The Christian’s Peaceful Trust

Psalm 125 and the Journey From Trust to Peace

Psalm 125, and if you would turn there and please stand for the reading of God's Word, this will be our text for this afternoon, Psalm number 125, a song of ascents. Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.

As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds His people, from this time forth and forevermore. For the scepter of wickedness shall not rest on the land allotted to the righteous, lest the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong.

Do good, O Lord, to those who are good, and to those who are upright in their hearts. But those who turn aside to their crooked ways, the Lord will lead astray with evildoers. Peace be upon Israel. God bless the reading, and now the proclamation of His Word, and please be seated.

Songs of Ascents and the Return From Exile

I love the songs of ascents. Whenever they were all written, they were gathered together into these 15 psalms, which are called songs of ascents, songs of ascent as going to Jerusalem from whatever point they came, when the pilgrim, for whatever reason, was going to Jerusalem, they went up to Jerusalem.

So these psalms, which are called songs of ascents, are always ascents because they're always going up to meet the Lord. They're always going up from wherever they were to meet God. This afternoon, we are in the sixth of these 15 psalms, number 125.

Now, this short psalm has us joining with these pilgrims, and here they're pilgrims coming from exile in Babylon and back to Jerusalem, singing this with the other psalms that are called these songs, and it's a journey from exile to the freedom that God has given them.

And from exile in Babylon, when the Lord stirred up the heart of Cyrus, the king of Persia, the conqueror of Babylon, and released them to return to Jerusalem. And here, as they're on this journey, they sing of trust in the Lord, and they trust in the Lord, and they call out the qualities and the joys of trusting in God, and they end this short psalm with peace be upon Israel, with much in between that we will talk about.

It's a journey that we join them in, journey we as pilgrims join these pilgrims, journeying towards Jerusalem as we are looking for the return of our Lord Jesus Christ and our resurrection when we will be with Him.

We are on a journey as well. This journey in Psalm 125, I'd like you to think of as one that begins in verse 1 and ends in verse 5. It's a journey from trust to peace. You'll see in the bullet, the title of this message is the Christians' Peaceful Trust.

We join the pilgrims because they are our ancestors spiritually. This remnant that survived the exile in Babylon and comes back, we join with them in this journey. But most importantly, we join in a journey, as I said, from trust to peace.

Trust in the Lord Is Like Mount Zion

Do you know the peace of God? When things are stirring up around you, relationships and jobs and the political situation we're in, the social movements of the day, things happening in the world like the war in Ukraine, do you get stirred up?

We can get angry about things sometimes with the righteous indignation. We can be sad about things that we hear, such as civilians being harmed by armed soldiers, those sorts of things. But do they take away your peace?

Do they take away your confidence? Do they move your eyes off of Christ? Or do you know that peace of God that passes all understanding, as the Apostle Paul would put it? This short psalm brings us on a rather long journey, and I hope we can join them there, going from trusting in the Lord to peace be upon Israel, peace be upon the church, peace be upon you, as the Apostle Paul so often ends his letters with this benediction of peace.

Now, if you were asked if you trust in the Lord, most of us would say, well, yes, I'm a Christian. I do trust in the Lord. But if I asked you, do you know that peace of God, do you know the peace of God?

The answer might be a little bit more varied, but the two are linked, trust and peace, trusting in God, leading directly to this other, which is peace. As we begin this, keep in mind all throughout this message that these were Jews who had been exiled.

These are returning Jews. These are Jews who had seen, or many of them had seen, the destruction of the wall of Jerusalem, the ransacking of the temple. They'd seen Babylon slaughter their sons, ravage their daughters, and in every way abuse the purposes that God had sent them for.

And yet they returned, calling out this trust. They have an enduring trust. They have an enduring trust. They say, those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.

That is, they are solid. They are immovable. This is like the rock that Jesus speaks of in Matthew chapter 7 at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Those who hear these words and do them will be like the man who built his house on a rock, and the winds came, and the hurricane came, and the snow came, and the sun came, and all these things came in upon it.

