Right. So do you want to get ready? We'll be in Psalm 139 today. Don't know what page that is in your particular Bible, but Psalm 139. And let's begin with some prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we come to you now. on this Lord's Day morning, and we ask for your blessing upon us as we open your word. Help us to understand it, and to receive it, and to apply it in our own lives. We pray that it would dwell in us richly, and we ask also, Lord, that as we proceed into the worship above, that you would bless us there as well, and that this entire day would be one in which you are worshiped, and glorified, and in which we are blessed, and we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, so we are in Psalm 139, which I've always personally thought to be a real gem of a Psalm. I think it's got a lot of profound insights about the nature of God. And I forgot this when I signed up for it, but as I was reading through it and getting ready, I realized there's actually some challenging thoughts and applications towards the end as well. So challenging, in fact, that if you, you'll notice in the responsive reading from the Pew Bibles upstairs, when we do that, there'll be omitted verses. There'll be some uncomfortable verses that don't make it into the responsive reading. It seems that the editors of the ESVPW Bibles found them, these verses, uncomfortable enough so as to be inappropriate for public recitation. But as someone who does not shy away from the inappropriate, And as a group that is not afraid to go to the difficult or uncomfortable places, we will not be following those editors in their own mission. We'll be covering the whole Psalm as if time permits. So let's get started. Psalm 139, the ascription to the choir master, a Psalm of David. So the Psalms title ascribes it to David. And I don't think that particularly affects the interpretation of the Psalm in any significant way. I don't think you have to know who's writing it to really be blessed by it. Although it might help us in some particular way now and again to know that when David's making these comments, maybe he's thinking of this or that person or this or that event in his life. Nothing is specific enough to really pin it down, but I guess it helps to know it's about David. We know a lot of the Psalms are messianic, that they are explicitly or very strongly implicitly about Jesus. I don't think this Psalm is making any kind of Christological or prophetic things that are found in here. that are coming through super strongly. This certainly can apply to Christ. All the psalms can be applied to Christ in a general way. You could read every psalm and look at it through the lens of Jesus being the ultimate psalmist. And so certainly what we're going to read about here will apply to his own life as well. But I don't think this is not one of those psalms that you read around the holidays or something because it's got explicitly messianic prophetic content in it. As for the layout of the psalm, the first 16 verses are this extended rehearsal and exaltation of several of God's attributes. Attributes being characteristics or traits of God. The first six verses will focus heavily on God's knowledge, and verses 7 to 12 on his presence, and then in verses 13 through 16, if not focusing on his omnipotence, then definitely on his power as far as creation and predestinating goes. Now in each section, David doesn't discuss these attributes like a theology text. He doesn't get technical. He doesn't give you lots of jargon and definitions, but he discusses them in a way that is constantly applying them to his own life and his own circumstances. Now, again, those are not, he doesn't specifically mention people and places, but when David's writing this, he's thinking about his own life and how those attributes come down into his life. And since it's general, Since it's general, I think that allows us to do the same for ourselves. So these great transcendent facets of God are brought down and made imminent. That means present among us in the sensible and experiential aspects of human life. So even though David's thinking of himself, we easily can put ourselves in the verses and they fit for you and me just as well. We can read this Psalm as if it's written from our point of view and it works. After David lays out these three attributes and praises them, then in verses 17 to 18, there's a bit of a summary and conclusion. And then David really pivots and goes into some supplications, some requests before the Lord in verses 19 to 24. And that's where we get into the verses that we don't want to recite in public. So we'll get to that when we get to it. But first let's work through the doxological part, the part where we're praising God, and we'll take it in a segment at a time. So verses one through six to begin, O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high, I cannot attain it. All right, so which attribute of God would you say is the focus of this first section? Anyone? Think they can throw me? Omniscience. There's some technical terms. Omniscience. Omni-science. Omni meaning like all, science, knowledge. Omniscience. The fact that God knows something is explicitly stated in all but one of these verses. And in the other verse, the remaining verse, it is implied. So it's all through this section. Now in the first verse, we just get a generic, God knows David. But it also says God has searched David, and that can be a little trickier. So the word search, in ordinary use, implies what about your knowledge, initially? It's just, yeah, yeah, I don't have enough, right? So normally when you say I'm searching, that means I don't know the answer. You don't search for your car keys if you know where they are, right? That would be like the definition of insanity. My dad would always roll his eyes when people said, it's always in the last place you look as if you would keep