Sermon: The Glorious 97th Psalm

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A few weeks ago, I contacted my friend, Michael Brown, and I said could you give me any help in finding the largest print

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Hebrew text you know of that you can still carry into a pulpit? And before he got back to me,

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I actually stumbled on it, and it's one he recommended. I know you can't see that from here, but I now have a large print

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Hebrew text. It's wonderful. But, it's still not nearly as big as what

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I can do on my iPad. It's just not even close, so if you are a biblical student and you're looking at the biblical languages, trust me,

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Greek is a more complex language, but it was a lot easier for me to learn than Hebrew was, because Hebrew, there are two words that I know of in Hebrew that actually sound the same in English.

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That's it. Many of our English words are based upon Greek words, so the vocabulary was harder, and almost all your

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Hebrew vocabulary words are three letters long. They're all roots that you learn. Can you imagine all your vocabulary words being three letters long?

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And then I've mentioned before, she's running right at the time I'm going to say this, but see, there she goes, she made it.

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I was taking, Summer had just been born when I was taking Hebrew, so my Hebrew has never been as good as it could have been, and it's, it's all her fault, so I keep saying that to her, that's why she leaves whenever I, I start talking about, talking about Hebrew.

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So what I want to do today, now when you think about it, this is our third week in a row, you're starting to wonder, there is a, remember that guy named

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Jeff Durbin, have you seen that, ever heard of that guy? He's, he knew he was gonna be really busy this season with, with end abortion now and things like that, so we knew that that was gonna be a possibility.

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But over the past, this will be the third week in a row now, and I'm not gonna ask anyone what the subject was two weekends ago, because we're all busy people, but you may recall we talked about Titus chapter 2, and we talked about the grace that teaches us to deny ungodliness and to live soberly and righteously and, and very practical application from Titus chapter 2.

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Last week was Biblical Sexuality Sunday, and so we dealt with the not so happy, enjoyable subject of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the revisionist reading of those texts, and what is actually being referred to there.

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And I hope and pray that someone in the congregation will, over time, find that information to be helpful, useful in your talking with someone, in your engaging with people, because no matter what we do these days, those subjects are forefront, they're right in the, we are now living in a day when the things the

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Scriptures call evil are being called good, and the things the Scriptures called good are being called evil. And so we have to be aware of these things.

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So here in week number three, what I'd like to do is, one of my favorite things to do, especially when

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I travel and I meet with churches and don't have a whole lot of time, don't necessarily know where they are in their preaching schedule and things like that, just one of the things that I've really, really come to love to do, and I, I really am,

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I am convinced that the, the sheep of Christ want to hear the voice of Christ, and simply opening the

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Word and walking through it, and looking at it carefully and slowly, you know,

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I've seen a lot of these reading plans, I've seen all these people going, I got through my Bible reading plan today in 23 minutes and 43 seconds, and I'm like, you're sitting there with a stopwatch?

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How does, how does this work? It's one thing to, you know, gobble up large sections, it's another thing to stop and meditate, to slowly consider, we are, we are such fast -moving people in our day, it's not that we're getting a whole lot done, it's just that we're doing a lot of stuff.

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I look back at, at people like John Calvin and I look at the amount of material that they wrote using a quill and ink, without lights at night, and I compare that with what we produce today, and they were, they're much less distracted than we are.

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With much longer attention spans, that's, that's for sure. But simply walking through a text, and so I started thinking about the

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Psalter, the hymn book of God's people, and my mind went back to my seminary days, when

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I was doing my first degree at Fuller Theological Seminary, and I, I already knew, I was, I was already involved in apologetics, and so I knew the biblical language was so important.

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And so I made, I had to make special requests to the seminary to take more

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Hebrew than they actually offered in the, in the Master of Arts program. And in that exegesis class,

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I, I just, I assume we, if I'm recalling correctly, we did some of the

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Psalms in the 90s, and if you, you look at how the Psalter is arranged, this section, the subject matter of the

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Psalms is very much related in regards to Yahweh's kingship and lordship over the world.

