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with you our approach in preparing
sermons and Bible studies on the Psalms. Let's turn to Psalm
90. Let's look at that Psalm for
a bit together with this in view. Now, when we preach from the
psalms, we may at times want to handle the whole psalm in
a sermon and be preaching a textual sermon from the psalm as a whole.
At other times, we'll want to preach from just one passage
and teach a single passage in the psalm. I want to introduce
the discussion of this particular psalm by looking with you at
a little outline that I have prepared in preaching from the
seventeenth verse of this psalm. Let the beauty of the Lord our
God be upon us, and establish thou the work of our hands upon
us, yea, the work of our hands, establish thou it. The division I called the title
of the sermon, I used the beautiful years, but as a theme, it's more
like satisfaction in the wilderness. The division that I gave to the
message was first the meaning of life, established the work
of our hands, and then second the joy of fellowship. let the
loveliness of the Lord our God be upon us, the meaning of life
and the joy of fellowship. And in terms of the meaning of
life, that was developed in two ways. First, against the tragedy
of life, the blessing of life. The meaning
of life against the background of tragedy, the reality of blessing. So that I sought to weave in
some of the material from the context from the earlier part
of the psalm as the background to the affirmation of the meaning
of life. Against the tragedy of life,
the psalm speaks of the brevity of life in verses five and six. Now it carries them away as with
a flood, they are as asleep in the morning, they are like grass
which grows up in the morning and flourishes and grows up in
the evening and is cut down and withers. And of course, where
life is compared to a sleep or to grass in those images, The
contrast is so sharp with God's eternity in the first three verses
of the song. Thou hast been our dwelling place
in all generations before the mountains were brought forth
and so on. Verse four, a thousand years
in thy sight are as yesterday when it is past. So there is
the contrast of the brevity of our lives with God's eternity. French existentialist motto that
living is slow dying. The psalmist says it isn't all
that slow. And then the psalm brings out
not only the brevity but the frustration. We end our years
as a sigh. The NIV has, as a moan, the frustration
that there's nothing to life. You know, there was one of Samuel
Beckett's plays. Samuel Beckett is best known
for his play, Waiting for Godot. I don't know, you may have seen
that produced. But he has a much briefer play. I saw it on television years
ago. They showed it twice, and both
showings didn't take quite as long as the series of commercials
that would be on. A very brief play, and it has
a point in being so brief. Now, of course, Beckett wrote
plays without heroes. The Waiting for Godot has no
hero, but he didn't usually write plays without actors, but this
one has no actor. It does have a setting. You see
a big pile of junk on the stage, sort of like a huge pile of refuse. There's lighting. At first, there
isn't any. It's very dark. And the light
comes up and the light goes down. That's it. Now, there is a soundtrack. At the very beginning, in the
darkness, as the light is just starting to come up, you hear
a baby's cry. It sounds a bit like a birth
cry of a newborn baby. And then, as the light gets brighter,
you hear a long inhalation. And then, as the light begins
to dim, there's a long exhalation. And at the very end, there's
a kind of rattle in the throat, like a death rattle. But that's
it. Oh, at the very end, there's
a touch of eschatology. You hear a baby's cry again. And the title of it is Breath. Well, it's right out of Psalm
90. I'm surprised. I guess people,
Americans, of course, couldn't understand it, but Europeans and Orientals would
make much more sense out of it than Americans do. But there
it is, see? There's our lives. The pile of
junk. The cry. You inhale, you exhale,
and it's over. Then another baby cries. The vanity, the frustration. We end our years as a sigh. I can't read that without thinking
of that death rattle at the end. The brevity of life, the vanity
of life, and then the curse on life. Because the psalm makes
that so explicit, right? Our lives are so short. If by
reason of strength they're 80 years, Their pride is but labor
and sorrow, it's soon gone and we fly away. But what accounts
for all this? Verse seven, we are consumed
in thine anger and in thy wrath are we troubled. Verse three,
thou turnest man to destruction and sayest, return you children
of men. The sentence of God's wrath that
condemns Israel to turn back to the wilderness. And this is
seen not as fate, but as judgment. God's judgment. God who says,
return to the dust, is the one who pronounces judgment upon
all of our lives. And again, this is very different,
you see, from an existentialist posture that would be represented
by Samuel Beckett. You're in no sense a hero of
the absurd. The existentialist approach is,
you know, life is short and meaningless, but a heroic man can give meaningless
life meaning just by the fact that he's determined that it
should have meaning. The myth of Sisyphus, you know,
Sisyphus, the mythological a king who was condemned for his crimes
to push a big rock up a hill, and every time he got the rock
to the top of the hill, it rolled back down again. And there's
real heroism when he goes back down the hill after the rock.
