The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Nothing is ever going to shake God's kingdom. Today on The Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we'll continue our study of the Psalms with Psalm 48, which speaks of the splendor and beauty of Jerusalem, a shining city on a hill. But what's so great about Jerusalem? Is it location, buildings, or maybe even the people?

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. In Psalm 48, Jerusalem was described as a strong, walled city with towers, ramparts, and citadels. God protected and delivered Jerusalem. How has God shown himself to be our fortress? If you have your Bible, turn to Psalm 48 and let's find out together.

Dr. James Boice: Most of us know that when you're studying poetry, you deal with symbolism. It's hard really to imagine a poem or a psalm for that matter, because the psalms are poetry, that does not involve a great deal of symbolism. That's true with virtually all the psalms we have studied. But we find something unusual when we come to Psalm 48, and that is that the theme of the psalm itself is symbolism, which means virtually the whole psalm is.

This is one of the psalms of Zion. Psalms of Zion are psalms in which the city of Jerusalem and Zion, the mountain within the city upon which the temple was built, is the focal point of the psalm. There are a number of them, not just these three here, also Psalm 76 and 84 and 87 and Psalm 122.

Now, some of them we know very well. Psalm 84 begins, "How lovely is your dwelling place, Oh Lord Almighty." We know that because we have it in one of our hymns and we sing it very often. Or again, Psalm 122. That begins, "I rejoiced with those who said to me, 'Let us go into the house of the Lord.'" We know that because often that's used at the beginning of services as a call to worship by preachers. Now, there are many of them.

If ever there was a psalm of Zion, however, it's this one. I pointed out when I introduced the theme that Psalm 46 has that phrase "the city of God" in it. You find it in verse 4. Psalm 47 doesn't actually mention the city of God, though it seems to fit the pattern. But when we come to Psalm 48, we find it three times. It's there, or its equivalent, in verse 1, mentioned again in verse 2, you find it in verse 8 a little further on, and the whole thing really revolves around Jerusalem.

Now, when we study it, we find that it does, however, carry us beyond Jerusalem. And that for several reasons. For one thing, Jerusalem is, according to this psalm, praised by all the people on the earth. And so it's already seen as something that people from every nation and scattered across the face of the globe are aware of and praise because of the God of Zion.

Moreover, it may very well be as one of the very good students of the psalms, Derek Kidner, who writes for InterVarsity, says, that what we have here already in the book of Psalms is a foretaste of the way Jerusalem is going to be treated later on in the Bible, particularly in the book of Revelation. In Revelation, Jerusalem becomes more than the mere earthly city; it's heavenly Jerusalem. And it may well be that here in this psalm, we have a foretaste of that because Jerusalem seems to take on tones that go beyond any mere earthly city. It's the dwelling place of God, and the only true dwelling place of God is heaven.

Now, when I read it, I'm not absolutely certain that the psalmist, the one who wrote this, was actually thinking in those terms, but he may very well have been. It's certainly true that they didn't view God as merely being localized in the city. They spoke of him dwelling there in a certain sense; it was a symbolic presence of God on earth within the most holy place of the temple, but they knew that God dwelt in heaven. So although it's not always explicit, we have to always think that probably they're beginning to think along those terms.

There's something else about this psalm. When it talks about Jerusalem, it's really talking about God because it's God's city and God dwells in the city and he is symbolized by it. Now, you find that as early as verse 1. Notice how verse 1 reads: "Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise." That's what we would expect, but it continues: "in the city of our God, his holy mountain."

Moreover, you find the same thing at the very end. If you go to verse 14, you find that the psalm ends by praising God, "For this God is our God forever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end." Now, that's a poetical device that scholars call *inclusio*. It's a Latin word; it means roughly what it sounds, that which includes or embraces something else.

It refers to the way in which, in the psalms, often you will have a psalm or a section of the psalm set off by something at the beginning that reoccurs at the end. It's a way of bracketing everything in between. Best example of that that I know of is the 8th psalm. The 8th psalm's about creation, but the way it begins is this: "Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth." And it ends in exactly the same way: "Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth."

