Psalms 124 The Holy Hypothetical

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan, where we are growing in faith, community, and service. This is a sermon series on the Psalms of Ascent by Pastor Don Filsack. Let's listen in.

Well, good morning. Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here. We're going to go ahead and get started, so if you can find your seats, that would be helpful as we kind of kick things into gear here.

I'm glad that you have gathered together with God's people. I'm glad that you're here. Be sure to fill out the connection card you received when you walked in. You can turn that in in the black box. Any offerings that you would choose to give, go in that same black box back there under the clock.

If it's your first time with us here, we welcome you, a special welcome to you, and just want to say there's a free coffee mug over on the table there. You can just grab one of those on your way out the door.

Again, just our way of saying thanks and glad that you have joined together. We recognize that visiting a new place for the first time can be a little bit of a stretch, so just thank you for being willing to give us a shot here and check us out.

Remember that any of those offerings that are given, that our marked expansion fund will go towards our eventual goal of building a building on the property that we purchased. This is obviously a temporary situation for us.

We're very grateful for this space for us to meet in that the school has provided for us, and at the same time, hoping to, again, keep this temporary and eventually get into a building. How many of you had a chance to read my blog this week?

Just curious about, I think, probably a handful of you. I would encourage you to go when the eCast comes out this week to pay special attention to that blog. It's almost kind of a little bit of a state of the union of our church, in a sense, just kind of like where we're at and how things are going right now.

And so, kind of in the midst of all this transition with Kyle's departure and different roles and things all going on, what that looks like. And I would ask this morning, just by way of announcement, again, that gives more detail, so read the blog.

I'm not going to re-read my blog to you up here. I don't know if I'm cutting out here or if you're cutting out back there.

Okay.

All right. Perfect. Please pray with us as we consider, as we're looking and currently seeking an administrative assistant. That position has been posted. Part of the rationale and the reasoning for that need is to help us shore up processes to aid in what I think has been kind of weak, honestly.

I mean, six years as a church, and I mentioned this in the blog, but I think we've been weak in communication. And I think that hiring somebody for that specific position would shore up some of my weaknesses and help us keep more administratively organized.

And so, that's the goal in this position. And in other words, part of that position is to help us get more stuff done. And that's one of the things that we've identified needs to happen. Resumes can be submitted to me, and we're taking them from inside the church as well as outside.

So, if you know somebody who is administratively minded that's looking for a position, we're looking at about half-time as a part-time job. And so, if you know somebody or if you yourself are interested, be willing to pray and ask God if it's His will that you might submit a resume for that.

To clarify a couple of points on that new position, this does not replace Carissa as our office manager. It's a different type of role. Carissa has done a fabulous job for us in the office and will continue to do that as long as she's willing.

And so, that is not a replacement. Some people have asked that in the follow-up to the posting of that position. It is not to replace Carissa at all. Other positions that we are considering that do not yet have job descriptions is a director of children's ministry, a director of technology, and a director of youth ministry.

None of this is set in stone, but this is what we're considering moving forward. And I want you to be aware of these things down the pipeline. There's a couple of other positions that might be worked into there as well.

And again, these are all part-time positions. None of those are, I mean, it sounds like, well, you're going to hire five full-time.

People.

How's that going to work? That's not the case. So, all right. With all that out of the way, again, check out the blog that's going to give you a lot more detail than what I just said. And you can come and ask me questions, too, obviously.

Some of you are a little bit more face-to-face and you'd like to talk about those things. I'd love to talk with you more. Shifting gears to introduce the text this morning, Psalm 124. And I just want to ask you a question, a terrible, dire question, one that the text kind of smacks us in the face with right up front.

And so, I think we need to just consider it at its bare, ugly reality of the question, what if God were not in your life? What if he wasn't guiding you? What if God was not guarding you? What if God was not protecting you?

I've heard many people say, and I think I've been guilty of actually this, something very similar to this phrase, if God wasn't in my life, I don't know where I would be. Have any of you ever said that?

