The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Imagine the feeling of having lost everything. Your home, your family, even your place of worship. As we study the response of the Israelites to the destruction of all they hold dear, we might wonder how we would cope when our world crumbles, and there is no hope on the horizon.

Guest (Male): Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and Internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.

Guest (Male): In this Psalm, the author is not searching for an answer. The Psalm itself is the answer. Let's join Dr. Boice as he examines Psalm 79, where Asaph concludes there's only one solution to that very difficult question.

Dr. James Boice: Just this morning I was talking with one of our elders at the elders prayer meeting before the morning service, and he said he was looking forward to the continuation of these studies on the Psalms because he had always had trouble finding an historical context for the ones that come later on in the Psalter. He asked me about a number of them.

I forget the exact ones, 113, 114, something like that, and I said I had no idea what the historical setting of those Psalms is. I haven't studied them yet. Unfortunately, sometimes even when you do study them, you're not sure because the scholars disagree and the evidence isn't always there.

Now, they disagree about Psalm 79 too. That's the one we're going to study now. It's obviously describing the destruction of Jerusalem. And you would think that would be obvious. Indeed, I think it is fairly obvious, but scholars disagree even with the obvious and the destruction of Jerusalem that we know about and think about most readily is what happened when it was destroyed by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC.

But there is some problem with that. Some scholars see difficulties with it. Some of the problems are the ones we discussed when I was looking at Psalm 74 because that's describing the destruction of the city as well. And some who look at it say, no, it doesn't quite fit what we know about the time of Nebuchadnezzar and so they tend to put it later in the time of the Maccabees and the destruction that they're thinking about in that connection is what was brought upon the city by Antiochus Epiphanes, one of the kings who did a great deal of destruction.

Now, I don't want to repeat all those arguments, we've dealt with them already, but there are two points that concern this Psalm that have bearing upon it. And that is citations of verses 6 and 7 in Jeremiah. You look up Jeremiah 10:25, you see that there seems to be some connection between verses 6 and 7 and that verse in the 10th chapter.

And then what you can't look up because you don't have it in your Bible, but that is a parent citation of the third verse of this Psalm in the apocryphal book of First Maccabees, found in the seventh chapter verse 16 of that book. Now, people who make a great deal of that say, well, that puts the Psalm later, obviously after Jeremiah because it's quoting Jeremiah, and in the time of the Maccabees because that's the same language. Neither of those arguments hold up very well in my judgment.

As far as Jeremiah goes, one of the characteristics of Jeremiah is that he seems quite free in quoting earlier portions of the Old Testament. You find that in many places in Jeremiah's writing, and as a matter of fact, in that 10th chapter where he seems to be quoting this Psalm or this Psalm is quoting him, just before that he quotes another verse from the Psalms. Not from Psalm 79, but from the sixth Psalm and so what he seems to be doing is just picking up phrases, verses out of the Psalms and and using them in the context of his prophecy. In other words, Jeremiah seems to be quoting the Psalm rather than it being the other way around. The Psalm is the original one. It had to come before his time. Therefore, going back at the time of the fall of Nebuchadnezzar.

And then as far as the quotation in First Maccabees is concerned, the quotation there is introduced by a very interesting phrase. The Maccabees says, "According to the word that has been written," and then it quotes the Psalm. Well, the author of Maccabees generally speaks that way when he's referring to something that's in scripture. That which has been written, that is what has come from God by revelation, and that would mean that if he's referring to this Psalm, the Psalm must have been in existence for a long enough time beforehand to be regarded as scripture or to be part of the canon of the Old Testament scriptures by the time of the Maccabees. In other words, it predates the time of Antiochus Epiphanes and probably this does refer to the destruction by Nebuchadnezzar.

That's the way the Jews take it anyway. You may be interested to know that even today at the Wailing Wall on Fridays, this is the Psalm that's recited. Jews still do that. And furthermore, it's written into the liturgy for one of the days in the Jewish calendar. It's the ninth of the month of Av and that's a day that celebrates the temple's destruction. So at least the Jews see it that way and probably we should see it that way as well.

