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All right, turn with me please to Psalm 33. Psalm 33. I figure that's quite some distance from the 90s where we are right now, so of course I'm not sure how many times we have made it through the Psalter in the decades of our traditions.
But I don't know if Pastor Fry has kept track of that. I get the feeling that he has not. But it would be interesting to sort of figure that out and see how many times we've gone through Psalm 33. I know that the reason I have spoken on it more than once goes back to seminary.
And in Hebrew class, one of the various Hebrew classes, I don't remember, I think I did do a paper on the 33rd Psalm. And so when you engage a text like that, there are certain passages that sort of grab hold of you at that time and remain favorites for you.
And I really think that this particular psalm is wonderfully constructed and I love reviewing what it has to say. So let's listen to what the psalmist says. Psalm 33. Sing for joy in the Lord, O you righteous ones.
Praise is becoming to the upright. Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre. Sing praises to Him with a harp of ten strings. Sing to Him a new song, play skillfully with a shout of joy. For the word of the Lord is upright, and all His work is done in faithfulness.
He loves righteousness and justice. The earth is full of the loving kindness of the Lord. By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth all their host. He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap.
He lays up the deeps and storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord, let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For He spoke and it was done, He commanded and it stood fast. The Lord nullifies the counsel of the nations.
He frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart from generation to generation. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom He has chosen for His own inheritance.
The Lord looks from heaven, He sees all the sons of men. From His dwelling place He looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, He who fashions the hearts of them all, He who understands all their works.
The king is not saved by a mighty army, a warrior is not delivered by great strength. A horse is a false hope for victory, nor does it deliver anyone by its great strength. Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him, those who hope for His lovingkindness, to deliver their soul from death and to keep them alive in famine.
Our soul waits for the Lord, He is our help and our shield, for our heart rejoices in Him because we trust in His holy name. Let your lovingkindness, O Lord, be upon us, according as we have hoped in You.
You have here a wonderful psalm, and you'll notice that it can be divided up rather clearly and succinctly in regards to having an outline. It flows rather well. You'll notice at the beginning, you have a sort of a call to worship in the first three verses.
And then, beginning at verse four, you have a reason why we can worship and why we can thank God. And that is that God is faithful, that God is just, that He loves righteousness and justice, and the earth is full of the Chesed, the lovingkindness of the Lord.
And if you don't mind, I would probably do this more often. I should be more consistent with it. That term, Lord, was used over and over again. But as you noticed, I hope, you saw that that is the Tetragrammaton.
That's L-O-R-D in all caps. That's Yahweh. And it does, I think, impact our understanding of the text if we use that covenant name of God when we see it. The Jews will not do that. They consider it too holy to say.
But obviously, it was there in the original. And so, when it talks about the word of Yahweh is upright, the lovingkindness of Yahweh, we're talking about something specific there. Not just a generic, general type thing.
But there is a very specific covenant element to that. And I think that's important to notice. And then, after that affirmation, you see in verses 6 and 7, the creatorship of Yahweh. And then, beginning in verse 8, you have the sovereignty of Yahweh.
Verses 8 and 9. Verses 10 and 11, the providence of Yahweh, which we focused upon in the past, where Yahweh nullifies the council of the nations. He frustrates the plans of the people. But the council of Yahweh stands forever.
The plans of His heart from generation to generation. Notice the contrast there. The peoples have all of their plans, but Yahweh nullifies all that. But the council of Yahweh, that stands forever. The plans of His heart from generation to generation.
And then, we have verse 12, which, of course, is the K-O-O-L verse. Okay, I only caught a very small number of you there, and you all showed your age by even knowing what I was talking about. I can guarantee you that the young people in the room have no idea what I was talking about.
And if you didn't live in the United States, if you didn't live in Phoenix in the 1970s, you didn't catch that. But it used to be that... Back then, it was Channel 10, wasn't it? But they all jumped all over the place.
But it used to be K-O-O-L-T-V, which someone, obviously, it was wishful thinking for a Phoenix television station to be called cool. You know, it was just a hoped-for thing. But it used to be, believe it or not, that at the top of the hour, station identification, which they don't have to do anymore, but back then, you had to identify the station.
It would flash this verse, and the station identification was Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, K-O-O-L-T-V, Channel 10. And I don't think there are too many television stations that do that anymore.
But this was the text that they utilized. And of course, it is a tremendous blessing. The people whom he has chosen for his own inheritance Blessed is the nation whose God is Yahweh. Then you have God's providential involvement with men.
The Lord looks from heaven. He sees all the sons of men. Verse 15, He who fashions the hearts of them all, he who understands all their works, God is intimately aware of everything that takes place in his creation because he knows his creation perfectly.
