The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): We often hear believers say they're relying on God for solutions to their problems. When actually, they're relying on God and something else. That something else is generally a worldly remedy. We trust in God to a point, but look to the ways of the world if things don't go as planned.

In today's message, we see David coming to a time in his life when he can say he finds rest in God alone.

Dr. James Boice: Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and Internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice. Preparing you to think and act biblically. Only God can bring us to a place of complete rest in the face of our problems. Let's join Dr. Boice as he explores Psalm 62 and shows us the reason that David could say with confidence, "I will not be shaken."

I want to begin by asking a question, and the question is this: Do you ever feel like an endangered species? We're to believe what we read in the papers, there are a lot of endangered species today. They're endangered whales, endangered seals, endangered otters, endangered plants, animals, even the snail darter that held up that hydroelectric plant in the South for many, many years.

Whenever we feel down, we sometimes feel like that. We feel like we're the only ones that are left, the only ones that are holding the fort, the only ones standing for righteousness, and we look at our enemies and we say, "Well, pretty soon they're going to get the better of us, and then we'll be destroyed, and everything we stand for will be forgotten."

Sometimes very good people feel that way. Elijah did. You know, he was out under the juniper tree, and his complaint to God was this: "They've killed your prophets, they've torn down your altars, and I, even I only am left, and now they're seeking my life to take it away." He was an endangered species of one, the last of the faithful prophets, and he was soon to perish, at least that's the way he felt.

Now, David apparently felt that way too. That's what Psalm 62 is all about. But the interesting thing about this Psalm is that in spite of the danger he felt, David is not really worrying, but instead he's trusting God.

You see, this second stanza, beginning with verse three, describes him. His enemies have surrounded him, they're treating him like a wall that's leaning over, it's about to fall down. Just going to take a little push and it'll be gone. But in spite of that, he's very positive. It's a very positive Psalm.

Almost all of the commentators recognize this, and it's probably the single most important thing to be said about Psalm 62. I mentioned H.C. Leopold before, he says, "There's scarcely another Psalm that reveals such an absolute and undisturbed peace in which confidence in God is so completely unshaken and in which assurance is so strong that not even one single petition is voiced throughout the Psalm."

Or again, Stuart Perowne says, "Scarcely anywhere do we find faith in God more nobly asserted, more victoriously triumphant, and so on." You see, what that means is that that Psalm is for you, if you feel in danger, if you feel threatened by anyone or anything.

Now, how do we outline it? Well, it falls naturally into three stanzas of four verses each, and you'll see, if you look at it carefully, that over on the far margin, there are two selahs, one after verse four and the other after verse eight, which naturally divided into those three sections.

But it's also true that the last part has verses that are longer than the others. You notice that in the translation, verses 9 through 12, and therefore the translators of the New International Version have divided the last natural stanza into two parts, making four in all. Now, I suppose it doesn't matter a whole lot how you divide it. That's a general flow of thought. I find that the divisions we have in the New International Version are good, and so that's what I want to follow.

So, let's start, let's look at the first section. Now, it introduces what I would call three interacting agents. God, of course, is mentioned first, and his enemies are mentioned second, and then tying it all together, David himself. So you got David the Psalmist, and God, and his enemies, and the critical point is that although his enemies are threatening him, David is trusting God. And not only that, he's trusting God alone.

If you make notes in your Bible, if you underline or circle words, I'd like you to circle that word "alone" at the end of line one. "My soul rests in God alone," and then do it again in verse two. And if you're very careful and conscientious, you can do it also in verse five and verse six. All those places it's translated "alone," and that doesn't quite do justice to what you actually find here in the original Hebrew text.

In the Hebrew text, the word "alone" or "only" occurs five times. You find it in verses 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6, and also once again in verse 9. It's the Hebrew word "ak," pronounced exactly that way. And it is very hard to translate it. The reason it's almost untranslatable is that no single word in English really does justice to it, which is why you don't find it that many times even in our NIV translation.