Now, how about the outline of the Psalm? A number of writers see it as having two parts: verses 1 through 4, that's sort of an initial lament describing what's wrong, and then the whole rest of the Psalm, that is verses 5 through the end, verse 13. That are the Psalmist's prayer. He describes what's wrong, he's complaining and then he makes a prayer to God.

It's possible to divide it very well according to the stanzas of the New International Version, which is what most of us use. Certainly they have divided it up thematically, slightly different idea in those two middle stanzas. The only correction I would make if that's what we follow is that verse 12 ought to belong with the third stanza and verse 13 really should stand by itself. Because verse 12 is part of the prayer, it's asking God to do something and then the verse at the end just sort of looks toward the future and anticipating God's answer to the prayer says this is what it's going to be in a future day. So if you want to outline it, that's the way I would handle it.

Now, I've already commented on this man Asaph's distress at the destruction of Jerusalem when we were considering Psalm 74. If you can think back to that, you may recall that in that Psalm, Asaph, as it were, took God by the hand and walked him through the ruins. And he said, "Look, I want you to see what's happened here. Right over there, the hole in the wall, that's where they broke through. And right over there is where the temple was, you just see ashes now, but that's where all the wonderful paneling was and they hacked away at it like they would have been hacking through a thicket with axes." And then they weren't content with that, they went through the whole land in order to destroy every place in the land where you were worshipped. And they were successful in doing it. All those places are gone. Look at it, you can see the ruins. That's the way Asaph talks in Psalm 74.

Now it's a bit different here. There are some similarities. Both of the Psalms ask God how long this terrible state is to continue, they use the word forever, is it to go on forever? Both of the Psalms ask that. Both ask God to rise up and destroy those who have destroyed Judah. That is the enemies, the Babylonians. Both look forward to a day when the people of God will be able to praise him for his mighty acts of deliverance once again. They can't praise him for that now because everything's in ruins, but one day they're looking ahead to that. So these two Psalms are alike and it really makes us think that they must be by the same author. He's got the same mindset, he's thinking the same way. But there are differences.

And the chief difference is what is bothering the Psalmist. In that earlier Psalm, what really was bothering the Psalmist is that the temple was destroyed. He had a whole stanza in which he talked about that. It's the one where he asked God to walk through the ashes and look at the ruins. Look at this, this was your temple. It's where we used to come and worship you. Look what's happened to it. That's what he's distressed about. In Psalm 79 that we're looking at now, what he seems to be chiefly concerned about is the people. What happened to them? He's concerned about those who have been killed because their bodies are lying in the street. There's nobody there to bury them. He is concerned for those who were taken prisoner, as many were, carried off to Babylon. A number of the leaders were taken away that way. And then for those who were left behind desolate, there are always some people who don't get deported. And so here they are stragglers, scattered around in this impoverished land. He's concerned for all these people.

Yeah, that's the way the first stanza reads, doesn't it? Look at it. He talks about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. God, the nations have invaded your inheritance. Nations means the Gentiles, of course. They've defiled your holy temple, they've reduced Jerusalem to rubble. That's what he said in the earlier Psalm and now notice where he goes now. They have given the dead bodies of your servants as food to the birds of the air, the flesh of your saints to the beasts of the field. They poured out blood like water all around Jerusalem and there's no one to bury the dead. We are the objects of reproach to our neighbors, scorn and derision to those around us.

Now, Jeremiah had described the terrible days that would come, and one of the things he had said, Jeremiah 7:33, is that there would be so many dead and so few survivors that there would be no one to bury the dead. That was a terrible thing. It was a disgrace not to be able to bury the dead. It would be bad enough in our culture. It was particularly bad for them. It was disrespect and all of that. And Jeremiah said the situation is going to be so bad that that's what it's going to be like. And now the Psalmist says, "Yes, that's exactly what it's like." What Jeremiah had prophesied had actually come true.