looking once you found it. So I never forgot that. The Hebrew word used for searching here is elsewhere used in reference to things like mining and exploration of lands. The idea being that miners have to dig around to find that vein of ore before they can extract it. And someone exploring a new country, they have to, they have to explore before they know what places they want to settle in and where they have to go to. Maybe the, maybe the spies would have to remove the Canaanites. They have to explore. They have to get the lay of the land. They have to find out what they don't know. So. When it comes to God, though, we know that isn't the case. God doesn't need to search for anything. God doesn't lack knowledge. His knowledge is eternal and complete. So this must be anthropomorphic language. And for those who don't know, we've used that before in other Sunday schools, but anthropomorphic is a fancy way of saying we take things about God and we put them into human terms so we can relate, even though it's not the same. So God doesn't lack knowledge. When God searches David, it's not because he doesn't know something about David already. He always knew things about David, but we can't know like that. And so we use human terms. And I think also we can say that God often does things in our lives that cause us to reveal who we are. Not so that he'll know what we're like, but so that we'll know what we're like. And so other people will know what we're like. So God does search us then in that sense, in revealing, in revealing ourselves to us rather than to him. God searches us. And that's, you put that in the same bucket as like, God tries us, God tests us. God is sounding us out. Not because he needs to fight up, but because, you know, when God tests Abraham, did he know what Abraham would do before Abraham? brought up the knife to take it down on Isaac? Of course he did. But now Abraham knows what Abraham would do. So God searches David and knows David. In verse 2, God knows David's activities and thoughts. He even knows them from afar. And again, that's more of this accommodating anthropomorphic language. It's not just that God discerns things through senses that get sharper as distance decreases. but he just has a greater range of vision than we do. From afar really here means from any distance at all. God knows all this about David, not because he has sharp eyes, but because he doesn't have any eyes at all. He simply knows all things by virtue of his being God. In the third verse, God knows David's path and his ways. And it's a very similar statement to verse two. I'm not going to dwell on it. It's just that Hebrew parallelism saying the same thing with some synonymous words. In the fourth verse, we see that God's knowledge of David's thoughts and words is not time-bound. He does not have to wait for them to come into being before he knows them. Even before David speaks, or presumably even thinks what he is going to speak, God already knows what those thoughts and words will be. And then we get to verse 5, which has some really great language, very memorable. In verse 5, God is said to ham in David. That is, in other translations, you'll see words like hedge or enclose or encircle him. The same language is used of armies besieging cities, cutting off all avenues of escape for their inhabitants. And so the idea here is, it might initially sound this way, but the idea here is not that God is attacking David or trying to conquer him. He's not hemming David in like the Babylonians are hemming in Jerusalem. But the idea here is that God's knowledge of David is complete. He sees David from every angle. No part of David's heart or life can escape from God's comprehension. David can't keep anything back in some dark recess of his heart. Now, that language, this kind of encirclement language, this hemming in language, would seem, I think, disturbing and oppressive to the sinner. Because sinners do not want to be seen. What does John 3.19 say? Men love darkness rather than light. Why? Because their deeds are evil. So in that sense, this does sound like a negative verse, right? If I'm a person who's at enmity with God, being hemmed in by God doesn't sound like a good place to be. he's got me on the ropes, right? But to the believer, to the redeemed, to David, and hopefully to you and me, this kind of epistemological encirclement, that's a fancy way of meaning how we know what we know, this kind of encirclement of knowledge is not a threat, but a comfort. We can rest easy knowing that God sees all and knows all. He understands us. Nothing can happen to us apart from his knowledge and therefore from his will. The surrounding army of God's omniscience is not besieging us, but watching over us. It's not spying on us. It's watching over us. It's a guard to us. So we can see that God's knowledge is perfect in every way. It's eternal and total, inescapable and infallible. And so it's no wonder that David concludes this section in verse 6 by expressing his feebleness before it. I can't attain this, right? It's too wonderful, too high, completely unattainable for a mere creature. Not only do we not have such knowledge ourselves, we can't even begin to fathom what having such knowledge would be like. we can only wonder and be awestruck, not only does such knowing exist, but that that knowing comes to us, that we are subject to such knowing, that such a knower would stoop to keep us safely hemmed in with that knowledge. So that's that first section there. Any thoughts on that before I move on to the next one? Yes, go ahead, Paula. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. The analogy of a mother bird keeping the chicks under the wings. Yes. That's how God's knowledge would be. Now they didn't want that, but we would want that. I would want to be under those wings. Right. In fact, there's verses that talk about being under God's pinions, that protecting God's knowledge will necessarily protect us. Right. And so, yeah, I can absolutely see a connection there. Okay. Moving on then to verses seven through 12. Where shall I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you. The night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. Okay, so what's the attribute here in the second section? I mean, presence. Yes. God doesn't just know everything. He is everywhere. He is in all things, fills all spaces. He is around and in it all. There is no spot where God is not as, I don't know. I feel like that's on everything at a Christian bookstore, that like a phrase like that, but it's true. It's very memorable. It's catchy. It's true. There is no spot where God is not. David tackles this attribute with rhetorical questions. Where could he flee to get away from God? Not that he would want to do that, mind you, but it's rhetorical. Can I ever get away from you? If I said it to my wife, that wouldn't be good, right? You got to be careful how you say that. But here, David is not meaning this in a negative way. In verse 8, David considers flight to the farthest vertical dimensions of the creation. What about up to heaven? Well, it's probably obvious you can't hide from God in heaven, right? Could David hide in the clouds or the Andromeda galaxy or the heaven of heavens with the angels? Well, obviously not. If anything, we tend to think God is most likely to be present in those sorts of places. But what about the other direction? What if we go down there? What if we go down to Sheol? Now, what even is Sheol, right? Other translations don't use that word. King James uses hell here. Others might say the grave or the netherworld. This is a generic term. for the abode of the dead, which encompasses the literal tomb where the body lies and also to the place where the spirit descends after death. Abraham's bosom, you might hear it referred to in other places. Where would the dead go to await judgment? And we don't have time for a whole lesson about how exactly that place is compartmentalized and who goes where and all the eschatology of that. But sufficient to say it's the opposite direction from going up. At least it was for some and at some time. So, David is wondering if he could hide from God in the ground, or even in the abode of the dead. Now, even we might think this is one place where God might not be. But we would be wrong, because God is present, not only in this sort of generic hell of the Old Testament, but even in the fires of Gehenna hell, the eternal torment hell. God is there. When we speak of hell, that kind of hell, as being cast out of God's presence, sometimes people refer to it that way. Oh, hell is separation from God. Well, it's separation not from his presence. It's just separation from God's benevolent presence. God's in hell. He's present everywhere and hell is a place. So God is there, but he's just not there in any mode of blessing. He's only there in modes of wrath and justice, but he's there. David couldn't flee from God in any such place. What about the horizontal extremes of creation? If David takes the wings of the morning, that means he's moving to the sunrise, to the easternmost place he can see. And if he goes to the uttermost parts of the sea, that doesn't mean he's going down to the bottom of the ocean. It means he's going out to the westernmost horizon, which for him would have been out over the Mediterranean. Even there, east or west, God's hand, another anthropomorphism because God doesn't have an actual hand, will be upon David to lead him. What if David doesn't flee geographically like this, but flees to the darkest place where no light can touch him? Will the darkness deliver him from God's presence? And of course not. Darkness is nothing to God. He does not need light. When you hide in the darkest basement or cave, you might as well be under stadium lights as far as God is concerned. And this brings us back around again to omniscience kind of comes back here, right? And what makes sense, and that makes sense because in God, omniscience and omnipresence are the same thing. For God to be present is to know it, and to know it is to be present. In fact, all of God's attributes are talking about the same thing. All attributes are the same attribute, just considered from a different human point of view. God doesn't have attributes, he is the attribute. And that attribute, we could call it all in one, we could call it godness. God's godness means that he's present everywhere, means he knows everything, and a whole bunch of other stuff. But they're all one thing. And we'll get to a third thing in this next section. Although I should stop and let anyone have any comment or question. All right, on to our third section. For you form my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. Okay, so now we're in the third section. We're getting to another attribute, which one's this one? So it might be a little less obvious, but omnipotence. Yes, all powerful, but especially in terms of God's powers of creation and predestination. So that's what David's gonna focus on. He's making it personal, right? He's talking about where I came from and the steps that are laid out for me. God arranged all that. That's showing God's power. God didn't just make the universe, he made David. He made David's parts. He put David together in the womb, as a knitter or a weaver makes a fine garment, each thread in the proper place, connected with the other threads in just the right way. So there's a beautiful analogy language here to craftsmanship. From the moment of conception, the great tailor meticulously oversees the assembly of the body with which David once was, and now you are, clothed. It's not haphazard or random, but all subject to God's perfect will and design. I think some people think, well, maybe God like made the big stuff, but then the rest just runs by like random or just flows on