It's a way of saying that although the body of the psalm is going to talk about creation—talks about man being made a little lower than the angels and being given dominion over all of the animals that are beneath him—although it's talking about creation, it's nevertheless putting that within the framework of the praise of God. And it's a way of saying when you talk about creation, make sure you get it in that framework, because God is the one who has created all things, and everything that exists owes its allegiance and praise to him.

The sad thing about human nature is that we don't do that in our fallen state. Instead of looking up to God, we look down to the animals and we become like them, and we forget about God. Now, that's *inclusio*. And it's what we find here. The psalmist is going to talk about Jerusalem; that's the bulk of the psalm. But it is bracketed by a verse that says praise to God, and by a verse that says this God is our God. So it's a way of saying that although we're talking about Jerusalem, what we really want to talk about is God because it's his city.

Peter Craigie, one of the scholars that studies the psalms well, says this: "The substance of the songs of Zion," he's saying it's true of all of them, "may appear superficially to be the praise of Mount Zion and the holy city, but at a deeper level, it is the praise of God whose presence and protection is symbolized by the holy mountain and its sanctuary." Now, that's the way we have to look at it.

Now, the psalm falls into a number of parts. After that introductory verse, which parallels the verse that concludes it, we have the section that begins to talk about Jerusalem. It goes from verse 2 through verse 8. And then we have the same thing happening again; we come to that later. That first section falls into three parts. First of all, there's the praise of the city itself. That's what you have there in verse 2, and it carries over to some extent into verse 3.

Interesting thing about Jerusalem, that it is not the highest point of that whole central area of Palestine, but it gives the impression of being that when you approach it. If you come to Jerusalem from the south, from Hebron, you actually have to go down a little bit to get to Jerusalem. But around the city, there are valleys, and therefore when you approach Jerusalem from almost any direction, Jerusalem seems to be high and lifted up.

That's why in the psalm, Jerusalem is praised for its loftiness, its beautiful and its loftiness. The psalms, when they speak about going to Jerusalem, always speak about going up to Jerusalem because that's the impression it left upon anybody who came, certainly from the west or from the north and from the east. If you come up from the Kidron Valley, but even from the south, if you approach from the immediate area of Jerusalem.

Now, the effect of that, praising that city for its loftiness, is something similar to the way we might praise the skyline of a city. We think of the tall buildings, and when we look at the city, what strikes us right away is the loftiness of the buildings. New York, of course, for a long time, was the city of skyscrapers. Everybody thought of New York in those terms. And then Chicago built those buildings that were even taller than the Empire State Building in New York.

Then New York put up the Twin Towers. And now in Philadelphia, we have our tall buildings, and some of them are still going up. And when you think of the city, you think in those terms, and it's the loftiness of the buildings which express the beauty. There is, however, a great difference, isn't there? When we think about skyscrapers, we're thinking about something man-made. And so we look at the city and we say, "Look at this mighty Philadelphia that I have built," just like Nebuchadnezzar boasted about Babylon.

That's not the way they thought about Jerusalem when they talked about its loftiness. You see, its loftiness came from natural settings, the fact that it was on the ridge there. And that was something that God had done. So when they say Jerusalem is beautiful and its loftiness, they never had in mind it's beautiful because we built walls and we put lovely buildings there and that's where the palace is. They weren't thinking in those terms at all. They say, "Isn't it wonderful how God has put Jerusalem on a hill?" You see, quite a different thing.

Now, although Jerusalem is beautiful for itself, the psalmist well understands that what really makes it beautiful is the presence of God. And so that's where verse 3 takes us. He's talking about Jerusalem, beautiful in its loftiness, but he says, verse 3, it's because "God is in her citadels; he has shown himself to be our fortress." So that's the framework with which this section begins.

Now, as soon as he says in verse 3 God has shown himself to be our fortress, that suggests a question. You want to say, "Well, how has God shown himself to be our fortress?" And so that statement leads in naturally to what he's going to talk about in verses 4 through 7. What you have here is the remembrance of a great deliverance. And it's because of this description, coupled with the similar descriptions that you find in Psalms 46 and 47, that most scholars tie these psalms together.

They seem to be written about the same mighty act of God to deliver the city from some foreign enemy. Now, we don't know exactly who that is. I've talked about it before; there are two possibilities. It might be that this is referring to the deliverance of Jerusalem from the armies of Ammon and Moab and Mount Seir in the days of Jehoshaphat. It's talked about in 2 Chronicles 20. Or again, it might be the better known deliverance of Jerusalem from the armies of Sennacherib in the days of Hezekiah. That's talked about in 2 Kings 18 and 19. We really don't know.