Now, none of us have ever been part of a disaster of this magnitude. I don't believe, there are people who go through it in other parts of the world, but I'd be very surprised if there's anyone among us who's ever gone through anything quite like this because this was the literal destruction of everything they had, everything they knew. The destruction was political first of all because the nation no longer existed. There wasn't any king, weren't any nobles, wasn't any army, wasn't any government. All of that was gone, just everybody was on their own. The nation was gone. The destruction was economic because the land was devastated. Nobody could make a living. Crops were all gone. All the little houses of the artisans were destroyed, and even if the artisans were there and the houses were intact, there would be nobody with any money to buy any of the things that they produce. So economically the land was devastated.

The destruction was social because the entire families were wiped out. There was no family in the land which had not lost a husband or a wife or a grandfather or the children. There was total destruction of the families and many were carried away as prisoners. And the destruction was religious because the religion of the people was centered in Jerusalem and its temple, and the sacrifices and the priesthood, all of that was gone. You just can't imagine a greater destruction than that.

None of us have been through that as I've said, and yet you and I have losses, things come into our lives that really hurt. And so, the question we ask, what you want to learn from the Psalm is how the Psalmist deals with it. The question is, how do we cope when bad things come? Now, this Psalm is not searching for an answer. Remember there have been Psalms that were doing that, the 73rd Psalm did. Asaph is describing how when he looked around at the ungodly, the wicked, and he saw them prospering, and he saw that the righteous weren't doing as well. He says his foot had almost slipped. He almost lost his faith until he went into the temple and began to perceive the end of the wicked, that God just hasn't finished with things yet. There's a judgment yet to come. He's searching for an answer and he finds it. This Psalm is not searching for an answer, this Psalm is the answer.

And you say at that point, well, what is the answer then? The answer is hanging onto God, even in the most terrible times. Not giving up your hold on God. In other words, hanging on by faith. Now, notice, you find it at the very beginning, don't you? Here he's describing this terrible destruction, but notice, he speaks of these enemies as having invaded what? "Your inheritance." That's God's inheritance. You see, he's still in touch with God. And as having defiled "your holy temple," it's God's temple that's been defiled. And having given the bodies of "your servants" as food to the birds of the air, and the flesh of "your saints" to the beasts of the earth. In other words, what he's saying at the very beginning is even though the people have suffered a great calamity, they are nevertheless the people of the living God.

And so the Psalm begins with that and it ends with that and all throughout what it's really doing is hanging onto God. And so the question for us, if you want to measure ourselves by the experience and the faith of the Psalmist, is simply this, do we have that kind of confidence in God? Bad things come into our lives. They do to all of us sooner or later. When they come, do you sort of lose everything, throw up your hand in despair or do you hang on to God? That's what the Psalmist does.

The next two stanzas, if we follow the division of the New International Version, really describe how he does that, and in my judgment they're best taken together. Because they really contain the substance of this Psalmist's prayer. He asks different questions, which is why the New International Version divides them up. The first one asks, "How long, O Lord, will you be angry forever? How long will your jealousy burn like fire?" That's the same question that was asked in Psalm 74 verse 10. And then the second stanza, the next one asked, the third one of the Psalm asks, "Why should the nations say, where is their God?" That's a different question.

But they're both the same thing really because what they're doing is asking God for help. The Psalmist has described how bad things are. The temple's gone, the people are deported, many of them are dead. How long is this going to go on? Won't you help us, God? That's what he's trying to say. And these next two stanzas, the rest of the Psalm really does that. Now, I think the way to do it is to look at the points they make. At least four of them. First of all, there's the question that I've mentioned, "How long will this punishment last?" That's often asked by God's persecuted people.

People of God don't complain about their punishment being unjust, they know they're sinners. They know they continue to sin in thought, word, and deed, and so they're not shaking their fist in the face of God, saying, "Oh God, why have you let this happen to us?" It's not a question of that at all, but they are hurting, you see. And so while they're not complaining, they are saying to God, "How long is it going to go on? I, you know, I'm just human, and you know that. I you know my frame, you know I'm just dust. How long is this going to go on? I'm not sure I'm able to handle it much longer."

