The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Much has been written in scripture about Mount Zion. It's been called the city of our great king, the joy of the whole earth, and the house of the Lord. God loves his holy city, and one day all the nations will stream to it.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour. A radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.

Dr. James Boice: Earthly empires will pass away, and powerful kings will become a memory. But Zion, the city of God, inhabited by the people of God, will last forever. Let's listen as Dr. Boice shows us that while Psalm 87 speaks of the physical city of Jerusalem, it also points to God's eternal kingdom and the salvation of all who are called.

Not long ago, when former President Jimmy Carter got involved in the diplomacy that was going on with the country of Haiti prior to the US invasion, I came across an article in a newspaper, an editorial type of article, that was very critical of him. It said that he was seeking peace among nations at any cost, and then it elaborated that last phrase, as if nothing else mattered to former President Carter. I do not know whether that is just. It seemed like an unjustified slander to me.

But whether that's true or not, this goal of peace among nations, or a brotherhood among people, is a worthy goal. It certainly is an ancient one. Socrates might have been one of the first to verbalize it, at least concerning himself, because when people asked him what country he was a citizen of, he called himself a citizen of the world. You know that? That's where that phrase came from. It came from Socrates.

The Stoics, which were another philosophical branch of the nation of Greece, spoke often of a world brotherhood and harmony among people. When Rome came along, Rome established it, but Rome did it by force. That is by the force of arms, and generally speaking, that's the way it's been done since. People would like things to all be together, people to be cooperating, but that doesn't happen naturally. It's because of the sin and independence of the human heart, and so it's usually done by force of arms.

Now, that was true even in ancient Israel. When you read some of the psalms that talk about a day of unity among nations, it's quite often described in language which is a language of military occupation or conquest. Nations are to be subdued by the force of Jewish arms.

Yet, at the same time, from time to time, in the Psalms, you get a grander and more glorious vision, and Psalm 87 is one such vision. It's a prophecy. It's anticipating a day of blessing, but not by arms, but by the power of God, the nations of the world will be brought together to acknowledge the one true God, worship him, and live in harmony with one another.

Now, that's a great advance over the Psalms that talk about the destruction of enemies, but we can't read it without also thinking of an even greater advance of the same idea that occurs in the New Testament. Because in the New Testament, this Zion of Israel becomes Zion, the church of God. And the vision you have in the New Testament is for a day when all will acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Messiah and serve him.

In other words, the vision of Psalm 87 ultimately is achieved in the church, whereas the Apostle Paul wrote in Galatians, there's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but rather all are one in Christ Jesus.

Now, this Psalm, which is probably not the most popular of all the Psalms, at least with most of us, was nevertheless the Psalm that inspired John Newton to write one of our most popular hymns. The hymn is "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken, Zion, City of our God." We sing it a lot. You probably know most of it by heart. At any rate, the first verse goes like this: "Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, City of our God. He whose word cannot be broken, formed thee for his own abode. On the Rock of Ages founded, what can shake thy sure repose. With salvation's wall surrounded, thou mayest smile at all thy foes."

And that verse, and in the other verses that follow in the hymn, Newton picks up on the theme of this Psalm, and by means of his poetry commends it and interprets it to the church of Jesus Christ.

Now, we should note, before we go on, that Psalm 87 follows very naturally on Psalm 86. Psalm 86 prophesied that all the nations you have made will come and worship before you. They will bring glory to your name. You find that in verse 9. Now, here in the 87th Psalm, you find this same thing developed, developed more fully. It's not the only place in the Old Testament that you find it. This idea of Jews and Gentiles all coming together to worship the true God is found many places in Isaiah, and Micah, and Zechariah, Malachi, and in other places too.

Now, there are different ways of dividing up the Psalm, that is, outlining it. You might do it the way the New International Version does. It's in two separate stanzas. Some other commentators divide it into other parts. It seems to me that the best way to treat it is simply by taking the sequence of ideas, and that's what I'd like to do. If we do that, verses one and two stand together. They are essentially the theme verses of the Psalm, and their point is that God has chosen and established Zion.

Now, Zion is a reference to the mount upon which Jerusalem is built, and so it's one of those words that stands for Jerusalem, or the city of God, or the kingdom itself. It's used in various ways. And what these verses are saying is that the spiritual work of the world is done by God. That is, God establishes Zion, and God establishes the church. It's that particular expression of the idea that caused Newton to write, "On the Rock of Ages founded, what can shake thy sure repose." Now that rock is Mount Zion, and founded upon that, Newton, of course, is thinking spiritually, nothing is going to shake us.

Now, when we look at those words, "his foundation." He said, "his foundation on the holy mountain." It's very hard not to think of Hebrews 11:10, which is praising Abraham because he looked for a city that has foundations.