If God wasn't in my life, I don't know where I would be. And sometimes I think that we're just saying that. Sometimes I think we don't really think about the implications of that statement. Because the reality is, for most of us, what would life look like if God were not in it?

We'd probably live our lives in the burbs, maybe here in Matawan even. Our lives would be up and down. We'd seek to pay our bills, struggle with selfishness, get upset with our kids and our spouses from time to time, maybe shipwreck our family to some degree or another, take pride in our work, overeat, and overspend.

And my point is, that if we're honest, what I just described doesn't sound too different than our lives today. If we're honest, it's just not that far off of where we live. When a person says, I just don't know where I'd be without God, do they think they'd be living out episodes of Breaking Bad?

Is that what we mean when we say that?

We'd be living that out. We'd be cooking meth.

We'd be murdering people.

I don't believe that the majority of the people in the room are murderers. I don't think that's the intent of your heart, that you'd be out slaying people if God wasn't in your life. Would you instantly be the dregs of society on skid row or on death row?

But our text this morning challenges us to think in terms of what I'm going to call, and my title of my sermon is a holy hypothetical. The hypothetical of what if God wasn't for us? What if we were not kept in his care?

But fortunately the psalm doesn't linger there, it doesn't end there, but by the second half it breaks free from considering what I would call the hypothetical darkness of our lives without God, and what breaks through in the second half is the reality that God is with us, and he has indeed provided deliverance for his people.

Praise God that the story of God in history is moving from the darkness toward the light. From the fall of humanity into darkness, into brokenness, into sin, and from that place toward redemption, towards glory, towards majesty, towards an eternity with him.

And this psalm is a psalm of rejoicing by the end, so listen to the joy and thankfulness of this psalm as we read it together. Psalm 124, if you're not already there, you can navigate in your app or your Bible or whatever.

If you don't have a Bible or a device on your lap to read the Bible, then just please raise your hand. We're not trying to call you out, we just wanted to give you a Bible, so you can take advantage of that.

Guys, thank you for being willing to pass those out, and you can take that home with.

You as well.

We want everybody to have a copy of the word of God, and I specifically like this translation. It's not magical, it's not mystical, it's not the only good one, but it happens to be my favorite, and if you don't have an English Standard version of the Bible, then take one.

Of those.

There will be a stack of them sitting on the table at the end of the service, you can have.

One.

Psalm 124, recast, this is God's word to us this morning. This is what He designed for us to hear, and He has you here for a reason, and He wants you to hear this text. Psalm 124, a song of ascents of David.

If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, let Israel now say. If it had not been the Lord who was on our side when people rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us up alive when their anger kindled against us.

Then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us, then over us would have gone the raging waters. Blessed be the Lord who has not given us as prey to their teeth. We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers.

The snare is broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.

Let's pray.

The band comes to lead us in worship this morning. Fathers, we go through these psalms of ascent, we go through these psalms about a journey.

Towards you.

We are constantly, constantly, constantly being bombarded with the reality that our help comes from you. And that we are to turn to you in times of difficulty, turn to you in times of stress. Last week's just very abundantly clear that we should come to you first and foremost with our problems.

Then we come to this text and we get a backwards glance, an opportunity to, having been delivered multiple times, to look back at the blessings of our lives where we sit here right now because of a chain of events of your grace, a chain of events of your mercy, a chain of events by which you have helped us.

So Father, I pray that we would lift our voices together as your people here this morning in gladness. Father, that you would speak to us through your word, you would speak to us even in the chosen songs this morning, and as we have an opportunity to reflect back on you, praise and worship, Father, that we would have glad hearts before you, and that we would offer these songs up to you as worship this morning in Jesus' name.

Be sure to have your Bibles open to Psalm 124. It's very helpful for you to have that open as I'm going to reference it. It's really my outline. I'm going to walk through the text verse by verse and thought by thought as every week, and so I'm having that available just to glance at from time to time is helpful.