We find that question throughout the Bible. You find it in Revelation 6:10. Here the redeemed in heaven are looking at the martyrs and they're saying, "How long, oh God, are you going to tolerate the way your martyrs are being treated? When are you going to avenge them?" It's a question Saint Augustine asked of God before his conversion. He knew the truth of Christianity and he was persuaded of it, but he couldn't quite abandon his past life of sin and actually embrace Jesus Christ and follow him. And he was in two minds, he was struggling with this for a long time and was great anguish about it. And in the confessions, he has a description of his conversion, how he was in the garden of a friend's estate in Milan, Italy. He went off to a corner of the garden because he was so upset, he was crying over his condition. And he says there, "I prayed," he said, not indeed in these exact words, "Yet to this purpose, I said, 'And thou, O Lord, how long, how long will you be angry forever?'" He's quoting from the Psalm. You see?

And while he was praying that, he heard a child singing on the other side of the garden wall. The child was singing the Latin words, "Tolle lege, tolle lege." It means take up and read. Augustine said he never ever heard a child sing like that before. So he took it as a word from God and went over to a table in the garden where they had a copy of the scripture. He opened it up at random and he came upon Romans 13, 13 and 14, "Let us behave decently as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness." It goes on to say and "put on the Lord Jesus Christ." And that's what he did, he was converted.

We say there are times even before our conversion when we're asking the question, "How long, O Lord, how long is this going to go on?" Let's acknowledge that the hand of God often does seem heavy upon us and his workings in our lives seem slow. It's not going to go on forever. That's the point. Remember that. And it will never be more than you can bear. God knows us and he's not going to tempt us above what we're able to bear.

So the message is, trust God, the time will come when you'll be able to praise him again.

Now the second point is this. You can't miss it in those verses. The Psalmist is saying it's time for you to punish those who punished us. Whenever we read anything like that, that bothers us because it sounds vindictive, wrong, and after all, Jesus Christ taught us to forgive those who persecute us, even to turn the other cheek. And so it's right that we should be troubled by it because Jesus did teach us to forgive. But we have to remember two things. First of all, in our culture today, if we err in any direction, and we do, it is not on the side of being too harsh, but it's on the side of being too lax. In our culture today, we hardly have any sense of right and wrong at all, and so we, we, we just kind of pull back and everybody can kind of do their own thing. So, it's not so much that we are forgiving, it's that we are amoral. We just don't care one way or the other. And we forget that moral people should hate the evil and desire that it be restrained and punished on the one hand, and also love the good and desire that it should be rewarded and held up for emulation. So our problem in a sense is worse than that of these ancient Jews that there may have been a vindictive note in some of this and we don't want that, but you see we err in the other direction.

And then the second thing we need to remember is that regardless of the attitude we take toward evil, justice is going to be done and evil is going to be punished. That's what we are talking about when we talk about the final judgment. Jesus talked about the final judgment. He said, "Prepare for it, get ready for it." Someday you're going to have to face God. And don't forget that the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, has more in it about judgment and hell and suffering and punishment than any other book in the Bible. It's as if God's final word to us is a warning. You see? So we may not be terribly concerned about punishment, but God is, and he's going to do the right thing, justice will be done.

So what should we do? Well, if we really love people, what we should do is not simply turn aside and not care what they're doing, but we should warn them of the judgment to come. And tell them about the forgiveness that is to be found in Jesus Christ as he made atonement for our sins. Salvation is through faith in him.

