On Wednesday evenings before our summer break Shawn and I were making our way, chapter by chapter, through the Psalms, which we will pick up again in the near future. One of the Psalms that really catches my attention, especially in light of the current circumstances taking place around us in our day, is the Psalm of David found in Psalm 11.
In every generation the people of God are stunned at the increase of hatred pf God and rebellion against Him taking place all around us as our culture presses hard into deeper sinfulness. Look back even over the past hundred years and we see that each generation had its plagues from world wars and millions being killed, the sexual revolution, the casting off of God’s moral law. I think for us, we need to understand that here in Canada, as in the United States, we have been greatly blessed in so many ways to be society that has been established to great extent on moral principles from God’s word. I would stop short of saying we ever were Christian nations, because I do not believe that to be true, but I can say that Christian ideals had great influence on our cultures, yet as the years have passed, with each flip of the calendar, that moral underpinning has been deteriorating, such that there is hardly any Christian influence left in our laws and actions as a nation.
We have abortion law that allow for the murder of the most helpless and vulnerable of our society, and frankly those who should be the most protected among us, instead as a nation we allow their legal murder at any time from conception to full term. In fact, more than that, not only do we allow it as a nation, we actually pay for the cost of the murder in tax payer dollars as well.
We have experienced the negative effects of the sexual revolution with fatherlessness, broken homes, children having children, sexual disease, and if that were not enough, now we have spent the last number of years going through the homosexual revolution bringing us to the point that it is almost against the law to be straight, or to raise your children to be hetrosexual. My son made a comment the other day regarding the celebrating of our veterans who served our nation in times of war, we give one day a year to honor their service, yet we set an entire month aside to celebrate perversion and as a society we force everyone to bend the knee and celebrate to such vile behavior, else we punish with boycotts, or refusing to grant a business a license to operate, or coming soon, if you
dare teach your children homosexuality is wrong, your children might well be taken from your care.
Then we are hit with a pandemic, and granted in the early days, no one knew what to expect, and as I have said, I think given the lack of information we had to work with, decisions had to be made, and its hard to fault our leaders, but as we began to learn more, one would think those in power would alter the course, but no, they saw a way to wield power to gain more power. I’m sorry, this Covid thing has proven to be more political than anything. I will find in a strange coincidence that come November, Covid will suddenly become much les dangerous. Of course we all know what happens to our south in November. People testing negative for Covid are being told that though the test did not confirm, they must be positive and are being counted as such because they had reason to get tested in the first place. People who have never even been tested are being counted as positive because they have been around someone who is probable for Covid, even though they haven’t been tested either. In fact, I was told by a nurse here in Saskatchewan, that if someone names you as being in contact with them and they are considered probable for Covid, if you fail to go in and go through the contract tracing, the RCMP will be called to force you to go in. Can you believe that? What in the world happened to our charter of rights and freedoms? But hey, I am not in any way saying that we should be political activists. We should have know all along that our hope was never in our political system or governmental leaders. Shame on us for ever think that to be the case. What I do what to show is that the very foundations of our society are disintegrating under our feet.
Then we have the riots and protests of these past few months. The claims of systemic racism that our leaders bow to. Is their racism in our nation? Yes there is. Of course there is. If one understood the depravity of man we would understand why. And so we become racist in order to stamp out racism, and we pass laws and bow to anarchists in order to appease. Here in Saskatoon, I know for certain there have been cases of police racism in the past, and police like all the rest of us are sinners, but here in this past month there was a case of a man claiming racism and police brutality as he tried to take a police officers taser. Look, I don’t care what color your skin is, if you try to take an officers weapon, things are not going to go well for you. O but that is police brutality. The media had to eventually at least add a little disclaimer at the end of the stories, to let us in on a little secret, the
officer involved was himself of the same ethnicity as the criminal who claimed abuse.