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And I remember being struck by Psalm 97, specifically because of verse 2, where we are told that righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne.

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Now, I was young in Reformed theology, I wouldn't have known, well,

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I, I may have, yeah, I knew what a theonomist was back then, but only because Westminster Seminary had put out a book about how bad it was, and so I hadn't read anybody on the other side, and, and so, but still, even at that time, before being faced with a lot of the issues that we're faced with now,

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I was struck with the thought, righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne.

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I recognized throne means that location of rulership and authority, but it just struck me how important it is to recognize that our

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God is just and righteous, and the gods of the peoples are not.

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Most of us don't spend time studying much about Assyrian gods or Babylonian gods or anything like that, and we probably shouldn't, but when you do, what you discover is that these were arbitrary deities.

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They came, they weren't eternal, they, they hadn't created the heavens and the earth. They came out of the heavens and the earth, and they were very, very human, and in fact, fallen in their nature.

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And so you, you wouldn't know, in fact, one of the reasons you had to have offerings and sacrifices is they could be very arbitrary.

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They would act toward mankind in different ways, and you had to try to appease their wrath, and they might just have a mood swing.

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Can you imagine what it would be like to serve a god who has mood swings? We take so for granted the fact that God's throne is built upon righteousness and justice, and it also, in our day, as we see so much unrighteousness and so much injustice, as we see the term justice turned into a wax nose that you can make into any form you want.

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I am absolutely thankful that justice, real justice, will be done in this universe.

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Maybe not necessarily in this life, but the

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God of all, the judge of all the earth will do right, and there is a day that God has fixed, and He has chosen a man, the man

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Christ Jesus, whom He raised from the dead, to judge on that day, and He will judge in righteousness.

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And I don't know about you, but as I see what's going on around us, that becomes more and more of a precious truth to me every day.

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So when we look at the Psalter, and we, with New Testament eyes, recognize that very often there were just these sentences, sometimes even clauses, that were filled with meaning prophetically in their fulfillment in Christ, and when we recognize that Christ's people down through the ages have sung these songs, and have contemplated these words, we have the opportunity for a few minutes this afternoon to enter into that, to join with all of God's people in singing the

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Psalm, and considering its truth. So, let's look at it, let's look right at the beginning,

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Yahweh reigns, let the earth rejoice. It's interesting, the term, you've undoubtedly heard, you know, when you hear a bimelech, you hear in that, that melech, melech is the term for king in Hebrew, and so, as I said, in Hebrew, very often the verbal root and the noun, they're just related to one another, so that's the term that's used here, it's

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Yahweh melech, Yahweh reigns, Yahweh is king. Let the earth rejoice.

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Think how sad it would be if the Creator who made the earth did not reign over that which

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He created. If deism was true, the idea that God just sort of wound this thing up like a clock and then went on vacation in the

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Bahamas, there would be no reason for the earth to rejoice. But you see, when we talk to this world around us, as this decayed,

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God -hating system collapses, and it will, we have to be the people to say, there is something so much more.

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There is more. The earth can rejoice, the earth must rejoice, because Yahweh reigns,

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Yahweh is king. There is a God who reigns over. I see so much despair in people's eyes, because they've accepted the idea, and they've accepted the belief that we live in a completely random universe with no meaning, no purpose, no end.

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They despair, and I understand why they would despair. But you see,

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Yahweh reigns. He is acting as king, therefore the earth should rejoice, the many coastlands should be glad in the fact that there is order in this world.

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There is truth in this world. Clouds and thick darkness are all around Him.

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He's not like these idols that sit in temples and you have to lock them up at night unless somebody steals them.

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He's not an idol in that way. We don't have direct access to Him by our vision.

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Clouds and thick darkness are all around Him. But what we know is righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne.

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That term that is used there, righteousness, in verse 2, that is a

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Hebrew term that you might want to familiarize yourself with, because later on when it talks about holy ones, the saints, it's the same root.

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And this is the word that lies behind the New Testament term for righteousness, like the righteousness of Christ, which has been imputed to us.

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It's zedek here, or zedekah, righteousness. It's straightness, it's proper balance.