In this psalm, there seems to be something that might be a clue. It talks in verse 4 about the kings joining forces. And that, on the surface at least, would seem to fit better the armies of Ammon and Moab and Mount Seir, three kings, three nations, joining forces, than it does the single army of Sennacherib from Assyria. And you might say, "Ah, well, here's the clue that settles it all."

The problem with that is that these verses talk about them being confounded when they saw Jerusalem. And in the case of the defeat of those armies I've just mentioned, they didn't actually get that close to the city. They were turned back by fighting among themselves before they got there. So it's inconclusive, you see. That's why I say it could be either one.

But whatever it was, it was a great deliverance. Verse 5 is an interesting verse and it is somewhat hidden—the effect of it is somewhat hidden in our translation. In the Hebrew, there really are just four verbs and they're very pungent. They kind of capture the effect of what happened as God moved powerfully against these kings. The closest equivalent we have that we might know about is Caesar's description of his victories in Gaul. You know he used three Latin words to describe it.

Anybody who's studied Latin knows that. He said *Veni, Vidi, Vici*. And all that means is "I came, I saw, I conquered." It was as simple as that. It was a way he had of bragging. Well, now you have the same thing here. You have four verbs, only in this case, the kings didn't conquer; they were conquered. That's a little bit hidden in the translation as I say, but what it actually says in the Hebrew is something like this: "They saw," Jerusalem is implied, it doesn't actually mention Jerusalem, "They saw, they were dumbfounded, they were overwhelmed, they fled away in terror."

That's what happens when God operates against them. This abrupt language, you see, captures the effect of what happened. Now, the psalmist at this point throws in two images because this must have been a rather astounding deliverance and they were spending some time to reflect on it and what God had done. He said, using these images, that they were seized with trembling like a woman in labor is overtaken by the birth pangs. That's the first image. And then the second in verse 7: "You destroyed them like ships of Tarshish shattered by an east wind."

Well, the first image says that when God moved against them, it was inescapable as labor is. Labor comes and there's nothing that can be done to delay it; it's there. That's what happened to them. And when he says that they were destroyed like the ships of Tarshish, what he's saying is the biggest things we know moving about on the face of the earth, these mighty ships—Tarshish was known as a great center for shipping—these great, great ships, impressive as they are to us, were just scattered by the wind.

And that's the way God scattered these powerful armies. Ezekiel has the same kind of comment in his prophecy talking about Tarshish and those great ships: "Your oarsmen take you out to the high seas, but the east wind will break you to pieces in the heart of the sea." It's exactly the same kind of image. No relationship between the two as far as I can tell, but you see they're casting around for something big to say that in the face of God, it's not big at all. He just scatters it.

Now, there is an interesting historical illustration of that in the Spanish Armada that came against England in the year 1588. You know the story of the Armada; the Spanish navy was the greatest in the world at the time and, under the King Philip of Spain, they wanted to conquer England. And so they outfitted this great Armada; it was called the Invincible Armada. Had 130 great galleons and supply ships. There were 7,000 sailors and more than 17,000 soldiers because the duty of the sailors was to transport the soldiers to England where they were going to conquer the land.

Now, they sailed in the summer, in July. They were delayed for a while, but they finally set sail. And the English navy, under command of Sir Francis Drake, met them in the English Channel. The battle went on for quite some time, on and off for about seven days. They couldn't just sail easily; they depended on the wind, and especially the great galleons did. And as these great galleons were making their way up the channel to the coast of England, the ships under the command of Drake kept attacking them repeatedly from the windward side. They had more maneuverability, even though the Spanish galleons were greater and seemed to be more fearsome.

The battle was going back and forth, eventually the English prevailed. But what really brought a victory for the English in the battle was the wind, which eventually drove the galleons on up the English Channel. And as they were losing the battle, they decided the best thing to do was to escape. And so they tried to make their way the whole way up across the North Sea, round Ireland, and come back down in the ocean sea and get home.

