The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Today on The Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we continue our study in the Psalms. David again praises God for hearing him and rescuing him. David reminds himself and us as believers that God's anger lasts for a moment, but His favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay for the night, but with God, joy always comes in the morning.

Guest (Male): Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. When David asked God to spare him from his enemies and certain death, God heard him and saved his life. God drew David up from the pit of despair, and now David is filled with grateful thanksgiving. If you have your Bible handy, turn to Psalm 30.

Dr. James Boice: Now we're studying Psalm 30, and I'd ask you to turn to that so we have it before us. We've read it earlier, and we want to see what there is to be learned for ourselves as we study it. A way into the mind of God, as J.I. Packer said on one occasion, is through the mind of the biblical writer. So we have to understand first of all what David is saying, and as we understand that, then we understand what God is saying here, and therefore also saying to us.

I sometimes point out as we begin the Psalms the particular type of psalm that we're dealing with, because often that's helpful when we're working with the Psalms. The scholars divide them up in different ways. There are perhaps seven or eight different types of psalms. The scholars call them genres. So if you want to be very scholarly and impress your friends sometime, you can refer to the different psalm genres.

One of them is a thanksgiving psalm, and that's what this is. David has something to thank God for, and he expresses his thanks and does it in very eloquent language. Thanksgiving psalms are usually closely related to two other kinds of psalms. One is a lament, and that's because when the psalmist writes a thanksgiving psalm, it's usually as a follow-up on a lament he'd given earlier. He'd complained about something, he'd asked God for help, and then when God provided help, he did a psalm of thanksgiving.

We don't have the background for this particular psalm, but some of the words of what must have been the lament are within it in verses nine and ten. David writes there in the past tense. He reminds the Lord that he called to Him for mercy in his sickness, and then these are the words that he said: "What gain is there in my destruction, in my going down into the pit? Will the dust praise you?" and so on. There are other psalms like that, and the other psalms are laments, but this embodies the lament in a past tense in a psalm which is basically a psalm of thanksgiving.

And then psalms of thanksgiving also relate to hymns because when the psalmist expresses his thanksgiving, it's in poetry. It's the kind of thing that would be sung, and of course, this psalm would be. So it's both a psalm of thanksgiving and a hymn, another genre, and it relates to a lament. It has a title, and the title with a little bit more to it than the psalms immediately preceding this have had. It says that it's for the dedication of the temple.

That's the first time since Psalm 18 that we've had that kind of a comment. The only difficulty is we don't understand what it's referring to very much. The actual word there is house, for the dedication of the house. That could refer to the house of God, in which case the translation temple is appropriate. It could also refer to David's own house, that is the palace, but he doesn't explain that, and as far as I know, we don't have any circumstance from the life of David that does explain it.

There is an interesting incident from his life that might be a background from that, and we're going to see that as we move along, but that in itself doesn't ultimately solve the problem. We're still left with an inability to understand exactly what that refers to. What we can tell from this psalm and is worth mentioning at the beginning is that it is thanksgiving for some great deliverance from sickness.

From time to time in the psalms, we'll find phrases that seem to refer to sickness, but in such an ambiguous way that you're not sure. Sometimes that language can be used when what David was actually being threatened by is his enemies. He was in great physical danger from his foes, and so he prays to God for deliverance in words that sound like being delivered from sickness, but probably not. That's not the case here.

In this case, he really does seem to be talking about a physical illness. You read the first phrase: "You lifted me out of the depths," that wouldn't necessarily mean illness, but verse two does: "O Lord my God, I called to you for help and you healed me." Now that really does seem to be a sickness. That leads into what is the best known and most quoted passage of the psalm, verse five: "His anger lasts only for a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning." We're going to see what that means as we study it.

From a literary point of view, the most striking thing about this psalm are the remarkable sets of contrasts that we find. I'm going to look at the contrasts as they're summarized in the various stanzas. I'm going to highlight four of them, but each of those four has other contrasts within it. When I go through the psalm and count up these contrasts, I find at least a dozen and maybe more than that as you study it yourself.

Perhaps you can do that, because the poetic effect of the psalm depends on the contrast, and the emotional effect as you read it and study it, or if we were able to sing it, emerges from those contrasts. The verse I just read contains many of them. You see His anger and His favor, a moment, a lifetime, weeping, rejoicing, night, and morning. You see four of them or five of them right there in that one verse. So that's the way the psalm is constructed.

