalm, verses 4 to 32. Then it has a final part, verses 33 to 43, in which the psalmist reflects on what he's observed about the working of God in history.

That is of a different nature than the earlier part, and so I'm holding that off to think about it next week because it stretches our minds in a different direction. But it has those three parts. We're going to look at the first two parts today. The middle portion, the long part, is made up of four sections in which, first of all, a peril is described, then there's a recounting of how God delivered the people out of that peril, and then there is a call to the people to thank him for it. That provides a refrain and it's repeated again and again.

So let's look at it that way. We go to the opening, first of all. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who wrote so much about the psalms, called this psalm "a psalm of thanksgiving and the motives for it." I think that's well said. Many of the psalms are psalms of thanksgiving, but here's one perhaps more than the others that tells us why we should thank God: because of his great deliverances to us.

Now look, here's the way it begins: "Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever." What has he done for us that he's so good? "Let the redeemed of the Lord say this, those he redeemed from the hand of the foe, those he gathered from the lands from east and west, from north and south." He's talking there about people who have been redeemed by God, who have been delivered and gathered.

He's saying we should praise God for that. Right at the beginning, we should stop and ask a very searching personal question. What we should ask as we read the psalm is, "Have I been redeemed? Am I among those whom God by his grace has gathered into the company of his people?" When the psalm was written, it was the Jewish people, the congregation of those who loved and knew God.

Today, it's the church as a whole, composed of Jew and Gentile and all races from the east and the west, the north and the south, all lands. But those who have been redeemed, who have been delivered. Are you one of those? We're talking here in spiritual terms, not just a physical deliverance, but a deliverance from sin. This is a psalm for those who have experienced the hand of God in delivering them from their sin through Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is the one who has died for our sin and who by his power sets us free from it so we can live a godly life. We don't always do it, but he's given us the power to do it. These are the people to whom this is addressed. These are the people who need to thank God. So the second searching personal question is this: "If I'm one of those redeemed people, am I really thanking God? Am I praising him for that deliverance?"

We ought to remember that Paul in the first chapter of Romans says that it's one mark of the unregenerate, those who have not been redeemed, that they neither glorify God as God nor give thanks to him, verse 21. There's ample area in which to apply the psalm. Now we move to the main body of it. This is the section in which there are poetic pictures of some deadly peril that's common to mankind and a description of how God delivers his people from that.

Now those may simply be poetic pictures of what the exile to Babylon meant, just different ways of talking about what it meant to be deported from your own land to a foreign land and have to suffer there. On the other hand, it might describe actual situations from which the Jewish people were redeemed or delivered. They were brought out of these terrible situations in order to come back to their land.

Certainly, when we begin to apply it to ourselves, it describes the kind of things the people of God throughout all ages up to our time, including our day, have experienced as well. Now let's look at the first one. What's it talking about in verses 4 to 9? This first main section, it's talking about homelessness, being without a home, a place to belong or rest, or maybe just being lost in the wilderness, being lost in the wilderness of this life both figuratively and literally.

Let me read it: "Some wandered in desert wastclands finding no way to a city where they could settle. They were hungry and thirsty and their lives ebbed away. They cried out to the Lord in their trouble and he delivered them from their distress." It's easy to see why that would have appealed to the pilgrims because they were homeless people. They had been driven from their homes in England.

They had fled to Holland to try to find homes there, and then eventually they crossed the ocean to try and find homes here. Listen to what Bradford writes about their condition: "They were hunted and persecuted on every side. Some were taken and clapped up in prison. Others had their houses beset and watched night and day and hardly escaped their enemies' hand. Most were constrained to flee and leave their houses and habitations and the means of their livelihood."

That's the problems they faced in the early decades of the 1600s. So when they finally came to America and settled down in the little homes that they were able to make for themselves, rustic and inadequate as they were in those first years, they were nevertheless very thankful for that. They turned to this psalm and they must have been able to say with probably more feeling than you and I are able to have, "Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble and he delivered them from their distress. He led them by a straight way to a city where they could settle. Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds to men."

Let's think about homelessness. We have people in our congregation who have been homeless, literally, who have been living on the streets, have been helped, now have homes. Those who have been jobless, now have jobs. If that's your case, you have great cause to be thankful to God. Most of us haven't had an experience like that, but if that's the case, if you've had a home, especially if you've had a good one, then you have even more cause to be thankful than those who were homeless and now have a home because you've benefited from that all these years.

One of the greatest blessings of my life, probably the greatest blessing of my life, was the Christian home in which I was raised. I had a Christian father, a Christian mother. They were concerned for me and my Christian growth. I learned to study the Bible, I learned to go to church, I learned habits of prayer, all of that in those early days when I was young and when it begins to form your character.