its own. Everything, the smallest things all happen according to God's determination. Every atom, molecule, it goes where God had intended it to go. We're not just talking about galaxies, even atoms are under his control. So truly then, we are fearfully made. Now fearfully here means in such a manner that we should fear and reverence the maker. We are wonderfully made. And that is we should marvel at what an incredible work this human frame is. And as medical science advances, that only confirms and expands the truth of that, right? The ancients knew very little, and you'll see some of that in the language. David likens this to being put together like in the depths of the earth where no one can see, right? There's secrecy and mystery. We know more now, but the more we know, the more amazing it becomes. The complexities of human development, how the nerves find the right pathways, how the genes know when to express and when to turn off, all that stuff, stem cells and embryos and mitosis and all those processes are so complex and precise. And that points to a creator, not away from one. Right? These verses should also forever put to rest all argument that it's permissible to kill a child in the womb. And I think these verses are frequently appealed to in the pro-life argument. Who would dare to rip up the work of the great knitter, or unravel the masterpiece of the great weaver, even as he's making it, before it can even take its first breath? And John Calvin says, quote, The fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being and it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because the man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light. If one runs to verse 16 to say, well, the fetus is just an unformed substance and thus not human, I don't think that follows. The fetus is unformed at the moment of conception, you might say, but the formation commences and continues all through the pregnancy. And we know even within days, there's a lot of development that's happened. The King James translates unformed as yet being unperfect. which is a more accurate phrase. It's not perfect yet, but it's on the way. And perfect meaning complete. Nor can one argue David is ignorant of biology because in verse 15, he talks about being made in the depths of the earth. David knows babies don't come from the ground. They're not created like orcs in the Lord of the Rings or something. He knows that. It's a metaphor. The womb to David, especially ancient people, is like the depths of the earth. It highlights the darkness, the mystery, and the fertility of the womb. Just a seed in the field cannot be seen germinating and putting out roots in the soil, at least until it breaks through with its first shoots. Something's going on down there beforehand. We can't see it, so we don't see the incredible transformation the embryo undergoes until it breaks forth at birth. The depths of the earth also, I think, calls us back to verse 8 in Sheol. The fact that God is in Sheol, if he's in those dark confines, he's also in the dark confines of the womb. And there he works in a mysterious and amazing way that we can barely comprehend. Now in verse 16, the section concludes by moving from creating to ordaining. God not only made David in his mother's womb, but even before he began to form David there, he'd already determined all of David's days. He'd written them in his book. Not that there's a literal book, again, this is poetic. But God had laid these out. God's knowledge and his power, just like his knowledge and his presence, are one. God doesn't just know the future because he can foresee it. He knows the future because he designed it in eternity past. And this future is not just, again, like the big picture of the fates of empires. It's the individual pixels of particular lives and days. God determined what you would have for breakfast today. That was part of his plan. Minute daily decisions and habits down to the smallest detail. God is there in and around all of it. Now, verses 17 and 18 sum it all up. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God, how vast is the sum of them. If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake and I am still with you. So having exalted God for these three great facets of his being, David winds up with a summary statement here. God's thoughts, though beyond David, are precious to him. And I love the last sentence in verse 18. I awake and I'm still with you. It is almost as if all that has come before was a dream or a vision or some deep meditation that kind of took David away from the world. He almost had an out-of-body experience thinking about all this. And now David's returning to himself. He's snapping out of it. And he has to get back up and get to work, the daily grind, killing Philistines or whatever he's doing today. He's got to get up. But God is still with him even then. When I come back to the mundane, when I got to come down from the lofty thoughts, you're still with me. You're not only near at the moment so that I can put aside the distractions and contemplate. He's with David. He's with us always. And that brings us to David's petitions, his prayers to God, which drastically changed the tone of the Psalm and unsettled David wants to stay in the lofty world of divine contemplation, but he has problems to deal with. He has hindrances that interfere with his enjoyment of the divine. And here they are. Oh, that you would slay the wicked, oh God. Oh, men of blood, depart from me. They speak against you with malicious intent. Your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate you, oh Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred. I count them my enemies. So beyond the material needs that we all must take time to handle, beyond the daily chores and labors, David has to contend with the wicked, the blaspheming enemies of God. And so do we, although maybe not to the same