And then remember that if you need any more coffee or juice or donut holes, if there's any still left over there, you can take advantage of that or stretch out, as I often say, whatever it takes to keep our focus here on God's word as the main point.

We think in all terms of all types of hypotheticals. I think the human mind can't help but process hypothetical questions from time to time. You know, some of these types of questions like, what if you didn't come to church this morning, then what?

What if you had been born to different parents?

You ever thought that?

I mean, you ever thought just that? I mean, it's a bizarre question, but just what if? What if you were born in a different country? What if you went to a different college, or what if you went to college if you didn't?

What if you, getting more serious, what if you never heard the gospel? Or what if you had heard the gospel and not believed it? Then further and deeper, what if God wasn't even for you? All of these are hypothetical questions, and they have some common theme in that they're all past hypothetical questions.

There are some types of hypothetical questions that are more future, and I don't mean to just kind of parse this out and try to get a little crazy on you, but there's a difference between asking past hypotheticals, what if I had done something different or something different had happened, versus the future is a little bit different.

Those are things that we still have to work through. So what if I sell my house, or what if I just add on? What if I stay in my current position, or if I go? And so those are the types of hypotheticals.

You don't know the answer. The point of a hypothetical question is you don't really know the answer to the question, right? You have some guesswork involved in it. And so there's a difference between past hypothetical questions and future ones.

You might, for the future ones, you might weigh the pros and cons, right? They're decision-making questions. What if this happens?

Then this.

What if this happens? Then this. And we're kind of guessing at it, but you kind of think, well, I think it'll probably lean towards better for my family if we do this, or worse for my family if we do this.

And so you work through that. And my point being that there's all kinds of hypothetical questions that vary significantly in their importance and value for human life. It's all different kinds. I recognize that some of you work in the realm of hypothetical questions.

That's what you're hired to wrestle through and work with. Maybe there's something that we could do better in this process. And so you're, I mean, some of you are literally process engineers where you're going, well, this process doesn't work this way, but if we tweak it or change it here, then it's going to get better down the road.

And so there's a hypothetical involved there, like I think if we make this decision in this process and take a turn here and do it different next time, it'll work out better. But for most of us who process these types of past tense hypotheticals, they're often whimsical and not very productive if we're honest.

Sometimes they're born out of a dissatisfaction with our lives. What if I had done something different? Or what if something different had happened to me in a passive sense? And we can have a bit of a longing involved in these questions where we can kind of get nostalgic about past decisions and go, man, it would be so different right now if, if something was different, if, if, if.

Some of us in the room are more concrete thinkers and we may find hypothetical questions to be silly and childish even. As if all hypothetical questions amount to, what if Bilbo Baggins never left his hobbit.

Hole?

What then?

Or what if Darth Vader didn't destroy the Emperor? And, I mean, we're talking no balance to the force, people. I'm sure that somebody out there has blogged or written or has a, a website dedicated to this out in geekdom.

I'm one of them. But there's somebody out there who's written on this, you know, just kind of what, what.

If, what if?

And that would be a great book, you know.

That's a serious question.

But the first five verses of our text propose an actual answer to a hypothetical question from the past. A question that you and I don't have the skill to answer. And only God Almighty Himself can answer these questions.

What if things were not this way? Think that through. Only God Himself can really answer that question fully and He's going to propose to answer a past hypothetical question. And although the question is not stated with a question mark at the end of the sentence, it's implied significantly all throughout this text and the question is simply this, what if God wasn't for you?

What if God wasn't with us? What if God was not on our side? What if He didn't care about you and me? What then? I call this question a holy hypothetical because in the answer, the text of scripture shows us that not all hypothetical questions are worthless.

Because this question results in praise. It results in an emotional outburst of gratitude. It is a hypothetical question that is worth asking and further, is worth answering. Verse one of our psalm begins, if it had not been the Lord who was on our side, if it had not been the Lord who was on our side, and then the songwriter interrupts himself.