The word that comes closest is the word "alone," and that's what I called your attention to in verses 1, 2, and so on. But a little later on, the translators felt that "alone" wouldn't quite do it in English, and so they translated it "fully" in verse four. And in verse 9, they use the word "but" instead. Lowborn men are but a breath, and yet in the Hebrew it's exactly the same word.

Moreover, there's this about it, in the Hebrew it occurs at the beginning of each of those lines. It's a little bit like a flag. "Ak," it begins, and then something is said, and then, "Ak," you've got it again, and something else is said. There's just no way of translating that easily in the English language, although people try to do it.

Marvin Tate is one who's done that. I've mentioned him before, he's done a commentary on the middle portion of the Psalms, and he gets to it by translating it with the word, "yes," Y-E-S. And so his lines go something like this: "Yes, my soul waits calmly for God. Yes, he is my rock when I am secure. Yes, despite being a person of high status. Yes, calmly wait for God, oh my soul." And so forth, he goes on and does it all that way.

Now, that gives you the idea of the repetition, and it also conveys the idea that the word occurs at the beginning of the sentence, obviously for emphasis. But it doesn't quite get the idea of "only," which of course is what David is really concerned about. You see, his emphasis is that he's trusting God, and not only is he trusting God, he's trusting God only. He's not trusting something other than God, and he's not trusting God and something else or someone else. He's trusting God, and that means he's trusting God alone.

Now I said that is probably the most important thing that has to be said about the Psalm. Moreover, it's probably the most important thing that you and I have to learn. You see, it's not that we don't trust God if we're Christians. You can't be a Christian without trusting God, at least in the matter of your salvation. You couldn't save yourself. God reached out to save you in Christ, and he's applied that to you by the Holy Spirit, and so you know that salvation is of the Lord. You trust God for your salvation.

The problem doesn't come in there. The problem comes in where we are uncertain whether God is going to do what we want or able to protect us when we need protection. And so, although we are trusting God, we want to trust God and something else as well. And usually that something else is something quite worldly, the world's methods, the world's technologies, the world's support, or whatever it may be.

Now, I think that was what must have been bothering John MacArthur when he wrote the book *Our Sufficiency in Christ*. You may have seen it. A lot of people didn't like that book because it was a critique of the way many of today's Christians depend on other things. We claim to depend on God, but we depend, in some cases, on mystical experiences. Unless we're having the experience, we don't feel that God is with us, or pragmatic solutions to our problems, or psychology, rather than fully trusting God for guidance, help, and wholeness.

And the critics who didn't like the book wanted to argue that all of those things were valid, and that he didn't pay proper attention to them. Well, there's some truth in what they say, of course. There is a certain validity in these things, just as you need doctors, even though God is the source of healing. All of that is right. And yet as I read the book, I found myself siding very much with John MacArthur, because, you see, he's not treating it in a comprehensive or academic way. He's simply a pastor, and he recognizes, because he pastors people, as I myself do, that a lot of Christians really aren't trusting God. And instead they're trusting psychology. You know, you go get some counseling, you don't have to trust God, get some counseling, or what you need is an experience. If you have an experience, then you'll feel good, or whatever it may be.

Now David didn't make that mistake, and what David says in this Psalm is that he's trusting God and trusting him only. I was interviewed by a staff writer from *Christianity Today* who are going to do an article in the magazine on the impact of culture on the ministry. And so they're interviewing a number of pastors. I don't know who the other pastors are, but they interviewed me, and I was glad to talk to them because I feel I do have some things to say about it.

I'm very critical about contemporary evangelical ministry because it has bought into the culture. And particularly, I'm critical of the way television has been impacting the church. You've heard me talk about that before. Television is entertainment, and therefore, television being so pervasive, ministers are pressured and, in some cases, willingly try to be entertainers. And so the church service has become entertaining. And I went on about that at some length, showing how, in my judgment, prayers, pastoral prayers have virtually disappeared, the great hymns of the church are squeezed out by jingles, and the sermons, instead of teaching the Bible or the great theology of the Christian church, instead deal with felt needs and pop psychology types of ways, and the sermons are filled with funny anecdotes and illustrations. And so I was pretty harsh.