See, it has absolutely no meaning. He knows that it has no meaning,
but he's going to do it again. See, there's existential heroism. But that falls flat when you
understand that this is not a fate that is upon us, but a God's
judgment that's upon us. And it is our sin that is exposed
to us, exposed to the eyes of God. to turn to Sartre one more
time. He has a play called No Exit. And in that play, he gives his
vision of hell. And it's very impressive. This fellow has gone to hell.
And when he gets there, it's just he's ushered into a room,
just an ordinary room with sort of old furniture in it and nothing
much around. And he thinks, well, it must
be a waiting room for where you go afterwards. sitting around
the waiting room and after a while a couple of women are brought
in and they all begin to talk, sitting there. It's a great play. Because, you see, each of them
comes in with a mask, as it were. Of course, they want to know
how they died. They're all very heroic. The man's a hero of the revolution,
he'd have you know, and he talks about his heroism. And then the women too, they're
remarkable individuals, both of them, as they tell the story.
But then as the conversation goes on, the mass slip off and
they begin to be, it becomes evident who they really are and
they become their own accusers you know because they trip up
each other's stories and go beyond it and come to the realization
of what had happened and the man who thought he was such a
hero of the revolution actually was killed in a train wreck while
he was trying to escape after he betrayed his comrades so he
was not a hero at all. One of the women had thrown her
baby out the window and there were all sorts of things that
had happened, you see. But the play has tremendous power
because, you see, they keep waiting and wondering what their punishment
is going to be. And then Sartre comes up with
this great line, Hell is other people. They have no eyelids. They can't close their eyes.
They can't sleep. They can't shut it out. And they're
just inflicted with one another forever without eyelids. And you can see why Hell is Other
People had a lot of impact in that play. But that isn't really
the main thrust of it. The main thrust of it is in another
line that says, you are what you have been and nothing else. It's fun to think about, isn't
it? See, nobody likes that. I'm not what I've been, I'm not
what I'm going to be, I'm what I intended to be. No, you are
what you've been and nothing else. And Sartre is saying it's
hell enough to be forever confronted with the fact that you are what
you've been and nothing else. Well, of course, we know that
he hasn't seen the half of it. But the half that he has seen
is true enough, isn't it? You see, our sin is exposed before
God, not before other people. who have no eyelids and you can't
hide, but before the Lord. Our sin is exposed before God's
face. Verse 8, you have set our iniquities
before you, our secret sins, in the light of your countenance.
It's not that we have secret sins that we try to keep from
other people that will eventually come out so they know about it.