And so we live in a world today where even politicians are pushing to defund the police. It doesn’t take a ton of thinking power to figure out what happens in a world where there is no police, and there have actually been areas that have abandoned police, and those test cites have not ended well, why? Because man is depraved. Where there is no enforcement of law, crime drastically increases. Of course it does. God’s word tells us this very thing. The governing authorities, including the police, carry the sword, or in our day the gun, as a means of deterring criminals from carrying our their desires. They are they to punish law breakers. Take that deterrent away, and law breakers have their day. So yeah, sound like a great plan, take away the police, after all, the world says, man is generally good in nature. They will quickly learn this is not the case, and God’s word will once again be vindicated in its truth.
We see in these past months the economic foundations of our world crumbling. I heard this past week that in the United States over these past few months, there are some 3 million businesses that have closed their doors permanently. A third of the population has lost their job south of the border, and here in Canada the story isn’t much different. Yes Covid cash is being dispersed, but how long can the government just keep handing out money? At some point, we become Germany right before world war 2, as they printed money to prop itself up, only to end up at a place where a wheel barrel full of cash was required to purchase a loaf of bread.
The foundations are crumbling all around us, or so it would seem. I want to take us to the Psalm today as we see that David, in his day, face very similar trials that gave this same appearance. In every generation it seems this question can be asked in light of our circumstances, and I would say this is especially true in the unprecedented circumstances we face in our day. “What are the righteous to do?” Let me point out that in the midst of the chaos of our day, this question is being asked, and unfortunately, a great deal of the church today sounds more like David’s unwise friends and counselors in the text, that they sound like David. Much of the church in our day is crying that we must give in the whims of the world, that we too must bend the knee to the cultural demands and direction. That we must also embrace a social gospel that seeks to see the world right before we can ever expect to have influence in the world for souls.
Turn with me to Psalm 11. Seven short verses for us to make our way through today, and I hope as we do, that we will be moved to see our condition in a very different light.
Psalm 11
1 In the Lord I take refuge;
how can you say to my soul, “Flee like a bird to your mountain,
2 for behold, the wicked bend the bow; they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart; 3 if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?”
4 The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven;
his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man.
5 The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. 6 Let him rain coals on the wicked;
fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.
7 For the Lord is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.
David writes this Psalm, and he begins it with a statement that sets the tone of the entire Psalm. “In the Lord I take refuge!” If I were translating this, I would have added an exclamation point at the end of that statement, because the entire Psalm will orbit that statement in all its points.
James Montgomery Boice writes of this Psalm, “Psalm 11 contains faith’s response to fear’s counsel.” That is an excellent summarization of this Psalm. Boice writes, “In the midst of this psalm, probably as a despairing question asked by David’s fearful but well-meaning friends, we have a classic question. You have probably heard it many times. “When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (v. 3). More than fifty years ago the great Bible teacher Arno C. Gaebelein called this “the burning question of our day.” But if that was so in 1939, when his study was copyrighted, it is a thousand times more true today. What shall we do when the laws are not upheld, when morality is undermined and evil sweeps on unchecked? What shall we do when the Bible is undermined and its teachings disregarded—when even churchmen seem to support the rising tide of secularism? What shall we do when family values are crumbling and the tide of frequent divorce sweeps forward with increasing damage to children, parents, and society alike? What can we do when everything around us seems to be giving way? Some counsel hiding, that
is, running away from what is happening. David’s response was to take refuge in the Lord. It is this—what it means and how it is done—that we must consider in this study.”
Now, at the time of Boice writing this in the 1970’s, he said it was a thousand time more true than it had been in 1939, and so we see the constant slipping away of these foundations. Yet if a thousand times truer in the 70’s, it would be a million times truer today. I am not at all claiming we are in the last days, but we certainly are even closer to them that in Boice’s day. This is always the case, as time moves on those foundations are always being chipped away, and one day, as the foundation goes, society itself will crumble. I remember attending the Ligonier conference in 2014 and hearing Al Mohler speak on the topic of a moral reversal. According to Molher, this is something that has only happened in societies a few times in history, and each time it has taken place, it has been at the end of a civilization. The end of the Egyptian domination, the Greek, the Roman, and it is now taking place in our day. A moral reversal, he said, is not just the turning of opinion on moral matters, but more, it is when a culture moves to celebrate what 50 years ago was condemned, and more over, condemning that which 50 years ago was celebrated. We see this no where more clearly that in our cultural views on homosexuality. Not only do we celebrate as a culture that “love is love”, we set up deviancy as a model to be emulated in our day. We set this up as the great role model for our youth. And we mark the moral views of sexuality as intolerant, unloving, bigotry, and anyone who would teach their children that homosexuality is wrong doesn’t even deserve to keep their own children. The state should take them away, because the state knows better how to raise a child to think like the state wants them to think. We have not shifted in thinking, we have completely flipped, reversed, and our society is quickly heading toward the cliff over which it will perish. This they call evolution of culture, all the while it is truly cultural suicide. But there is no wisdom in them, for they fear not God.