Now we look at the first three verses. These are the ones that talk about his sickness, and I begin by pointing out that when we studied Psalm 28, David was speaking along much the same line when he spoke of the pit and of the danger of falling into it. He said, "If you don't help me, I'm going to be like those who go down to the pit." The pit is Sheol, and he was saying, "If you don't intervene, I'm going to be dead."

Now there's a difference between that psalm and what he says here. Psalm 28 he was praying for deliverance and he was saying, "If you don't deliver me, I will fall in." In this psalm, he says he's already fallen. Now it is true technically he doesn't say that he's fallen into the pit, because if he said he had fallen into the pit, it would mean that he was dead. It doesn't say that, but he does say that he's fallen. He'd fallen into the depths in verse one. That's what God has lifted him out of.

And later on, "You brought me up from the grave." Now he doesn't mean literally that he was in the grave, but he's talking about a very serious illness. And he's saying, "I was so sick that as far as anybody standing around me was concerned, they would have said this is a terminal illness." I wonder if it strikes you as strange for David to be talking about an illness. You read the story of his life, and I don't recall anything in the story of his life in the Old Testament that concerns illness.

Many stories about danger and threats from Saul, for example. Saul threw his spear at him on one occasion; he could have died. God protected him. But I don't find stories about illness. I'm not sure why that's the case. Perhaps because when the king was sick, nobody broadcast it. That might be the reason. Or perhaps sickness was just so common in that day that nobody paid a great deal of attention to it, though of course, it was a very serious thing.

You could die in ancient times from almost anything. I think people who know this say that probably in the long history of the human race, more people died from simple high fever than from any other source because until we had very simple drugs like aspirin, many people simply died because their temperature got too high because of some infection and then their system broke down and they died. To get sick really was serious, and David is saying here he was so sick that even his enemies, well, we have an expression when we're talking about people who are very old or perhaps very sick. We say they have one foot in the grave.

Well, that's the way his enemies were looking at David. They say he's got one foot in the grave already and we can hardly wait till the other one goes in after it. You see as far as they were concerned, in their minds at least, they were picturing him already in the coffin. But now David said, "I prayed to you and you lifted me up out of that dismal situation. You saved me." He uses a very interesting image for it, a little bit hidden here because the verb is right; it's translated right. The reason we miss it is that we don't use the verb that way. It's that verb "lifted" in verse one: "You lifted me out of the depths."

Now that's a literal translation of what that Hebrew word means, but the reason we miss it is that that word was usually used for drawing a bucket up out of a well. You went to the well to get water, you threw in the bucket, when it was full you drew it up. Now drawing it up is that verb. And what David is saying is, "You drew me up out of a well." You see isn't that vivid? He said, "I was so bad off, it was like I was down in there. It was absolutely hopeless unless you reached down and lifted me out."

Do you realize that that's what our situation is like in all areas? Unless God reaches down and lifts us out. It's what it means to be saved from sin. You and I aren't capable of crawling out of the pit of our own sin, not by ourselves. The only way we're ever saved is if God reaches down and saves us. And here David is talking about the same thing very vividly in terms of his sickness.

You see when we think about sickness today, we usually think of it in terms of science and we often speak of the wonders of modern medicine. Sometimes we even speak of the miracles of medicine. You have to understand that medicine is not a miracle; it's a technology. And although we should be very thankful for the skills and the knowledge and the talent of doctors and those who stand behind them in the area of research and all the medicine that's provided, it is not the medicine that does the healing; it's God who provides the healing.

And this is what David saw in his day, and which I am afraid we are in danger of losing in our day because we live so much as people of the age that we look at secondary causes and we forget the first cause that stands behind it. You see what we have to do is learn to think of our lives more and more as being controlled by God, because of course whether we think of it like that or not, they are. And if God saves us, we are saved, and if God doesn't save us, we are lost. We have to think in those terms.

So let's think of it in terms of sickness, and let me apply it this way. When you are sick, what should you do? You should pray. You should ask God for healing. That's entirely right; James says we should do it at the end of his letter. But then this, equally important: when you are healed, remember to thank God for it. Remember that it's He who has healed you and praise Him for what He's done as the psalmist does. That's what the psalm is about.

Well, we see a lot of contrasts here. I mentioned that the psalm is a psalm of contrast. Look at the contrast you have in just these first three verses. There's lifted up versus going down. He fell into the pit, and God had lifted him up. There is God who helped him versus his enemies who gloated over his fall. There's his serious sickness versus his renewed health. It's in health that he's praising God. There's the threat of the grave versus life, and there is physical suffering versus praise and thanksgiving to God. All of that is there in those verses.

