The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Have you lost the joy of the Lord? Has discouragement with the Christian life overtaken you? It happened to the Israelites and it happens to believers today. But now, like then, there is a solution in the word of God.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. In today's study, Dr. Boice lays out a four-step plan from Psalm 85 to deal with the discouragement that sometimes overtakes us all. Let's listen as Dr. Boice shares the recipe for restoration.

Dr. James Boice: I'd like to talk about discouragement this morning and begin by asking whether you have ever been discouraged. I'm sure you have, but I am not thinking just about the kind of discouragements that come because life isn't going exactly the way you'd like it to. That is the sort of thing that comes to us all the time. Things don't go real well at work, the sales don't go up, or we have problems with people. It's not so much that I am talking about as the Christian life. Do you ever feel discouraged about the Christian life, that you don't seem to be experiencing the kind of joy, blessing, deliverance, and strength now that you had when you first became a Christian?

It might be helpful to know that other people have felt that as well. One of them was John Wesley, the great evangelist. He wrote a verse that asked, "Where is the joy I knew when first I saw the Lord?" Apparently he went through a down time. It's a very good question and it is what we want to deal with. If people like that have had problems, it is not surprising that we do. Now our prayer in times like that is that God would restore us, that He would restore the blessing we once had. I begin this way because that is exactly what our Psalmist is talking about. It's a prayer, and it is precisely this kind of prayer.

Now there is nothing in the Psalm that gives us a clue as to exactly the circumstances out of which it was written. It's another one of the Psalms of the Sons of Korah. We've been looking at those. We came to a bunch of them at the beginning of Book Two: Psalms 42, 44 through 49. Now we are in the midst of another group: 84, 85, 87, and 88. But that doesn't help us an awful lot. It did when we were studying the earlier Psalm where the Sons of Korah were the janitors. Here was a Psalm of the janitors, a great blessing. But we don't really get much of a clue here.

One speculation is that it was written shortly after the return of the Jews from their Babylonian captivity. That might not be the right setting for the Psalm. If you read the commentators, some think it is and then others advance perfectly good reasons why it is not. But whether it is the right setting or not, that period in Israel's history certainly becomes an illustration of the kind of disappointment and discouragement that the Psalm reflects. The situation was this: the Jews who returned to their homeland first did so under the blessing of Cyrus, the King of Persia, in the year 538 BC.

You get the account of that in the book of Ezra in the Old Testament. The first six chapters tell about it. When they got back, the first thing they did was lay the foundations of the temple. Then they worked for a long time trying to get the temple up. It was finally completed between the years 520 and 515 BC, to judge from the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah. You have to sort of reconstruct some of that history, but that seems to be what happened. They also tried to rebuild the city's walls somewhere along the way, but that was a much harder task than building the temple.

At some point they stopped it, probably because their enemies made it impossible for them to continue. Nehemiah, the first chapter, seems to indicate that sometime in this period, their enemies actually were successful enough to come to the city and burn down the gates. A city without walls without gates wasn't any good. So they undoubtedly entered into a period of real discouragement here. In the beginning, they would have been filled with joy. They were returning to their homeland. God seemed to be blessing. But then they entered into this really difficult time of discouragement, and even despair set in. According to the opening chapters of Nehemiah, which reflect what was going on there in the homeland, the people were in great trouble and disgrace.

The question is, if we could use that as an illustration, what do we do in circumstances like that? How do you respond? What do you do? The answer is that you pray and you wait for God to answer. I repeat, I don't know whether this is the background of this Psalm or not, but it is certainly what the Psalm does. If it is the background, if this was written to reflect that situation in the early years of the return of the exiles, then it's significant to know that God did answer the prayer. He answered it by Nehemiah because Nehemiah was led of God to return to Jerusalem. With able administration and blessed by God, he enabled those walls to be erected in a very short time.

So what I'd like to do is look at the Psalm that way, assuming that it is praying out of a situation like this and searching it to see what it actually tells us about how we should deal with disappointments or discouragements. It actually gives us four steps, and they are marked by the four stanzas of the New International Version. I don't like formulas as a rule, four things you should do. If you do these four things, you will be all right, because generally they are superficial. What I work for is understanding, to understand the ways of God and understand what it is to be a Christian. Because if you have the understanding, that works in a great variety of circumstances.