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There's a lot of different ways in which it is used. Morally, there are those who are called the righteous.

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But then when used of God, it is that unchanging consistency that He demonstrates in all that He does.

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And justice, same term for judgment. Righteousness and justice are what

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His rulership is based upon. So many people reject and rebel against God's ruling over us because they have no heart that wants to see righteousness and justice done.

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Like I said, those terms have been stolen from us of late. Justice redefined in a way that the

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Bible would never define it as. We need to be people who don't give up these special words, but we define them and we define them biblically.

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Our world is talking about justice all the time right now. What they mean by that is very different than what

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Scripture says. We need to be the first ones to say God's rulership in this world is based upon righteousness and justice.

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It doesn't matter what land you live in, doesn't matter what borders you live within, if we even have borders any longer.

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God's righteousness and justice will be done. And because of that, verse 3, fire goes before Him and burns up His adversaries all around.

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Fire goes before Him. When you think about fire in the ancient world, it was vitally important.

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Vitally important. It was how you cooked food, it was how you stayed warm in the cold winters.

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But there was no 911. There was no fire department down the street.

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Some of the most amazing losses of life down through human history have been due to fires, the great fire in Rome, numerous fires in London, for example, that would just take out entire blocks, entire sections of cities, because there was no way to really control them.

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The way that we can control that today, for example, very safely with a gas stove.

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So much for that. But fire goes before, and fire is a sign of judgment, of cleansing, of purifying.

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And notice, burns up who? His adversaries. We don't, we are not encouraged to think in this way any longer.

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Moral relativism, everybody gets to be his own God, makes us uncomfortable to talk about God having adversaries, but the fact of the matter is, those who stand and say no to God's way and to God's law, there is adversaries, there is enemies.

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God has enemies. And in fact, if you are not in Christ, you are

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God's enemy. You are rejecting the testimony he's given of his own son.

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If you have not bowed the knee in repentance and faith to Jesus Christ, you are

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God's enemy. And his fire will consume. Oh, it's this hellfire preaching.

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Hell, it was hellfire preaching before the New Testament came along. God's people have confessed the reality that if you die as the enemy of God, you will face his terrible wrath.

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You do not want to be the adversary of God. That fire burns up all his adversaries all around.

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Move down to verse 5. We are told that the mountains melt like wax at the presence of Yahweh.

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You've probably seen how wax melts. I remember it was, I miss it every year now.

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My mom used to do Christmas cards. And Summer will tell you, my mom had the most beautiful handwriting

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I've, I've ever seen. But she'd have to start in November. And one of the favorite things

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I loved about it, I don't know how long she did it, and these days with automatic mail and stuff like that, it probably would have gummed up the machines, but she had this, she would get these little candles.

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And she had a metal stamp, signet stamp, with a

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W, a really nice fancy, you know what I'm talking about, really fast, nice fancy W in it. And you'd light that candle, and you'd let the wax drip onto the back of the envelope when you'd closed and sealed it.

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And then you had to wait, you couldn't, if you did it too fast, it wouldn't work. But right as the wax started to harden, but was still pliable, you'd push that W into it and it would make this beautiful seal on the back of the envelope.

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Anybody? Okay. You're dating yourselves, okay, alright. And I remember when

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I got old enough to help my mom with the, with the stamps of the W's on the back of the

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Christmas cards. And so, we know what it means for something to melt like wax, but we've never seen a mountain do that.

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Well, I suppose if you've watched the eruption of Mount St. Helens, that would sort of be an example,

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I think, of what looked like a solid mass, unmovable mass, just turned to smoke and vapor in a matter of seconds.

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That's the picture of Yahweh's supremacy and His power over His creation.

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What really caught my attention was the description here. Now, again, looking at the

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Hebrew, Hebrew poetry is very expressive. Hebrew grammar is not as complex as English or Greek.

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And so, they express things by repetition, parallelism, and by how they lay out the terms.

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And so, it's interesting when it says in verse 5, the mountains melt like wax in the presence of Yahweh, in the presence of the

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Adon, Kal HaEretz. Eretz is earth. Kal HaEretz, all the earth.