You have to remember that Abraham was a Bedouin. He was taken out of Ur of the Chaldees, that is, his home city, and he wandered for the better part of his lifetime. He was brought into a land that God had promised to give him, but he never actually possessed it. And he certainly didn't possess Zion, that is, the city of Jerusalem, which became the capital under King David. It wasn't even possessed by the Jews until that time. So, what was it that Abraham was really looking for when he was looking for a city with foundations? Well, the author of Hebrews makes very clear that it's a spiritual city that he was looking for.

In other words, if you go back in the Old Testament, even as far as Abraham, you find that the spiritual focus of the people of God was not on things tangible, things that you can hold and manipulate and possess and give and all of that, as important as some of those things may be, but rather on things that are intangible. Remember how Paul, in the second letter to the Corinthians, points out that the visible things all pass away. But it's the invisible things, that is, the spiritual things that remain, and so his point is, you're very wise if you set your heart and your mind on that.

The earthly has value. It may be a foretaste of the heavenly. That's what the Psalm is saying. Zion is a foretaste here of the Zion that is to come, that is, the spiritual fellowship of the people of God, but it's the invisible, spiritual things that really matter.

Now the next section, the next idea, really, is verse 3, which is where Newton got the first line of the hymn: "Glorious things are said of you, O city of God." What is it that God has said in praise of Zion? Well, if you think about the earthly city first of all, you come across statements like this from the 48th Psalm. We've already studied it. "It is beautiful in its loftiness, the joy of the whole earth, like the utmost heights of Zaphon is Mount Zion, the city of the great King."

Again, Psalm yet to come, Psalm 132, is about Zion. "The Lord has chosen Zion, he has desired it for his dwelling." In the second chapter of Isaiah, there's a vision of the city of Jerusalem in the last days, and it goes like this: "In the last days the mountain of the Lord's temple will be established as chief among the mountains. It will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it."

"Many peoples will come and say, 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.' The law will go out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem."

So there, Isaiah has a vision that corresponds very closely to what we have in the Psalm.

Now, it's not only John Newton that was inspired by the Psalm. Saint Augustine was as well. You know, the great Saint Augustine, the greatest theologian of the church between the early days and the time of the Reformation, and the Reformers depended to a large extent on Augustine, wrote an enormous amount of material. We know him best for his Confessions, but perhaps the most influential work he did was called The City of God. Augustine was developing a Christian philosophy of history, and he was trying to react to the fall of Rome, which seemed like an unmitigated disaster to the people of his day. And Augustine said, "No, it's just an example of all things human passing away. No matter how great the empire may be, eventually it's going to be gone." And that has been true of the empires of the world. It's going to happen to the United States. The United States isn't going to last forever.

All things human pass away. That's the way it is with the city of man, Augustine said. It's a sinful society. It flourishes for a time. Eventually, it's judged and it passes away. But over against, you see, the city of man, he set the city of God. And he said, "The city of God is composed of the people of God, and it's established by the work of God. It has different origins, and it has a different course of history, and it has a different goal." And so from this Psalm, "O city of God," Augustine got the title for that great work of the Middle Ages.

Look, here's the way the author of Hebrews makes the point. This is from chapter 12. He's talking about Christians, and he's using this imagery. He says, "You've come to Mount Zion." Then he explains. He says, "That is to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God, the one for whom the earthly city was only a type." "You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than that of Abel."

Now, remember, the author of that book of Hebrews was a Jew, and he's writing to Jews. And he's saying, "Look, the fulfillment of all these things that you have in Judaism, and they were great, is in Jesus Christ and the heavenly kingdom that he has come to establish. And so don't keep harking after the earthly city. Even earthly Jerusalem is going to pass away. But come rather to the Jerusalem of God where you come to know God."

Now, the next section of this is verses 4 through 6. What this describes is the coming of the Gentiles to worship God together with the Jews in Jerusalem. The author mentions five representative nations here. Rahab, first of all, in verse 4. He doesn't indicate in the Psalm what Rahab stands for, but other verses show that it actually stands for Egypt. It was used that way. It literally means pride or ferocity, and it is used for Egypt the same way we might use the bear to stand for Russia, or the eagle to stand for America, or something like that. It was understood in its day.

That was the great power to the south of Israel. The next one mentioned is Babylon. This was the great power to the east. Now, Babylon didn't emerge as a world power until relatively late in Old Testament history, presumably after the Psalms, most of the Psalms have been written. So, the reference to Babylon here probably indicates that this is a late Psalm. He mentions Philistia next. This was a great power to the west. It was a very close and formidable threat to Israel during much of its history.