Well, as we got to the end of that, my interviewer asked this question. He wasn't necessarily disagreeing with me, but he said, "Now, I want to ask, what would you say to the argument that in spite of all that, you'd nevertheless have to begin where people are? If people are addicted to entertainment, then you have to entertain them if you're going to get them to listen to the preaching."

Well, I answered that in two ways. I said, first of all, there's obviously truth to that. You have to begin where people are. Moreover, I said, anybody who can communicate well at all knows that and does it. To preach as I'm doing in a church where expository preaching has been done probably for a century is a lot easier than going into a brand new environment where people have never had any kind of preaching and trying to teach them. You have to begin where they are. But, you see, I said any good communicator knows that. And so you do start somewhat where people are, while nevertheless, at the same time you're trying to teach the Bible.

But I said, "Now, that's, that's the simplistic answer. That's the answer you'd expect anyone to say." The answer I really want to give is on a deeper level. I think the real reason why preachers today don't preach the word of God and instead try to use all of these various techniques is they really don't believe that the word of God is powerful and that God will use it to convert and strengthen Christians. In other words, it's a crisis of faith, it's a crisis of belief. They really don't believe God. Because if they did, they wouldn't be trying the world's methods. I don't know whether they're going to print that. I hope they do, because I think it's true. At any rate, I think that's what John MacArthur sees.

And what John MacArthur is trying to get at in that book is the very thing that David is trying to teach us in the Psalm. If you're not trusting God alone, you're really not trusting God. Because what you're really doing is trusting other things, worldly things, instead. What do you say when people say, "Well, it works!" After all, all these other techniques, it works. Well, the answer is, of course, it does. It does work. If you give people what they want, if it's not the word of God, they'll come because you're giving them what they want. But it isn't kingdom work.

You see, and you can build a great church, build a cathedral that way, but it's not going to last, it's going to perish. You see, it's far better to do it God's way. Moreover, it's a betrayal of God. Let me give you an illustration as to what it's like to think you're trusting God but not to trust him only. It's a little bit like putting one foot on a solid foundation but the other foot on something that's moving and unstable. You don't remain upright very long.

I remember when I was a boy growing up out in Western Pennsylvania, my parents had a cottage in New York State on a lake. And my grandmother was a very heavy woman, came to visit us from time to time, and one summer she was there, and we had a motorboat, and my father took my grandmother out for a ride on the lake. We were all there, some were in the boat, some were waiting. And when the ride was over, he came back to the dock, and my grandmother started to get out. The only problem was my father had neglected to secure the boat to the dock.

So she stood up on the edge and put one foot on the dock, and then her weight began to push the boat away from the dock. So she had one foot on the dock and the other on the moving boat, and there was absolutely nothing to be done. We saw it happening. It was happening in slow motion. The boat just slowly slid away from the dock, and she just slipped lower and lower until finally she ended up in the lake with a splash.

Now that's what will happen to you if you try to trust God and something else, or and someone else. God is secure, he's a firm foundation, and his word is a firm foundation, but nothing else is. And David knew that, and that's why he says what he does in the Psalm.

You see, when he did, he found, and to use his own terminology, that God was his rock, his salvation, and his fortress. And he discovered that when he was fixed upon that rock, he would never be shaken. That's what he says in verse two. Now, that's the first stanza. The second stanza tells us something else very important. It tells us that although David trusted God, he nevertheless had to keep trusting.

The reason I say that is because there's a great deal of similarity between the first verses, the first part of stanza one, verses 1 through 4, and the first verses of stanza two, verses 5 through 8. If you look at them carefully, you'll find that verses 1 and 2 are almost identical with verses 5 and 6. They're not a refrain, we've seen refrains in some of the other Psalms, they're just a theme that's repeated in the second stanza. But they are not identical. There's a change when you get to the second stanza. And what happens in this?