David begins this Psalm with a statement of where his hope is founded. It is not on culture, nor on governments resources and counsel, not on military might, nor on wealth. His hope is firmly established in the Lord of glory. If, for us as believers, our hope is correctly placed, we too like David, will be able to stand no matter what is happening around us.
David states, “1 In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to my soul, “Flee like a bird to your mountain, 2 for behold, the wicked bend the bow; they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart; 3 if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?”
So we see that David is challenging some of the counsel he is receiving from those around him at this time. We don’t know precisely the occasion of the Psalm being written. Spurgeon and Charles Simeon both suggest that this was written during the years of King Saul pursuing David to kill him, but that doesn’t fit very well really, as David did in fact flee to the mountains. Others suggest this was at the time of David’s son Absolom’s uprising and seeking to kill his father and take the throne, but again, David did flee at that time, so that too seems not to fit the occasion. So, we don’t know what the exact circumstances were as David penned this Psalm. Therefore we are forced to interpret it more broadly.
What we do know, is that whatever was happening, David was being given counsel from those around him, and generally agreed is that these were his royal advisors, his friends, those he trusted. Look what they are telling him. “Flee like a bird to your mountain.” In other words, “get out of the city and head for the mountain stronghold for protection. The wicked are coming for you, the enemies are hidden well and seeking to do you harm. They pursue the righteous from their darkness. The have designs to take down the people of God in violence. To suffer them. David the foundations are shaken and even destroyed, you have nothing to stand on, get out while you can. What can the righteous do. The enemies of the righteous are numerous, they lie in wait, you won’t even see it coming.” An alternate way to look at that question would be to ask “where can the righteous turn”, or “to what can the righteous look for help?”
I think its interesting that during good and stable times, it seems that many, and even much of the church, looks to the government and national laws for establishing standards for morality, but when bad times come, as we see today, then this question becomes the cry of those who have so misplaced their hope, but the righteous, those who know the Lord, know, He has always been, and always will be our only hope, and the kind of hope that cannot be shaken. I take refuge in the Lord! David has presented us with the problem. Those who should be trusting in the Lord are panicking as the things they have put their hope in crumble. David declares
his hope is firmly established, but how can he have such confidence? Doesn’t he see the same things they do? The answer is, no. His eyes are focused in a much different direction then are theirs. They are looking down. It’s been said that the more we look to the beast the more we become like them. If our gaze is focused downward, we grow to be more and more like that upon which we look. But David’s eyes are not looking down. His gaze is up.
4 The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven;
God is on the throne. The happenings of this world have not moved Him in the least. He is not challenged in his position and authority. He reigns. O to have such an understanding of the absolute sovereignty of our God. To know that this God is in such control that not a single thing that happens, happens without His sovereign approval. Not even Satan himself can do a single thing with God giving his approval. To summarize what Martin Luther once said, “the devil is God’s devil”. He never acts outside of God’s decreed will. He is creature, and is created subject to the Lord. Though God is not culpable for the evil of the devil or the evil the devil incites, God wields the devil and uses the devil to accomplish the very will of God. The Lord even uses man’s sin to accomplish His good purposes.
David understands the sovereignty of God upon his throne in heaven, and that understanding brings both comfort and confidence to David in the midst of what to everyone else are terrifying times. O that our eyes would have such a view of God. This is where hope is found. Yet, sadly, for much of the church today, how could they have such confidence? The god that has been preach in much of the church within our culture for the past few hundred years has been ever slipping from his throne. His sovereignty has been dwindling in the preaching and teaching of the church, so much so, that he is now a god without power and authority, in fact he now looks to us, hoping we will do the right thing. In much of preaching today he is a god without power and a god whom rather than being hoped in, is a god hoping in us. Brothers and sisters, that is not the God of the Bible. Our God reigns. He is on His throne. He does all that He pleases to do, and none can thwart His plans.