That is an inestimable, uncalculable blessing. Many of us have had that. If we have, if you've had that kind of a home or for that matter any kind of a home, shouldn't you be thankful as these people are? Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds to men. And let me apply it spiritually too. You see, you have to take this on different levels. What does it mean spiritually to be homeless?

It means to be cut off from God because God is our spiritual home. Saint Augustine understood it. He wrote in his *Confessions*, "You've made us for yourself and our hearts are restless," or wanderers, "until we rest in you." God's our home. That explains the restlessness of so many in the world. They think, "Well, my goal in life is to fulfill myself. I want to be happy." So they try everything the world has to offer and they're still not happy. They're still unfulfilled.

Why? Because they're made to rest in God. So in a condition like that, we find ourselves like the Prodigal Son. Remember, he left his father's home? It's a picture of God and the wanderer. He goes off to a far country, he has no home. He finally there is living with the pigs. It's only the end of a period of frustration and terrible debasement and humiliation that this son who was made to have fellowship with the father comes, we're told, to his senses.

He comes to right thinking about things and he repents of his sin. He says, "I'll go back to my father and say I've sinned against you. Take me, I'd like to be just a servant if you'll have me on those terms." And the father receives him back as a son. You see, if you're a Christian, if you're one of the redeemed that we began to talk about, that's your experience. That's something you can say.

Should you not give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for men? If that's what you've experienced, how can you not do it? How could you possibly fail? The second of these images in the central section of the psalm describes the distress of prisoners. Now the pilgrims suffered this way too. Their leaders were often put in prison for dissenting from what was the established religion of the time.

When small groups tried to escape the persecution, as they did by sailing across the English Channel to Holland and elsewhere, they were sometimes arrested on that account too. If they saw them trying to get out of the country, they arrested them. Let me read you again what Bradford says. He's describing one particular incident: "Pitiful it was to see the heavy case of these poor women and their distress, what weeping and crying on every side.

Some for their husbands that were carried away, others not knowing what should become of them and their little ones, others again melting in tears, seeing their poor little ones hanging about them, crying for fear and quaking with cold. Being thus apprehended, they were hurried from one place to another and from one justice to another until in the end the justices didn't know what to do with them."

Bradford recounts finally because they didn't know what to do with them, in this case at least, they let them go and they eventually ended up in Holland. Now there aren't many in our midst who can speak of being delivered from prison in a literal sense, though there are some. We have some in our midst that have been in prison and God has delivered them.

But all of us can speak of a spiritual deliverance if we have come to trust in Jesus Christ as our savior. I think that's what Jesus was speaking about when he preached for the very first time in the synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth. Remember he quoted from Isaiah and one of the phrases he used was "he proclaims freedom for the prisoners"? As far as I know, at least reading the gospels, Jesus never set anyone free from a jail literally.

But that's exactly what he has come to do for all people spiritually. Can't we say, if we think spiritually referring to verse 11 of our psalm, that we have all rebelled against the words of God and despised the counsels of the Most High? Or verse 14, that God has brought us out of the darkness and the deepest gloom and broke away our chains. If God's done that, if he's given us freedom in Jesus Christ, shouldn't we thank him for it?

Here's what it says, verses 15 and 16: "Let those people give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for men, for he breaks down gates of bronze and cuts through bars of iron." You know, John Bunyan? John Bunyan who wrote *Pilgrim's Progress*, he was a Puritan, an early Puritan. He used this psalm to describe that as his experience. He said that's exactly what God did for me. My hard heart was encased in a prison with iron bars.

And he said God by his grace broke through that and set me free. If God's done that for you, shouldn't you be thankful to him for it? The third image is of people who have suffered affliction because of their iniquities, that is, they're sick. It describes illness so severe that it brought those afflicted near the gates of death. Now that also describes the pilgrims' experience.

You know, 102 of them came over on that first trip of the Mayflower. Four of them died before they even got here, one just before they landed. So they were down to 98 before they even set foot ashore. And then in that first winter, which Bradford called "the starving time," half of the remainder died. Only 12 of the original 26 families survived. Only four out of the original 12 unattached men or boys.

Almost all of the women perished. And they were all sick. So let me ask this question: Have you ever experienced God's deliverance from a serious illness? As the pilgrims, when they finally made it through that first winter. Many of us can say that. God has done that for us. I want you to see, however, that the psalm itself is also thinking of deliverance from spiritual sickness because it refers to affliction that is caused by their iniquities—that's sin—and it speaks of God's word as the agent of our healing in verse 20.

So although probably we're to understand the psalm as speaking of real illness from which God does often many times deliver his people, the psalm is also aware that the greatest sickness of all is a spiritual sickness from which we need healing by the word of God. And it's the word of God that does it. The word of God is the only thing that does it.

