The Bible Study Hour

Narrator: Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. James Boice. For more information, please contact us by calling toll-free 1-800-488-1888. And now the Alliance is pleased to present The Bible Study Hour, preparing you to think and act biblically.

Dr. James Boice: Praise the Lord, all you nations; extol Him, all you peoples, for great is His love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord.

Now, that's the shortest psalm in the Bible, also the shortest chapter in the Bible. It is, however, a psalm which, as Derek Kidner says, has faith which is great and a reach which is enormous.

Now you probably think a short psalm should lend itself to a short sermon, but no such luck. I've got a great sermon on the message of the entire Bible. I can do it in about 15 minutes, but when we deal with something short, it takes time to explain what it is.

I remember preaching years ago on the verse in John which is the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11:35. I'm sure you memorized it. It has two words, "Jesus wept." How much time can you spend on Jesus wept? Well, on that occasion, I thought we should really take about a month to deal with it, four separate Sundays.

I remember treating that verse first of all for what it teaches us about God. Jesus being God, we find the character of God in those words. God is not an abstract, remote, unemotional God, but one who actually identifies with us in our struggles. It was an important thing to see because some people have a very different idea of God.

And then we looked at it for what it tells us about Jesus Christ. Who was He? He was the God-man. He had all the attributes of deity, and He also had all the attributes of humanity. And here He was, like us, entering into our lives, enduring all the things that we endure, suffering as we suffered, weeping as we weep.

We looked at that in the third place for what it tells us about ourselves. Ever think of those words that way? Jesus wept. Why? Because death had come into the experience of one of His friends. Death is the fruit of sin, the wages of sin is death. The verse tells us what has happened to us, that we should become such miserable creatures that even God weeps over us.

And then finally, I looked at it for what it tells us about how we should relate to other people. We should weep with those who weep, as well as rejoice with those who rejoice. Christians should be those who are touched by the infirmities of other people. All of that in two words.

Now, Psalm 117 doesn't have two words, but it does have two verses. And, as I said, it's the shortest psalm. It's the shortest chapter in the Bible, and it does contain an enormous amount of teaching. In his massive commentary on the Psalms, Charles Spurgeon refers to a writer that we don't even know anything about today. His name is Molaerus.

But this man found five great doctrines in this chapter and organized a sermon around them. Number one, the calling of the Gentiles. Two, a summary of the gospel. Three, the end and goal of all such blessing. Number four, the duties of God's people. And number five, their privileges.

I've been even more impressed by the study of this psalm by Martin Luther. Luther is a master, you know. And at times, he just really blows you away. He did 35 pages on this psalm. Now, if I would divide that up into sermons and just preach what Luther preached, that would take about four Sundays to go through that amount of material.

And here's what Luther found, and this is really marvelous. Number one, he regarded it as a prophecy, that Gentiles will participate in gospel blessings. Number two, as a revelation. The kingdom of heaven is not earthly and temporal, but rather heavenly and eternal. That was very important to Luther. He went on at great length about that.

Number three, instruction. We're saved by faith alone and not by works, wisdom, or holiness. Number four, we should praise God for such a great salvation, which is admonition. It would be great in a homiletics class to take Luther's treatment of that psalm and show what you can really do with a passage of scripture when you interpret it rightly.

Derek Kidner is quite right when he says the shortest psalm proves, in fact, to be one of the most potent and the most seminal. Now, the first striking feature of this psalm, and you can hardly miss it, is that it calls upon all the nations and all peoples to serve God. Very significant out of the context in which it comes.

The word for nations there in the Hebrew is the word `Goyim`. And you know the Jews refer to the Gentiles as the `Goy`. The `Goyim`, they're the nations. Actually, the word simply means nations, and there are places in the Old Testament where it's used of Israel as well because Israel is one of the nations. But generally, it refers to all the various Gentile nations of the world.

And then the word people there is a rather unusual plural form of the word for people, `Am`. And it means peoples, and it's referring now not so much to nations as to various ethnic groupings, various types of people throughout the world. So when you put that together, what it's really talking about is all people everywhere. Exactly the sense that we have spelled out in other language in Revelation where in heaven, all these people from every nation that no one can count, every tribe, people, and language, they're all standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb.

Now, that's what this psalm is envisioning as it calls upon all these people to join in the praise of Israel's God. Now, that's a true Christian universalism. We are rightly on guard against the wrong kind of universalism. The wrong kind of universalism says all kinds of religions are equal, everybody's all right. We all get to heaven by our own way. All roads lead to the top of the mountain and so on. There's nothing of that in Christianity.