Now that leads to the next point that we find in these stanzas, and that is the forgiveness of sins. Every prayer, every true prayer should have within it a confession of sins. It's one way you can know whether you're really praying. If all you're doing is asking God to give you things, that's really not prayer. If you're comparing yourself to other people and thinking how much better you are than they are, that's not really prayer either. You remember that prayer of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Jesus' story? The Pharisee was the one that stood up to pray. Everybody asked him to pray, after all, he was the Pharisee. He's the religious man. Pharisee, pray, please for us. Won't you say a word? And he began in what seemed to be the right way, "God," he said, lifting up his eyes to heaven, but from that point all he did was talk about himself and how much better he was than that tax collector standing over there. Everybody would have agreed with him. But Jesus said he wasn't really praying. What did Jesus say? He said the Pharisee prayed to himself. That was Jesus' evaluation.

And over there you had the tax collector and what did he say? He said, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." And Jesus said, "That's a real prayer." And not only is it a real prayer, it's a prayer that God hears and that man went home justified. Because he didn't say to God, "Look how righteous I am." He said, "God, I'm a sinner and I need your mercy, which is provided through the atonement on the altar." So he prayed in that way.

Now this has bearing on Psalm 79 because one of its most striking features is an acknowledgement of sin. He acknowledges it in two ways. First of all, the sins of the fathers. Our fathers sinned. We are descended from sinful human beings, and it's because of their sin that the judgment has come upon us. That was patently true. God had warned them generation after generation that he was going to destroy their city and their culture, and he did. So now they're looking at the destruction and they acknowledge the sins of the fathers. Now, that's something in itself. But this Psalm also goes on from that point and it acknowledges the people's sins in the present. Because what they really are saying at that point is, "And we are no different than our fathers. They sinned, and we sin too." And so what the Psalmist is really doing is asking for mercy.

Notice verse 9, "Deliver us and atone for our sins for your name's sake." Now they went through all those things that I described earlier, the political, economic, social and religious destruction of their entire community and their lives and their nation, and there is not a suggestion in this Psalm, not a breath anywhere that they didn't deserve it. They acknowledged whatever happened to them, they deserved. But now they come and they ask for mercy by the atonement of God. That's an interesting word, isn't it? Here in the middle of the Psalm, "Make atonement for our sins."

Now, what was the Psalmist thinking of when he said, "Make atonement for our sins"? The only atonement he knew was the atonement that was made by the high priest through the sacrifices, particularly on the Day of Atonement. But the high priest did was take an animal, he confessed over the animal the sins of the people. Then that animal was killed and the blood was taken into the most holy place and sprinkled on the mercy seat, on the Ark of the Covenant. It came between the holy presence of God and the law which the people had broken represented by the tables of the law that was kept within the ark. So that's how atonement was made. That's why the covering of the ark was called the atonement seat or the mercy seat. It's because of making atonement through the shedding of the blood that the people could be forgiven from their sins. Now, that's interesting that the Psalmist would say that, isn't it, because in these circumstances there is no temple. Right? There's no Jerusalem. There's no temple. There's no priesthood. There are no sacrifices. What are you thinking of?

He must be going beyond it. He must be saying, "We can't go through the types, but that's what we need anyhow." He doesn't say, "Forgive us our sins." He says, "Make atonement for our sins." I don't know how strong his faith was or how much insight he had by revelation, but I do know how God did make atonement for our sins, and that was through Jesus Christ. Because the time was coming when God would send his son to die upon the cross, right there in Jerusalem, shedding his blood, giving his life as an atonement for the sins of his people in order that they might not die and go to hell, but rather die and go to heaven. And that is why on on the day of Christ's death when he actually expired upon the cross, we're told in Luke's Gospel that that great veil of the temple that divided the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place was torn in two from top to bottom, because it was God's way of saying, "The atonement has now been made. All these other atonements have just been types looking forward to the great atonement to come and now Jesus has done that." And now the way is open into the presence of God, the holy presence of God for all who will come through faith in him.