Of course, he means the incursions of the world, trying to break in upon the people of God. And what does Jesus say? It did not fall because it was built upon the rock. It was steady, immovable. And this is what the people who trust in God in this psalm are likened to.

They're likened to Mount Zion. What is this trust? A man named John Oswald wrote very well that it's that sense of well-being and security from something or someone in whom you can place complete confidence and reliance.

It's to be solid. It's to be immovable. The word actually comes back to an ancient Arabic word. The Hebrew word is batak for trust. And there is good evidence that it's back to this more ancient word that had to do with something that was stretched taut, something that was super tight.

Now, not like stretched taut, like you stretch my patience to the end and you only have to step on that nerve one more time. Not like that. This idea was more like some of those palatial tents that the nomadic tribes would set up for the nobles.

And it was stretched out taut so it would withstand the winds. Even a shiraka, which is something like a hurricane in the desert, stretched taut, solid and immovable. When the sand comes and the wind is blowing it, the people inside are safe.

So this idea of those who trust in the Lord being like Mount Zion and this word batak, this word of being stretched out taut and staked down to the ground, if you will, attached to that rock, immovable, not willing to give in.

Now, what is a mount? What does he liken it to a mount? Well, Mount Zion is where Jerusalem is, and we'll talk about some of the topography around Jerusalem in just a moment. But I want to think about mountains for a minute, just mountains in general, not Mount Zion in particular.

Any mountain. Let a mountain come to mind. Some of you are going to say Mount Everest. Some of you are going to say Mount Matterhorn, and some of you said, what? Mount St. Helens, which got changed a little bit.

But even Mount St. Helens, which in 1980, help me, yeah, 1980, blew its stack and changed quite a lot around it. But the mountain itself didn't move. And in most cases, except for Mount St. Helens, thank you for that one example.

You think of a mountain as the same as today as it was yesterday, last week, last month, last year, last decade, last century, and on. Now, I ask you to think of a mountain, most of us would think of like an Everest or a Matterhorn or K2 or something like that.

And this is the idea, because when you look at a mountain, it is what it is, and it always is and always has been what it is. And we speak, of course, in human terms. And when winter comes and it's covered in ice, well, it's still in the mountain.

And when the ice melts, and now you can see the rock that was under the ice during winter, it's still a mountain. And when the spring comes and the flowers flourish up upon it, it's still a mountain. And this is the idea, that the people of God who are trusting in the Lord, who put their faith and their hope and their reliance upon Him because He is worthy of faith and hope and reliance, they are today what they will be tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and next decade and so on.

This idea of trusting is the idea of being immovable, being rock solid, being locked in on that one which is God the Lord. Those who trust in the Lord, those who trust in Yahweh are like that mount because that mount cannot be moved, cannot be shaken, and whatever that mount is today, it was yesterday and will be again.

And this is the people of God. This is what it is to trust in God because we trust in a God who does not change. Now we're variable, we're mercurial. Some of us have different ideas about different parts of Scripture.

God doesn't. But the idea here, the biggest point here, the takeaway as we like to call it, is that when you trust in Christ Jesus our Lord, there are certain unquestionable, non-negotiables, His virgin birth, His death for us, His death for our sin.

He became sin for us that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. His virgin birth, His death for us, His burial, His resurrection on the third day. On these things you must be that rock, that rock solid that cannot move, that cannot negotiate, that tomorrow will be what you are today here in church for these few hours that we meet.

We must be that tomorrow and the next day and so forth. Those who trust in the Lord are like that mountain because the Lord doesn't change. Him in whom we trust, Him who we see as reliable is unmovable and unshakeable and will not change.

He says, I am the Lord through Malachi and I do not change. You're built on the rock that is Christ Jesus if your faith is in Him. And as Christ is unchangeable and His doctrines and what He's given us in His Word is immovable, so must we be.

The Lord Surrounds His People Like Jerusalem’s Mountains

It abides forever, always is what it is. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds His people from this time forth and forevermore. There are seven mountains around Jerusalem which made it very defensible and made it very difficult for armies to go through or around those passes if they went between them, they were in a very vulnerable position in a military sense.