Christianity is exclusive in the sense that it presents the one true God and the one true way of salvation, which is Jesus Christ. But there's a true universalism, which is to say all people everywhere, all tribes, all people, all nations may come to God through Jesus Christ. There are no barriers on that account.

Now you have that in Israel. When God first called Abraham, the father of the people to himself, He said He was going to be a blessing to all the nations. So from the very beginning, you have that there. What the Jews did is what we also do in our own way. They became exclusive as they went along. It wasn't that they were against Gentiles getting to heaven and experiencing God's salvation, but they had to become Jews first. They're glad to have the Gentiles enter into Judaism. We should add as long as there weren't too many of them, and they did things in a Jewish way.

But the problem was they weren't willing to have the Gentiles become Christians or or or experience God's salvation as Gentiles. And that's the great battle that Paul fought in the early days of the church, culminating in the first great council in Jerusalem. It was over the matter of circumcision and keeping the dietary laws and things like that. Here the gospel was going out to all these Gentile communities. Paul was the great evangelist to the Gentiles, and suddenly there were all these Gentiles out there that were not behaving in a very Jewish way.

And so they had the council to decide whether it was necessary for the Gentiles, if they were going to be saved, to become circumcised, the mark of their Judaism, and then keep all the dietary and other laws of Israel. And it was decided in the direction of Christian freedom. You don't have to be circumcised to be saved. You don't have to keep kosher in order to be saved. The Gentiles could be saved as Gentiles through Jesus Christ.

Now we have exactly the same kind of thing in the Christian church. We have throughout the country dozens of churches, I should say thousands of churches, where things have to be done in the way that that church does them. You have a a dominantly white church with a certain social class. Now they're not against having some from another class come in or perhaps from another race come in, as long as there aren't too many of them, and they don't upset things.

You see, we know that. It begins to strike home at that point, you see. But a real Christian universalism says, if you believe in Jesus Christ, you're one of us, you're part of the body. And it may be you have some ways of doing things that are different from the way we do them, but that's all right. God's a God of great variety. The very fact that so many churches are insensitive, not not missionary churches, in this sense should really cause us to repent of our sin when we look at a psalm like this.

This doesn't say, praise the Lord, all you white people. Extol Him, all you Americans. It's talking about all the nations and all the peoples of the earth.

Now I suppose this is the place to point out that Paul uses this psalm in that significant section of Romans where he's talking about the relationship of the so-called strong believer to the weak believer, the weak believer who has scruples about things and the strong believer who doesn't. This is a long section, especially for a book like Romans, where he's trying to summarize virtually the whole of Christian theology. It goes from the first verse of Romans 14 through the 13th verse of Romans 15, that is a chapter and a half.

And when he gets to the end of that, Paul does what he does in the other sections of the letter. He brings in texts from the Old Testament to nail down what he's been explaining. I pointed out when we were studying Romans that Paul's procedure is different from Peter's at that point. Peter, when he preached at Pentecost, would give the text and then he'd explain the text. Paul would teach and then he'd give the text. And of course because Peter was speaking to Jews who knew the scriptures and Paul for the most part was speaking to Gentiles who didn't. But at any rate, that's the way Paul handles himself.

So he gives this long argument about how the strong should treat the weak and the weak should treat the strong. And when he gets to the end, he has four great texts from the Old Testament: Psalm 18:49, which is cited in Romans 15:9; Deuteronomy 32:43 in verse 10; Psalm 117 verse 1, that's our verse in verse 11; and finally Isaiah 11:10 in verse 12.

But you see, the surprising thing when you look at those texts together is that they don't have anything to do with the strong and the weak, but rather every single one of those texts has to do with Gentiles being brought into the fellowship of an apparently Jewish church. And here are the texts. Look. "Therefore, I will praise you among the Gentiles. I will sing hymns to your name." Or again, "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people." Again, "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and sing praises to Him, all you people." And again, "The root of Jesse will spring up, one who will arise to rule over the nations, the Gentiles will hope in Him."

Now, that's a wonderful thing. Because we live so many years after the proclamation of this message in the ministry of Paul, we, who are Gentiles, generally speaking, take it for granted. If anything that's to be taken for granted, it's a marvelous thing that God way back there in the Old Testament prophesied that one day the gospel would be offered to the Gentiles.

The way to appreciate it is to see by contrast the special blessings that are promised to the Jews. Paul does it in Romans, the third chapter. He asked the question about the advantages of being a Jew and he says, well, every advantage in the world. Chiefly, unto them has been committed the oracles of God. That is, they have the Bible. Gentiles didn't have the Bible. There's no salvation apart from knowledge of the way of salvation through Christ. That's what the Bible speaks about. The Gentiles didn't have that.