The fourth of these cities is Tyre. It was a powerful city-state to the north. And so, by the time you get these four mentioned, that is, Rahab, standing for Egypt, and Babylon, and Philistia, and Tyre, you've got north, east, south, and west. In other words, it's looking out in all directions, and it's saying all these nations are going to come eventually and worship God in Jerusalem. And then it adds on one more, and that is Cush. That stands for Ethiopia, and it appears in the Old Testament more or less as a representative of a far distant nation.

In other words, in that day where they didn't travel as far or as easily as we do, Cush, Ethiopia, way down there in Africa, was just about as far as you could go. So, it's a way of saying, "Even the distant nations, the farthest reaches of the world are going to come and worship God." It's hard to read that prophecy without thinking of Pentecost, because you recall that on Pentecost there in Jerusalem, after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, when Peter stood up to preach the first sermon of the Christian era, people were there from all over the world. They had come up to Jerusalem for the feast.

The various nations went by different names in that day, but a lot of them are mentioned: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Egypt mentioned explicitly, parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, Cretians, Arabs. You see, all of them were there and heard the preaching of the Gospel, believed, and responded to it.

Now, those nations also have certain characteristics, and one writer picks up on that, noting that Egypt was known for its pride, and Babylon for being worldly, and Philistia for being a wrathful kind of place. And here's what this writer says: "It's the glory of the church that into her the fullness of all the nations enter, the proud from Egypt, who for her haughtiness is called Rahab, the worldly from Babylon, the city of confusion, the wrathful from Philistia, so long among the enemies of Israel, the covetous from Tyre, the rich city of the traders, and the slaves of ignorance from Cush, and from the land of Ham."

You see, that's the way the church is constructed. The church isn't constructed of saints, except in the sense that they're called to belong to God. It's constructed of people from every walk of life. And one of the glories of the church, when it functions as it should, is that it's not a reflection of a certain class of society, or a certain set of social values, so that a church becomes a reflection of the main line alone, or a particular outlook of the inner city alone, but it becomes a broad collection of all kinds of people who are brought to God by the power of the Gospel.

One of the great strengths of this church in my judgment is that it is just like that. We have people literally from all over the Delaware Valley, from distances that make it possible for them to get here, and some people come a long, long way. And so we have city people and mainline people, and people who think in a secular way, and others who think in a conservative way, and all of that. But you see, the church of God encompasses them all when they come to Jesus Christ. And that's what we're concerned to do, to present him in such a way that this great work of evangelism is done. As Jesus reaches out to the nations, even in our midst, many nations right here in Philadelphia, and begins to draw these people one by one to know and to worship Jesus Christ. And that's what's said about them. Two things here, you see.

All these people are coming, and then it says, "I will record them as those who acknowledge me." The word that is translated acknowledge there is the Hebrew verb yada, and it's usually translated "know" or "come to know." I say usually, but it's translated in all kinds of ways. I was surprised in looking at this some time ago, to find out that it's translated, believe it or not, no less than 190 different ways in the New International Version. Most of them have to do with knowing God, and that's what it means here. You see, it's not just saying that God is going to bring representatives of all these nations to Jerusalem, or for that matter, that God is even going to bring representatives of all the nations into the church of Jesus Christ. It's saying God is going to bring representatives of all the nations to know him, which happens then within the fellowship of the church. But the important thing is knowing God.

What does it mean to know God? It means to be saved by God, to enter into a saving relationship with him. Before we come to him in Jesus Christ, God is unknown to us. We know there's a God. We know anything about him. We don't have any relationship with him. That happens through Jesus Christ. It becomes possible. So much so that you can equate the idea of knowing God with salvation itself. Jesus did. Jesus said in John 17, "This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."

So we say, that's the important thing, that you might come to know God. That's why we teach the Bible. That is why we pray that people might come to know God, because that matters more than anything else. And so, what we say is to those who consider themselves wise, or strong, or rich, the very categories that are suggested by these nations that are brought to Zion, we say it with Jeremiah, "Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom, or the strong man boast of his strength, or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this, that he understands and knows me. That I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth, because it is in these that I delight, declares the Lord."

You see, the greatest blessing that can come into the life of any individual is to know God. And the greatest blessing that can come upon any community is when people in that community come to know God. And the greatest blessing that can come upon any nation is when the people of a nation in large numbers come to know God.

This is a second thing that's mentioned here, and that is that these people, in coming to know God, are also born again. That must be the meaning, certainly the spiritual meaning, of the emphasis here upon this one being born in Zion. You notice it's repeated three times. It says in verse 4, "This one was born in Zion." And then again in verse 5, "This one and that one were born in her." And then verse 6, "This one was born in Zion." So that's important. It's a short Psalm, seven verses, three times over, you find that phrase. Obviously, it's the core of what is being said. But what does it mean? Well, even if you're thinking of literal earthly Zion, it can't mean that all the people of all the nations of the world literally are going to be born in the city of Jerusalem.