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You hear that term, Adon, you've heard the term Adonai, my Lord, Adonai is my

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Lord. Adon, the Lord of all the earth. Here Yahweh is described as the

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Lord of all the earth. And you and I sit there and go, yeah, we sang that three times already today.

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But you need to realize something. That was revolutionary and repugnant to all the people around Israel.

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You must realize that in those days, people believed their gods had authority over certain aspects of life within certain boundaries and borders.

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And so, it was considered absolutely, positively arrogant on the part of the

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Israelites for them to say that Yahweh is the

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Adon Kal HaEretz, the Lord of all the earth. Who do you think you are?

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That's not very inclusive. Well, it's not.

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But the reality is, that has been the message of the Hebrew scriptures and the

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Greek scriptures from the beginning. We aren't coming up with something new, we're just following that which is old.

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And we have to take seriously, you know, we think, we go to Matthew 28, 19, we go to all authority has been given to Christ, heaven and earth, and that's why we're to go, and that's all true.

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But that authority had been God's over all the earth from the beginning. Yahweh is

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Lord of all the earth. Yahweh is Lord of China.

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Yahweh is Lord of Russia, of Ukraine, of Brazil, and every single legislator that walks in the

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United States Capitol, if they would but look at what's engraved on the walls, would know that those who built it confessed that Yahweh is

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Lord of the United States as well. And the nation that they formed, they formed under the light of His law, and they were unashamed to admit it.

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Now the vast majority of those who walk through those corridors would love to scrape those things right off the wall, and are doing so, whether physically or not.

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The mountains melt like wax at the presence of Yahweh, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth, and every human system and every human philosophy will melt like wax and be washed away at His presence, at His coming.

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There is no question of that. And so this section of the psalm concludes in verse 6, by saying, the heavens declare

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His righteousness, same term that is used at the foundation of the throne. The heavens declare

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His righteousness, and all the peoples see

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His glory. Now this brings us back to what is revealed in what's called natural revelation.

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God has made us so that we look at the heavens and we are astonished and amazed.

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I saw something, it just struck me. A lot of you know that I haven't had as much chance recently to be doing as much stargazing as I'd like to do, but you know that I do a little astronomy, and both day and night

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I have a solar scope, so a number of you have looked at the sun through my solar scope, and it's a fascinating thing.

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And I ran into something just recently that a couple years ago, I think it was in LA, there was a massive power outage.

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And amongst all the other 911 calls, which I'm sure there were a lot, amongst one of the common themes amongst the 911 calls was that people were calling in saying, there's some kind of a, like, silver -white cloud over the city, it was called the

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Milky Way. Which you can never see because of the light pollution in LA and Arizona, in Phoenix.

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And once you get out of the valley and get out into some place without any light pollution, there aren't many places like that left, but you can see the rest of our galaxy that we are a part of called the

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Milky Way. And it is funny what mankind has tried to figure out over the years what that was.

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And we think we are so wise now that we have, you know, we have Hubble and we have the

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Webb Telescope and all the stuff it's discovering and all that neat stuff going on right now. And yes, it's the first time in human history to have had that level of information.

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In fact, I just want to point out to you, it's only been 100 years that mankind has realized that those little, teeny, puffy things up in the sky are galaxies as big as ours.

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There's over 100 billion stars in our galaxy. And we now estimate there are over 100 billion galaxies.

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But it's only been 100 years. We look in primitive telescopes and we go, what are those cotton balls?

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Till finally someone goes, that's another galaxy. Wow. God's big.

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God's creation speaks of his glory. The heavens declare his righteousness and all the peoples see his glory.

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They don't see the Trinity. I'm sorry. I know there's some people who say you can find the Trinity in the stars and no, it's not there.

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That's special revelation. That's in scripture. But we are made to look above us and to realize that we are very small.

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But in the midst of that, we are then called to realize the one who made it is very big.

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And the sad thing is that when God turns people over, instead of looking up and being amazed and glorifying the creator, we turn what we look at into an object of worship.