Well, there's a fourth point and it's that God might glorify his name. G. Campbell Morgan in one of his comments says, "This is the great passion of the Psalm, the glory of the divine name." And God is appealed to on that basis. Verse 9, "Help us, O God, our Savior, for the glory of your name." I suggest that is the strongest appeal you can ever make to God. Because God himself says, "I am the Lord, that is my name. I will not give my glory to another." Isaiah 42 verse 8. If you begin to pray with the glory of God in view, not your glory, not your comfort, not your desires, but the glory of God. If you put that into your prayer, if that's what you really are concerned about is that God might be known as the God he is, glorified in you and in your circumstances. Then that's a very strong appeal, and other things fall into place after that. You see, you're not praying so selfishly after that. You're not praying for yourself so much or just for material things. You begin to see it from the perspective of God.

Isn't that why the Lord's Prayer begins that way? "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name." It means may your name be glorified. That's where it starts. And after that it talks about the kingdom and our needs and all of that. When it gets to the end, it goes back to the same thing again and it says, "For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory." You never go wrong if you begin with the glory of God and you end with the glory of God as well.

Now I said earlier that the last verse of this Psalm stands by itself because this last verse is no longer a part of the petition. The prayer is really ended with verse 12. What this is is a faith-filled anticipation of a brighter future day when God's people will again praise him with full hearts. And with fresh memories of what he's done for them. Notice how it reads. "Then we, your people, the sheep of your pasture, will praise you forever. From generation to generation, we will recount your praise."

When you think how that Psalm began, it's really remarkable that it should end with praise, isn't it? It begins with the destruction of the city, the ruin of the temple, the death and scattering of the people. That's the lament. But you see, after he prayed to God and lays all these things before him, this man has such confidence in God that he can actually end anticipating a day when the people are going to praise God for his blessings once again. Well, where does that come from, that kind of confidence? It comes from the very theme that you had at the beginning. That is knowing that these people are God's people, or to use the theme that you have at the very end, that they're the sheep of his pasture, that he's the divine Shepherd.

We pray to our Shepherd, our great Shepherd in heaven. That's that's what he's saying. And if God is our Shepherd, then we are his sheep, we're his people, we belong to his flock and he is not going to allow his sheep to perish. You know, that really links this Psalm with the two that came before and it links it with the one that comes afterwards. Each one of them has this shepherd theme in it. Remember at the end of 77, you have this picture of God shepherding the people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron. That takes us back to God's shepherding role at the time of the Exodus and the wandering in the wilderness. And then Psalm 78, the next one, looks forward to God shepherding his flock by the hands of David, that is during the time of the monarchy. And now we get to Psalm 79, and here this shepherding work of God has been extended into the present and even beyond because the Psalmist is anticipating that kind of shepherding in the days that lie ahead. It's a way of saying that God is our Shepherd and God will always be our Shepherd.

Well, the question is, is he your Shepherd? Have you come to know him, belong to his flock? Jesus Christ said, "I'm the good Shepherd and I give my life for the sheep." Has he given his life for you? You trust him as the one who gave his life for you? He said when he was speaking in that Jewish context, "I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I have to bring them too." He's talking about the Gentiles. Are you one of those Gentiles that has been brought by Jesus Christ to faith in him? If not, you need to come to him. That's the flock to belong to. That's the only place security can be found because troubles are going to come. You can count on that. You're going to die if nothing else. How are you going to do that? Are you going to die passing into the hands of your great Shepherd or with no Shepherd at all?

And if he is your Shepherd, then draw close to him, trust him, love him and find that he will be to you even more than you could possibly imagine. And not only now, but in future days, like the Psalmist, you'll be able to give God praise. Let's pray.

Our Father, we are thankful for your blessing in our lives and most of all, for that work by which you call us to faith in Jesus Christ. We thank you for what he's done for us and what you do in calling us to him and how you keep us, all these things. We study here tonight a Psalm in which a man has gone through the destruction of everything he knew and yet he's still hanging on to you and finding you adequate and looking forward to a day of future blessing. As I've said, we've not gone through things like that, but troubles come, and by your grace, would you give us that same kind of faith? That we might hang on to you and finding you adequate in all things, be able to speak about you to other people too. For Jesus' sake. 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.