Peter Craigie, whom I quote on occasion as a very good commentator on the Psalms, says the occasion for the present act of worship is not merely the assurance that God would answer. We find that in some of the other psalms, but rather the experience of actual healing because God has answered his prayer. Now after expressing his thanks to God for the healing, David does something that is very characteristic of David. That is he turns to the people of God whom he calls "you saints of his," verse four, the second phrase, and he asks them to join his in praising God too.

Now why does he ask them to join in? It would be quite proper for him to ask the people to join in in praise to God for his healing because he was the king, their king. He could say God has healed your king; you have to thank Him for healing your king. That would be right. But that's not what he does. You see David does something much finer than that. What he calls upon them to do is praise God not merely because God has been gracious to himself, but because it's God's nature to be gracious.

You know what that means is he wants them to remember that that's exactly the way God has acted in their lives in undoubtedly numerous situations. You see to understand what he's saying in this section, verses four and five, we have to understand that what he's giving here is not a general principle, but something that describes God's character. The reason the saints are to praise Him is this: because His anger lasts only a moment, but His favor a lifetime. Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.

You see in that verse five, how you have to take those two parts together. If you take just the second half of that, it might very well suggest something wrong. I suppose that's why that latter half is so popular: weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. By itself that could mean only, well, you know, into each life a little rain must fall, as we sometimes say. Or every cloud has a silver lining, or you've got to take the bad with the good, or cheer up, things are going to get better, or as we have it in our time, don't worry, be happy.

But you see that isn't what David is saying. That's the wisdom of the world, but David goes beyond that. He's talking about the character of God, and since he talks about God's anger, what he's talking about is the disfavor of God because of our sin, and he's saying something like this. God is displeased by sin. He is always displeased by sin. It's His nature to be displeased by sin. He's going to judge sin. But for His people, the judgments are always mitigated by His mercy.

Which means it's true for Christian people that His anger lasts only a short time while His favor lasts forever. You see that's quite a different thing than simply a Pollyanna view of life. Now David himself knew that and lived by it, and the reason we know that is that there's an incident in his life, the one I referred to earlier, that might actually be the background for the psalm, though it's hard to say it is. But it illustrates the principle.

In 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21, we're told about something David did that displeased God. They had been fighting the enemies of the nation on every hand, and they had a moment of peace. And David said, "What I'd like to do is count the army. I want to know how many soldiers I have." Now that would seem perfectly proper to us. If we're sending soldiers to the Persian Gulf, we keep track of how many are out there, 200,000 and growing, and then we want to know how many are there from the other nations because we measure the one army against the other.

Thus that is proper, but Joab, who was the commander of the army, sensed that that was not right. That was really a case of trusting to the size of the army rather than trusting God, and he warned David. He said, "That'll displease God." David was the commander; he insisted that it be done. So Joab and the other commanders did it. They came back with a report, but it did displease God. And a prophet, the prophet who was living in Jerusalem at the time, a man named Gad, came to David with a pronouncement from God as to God's displeasure and judgment.

And he gave David a choice, a choice of three judgments. He said that he could experience three years of famine, or secondly, three months of being swept away before his enemies, that is his armies would be defeated for three months, or finally, three days of plague in the land while the angel of God was sent to ravage the kingdom. Now that was a hard choice. I don't know how you would have made a choice under those circumstances, but David did something that was very wise.

He chose the latter, because, he said, "Let me fall into the hands of the Lord for His mercy is very great, but do not let me fall into the hands of men." Now you see that is exactly the principle we have here. The Lord's anger was displayed and displayed justly, but God gave the choice and David said, "I'd rather be in the hands of God because I know," let me quote Psalm 30, "His anger lasts only a moment, but His favor lasts a lifetime."

And it proved to be wise because the angel came and began the work of devastation in the kingdom; 70,000 people died the first day. And on the second day, the angel came to Jerusalem and stood at the edge of the city at a threshing floor there called the threshing floor of Araunah, and God took mercy on the city and He told the angel to stay his hand. One day of judgment you see instead of three. And David was so impressed on that occasion with the mercy and grace of God that he bought the field and then he appointed it to be the future site of the temple and of the altar of burnt offering where atonement for sin by sacrifice would later be made. It's where Solomon eventually built the temple.

Now it's suggested that that's what stands behind the psalm. One of the commentators, a German commentator named Leupold says that, and he says that the psalm for the dedication of the temple would actually have been for the dedication of the site upon which the temple later was to be built, and that may well be. At any rate, in his judgment, it seems to fit the situation quite well. Now I said a moment ago that when we're talking about this, we're talking about the favor of God and the character of God, and I pointed out that His anger is anger against sin, and that anger against sin though it's a real anger and effective is mitigated by His mercy, and that's true.