In the first stanza, David declared that he trusts God and that he had found rest in him alone. In the second stanza, what does he do? He urges himself to find rest in God and to trust him alone. In other words, he says, "I'm doing it, but, oh my soul, keep on doing it. Don't waver." He knew what was in man, he knew how unstable we are. God's a firm foundation, but we're no firm foundation. We have great heights of faith. But then we also have valleys of doubt, and we find ourselves like Elijah out under the tree, and we say, "I'm the only one who's left," and we're feeling sorry for ourselves.

David knew, "You have to trust, and you have to keep on trusting," and that's what he wants to do. Now, how does he do it? How does he encourage himself to keep on trusting? Well, in the first case, after he had expressed trust in God alone, he looked aside to reflect on his enemies. You see, that's what you have there in verses 3 and 4. What are they doing? Well, they're treating him like a tottering wall, and he describes them a little bit. Their lies, their open blessing, but inside they're really cursing him.

Now, the second time around, he doesn't do that. He gets his mind off his enemies, and what he does now is think about God. He focuses on God. And if you ask at that point, "Well, how does he focus on God? What's the mechanism by which he gets his mind off his enemies and onto God?" What you find is that he's talking about God's attributes. He repeats the images and the epithets that he had used to describe God in verses 2 and 6. He does it in verse 7. That is, he brings them into his mind once again.

So what he says in verse 7 is this: "My salvation and my honor depend on God. He is my mighty rock and my refuge." Now, those are exactly the words he used earlier: salvation, rock, and refuge. So, you see, what he's doing is reminding himself of who God really is, and he's doing it consciously and conscientiously.

Now, here's where we can learn from David. Alexander McLaren, who was a great preacher, he had an interesting sermon in which he compared verses 1 and 5. For in verse 1, David says, "I'm trusting God," and where in verse 5 he says, "Keep on trusting God, oh my soul." And McLaren says this. He says, "That settled confidence that David shows in verse 1 may be beyond us, but his desire to find rest in God is something we can copy." Now, that's exactly right, you see. We may not be able to say, "I am trusting God always," but we should be able to say, "Trust God, oh my soul," and do it.

Now, when we come to the latter part of this, we find in some ways a repetition of what we have seen before. He's talked about God and his enemies, and he's talked about mankind in general, and then about God. You get to the last part of this, and you'll find that something has really changed. They're the same interacting agents that we saw earlier. You remember, I mentioned God, and the Psalmist, and the Psalmist's enemies. They're also here at the end as well.

But, you see, in the earlier stanza, David was looking at his enemies in relationship to himself. His enemies are attacking him. And when he did that, he said, "Well, I'm a tottering wall, and these enemies out there are going to push me over." Now he's trusting God, you see, but he has his mind on his enemies, and he's seeing them in relationship to himself. You get to the end, this has changed. The same agents are there, it's God, his enemies, and himself. But instead of seeing his enemies in relationship to himself, he sees his enemies in relationship to God, and when he makes that comparison, what are his enemies?

Well, look what he says. He says, "They're just a breath. Only a breath." They're not worth fearing, not when you see them over against God. In fact, if they are weighed on this balance, verse 9, they're absolutely nothing. Harry Kettner says, "There are two important points here." Number one, we have nothing to fear from man. Number two, equally important, "We have nothing to hope from man either."

As far as fearing man is concerned, I suppose most of us agree with that, or at least we try to operate that way. We say, "If God's on our side, well, what should we fear?" We are greatly comforted by our Lord's words when he said, just before he was taken up to heaven, "Surely I am with you always to the very end of the world." And we say, "Amen, he's with us," and we're comforted by that. So we don't fear man very much.

But as far as hoping from man, that's quite a different thing. You see, because although we don't fear man, we somehow think that God is not going to take care of us adequately or provide what we need. And so we're always looking to human beings to somehow make it up. If you have a good friend, that's something to thank God for. If you have a companion that's stuck with you through all the hard times in life, that's something to praise God for. But you see, you make a mistake when you place your hope in man.