It's that our secret sins are set before God, that He sees
them, He knows them. And the curse on life is the
curse of God's judgment as we are before His face. Now contrast
the tragedy of life with the blessing of life, even life in
the wilderness, because of verse 13. Verse 13, return, O Lord,
how long? and let it repent thee concerning
thy servants." There was the return of God's wrath in verse
three, but here's the return of his mercy. Moses prays that God will repent,
that God will turn from his wrath. He prayed that in Exodus 32,
didn't he, in verse 12. He called upon the Lord to return
to repent. Our penitence is a prayer for
God's turning to us. And what is the ground of God's
turning? Well, it's in verse 14, His loving
kindness, His chesed. He remembered for them His covenant
and repented according to the multitude of His loving kindnesses. Psalm 106, verse 45. The work
of God's salvation. is verse sixteen. Let thy deed,
its work, I don't know how it is in your version, let thy deed
appear unto thy servants and thy glory upon their children. In the morning, in the day of
God's salvation, in the great resurrection morning, we will
hear of God's saving deed. Cause me to hear your chesed
in the morning. Psalm 143, verse on the other
side of the Red Sea. The establishment of God's blessing. His work establishes the work
of our hands. You know that word for establishing
is used of God's establishing the earth, of God's establishing
the heavens, the stars. God establishes the nation, the
city, the sanctuary, and then God establishes our steps. Deuteronomy
2.7. For the Lord your God has blessed
you in all the work of your hand. He has known your walking through
this great wilderness these forty years. The Lord your God has
been with you. You have lacked nothing. Even
in the wilderness, God could establish the work of their hands. And the psalmist says, I muse
on the work of your hands. Psalm 143, verses 5 and 6. So His work establishes our work,
His work of salvation, His deeds establishes our work. But then
the prayer is that God would establish the work of our hands
upon us. You see, we're not independent
in doing the work of our hands, we look to God to establish them. So even in the wilderness, the
people of God are praying that God establishes their work upon
us, upon them. You know, in in the city of Philadelphia,
there's a Rodin Museum to the French sculpture Rodin that's
right on the parkway, the main artery from downtown Philadelphia
out toward the Fairmount Park. And they have the thinker, the
statue of the thinker sitting out. observing the traffic snarls
in the highway. But, you know, in that museum,
it's interesting to look at those bronzes of Rodin's sculptures,
because, you know, he didn't polish it all off on the end.
He left a lot of his sculptures just a little bit rough. And
of course, he did them in clay first, and then they were cast
and put into bronze. But the thing is, you can see
just where his thumb went. You know, this is where he finished
off a little bit of it. It's kind of interesting. There's
the work of the hands of the sculptor Rodin, you know, and
preserved for posterity in bronze in a museum in a great metropolitan
area, and of course, other museums of Rodin's work in France as
well. So there they are, the work of
your hands, kept for eternity, as it were. But think of what
it means that God establishes the work of our hands. Because
eventually, you know, all that bronze will be in the final meltdown,
won't it? It won't be preserved forever.
But what is preserved forever? The things that we do through
God's redemption. those who are faithful in the
wilderness, Moses and Joshua, those who honored the Lord, the
work of their hands remains. It's a good thing to think about
in applying the text, right? So many things that Christians
do that are unnoticed, the work of a mother caring for the children,
things that a father has done, things that the Lord's saints
have done, that are not recorded in any history, they're not on
tape, they're not... in museums. They're not anywhere. They've disappeared from the
world. But God, who keeps our tears in his bottle, also keeps
our names in his book. And he keeps down the record
of those things that have been done. So nothing that we do for
the glory of God is lost. Establish thou the work of our
hands upon us, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all
the work of your hands. The French philosopher Jean Brun
has a book called The Hand, La Main, and in that book, which
is beautifully illustrated, it looks like a time-life book,
he has given first a study of the physiology of the hand and
the marvel of it. What an intricate thing it is
to operate on the hand because of the way in which it's constructed.
And then he talks about the technology as an extension of the hand and
the place of technology in human life. Establish the work of our
hand for it. But then he also talks about
the hand that reaches out, you know, reach out and touch someone,
the hand of the human side of our relationships with one another.
