The Old Testament reading includes two Psalms, the 133rd and the 134th. Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity. It is like the precious oil on the head running down on the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon which falls in the mountains of Zion. And there the Lord has commanded the blessing, life forevermore. Come, bless the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, who stand by night in the house of the Lord. Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord. May the Lord bless you from Zion, he who made heaven and earth. Father, I pray that the words of my mouth and meditations of my heart will be acceptable to you, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen. You may be seated. Well, we've come to the end of the Psalms of Ascent. Those psalms are the 120th psalm through the 134th psalm, 15 psalms, that actually were set apart. And you could say what we have is a set of psalms within the psalms or a hymn book within the hymn book. And you can easily identify them because they are each introduced as a psalm of ascent. There you are. Now, what they were for is they were to be sung by pilgrims, pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem for the three great feasts, the three great feasts that all men, faithful Israelites, were to take. And so they would go up to Jerusalem. Now, Jerusalem is about 2,500 feet above sea level. And Bethlehem is actually further up, about another 100 feet above sea level. So some people, you could say in a literal sense, we're going down to Jerusalem. But the meaning is that we should take this not so much as a literal sort of trek up a mountainside, although that is the case, but more of a spiritual ascent to the holy place. to where God's Spirit resided. And we're told in Deuteronomy 16 what those feasts were. Let me read for you the last few verses there of that chapter. Three times a year, all your males shall appear before the Lord your God at the place he will choose. At the feast of unleavened bread, which would be Passover, At the Feast of Weeks, which is Pentecost, and at the Feast of Booths, they shall not come empty-handed. Every man shall give as he is able according to the blessing of the Lord your God. Now these were feasts that punctuated the agricultural calendar, so there is an allusion here to bringing the produce of your land before the Lord to present as an offering. And this was a cycle that, of course, occurred every year. Now, you might wonder, as Christians, how are we to relate to this and understand it, and does it have any significance for us? I mean, the law is fulfilled in Christ, and we don't live in proximity to Jerusalem, and we don't take three trips a year there to worship the Lord and make sacrifices. So is there any significance to this, or is it just something that people, once upon a time, did? Now, there are people who think that we ought to follow all of the laws that we see in the Old Testament because, after all, they're God's laws. But this statement that I made a moment ago that Christ in a real way fulfills the law, we can understand that in a very manifold way. And when it comes to these feasts, it's not too difficult to see how Christ fulfills the law. Now, remember that the events surrounding Jesus' crucifixion occurred when? during the time of Passover, right? And the Lord's Supper was instituted, right, during that time. And in a real way, we as Christians believe that Christ is the one that is the true Lamb of God, that the offerings that were made every year during Passover was pointing to. So in a real sense, what the Old Testament church was doing was looking forward to the work of Christ and His sacrifice, even though they couldn't see that. because of where they were in time. But in faith, they were doing what they were told to do, and in a real way, Christ fulfills what we see alluded to in the Passover. Just think about the Passover for a minute, and I think you'll see what I mean. Now, in the Passover, if you recall, during the plagues that were visited upon Egypt, When the Israelites were delivered from the land of bondage there and the control of Pharaoh, the plagues escalated, the stakes, until finally the plague of the death of the firstborn occurred and the angel of death visited Egypt to bring about the judgment of God in that plague. But the Israelites were told if they did something that the angel of death would pass over them. If they sacrificed a lamb and placed his blood on the doorposts and the lentil of their homes, the angel of death would know that they were covered by the blood of the sacrifice and would pass over their house because there had already been a death that had occurred there. So, in a very real way, Christ delivers us from death, and this is a sign of how He does it. His sacrifice is what makes it possible for us to be delivered from death because He died for us, and of course, later was raised for us. And so, we don't observe Passover because Christ has fulfilled the law. Christ is what the Passover was referring to, and if we were to observe Passover, in a very real way, we'd be saying, well, we're not really sure. We're not really sure if Christ fulfilled the law. We're not really sure if, you know, this is something we should no longer do. Maybe we should just kind of, I don't know, hedge our bets a little bit, just in case. Insurance, so to speak, in case Christ's sacrifice wasn't enough. Obviously, Christians can't do that. So that's why we don't observe Passover, because Christ was the one that Passover was referring to all along. What about the Feast of Weeks? When did that occur? Seven weeks following Passover, on the 50th day, Pentecost, You would have the Israelites bringing the first fruits of their harvest. The first harvest would occur and they would bring the first fruits before the Lord in anticipation of the rest of the harvest that would occur later. And what we have at Pentecost is what? The first harvest. When the gospel is preached and people respond in faith, 3,000 are added to the number that day. It's the first harvest of the preaching of the gospel that occurred at that time. So that's why we don't observe the Feast of Weeks because Pentecost was what it was referring to all along. And then, what about the Feast of Booths? Well, that's the last feast. At the end of the harvest, when there's no more harvesting to be done, you come before the Lord at