So the mountains surrounding Jerusalem were seen as a great defense against enemies. And what the psalmist is saying here as those mountains surround that goal that we're going to, that Mount Zion, that Jerusalem, the two are synonymous.

As those mountains give defense for that city, so the Lord surrounds us but more completely than even those seven mountains that are in Jerusalem. The Lord surrounds His people from this time forth and forevermore.

As Jesus said, I will never leave you or forsake you. He surrounds us. He has us as it were in His sheepfold. And who's the keeper of the gate? Who protects us? Who's watching over us, surrounding us with His protection?

None other than Jesus Christ. So as the mountains are surrounding Jerusalem, that's just a picture of how geography works for that great city where God chose for His name to reside. So the Lord, in fact, surrounds His people.

Now, you could think of Elisha with his servant. And do you remember when the servant looked out and saw the Syrians coming after Elisha? And there's no defense. And of course, the city is going to open the gates and say, will you take Elisha, leave the rest of us alone?

They knew it was going to happen. He says, oh, my father, what are we going to do? And he prays, says, open his eyes, Lord. He opens his eyes so he can see reality. Not those cheap chariots. Not those hundreds of thousands of soldiers or however many there were.

See reality. And he opened his eyes and he saw the chariots of the Lord all around Elisha. That's what's real. As the Lord surrounds you by your faith in Christ Jesus, as the Lord surrounds you, so you are safe as we go through this world, as we go on this journey.

This is what it is to trust in the Lord. This is what it means to know for sure that this firm, unchangeable, reliable God who's worthy of all our trust, in whom we must invest, surrounds and protects.

Just as the Psalm says, just as Jesus said in John chapter 10, where he says, I am the good shepherd. And he lets no one come in except through that gate and they have to go through him. The mountains surrounding Jerusalem, the Lord surrounding us, God giving us each other to watch over each other, protect us, God giving you pastors to teach you the word of God so you'll be protected by that word which you've hidden in your heart that you might not sin against the Lord.

All of this, all these means of grace. We can ferret out of this one idea of the Lord surrounding you. Surrounding you, hedging you about, watching over you. Does this mean we never fall into trouble?

That we never err or go into sin? Of course not. It means, though, as we understand in our acrostic TULIP, the perseverance of the saints is God who will persevere in you. It is God by his spirit who will bring you to the end that he predestined you for.

It is God who works in you to will and work for his good pleasure. It's all of God. It's all of Christ. It doesn't mean that we don't go through hard times. It doesn't mean that we don't go through the waters and the storms, as I preached from Psalm 124 a few weeks ago, but God's protection is always there and it means that God will bring us to the end that he designed for us, that he designed for you.

Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Scripture says that then you will follow in a resurrection like Jesus's. We must know this. We must hang on to this. We must grasp this. This is the kind of trust that makes us invulnerable to the workings of the world around us.

As things are stirred up, as I said before, we have social movements around us. We have political things going on. We have high taxes. We have inflation. We have wars in Ukraine. We have all this stuff.

We can be concerned about it. We can even be activists about some of these things, but they cannot take away your trust in God who's sovereign over all. Mount Zion cannot be moved, abides forever, and the Lord surrounds us from this time forth for the day of your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, from that time forth and forevermore.

Do you believe this, church? Do you trust in that God, that God who gave you faith to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you trust that you will follow in a resurrection like his? That has to do so much for us as we walk through this world, as we're on this journey with these pilgrims, as they go to Zion, as we're looking for that heavenly prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.

As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people from this time forth and forevermore. And then verse three, for the scepter of wickedness shall not rest on the land allotted to the righteous, lest the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong.

So that's about the wicked. That's about the wickedness. That's about rulers that don't follow God's ways. That's verse three. Verse four, do good, O Lord, to those who are good and to those who are upright in their hearts.

So the wicked, and then the good, and then verse five, but those who turn aside to their crooked ways, the Lord will lead away with evildoers. Do you see how these two negatives in verse three and five kind of sandwich verse four?

He says, for the scepter of wickedness shall not rest in the land of the righteous. So why does the Lord surround his people? Why does he protect us as he does? It's because there is a scepter of wickedness.