It's a beautiful book, it's a kind of pre-evangelism book, because
it ends with the statement that at last what counts is the hand
of God. He gives all the history of art. You know, of course, he has Michelangelo's
creation of Adam with the hand of God touching the hand of Adam
and so on. It's a beautiful book, but it's
a reflection on this fact. Our hands are so important in
terms of technology, their extension in technology. But the hand that
we have, where we lay hold of a friend and hold him established,
Lord, the work of our hands. Not only establish us as we seek
to develop the world that you've made, but establish us as we
put a hand on a loved one or lift up a little child or serve
him with our hands. So we have this beautiful prayer
then that shows the meaning of life. The meaning of life is
found in the fact that God establishes the work of our hands. It's not
in vain. It doesn't disappear. Even a
generation in the wilderness can be memorialized forever by
the fact that God sees and knows. And then the other aspect of
this verse is the joy of fellowship. Let the loveliness of the beauty
of the Lord our God be upon us. In contrast to the desert waste,
there's the dwelling of God's beauty. See, the temple isn't
built yet, but Moses nevertheless prays, let your beauty be established
upon us. And the other day I mentioned
to you the three forms of terms for beauty in the Old Testament,
remember? The beauty of glory, the majestic
glory of beauty, honor and majesty are before him, strength and
beauty in his sanctuary. The sun shall be no more your
light by day, nor for brightness shall the moon give light to
you, but the Lord will be unto you an everlasting light and
your God, your glory. And then the beauty of ordered
design. The works of the Lord are beautiful in their splendor.
Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. God is great in
the beauty of His power. God is holy in the beauty of
His wisdom. And God is good in the beauty
of His grace. One thing I ask of the Lord,
this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and
to seek Him in His temple. And you see, all of this beauty
is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The beauty of glory is Christ.
On the Mount of Transfiguration, the glory didn't begin with a
cloud, it began with the face of Jesus. The light of the glory
of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The beauty
of wisdom, in the book of Revelation, Jesus appears in holy array with
a golden belt and with the white robe of the priest in heaven. Jesus is the Logos. Jesus is
the source of all wisdom. And the beauty of God's design
is the beauty of that great plan of salvation that is given to
us through our Lord. And then finally, the beauty
of grace. In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful
and glorious, and over all glory for a covering." And Jesus Christ's
beauty is beautiful in grace, and the beauty of God's grace
is seen in him at that very moment when he's made hideous. When
he's made so disfigured in his sufferings that he seems inhuman
at that very moment when there is no beauty that we should desire
him. At that very moment, he is made
the king of beauty to our hearts, the fairest of ten thousand.
Isaiah says, you will see the king in his beauty, and it is
his glory, the glory of his grace. The psalmist Moses says, who
knows the power of your anger? And the answer is, Jesus knows
it. He knew it on the cross. He bore the anger of the wrath
of God for us. so that we might know the beauty
of his presence with us. Your glory be on our children,
Moses says, and the son of righteousness arises with healing in his wings. The beautiful years for us as
Christians are not only now, but they are ahead of us, not
in terms of utopian dreams, but in terms of the living Savior.
Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us. and establish
the work of our hands upon us. Yes, the work of our hands establish
it. Well, friends, I went over that
sermon sort of in a rough out form for you to open up discussion
about how we study, how we get at this, how we preach it, how
we present it. First of all, let's just have
a few questions about that and a few observations. Then I want
to talk about just how we go about it, getting a sermon on
the Psalms together. I thought it would be helpful,
I don't know, I just thought it would be helpful to go over a
sermon like that and then look at the Psalms and talk about
what you do handling the Psalms. I know that you will start with
the theme and you're developing that theme, but you don't seem
to feel a need for like a rigid restriction where you state your
theme and then each Each sub-point is almost like rigidly developing
and when you see the big other point, it moves. I've seen other
models for certain structures that almost seem to be kind of
rigid and cold and almost It's probably a weakness that I don't
give enough clues as to where I am in an outline. I always
have an outline. I always work hard to get a logical
outline. Probably, I don't often enough
tell people where they are in the outline. You know, the first
point, the meaning of life, the second point, the joy of fellowship. Now, I did say that, but whether
I said it clearly enough or repeated it enough, would people know
that afterwards? Probably not. I think it's a
weakness in my preaching that I don't make those divisions
clear enough. Yeah? Well, you go with the whole
song here, in a sense. But how did you determine that
you were going to use verse 17 as the door into this psalm? How did you come to that conclusion?
Probably it goes back to my own training in preaching with R.B.