Allow me to read the entirety of Psalm 115.
Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!
Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?” Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.
O Israel, trust in the LORD! He is their help and their shield. O house of Aaron, trust in the LORD! He is their help and their shield. You who fear the LORD, trust in the LORD! He is their help and their shield. The LORD has remembered us; he will bless us; he will bless the house of Israel; he will bless the house of Aaron; he will bless those who fear the LORD, both the small and the great. May the LORD give you increase, you and your children! May you be blessed by the LORD, who made heaven and earth! The heavens are the LORD’s heavens,
but the earth he has given to the children of man. The dead do not praise the LORD, nor do any who go down into silence. But we will bless the LORD from this time forth and forevermore.
Praise the LORD!
O friends, I fear that much of the church today have made their god in their own image. Sure, they take bits and pieces from the bible, but they discard the parts they do not like and replace these with their own imaginations. They set up a god that does not exist and as the Psalm says, those who make them become like them. I think this might well have been the case for David’s counselors. Their god had slipped from his rightful place, and in their eyes, he no longer had dominion or his creation. But David calls them back to trusting in the Lord much as Psalm 115 does the same. Israel, trust in the Lord. He is one His throne. He is our shield. He will not abandon us. He will not forget us. As Mark preached a few weeks back, we are already blessed in Christ, and with a blessing that will never be taken away. We stand secure no matter what is happening around us. As Shawn preached last week, our fear is to be rightly placed. We are to fear the Lord, and understanding that none but the Lord can save us from the Lord, we run to the Lord for our refuge, and none who run to Him will He ever cast aside.
God is on His throne in heaven. God is in His Temple. Not the Temple in Jerusalem, that has yet to be built at this point in history and will not be built in David’s lifetime, but His Temple in Heaven where He currently is, always has been since creation began, and always will be for all eternity worshipped. There is only one thing that is this certain in which hope can rightly be placed. God is in His rightful place. His Throne, His Temple represents the seat of both power and authority, as well as the seat by which all moral standards by which all men’s thoughts and intents, words and actions will be judged.
But David doesn’t stop there. Not only is He in His Temple and on His throne. God
his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. 5 The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.
We see here in verses 4 and 5 the repetition of one word in the Hebrew that is at the center of each verse, the center of the idea being presented. The word baḥen is used in both verse 4 and 5. It is the word translated as test. Some translations translated differently in each verse as if this is something different for the believer as opposed to the unbelievers, but that seems unlikely from the context. Spurgeon for example took this approach teaching that for the believer it is God that uses affliction to purify his people, and that certainly is true, but that is not the intent here in the passage we are looking at. Here the point is simple God sees. God examines. He sees both the righteous and the wicked. He observes all that is done. We see the same idea in Proverbs 15:3 The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good. Think back to the previous verse, the wicked lie in wait and “bend the bow; they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart”. But believer, God sees! He knows, and further, God is in control.
Nothing in this Psalm suggests that David is viewing the temptations of these trials upon the righteous as a means by which they are being perfected. The Psalm is rather one of judgement for the wicked and the fact that the righteous can be certain that God will do the right thing in that judgement.
Look at the judgement presented.
6 Let him rain coals on the wicked;
fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.
7 For the Lord is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.
I skipped over a very important doctrinal truth that we must understand in verse 5 which leads into a proper understanding of verse 6 and 7.
his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.
O how this flies in the face of much of what the so called church teaches today. God is love and in Him is no hatred whatsoever. I’m glad that is not true. How could we celebrate a god who loves murder, injustice, tyranny, oppression. If God was nothing but love we would have to conclude that God loves those things too. But it is simply not the case. As Paul washer has done such and excellent job of teaching, a God of love is a God who must hate. A God who loves babies, must hate abortion. A God who loves freedom, must hate slavery, after all, abortion kills what God loves, and slavery takes away what God loves. He cannot love both abortion and babies. It is not possible. He cannot love both freedom and slavery.