What the Bible pictures when it talks about our condition apart from God is not even so much that we're sick, but the word the Bible uses for it is death. It says we're dead in our trespasses and sins. And the reason we need the word of God is that it's only the word of God that brings life. My word doesn't bring life. Your word doesn't bring life. The word of the philosophers and the politicians and the artists and the novelists of the day doesn't bring life. Might entertain us, might deceive us, might do all sorts of things, but it doesn't bring life.

Only the word of God does that. And that's why in a worship service like this, we're not here teaching poetry. We're not here reading from the great novels of the day. We're not here promulgating laws that we think might be effective in the city. We teach the Bible. Because the Bible speaks God through this written word, speaks to hearts actually to bring life out of death and spiritual healing where the sickness is a sickness caused by sin.

If you're a Christian, God has saved you from the grave, verse 20. Can't you be thankful for that? The psalm says you should: "Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for men. Let them sacrifice thank offerings and tell of his works with songs of joy," verses 21 and 22. Now the fourth image has to do with perils at sea.

In the opinion of many commentators, this is the most beautiful, most poetic, certainly the most moving section of the psalm. It wasn't written about the crossing of the ocean by the pilgrims, but it could have been. It could have been written about the difficulties of that difficult 65-day crossing in the lateness of the year when the ocean was rough. But let me read it to you: "Others went out on the sea in ships, they were merchants on the mighty waters. They saw the works of the Lord, his wonderful deeds in the deep, for he spoke and stirred up a tempest that lifted high the waves.

They mounted up to the heavens and went down to the depths. In their peril, their courage melted away. They reeled and staggered like drunken men, they were at their wits' end. Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble and he brought them out of their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper, the waves of the sea were hushed. They were glad when it grew calm, and he guided them to their desired haven."

I think you almost have to have been at sea in the midst of a terrible storm to appreciate the full force of that. But leave the ocean out of it for a minute. Not all of us have been to sea. Just forget about that. Haven't there been times in your life when you have been, to use the language of those verses, at your wits' end? Of course, most people have at one time or another. It could be all kinds of things.

It might have been a serious financial problem. People lose their jobs today. They're at their wits' end. They don't know what they're going to do. Some have illness, some of it seems to be an illness that will be fatal. They don't know what to do about that. There may be personality conflicts, all kinds of things that bring us to the very end of ourselves, which is what being at your wits' end really means.

But God who is the God of deliverance, the God of love, the God of mercy, acted in your life. Have you had an experience like that? If that's the case, listen to what the psalm says of these people: "Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for men. Let them exalt him in the assembly of the people and praise him in the council of the elders." There is nothing so becoming the children of God as public acknowledgment of his great grace, mercy, and his deliverance and redemption.

And so the people of God rejoice to praise him. Now as I said, we're going to look at the third section of that next week, and I invite you to come back for that. As we do, we're going to see that it's a very sober reflection on this. But before we go on to that, this is the point to go back and look at the chorus. I called it the refrain. Remember at the end of each of those four sections, there is a refrain that's much the same?

The first two lines of the four lines of the refrain are the same in every instance. They say, "Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for men." And then the next two lines of each refrain vary, and they vary appropriately with the thing that's being discussed. So in the first two cases, there are reasons for giving thanks to God and they're these: number one, because God satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things, and number two, because he breaks down gates of bronze and cuts through bars of iron.

So he's talking about salvation, he's saying that's why you should praise him. Now the last two cases suggest ways in which we can give God thanks. And that is, number one, by offering God thank offerings, verse 22, and number two, by exalting him in the assembly of the people and praising him in the council of the elders, verse 32. Now you see, that makes everything very practical because when we get to the end, we want to ask the question: How can we sacrifice thank offerings to God?

That's what it's telling us to do. And the answer to that, the only possible answer, is by giving God ourselves. That's the only sacrifice we have to make. That's why Paul when he was writing to the Romans in Romans 12 said, "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship."

Nothing less than the offer of our complete selves to God is adequate if God has actually redeemed us from our sin and set us free. So God forbid that we should fall in the habit of coming to church and praising him with our lips while our hearts and our lives are far from him. But how wonderful it is to come to church when not only our hearts and our lives but our souls, our strength, indeed everything we are belongs to God. And we acknowledge that and we say praise be to God, for he is good and he's merciful and he's redeemed me by the blood of Jesus Christ. Let's pray.

Our Father, we're thankful that we've had an opportunity to study your word here in this hour. We thank you for this great psalm and all it has to tell us about yourself and your goodness and your ways and the experience of your people down through the ages. If there are any here who have not experienced that and don't know what we're talking about, we pray that you would give them that ability to see their need and to see what you've done in Jesus Christ to meet the need, and may they come to place their faith in him and find the deliverance we're talking about.

And then for your own who have experienced that but perhaps have lost something of the joy of their salvation, may there be a new kindling of their hearts. And may we find ourselves together as your people gathered from the east and the west and the north and the south, lifting up hearts and minds and voices to praise you as we ought, as the great and glorious, powerful, redeeming, and loving God. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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