Kuyper at Westminster Seminary. I think we all tend to be products
of our teachers. But I guess the reason I do that
is that I feel that if you're going to preach on the whole
psalm, then you have to do justice to the whole thing. And so I'd
rather preach on a shorter text and feel that I hadn't left anything
out of that text. See, that I've said enough about
the term for beauty that's used here and establishing the work
of our hands and all that. So I like to choose a shorter
text just so that I can feel that I've done adequate exegesis
on it. Then I always try to draw in
other material from the context, so the text is being preached
in the light of the context, and not just as a sermon that
ignores the context. Now, of course, in this psalm,
it's a unique psalm, you know, a psalm of Moses, the setting
is quite different from the other psalms. So, you don't tie in
as much from the other psalms, but I did, you know, I drew in
quotations from other psalms. Yeah, I think it's a richer verse,
really. But you could preach from any
one of the verses of the Psalms, you know. I preached from the earlier part
of the psalm at Urbana one time, where the emphasis was on God's
judgment against sin, you know, his wrath, the frustration of
life but underlying it, the wrath of God. Yes? And yet the conclusion really
drew upon your knowledge of Christ and all that we have to give
you. Is there a method to that that you look for? Now that we have computer concordances
coming out, that's becoming much less labor intensive. Well, I didn't use it in the
preparation of this sermon, but I have the NIV PC. That is the software that
John Devin puts out with the NIV. That gives you the Greek, you
know, on one side, and the English on the other side, and then you
can do a search with the Greek word. So it's a Greek concordance
built into it. But the search gives you the
Greek and the English all the time on the split screen. And
it even highlights the English word that translates the Greek
word. Once in a while it's the wrong word, but not often. I was astonished to see they
had it wrong one time. But mostly it's right. Don't get upset. But you know,
that's fantastic that you can go through And it's so rapid,
you know. You just hit a key, and you're
up at the next one. You hit a key, you're at the
next one. So you can just browse through the whole New Testament,
and you can also order a search in a restricted area, like you
can search everywhere in the book of Matthew, or you work
through the Pauline epistles, you know. But the big thing,
better than that even, is that you can do strings. You can and
you can do this with other software too. You can do string searches.
Where you're not looking just for one word, but where you're
looking where three different words are used within a specified
radius. Anywhere within 20 verses that
you find these three words used. I want to see the passages. And
you can just go through the whole Bible that way, catching passages
that deal with these things together. You know, loving kindness and
truth are often related in the Bible. Well, say you want to
look at every passage where loving kindness and truth are joined
together, you can just get those. Of course, that way you don't
have to look at as many passages as you would if you were going
down for all the occurrences. However, even with the great
value and benefit of these searches, excuse me, let me finish the
sentence and there's something else I want to bring in here
too, but even with the great value of these searches, You
don't want to discard the Englishman's Hebrew Concordance and the Englishman's
Greek Concordance. You still want to keep those
books available. Because for some things, they're
greater time savers. See, there you've got the list
in English. of the phrase where that occurs. And the Bagster, they're reprinted,
been reprinted many times by different people, but the old
Bagster, Englishman's Greek Concordance, Englishman's Hebrew Concordance,
you go right down the column with your eyes, you know, and
you can often right away see the You'll recognize the text
often just when you see that little clause, you know, oh yeah,
you'll know what that one is. But you go down and quickly get
those. Now that's faster than a computer.