He literally like just steps out of the song for just a second and interrupts us as if you can imagine Josh getting up to sing and he begins to lead us in a song and nobody's singing. He says, hold on a second, let's go back to that line and let's start over again, recast, sing with me now.

Sing with me, say it, with me. Sing with me. And he interrupts himself. The pause at the end of verse one is dramatic. It's intentional. In a time when scroll and parchment and paper and ink, all of that was extremely valuable, he took the time to write it twice.

He said, repeat it with me. So the pause is dramatic because what he has just said in the opening line needs to settle on us with a heavy weight. And I fear that oftentimes we can hit the beginning of a psalm, we can hit the beginning of a verse and we can skip right over and move to the meat of the text and so it would be very easy for us to brush these, this question, this concept, this hypothetical off to the side.

If the Lord, what if the Lord wasn't for us? What if he wasn't with us? But don't brush those words aside. The psalmist starts our text this morning with what ought to be a devastating thought to all with an earshot.

It ought to be a weight on our shoulders. It ought to be heavy on you when you hear that, when you begin to process the question that he's asking. It should be heavy and difficult. We're brought to the place of considering what is implied in the text.

Certainly it says what if God wasn't on our side and the flip side of that is equally valid in the text. What if he was against you? What if he was against you? You see, we might only think in terms of, about this psalm in terms of God is on our.

Team, right?

But the reality is that God is on the side of truth. God is, hear me carefully, God is always on the side of truth. And we, either we are with him in the truth or we are opposing the truth and therefore on the opposite team.

As unpopular as that is to say, and I would even suggest to you a step further that there are areas in your life and mine where we are indeed opposed to God because we are not on the side of truth there yet.

So it doesn't just cut down the room, well we could divide the room in those who are on the side of truth and those who aren't. What's in our hearts, there's a division in our hearts about areas that we've yielded over where areas of our lives where, how many of you have ever identified a lie that you have believed that's caused sin in you?

I have.

I've seen it. I've seen it within the last 24 hours, lies that I believe that have led to sin. And so I, you know, you have these, this side of truth and this side of untruth or lies. And some would like to think that God is not taking sides.

Many in our culture would just completely retch at the thought of what I'm up here preaching right now. God is on a side. He's on the side of truth. And yet I would say that when people would kind of reject or kind of recoil at the notion that God is on someone's side, I understand where they're going with that.

It is strictly true that God isn't on my side or God isn't on your side. God isn't looking around for those who are mostly right. Well, I guess, you know, I got to pick the Christians because they're the closest.

As if he's looking for a team to join, didn't get selected. So he's picking, you know, he's like, well, I got to find a team for myself.

Hear me carefully.

God is always true. And only those who are being transformed by the truth are with God. So this notion has to be dealt with in the text where it literally says, if the Lord was not on our side, I want to be careful and clarify.

God is not an ace pitcher that we can add to the rotation during a key start. Boy, we got a key start coming up. How many of you are going to be watching that key start? Okay, Tigers? Anybody even know what I'm talking about?

A couple of you?

Nope.

Wow.

Sorry.

It's written in here, so I'm going to stick with the baseball illustration, but maybe I'll just kind of edit that out later. And note to self, baseball doesn't fly very well. It does with my wife.

She's up there.

Yeah, good feedback.

Yeah, eye contact.

It's like looking at the roster, looking at the team, and, you know, we're going to be opposing some teams this year, the Tigers, and they're going to be looking at it and they're going to be like, you have Scherzer, okay?

Did you guys know that somebody else has Scherzer now? And at the same time, it would be like me saying, well, yeah, you've got Scherzer, but wait until you see who my ace pitcher is. God's on my team.

He's not on my team in that way. He's the inventor of the game. He's the owner, the manager, and by his grace, he invites us to join with him if we will humbly set down our own equipment and accept his invitation to play his sport according.

To his rules.