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Science becomes our worship, our God, rather than all the people seeing his glory.

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You have to suppress what God has made you to see, to not see the beauty of the sunset or the beauty of the stars.

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And so there's a transition in verse seven then. And notice what happens.

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Let all those be ashamed who serve pestle, pestle, graven images, pestle.

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That word even sounds evil, doesn't it? Let all those be ashamed who serve graven images.

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That term to serve there is, in the

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Old Testament, serve and worship are both translations of one word.

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We, we can, we separate those things in our minds. As if service is, you know, you can worship

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God but then if you really want to get into worship, then you serve him too. No, not in Hebrew. That's why the

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Roman Catholic distinction that has been made since, well, even before the

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Reformation, where they try to say that they are, they're not worshiping the saints when they're bowing down and praying to them.

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They are, they are giving dulia, service to them, rather than latria, which is worship.

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That very distinction that is fundamental to Roman Catholic theology is not a part of the biblical text.

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Those are both translations of the same Hebrew term. The Reformers pointed that out as part of the

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Reformation. So here, let all those be ashamed who serve graven images.

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We live in a day where the term shame has been shamed.

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Has it not? We live in a day where you're not, you're not supposed to shame anyone for anything.

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Well, okay, take that back. You are supposed to shame anyone who still holds to, well, pretty much everything the

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United States stood for for the past, you know, 200 some odd years. Anyone who holds to Judeo -Christian values, anyone who would believe that the baby in the womb is a human being.

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Those people can be shamed, that's fine. But everything else, you can't have shame.

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How dare you say that a man who pretends to be married to another man should be ashamed of his profaning of God's institution of marriage.

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How dare you? How dare you? How dare you say that a homosexual couple should not adopt children while hopefully this past week helped us to see the problem with that, huh?

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If you're not aware of the story, I'm not going to mention it here. There is no shame any longer.

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This can't even be understood. What do you mean, let those be ashamed who serve graven images? They're just being themselves.

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They're just giving expression to what makes them them. And you see what's behind that?

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See what's behind Psalm 97 is the recognition that we are made in the image of God.

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That means that there is a moral standard to which we are to be compared.

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And when you serve graven images, when you boast of idols, you should be ashamed at the fact that you are denigrating yourself.

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When you read that incredible section in Isaiah where the prophet mocks the idol makers, where the prophet talks about a person, he cuts down a tree.

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With half of it, he cooks his food. With the other half of it, he fashions it into an idol and then bows down and thanks the idol for having provided his food.

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It's meant to bring shame. Shame is a good thing.

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When it stops you from walking away from the light of God's truth. But there's no shame left because there is no objective moral standards in our society.

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Nor can there be. Ugly bags of mostly water, moist robots, stardust, all the other term that is used, can't have objective morality.

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Let all those be ashamed who serve graven images. Instead, worship

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Him, all you gods. Now, real quick, got to mention this because we do our evangelism of the

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Mormon folks. And one of these, if you're not into it, just hold on a second and I'll be back to Psalm 97.

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But the term here is call Elohim, all Elohim. Now, if you know

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Mormon theology, they identify today, Joseph Smith didn't, but today, they identify

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God the Father as Elohim and Jesus as Yahweh, Jehovah, which means

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Elohim is a different God from Jehovah, which of course is absurd to anyone who reads the Old Testament. 535 times in the

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Old Testament, you have Yahweh, Elohim used as a singular title for the one God. So the distinction of the two is just something that Joseph Smith had no clue he was talking about.

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But one of the things that you'll hear from the Mormons is they say, well, Elohim is plural and here it is. You, you, doesn't it, doesn't it, isn't the translation there, all you gods?

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Yeah, Elohim is plural. When it's used with a plural verb, you translate it as a plural.

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When it's used the singular, you translate it as a singular. So, when Elohim is used as the name of God, it's always with a singular verb.

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Here it's the plural verbs, you translate as gods. It makes perfect sense when the Mormons try to go, no, no, no, it always means gods.