But the wind drove them on the rocks. They had terrible destruction when the ships floundered in the sea. The sailors drowned. When they ran upon the ground, they were massacred by the inhabitants of the islands. And finally, in the end, only half of the ships made their way back to Spain. It was the end, really, of the Spanish dominion of the ocean sea. Now, you would say under those circumstances, well, the English navy certainly fought well and won a great victory.

Well, that's not the way the English looked at it. The reason we know that is because they struck a coin to commemorate the defeat of the Armada. And on the coin, there was this inscription: "God blew upon them and they were scattered." Now, that's what the psalmist is saying here of these armies that had moved against the city. He's using a naval image involving the ships to say that's just what it was like when the armies came against Jerusalem. They came, these great galleons, moving against our city, but God just went [blows] and they were gone. And whether that refers to the armies of Ammon and Moab and Mount Seir or the armies of Sennacherib, that is exactly what happened.

Now, what do you do after you have a delivery like that? Well, you do what the psalmist does in verse 8: you give your own testimony to what has happened. Isn't it interesting the way it's written? "As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the Lord Almighty, in the city of our God." That's a corporate testimony rendered by that generation that saw the deliverance. What they're saying, you see, is this: "We're Jews and we have the whole Old Testament behind us," a great deal of it at that time.

And so we have a long history, and we know because of our history how God has operated for us in the past. We have the stories of what he did with the patriarchs and how he delivered our people out of Egypt, defeating the great armies of the Egyptians when they tried to cross the Red Sea, and brought us into the land and how he drove out the Canaanites before us. We heard all of that; our fathers told us all of that. That's part of our heritage. And now, we've seen it ourselves; it's happened in our own lifetime as well.

And let me suggest that something like that should be true of Christians. You see, when we become Christians, a lot of it has to do with what God has done in the past. It would be impossible for us to become Christians in any other way, because what you do in becoming a Christian is to believe on the gospel as you hear it, and the gospel involves content. So we hear how God sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross for us, in our place, and how God, by his power, raised him from the dead in proof that his atonement was accepted and in a demonstration of his power made available to those who believe.

We have heard those things and we believe them. And we become Christians by that, and then we begin to hear about all of the things that God has done in history for his people, the church. We have stories of the early church and the Reformation and the revivals, and perhaps it comes up even to recent times. But you see as important as that is—you can't be a Christian without knowing at least the gospel, the content of that—that really is not where it should stop.

And we ought to be able to say, as the psalmist does here and the people do as they would sing this song, what we have heard, we have now found to be true for ourselves as well. This God is our God! And just as he has operated for others in the past, we've heard those stories, so has he operated for us in our own time. Most Christians who've lived for any length of time can give their own personal testimony in just that way.

And what is the conclusion of it? Well, the last line in verse 8: "God makes her secure forever." Any security Jerusalem had, they had because God gave it to her. And any security you and I have is because God gives it to us. And he does. We talk about the eternal security of the believer; it's a great doctrine. You ought to reflect on that. That's what we're encouraged to do by the psalm.

You notice that at one point in this psalm, you have that word *Selah* over in the margin. Probably means stop and reflect. And this is the point at which we're called upon to stop and reflect. We have this praise of God, followed by the praise of Jerusalem and a statement of why God is being praised; it's for his deliverance of Jerusalem. And then you have this personal testimony. And at that point, you have the word, and it says stop and reflect on that; that ought to be your experience too.

Now, beginning in verse 9, we have another section. And as I see it, we probably also have another section in verse 12. And what is happening is something like this. In verse 1, we have the praise of God to set the tone, and then we have the praise of Jerusalem. Now, the pattern repeats itself because, beginning in verse 9, we have rejoicing in God. And then, beginning in verse 12, we have rejoicing in Jerusalem. So the same pattern is repeating, and at the very end, you have the verse that takes us back to God again.

Now, the praise of God has this going: it says that God is to be praised because his praise is spreading in two ways. First way is spatial; that's to say it's spreading across the earth. That's what's referred to in verse 10: "Like your name, Oh God, your praise reaches to the ends of the earth." We are carrying on exactly that when we engage in world missions. We have a spatial concern.