I mean, nobody would be foolish enough to say that, and so it has to have a suggestive meaning. At the very least, just speaking of the earthly city, it must be envisioning a day when the peoples of the world will be counted as if they had been born in Zion. That is, they would have the fullness of citizenship or something of that nature. And if we think of it spiritually, well, it has to be concerned with being born again, that is, born into the family of God. So, it will be said of this one who is an African American, "He is born again. He's born into the family of God." And this one who is a WASP, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, "He was born into the family of God." And this one who comes from Europe and finds Jesus Christ is born into the family of God, and from South America, and so forth. That's what it's talking about.

There is an interesting bit of information on that, and I just mention it for the Bible scholars. And that is that in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. In this Psalm in verse 5, where it says, "This one and that one were born in her," the Septuagint adds in the Greek language the word mother. So, Zion becomes the mother of these people. And the reason that's significant is that the Apostle Paul apparently used the Septuagint, that is, the Greek version of the Old Testament, most often in his preaching, because the people he preached to were Greek speaking. And he seems to have referred to it spiritually, because it's reflected in Galatians. In the fourth chapter of Galatians, verse 26, Paul says, "The Jerusalem that is above is our mother."

Now, the only place he got that from was the 87th Psalm, and he's speaking spiritually. So, what the Apostle Paul is saying is this: if you understand the 87th Psalm, it's about the heavenly Jerusalem and about the work of God of bringing us by new birth into that new family.

Well, we come to the very end, verse 7, the last of these ideas. And it says, "As they make music, they will sing, 'All my fountains are in you.'" It's natural for the people of God to sing. If you've been brought into the family of God and know something of the joy of salvation, then you naturally sing about it. That's why Christians sing. That's why we have hymns. That's why services are filled with hymns. It's a natural expression of Thanksgiving and worship and joy in our hearts. And in this case, the essence of the song is that our fountains are in God. What does it mean? Well, a fountain is a thing of refreshment and blessing, and it's saying all our blessings are in God.

You know, the image itself is found other places in the Bible. It's found in Psalm 46, where we read about a river whose streams may glad the city of God. You find it in Ezekiel. Ezekiel describes a great fountain coming out from beneath the throne of God and flowing out in a big river to bless all the nations. Interestingly, John Milton picked it up in Paradise Lost. You know Paradise Lost, you know the beginning of that. He appeals to the Holy Spirit as a Greek writer would appeal to the heavenly muse. And in one place he says, "Or if Zion's hill delight thee more." He's talking about this Psalm, you see. "Or Siloa's brook that flowed fast by the oracle of God. I thence invoke thine aid to my adventurous song."

The point of it, you see, is that the people of God know that their blessings are in God. That's where every good and perfect gift is to be found. Anything you have that's good comes from God, because he's the source of everything good. And that is true whether you know him or not. You may not be a Christian, but if you have a good mind, it's from God. He gave you the mind. You may not be a Christian, but you may have a good job. If you have that, it's because God has made it possible for you to have it. Lots of people who don't.

And see, the difference between a non-Christian and a Christian at that point is that the Christian has come to know God and recognizes that God is the source. And so you want to thank him for it. But I want to ask, because I want to speak to people who are Christians as well as those who are not, do you do that? Do you actually acknowledge that all your fountains are in God, or do you take credit for these things for yourself?

You see, if you acknowledge that everything good that comes to you or is in you is from God, and therefore that God is good, then you grow strong in that knowledge, and you stand firm not in yourself, but in him, because he's a good God. And that's what Newton said in the hymn. Remember the verse that goes, "See the streams of living waters, springing from eternal love. Well supply thy sons and daughters, and all fear of want remove." You see, he's developing that last verse poetically. And then he concludes, "Who can faint while such a river ever flows their thirst to assuage. Grace, which like the Lord, the giver never fails, from age to age."

That grace has never failed yet, and it never will, because it comes from the inexhaustible supply of the eternal and sovereign God. And we are blessed. You are blessed. Have you and I actually come to know him and to worship him?

Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for this Psalm. We're thankful that we have had time to study it together today. We acknowledge that the truths that are in it go beyond our ability to receive, and yet what we have understood is in itself a blessing. So, we ask you to bless the teaching of your word in the hearts of many people. For those who don't know you, may this be one thing that will help bring them to a knowledge of yourself, and the joy that is to be found in that kind of salvation. And for those who do know you, may there be a strengthening of the trust which they already have in you, and an increased willingness and desire to acknowledge that you're the source of all good gifts. And so may you be praised accordingly. 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.

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