You see, David makes a contrast here. He said, "It doesn't make any difference whether it's someone born low or whether it's someone born high." He might have said, "Somebody intelligent, somebody not intelligent, somebody strong, somebody weak, somebody close, somebody far away." It doesn't make any difference what it is. Men are just fragile, passing. So don't put your hope in man. Instead, trust God, because, you see, if you trust God, you trust the one who is eternal and the one who is unchanging, and you can know that you'll never be shaken when people disappoint you as they always do.

Well, we come to the last two verses, and they are intended as a summary of what David's been learning. They also go a step beyond it, as biblical statements do. Biblical truths are seldom mere repetitions or summaries. And in this case, David says that he's learned two things from God, namely that God is strong and that God is loving.

Now, those opening lines, "One thing God has spoken, two things have I learned," can be taken in a couple different ways. They can mean God has spoken one thing twice. In other words, he's repeated it for emphasis. And sometimes that happens. It can also mean that God has taught David two lessons, one and two being only a Semitic literary device. "One thing I've learned from God, no, two things I've learned from God." Could be handled that way.

The third thing it can mean is that God has spoken once, but that David learned two things when he spoke it. But what it probably means is that David has learned two great things about God as a result of God's continuing self-revelation of himself, two important things, the things I mentioned earlier, namely that God is strong and that God is loving.

What does it mean that God is strong? Well, when you're talking about God, it means that God is sovereign. God is the King, he's the all-powerful one. He's omnipotent. Nobody can shake him. Nobody can overpower him. Nobody can frustrate anything that God does. God is all-powerful.

Secondly, God is loving and merciful, and that is true even when things seem contradictory. You see, if God is all-powerful, he controls all things, and yet things come into our lives that seem harmful and certainly disappointing. But you see, in spite of that, God is loving. He's loving even in those things. The word David uses here is *hesed* in Hebrew, and it has to do with the covenant-keeping faithfulness of God. It's the word that's always used in relation to the covenant. God has entered into a covenant relationship with his people, and he is faithful in that loving covenant relationship.

Now, if you know anything about God and the salvation that he's provided for you in Jesus Christ, you know how important each of those two things is, and you should be rejoicing in them. Because, you see, if God lacked either one of those two things, salvation would be impossible. Suppose he had power, but he didn't have compassion. Well, he could save us. He's all-powerful, he can do anything. But why should he bother? God doesn't care.

Or, suppose on the other hand, that he had loving kindness and mercy, but he lacked the power. He wants to save us, he'd love to save us if he could, but he can't do it. Not powerful enough. How can he possibly overcome the power of sin? You see, if God lacked either one of those, you and I would be lost. Our condition would be hopeless. But because God is both all-powerful and loving, you and I are saved. He wants to save us, and he has reached out to save us in Jesus Christ. He's accomplished it in him. We should rejoice in that.

Guest (Male): Stewart Perowne reflects on this in a slightly broader way, and I will close with what he says. He says, "This is the only truly worthy representation of God. Power without love is brutality, and love without power is weakness. Power is the strong foundation of love, and love is the beauty and the crown of power." Which, of course, is why we can rest in God alone. We can come to God for help because he loves us and he invites us to come to him. And when we come, once there, we can rest in perfect contentment because we can know that this all-powerful God is not only wanting to help us, but he is able to do it, and he will. He's a loving God, but he's also an impregnable fortress.

Dr. James Boice: Our Father, we thank you for this Psalm and for what you have had to teach us from it. We thank you for David's faith and for the height that it attains in these verses. How he's learned not only to trust you, but to trust you only. And because he trusts you only and puts his whole faith in you and doesn't trust man, he finds himself absolutely content and secure. Teach us to do likewise and so to be strong, and in that strength, be able to point others to the one who is all strong and loving as David also did. We pray in his name. In Jesus' name. Amen.

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