Well, God loves righteousness, and therefore by necessity God hates wickedness. If the cross shows us anything, surely it should teach us that it is not true that God hates the sin but loves the sinner. Our sin was placed on His Son, and it was the man Jesus, in our place who was nailed to the cross and crucified. It was the man Jesus whom the Father turned His back upon. It was the man Jesus bearing our sin who had to die. It was not sin, it was sinner. Jesus didn’t become a sinner, but He did bear our sin, and it was the man who was punished.
God hates, this is a doctrine we need to be familiar with because it is truth. The doctrine of the hatred of God. Look with me back just a few chapter in the Psalms. Psalm 5:4-6 For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.
You hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies; The Lord abhors, that is really strong word. Abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man. This
God of love is also a God of hate. He loves righteousness and hates the wicked.
In fact, if we don’t understand the hatred of God we will never really understand His grace and mercy. If we don’t understand His holy hatred of sin and sinner, then we will walk in this understanding that of course he will have grace toward me, after all I’m not all that bad. But the truth is this God who hates sin and the wicked, would be completely right to hate me and you, but in Christ, He has instead withheld the wrath we rightly deserve and instead granted us mercy and blessing in His Son and for His Son’s glory and possession. Psalm 7:11 God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day. If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and readied his bow; he has prepared for him his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts.
God does not occasionally hate. He is a God of indignation every day. This is not a temper tantrum, this is his consistent character toward sinners. And yet for some reason outside of me and you, He has withheld that indignation toward us in His Son, and instead blessed us with grace and mercy and adoption and fellowship and inheritance. Even our repentance is something that originated in Him. He is a judge and He hunts down and destroys His enemies, but for some reason He has chosen to bless all who believe in His Son, and even that faith originates in Him.
He rains coals on the wicked, fire sulfur, scorching winds. David isn’t pulling this out of thin air. He has in mind here the great judgement that the Lord brought on Sodom and Gomorrah. But even in that, God’s mercy was present. God would have restrained his wrath on that day for just ten righteous people. He would have endured the sin of the wicked for the sake of His righteous, and even when ten were not found, God allow and orchestrated the removal of the few righteous before He brought his judgement to bear as he removed Lot and his family from the city.
God gives to the wicked their portion. He gives the judgement they deserve. God is righteous, and the God of righteousness will by no mean clear the guilty. Look with me at the statement the Lord makes to Moses in Exodus 34.
Exodus 34:6-7 “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping
steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
How can it be that both are true, that God is both forgiving of iniquity and sin, but also by no means clearing the guilty? Well, we know the answer don’t we. God does not turn a blend eye to sin and He does not simply pretend sin never occurred. He pours out justice on sinners. But our God has chosen to save a people, sinful as we are, and He has done so by providing a substitute to take our place in judgement and wrath. Jesus Christ, the savior of the World, and for all who are in Him, the very justice of God has been satisfied. You and I are no better, and we deserve no better, yet God is His choosing to set His love upon us, has placed us in His Son and blessed us from before the foundations of the word in Christ. He is then free to forgive us as our sins have been atoned for in the person of His Son.
7 For the Lord is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.
Seeing His face is the beatific vision held out as the great hope of the people of God. This is the ultimate aspiration of God’s people. We see this in the blessing pronounced in the O.T. The Lord gave this blessing for the people of Israel in Numbers 6:23-27 The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them, The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. “So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.”
May the Lord make His face to shine upon you. This is our great hope which one day will be realized in Christ when we actually see God face to face. This our untimate reward and bliss. The wicked will be judged. Justice will be served perfectly, but our justice has already been accomplished as His son took our place in death, and in His resurrection so too we have life never to end. We will see Him as He is. 1 John3:2 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know
that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.
He is our hope. Why would we ever take our eyes off Him and trust in anything less than Him. In Him there is a certain hope. If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? Well, if your foundation is anything other than Him, realize your hope was wrongly placed, and turn to Him. The righteous are those whose hope is rightly placed, those who like David will declare “I take refuge in the Lord!”