Feb. 26, 2017 PM Service: Pleading Our Innocence by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Psalm 7 and David’s Plea for Vindication

We continue in Psalm 7, which I've broken into three parts, this afternoon, the second, and Lord willing, next Sunday we'll finish it. Let me read the entire Psalm and then attend ourselves to just the few portions that we will look at this afternoon.

Psalm 7, a Shugion of David, which he sang to the Lord concerning the words of Cush, a Benjamite. O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge. Save me from all my pursuers and deliver me, lest, like a lion, they tear my soul apart, rending it in pieces, with none to deliver.

O Lord my God, if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands, if I have repaid my friend with evil, or plundered my enemy without cause, let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it, and let him trample my life to the ground, and lay my glory in the dust.

Selah. Arise, O Lord, in your anger. Lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies. Awake for me, you who have appointed a judgment. Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you, over it return on high.

The Lord judges the peoples. Judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness, and according to the integrity that is in me. O let the evil of the wicked come to an end, and may you establish the righteous.

You who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God. My shield is with God, who saves the upright in heart. God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day. If a man does not repent, God will wet his sword.

He has bent and readied his bow. He has prepared for him his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts. Behold, the wicked man conceives evil, and is pregnant with mischief, and gives birth to lies.

He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends. I will give to the Lord the thanks due his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, Most High.

Self-Examination Before Pleading Innocence

So we began this psalm last week by looking at the beginning and the end. We attended to verses 1 and 2, and then to verse 17, as you know we're going to be driving down from the top and up from the bottom towards the center of the psalm.

And last week in those three verses that we looked at, we saw that David places himself distinctly under God's care. He says, I will look to you for my shelter. God is his refuge. God is his place of safety.

It's the place where he is safe from the harm of the false accusations that have come against him. Now you'll recall, Cush the Benjamite was obviously from the same tribe as King Saul, he being specified here as a Benjamite, probably a court official who had the king's ear.

And as such, it seems he was feeding in by whispering behind the scenes, as it were, whispering into Saul's ear things that would feed his paranoia, his insane jealousy of David. And what David pleads here is his innocence, his innocence.

Whatever it is that Cush has whispered into Saul's ear, David says, no, I have not betrayed my king or my God. And betrayal of the king would actually be tantamount to betraying God. So verses 3 to 5 is where we begin, O Lord my God, if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands, if I've repaid my friend with evil or plundered my enemy without cause, let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it, and let him trample my life to the ground and lay my glory in the dust.

Selah. There's an immediate lesson here for us, that's before we go to God with our not guilty verdict, we need to examine ourselves very carefully. We need to have consideration of exactly who it is that we're going to, that when we pray like this, if we have faith as we discussed this morning, if there be faith, and we truly know that we are bowing down before the God of the universe, the righteous judge, he who will judge all the earth and do only what is right.

If we understand that we're standing before him, and let us be very careful how we declare ourselves to be innocent or not guilty. We've entered the courtroom of the great judge of all the earth. And I think, looking at the Sermon on the Mountain, what the Lord Jesus Christ says when we judge others, when we throw accusations at others, what is our first responsibility?

It's the log in our own eye. It's the self-examination that we must do first. And I like to assume, I like to read into this a little bit, and perhaps you'll bear with me on that, assume that David has done this review, that David has looked at himself carefully, that he's reviewed himself, understanding David, realizing more than most saints ever will, who it is he is before, and what it means to go to God and make any such declaration.

So let's assume that he's done this review, that he is confident of his innocence. What he says is, if they are correct, if my hands have done this evil, if I have betrayed friends or mistreated an enemy, plundered my enemy without cause, if I've done these things.

If any such accusation is proven true, then let the accuser, the very one I'm claiming to be a false witness, if I'm the one who turns out to be false, let him have his way over me. That's what he means when he says, let the enemy pursue my soul, let him trample my life to the ground, and lay my glory in the dust.

And that's heady stuff. These are grave words, considering that the court he appeals to is presided over by God who tests the minds and looks to the heart. We know David was often vulnerable to false accusations, and is not that the condition of many saints.

When we claim Jesus Christ, we do leave ourselves open as a target for the derision of the world to come at us, and even if it's not a conscious thing, then I believe that many people will take an aggressive approach towards the Christian, towards the one who they just want to say, you're just holier than thou, you just think you're better than the rest, you just think that you are far and above all the rest of us because you get to claim Jesus Christ.

None of that would be true, but I think there is a vulnerability that we have just by naming Jesus as our Lord. David, this great type of Christ, this one that we can look to in so many ways for encouragement and how he stayed faithful in his life, he was vulnerable to these kinds of accusations.

If you read 1 Samuel 17 and verses 28 to 30, you find that when he went to his brothers who were standing in the Israelite battle lines against the Philistines, and his father Jesse sent him with some food for his brothers and a gift for the commander of the thousands, and he showed up there and he asked what was happening, you remember I think it was Eliab was his older brother's name, and he says, we know why you're here, you're not here to help out, you're not here to feed us, you're just a conceited young man come to see what's happening here, you just want to see some excitement.