But isn't it also true that the principle holds true for Christians even in the circumstances of life that don't have anything particularly to do with God's judgment? You see one of the great errors in the Christian life is to see everything either as an expression of favor or judgment because of something we personally have done. Your car gets hit by another car and so you say, "What did I do this morning? Didn't I have my quiet time?" You see that is not the way to think.

You have to keep that in mind because often we do things that are wrong and God steps in, and usually when He does, He makes it very clear that He's done what He's done because He's displeased with your action. But not everything in life is like that. There are good things and bad things. There is sickness as well as health. There are accidents that come, and they don't have anything particularly to do with God's favor or disfavor.

And yet isn't it also true? Haven't you found this to be true in your life as you look back on it? That the principle holds. That although there are bad things, God controls them, and they're limited and they're numbered in duration and that His favor certainly seems to abound. Can't you say as the psalmist does again and again, "God has been gracious to me; the Lord is good; His mercy endures forever"? I'm sure you can.

I want to say that there are people, Christians, who are called to go through very hard times and we mustn't be blind to that. What do you say to someone who for their testimony is arrested and kept in prison for 30 years? You can hardly say, at least if you're looking at external things, the good outweighs the bad, though even in prison, God can do many, many good things. You have to recognize that there are people who go through tough times.

But what do you say about that? Suppose you have a life that has been one series of calamities after the other. Well you see for Christians, even there the principle holds because our existence is not bound up with this life. David is giving us a principle for this life, but we recognize that it goes far beyond it; there is an eternity to be considered. And you see that far outweighs anything that we could possibly experience now. It's hard to feel that when we're going through the difficult times, but it is nevertheless true.

Sometimes I refer to Harry Ironside because he had such experience of life and he had a wonderful way of wrapping it into his study of the Bible, and he says in his comment on this psalm that his father died under very painful circumstances. He doesn't describe the nature of the illness, but the father was suffering a great deal and a friend came and visited him and said, "John, you're suffering terribly, aren't you?" And here was the father's testimony.

He said, "I am suffering more than I thought it was possible for anyone to suffer and still be alive. But," he added, "one sight of His blessed face will make up for it all." And you see that is a true perspective for Christians. The world doesn't understand that. The world just cannot understand that at all. That is just absurd to those who are not believers, but not to believers. You see for Christians, that's a blessed reality, and it really is the faith that triumphs over everything.

Well, I'm giving you sets of contrasts. I gave those that were found in verses one through three. Here's a new set of uplifting contrasts in verses four and five: God's anger versus God's favor, weeping versus rejoicing, night versus morning, and a moment versus a lifetime. Now let me give one warning before I go on. It's true that for God's people, the sufferings of this life are minimized; I really do believe that. And even if their miseries are great here, they have an eternity of blessing and favor to look forward to, and that transforms anything they may endure.

That is not true for unbelievers. For unbelievers, it is exactly the opposite. For unbelievers there may be a little bit of heaven here. There are what even the Bible calls the pleasures of sin, and some will sell their soul for those pleasures, but those pleasures last only for this life. And it would be true to say, using these verses but applying it to them in a different way, the anger of the Lord in their case will last not only a lifetime but forever. Now that's the warning. The time to discover the grace of God is now because the Bible says this is the day of His grace, and yet it warns us that a day of judgment is coming.

Now when we come to verse six, the next section of this, at first glance we sense that the psalm has taken an unexpected turn. He's talked about his sickness, he's called upon the saints to praise him and thank God in the same way he is doing. Now suddenly in verse six, he seems to be confessing a sin: "When I felt secure, I said, 'I will never be shaken.'" It's the sin of self-confidence or pride, and apparently, he's linking that to his illness. Now you say, well, isn't that surprising? Why in the world should that be found here? Well, it's not surprising when we remember the principle that he's just talked about.

The principle he's talked about in verse five is this: His anger lasts only for a moment. Now God's anger is not a capricious anger. God isn't just sometimes gracious and sometimes angry, and you never know what He's going to be because you never know what side of the bed He's going to get up on. It's never a case of that with God. If God is angry, God is angry against sin. So if David talks about the anger of God, the question of sin immediately emerges, and David is confessing here the sin which in this particular case led to his suffering. And he's describing it as the sin of self-confidence.