But all that aside, you do have certain principles or steps here, and they are very useful. That is what I would like to look at. The place we have to start to overcome discouragement is by reflecting on the goodness of God toward us in the past. That is what verses 1 to 3 do. Now that is part of the problem, of course. Remember the way I began? I said, do you ever feel discouraged because you don't have in the present the kind of joy and strength and happiness and all that you had shortly after you became a Christian? So when you look to the past and you remember the good days, that is part of the problem now.

But at the same time, it's also part of the solution. Because if you look to the past and your sensitivity to the goodness of God in the past, if nothing else, you are reminding yourself that God really is good. That's nothing to be treated lightly. We serve a good God. We serve a gracious God. We serve a pardoning God. If you've become a Christian, you know by looking to the past that that's exactly the way God has dealt with you. Now the first verse of the Psalm deals with the land and with the people's reversal of fortune. It is why we think that this might possibly have to do with the period following the exile.

But what is striking about that opening stanza is that it doesn't go on to dwell about the restoration, but rather it talks about the forgiveness of sins and the removal of the wrath of God. Here is the way it reads: "You forgave the iniquity of your people and covered all their sins. You set aside all your wrath and turned from your fierce anger." You see, the greatest of all the mercies that we can receive from God is the forgiveness of sins. But we don't often think that way. This is a foundational experience in the Christian life, but we don't value it. The reason we don't value it, or value it as we should, is that we are so wrapped up in the affairs of this life.

We think so much in terms of material things that if we have the material things, we think we're blessed. If, even for a short period of time, the material things are taken away from us, then we think we're not blessed and we get discouraged. I know some people, the best thing that could happen to them would be to lose some of their material possessions, because then they'd begin to think about spiritual things and God in their desperation might actually get through to them. But they float along in a sea of comfort and very seldom consider their relationship to God.

But you see here in this Psalm, this Psalmist, or Psalmists if there are more than one, really appreciates the fact that God has forgiven the people's sins. Some of the strongest salvation language in Scripture is present in those verses. You may have noticed it. How about that phrase, "covered their sins," in verse 2? That describes what's meant by the atonement. That is what the atonement means, the covering of sin. How about the next verse that speaks about setting aside all your wrath? The theological term for that is propitiation. It has to do with turning aside the wrath of God. So we really have a very rich stanza here.

Now if some of us would do that, we wouldn't even have to go on to step two. We are talking about principles here or steps or formulas, whatever you choose to call it. You might not have to do that at all. It would make a difference in many of our lives if we would just stop thinking about the material things and begin to think about the spiritual. Remember, everything material is going to pass away. It says that in the New Testament. But the things that are invisible, that is to say the spiritual things, are the things that remain. So just to begin to think spiritually about the forgiveness of sin and escape from the wrath of God that we have by His grace through Jesus Christ might actually change you so much that you would soon be praising God instead of complaining to Him.

However, remembering the past doesn't always provide victory in the present. So in the second stanza of this Psalm, the writer moves to direct petition. That's verses 4 through 7. He moves to prayer. He's praying no doubt for himself, but also on behalf of the people. He includes himself with them and he prays for two things. First of all, that God would restore the people. "Restore us again," verse 4. Then secondly, "revive us again," verse 6. Now let me say there is some question as to how that first phrase should be translated, because the Hebrew word simply means "turn" and it can be thought of in at least three ways.

It can refer to the people, which by the way is what the New International Version suggests. That means it can be understood as "turn us" or "turn us back," which has with it the idea of restoration. It's why it's translated that way. Secondly, it can refer to God with the idea of God being asked to turn away from His wrath. If that's the case, it's a repeat for the present of what was just said in verse 4. You turned from Your wrath in the past, we ask You to do it in the present. Or thirdly, it can refer to God with the sense that He's being asked to turn back to His people again.

He seemed to have turned away from them in His displeasure, and now they are asking Him to turn back again. All three of those are true, but the best translation is probably what the New International Version gives because the other two ideas are redundant and because this prayer, "restore us again," is matched two verses later by "revive us again." So he seems to be talking about two aspects of what God really needs to do to bless the people. Now God can restore us. Not only can He restore us, He can restore to us the things that we have lost.