By his grace, he invites us in. So just to clarify the use of the phrase that the Lord is on our side, I want to suggest to you that that's often a criticism of Christians out in our culture. Oh, you just think, you know, God's on your team, that's what you think, and it's a significant criticism and it is indeed a genuine issue if we're out in the community, if we're in our workplace, espousing and putting forward the air of arrogance that, well, you know, well, you can do whatever you want, but you're on, you know, think about who your team manager.

Is, the evil one.

God is on my team. How many of you think that that might be a stench to our culture and to our society around.

Us?

As if God's my buddy, he signed, you know, he signed the contract, he's with me. But I do think, as much as I'm pulling back from that, that this is an internal conversation to be had here within the confines of the church and here within the body of believers and those who are called by his name and those who indeed are his children, that he is for you, that he does love you, that he is indeed for you and wants what is best for his children in a way that is intended to give us hope and courage for the future, even in dark times and difficulties.

He does indeed love his children.

You see, if God were not for us, the songwriter says, a lot of bad things would have happened to us by now. Now the context of this song is obviously Israel and we need to snap our minds into focus here and think about who specifically was this written about in its original context and it's Israel.

And it's easy to tell from the Old Testament that there were plenty of situations, plenty of times in Israel's history, that there were significant threats posed to them as a nation. Go through the Old Testament and read a lot of them.

You have that whole Exodus Egypt Red Sea thingy where their back is against the Red Sea, the Egyptians are pressing in, anger, rage, wanting to annihilate the Jews, and then the Red Sea opens and they walk through.

Were it not for the Lord on their side, what would have happened? They would have been crushed, destroyed, they had no means to defend themselves. And yet God proved himself to be for them. You have famines that occurred where God led people, the patriarchs, to Egypt for a season and for a time to be preserved from famines.

You have the whole Esther with Haman's decree to extinguish all the Jews from the face of the planet and saved in the last moment. You have the exile and deportations to Assyria and Babylon in Israel's history, which spelled the end of them as a people.

Not to mention David and Goliath and all the running battles with the Philistines and times and decades where they were subjugated by the other tribes around them. Many many times where it looked like they were going to be thoroughly and completely.

Wiped out.

So to nail down a specific context that the songwriter has in mind isn't really very helpful. It's very difficult to tell and I think maybe intentionally he's generic about this. Certainly the types of situations the psalmist is writing about were pretty dire because the terminology he's going to use here is significant.

He goes into great detail with a lot of picturesque language to illustrate the danger that has been averted. He in general refers to it as mankind that rose up against them.

Look at verse 2.

Go ahead and look down at your Bibles for a second. If it had not been the Lord who was on our side when people rose up against us. The word people in verse 2 is a translation of the word Adam. It means humankind, mankind.

It's the actual name of the first dude that God created and then equally it is used as a collective word for all of people or humanity. If the songwriter had wanted us to think more specifically or had wanted to key in on a specific time of history, he would have easily said when the Philistines rose up against us or when the Egyptians rose up against us or when the Persians rose up against us.

But I think it's his desire for us to apply this to our situation and therefore he kept it general. He wanted to make sure that we weren't thinking too narrowly about this notion of people rising up against the people of God.

But he just said, you know, when people rise up against you, when mankind rises up against.

You.

If God were not for us, the text goes on to say, they would have swallowed us alive. One gulp and we'd be gone. Interestingly in poetry, this author is speaking about enemies and I don't think it's a stretch to turn our mind to the enemy of God's people, the evil one, Satan himself.

In 1 Peter, Satan is called a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.

That's the Greek word for swallow alive, swallow whole.

Here we have the Hebrew word for swallow alive, swallow whole.

And I believe it's intentionally similar in the text.

Who is our enemy?

Who is it that rises up against us? Some of us may look at our lives right now and say, Don, this is an interesting bit of history. I can read the psalm, I can read the song, we can understand the poetry, we can dissect it to some degree, try to get the feeling of it, try to get a sense of desperation or a sense of gratitude.

But Don, I don't have any enemies. Thankfully, I don't have anyone rising up against me. I don't have anyone whose anger is kindled against me. There's nobody seeking to devour me.