degree or in the same way David had to. He was the king, surrounded by violent heathens all around and so on. But we could relate to some degree, I would think, if you watch the news, if you look at the world we're in. David's language though, is jarring to modern people. We wonder how a guy that has just has such sublime and loving thoughts can turn on a dime and demand death and proclaim his hatred for people. Look at what he says. Really look at it. His first petition is begging God to slay the wicked. And then he says he hates and loathes those people. Completely hates them even. Not like I got a little bit of hate. It's like, I hate you. I completely hate you. The King James calls it perfect hatred. And this is not just annoyance or disappointment. This is visceral, deep, and extreme. Now, the little mainline liberal that American culture has created in all of us cries out in offense and says, David, you can't say that. That's not Christ-like. We must love our enemies. And so on. So is the voice of your inner Tony Campolo correct? What do we do with this? What do we do with this kind of visceral hate language? Well, I think there's a couple of things we need to think of before we dismiss it. First, we need to note who David says he hates with perfect hatred. God's enemies. Not firstly his personal enemies. Now they'll become his personal enemies because they're God's enemies, but they're not firstly his personal enemies. David is not calling for the death of personal rivals or people that just slighted him. He is not hating people for being personally opposed to him. Consider how he treated Saul, right? He is talking about those who have set themselves against God and his purposes. David does count them as his personal enemies, but only because they are God's enemies first. And that order really matters. He does not take his own enemies and then declare them to be God's enemies. That would be a really big mistake. To get the people that just, I just, I don't know, sticking your craw and say, well, God must be opposed to them. So I really hate those people. This psalm does not give you license to pray for God to slay your neighbor because he lets his dog go to the bathroom on your lawn. or for God to destroy the guy vying with you for the promotion at work. Second, we must understand what hate actually is, or what hate should be, at least. Like love, hate is not firstly an emotion or a sentiment. Of course, it often spills into the realm of emotion. Love and hate are both habits or dispositions when rightly considered. We talked at length in our whole series about love. It was a year ago, right? We've talked about how love is not so much a warm fuzzy, though warm fuzzies are great, not the warm fuzzy, but love is instead a disposition of goodwill toward another that manifests as good actions for their benefit. Thus, a man who is emotionally reserved but makes tremendous sacrifices for the sake of his family is more loving than a man full of positive emotion for his kids that consistently fails to provide for or protect them. Let's not confuse sentiment with the real virtue of love. Well, hate is the flip side of the coin of love. It is not so much a cold prickly. but is instead a disposition of bad will toward anything that opposes or threatens what he loves. One cannot truly love, now think about this, one cannot truly love or will the good of a thing without a commensurate hate for or willingness to oppose whatever threatens that thing. One need not be a theonomist to agree with what R.J. Rushdoony says in this quote. I'm going to read you a quote from this man named Rushdoony. He says, If a man truly loves a thing, he does not love its opposite. If a man loves his country, he will hate treason. If a man loves God, he will hate evil, heresy, and all anti-Christian activities. If a man loves God's law and order, he will hate and resent all lawlessness. There is always an exclusiveness about love. Love cherishes the thing loved and excludes its antithesis. Every attempt therefore to abolish hate by telling men they must love all things is an attempt to abolish love. It is a summons not to love but to hate. Universal love is an impossibility. A man cannot at one and the same time love Christ and love every evil and satanic thing. Our Lord said, no man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. He cannot serve God and mammon." Matthew 6, 24. When we are asked to have this universal love for all things, we are asked to tolerate evil. If a man's attitude towards a criminal and towards a saint be the same, then he is saying there is no difference between the two. By his tolerance of evil, he is discounting righteousness and acting intolerantly towards the claim of God that they who fear him must depart from evil. Proverbs 3, 7, end quote. That's, thus far, rush duty. So well and good, you may say. But this only applies to evil actions, not to persons, right? Well, not so fast. Hate the sin, but not the sinner is an ancient idea. Augustine says it. And it's not even untrue. It's sound as far as it goes. But I think we sometimes use that to oversimplify how intertwined sinners and sin really are. And they won't let you forget it either. How much of the sin going on in our culture today is now your identity? You can't separate me from my sin. If you do, you kill me. It's murder to make me forsake. This is who I am. They certainly don't see a distinction. So it's not always that easy. It's good and right to hate murder. But when the home intruder is coming at your family with a knife, you aren't going to be able to shoot the abstract concept of murder. You're going to have to shoot the would-be murderer. You're going to have to will their harm and destruction until they are no longer opposed to the good of those you love. And if you have a lot of anger towards them and a desire to see them harmed in that moment, it could be, but it's