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No, it doesn't. You have to look at the number of the verb. And here's an example of it. And in fact, the gods being referred to here are the very idols in the graven images you should be ashamed to be worshiping.

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Just a text to keep in your mind as you're talking with the Mormon folks and the consistency of the biblical revelation as well.

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Verse 8, Zion heard this and was glad. So, the people of God hear that God's going to judge false gods.

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They're glad. The daughters of Judah have rejoiced. Why? Because of your judgments,

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O Yahweh. Do we rejoice when

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God's justice is done, when His judgments are seen in the earth? We should, but never self -righteously.

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That's the balance. See, there are some people just, they can't even understand. We have the imprecatory psalms.

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You know what the imprecatory psalms are? They're the ones, oh God, destroy your enemies. Break their teeth.

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The most famous line in all the Psalter, bless are those who dash your baby's heads against the rocks.

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And there have been lots of people, lots of Christian people today, will say, I don't believe that scripture.

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I reject it. No. I won't. I can't. Can't do it. They're always the same people who would say, yeah, and I don't believe there is a flood because God wouldn't do that, and I don't believe there's going to be any judgment in the future because God wouldn't do that, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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Let me tell you something. If you're squeamish and squishy and uncomfortable with God doing

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His judgments in the earth, when you see the wicked cut off in their wickedness, the daughters of Judah and Zion, Zion was glad.

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Daughters of Judah rejoiced because of your judgments. We can't do that anymore? We should.

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But as Christians, what you need to understand is once you stop believing that God is just and as a judge will judge the wicked, you no longer have any foundation to truly understand the cross.

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That's why I've said so many times for most Christians today, the cross is just a sentimental thing. It's an emotional thing.

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Not a historical event where the Son gave His life on that tree in fulfillment of the law that is here being extolled and exalted.

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So when people get squishy and uncomfortable about God's wrath, they can no longer have a meaningful doctrine of the cross.

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Because I've said it many times before, when you look at the cross, if you do not see

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God's wrath at the foundation, you're not looking at the cross. Yes, it's the ultimate example of His love, but what makes it so rich and so deep is the fact that it's also the ultimate statement from God saying, my law must be fulfilled.

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It represents who I am. You don't understand that.

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You end up with, there's a guy named Steve Chalk in England, former evangelical.

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We have lots of those. Steve Chalk left evangelicalism and as he moved left, or as he jumped off the cliff to the left,

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I guess you could say, on the way down he's famous for having said, I can't believe in penal substitutionary atonement, that makes

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God a child abuser. God's a child abuser. That He would do that to His Son.

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Well, first of all, the Son does that voluntarily. But secondly, once you understand the whole essence of the cross is so that God's just wrath in light of His broken law can be fulfilled.

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He takes that punishment upon Himself and the person of His Son voluntarily. But that wrath is real and that law is real.

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And if we're going to be with the people of God, stand with the people of God, then we need to hear and be glad.

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And with the daughters of Judah, we need to rejoice because of Yahweh's judgments. And not fear to confess that.

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And you go, I don't know that I can really wrap my head around all that. Well, then look at verse 9. For you are

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Yahweh most high over all the earth. You are exalted far above all

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Elohim. Above all gods. Sometimes you've got to let

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God be God. Sometimes you've got to recognize

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I am His creature. His ways are above my ways.

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And I may want to try to put everything into a nice, neat little package, but He Himself has said, my ways are above your ways.

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My thoughts are above your thoughts. He was already described as being hidden in clouds and darkness.

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And sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes that's a good thing. So in light of that, here's an exhortation.

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And here's literally the word order. Lovers of Yahweh hate evil.

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Lovers of Yahweh hate evil. That's a good exhortation.

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We are surrounded by it. Sometimes it feels like we're swimming in it. So once again,

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I think to myself how often I voluntarily expose my eyes and my ears and my mind to the evil around me when

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I didn't need to. It's found in entertainment.

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It's found in almost everything. It's in music.

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Oh, there's an effective way of doing it. Music is such an effective communicating tool.

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That's why the Psalter is music. Many of the Psalms, you're told exactly what tune you're supposed to sing it with, unfortunately.

