Let’s pray as we prepare to hear God’s word. This prayer flows from Psalm 119, the section entitled KAAF. Let’s pray. Father, we, our souls, long for your salvation. And we long to hope in your word. Our eyes long for your promise. And yet at times we find we ask, When will you comfort us? For we have become like a wine skin in the smoke, and yet we have not forgotten your statutes. Even when we ask, How long must we endure? When will you judge those who persecute us? Even when we see that the insolent have dug pitfalls for us, that they do not live according to your law, we remember that all your Commandments are sure. Our enemies persecute us falsehood. And so, Father, we ask that you would help us. They have almost made an end to us at times. We desire not to ever forget your precepts. And so, Lord, we ask as we come before your word that in your steadfast love you would give us life, that we might always keep the testimonies of your mouth. Lord, this is our mindset as we approach your word. Through Christ our Lord, we pray.
Amen. This morning we’ll be looking at Psalm 55, and here it is. Give ear to my prayer, O God, and hide not yourself from my plea for mercy. Attend to me and answer me. I am restless in my complaint, and I moan because of the noise of my enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked, for they drop trouble upon me, and in anger, they bear a grudge against me. My heart is in anguish within me. The tears of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me. And I say, Oh, that I had wings like a dove. I would fly away and be at rest. Yes, I would wander far away. I would lodge in the wilderness. Selah. I would hurry and find shelter from a raging wind and tempest. Destroy, O Lord, divide their tongues, for I see violence and strife in the city. Day and night, they go around it on its walls, and iniquity and trouble are within it. Ruin is in its midst. Oppression and fraud do not depart from its marketplace. For it is not an enemy who taunts me, then I could bear it.
It is not an adversary who deals insolently with me, then I could hide from him. But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend. We used to take sweet counsel together within God’s house. We walked in the throng. Let death steal over them. Let them go down to Sheol alive, for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart. But I call to God, the Lord will save me. Evening and morning and at noon, I utter my complaint and moan, and he hears my voice. He redeems my soul in safety from the battle that I wage, for many are arrayed against me. God will give ear and will humble them. He who is enthroned from old Selah, because they do not change and do not fear God. My companion stretched out his hand against his friends. He violated his covenant. His speech was as smooth as butter, yet war was in his heart. His words were softer than oil, yet they were drawn swords. Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you. He will never let the righteous to be moved. But you, O God, will cast them down into the pit of destruction.
Men of blood and treachery shall not live out half their days. But I will try. As my words are true to your word, may they be taken to heart. But if my words should stray from your word, may they be quickly forgotten. I pray this in the name and in the power of Jesus Christ. Amen. Well, it might be a week early to break into the Psalms as this is Trinity Sunday and it’s also Father’s Day, but I couldn’t wait. I love the Psalms, and I hope you do, too. I find in the Psalms, as I was praying that you would, an honest observation of the challenges of living in a broken world, as well as a charge on how we should respond in light of that brokenness. If you are familiar with the Psalms, you know they are of rejoicing, lament, victory, and felt defeat. There in Psalms are powerful statements of blessed assurance and dark doubts. Sometimes this all happens in a single psalm. I’m guessing that you, like me, have days in which we would just call that Monday. This is our psalm this morning. Psalm 55, as you perhaps heard in the reading, it’s one of those packed psalms.
We’ll move from personal lament in and through imprecatory prayer. We move from a cry for help to assurance of God’s love. More specifically, we’ll see three sources of the Psalmist’s agony, and we get a glimpse of his wrestling with a couple of options on how to respond. And ultimately, we’ll see a reminder of the truth that God is our refuge, and we need and are invited to cast our burdens on him. I’m sure you’ll find that the effects of sin that plague us in a fallen world cannot be escaped. Our only refuge is in the Lord who sustains us. Therefore, let us cast our burden on Christ, our Lord. Now, in this Psalm 55, we aren’t given any particular historical information in the superscript, which sometimes we see and can help us place a Psalm in its historical context. But we are shown that this is a Maschil of David. A Maschil is one of those mysterious, curious words. It might be a musical term, it might be poetic, but it is formed off of a Hebrew root word, which means to have insight. And certainly in this psalm, we see David reflecting tremendous insight as he laments various sources of agony as he muses over multiple, but ultimately ineffective means to find relief.
