I'm going to look at Psalm 10 tonight. And just like I mentioned this morning, we're just doing a couple weeks for some topicals because my schedule has been so. upended, but I've thought, passionately speaking, the couple of subjects that we've been considering in the morning and the evening would be helpful, just like we'll continue with the Galatians series in the morning. I don't know where we are in Ezra 7, 8, something like that. We have 10 chapters, and it is my intention to finish Ezra And it's my intention next Lord's Day to get back to our regular sermons. But I have kind of a methodology. I often go to the Psalms. I just do. Psalm 10 is another one. Like this morning, I wanted to look at perseverance. So I guess that was a personal desire. And then this one too is another one which comes from my own personal This is a prayer of God's people to overthrow the enemies of God's people. It's an imprecatory psalm, a cursing kind of a psalm, very unusual. It's perplexing in many ways. I will talk about it in just a bit, but let's read God's word. It's Psalm 10, 18 verses. And I will begin to read God's word at verse one. And this is a perfect and a holy word. Why do you stand far off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In pride the wicked hotly pursue the afflicted. Let them be caught in the plots which they have devised. For the wicked boasts of his heart's desire. The greedy man curses and spurns the Lord. The wicked in the haughtiness of his countenance does not seek him. All his thoughts are, there is no God. His ways prosper at all times. Your judgments are on high, out of his sight. As for all his adversaries, he snorts at them. He says to himself, I will not be moved. Throughout all generations, I will not be an adversity. His mouth is full of curses and deceit and oppression. Under his tongue is mischief and wickedness. He sits in the lurking places of the villages. In the hiding places, he kills the innocent. His eyes stealthily watch for the unfortunate. He lurks in a hiding place as a lion in his lair. He lurks to catch the afflicted. He catches the afflicted when he draws him into his net. He crouches, he bows down in the unfortunate fall by his mighty ones. He says to himself, God has forgotten. He has hid it in his face. He will never see it. Arise, O Lord God, lift up your hand. Do not forget the afflicted. Why has the wicked spurned God? He said to himself, you will not require it. You have seen it for you have beheld mischief and vexation to take it into your hand. The unfortunate commits himself to you. You have been the helper of the orphan. Break the arm of the wicked and the evildoer. Seek out his wickedness until you find none. The Lord is King forever and ever. Nations have perished from his land. Oh Lord, you have heard the desire of the humble. You will strengthen their heart. You will incline your ear to vindicate the orphan and the oppressed so that the man who is of the earth will no longer cause terror. Let's pray. Lord God, it is to you that we run. You are our rock, you are our high tower, you are our defender, and we are your little flock, Jesus Christ. We are often the weak ones, the afflicted ones, but you are the mighty one. And we know, Lord Jesus Christ, that you have purchased us body and soul, you take notice of all things, and there is coming a day, oh God, when indeed you will require it from the hands of those who hate you to your face and who slaughtered your people as they slaughter sheep. We commit ourselves to you. I pray for me in this especially difficult psalm that I wouldn't speak anything improper, Lord, and that we as your people would commit our lives into your hands, and that we ourselves would not be prompted to do evil in these evil times. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Well, Psalm 10 is fairly straightforward. Clearly this is a believer who is either himself being afflicted or he looks around at the people of God being afflicted and they're being afflicted by wicked people. I mentioned this morning that I feel like I'm less polemical than I used to be. Polemics is this is right and this is wrong. This is an imprecatory psalm. An imprecatory psalm is a cursing psalm. And therefore, by nature, it's a polemical psalm. So I hope I don't contradict myself. And these cursing psalms are somewhat perplexing to us as we live in the New Testament epoch. that we are to love our enemy as ourselves, and when they slap us in the left side of our face, we're to give them the right side of our face, those kind of things. And certainly that's true. Christ tells us that we're to pray for those that abuse us. But one of the reasons I had us read our catechism question and answer, what was it, 98, 99, And the rule for our faith in life is the Bible. And related to that, the rule for our worship, including praying, which is a vital part of worship, is the Bible. And the particular form of prayer which is useful to us is what Tony has been teaching on the Lord's Prayer. But the whole Bible is serviceable to our prayers. And certainly the book of Psalms are both express prayers and they're also songs. And the book of Psalms is ready made for praying. But when we come to these imprecatory statements, we have a difficult time. But I think this will be serviceable to us tonight. And I want to read to you something. There are only a handful of imprecatory statements. in the Psalms, and there are a few in the New Testament. I'm going to read you one. This is not something which is particular to the Old Testament epoch. In 1 Corinthians, this is Paul under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, chapter 