He has not gone on vacation in the Bahamas. This is not some kind of vague philosophical middle knowledge he got from someplace else. He is involved in his creation. And because of that, then verses 16 and 17, it's not the size of one's army.
It's not the technology that one has. God is the one who raises nations up. God is the one who casts nations down. I can guarantee you this is a nation that really needs to understand verses 16 and 17 because there are many in our fellow citizens who trust in the military might of this nation.
That military might is very much dependent upon the blessings of God economically. And that military might has not only lessened greatly, but could disappear very, very quickly as well in light of this nation's rebellion against God.
But then you have the promises, verse 18. The eye of Yahweh is on those who fear him. Even when God's judgments fall, Yahweh is not distant from his people. Those who hope for his, again, his hesed, his loving kindness in verse 18.
To deliver their soul from death and to keep them alive, even in famine, a reminder again, the people of God can go through great difficulties. The confession of the people of God, verses 20 and 21. Our soul waits for Yahweh.
Our heart rejoices in Yahweh because we trust in his holy name. And then finally the prayer of God's people. Let your hesed, your loving kindness, O Yahweh, be upon us according as we have hoped in you.
And so it's a tremendous, tremendous psalm. And we have focused normally in the past upon the middle section that speaks of God's creatorship and the fact that he has a certain plan and intention and that the plans of the nations, he nullifies them.
When they are not in line with his will, when they are not in line with his heart, he nullifies those things. He will accomplish amongst the peoples what he desires to accomplish amongst the peoples. And therefore we have this assurance and we have this certainty that even though from our very, very limited perspective, where much of the information that we have is frequently false, at best incomplete, we tend to look around the world and judge God based upon what we see.
And we of all people should be the last ones to do that. When we see what's happening in the world, that should be the last thing that causes us to waver in unbelief because we know from the Bible that God has his purposes.
He has been faithful down through the ages. We have only a small amount of the information. No one ever has enough information to truly call God's wisdom to account and to bring him before our bar. These are all truths that we should know and yet how many times do we fall into that trap?
And so that's what we focused upon. But actually, this time around, I want to look instead at what we have at the beginning. We have in the first three verses a call to worship. We have a call to give thanks to the Lord, to give praise, to sing for joy, sing praise to him with a harp of ten strings, sing to him a new song, play skillfully with a shout of joy.
And so we have this type of language is used many, many times in the Psalter, especially when we get toward the end of the Psalter. There's more of the calls to worship in that context. But here you have the people of God are called to praise and to worship him, to sing to him a new song.
But why? But why? Why do we do this? It's not because it's just our tradition. Many people will come into our fellowship and they will be taken aback if they have been doing some church shopping. We have a rather backwards sense of things in comparison to what's going on in the world around us.
I have often commented in other contexts that I have a feeling, and you can ask him if this is the case, I have a feeling that if Brother Fry were asked to preach with a drum set behind him, he would break out in hives.
I have preached the drum set behind me many, many times. I did not break out in hives. I was okay. I've been called to a different realm, shall we say. But when people come here, they don't see a band and if they come here long enough, they'll discover that that organ is actually a prop.
It's actually there to entertain the children and to provide them with artifacts to take with them slowly until there's nothing left of sitting at that particular location. But they come here and they don't get what they're used to because while we do have music, sometimes it's a cappella and sometimes we really sing out and we know that particular hymn, but then once in a while, Pastor Fry has this compulsion to try to expand our hymnology and we sing those songs we've never sung before.
And it's generally disastrous when it happens and I've noticed that very rarely do those get repeated in the near future. But when I travel, in fact, I sang the Trinity Hymnal at a Reformed Baptist church in Sacramento on Sunday and they sang a hymn that I had never heard before, but it was out of the Trinity.
I could find it. I think it was 435, I think. I'm not sure about that. So we do this, but the real question is why? Why do we, for example, why do we have a concern about the propriety of the hymns we sing?
Why don't we just have happy, clappy little songs and things like that and just get everybody all jazzed up before the sermon because we know that Pastor Fry is going to try to tug our heartstrings with that sermon every single time and tell all those warm fuzzy kitty and puppy stories to get us all excited.
Well, of course, that's not how we do things either. But still, why do you have this command in Scripture to sing praises to Him? In fact, you'll notice, sing for joy in Yahweh, O you righteous ones. Now, I think most of us will admit there have been a few times we have sung with somewhat less than the proper joy that we should have, but this psalm gives us a basis.
The whole psalm gives us a basis for why we should truly, with our hearts and our minds, sing praise to our God and to enter into worship and to extol our God. Why? Well, we look through all of it, but let's just look at the first reason it's given.