We see this in his first lament. As he cries out to the Lord, he pleads for an audience calling on the Lord not to hide himself from David’s cry. And in it, we ought to learn to bolster our own prayer life. Call out to the Lord. Several scholars note on the similarity of the phrasing in the Hebrew, this call not to hide yourself in verses one and two, echo God’s charge to his people, Israel in Deuteronomy 22, where three times in the first four verses, Israel is told something like, You shall not see your brother’s sheep or ox going astray and ignore them. David is likely praying God’s words back to God. It’s like David saying, God, you call us to be attentive to our neighbor’s needs. Please, therefore be attentive to me. Our prayers ought to be informed by scripture. They ought to be heartfelt. They ought to be honest. Notice the energy that David brings in his pleading and in his despair. Verses 2 through 5 show the impact of the trouble that he’s feeling. Listen to these words. Restlessness, moaning. Trouble falls or drops. He is staggering under trouble. His heart is in anguish.
He’s experiencing the terror of death and fear and trembling. And these are all words written by the valiant David, the warrior king, of whom it is song, he has slain his 10,000. But here he is overwhelmed. And the temptation to flee is strong. You hear it loudly in verse 6, Oh, that I had wings like a dove. I would fly away and be at rest. On this urge to escape. Make trouble, Derek Kidner remarks, It is some comfort for us to know that there are spiritual giants who have had this urge, whether they have succumbed to it like a Elisha did in first Kings 19, you know the story, he had defeated the Bales and then fled for his life or had withstood it like Jeremiah in Jeremiah’s chapter nine And 10. Some of us here this morning have done this very thing. Tired, exhausted, frustrated with the troubles of our previous location, we may have with Old Testament scholar Marvin Tate that, The simple living accommodations of the wilderness would be a place of rest from the raging disorder of the city. We long to Sprout wings and fly away. Instead, we simply packed up a truck and moved to the Flathead Valley.
If that’s you, you are welcome here. Now, I know that there are some homesteaders in this that are wondering how I could be so audacious as to welcome you here. I’ve only lived here six years. But I extend this welcome for the simple reason that it is what God commands us to do. We, his church, are to welcome all who come, our neighbors, all those new among us, sojourners, refugees, whoever he puts into our lives. We are to welcome them with the gospel and the good news of Christ’s work. Flight at times is an option for David. It was not an option. We may at times want to wander away, but the Lord often Sometimes calls us to stay. And this was certainly the case with David. He was the king in Jerusalem. And even when he fled at the rebellion of Absalom and Son, he was always intending to come back. He had a responsibility to his people. And I hope you realize you do, too. You actually heard it in your membership vows, our responsibility to stick with one another. And yet still there is this urge to find relief. You can See it in verse 8, to find shelter from raging wind and tempest.
That is understandable, that is desirable. And in David’s search for a relief, when he realized that flight needed to be rejected, he turned to another one of our typical response. This one is fight. He begins in verse 9. He’s not picking up a sword himself, but he’s calling on the Lord to do just that. He begins this short imprecatory prayer. He holds it for just a verse, drops it off, and picks it back up again in verse 15. And then he abandons that whole approach altogether, as he realizes that vindictiveness is no real solution to wicked all around us. You can see the beginning of his prayer in verse 9, he begins, he says, destroy, O Lord, divide their tongues. It’s an echo of God’s judgment at Babel, where their plots and plans to make a name for themselves is thwarted by God’s intervention. Here, David cries out to the Lord to destroy them by confusing their speech. There’s some question as to the actual target of David’s prayer. It may be his own city of Jerusalem. Others may have written in his name and referring to their own city. It could be any of the cities throughout history.
But when you look at what’s happening, it is organized evil. And this observation both breaks his heart and terrifies him. The evil is nonstop. Verse 10, it speaks of it being day and night. Several scholars noted that there’s at least a sevenfold description of its evil. Terms like violence, strife, iniquity, trouble, destruction, oppression, fraud. This is what characterizes this city. It’s further noticed that violence and strife, they’re pictured as the city’s watchmen patrolling the gates and the And day and night, they patrol the walls. And while they’re parading around the edge of the city, oppression and fraud are in the midst in the center square in the marketplace. Sounds like a delightful place. It’s a terrible picture. And yet it is not the worst thing that bothers David. His troubles are felt even more keenly because they flow from the betrayal of a close friend. Now, here we are invited to become distracted by trying to solve one of the several historical mysteries. We may have been distracted by saying, What city is he referring to? Now here in verse 12 through 14, we may wonder, who betrayed him? Was it perhaps his son, Absalom, trying to take the throne for himself?