And later on in the ninth chapter, he elaborates what he says in chapter 3 even more. He says, well, theirs is the adoption as sons, theirs is the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ. The Gentiles didn't have any of those advantages.

And so when Paul writes to the Ephesians, a largely Gentile church, he reminds them that before they came to God through Christ, they were excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. Now, that's a very grim assessment. But if the Bible is true, if those statements are right, that's that's absolutely correct.

And in the Old Testament times, there was really no hope for the Gentiles because what God was doing, he was doing in that time exclusively through Israel. And yet, we have to say that this former absence of hope isn't the last word. Because there in the Old Testament, in texts just like the one we're studying, you have the promise that one day salvation is going to be offered to the Gentiles too.

When you notice at the end of that 13th, that 15th chapter of Romans, where Paul is quoting all these texts, the fact that he quotes four of them from various parts of the Old Testament, including the 117th Psalm, gives you some idea of the resistance Paul himself experienced when he tried to teach that to communities that had Jews among them. It just didn't seem to fit, but nevertheless he said that's right. You see, we have to insist upon that today as well. All of that comes out of the psalm. Jew and Gentile, bond and free, whatever it may be, rich, poor, high, low, whatever it is, the church of Jesus Christ is made up of them all.

And if I can put it this way, God is Himself not satisfied until people from every tongue and race and kindred and nation bow down before His throne. Now, that's only the first thing I want you to notice about this psalm. Here's the second.

Psalm 117 teaches us that the reason the Gentiles, along with the Jews, are called upon to praise God is God's love. And indeed, it's a love that endures forever. Now, those words are picked up from what I called on an earlier occasion, the favorite text of the post-exilic community. It's from the book of Exodus. They had the book, they studied it, Exodus 34:6, it has to do with God's revelation to Moses. And that figured very strongly in Jewish history.

We see it, for example, at the time when David brought the ark up to Jerusalem. He wrote that great psalm that you find in 1 Chronicles 16, and this verse is quoted. You also find it in the psalms, for example, in the very next psalm, Psalm 118. You're going to find that phrase three times over in the first few verses, verses 1 through 4, four times over. And then it's again there in verse 29 at the very end, "His love endures forever."

Now, that is something, of course, that we wouldn't say is unique at this point in the Psalter or in Jewish history. They knew that God was love from the beginning, but it does seem to figure strongly as you get on toward the end of the Psalter. We're going to get from this point on into one psalm after the other that is a praise psalm, praising God. And what it's praising God for is His love and the fact that His love endures forever, the fact that He's merciful. And if you say to yourself, well, why does that emerge so strongly at that point, since it was there earlier as well?

The answer surely is that these psalms are written by the Jews after their exile in Babylon, when they had come back and they were aware, as they had not been before, of the great mercy of our God. Now, if that is true, if the Jews, after their deliverance from Babylon, experienced something of the love of God in a new way and praised Him for it, as the psalms seem to indicate, certainly that should be true of us as well. Because their deliverance from Babylon was a physical deliverance.

And our deliverance, the deliverance we talk about, is the deliverance from sin by the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son our Savior. If they knew something of the love of God, certainly we should too. Now, at that point, let me remind you of John 3:16. It's the best loved, most quoted, probably most memorized verse in all the Bible. "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life."

That verse talks about the measure of God's love. It says God's love was so great, so wonderful, that He sent His Son to be our Savior. We should appreciate that. This was the verse, by the way, from which D. L. Moody first came to appreciate the greatness of God's love. Moody had been an evangelist for some time. He'd even traveled to England, but by his own testimony, he didn't understand much about the love of God until he came to appreciate this verse. And the story goes like this. He was in England, and while he was there, he made the acquaintance of a man whose name was Henry Moorhouse.

Moorhouse later became quite distinguished for his work among the poor in London's inner city. And so he pioneered what we would call church work and social services and so on. But Moody didn't know much about this at the time. He didn't even know much about Moorhouse, but he liked him. And so he said to him in passing one day, "If you ever get to America and get to Chicago, I'll give you a chance to preach." And Moorhouse said, "Fine." And Moody afterwards thought to himself, "Well, I probably shouldn't have said that because I'd never heard him preach, but it's okay, he probably won't come."

And then one day he was in Chicago. He was about ready to leave for a trip, and he got a telegram. And it said, "Have arrived in New York, will be in Chicago Sunday. Moorhouse." Oh, he said, "What am I going to do now? Moorhouse is going to be here next Sunday. And I can't even say, I've already announced my sermon topic and I can't change it, because I'm going away." "What am I going to do?" So he consulted with the leadership, and finally they decided on this. Moody said, "Well, let him preach once in the morning. If he's any good, you can let him preach again. I meet my obligation."