16, he concludes the letter. You would think that this is not Pauline, but clearly it is. He says, the churches of Asia greet you, Aquila and Priscilla greet you heartily in the Lord with the church that is in their house. All the brothers greet you, greet one another with a holy kiss, so far so good, very warm, very loving. The greeting is in my own hand, Paul. He writes in big letters because he has an eye problem. He talks about this in the book of Galatians. And then listen to what he says in verse 22 of chapter 16. If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed, anathema, that means devoted to damnation. And then he says something which is peculiar. If anyone doesn't love the Lord, let him be anathema. That's an imprecatory statement. And then he says, maranatha. And what is maranatha? Come Lord. So he says these wonderful things. I love you, greet one another with a holy kiss. If anyone doesn't love the Lord, he will be accursed. Come Lord. So what we're looking at, I read that for the purpose of, I'm gonna try to treat Psalm 10 delicately. You can misuse these Old Testament imprecatory Psalms. It would be very easy to misuse them. There are a handful of them, break their arms, break their teeth, right arm, make them childless. You see these kinds of statements. This is the cry of a child of God longing for justice. That's what this is. This is a child of God who's being afflicted unrighteously, sinfully, and he is not taking matters, or she's not taking matters in her own hand, he's not taking matters in his own hands, he's committing the matter to the Lord. And I think this particular psalm needs to be embraced by us as Christians now. I don't want to get political, and I'm not going to mention political parties or any of that. But we live in, for me, I'm 56 now. It seems chaotic to me. Things seem very chaotic. And it seems like a lack of justice in the land. And as God's people, you think, where's the righteous God of heaven and earth in all of this? And I don't just mean maybe some of the riots and those kind of things. The abuse of Christians throughout the world, the destruction of infants in their mother's womb, Things on our television, we look around and think, why is our country the way that it is? I don't think any of us should ever think, why is our country the way that it is? If you turn on what passes for entertainment, it's essentially Sodom and Gomorrah. It's essentially Sodom and Gomorrah. So our shock should not be that we have the measure of chaos that we have. Our surprise should be that we even have a land because we're so terribly, our country is so terribly immoral and in unjust sin against God. I'm not talking against, certainly against man to man. And so one does wonder, what is the recourse for the believer? And I prayed earlier that we would follow God's method to deal with the wicked afflicting the righteous. You see here, there's a phrase, the unfortunates. There are two classes of people in Psalm 10. There is the believer and the unbeliever. And the believer is called the afflicted, the unfortunate, the poor, the little. And then the other, these are the evildoers, these are the wicked, these are the afflictors. And when we are not looking at the Word of God, which is the Spirit-inspired Word, and when we ourselves are not being led by the Holy Spirit, the temptation, of course, when you are the afflicted, and you are seeing injustice prevail, when we are not being guided by the Word of God, then our flesh will guide us. And I have often maintained there are only two ways to control men. One, they are converted to the Lord Jesus Christ, and they are internally controlled by God, or you control them by force. That's how it works. And so plan A is obviously conversion, and plan V has been, since the foundation of the world, violence. That's how it works. And I do know Christians look around in our day, what are we gonna do, what are we gonna do? Plan A. commit your way to the Lord. I deny that the church has been given the sword, the church has been given the keys. We are lambs and we are not wolves. And when we're looking at this imprecatory psalm, what we are not looking at is a psalm is saying, what we're gonna do, since we are the poor and the afflicted, is we're gonna start a militia. That's what we're gonna do. We don't see that. What does the poor, afflicted believer do when there is injustice, abuse, physical abuse, it appears? What does the believer do? That's exactly right. They pray. They actually pray. Prayer is the recourse of the believer. And notice that the believer is saying to God, God, you rise up. God, they will fall in your hands. This isn't a believer saying, I can't wait to watch you get yours. This is a believer acknowledging a holy God, looking and rightly acknowledging injustice against the poor and the afflicted, acknowledging it, and acknowledging God will come and judge. There doesn't seem to be any joy, any delight, ha-ha, I can't wait to watch you get yours. That's not the heart of a believer. The heart of a believer is to take our concerns to God in prayer. What's going on in our country should make us fall down on our faces. and to pray to God. God, you see it. Please, rise up. That's what's going on. And I'm not being flip when I say that Christians are tempted to go to plan B, which is violence, which is not the way of the Christian. There's a 17-year-old boy that might spend a lot of time in prison because he just shot two or three people, because he was a foolish young man and got caught up in what he got caught up in. Did he not? Did he not? And I'm sure he'll, oh, we're gonna