We're not concerned merely that God be worshiped here where we gather together on Sundays, but we want other people in other places to worship our God too. And so we send out people to tell them about the gospel. We do that in our own city, we do it more broadly in our country, and we do it abroad. Spatially, we want the praise of God to spread. But we also want it to happen temporally, that's to say from generation to generation.

And that's what you have in verse 13. The people are to walk around Zion, count her towers, remember her ramparts, view her citadels in order that they may tell it to the next generation. And you say to yourself, "Well now, when the next generation comes along, isn't Jerusalem going to be there for them to see it for themselves? Why do you have to count the towers to tell it to the next generation if the towers are going to be there longer than you are?"

Well, the reason has to do with this deliverance. You see, the armies came up against Jerusalem, but they didn't even touch the city. After the thing was over, the great battle was won, they walked around and there was Jerusalem just as it had been before. That's what they're going to testify of. And they're going to say it to the next generation so that, as we have already seen, that generation in its time can also experience the grace and power and glory of God and tell it to the next generation, and so on until Jesus comes again.

I think this last section is one of the best in the psalm, at least it appeals to me, where the people are told to walk about Zion, go around her, count her towers, consider well her ramparts, view her citadels. I can see them doing it. Wasn't a very big city for most of its history; you could circle the city, I suppose, in an hour. But there they are said to do it. They're to go out, actually look at the walls and look at those towers and say, "Isn't it wonderful how God has preserved this city as a place where his name is known and honored and where we worship him?"

John Owen, a great Puritan, liked this section of the psalm, and he reflected on it this way. He didn't have the NIV, the New International Version; he worked from the King James or the Authorized Version. And in the Authorized Version, the word for ramparts was bulwarks. And the text actually said, "Mark ye well her bulwarks." So Owen began to deal with that. He said, "Yes, that's what we ought to do. We ought to mark well her bulwarks."

But when he said that, he was thinking not of earthly Jerusalem, he was thinking of the church of Jesus Christ and of the bulwarks, that is, the towers, the citadel, the fortresses that God has thrown up around his people so that the world will never triumph over his church. Now, he named a few of them; let me just share with you what he said. He said there are five great bulwarks, and here's the first: the designation and constitution of Jesus Christ to be king of the church, the king of Zion.

Now, there are all kinds of kings. There have been all kinds of kings throughout history. Some have been cruel and cunning, like Richard II of England, a model bad king. Some have been very magnanimous, like Cyrus of Persia; seemed to have been a very gracious man. Some have been weak; Claudius of Rome was a weak man, and when the guard of the emperor came to find him to make him the new emperor after the death of the former one, he hid behind a curtain. He didn't even want to become a king.

Some of them have been very strong and so on. But although kings have varied this way all down through history, there's never been a king like King Jesus. He is everything a king should be: all-sovereign, all-wise, all-loving, compassionate, and all of that at the same time. And what is more, his is a kingdom that endures forever. Nothing is ever going to shake his kingdom.

We come to the book of Revelation, where a number of these themes in the Old Testament come to culmination, and we read: "The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever." And it's true. And so that's the first great bulwark of the church. Then secondly, says Owen, we have the bulwark which is the promises of God, and they are innumerable.

A Bible teacher some years ago was teaching a group of children, and he said to the children, "I'll give you ten dollars if you can think of a promise for our good that God has not given us." And then he said he might as well have offered them a million dollars because God promises to give us all good things and to meet all our needs according to his riches in glory. Now, the promises of God have that kind of scope.

And so when John Owen says the promises of God are great and innumerable, he was enunciating another great truth and another great bulwark of the church. We should say, when we begin to think about those promises, what the psalmist says: "Mark well those promises, consider well those blessings, impress them upon your mind so you can pass them on to the next generation." Those are the truths upon which the church of Jesus Christ feeds and by which it grows strong in the joy that it has to pass to other people.

The third great bulwark of the church, according to John Owen, is his watchful providence—God's watchful providence over the church. Now, if you and I care for something, we generally keep a watchful eye on it. It's true of possessions; it's even more true of people. You have children, for example; you keep an eye on them so they don't get into trouble. Sometimes you might take your eye off of them, and then you do have trouble. They might run out into the street, for instance.