Some have suggested. Or perhaps it was his closest advisor, Ahithafel, who sides with Absalom in that rebellion. That would certainly fit the call to confuse his tongues. May his counsel be worthless or like air, but there’s really no Nothing else to back a confident pick on either of these candidates or frankly, anyone else. We’re not revealed that. But what is revealed is the pain in his heart. David is betrayed by a close friend, and that has ripped a hole in his confidence. And as David shares his pain, he gives us several points to reflect on. Betrayal hurts so profoundly because it is unexpected. We don’t put walls around ourselves protecting us from those closest to us. David, in verse 12, notes, If this was an enemy or an adversary, then I could bear it. But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend. Notice next in verse 14, David’s example showing how close they were. He says, We used to take sweet counsel together within God’s house. We walked among the throng. The throng, rather. They were with God’s people in God’s house. It’s not the battle’s wan with a comrade in arm that he’s reflecting on here.
It’s not a grand party or some other intensive memory-making experience that can and does form deep friendships. What David is remembering is how they used to worship together. I wonder if worship plays a role like that in your life. A Westminster Confession in Chapter 21, which is entitled Of Religious Worship, It reminds us all that the God we worship is to be, quote, feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served with all the heart, with the soul, and with all the might. Do you bring that expectation into worship each Sunday? Do you realize that right here, This is a place to develop deep and intimate friendships as we work and live and struggle together to worship the Lord here and in the world around us. Right here as we worship God, he can be forming us as his family, worshiping him in this church and with our lives. It was one of these fellow worshippers that had betrayed David. And David was crushed. Now, as you reflect or listen to the betrayal, if you’re a history buff, you might have heard Caesar saying, You too, Brutus. But certainly, I trust that you realize the most significant example of betrayal is of Jesus by Judas.
But Jesus question, Would you betray me with a kiss? It shows how utterly inconceivable what a great and tremendously horrible surprise a betrayal is. And painful. And it’s no wonder then that feeling this pain, David moves back into an imprecatory appeal in verse 15. Then he writes, May death steal over them. May they be cast into shield alive. Most scholars agree that this is reminiscent of the Earth opening up and swallowing Cora and company in their rebellion in numbers, chapter 16. To pray that someone is buried alive is a powerful prayer. And then David checks himself in verse 16. And he immediately remembers, But I call to God, and the Lord will save me. Betrayal is a painful emotion that many of us felt. James May notes, Life is so inextricably connected with friends and society for support and confidence that the betrayal of one or the unreliability of the other is threatening to life. Betrayal is devastating, and it is comforting to know that our savior has felt its sharp edge as well. Christ wasn’t surprised by his betrayal, but he certainly knew that pain. And he has gone before us, and he is able to sustain us through all of our dark times.
But before we move into a brief look at Jesus as the only hope of relief, we would be remiss not to consider our own roles in betraying. If many of us feel like we’ve been betrayed, just mathematically, it’s quite possible that there are someone else, somewhere else out there who have felt we have betrayed them. Furthermore, if we think a little bit more deeply about it as believers, if we know the goodness of the Lord, that he is good, that his word is good, that his law for us is good, then when we refuse to worship God or sacrifice for God, or when we ignore his word because it sits on that table from Sunday to Sunday, or when we disregard his law? Are we aware that that would feel like a betrayal to our heavenly Father? And yet he is so patient with all of us. It It is hard for us to see how we have maybe betrayed others. I was reading through, and I’d read through seven commentaries on this, and in the eighth one, as I was reading, I came across this phrase from Derek Kidner. He writes this, What David was unwittingly describing in this moving passage was also the essence of his own treachery to Uriah, who was one of his staunchest friends.
End quote. Uriah was one of David’s mighty men. David and Uriah were close, and it was David who had betrayed Uriah. David was, as Nathan said, the man, and he was guilty, and I think each of us are as well. That is why it’s important that we find that neither escape nor fighting offers real relief. But David points us to that hope of relief. He points us to Christ. Notice in verse 17, he mentions he cries out to God evening and morning and noontime. This may be the literal practice of praying three times a day, or it could simply be that he begins, ends, and spends the whole day in between petitioning God for relief. Certainly, the application is here, and it’s quite simple for us. God desires regular, consistent, and honest prayer. The Psalmist presents prayers, or when you read through the Psalms, there’s prayer in almost every chapter. Most of the New Testament writers record their prayers. There are calls for us to pray constantly, to pray without ceasing. When we look at Jesus, we see that his life was characterized by prayer. At times, he prayed alone. At times, he prayed with his disciples.