do this and we're gonna do that. Look at all the injustice, look at all the chaos. And that poor young man didn't have a father or a mother or a minister to tell him, son, Psalm 10, Psalm 10, put your rifle down, pick your Bible up, get on your knees. You see what I mean? This has real practical import for us in our day, in our day. And I know if this fellow was tempted, this young fellow was tempted, I have no idea what goes on in the hearts and the minds of some of the people. So that's what we're looking at. So I find this particular psalm useful to us and the present difficulties that we find ourselves. As I mentioned, we're just going to look at this particular prayer. of God's man praying against the afflictors of God's people, praying for justice for God's people against the afflictors. The Bible presents for us in this psalm, and I would say in the whole Bible, two classes of people. and it's not black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor. Those are the things that divide us man to man. I find them not secondary or even tertiary. Yes, they have some kind of import in a natural kind of way. When I read my Bible, I don't see that they have almost any import. The only thing that matters is what think ye of Christ. Are you in Christ or are you out of Christ? Are you a believer or are you an unbeliever? Are you the afflicted lover of Christ? Are you the afflictor who hates the lambs of Christ? It doesn't matter if you're black or white or yellow or red or rich or poor. I want you to think of this, beloved. The unbelieving Klansman will spend eternity with the unbelieving person on the other end of the spectrum. The unbelieving person who votes Republican will spend eternity with the unbelieving person that votes Democrat. So the only thing that really means anything is do you belong to God in Christ or not? Are you a child of God or not? And we find the two classes of people. So if someone is, I'm from the North and someone's from the Deep South says, I love Jesus. You are my brother. You are my sister. You see what I mean? And so when we come to the Psalm, the Psalmist delineates the two people of God. And that's all there are. And I think it's helpful for us as the church to really believe that. And I say really believe that because in the tumultuous times in which we live, we all have political views, ideological views, and sometimes we let these things get in front of our love of Christ and our love of Christ's people. In other words, if I hold a political view tenaciously, and you as my brother or sister hold another political view tenaciously, I let my political view make me not love you. You see what I mean? And that could break down the unity and the harmony of God's people. And so I just as I think this poor 17 year old boy should have had someone tell him, look at the Psalms. Don't look at your militia friends. I do believe that ministers and mothers and fathers should squelch that hyper allegiance to these secondary type things. It breaks the unity of God's people. It's not helpful. It is, in fact, sinful. And we should consider all lovers of the Lord Jesus Christ our people, and all those who do not love the Lord Jesus Christ, even if they come from our own womb, or we raise them, we should pray for them and recognize that they are still yet not God's people. So the Bible presents for us two classes of people, and the two classes of people, as I mentioned, are the afflicted and the afflictors, and that's important for us. The Bible is the Word of God. It is our rule for faith and practice. I have shared it with the Church. I am, in my eschatological view, a millennial. I am not. I'm optimistic with Christ. All those that begin with Christ end with Christ, and we are forgiven. There's no condemnation. I am not. I am not a post-millennial person in my view. I don't see it from the Bible. I'm not picking on my brothers that do see it from the Bible. I just don't. I don't see the Bible teaching me that increasingly the flock of the Lord will vastly outrank those that do not believe in the Lord. I don't see in the scripture that the people of God take political, social, cultural power. I don't see it. The language that I find in the Bible is Jesus calls the people of God, my little flock. We are called the beleaguered ones, the afflicted ones, the unfortunate ones here in this psalm. We are the ones, I referenced it in my prayer from Romans chapter eight, we are slaughtered like sheep all day long. That's what I understand about the people of God. I do not see the Bible teaching us that we will ascend to places of political, economic power. I don't see it. You may differ with me. When I look at this psalm, you don't see the people of God ruling with vigor and power over those who hate the people of God. You see the exact opposite. It is the unbeliever who is in the position of power. It is the believer who, earthly speaking, is in the position of inferiority or weakness. This is very much like Psalm 73, the Psalm of Asaph. And Asaph looks around and says, what is going on? We love God, and the people who hate God and hate us, they're so rich and fat, their children are healthy and wealthy, and look at us. And what does God say? Look again. In a little bit, they won't be here. And in a little bit, you'll be with me. So we have two classes of people, those who love the Lord and serve him, those who hate the Lord, and they hate the Lord, and therefore they hate the Lord's people. That's the warfare that's going on. That warfare has been governed by God from Genesis chapter three, verses 15 through the rest of the Bible. What does God say? I will put