the Feast of Booths, make their offerings, and thank the Lord for what He had done. What's that referring to in the Christian framework? The Last Judgment. You and I are the harvest. We see this throughout the Gospels. We're referred to as the people who are to bear fruit for the Lord. The Word of God is sown, and our faith and our obedience are the result. And the harvest of souls, the bringing into the sheaves, you know that great hymn? The angels bring them in, and guess what the sheaves are? Well, you and me. And so that's what the Feast of Booths is referring to. And even though that has not occurred yet, we believe it's as good as done, because what Christ has done is done, and consequently, we don't observe the Feast of Booths. So, there's the logic of how Christ fulfills the feasts. That's the typology. Now, these Psalms, though, are still meaningful to us. Because in a real sense, what we actually have, well, let me think about it this way. I'm gonna help you think about it this way. These two Psalms are about the end. As the pilgrims get closer and closer to Jerusalem, guess what happens? They get, at one and the same time, closer and closer to each other, right? And then they're in the presence of the Lord when they finally arrive at the temple where the Lord's spirit dwells. And what you have with these two, Psalms is an appropriate set of things to sing when you have this occurring, this convergence of people and the convergence of these people as they come into the presence of the Lord. And they correspond to the two tablets of the law. If you think about this in the right way, you can see that when you talk about the law, meaning specifically the Ten Commandments, there are commands that are directing us to what? obeying God's laws in such a way that we don't violate the interests of our brothers and sisters. Thou shalt not, remember? Thou shalt not kill, steal, commit adultery, so forth. Those are things that secure the interests of our brothers and sisters. But then there are the laws that relate to our obedience to God. That's the first tablet of the law. So the 133rd Psalm is really encapsulating the proper way to regard our brothers and sisters in the faith. And then the 134th Psalm is directed toward the Lord Himself. And so we see, you know, really a nice encapsulation of the heart of the law. Remember when Christ was asked, you know, what's the greatest commandment in the law in Matthew 22 and what his response was? His response really summarizes those two tablets. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the second is likened to it, love your neighbor as yourself. And then he says, all the law and the prophets hang on those two commandments. In other words, the commandments break down. You get into some specifics, but the heart of the commandments is summarized with love the Lord your God and love your neighbor. And so what we have here, as they arrive in Jerusalem, ascending the hill of the Lord, they're singing, and they're singing these two psalms, and they've saved the best for last. They've come to the end of their journey. And if you look at the other psalms of Asset, they're basically about the journey. in a literal way, but also in a kind of metaphorical way, alluding to just the struggle that believers have, or the struggles that believers have in this life and how God helps them through those. And in a real way, this mirrors our own pilgrimage. You and I are on our way to the Holy City. And as we arrive, we're going to see that there are some other people there as well. And we're going to find ourselves in the presence of the Lord for all eternity. And our lives, as we lead them in this world, are a trek to that place. And every Sunday as we gather in this way, this is sort of a dress rehearsal, you could say. It's kind of to get you ready for the big day. You find yourself in a room with a bunch of people you hardly know. but the thing you have in common is your common faith in Christ, right? And really, there are certain things that should characterize your relationship with those people, right? And then, of course, in faith, we believe that we've come into the presence of God. that we are seated with Christ in heavenly places right now. I know what you're thinking, no, I'm seated in a square dance hall in Vancouver, Washington. No, in a real way, you are actually seated with Christ in heavenly places if you are one of his people. Now let's take a look at a couple of things that we see mentioned in these Psalms. The first is found in the 133rd Psalm. In the first verse, behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity. How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity. Have you noticed that there's a lot of stuff in life that isn't good or pleasant? And sometimes you associate that stuff with your brother or your sister, and maybe they're not so good or pleasant. You know, you're just sort of like, ah, Thanksgiving. Here comes the argument. My brother, my sister, disagreed with me about so many things. How can that person be so stupid? You get my drift. But there we see that, as I noted, brothers and sisters don't always get along, and we have plenty of evidence of that in the Bible. Right in the book of Genesis, we have all these brothers who can't get along with each other. Cain and Abel, right? You know, Ishmael and Isaac. Jacob and Esau, Joseph, all of his brothers hated him. So you got a lot of tension in these houses, households, and these are people who made it into the Bible. Think about that. So there's hope for you. But what we see here is that natural bonds are not enough. When we think about brothers, we know that they ought to get along. They share a father and a mother, right? If they're biologically the descendants of the man and the woman. But this isn't just a problem that we see sort of observed in the Bible. Think about the founding of Rome, Romulus and Remus, right? One of us has got to die to found this city. And that's what occurs according to the story of how the city was founded. Now living in unity requires more than just the natural stuff that comes to you, the things that come naturally to you. You need the grace of God so that you can practice the art of living with other people. Let me take you to a scripture that lays out for us just what we're up against. And it's found in Galatians. It begins at the 16th chapter of chapter five. And here we hear the Apostle Paul say, Now we can all relate to that. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now, the works of the flesh are evidence. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalry, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God, but The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law, and those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. There you have it. We need God's help to overcome the flesh in our lives. We need to be, you could say, dead men walking. Think about it. Crucify the flesh. There's something in you that wars against the Spirit, and that part of you must die. A lot of people have a strong affection for that part of their lives, and consequently are not at all pleased when they're told this. And that's why growing in grace is something like what we see with Kubler-Ross and her book, The Five Stages of Death and Dying. Are you familiar with that book? What she did is she did some research to discover that people, when they were told that they're about to die, go through a set of states, five stages. And the first stage is denial. The second stage is anger. And then you have just kind of despondency, and then bargaining, and then finally acceptance. Now, when people hear the law of God proclaimed, they recognize that there is something in them that must die, and they don't want it to go. And so they kind of, you know, kind of try to live with it, try to deny the truth that that part of themselves needs to die, or they get angry. Have you noticed this? People get angry when God's law condemns them. But growth in grace doesn't mean that you don't feel those things. Growth in grace means that as you get more developed in your spiritual life, you go through the stages quicker. So the goal is to just sort of accept the truth about yourself and the fact that something in you must die so that you can keep in step with the Spirit. And if you keep in step with the Spirit, what do you see? You see the fruit of the Spirit. love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness. And finally, self-control is at the very end. But if you have those things in mind, you get what Paul is getting at when he says there's no law against those things because those are the things we want. We're not trying to prohibit you from being loving. We are trying to encourage you in your loves, right, in the right way. And self-control and love are, you could say, kind of the kind of the framework within which all of this is known. It's not as though love is the most important and self-control is the least important. That's not really the way to think about it. It's more, these are the two most important things that frame everything else and make those other things possible. You need to grow in grace and keep in step with the Spirit, and if that's the case, then you will enjoy the kind of blessing that the 133rd Psalm is describing. communion with your brothers and sisters. It's a beautiful, sweet thing. And for many of us, an alien thing. We've never experienced it. But it's what God wants for us. and it's the work of the Spirit in your life and in the church to bring it about. This is really important. And our communion is based on some things, and we saw those things enumerated. You can look at Ephesians 4 1-6, where Paul, again in a different letter, says, I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, literally a prisoner, Urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. With all humility and gentleness, with patience, patience, you've noticed that came up again. Gentleness, it came up again. Bearing with one another in love, love, it came up again. Eager to maintain the unity of spirit in the bond of peace. the bond of peace, and then we're told there is one body and one spirit, just as you recall, to one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. And the Lord, on the night when he was betrayed, prayed that we would be one. This is really important stuff. This is not secondary or tertiary. This is at the heart of things, our unity and the work that's required in order to practice being gracious to each other. You know, one of the things that's great about the list there in Galatians is, you know, long-suffering. In other words, we're gonna have to put up with a lot with each other. That's just part of the process. Now, there are gonna be times where things are great, and we're enjoying a season of peace in our church, and it's a marvelous thing. But sometimes things get tough. Sometimes things have to be addressed and things aren't so pleasant. But if we work at putting up with each other a bit, we can press through those times and enjoy the promise that we see in this psalm. Now, one of the things that's interesting about this psalm is that this is all likened to having oil poured on your head. I just don't think of that as something to look forward to myself. So what's this all about? We're told that this is like precious oil on the head running down on the beard, on the beard of Aaron. Aaron, of course, is the first high priest, running down on the collar of his robes. Now, when we think about biblical symbolism and signs, they're not all that hard to understand. You just need to stop and think about it a little bit and reflect on the sign. What we have here is the anointing that's intended to demonstrate or put on display God's favor. So Christ means the anointed one. I don't know if you knew that. It wasn't just like Jesus' last name. It's a title. It means that he is the anointed one. He enjoys his father's favor. And it also, throughout scripture, alludes, or it's sort of connected to, I should say, the spirit and the work of the spirit and the presence of the spirit in someone's life. But when we think about oil, what can we attribute to the presence of oil? Well, there's a kind of sheen and a luster when it's applied. There's a beautifying and a saturating and a softening and a renewing. You know, that baseball glove you got, what it needs is some good oil. Work it in there. It'll loosen it up a bit and make it useful again. Look how beautiful those shoes are since you've polished them and put that oil I told you to put in. That's the kind of thing we're talking about. It's that kind of simple. sort of direct, easy-to-relate-to thing. And when it comes to what we experience when we enjoy being in each other's presence, when we dwell with each other and are unified, It's as though God is pouring out upon us something that is making us beautiful and open and responsive and saturates the church with his presence. That's what this is referring to. Now, I'd like to take you to the last psalm, the next psalm, 134, and reflect on that a little bit with you. We're told there that we should bless the Lord if we are a servant of the Lord. Come bless the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, who stand by night in the house of the Lord. Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord. May the Lord bless you from Zion, who made heaven and earth. Have you ever wondered about what heaven's like? I think everybody does. What's heaven like? We're told in scripture that no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor heart of man imagined what God has prepared for those who love him. But that doesn't mean you don't think about it. That doesn't mean you don't speculate a bit, try to envision what it's like. Now, according to conventional wisdom, heaven is dull. Have you noticed this? You know, what you have with cartoons and stuff like that in the newspaper. If you see some guy in heaven, he's got what? A harp, right? He's got a white robe, sitting on a cloud, and he's bored. He's like, well, all eternity has nothing to do except strum my harp. And that's why you get ridiculous stuff by rock and rollers about, hey, when I get to hell, I'm going to be there with all my friends. We're going to party! Right? Well, no. Really, no. The images fail us because of transposition. And what I'm getting at is, and this is something that C.S. Lewis talked about, imagine you lived in a two-dimensional world. And somebody from the third dimension arrived in your world and tried to explain it to you. How could you possibly imagine life in a three-dimensional world where everything is just flat, right? There's no above and below. It's just all on one level. But you could transpose. You could try to, in some sense, create on that level surface the impression of a third dimension. This is what I do all the time as an artist. I illustrate children's books. And I'm working with what? Flat piece of paper. And I create the illusion, right, of a third dimension, of depth, or at least I attempt to. Heaven. No eye has seen. No ear has heard. No heart has imagined. In other words, it's beyond our ability to think about in a real way. and relate to, everything we have in some really significant way falls short. Even in scripture, we're given images that don't do justice to what's in store for us. That's the challenge that we have. Now, we can imagine hell because it's just this world without the good stuff. So, you know, back to the rock and roller. Imagine your best friend And all that's left is the stuff that annoys you. Forever. There's no upside. There's no pleasure at all. It's just, you know, you think that, well, it'll be pleasure without guilt at last. No, it'll just be guilt without pleasure. Forever. That's hell. It's pandemonium. Demons everywhere. That's what pandemonium means. Demons literally everywhere. Pan everywhere, demonium, demons everywhere. And what does that kind of bring to mind? Noise. Just nonsensical, deafening noise. Contrast that with the harmony of heaven. Where souls are in harmony. praising their God for eternity, and enjoying a blessing that's just otherworldly and we can't fully appreciate. That's what's in store in heaven. That's where you wanna be. The other place is not a party. Or if it's a party, it's not for you, it's for the other folks, meaning the demons who are down there. Now, blessing the Lord, how do we do that? How do we bless the Lord? Well, we praise the Lord And how can that be heavenly, though? When you praise another person, don't you, in some sense, lose something in the process? Don't you, in some sense, kind of make yourself small at the expense of making that person big? That's not the way this works. There's a paradox, a marvelous paradox. We don't actually increase God's stature one bit when we praise him. The one who benefits is the one who does the praising. That's the paradox. The more you give, the more you get. There's a marvelous book by C.S. Lewis entitled The Last Battle. It's the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia. How many Chronicles of Narnia fans do we have here? All right, three, okay. Actually, there was a good number of people who raised hands. But at the very end, in The Last Battle, it's about the end of Narnia, this fantasy world, right? It doesn't really exist, but in some sense, it's intended to help us think about our own world and understand some things about the real world that we live in that maybe we miss. And at the end of the story in the Chronicles of Narnia, you have a number of the characters, they find themselves in some place that strikes them as very Narnia-like, but bigger and better and brighter. And then it occurs to them that everything that they loved in Narnia was actually just a reflection of this. Let me take you to the story itself. There we have a unicorn, and the unicorn sums up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right forefoot or hoof on the ground and neighed, and then he cried, I have come home at last. This is my real country. I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we love the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Come further up and further in. And then all of the characters begin this remarkable race further up and further in to the heart of Narnia. And we're told that as they ran, everything got better and better and better and better and better and better the further they went in. That was the moment my oldest son became a Christian when he read that story for the first time. I'm talking in terms of his response and faith. He was a Christian because he was a covenant child, but he came to faith for himself at that moment when he saw heaven in that story and knew that it was talking about not just some fantasy, it was talking about what we as Christians look forward to. blessing the Lord and being blessed by the Lord forevermore. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, these are remarkably challenging psalms if we understand them in the right way, but at the same time also a source of great consolation. I pray, Lord, that you'll help us to live the way that we should enjoy enjoying each other's presence and enjoying being in your presence. And I say these things in Jesus' name, amen.