 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| God, and God Alone The photograph looks like it could have been snapped during one of the recent hurricanes in Florida. An immense wave, apparently driven by gale-force winds, is crashing over a sea wall, sending spray high into the air. The picture was taken at night, or in the midst of a storm furious enough to simulate nighttime darkness. The wave is illuminated by the light from a massive lighthouse that stands even higher than the breaking wave. The image triggers anxiety as you imagine being near enough to see such a squall. You feel like you want to turn and run. Then you notice a single word in large print under the picture: faith. After that, these words: “With a guiding light all obstacles can be overcome.” Without faith, life would be impossible. Of course, the Bible talks a lot about faith, specifically faith in God, as is the case in the Scripture for today, Psalm 62. (Read Ps. 62) We are urged to trust God, and him alone. We are encouraged by his sufficiency. This is seen obviously in verses 1 and 2, with the repetition of the word “alone” (NIV), then 5 and 6, which are virtually identical to verses 1 and 2. Psalms were originally written as worship songs for the community of Israel. This repeated couplet of verses was probably the refrain of the song. Over and over again, then, as the people would have sung this song, they would have been reminded of how important it is to trust God above all others. The psalm has a notation in the title, which is found in only a few others: “for Jeduthun.” This is a person we know very little about except that he was one of the musicians in Israel. He is said to have been a man who prophesied, accompanied by harps, lyres and cymbals (I Chron. 25:1). As such, David must have felt that the two of them had much in common. I get the picture of them staying up late, “jamming” on their stringed instruments together, making music that honored the Lord. Since Psalm 62 is a psalm of David, we can assume that the king dedicated it to Jeduthun either for him to put to music, or to honor him on some occasion. Jeduthun’s name appears in Scripture around the time when the Ark of the Covenant was brought into Jerusalem. You may recall that there was a huge celebration over that. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume that, if Jeduthun was being honored, it might have been for something he did in connection with that occasion. At any rate, Jeduthun was instructed to trust in God and him alone, and all of us should accept this good Word from God for us too. The last two verses of the psalm help me to get a sense of its outline:
The phrase, “one thing God has spoken, two things have I heard” is an idiom, indicating repetition. This is something that the psalmist knows well – that God is strong and loving. And that is the God we are being admonished to trust. Isn’t it nice to know that He is both strong and loving? We couldn’t confidently trust God if he were only powerful but not loving anymore than the people of Iraq could have trusted Saddam Hussein. Neither could we confidently trust God if he were just loving, but not powerful. For example, I’ve never doubted my mother’s love for me, and she has always been a strong woman, but she is not anymore. She has Alzheimer’s, the most debilitating form of dementia. Once she had the power to reason, but today she can’t match her socks. Once she had the power of speech, but today she can hardly string together two words that make any sense. Once she had the physical strength to climb a fifty-foot hill beside her home in Temecula and pull weeds in 100 degree weather, but today she cannot stand without assistance. She has always loved me, and I believe that she still does, but because of her disability she would be powerless to help me if I had a need. God, however, is both powerful and loving, so there is no reason for us not to invest full confidence, faith and trust in him, and this is what David is calling upon us to do. He is saying that we should trust God completely, with the implied promise that if we do, he will prove himself to be both powerful and loving. IF WE TRUST GOD COMPLETELY, HE WILL PROVE HIS POWER. How did God prove his power in David’s life? Verses 3 and 4 speak of a time when he was overwhelmed by his own powerlessness,
The way it is expressed makes it sound like it was a current dilemma that the king had in mind. In David’s earlier life he was fiercely assaulted many times by King Saul and his troops, but because of the reference to Jeduthun we would say this would relate to some event in David’s own reign as king, long after Saul was dead. An educated guess would be that the enemies in mind here were the Philistines who caused such distress in the early part of David’s career as king. If the psalm was written somewhere around the time of the placing of the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem, it would have been written before the decisive battles against the Philistines and the other enemies of Israel, outlined in II Samuel 8. In those days, the Philistines seemed like unbeatable foes, and before them David must have often felt like a tottering fence. He discovered, however, that God’s strength is made perfect in weakness. He discovered that it was precisely when he felt the most powerless that God proved himself the most powerful. Twice in the psalm David points to sources of confidence, other than the Lord, that a person might tend to lean on, and insists that these amount to nothing,