We think here of the book of Joel, a book that deals with this very problem. Joel speaks of God restoring the years that the locusts have eaten. It comes out of the imagery of the day. There had been a great locust plague. Joel explains it as being an expression of the judgment of God on His people, but also as a warning of an even greater judgment to come. He said, "You think it's bad that the locusts have come and have eaten everything around that you could possibly have to survive on. What are you going to do when the final judgment comes? That's even worse."

But then what he says, this is where the grace of the gospel comes through in this minor prophet, he says if you will repent of your sin and return to God, He's able to restore what you've lost. Then there are these classic verses: "I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten, the great locust and the young locust, the other locust and the locust swarm." It just breathes with the vitality of the actual destruction. "My great army that I sent among you, you will have plenty to eat until you are full and you will praise the name of the Lord your God who has worked wonders for you."

Now sin causes us to lose blessings. It causes us to lose many blessings, and the blessings we lose themselves can't be restored. But God is able to start again with you and provide blessings with new opportunities that come along. So let me apply it this way: if your life has been ruined by the locusts of sin, what you are called upon to do is repent of the sin, return to the Lord, and find that He will return to you. Now secondly, the Psalmist prays, "revive us again." Revive means to resurrect or make alive, and it implies that the people as a people were alive once, but spiritually speaking, they have died.

So what they need to do is live again. That is what the church always needs, and that's what revivals are all about. That is the coming to life once again of the alleged people of God so that the church actually becomes the church. When we think of revivals, we tend to think of them taking place in the world. It's part of the self-righteousness or hypocrisy of Christians. They look out at the world and say, "The world is a terrible place. God really needs to revive the world." No, God needs to convert the world through the witness and life of Christian people. But the revivals take place in the church.

You know, they go through three stages historically speaking. Those who have studied revivals have noticed it. In the first stage is when in a local congregation under the powerful preaching of men like Martin Luther or John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, George Whitefield, or somebody like that, the people of God, as the word is explained to them, the alleged people of God, wake up to the fact that they're not really Christians. That is why in this country in the time of the early revivals in the days of Jonathan Edwards, they spoke of them not as revivals but as the Great Awakening.

Because what impressed these preachers is that the alleged people of God were waking up to the fact that they really weren't Christians. Then the second stage of the revival is the revival itself. It's when these awakened people under the same preaching and the hearing of the gospel of God's grace in Christ actually come to trust Jesus Christ as Savior and are born again. So being born again, the life is present. That's what revival refers to. Then the third stage of the revival is when the world outside sees what's going on in the church and is so impressed with what's happening among the people of God that the world actually comes to the church and says, "What in the world is happening here? Something's happening that's important. Let's find out what it is." Then they come under conviction and are converted as well.

Now we live in an age that's quite different from that, you see. We haven't had anything like a revival. So we're making efforts to go out and reach people. It's good. We should, you see. But what is the basic need is the reviving of the people of God. Now that is what the Psalmist is asking for. He's asking to be revived. We haven't had a revival in this country for many, many decades, hundreds of years. I want you to notice one more thing about this stanza, and that's the reference to God's unfailing love in verse 7. It is used as an argument for the two prayers.

You see, he's asking God to restore the people and revive the people, but he doesn't plead the people's goodness or even their intentions to reform. On the contrary, he acknowledges the justice of God's displeasure. What he does say is, "Nevertheless, God, You are a loving God and You are endless in Your love, and so that's what I plead for. I plead for Your mercy." It's not the justice of God we need. It's the mercy of God and we need to ask for it, and ask for it sincerely. Now thirdly, having reminded himself about God's past mercies and having prayed for a renewal of those mercies in his own day, what does the Psalmist do next?

Well, it's what I alluded to earlier. What he does is get quiet and wait for God to answer. That is what verses 8 and 9 talk about. The text says, "I will listen to what God the Lord will say." Let me give you an illustration of this from another one of the minor prophets. His name was Habakkuk, and in the early chapters of his book you find that what he has been doing has been praying for revival. He wanted God to restore the people. It is exactly the prayer that we have here in this Psalm. God doesn't do it. What God says is that He is going to send a judgment instead.

It's quite interesting when you compare Habakkuk with Jonah. Habakkuk prayed for a revival and didn't get it. Jonah got a revival and he didn't want it, which is a way of saying that God is sovereign in the matter of salvation. But at any rate, Habakkuk was praying for God to send a revival and God said, "No, instead I'm going to send the Babylonians, that great and terrible people, and they are going to overrun the land." At that point Habakkuk began to tremble because that certainly was not what he wanted and he feared it as anybody would. He didn't know what to do, so he got quiet.