Four, the word of Yahweh is upright and all His work is done in faithfulness. In faithfulness. And that term faithfulness in Hebrew is related to the term amin, amen. It's ironic, of course, that we and about four other churches in the world sing the amen at the end of the hymns.
Actually, the church in Sacramento did as well. There have been a number of times that I've been in churches where we got to the end of a hymn and then I became a brief soloist for about half a beat because I'm so used to singing the amen.
So they get done and I go, ah, who did that? I don't know who did that. And they're all looking at me. We sing the amen. Well, there's a reason why there's an amen at the end of hymns. And interestingly enough, here you have an indication of that.
This faithfulness, this truthfulness that is God's is a mark of all of His work. All His work is done in faithfulness. The word of Yahweh is upright. It is trustworthy. There is no twistedness in it. There is no...
I guess the way I could illustrate it is it's almost... These days, it's the exact opposite of everything you expect out of politics. In our day, if it's political, it's not going to be upright. It's a backroom deal.
I've got to keep this person happy, that person happy. That's not how Yahweh works. For the word of Yahweh is upright. All His work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice. The earth is full of the chesed of Yahweh.
And so, for the righteous ones, for the saints, we should with joy desire to enter into the worship of our God first and foremost, because we know something about Him. Christian worship is never worship in ignorance.
And what that means is Christian worship is directed away from ourselves and toward God, the God that we know and that He has revealed Himself to us. It's the exact opposite of the pagan worship where Paul talks about in Acts chapter 17, the altar, the unknown God.
That is the exact opposite idea of what you have in Christianity. We worship God because He has revealed Himself to us and one of the reasons He is so opposed to idolatry and opposed to the idols amongst the people and there's so much in the prophets warning people against idolatry and warning people against syncretism and the joining of the worship of Yahweh with other gods and all the rest of the stuff is because the essence of worship is that it is directed away from ourselves to the God that we know and what we worship Him for is those attributes that He has revealed to us that are supposed to be so precious to us.
I mean, I was thinking about my first encounter. I saw some Mormon missionaries down on Indian School as I was driving in and man, they look young these days because they are and when I first met with those two Mormon missionaries in 1982, Elders Reed and Reese which led eventually to Alpha and Omega Ministries and everything I've done since then.
They have no idea they did all that, but when I first met with those two young men, the last things I shared with them as they were leaving on that second day, a Monday and a Thursday, about three hours each time, one of the primary things I really pressed upon them in that second meeting and I was all of 20 years old at this point in time was I said to them, gentlemen, someday you're going to need to know a God who does not change, who does not evolve, who may be different tomorrow than He is today.
Your God is not like that. Your God has changed. Your God was once a man. He's become God. He's had different ways of salvation even in the time period of the Mormon Church and that's even become more the case now.
But someday when you want to know the true God, I hope and pray that true believers in the one true God, that He will bring them into your life even if it's not me that gets the opportunity of speaking to you at that time.
That faithfulness of God, that consistency of God, that fact that you can get up every single morning and no matter how much this world has changed, no matter how much you have changed, no matter how much your circumstances have changed, as you age, how much your body has changed and it can't do the things that it used to be able to do and you have all these warning signs that eternity is coming and so on and so forth, no matter what the situation might be, God is not going to have changed.
His promises remain the same. His loving kindness remains the same. His gospel remains the same. His standards remain the same. And there is just one aspect, there's just one of the reasons given to the people of God in this psalm to joyfully enter into worship of God.
And so it should be our joy to sing these hymns. It should be our joy to enter into the prayers and the corporate worship of God because we recognize that He has revealed Himself to us. He has changed our hearts and our minds and we rejoice when we see these truths, when we see His sovereignty, when we see His providence and we see the fact that the earth is full of the Chesed of Yahweh.
The earth is full of His loving kindness. When we have biblical eyes, we can see how often that even in the midst of His judgments, we see mercy. In the midst of His judgments, we see undeserved mercy.
And so the rest of the psalm gives us just so much reason to fulfill the commandment of the beginning of the psalm. But it all, in all of it, never directs us to ourselves. When I see how much of what's called worship in the church today and it's all about man, it's all about our emotions, it's all about us, I realize that's not biblical worship.
Biblical worship draws us away from ourselves and to God. Now, does that change us? Does that meet our need? Of course. But the point is that true biblical worship is focused upon God, what He's revealed about Himself, who He is, His majesty.
Not upon me. Not upon me. And when we design it to be pleasing to the flesh, to be pleasing to the mind of man, we are truly short-circuiting the very purposes of God. And so I would once again recommend to you the contemplation of this particular text, Psalm 33.
It certainly is one of my favorites and I do believe that it gives us great insight into what true Christian worship is and the foundation of why we can trust God and should be excited to enter into this worship.
Amen.