He cautions against trusting in people or in wealth, and instead insists that if we want to see God come through powerfully for us, we need to trust him simply and completely. IF WE TRUST GOD COMPLETELY, HE WILL PROVE HIS LOVE. Again, I go back to the couplet sandwiched into verses 11 and 12
How does the Lord demonstrate his love? By, as the last verse says, rewarding each person according to what he has done. Knowing that we will get from God what we deserve is not always good news! The concept surely is a double-edged sword. But here the idea is one of reward, not retribution. God’s lovingkindness is extended toward his people in rewards for the godliness they practice. It is interesting that, in the Hebrew, instead of saying “each person” or “each man,” it says “the man,” suggesting an individual. The Hebrew word is ISH, leaving me to wonder, if an individual is in mind, who is it? Maybe it is David himself, since he seems to refer to himself in the third person earlier in the psalm. But could it be Jeduthun? After all, the psalm is dedicated to him. We’re doing some speculating here, but if the occasion is the return
of the Ark to Jerusalem, and if the point of the psalm is to honor Jeduthun
for some special ministry he performed related to that special event,
wouldn’t it be appropriate for him to be on I believe that the more trust we invest the more of God’s power and love we will see proved in our lives. To say it more simply: trust God completely and he will prove himself completely trustworthy. Let me mention a few ways that this applies to people’s lives today. APPLICATION Who needs to trust God completely today? Those whose lives have become controlled by addictions and debauchery. Addictive substances are plentiful, and becoming more so. Alcoholics Anonymous long ago learned the secret of turning the focus of alcoholics upon a “power greater than ourselves,” as they say it. Typically, however, they soon discover that this “power greater than ourselves” can’t be an imaginary figure or lifeless object. Typically, those who successfully climb out of the pit of addictions find that they need Christ, who is true power. Who needs to trust God completely today? We all do, with respect to protection from the hazards of life. I was meeting with a group this week, discussing this psalm, and I casually mentioned that it is a good thing that we don’t have to fear attacks from enemies of Israel, like David did. One of the men in the group corrected me. “Yes we do,” he said, “What about the terrorists?” And he was right. Isn’t it astonishing that three thousand years after David wrote this psalm the enemies of Israel continue to harass the world? How do you and I handle such threats? The same way David did, way back then, by quietly trusting that a powerful and loving God will not allow anything to happen outside the scope of His will. On a similar subject, those who face persecution as Christians today can easily identify with this psalm. This includes those whose livelihoods and very lives are at stake for confessing Christ, and it also includes us in the United States who face the threat of harassment for speaking out about what the Bible says about homosexuality, for example. Take the case of the Poway High School student who has been forbidden to wear a shirt bearing an anti-homosexuality message. The school district’s lawyer has argued that the school has a responsibility to crack down on anti-gay speech, though the school has observed pro-gay events. A specific concern of mine is that the paper has printed the student’s name and photograph, though it professes to practice a policy of protecting the identity of minors. This young man has not committed a hate crime; however, the paper has set him up to become the victim of one. (Source, San Diego Union-Tribune, 9/17/04.) Who needs to trust God completely today? We all do, with respect to salvation. Salvation comes to us through the Gospel, which, Paul reminds us in the New Testament, is the power of God. (Romans 1:16). And where else do we need more trust in God, and God alone, except to save us from our sin? People can’t help us here. That is, godly people who get to heaven before us cannot leave a good word for us so that we will be let in too. Riches cannot help us here either. In fact, wealth can hurt us in this regard. Jesus warned that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, prompting astonished disciples to gasp and ask, “Who then can be saved?” The fact is that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, by Christ alone. The question for you is this: On what or whom are you depending for salvation? If it is on Christ alone, that is faith, and that faith will trigger the power of God. CONCLUSION Think again about that lighthouse I described earlier. Now picture yourself not outside where you are in danger from the storm. Picture yourself inside. The howling of the winds and the pounding of the surf may leave you feeling unsettled. Then you realize that this lighthouse has weathered much worse storms, and that it will weather this one. Because it will make it through the storm, you too will make it through the storm, if you are in it. That is the beauty of being in Christ. The storms of this world threaten us, but Christ will make it through them, and because we are in Him, we will make it through them too. Trust God completely and he will prove himself completely trustworthy. |