not necessarily a sin. It's a certain appropriate measure of aggressive feeling that one must have towards the enemies of what's right. Sinners aren't going to let you hermetically seal them off from their sins so you can just attack their sin. And so insofar as they are in sin, they are God's enemies, and you are to hate them and will their harm. That sounds harsh. I don't mean, but hang on, let me, oh, I'll clarify some things. Now moreover, if our love and our hate is rightly aligned with God, then the willing the harm of the evildoer is actually in a way willing their good. It is better for the rapist to be injured or die than to accomplish his objective. His soul will be better off if you prevent him from accomplishing his evil purposes. Preventing him from sinning lessens the severity of his judgment. Punishing the wicked might even be instrumental in them coming to repent and find salvation. How many wicked people are saved in prison when society's will to oppose them forces them to face themselves and think? That's basically the plot of every episode of Unshackled. Ever listen to Unshackled? I love that show. Every Sunday night we're coming to church, we listen to Unshackled. It's some guy who's hit rock bottom, and he's paying for all the things he did wrong, and then he has to face himself and think, as the show says, and he gets saved. Now, if this still sounds wrong, if this still sounds like it doesn't fit, here's what the Bible says regarding God himself. And remember, God is love. Psalm 5-5, the boastful shall not stand before your eyes. You hate all evildoers. Psalm 11-5, the Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. God hates evil and he hates evildoers because his very nature demands it. And yet at the same time, God, to some degree, loves them. Even the vilest sinner has something good within him, because he is a creation of God, and just that fact alone imparts some goodness to him. Even sinners have admirable traits and traces of transcendental things like truth and beauty within them, and God loves him for those even as he hates them for their sins. So he therefore often gives those he hates rain for their crops. and other blessings that should lead them to repentance. And in his own wisdom, he decides when to punish and destroy them if they do not. We ourselves redeem sinners. God once hated us, even as he loved us, and now made us his children. And we will never perfectly balance this the way God can, the obligations of love and hate. But like David, we're called to have perfect hatred. It is fitting to pray imprecations upon the wicked as the Psalms so often do. I often pray, Lord, please cause this person to repent and if not destroy them before they can do more harm. That sounds harsh. I don't firstly want their destruction, but I don't want them to harm the people I love. It is appropriate to do harm to the wicked within the limits of the power and authority we are given in our earthly positions and relations. So I'm not calling for vigilantism or anything like that. We're not allowed to go rogue and start bumping off everyone that does something bad. But we're also not allowed to become complacent with evil or to abet it under some kind of ungodly appeal to love. We should pray that God will convert the wicked, and if they will not, God will slay them, if that is what it takes to arrest their evil. And we should, to whatever degree we are able, be as Job who said, I broke the fangs of the unrighteous and made him drop his prey from his teeth. This is especially true of Christians who hold public office and have some kind of societal power. Again, we don't all have like automatic license to go out and just start taking out people who litter or something, not calling for that. But this points out why we need Christians in government, people who will rule justly and punish the evildoer, who will hate the evil one because they love They love the people of God because they love the ones that they are to love. All of this is fully compatible with a Christian view of love because true hate, a true love, demands true hate, not sinful hate, not excessive hate, not petty hate, but true hate, hate of evil. And David concludes saying, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts, and see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. So the Psalm concludes with a second petition, and I think it really works with the first. This time, it's a petition that God would search David, which he already did in verse one, right? David knows that perfect hatred is hard. David thinks he has complete hatred, thinks he's doing it right, but he wants God to search him. It can very easily become petty, vindictive, selfish, and otherwise ungodly. David invites God to search him and see if he has fallen short, and if he has, to lead him in the right way instead. The first part of the psalm has already told us that God has done this, but David again wants God to not only search David, but to reveal the search results to David. Reveal what you already know about me, God. This should be our prayer as well. Even as we strive to love what is lovely and hate what is vile, we should invite God to show us where we go amiss and lead us back to the way everlasting. Okay, let's pray. We have to wrap it up. Oh, God, we thank you for your word. It is a challenge to us. It is hard to look at the concept of hate as a positive. And indeed, it is often a negative because we, in our sin, hate what we should not hate, or we hate in a self-serving way rather than a way that is godly. We ask, Lord, that you would, as David did, that you would search us, reveal to us where we are hateful and resentful in a sinful way. Likewise, Lord, reveal to us when we are complacent, intolerant, and insufficiently hateful of that which is evil and wicked and vile. And help us, Lord, to walk in the way everlasting. And we ask it in Jesus' name, amen.