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We no longer have the ancient Israeli Psalter hymn book to be able to figure out what the tunes were.

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But music is an effective way of communicating. But we are told to hate evil.

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Not just avoid it. We are told to do that. But I think when you look at it in the

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Hebrew, lovers of Yahweh. So in other words, if the expression of your love is centered upon God, then you will see evil for what it is.

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Because whatever is evil is opposed to his reign, is opposed to his glory, is opposed to his goodness.

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And so lovers of Yahweh hate evil. Because it's he,

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Yahweh, who keeps the souls of his holy ones. His holy ones.

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He delivers them from the hand of the wicked. So you should, if God is protecting you from those things, then you should hate evil.

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It shouldn't be a temptation to you. Now the world says, no, no, no.

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Well, first of all, the world says there's no way of defining evil in the first place, isn't there? And today we are literally living in a land where you need to celebrate and love evil.

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We can't. It is not an option for us. It is not an option for us.

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Hate evil, you who love Yahweh. But then

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I mentioned in the lengthy introduction to the prayer, verse 11.

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Light is sown. Light is sown. Tzara is the term for seed.

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So it's sowing of seed, like the parable of the sower. Goes out, sows seeds, sows seeds.

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Seed lands in various kinds of soils, so on and so forth. It's the exact same thing. But light is sown for the

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Zadik, Zedekiah, righteous. Same term we saw before.

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What does that mean? Light is sown for the righteous. Well, I think it would help to remind ourselves.

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What was it like to live in a day where once the sun went down, it was just dark?

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Oh, you could light a fire. And you have to keep that up all night. And people learned how to make torches and lamps.

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But they had to be trimmed and maintained. And then again, they could burn the whole place down. We have so many sources of light today.

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Most of you know that for many, many years, I've been a cyclist. And when

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I first started riding, bicycle lights were worthless. They were, you know, they ran on a AA battery.

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They really didn't do much for you, especially really at night. Now, the past 10, 15 years, man, have we developed some incredible, incredible lights for bikes.

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Light, bright, long battery life. I have one that puts out 2 ,000 lumens.

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Really 2 ,000. You can buy all those cheapy things online. 100 ,000 lumens.

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It's all a bunch of Chinese lies. Trust me, it really is. It really is. There are only a few companies that put out the really, really, really good ones.

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And until recently, until COVID basically made a mess of everything in Phoenix, and, you know,

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I used to be able to ride the Arizona Canal to get out of the tough part of the city and get out north where it's safer to ride.

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Can't do it anymore. The underpasses are all just filled with needles and gangs and drug paraphernalia.

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And, you know, they've just been turned into little cities and tents and everything else. You can't ride through them anymore. So you've got to play with the traffic.

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And some of the traffic at 3 o 'clock in the morning is not really going to be seeing you on a bike real well, if you know what

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I mean. Anyway, I used to, especially during the summer, when it was hot, still in the 90s, upper 90s,

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I'd go out and I'd do a 100 -kilometer bike ride, 62 miles. Nice start, 2 .30

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in the morning. And I remember once I was going up 35th

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Avenue and I had my super bright light on my bike. And I was so proud because a guy going the other direction flashed me to try to get me to dim my light.

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And I'm like, I'm on a bike, dude. Ha ha ha. You know, it was great. It was wonderful. That's how much light

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I was cranking out the front of that thing. It was awesome. You realize how modern that is?

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How many generations could never dream of that tiny little gadget in your hand, just putting out a blinding amount of light?

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Light is sewn for the righteous. You needed to have light to be able to navigate your way through darkness.

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Can you imagine people trying to make their way through the wilderness in the darkness?

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I used to climb Squaw Peak, Piestewa Peak, I guess they changed it too.

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But anyways, I'm showing my age. And if you did it at certain times of the year, if you started when they opened at 5 o 'clock in the morning, it was still pitch black.

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And I remember how cool it was to see from a distance, you'd see these little lights going up the side of the mountain.

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And was it a little bit more dangerous during daylight? Yeah, especially coming down. That's true.