He said, "I'll stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts. I will look to see what He will say to me and what answer I am to give to this complaint." So he expressed the problem, he waited for God to answer, and God did. When God answered, what God said was this. He said, "I am going to judge the Babylonians too, so don't confront Me with the moral problem saying I'm using the ungodly to judge those who are more godly than themselves. No, the Babylonians will be judged in time. But I'm going to judge My people first."

Then he gave that great revelation which had to do with what Habakkuk and the godly of his day would need to do during the time of judgment, and it went like this: "In the meantime, the just shall live by faith." Habakkuk 2:4, that's the verse that's carried over into the book of Romans, Romans 1:17. Martin Luther read it and it became the key verse, the cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation: the just shall live by faith. Well, let me say it's never foolish to wait upon God because God is not slow to answer. Our problem is that we are impatient with Him and that we hardly wait at all.

So if you're following the flow of thought here, first of all, you've got remembering. Remembering the blessing of past days. It takes your mind off yourself and it gets your mind thinking about God, how great He is, how good He is. Then secondly, praying. It's perfectly right to express the discouragement you feel and ask for a renewal. "Lord, I don't want to be like this. I want to be lifted up again. I want to be restored. I want to be revived." Then because the prayer is serious, you wait upon God to answer and to actually do it. That's what the third stanza is about.

Now while he's waiting for God to answer, one other thing occurs to him, something else he can do. It's a waiting but it's not an utterly passive waiting. So what you find in the last stanza is that he looks ahead to the future, anticipating what God is going to do. In other words, he's prayed a prayer of faith. He's asked God to do something and really he believes that God is going to do it, and so while he's waiting for God to do it, he thinks ahead to what it is going to be like when God does it. Now if you want to talk about the power of positive thinking, there it is, but you see, it's grounded in the character of God.

He remembered that God had promised peace to His people. It's the great Hebrew word, Shalom. He reminded himself that the Lord's salvation is near those who fear Him, that His glory may dwell in the land. And so he looked ahead to see what this would be. You come to this last stanza and it is really a bright, uplifting, joyful stanza. It is one of the great poetic sections of the Psalms. Verse 10 alone is mentioned many, many times by people. "Love and faithfulness meet together. Righteousness and peace kiss each other." We probably know it best in the King James Version, which says "mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other."

Now that is generally understood as a promise of the way salvation comes through Jesus Christ. So you have a conflict, as it were, in the character of God where sinners are concerned. God the righteous God must judge sin and yet He's a merciful God and wishes to save them. So how is that resolved? Well, it's resolved by the atonement, when Jesus dies for sin. So it's at the cross that righteousness and mercy come together. Now that of course is true, but I don't think that's primarily what the stanza is about, maybe part of it. But the stanza is much bigger and broader.

What it is actually doing is looking forward to an ideal state in time when the harmony that is in God Himself will also pervade and dominate the creation. Derek Kidner, one of the commentators, says of this stanza: "The climax is one of the most satisfying descriptions of concord, spiritual, moral, and material, found anywhere in Scripture." Now let's remember as a background that the devil is the great disrupter. That's what sin does. Sin disrupts. It produces barriers between people and it messes up the harmony of God's creation. Satan can never put anything back together again. He can only break it up.

But God is the great restorer. The reason He is able to do that is that He has everything in harmony within Himself and He has the power to do that in us as well. Now the stanza, as I look at it, suggests three harmonies. First of all, there's a harmony in God. Remember I said a moment ago that when we speak of righteousness and mercy in God and we think of the cross and sinners, we sometimes picture that as if that is a struggle within the nature of the Godhead. Here is God the righteous God trying to figure out how He's going to save sinners. He wants to save them but He can't save them, and so He's wrestling with this and He finally comes up with the atonement.

Now it may be helpful as a way of explaining what the atonement is all about, but it's a misrepresentation of God. God is never in disharmony. God is in perfect harmony within Himself. That is what the verse is saying. These great attributes, all of them, love and faithfulness and righteousness and peace, they are always at home in God. It's from that harmony that all the other harmonies come. The second harmony is between heaven and earth. That is a way of saying there is a harmony between God and man. It is what verse 11 suggests when it speaks of faithfulness springing from the earth and righteousness looking down from heaven.