He even prayed in front of crowds. There’s a takeaway here, and it’s the call to earnest and regular prayer. If you think about your own prayer life and you would say that it is generally or ordinarily characterized by just simply thanking God for your food, I would say you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to deepen your relationship with God and your trust on him. If you don’t pray much, ask yourself Why? Is it because you don’t believe God cares? Is it because you don’t think it’ll help? Is it because you’re not sure how to pray or even what to pray? Don’t kid yourself in thinking you don’t have time to pray. But if you don’t know how to pray, perhaps the answer in our shorter catechism to the question, What is prayer? Will help. This is what they said, Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to his will in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgement of our mercies. Prayer is as simple as talking to God about your desires your sins and your thankfulness for his mercies all in Jesus name.
And when you do that, begin to experience the deliverance and the hope of relief that David experiences in verse 18, where he says, he redeems my soul in safety. David’s realizing that he needs to let God bring about his judgment in his own good time, and God will do it. Instead of following one who in verse 21 has the line, whose speech is as smooth as butter, which is just genuinely a cool statement to see there in the Old Testament. Smooth as butter while war was in his heart, or softer as oil, but with poison there as well. Instead of following a covenant breaker, in verse 20, follow instead, petition instead the Lord, the great and faithful covenant keeper. Here we’re invited to cast our burdens. Casting here literally means lose control. This isn’t the cast of a seasoned guide or outfitter who can delicately place a fly in front of a hungry drought. The picture here is rather of a ship’s crew lightening the load in the midst of an overwhelming storm. They stagger to the side under their burden and they pitch it off the side, completely losing control of it with the great hope that somehow they will lighten the load and hope for better voyancy.
Then notice the promise of the text, he will sustain you. What God doesn’t promise is the always immediate command to the storm, be still, which is what we would want. He won’t always calm the waters, but he promises to sustain you. 1 Peter 5: 7, which is the lead verse, you can see it on the cover of our bulletin, assures us that God will sustain us because he cares for us. It is the care of God. It is coupled with the nature of God. He is a good God who is a sovereign God, and that ensures that we, as his children, are cared for. I appreciate the Puritan Thomas Cais’ reflection on a similar passage in 1 Corinthians 1: 8. Susan and I read through this in our time together, that we, his children, he writes this, reflecting on Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 1: 8. Paul writes, We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. End quote. Case notes. That was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who can raise from the dead. If God can raise from the dead, he can surely conquer our greatest difficulty.
He can put life into dead hopes. He can raise up expectations from the grave of the spare. Jesus has gone before us. Jesus has experienced our suffering. Jesus knows our weaknesses, and he loves us anyway. And Psalm 55: 22 reminds us that we are made righteous by his working in us through these difficulties. As he sustains us, we are made righteous and that he will never permit us to be moved. And so I invite you to see a change in David, a new confidence as he brings this Psalm to an end. He realizes, as Derek Kidner has observed, that in the end, there’s really only two parties, not three. David need not be involved in God’s justice coming down on others. His relationship is with the Lord. And similarly, he need not worry about the threats from others. His security and identity is simply with the Lord. So he doesn’t need to be involved in God’s justice coming down. In verse 23, the, But you, O God, will cast them into the pit of destruction. They shall not live out half their days, is followed by his realization, I will trust in you. God will do it.
David is relieved. But how often we feel the need to be caught up in this need to punish, to see God’s justice and wrath poured out on the other? Or how often have we wasted away in our souls or wasted Wasted away time, dreaming of escape or perhaps pursuing dangerous ways of escaping? When all along the remedy for our anguish was right there. Our Lord is ready to hear. He is ready to listen. He is ready to receive your burdens, and he is ready to sustain us through this challenge. Christ Jesus is worthy of your trust trust, and he is your only hope of refuge. As I close, I’m going to close with a prayer written on this chapter by a 16th century German reformer. Let us pray. Almighty and eternal God, the world is not to be trusted. Your beloved son himself was betrayed by his disciple, Judas, and everywhere in all places infidelity and injustice blossom. Everyone wants to be seen as innocent and pure. They offer good words out of a false heart. Therefore, we ask you that you would govern us with your Holy spirit so that we would not become impatient, but we would instead cling to your word and to your promise and trust and hope in you, that we would carefully execute the office of whatever you’ve entrusted to us with devotion and diligence in a good conscience.
That we would learn to cast all of our cares and concerns on you, you who will not let us, who will not let the righteous remain etern in discord, even though the world makes so much discord for us, we hope in you. And we will, by your help, break through into eternal life. And we will laud and praise you and your son and the Holy spirit in eternity. Amen. I.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.