And so he went off on his trip. He came back a week after Moorhouse was supposed to have been there, seven days later. And the one of the first things he asked his wife was this, he said, "How did the young man Moorhouse do?" And she said to her husband, "He's a better preacher than you are." And Moody said, as any man would say under the circumstances, "How can that be?" And she she replied to him, "Uh, well, he's he's teaching people that God loves them."

"Oh," Moody said, "that isn't quite right. You know, you have to qualify that." Moody was a theologian at that point. And she said, "Well, if you don't believe it, go and hear him." He said, "What do you mean, go and hear him? Is he still here?" "Oh, yes," she said, "he's still here. He preached so well Sunday morning, they invited him back Sunday night. He did so well Sunday night, he preached Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. He's been preaching all week. And he's preaching again tonight." So Moody went down to hear Moorhouse preach, and Moorhouse got up and uh he said something like this. He said, "Now, all week we've been talking about John 3:16, for God so loved the world, the greatness of the love of God." He said, "I I've been thinking all day, searching all day for another text, and I couldn't come up with a better one. And so I'm going to preach on John 3:16 again."

And so he preached on the love of God for about the eighth or the tenth time, something like that. And afterwards, Moody said that's the first time he ever came to appreciate the greatness of God's love. You see, I'm saying this psalm is talking about God's love. "Great is His love toward us." And if the psalmist could say that before the coming of Jesus Christ, you and I certainly need to say it. Great. Great is the love of God. Not only is the love of God great, it's the greatest thing there is. There's nothing greater than that than to think that the God of all the universe loves us, who are sinners and who have rebelled against Him and does something to save us through Jesus Christ.

Great theologian Karl Barth was in this country late in life. He had never traveled to America. He'd always been on the continent. But I guess he was well over 60 years old at the time. He hadn't even begun to learn English until he was about 60. But he came to this country. They had arranged a series of lectures for him. I was in seminary at the time. And he did some traveling around and some lectures. And then they had question periods following some of the lectures. And on one of these occasions, at a question period, somebody asked Barth a typically American question. Only an American would ask a question like this.

This person stood up and said, "Dr. Barth, what is the greatest thought that has ever gone through your mind?" And Barth took it seriously. He thought for a minute. And then he raised his head and said, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." I don't know what you think of Karl Barth and Karl Barth's theology, but that was good theology. And also evidence of a humble spirit and who something about the love of God. It's his profoundly true. There is no profounder truth than this, that God has shown His great love toward us by sending Jesus Christ to be our Savior. And we learn about it in the Bible.

Now, there's more to this psalm than I have explained so far. And let me go on. I've taken that word great in verse 2 in the normal English sense as something that's large, remarkable, or distinguished or superior. And while that is true of the English word, the Hebrew lexicographers tell us that it actually has an even greater sense than that in the Hebrew because it has to do with something having prevailed over something else or someone else because of its superior qualities. Let me give you some examples so you know what I'm talking about.

It's used of the stronger side in a battle. As for example, in Exodus 17:11, where it's said that as long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning. And as they were prevailing over their foes, that's the word. They they were becoming great. Or again, Genesis 7:18. It's said there that the waters of the flood rose greatly on the earth or prevailed over the earth. The earth wasn't high enough to resist them. They covered the whole earth.

Or again, Psalm 65:3. It describes our sins. "When we were overwhelmed by sins." You atone for our transgressions. Now, that's the same word. Our sins have prevailed over us, conquered over us. Now, the point here is that when this word is used of the love of God for His people, it has the thought of God's love prevailing over any obstacles or any enemies.

Now, I mentioned when we began something about Martin Luther and his great exposition. I want to give you a little taste of Luther at this point. Luther had a lot of enemies, as you know, and they were trying to get him killed. But when he writes about this verse, he's not thinking of those physical enemies, but always thought spiritually. And he's thinking here of temptations and the kind of things that are brought upon us by the devil. And here's just a little flavor of the exposition.

"Although sin makes itself felt, death bears its teeth, and the devil frightens us, still there is far more grace to prevail over all sin, far more life to prevail over death, far more God to prevail over all the devils. In this kingdom, sin, death, and the devil are nothing more than the black clouds of the material heaven. For a time, they may well conceal heaven, but they cannot prevail. They must stay beneath the heavens and suffer it to remain, prevail, and rule over them. And at last, they must all pass away. Therefore, although sin bites us, death frightens us, and the devil throws his weight around with temptation, these are still only clouds. The heaven of grace prevails and rules. In the end, they must remain below and surrender." That's Luther. That's really great.