enmity. God says, I will put enmity between two classes of people, those who love God and those who hate God. God is the one that governs the spiritual warfare. He does it for the glory of His name, and He does it for the good of the people. Us. He does it for the good of us. And He does it also to delineate who hates God's people, and they'll be judged righteously. This warfare that's going on, this prayer against the wicked, this is one of God's methods of keeping God's people a separated people. Here, in context, a physically separated people, but in our day, in the New Testament Epoch, an emotionally, religiously, and spiritually separated people. We simply cannot become one with the enemies of God, because they hate us so much. You want to go fishing with them? You want to hang out? You want to do these things? And what happens? They abuse Christ, they abuse Christ's people, they abuse God's word, and we instantly see, oh, there is this animosity, there is this chasm that cannot be breached. It can't be breached by blood. When I blood family who don't love Christ, and then when you express your love of Christ, you have a Psalm 10. You have a Psalm 10. You quickly will see who is on the Lord's side and who is not on the Lord's side. This is part of God's divine government to keep his people exclusive to him. So we have two classes of people, the believer, the unbeliever, those who love the Lord, those who don't love the Lord. God uses this spiritual warfare that clearly is evident. And we also see the relationship of these two peoples. There's a famous, he's a conservative talk show guy. He's very well liked. And he said something to the effect of, you know, people are not born into this world wicked. People are basically born into this world good. No one believes people are born wicked. And this is where I wish my Christian brothers and sisters who love conservative things, I love conservative things, but then you see, well, that's wrong, that's wrong. Beloved, when we see the wicked abusing the righteous here in Psalm 10, are the wicked just good people that sometimes do bad things? No. They're called the wicked. Over and over and over again, the wicked, the evildoer, the afflictor against the little flock of God. The only reason we are the righteous and the holy saints is because of the blood of the Lamb of God. Otherwise, by nature, we're children of wrath, even as the rest, children of disobedience, even as the rest. But what this psalm is testifying is that there is a spiritual hatred and enmity between one class of people and another class of people, and that spiritual enmity reveals the spiritual nature of those who don't love God and Christ. And those who hate, those who love God in Christ, they are the wicked. Now, if your mom is an unbeliever, I think it would be sin to say, Mom, I've been reading the Bible, and the Bible calls you the wicked. I wouldn't do that. I think it would be foolish. But if your mother doesn't love the Lord, She is a daughter of disobedience, a daughter of wrath, even as the rest. And if she does die in that estate, she would in fact be called the wicked. And that's what we find here. And what I want us to see is the Psalm shows us that this is an irreconcilable enmity, an irreconcilable warfare that's going on. So when we look around, we think, well, could we do this? Could we do that? Beloved, this is why I think we get hoodwinked. into becoming overly, I think everyone's political to some degree, and we all have our sociological, cultural views to some degree, all of us do. But when we become inordinately absorbed with those things, I think we get tricked easily And we're thinking, these folks are on my side, or those folks are on my side. Beloved, that's not true. That is not true. This is an irreconcilable spiritual difference that's going on. You can't placate the other side by money or medicine or education. You can't, well, you hate us, we're Christians, we love Jesus, we love the word, and you hate us, and we'll placate you. We'll use your language, we'll dress like you, we'll say some things, and then we'll win you and we'll become friends. This is an irreconcilable war. The only way to have the afflictors not afflict the afflicted is that they have to come over to us. We can't go to them spiritually. If you have unbelieving family and friends, you cannot go over to them spiritually because you're a believer. They have to come over to you. They have to be converted. The Bible says this. The Bible says this. Do not be bound together with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness and lawlessness? What fellowship has light with darkness? What harmony has Christ with Belial? What is a believer in common with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? We are the temple of the living God. Just as God said, I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God and they shall be my people. Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is clean. You know, and I will welcome you, I will be a father to you, and you should be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord God Almighty. The only way that we as believers can have true friendship and have the warfare cease is that we are in the same kind of spiritual union with God. They have to be converted. And other than that, we are praying this particular Psalm, Lord, would you please bring your justice? That's one prayer that we can justly pray. Be careful with that prayer though, as I say. And the other prayer is a prayer that I pray often in conjunction with praying for God's righteous justice is I pray for conversion. for God's enemies and my enemies for God's sake, please, Lord God, convert them. I was an enemy of God. I didn't love God. I didn't love Christ. I didn't love Christians. I thought they were fools. And what does Paul say in Galatians towards the end, maybe chapter one, verse 23, 24, I'm preaching the faith I once tried to destroy. So it is possible, according to the mercy of God, that God would take a great enemy of God's people and make them one of God's people. So that certainly is a legitimate prayer. We pray it all the time. But it's also legitimate to pray this kind of a prayer, albeit very carefully. And I mentioned the careful part. Perhaps if we're inclined this way constitutionally, it can be our flesh. We could pray this from our flesh and not from our faith. Oh God, make them childless. Oh God, break their arms. He clearly is praying that. This is a Revelation chapter six. The souls that were beheaded under the altar, they say to Jesus Christ, how long? So this is New Testament. How long? J.C. Rowell, you know, he's one of my favorites. He has a sermon on Revelation 6 called The Wrath of the Lamb. J.C. Rowell is so Christ-centered, so gospel-centered, but he also recognizes that Jesus Christ, who is the Savior, is Jesus Christ, who is the Judge. And if a man does not receive grace and mercy in Christ, he will receive justice at the hands of Christ. And this is essentially what the psalmist is committing himself to. Lord, look upon your people who are beleaguered. Look at how he starts off. He starts off with a question. Why do you stand far off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? This particular question, I've often said this, and sometimes it's hard when you see in the Bible which one is a right question. It's never good to question God in an accusatory manner. Why have you done this? That would be wrong. But this is not the tenor of this man. Why, Lord? You are such a loving God, such a holy God. You love your people so much. Why do you allow your people to be slaughtered like sheep? That's a different posture in prayer. You remember, it was Zacharias, John the Baptist's dad, who questioned the angel when the angel said, your old wife is gonna have a baby. And Zacharias said essentially, what? My old wife having a baby? How's that gonna happen? And the angel said, well, since you sinned in asking that question, you're not going to talk until she has that baby. So the question was impertinent. It was a sinful question. But then the Virgin Mary, when the angel says, and you're going to have a baby. And she said, how am I going to have a baby? I've never known a man. and the angel explains it. The Holy Spirit will overshadow you. She's not rebuked. The difference is, one question is an important sinful question, and the other question is a legitimate question asked in faith. I don't understand. I look around, oh God, you're such a good and a holy God, how could you let, holy God, how could you let America, how could you let the church go the way that we're, why, oh God, why? That's legitimate. And that's why I say the recourse for the Christian is not the rallies and not the guns and not the Facebook and not all that. The recourse for the Christian is what this man is doing. Praying. Praying. I had the best Lord's Day I've ever had, I've had in years today. It was glorious. My wife and I just had sweet prayer together. It was glorious. And my prayer life, and I don't know whether it's you have, I pray every day. I have personal worship every day. But my family prayer life used to be very consistent, but it's not very consistent. Praying is a hard business, is it not? Praying is hard business. Even for box checkers like me, and I'm a box checker, I can read my Bible like a box checker, and I do. And then I read my Bible and have sweet communion, and I do. Prayer is a different business. Part of our lack of power and part of our anxiety over the state of things, why, oh God, why? We're not asking that. We're not doing that. We go to this website, that website. What have we not done? I'm gonna shut that thing off. I'm gonna shut that little monkey box off and put it away. And I'm gonna get my Bible out. And I'm gonna get alone. And I'm gonna get on my knees. and say, God, why? Why? And you see the man's faith is being built up, built up, built up. He's getting God's answer in this, and he's committing himself and God's people into the hands of God. I wish I could do for me what I wish I could do for you. I don't believe in magic, but if I had a magic wand, I would first wave it over me, and then I'd wave it over you, and we would be a praying, praying, praying, praying people. Our Puritan forefathers killed forests. They wrote so many books on prayer. Writing books about prayer is a wonderful thing. Reading books about prayer is a wonderful thing. We need to pray. When we wring our hands, what a wicked country, how sexually immoral, how decadent we are, how anti-God, anti-Christ, death-loving, murder-loving we are. True. I wonder if all of those things that we say to our friends that agree with us, if we use that same amount of time telling God the very same thing. The psalmist is giving us a direction, Pastor John, get on your knees. get off your Facebook and get on your knees. I got really depressed the other day, thinking about the election and the virus and the riots. And I was feeling sick that day. So sometimes when I feel sick, I can feel extra melancholy. And my poor son called me, and I was mindful of myself. I didn't want to be melancholy to my son. Very much along the lines of Psalm 73, he says, if I said this, I'd hurt your people. And I knew I was in