He said, "I'm secure; I'm never going to be shaken." That verse alone makes me think that there might be something to the theory that the psalm is a dedication of the land upon which the temple would be built that emerged as a result of the incident I referred to earlier. Because you see what was the purpose of David numbering the soldiers? It doesn't tell us what he had in mind back in 1 Chronicles and in the book of Samuel, but if we read the psalm in the light of that, it would seem, if it's right to link the two, that it was overconfidence.

He said, "I don't have to worry. I have lots of troops. We have lots of soldiers. We have plenty of soldiers to stand against the Philistines or the Amorites or whoever it may be. Let's count them up; I'll show you we have enough to fight our enemies." You see it really was a sin of self-confidence. It was the sin of saying, "We can stand against our enemies by ourselves; we really don't need God." And I suppose there's no sin that is more characteristic of the Christian church today than that. It's a common failure among us.

Many of us are blessed with wealth and education and technical skills, and as a result of that, we say, "Well, we don't need God. We have our wealth and our education and our skills." And so as a people, individually we think we can get by on our hustle. We don't have to pray. As a church we think we can manage our affairs by secular skills and good accounting and management techniques, and we don't rely on God. As a nation we think we can survive on the strength of our military might and our industrial production.

What a shaking there's going to have to be. I think it's happening already as this great country of ours, which has come to trust its secular might rather than God who was trusted in past days, is shaken to its roots. I think we're going to have to have calamities before we'll again humble ourselves under the hand of God. Well, the last set of uplifting contrasts is found in verses 11 and 12 at the end, where David contrasts wailing with dancing and sackcloth with joy.

Wailing and sackcloth describe his confession of sin, and they point back to the verses that are immediately before that. You see verses nine and ten, which are quoted from the past, David is saying there was a time when I was praying this way, calling on God for mercy, mercy because he'd sinned, and making this argument: "What gain is there in my destruction, in my going down into the pit?" He thought he was going to die. "Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? Hear, O Lord, and be merciful to me. O God, be my help."

He was wailing; that describes the words themselves. And he was at least figuratively clothed with sackcloth because that describes the attitude in which the words were uttered, since sackcloth was the dress you would put on in times of mourning and confession of personal transgression. Well, God answered you see. God heard that prayer; there it is. God healed him, and as a result of that, "You turned my wailing into dancing, and you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy." There is a final set of contrasts.

And yet there's one more. I wonder if you've seen it. It's there in verse 12: "that my heart may sing to you," which means verbalize your praise, "and not be silent." Here he was healed, blessed by God, delivered, forgiven from his sin, and yet he recognized that it was possible to have that happen and still be silent about it and not really praise God or thank him. You know that hymn that was written by Charles Wesley that we sing so often: "O for a thousand tongues to sing."

Very pious hymn, very nice thought, a thousand tongues to sing our great Redeemer's praise. But what would be the use of having a thousand tongues if we don't even use the one we have? The one we have is so often silent. Jesus said something interesting in Luke 6:45. He said, "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." You see if we're not speaking praise to God, it's because our heart isn't filled with God.

We experience His blessings, and among them are health, and there are many others besides, but we don't think of God as the source of those blessings. Our hearts aren't filled with Him, and so we don't praise Him. Instead, our hearts are filled with the things of this world, things that will perish with the world and pass away. A sad exchange you see, the things of the world that perish instead of the glory of the eternal God. Well, there are a lot of lessons in this. We've looked at them.

Here's the final one. It's in the form of counsel that would come to us from the psalm, that David himself would express if he were here. He would counsel us to fill our hearts and minds with God. That is to think about Him, think about who He is, and think about what He has done, and then when our hearts are overflowing with thoughts about Him, speak His praise and speak it to other people as David is doing in the psalm.

I think if we do that, if you will do that, that you'll find two things. First of all, you'll find that God delights in such praise, and as a result, you'll be drawn to Him in closer ways than you had been previously. You'll find that your spiritual life is enriched even as you pray and praise to Him. And then secondly, you'll find that God will use your praise; He'll use it to attract others, to win them to Christ, and when that happens, as a result you'll have even more cause for rejoicing and you'll have to write an additional psalm of your own.

Our Father, we thank you for this psalm, for this simple, direct, honest pouring forth of praise from the heart of the great King David. A man with a great heart, but above all a man who had a heart for you and a heart for godliness. Father, we want to learn from him. We are not a very godly people, and we don't think in terms of your presence in our lives or your deliverance, but we need to. We need to be taught, and we are here, we want to learn. Teach us and grant that we might grow in that greatest of all relationships, namely our relationship to you. For Jesus' sake, Amen.

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