And you would be deceived.

You would be believing a lie if you are sitting there thinking, I have no enemies. You have one. At least, who would love your demise?

Who would love your moral failure?

Who would love you to destroy your family? Who would love to destroy your career? Who would love to bring you down and sink you in a mire of your own sin and corruption? You have an enemy. You see, at the end of verse one, go back there for a second, look at it, the songwriter tells God's people, he says, join in.

If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, let, let, pause, let Israel now say, come on guys, repeat it with me, he says. Join in with this. Because the songwriter wants to lead us in a way of thinking.

The people of God are told by the word of God what to say and even think about their circumstances.

Did you hear me?

Scripture is telling you how to think. Scripture is telling you how to process and think through what's going on in your life around you. That's a, that's a lot of gumption to tell you what to think. I mean, you can see, you're like, I can see, I can hear, I can smell, I can taste, I've got these five senses, I can take in, I have a pretty good idea what's going on at my workplace.

Scripture's saying there's something else going on at your workplace. Scripture says there's something else going on in your neighborhood. Scripture says there's something else going on in your relationships with people.

And if it were not for God, you'd be destroyed. That's what he is saying. He's saying, say it like this. Say it this way. If God wasn't for you, you would be toast. Say it that way. Or we might, in the weaker moments and processing lies and thinking through the way that we perceive our life, man, you know, if it wasn't for my people skills, yeah, I'd have some, I'd have some rough life if it wasn't for my, my skills in interacting and social situations or if it wasn't for my savvy and the, you know, my ability to kind of get the boss on my team or whatever or to smooth that over with my neighbor or whatever you think you are doing in that situation, God says, no, say it this way.

If it wasn't for me, you'd be toast.

It'd be over.

He's leading us in a way of thinking. Sometimes we desperately need to speak reality to ourselves and that's, that's, that's what this psalm is reporting to do. Say it with him. Speak it with him. We indeed have enemies and they would destroy you and me were it not for God's merciful presence with us.

The text gets detailed.

They'd destroy us in every which way, every which way.

They would swallow us up alive.

They would have swept us away like a flood. The torrents would be so deep that you would have no hope of resurfacing, like your ears would pop. You'd be so far down there under the waves and under the water that there would be no.

Hope of rescue.

You couldn't get to the surface before your lungs would expire. You'd be so buried in life. You'd be so far right over your head you would never recover. We would be battered by the rage of the waters, the text says.

Obviously the songwriter is piling on pictures from verses three to seven, just piling on picture after picture, metaphor after metaphor, even mixing some metaphors in the process. Some that we have a hard time connecting with.

Even this concept of waters we might struggle with to some degree. But the illustrations serve a purpose beyond just saying that we'd be toast. Beyond just saying we'd be busted. Beyond just saying that we'd be down for the count.

But in these metaphors the enemy snaps further into focus. Who is this enemy? The waters were a terrifying thing in the ancient world. They were a metaphor for unseen forces of chaos and darkness. One thing that you need to understand is something that maybe is missed on us to some degree you probably haven't heard much mentioned about it, but the fact of the matter is Israel lived next to a massive body of water.

Have you ever thought about that? The Mediterranean Sea is a huge body of water.

They have a coast.

We don't think about that in terms, you think about the, maybe when you think of Israel you think of the desert, you think of the high place, you think of the Judean wilderness and dry places or the salt sea or something like that or the Sea of Galilee.

But very rarely, I think, my mind doesn't often turn to the coast. But all of my point being that they had an understanding in their culture and in their history in this ancient context of the deep waters.

So that at times, I mean imagine in the history of this, again, unscientific ancient culture, how many of you think that there were times when somebody got pulled under the water by something and never returned?

And they would have no way of processing whatever that thing was under the water.

Would that be a little terrifying to you?

Would that make a trip? What if all that you knew was that once in a while somebody goes to South Haven and disappears and never returns? Would that make a trip to the beach different for you? So that you understand this culture to be a fear of water was significant in this time and in this place.