We could see this as God's gift of righteousness which comes to us, received on our part by faith as we open our hands to God's gift. Verse is probably best seen as pointing to a state in which God's people live in faithful obedience to Him and are blessed by Him, the chief blessing of which is righteousness. That's what happens when salvation really comes to a people and a people in large number seek God. The glory of God dwells in their land. And then thirdly, it speaks of a harmony in man, in man himself. You see, these qualities, love, faithfulness, righteousness, and peace, are not among the incommunicable attributes of God.

That is, those that belong to the very essence of deity and that God can't share with us, things like omniscience, we're never going to know all things. Omnipotence, we're never going to be all powerful. Eternity, we're never going to be eternal. Self-sufficiency, we're never going to be self-sufficient. Those things are in God and can't be shared. But these are not those qualities. These are things that can be shared. They're communicable qualities. And therefore, not only can they be shared with the people of God, they must be shared with the people of God if they really are the people of God.

In other words, if we really are at peace with God ourselves, peace having been made with us by the blood of Christ's cross, then we will become peacemakers because we'll be at peace and therefore we will help to bring peace in an otherwise cruel, warring, and disharmonious world. Let me tell you something about Oliver Cromwell. Sometimes these Psalms are reflected in incidents from the past. He was the Lord Protector of England between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. He loved the Psalms. This was one of them.

On the 16th of September in 1656, he was reading this Psalm in Whitehall in London, the day before the meeting of the second parliament of the Protectorate. It was a Tuesday. The parliament opened on Wednesday the next day. When it did, Cromwell addressed the assembly and he based his talk in part on this Psalm. He began by saying, "Yesterday I read a Psalm which truly may not unbecome both me to tell you of and you to observe. It's the 85th Psalm and it's very instructive and significant. Although I'm only going to touch a little bit upon it, I ask you to pay attention clearly."

Then he expounded on the Psalm as an expression of his vision of hope that by their faithfulness, he was speaking now to people who professed to be followers of Jesus Christ, their faithfulness to God's righteousness, that righteousness itself may begin to reign in England and a better, finer, happier, and more harmonious age might come. Well, that was never perfectly achieved of course, but it was in part and it still is wherever the people of God really repent of their sin and seek His face. You see, that's what it says in 2 Chronicles 7:14, a key verse.

It is not written to the world. It is written to the people of God. It says, "If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land." God will hear, forgive our sin, and then begin a process of healing. There may never have been a period in the history of our country where that is more needed than it is today. You see how that works? We begin with our discouragement, we get our eyes on God, we begin to pray, we wait for His answer, we have a vision of a better age to come, and by the time we get to the end, hopefully our minds are off ourselves and on to God and to the work to be done. God brings blessing and the glory is to His name.

Let's pray. Our Father, we are thankful that we have had time to study this important Psalm. It's not one that is perhaps best known in its entirety, but it's an important Psalm. It deals with an important problem, one we wrestle with in our lives frequently, and it points us to something which is far greater and bigger than ourselves, blessing on the world for the sake of Christian people who know You and have turned from sin to follow after righteousness. Our Father, with no sense of pride or arrogance, we pray that You would revive us again in order that we might be that kind of a blessing for the sake of other people and for the praise and honor of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to this message from The Bible Study Hour, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is a coalition of pastors, scholars, and churchmen who hold to the historic creeds and confessions of the Reformed faith, and who proclaim biblical doctrine in order to foster a Reformed awakening in today's church.

To learn more about the Alliance, visit AllianceNet.org. And while you're there, visit our online store, Reformed Resources, where you can find messages and books from Dr. Boice and other outstanding teachers and theologians. Or ask for a free Reformed Resources catalog by calling 1-800-488-1888.

Please take the time to write to us and share how The Bible Study Hour has impacted you. We'd love to hear from you and pray for you. Our address is 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. Please consider giving financially to help keep The Bible Study Hour impacting people for decades to come. You can do so at our website, AllianceNet.org, over the phone at 1-800-488-1888, or send a check to 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. For Canadian gifts, mail those to 237 Rouge Hills Drive, Scarborough, Ontario, M1C 2Y9. Thanks for your continued prayer and support, and for listening to The Bible Study Hour, preparing you to think and act biblically.