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But you could still do it. Can you imagine what it was like back then when you didn't have that? Light is sewn for the righteous.

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Those who follow and love Yahweh. It doesn't matter how deep the darkness

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God calls you to walk through. He will provide you the light to see. He'll provide you the light to see.

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And we think of so many of those who've gone before us, who've given us testimony that this is the case. You know how many times

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I've said you really need to read The Hiding Place. If you haven't read The Hiding Place, you need to read The Hiding Place because the darkness that the ten booms were in, in the

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Ravensbrück concentration camp, was about as intense a darkness as you can have. And yet God's shown

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His light there. God's shown His light there. Righteousness is sewn.

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Light is sewn for the righteous. And gladness for the upright in heart.

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I need that gladness these days. It's so heavy to see what's going on.

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It's so heavy to see the destruction of human life. It's so heavy to see evil people being paid a king's ransom to mutilate healthy bodies out of utter deception and destruction of human life.

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We need gladness. But it's for the upright in heart. And so what is the exhortation that Psalm 97 gives to us?

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Be glad, you righteous ones.

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Zadikim. Be glad in Yahweh. And then, depending on how you translate, and give thanks, it's literally for remembering

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His holiness. Some say His holy name, something like that.

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I suppose that's one way of rendering it. But what's interesting is, we are called the righteous ones,

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His people. But we get gladness and we give thanks when we remember the fact that He is holy.

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Reminds me of Isaiah's temple vision, Isaiah chapter 6. When you see that vision of worship taking place in heaven.

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And I've always, and I preached this sermon a couple years ago, but once again, just to remind you, it's beautiful to me to look at Isaiah 6, see the worship of God taking place there, and then you fast forward to Revelation 4 and 5, and guess what?

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Kingdoms and empires have risen and fallen. Millions of people have born and died.

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God's still being worshipped in heaven the same way He was before. Nothing has changed it, nothing has stopped it.

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However, the one thing that changes is in Revelation, there's a lamb standing as a slain.

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Something did take place in history. The incarnation, ministry, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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But that never stopped the worship. All that's done now is to only focus that worship and give us a greater insight into what that worship means.

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So be glad in Yahweh, not in your car, not in your house, not in your youth, and your strength, your good looks, and all the things that God has blessed you with.

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All those things can be taken away. And if they are, we are still to be glad in Him.

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We are still to give thanks, the remembrance of His holiness, because nothing that happens down here will ever change

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His holiness. And if our satisfaction, if our joy, if our gladness comes from an unchanging source, we will be people who can never be stopped from doing what's right.

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If we as a people are focused upon God, upon His truth, upon His glory, the

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Lord won't be able to divide this church, disrupt it from inside, and the world will not be able to take everything from us.

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It won't be able to take anything from us. If the world comes along and takes all of our possessions, if the regime comes along and takes our homes and gives them to somebody else, puts us out into the elements, all they've done is taken something

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God gave to us in the first place, and they will answer for their having done so. But our gladness, our peace, our happiness is found in our focus upon our

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God, His worthiness, His acts, and the fact that we have been called into fellowship with Him.

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These are the words that have been given to us in ancient times They remain for us today a source of truth and light and encouragement.

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Let us be thankful for what God has given to us in His word. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we do thank

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You for these ancient words. We thank You for the psalmist who penned them.

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We thank You for Your Spirit's providential guidance of His thoughts and then the preservation of these words down through the centuries.

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Here we are on the other side of the planet reading in a completely different language. And here, millennia later, our hearts are touched.

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And in light of Christ and His coming, we see what we are being called to do.

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We see the exhortation that is found in these words for us today, in our day, in a day where there are literally kinds of evil that have only rarely been thought of in centuries past, now being promoted openly.

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Lord, sow light for us because we are walking in a dark valley.

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We need Your light. You have promised to provide it. Help us to know how to walk in wisdom toward those that are outside.

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And may we as Your people proclaim to the world that we serve a

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God whose throne is built upon righteousness and judgment.

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May we rejoice with the daughters of Zion and Judah when

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Your judgments are done. We thank You for Your Word. We thank