This trust in God says that this scepter of wickedness will not rest on the land allotted to the righteous. It won't be there forever. God will not allow us to be tempted beyond what we can endure, says 1 Corinthians 13 10.

But in the temptation, in the troubles, in the trials, in those things that would take away even a pebble of faith and trust from your mount that you are in Christ. The Lord will give you a way of escape.

That scepter of wickedness, those ways that are wrong and ungodly, those things that are incursions that are tried to make into our faith, into our church. Those things shall not rest on the land allotted to the righteous.

And he goes on to say, let the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong. You know, in these three verses, 3, 4, and 5, there is a confession that is being made. And that confession is what I just said, let the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong.

Brethren, we have to admit that it is hard to keep from doing wrong. It's hard to keep from thinking wrong. It's hard to keep our trust in this world. It says that if that scepter was there for too long, if it went further than we could bear, we would stretch out our hands to do what is wrong, to do something unjust, which is what is behind that word for what is wrong.

Trust says that that scepter will not stay for so long that we will fall away. We may be tempted. We may slip here and there, but that scepter of wickedness will not rest. This confidence that God will take it away.

When Christ Jesus returns, he will make all things right. Will he not? He will not allow that scepter to continue. The scepter of ruling is actually his. So there's confidence in the Lord. There's also confession here.

Lest the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong. Brethren, we need to confess that we will stretch out our hands to do wrong. We can only take it for so long. We need the Lord's protection while we're here.

Like during that waterboarding controversy, I heard experts on TV saying that, you know, no man, you can be seal team six, the toughest guys there are, nobody can stand torture for too long. You will give in.

It's sort of like that. If the scepter of wickedness would rest on the land for too long, if it was around us for too much, if the incursions came in all the time and there was no end to it, we would eventually give in.

Accept. Accept what? What would keep us from reaching out our hands to do what is wrong, to do what the world would have us to do, to go along with the types of things that they preach and teach and practice?

It's that protection that we have in verses one and two. The Lord's surroundings are protecting us and that confidence, that trust we have says that that scepter, those influences will not be more than we can bear because of God's protection and because of the sureness of His Word.

So there's confidence in the Lord. There's a confession. There's also commitment here. There's commitment to do what is right. There's commitment, for example, in what we have in Romans 6. Excuse me. I thought four tassels would be so efficient.

They're actually kind of hard to unwind from each other. Romans 6, 17 says, but thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed.

This is a commitment that we have. This is a commitment similar to what we have in Psalm 125 about stretching out their hands. It implied that there's commitment that we won't stretch out our hands. We will resist it as long as we can and that long as we can perhaps stretched out by God, by His Spirit as He protects us.

So there's confidence in the Lord that He will not give us more than we can bear. There is confession that except for the Lord, we could not bear it. And there's commitment that as God was working in us and through us, that we will not reach out our hands to do what is wrong.

We will not give in to those things that are trying to pull us away from God. In verse 5, it says, but those who turn aside to their crooked ways, the Lord will lead away with evildoers. It's not quite a wordplay.

The words sound similar, but when He speaks of do good, O Lord, to those who are good, to those who are upright, that word upright means straight. Those are upright in heart. Those whose heart is straight to the Lord.

Those whose heart looks to Him and Him alone and doesn't waver to the left or the right as they look to His Word, as they pray, as they look for His Spirit to guide them, going straight to the Lord. But to those who turn aside to their crooked ways, those who go on a different path, those whose heart is not given over to the Lord, those who do not love the Lord their God with all their heart, isn't that come first, with all their heart, soul, and strength.

Those who turn aside to their crooked ways could be apostate Jews. If you read Ezekiel 25 and 26, it could be the Ammonites and the Philistines and the Moabites and the people of Tyre who added on to their suffering when Jerusalem was first conquered.

And in those two chapters of Ezekiel, you hear their recompense from God and what's going to happen. Maybe those are the ones who turned aside to their crooked ways. And here's confidence that the Lord will lead them away with evildoers.

God will do what is right. It's like Jesus in Matthew 25, or maybe it's 23, but Jesus speaks about separating the goats from the sheep and sends the goats to the lake of fire reserved for the devil and his angels.