But that's what we have elsewhere in the Bible. Several studies ago when we were looking at Psalm 114, I referred you to Romans 8, those last verses. That's exactly what Paul is saying. He writes, "I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus our Lord."

The love of God is not just great in that He sends Jesus Christ to be our Savior. The love of God is great because it triumphs in victory over our foes. Now, there's one more word I want to look at before we bring this study of the shortest psalm to a close. And that's the word that is rendered faithfulness in verse 2. It's actually the word `Amen`, and it can actually be translated equally well truth, steadfastness, or reliability. In the New Testament, Jesus used it a lot, and it's sometimes translated `verily, verily` or `truly, truly`.

Now, `Amen` is an odd word in that it's found in virtually all the languages of the world. Very interesting. That's not true of many words, but it is of the word `Amen`. It comes from the Hebrew word, a verb, which means "to support with the arm" or "to carry." So something that is supported or held up or carried firmly is something which is firm or unshakable. This word occurs that way in a passage in Isaiah 22, for example. It refers to a firm place in a wall where a nail can be driven. "I will drive him like a peg into a firm place." The word firm is that word `Amen` or faithful. Isaiah is speaking about the unshakable character of Christ's kingdom.

Now, over the years that word came to be used in two special ways. And they're both very familiar to us. First of all, it was used of God as one of His attributes. And that follows, doesn't it? Because if the word means that which is firm, unshakable, or steady, you would have to refer to God because the only stability anything else has is because it comes from Him. If you're anchored in the Rock of Ages, you're secure. And so it's used in that way. So we find the Bible using the word of God. And some versions translate it the `God of truth`, but it has to do with the `God of stability`, truthfulness that can be counted on. Listen.

Here's Isaiah 65:16. "Whoever invokes a blessing in the land will do so by the God of truth. He who takes an oath in the land will swear by the God of truth." Now, the Hebrew literally says by the `God of the Amen`. Now, being faithful is one of God's characteristics, and this is what's mentioned in the psalm. As a matter of fact, you have a parallel construction here in which the same things are said of God's truthfulness as are said of His love. If you look at that psalm carefully, you'll see it's true. The first verse contains an obvious parallelism. "Praise the Lord, all you nations; extol Him, all you peoples." Each line is saying virtually the same thing, just varying the language slightly.

Now, the same thing is true of verse 2. "For great is His love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever." That tells us that the love of God is great and His faithfulness endures. But what is said of each of the nouns is true of the other, isn't it? You could equally well say the love of God endures and His faithfulness is great. And the reason, of course, is that each one supports the other. It's because God is the truthful God who doesn't lie and His words, or vary in His commitments, that His love prevails. And it's because His love does not vary that He can be trusted to be truthful. Now, that's the use of the word in reference to God.

The other use is this, and we know it best of all, we use it. Because we say `Amen` when we finish prayers. We say `Amen` when we hear a truth of scripture. What that means, it's a word that we use to express our agreement with what God says. God says something and we say `Amen`, meaning that we're setting our seal to His pronouncement. Now, I end that way. We've studied the psalm. Can you say that of Psalm 117? The psalm says, "Great is His love toward us and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever." Can you say `Amen` to that? You must confess that is exactly what I've discovered in God's dealings with me. I have found that His love is great and prevails and that His truth endures forever. If you have found that, which is what it is to be a Christian, and to live with God, then you say `Amen`. And when you get to the end of the psalm, you say, "Hallelujah, praise the Lord." Let's pray.

Our Father, we're thankful that we've had time to study this psalm together. We thank you that you have this marvelous way of pouring great meaning into a very short space or compass. And so we ask you to bless this psalm to us. Perhaps we should memorize this psalm and say it, but press that upon our hearts. Above all, the truthfulness of what we've just studied, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Narrator: You have been listening to The Bible Study Hour, a production of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of Reformation theologians from decades, even centuries gone by, we seek to provide contemporary Christian teaching that will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place. The Alliance Ministry includes The Bible Study Hour, featuring Dr. James Boice, Every Last Word with Bible teacher Dr. Philip Ryken, and Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, featuring Donald Grey Barnhouse. For more information on the Alliance, including a full list of radio stations carrying our programs, or to make a contribution, please contact us by calling toll-free 1-800-488-1888. Again, that's 1-800-488-1888. You can also write the Alliance at Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Or you can visit us online at www.alliancenet.org. Ask for your free resource catalog featuring books, audio teachings, commentaries, booklets, videos, and a wealth of other materials from outstanding reformed teachers and theologians, including Donald Barnhouse, James Boice, and Philip Ryken. Thank you again for your continued support.