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.