And the sheep on His right side who come to glory with Him. The Lord will separate and here's confidence in Him. Those who turn aside their crooked ways, it's something we have to look at in our own hearts.

I would ask you again, is your heart straight to the Lord? I think none of us would have a perfect straight line from heart to God and that straight line representing our compliance with His word, our doing as Jesus commands.

Well, none of us are perfectly straight, but are you crooked? Do you bounce to the left and bounce to the right? Do you want to grab hold of those things from outside? Those dilutions of the gospel? Those certainties that we have, for example, as I said earlier, of the virgin birth, His death for your sins, His burial and His resurrection on the third day.

Stay straight with those. Don't let people convince you that that's all a myth, that it was made up 2 ,000 years ago to control people. It's true. It's factual. It's that Mount Zion that cannot be moved.

It's that sure and certain rock upon which our faith is built. Those who turn aside their crooked ways, God will lead them away. God will purge His church. We have terrorism, we have weed in the church always and the church will be in that situation.

And even so, during that time, even though Jesus is going to do that final division between terrorism, weed, goats and sheep and all those other illustrations that He uses, even now we have through church discipline, through the Word of God, through the way we maintain our orderliness in the church, this way of making sure that those who follow crooked ways, those who do not believe in Jesus Christ, do not remain.

Peace Be Upon Israel

And finally, peace be upon Israel. So from trust to peace, do you know the peace of God? Romans 5 says, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God. You know, the peace with God is different than the peace of God.

And I would argue that Psalm 125 speaks of the peace of God. Romans 5, peace with God because of our Lord Jesus Christ that refers back to His cross. It refers to Him suffering God's wrath, God's anger, God's enmity against you or against me and poured out upon Him.

And because Jesus Christ emptied that wrath from God in Himself, we have that peace with God, meaning we're not at war with Him anymore because He declared peace with us. Not we with Him, He with us. Peace with God, no more war.

The peace of God is different. The peace of God is that peace that Jesus gives to us. He says, my peace, I leave you. Not as the world gives peace, do I give you peace. A peace that infuses us. A peace that helps us in everything that we do.

That peace that comes from trusting God because we know God's Word is reliable. Remember this people, they trusted God. They're just coming back from the punishment that they had. Why do they trust a God who punished?

Think of a parent who would say to the child, now this is the 111th time that I've had to tell you this, that you're going to get spanked for that. Now last year, the second time I told you, I really meant it.

And when you do it the 113th time, you're going to get, well you wouldn't trust that parent. Here this people trusted God because He kept His Word in punishment. And here they are at the end of that time, coming back to Jerusalem.

They trusted God because He keeps His Word. Do you trust that God? I mean, trust that God as securely as Mount Zion is fixed to the ground upon which it rests? It hasn't moved in a very long time. With that trust then, there's peace.

There's peace that comes from certainty. There's peace that comes from confidence. There's peace that comes because my trust is in Him who is reliable. He promised you in Romans 10 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus Christ and believe that He was raised from the dead, you will be saved.

We trust that well enough, but that has to give peace. That has to give sureness, that has to give confidence. It says, peace be upon Israel, that final lasting peace. That peace that comes from trust, that peace that comes from reliability, that peace that comes from our sureness that Jesus Christ died and rose again.

Those who trust in Mount Zion, those who trust in the Lord, excuse me, are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. Brethren, when we trust in the Lord, we have that ever-abiding peace from the Lord Jesus Christ who says, I will never leave you or forsake you.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for this afternoon and for this time that we have together. I pray, Father, that we would increase in our trust. We cry out with the man in Mark's gospel, I believe, Lord, help my unbelief.

Give us that peace that passes all understanding, that peace of God which the world can never understand, but Lord, which makes us invulnerable to the world's incursions, which makes us sure all the time that our trust is placed properly in you, Father, who sent your Son to die for our sins and who raised him from the dead.

Father God, bless us now as we continue in prayer, as we continue to seek your will in full trust that you hear us and we'll answer speedily in Jesus' name, amen.