Or they might get into trouble that you can't prevent, but you try, you do the best you can. Now, when we're talking about God and his watchful providence, that means he keeps an eye on his people, he keeps his eye on the church, and he is not forgetful and he doesn't miss and he's not impotent. He can accomplish anything he wants, and he sees all things and he knows what's best.

Now, we talk about that as God's omnipotence and his omniscience and his omnipresence, all those things which are true of God and true of no other. This is our God. And when we talk about watchful providence, we don't say, "Well, God must have been asleep when that terrible thing happened." No, God has his eye upon us all and he is directing all of those things for our good. Owen is right when he says that's another great bulwark of the church.

He mentions fourthly God's special presence in his church. These ancient Jews were very impressed with the way in which God resided symbolically in Jerusalem. And that was true in a symbolic sense. There was a focus there for the worship of God. But we don't have anything like that. We can't claim that God is present in our buildings in the same way, or in our cities or in our country.

We don't have that, but we do have something better. Now, what we have is the presence of God within us by the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself talked about it; he did it in John 14. He talked about the Holy Spirit a great deal there in those chapters. And what he says in John 14 is this: "I will ask the Father and he will give you another comforter to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him for he lives with you and will be in you."

Now, the presence of the Holy Spirit in us accompanies the providence of God that surrounds us, and the kingship of Jesus over us, and the promises and blessings of God which direct us as we go along our way. There's a fifth thing, and this is the last that Owen mentions, and he calls it the greatest of all into which all the others, he says, may be reduced, and this is the covenant of God.

That is the arrangement that God has made with his people, the sacred obligation into which he has entered to say that you will be my people and I will be your God and I'll be that forever and ever. It includes everything else. You know, when you begin to think that way, we're thinking of Jerusalem and the presence of God and the covenant, and we're thinking ahead because obviously Owen is thinking about God's covenant with the church that transcends his covenant with the earthly city.

We're carried on to the New Testament to where those themes are developed in a very powerful way. You know how they're developed in the book of Hebrews? The author of Hebrews begins by telling us that Christians today have not come to Mount Sinai where the ancient Jews came where God gave the law, that was a place of darkness and before which even Moses himself trembled. He said no, rather you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem.

Now you see how he's developing that. That's this identical imagery that we have in the psalm. And he continues this way: "You have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly. We're part of that heavenly kingdom, 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 the blood of Abel."

Well, you see all of that is picking up on these themes from the psalm, and he concludes that section of Hebrews very aptly in view of Psalm 48: "Therefore since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe." Now, that's where the psalm ends too, doesn't it? The last verse says, "For this is our God forever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end."

Sometimes I get impatient with the scholars. Some of the scholars don't like that; they say that's an inappropriate ending to a psalm that's in praise of Zion. Here it talked about the security of Zion, the glories of Zion, and now it says this God is our God and he's going to be with us forever and ever. It actually says in the Hebrew "even unto death," and they say what an inappropriate end.

Well, what do scholars know anyway? They really miss the whole point. It's a most appropriate end because what the psalmist is saying is this: God has established Zion, but what does that to me if God doesn't establish me? God has promised to be the eternal security of Zion, but what about my eternal security? And what about death? Is he going to be with me even unto death? And his answer is, Oh yes, he is.

And the reason he is is that the God of Jerusalem, the God of Zion, the earthly Jerusalem and the heavenly Jerusalem, is our God, and he's our God forever and ever, and so I praise him for it. Can you say it the way the psalmist does as he concludes this great psalm of Zion? You say, you should be able to, "For this God," let's leave *our* out and make it *my*, "For this God is my God forever and ever, and he will be my God and guide even to the very end." And so he will.

Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful that you don't change. We change. We change not only from year to year, we change from moment to moment. Some little thing comes into our lives, it gets us thinking a different way, and our entire mood changes and we act differently than we did just a short time before. You are not like that; you are the eternal God and you are all-wise and faithful. You can always be counted on and you are the ultimate security of your people.

We've studied a psalm here about earthly Jerusalem; we recognize that it's a picture of heavenly Jerusalem, but even the heavenly Jerusalem is only a reflection of yourself. So we actually look to you and we praise you in your glory. We rejoice in our security in you. And we would make this our testimony, even the testimony of the psalmist as he ends, as we say, this God, you yourself, are my God—our God as a company of people—forever and ever. And so let it be. 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.