a kind of a tender spot, so I was trying to get off the phone with him because I was so depressed about what I'm seeing. The answer for my depression is not to sit in my depression. The answer from my depression is to go to the Psalms and to follow the Psalmist and to take it to God in prayer. Why do you stand far off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself? And he goes on to describe the wicked. In pride, the wicked hotly pursue the afflicted. That's the believer. And then he says, let them be caught in the plots which they devise. That's the imprecatory aspect to it. Wicked people are proud people. And God abominates pride. Proverbs chapter six, it's the thing he hates most because it's a worship of self over a worship of God. And we, this is kind of, it tracks along the lines of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the meek and blessed are the humble and these kind of things. We are only the meek because we have been found in the meek one. Apart from being found in Jesus, we are the proud. and the wicked have not been subdued by the Lord Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit, but the wicked people are proud. And he recounts what they do. We're always gonna be healthy. We're always gonna be wealthy. We're never gonna be afflicted. And even if there is a God, he's never gonna call us to account. We can abuse his people at will. My wife and I had a discussion about social justice. when we were having our worship time, and we talked about various things, and not specifically what it usually passes for social justice in the common discussion. Ours was a little bit different. And we were looking at things which we thought were the abuse, the grinding of the face of God's poor, not specifically race-related at all. And what you see here is the grinding of the face of the poor by the wealthy unbeliever. The poor are being afflicted by the powerful and the wealthy, specifically in one example. And so we were talking and I said, well, if we were gonna apply God's Old Testament law to the day, I'm not a theonomist, but if we did, I would shut down the title loans. That's the grinding of the poor. It's an abuse of the poor. Poor people use title loans. People with any kind of means don't use a title loan because you don't need a title loan. And so you abuse them. You take you serious interest. Oh, you can't eat. You can't buy medicine for mama. Sign over the title of your car. That's a grinding of the poor. You're getting wealthy off the poor. So if we were gonna talk about social justice, those places should be illegal. Because it's the abuse of the afflicted. But here in the context, it is the poor believer who is being abused by the unbeliever in various ways. And God, the Holy Spirit, inspires the penman to describe the wicked, which even this should be comforting to us. And what I mean by that is this. One of the things that's perplexing this believer, and that perplexes us as we look around and think, are you aware, God? Are you aware of what's going on? And God inspires this man to detail exactly what is going on. And that means God knows exactly what's going on. God says, this is what the wicked are saying, this is what the wicked are thinking, this is what the wicked are doing, and this is what I'm gonna do. So even the inspired prayer testifies to us as the believer, oh, you're actually governing all of this, even though I don't see your hand. If I were to ask you, does America look like it's being governed by King Christ, what would you say? No. Is America being governed by King Christ? Yes. Does any act of injustice escape the notice of our Lord? No. Does any abuse of any of Christ's lambs escape the notice of our shepherd? No. The recourse for God's people is to cry to God, to commit our case to God, And then he says this, he says this at the end. Where is it? He says this. The Lord is in his holy temple. The Lord's throne is in heaven. His eyes behold, his eyelids test the sons of men. The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked. And the one, excuse me, Arise, O Lord, excuse me, this is verse 12 of our psalm. Arise, O Lord God, lift up your hand and do not forget the afflicted. And then he says, the Lord is king forever and ever. O Lord, you've heard the desire of the humble. The psalmist acknowledges what I think is in the breast of every human being, even fallen human beings to some degree, we have a sense of justice. And this is the proper prayer of the believer committing the ultimate justice to God, which the New Testament calls the vengeance of God. The mercy of God is the cross. But the wrath of God for sin is also the cross. If we do not come to the Lord Jesus Christ and rest in his cross work and receive his mercy, we ourselves would be the recipients of the administration of God's justice. And what this believer is acknowledging is, Lord God, when I look around and see wickedness prevailing, I won't take vengeance in my own hand. I will acknowledge that vengeance belongs only to you and I will rest in your government. Beloved, please rest in the government of God. I'm preaching to myself probably more than I'm preaching to you. If you have family or friends that are excited about this, I mean in a negative way, please calm them down with the gospel. Please bring them to the Psalms if they're believers. If you have family or friends or even acquaintances, that are tempted to plan B, as that young boy was tempted to plan B, to take matters in their own hands and tell them to read the Gospels and to read Psalm 10 and commit it to the hands of God. May God be pleased with the preaching of his word.