Just scan down with your eyes. If you just quickly are looking
for certain uses or applications. But other things are much faster
with the computer, because the Englishman's Hebrew concordance,
for example, won't help you a bit to locate passages where two
different words are used. I mean, those little snippet
quotations won't give you enough context to tell whether the other
words used in that passage are not. For a lot of things, the
computerized concordance is the only way to go. So the Hebrew
form of the NIV is coming out now. So I don't know how soon
it's been done at Westminster in Philadelphia by Al Groves,
and he's worked with other scholars around the world And there's
going to be the same thing in Hebrew. Gives you the English,
Hebrew on one side, the English on the other side. You can do
a word search on the English word, which in the NIV isn't
worth much because, you know, it's so paraphrastic. But you can do a Hebrew, you
can do a Hebrew search. And that is something, see, there
you can, you've got your own Hebrew concordance that'll be
built right in. Of course, you've got Gramcord,
which is much better for searching, if you're interested in all the
heiress that Paul ever used or something, there it is. My roommate,
Steve Baugh, has a fantastic interest in heiress, and that's
highly important for New Testament scholarship. But these more rudimentary
tools are really fine for sermon preparation. To be able to go
through and see wherever the Hebrew word is used, or get a
group of words and go through and check them out. And you see,
even if your Hebrew is so deficient that you can't even find the
Hebrew word in the Hebrew text. it's illuminated. You light up
the English word and the Hebrew word lights up. Isn't that nice? Oh, that's very nice. And then you take the lit up
word Now on the NIV you do have to transliterate it, but they
give you help on that. But because they have that on
a screen too, you can bring up the transliterated screen. If
you don't like Hebrew characters, if ever since your first day
in seminary you've been allergic to Hebrew characters and sneeze
whenever they appear in the screen, well then the thing you do, you
bring on the the transliterated Hebrew, see? And then that gives
you the very form you want to tell it to search for. So you
pop that up there and tell it to search for it, and it searches
for it. It gives you all the instances through the Old Testament. Friends, this is very important
because so often the whole meaning of a passage will depend on the
use somewhere else. Well, no, the commentaries are
a lot of help, but you find things often that aren't even mentioned
in the commentary, so it's certainly the way to go. You know, you
have that Genesis 15, this isn't an illustration from the Psalms,
but here you have Genesis 15, and you're looking at that experience
Abraham had, you know, when God gave him the vision of the smoking
flame going between the divided pieces. The first time you read
that, you might wonder what in the world is going on here. Many
of you may have heard Meredith Klein speak about this, and so
you've had this all exegeted, but the first time you wouldn't
know. But you check it out, and then
you find way over in Jeremiah, there's a reference to the ceremony
of walking between the divided pieces when you make an oath.
And then you suddenly realize, uh-oh, that's why the divided
pieces. God's making an oath. He's swearing
by himself. He's saying, in effect, may I
be divided and scattered for the birds to eat if I don't keep
my promise. And then you look at the terms
and you've picked up in some translation that it's like a
smoking fire pot or it's like a hearth going through. Say,
what in the world is this? Is this like a mobile cooker
that's going down between the pieces? Does that make sense?
So then you look at the words and you get the concordance on
the words. And then you find out that these
words, not one of them, but three of them, are used in the Sarniai
occurrence, you see. And then you begin to realize
that we're not talking about smoking firepots, we're talking
about lightning. We're talking about the very
flame of God's presence, you see. You can tell as you compare
scripture with scripture with the use of the concordances.
And with the psalms, you're in a wonderful position because
the vocabulary of the psalms, as you know, is rather different
from the rest of the poetic vocabulary. But as you compare psalm with
psalm, you get tremendous insights. And then there's these literary
structures we've been looking at. they help to define the words
because you see something that's contrasted with something and
then you begin to understand what it has to mean in terms
of that contrast so it's worth doing and now it's time-consuming
but it's much less time-consuming than it used to be with computer
assistance so Rejoice, guys and women. You've got a whole new
way of studying the Bible now that's much more efficient in
terms of time. You don't have to spend the time
you used to have to spend. I must admit I do still often
spend trying to find the Hebrew word in some recognizable form
in some dictionary. So it isn't always easy to locate
the word to start with. But here's help on that too. Okay. Joe Young, E.J. Young at Westminster in Philadelphia
used to say about Brown Driver and Briggs that he had to figure
out not only what the root of the word was, but what Brown,
Driver and Briggs probably would have thought the root of the
word was. OK, we'll break for lunch.
Preaching Christ from Psalms #9
Series Westminster Seminary CA
Series given at Westminster Seminary California
| Sermon ID | 1219072255210 |
| Duration | 42:53 |
| Date | |
| Category | Teaching |
| Bible Text | Psalm |
| Language | English |
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