He says, what have I done now, was David's response. But he was often, as the one who prefigures his greatest son Jesus, vulnerable to these false accusations, and this, since it is Jesus who he prefigured, should not be a surprise to us.

Jesus, of course, was often accused of wrongdoing, breaking the Sabbath, was an especially popular accusation against him, blaspheming God by telling the truth of his origins and his relationship to the Father, happened quite often.

John chapter 7 says that when his brothers told him, why don't you go to the feast now, why don't you show people the miracles you're doing, because nobody who does these things should do them in secret, and what does John say to us?

The author John, in sort of an editorial excursion, says, for even his own brothers did not believe in him. Here, in Psalm 7, David places himself under the auspices of the law of God, and what he says there, in the verses I read to you a moment ago from Psalm 7, he's saying, if I have done this, in other words, if my accusation against them is false, then let those things return on to me, and this is Deuteronomic law.

In Deuteronomy chapter 19, beginning at verse 17, it says that if you bring a false accusation against someone, then the punishment they would have endured as a result of your falsehood, that punishment will be visited upon you.

Let me just read these to you. The judges shall inquire diligently, and if the witness is a false witness and is accused his brother falsely, then you shall do to him as he meant to do to his brother, so you shall purge the evil from your midst.

This is part of what it means to examine ourselves first, to understand that God's principle, God's law here is that if we make that false accusation, if we forget to look for that log in our eye, if we don't do the kind of review I believe David did before he goes to God and claims his innocence, then we're vulnerable to this thing coming back upon us in just this kind of a way.

I think we have a good example of the right way to handle these things, to look at ourselves by thinking ahead to the thief on the cross, the one on one side of Jesus Christ who calls out to his fellow criminal on the other side of Jesus, on the other cross on his other side, and he says, and we indeed are being punished justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds.

But this man, of course meaning Jesus, this man has done nothing wrong. First responsibility here is to be sure our conscience is clean, to go to God claiming innocence is to expose ourselves to him who searches the heart and never leaves the inquiry, but with a perfect and exact knowledge.

Note the plea here is not perfect moral innocence in the manner of Jesus Christ's perfection. Jesus could claim an innocence that was not bounded by a particular incident, his was total because he knew no sin whatsoever.

Now you and I can't make such a claim, we dare not even try to make such a claim. David's position is the one when I'm preaching that we should be innocent, that we should guard ourselves and guard where we stretch our hand out and what we think to do, the actions we take, that we be innocent of doing wrong.

Our position would be like David's here. What's he saying is that he didn't do this particular and discreet act of evil. He's not claiming a complete moral purity like Jesus Christ's. He's saying I didn't do this thing.

In the context of the psalm, I was never disloyal to the sovereign king, Saul, who had been properly anointed at the Lord's command as king over Israel. Now his moral weaknesses, Saul's moral weaknesses were soon exposed.

In fact, David was the Lord's chosen instrument to force them out of him so they'd be seen all the more clearly. I think here how often the presence of good incites evil rather than imitation. Imitation of what is right.

Thinking ahead again to the gospels when Pharisees looked upon Jesus, the wickedness that seeing him exposed in them more often than not caused them to gnash their teeth in violent hatred rather than repent.

Recall they chased him out to the brow of a cliff. They were going to throw him over, but he escaped from the midst of them. He walked through them. All the different things that they had planned against him, how often they plotted to destroy Why?

Well, because he told the truth and the truth exposed their lie, and I think part of it too is that they stood in the presence of pure good, which so much exacerbates the incitements of evil within men.

We in the church, of course, we're given to each other to bring out something very different, aren't we? We're given to one another to bring out the good in us, to make one another, if you would, innocents, to excite each other to want to be more like Christ than by our actions, in fact, to do things more the way he would have us to do them.

Hebrews 10 .24 says, and let us consider how to stir one another to love and to good works. When we see a brother or sister whose walk with the Lord is admirable, we need to encourage Saul and his kinsman Cush hated to see this sort of thing.

But us, let us imitate what is good and let us thank God for the conviction we have when a good example is in our midst. The 11th verse of 3rd John, it says very helpfully here, Beloved, do not imitate evil, but imitate good.

Whoever does good is from God. Whoever does evil has not seen God. John chapter 3 verse 19. And this is the judgment. The light has come into the world and people love the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.

Now, it's very simple to understand that light exposes darkness. But of course, these are metaphors as John uses them in that gospel where goodness exposes evil. That's the light and darkness. He's talking about exposure to light causes the most violent reaction in those who love the darkness.

On the one hand, the mercy of God in uncovering sin might lead to repentance. More often, too often, it leads to a defensive sort of hatred. Darkness defends its ground in the sinner's heart and causes him or her to despise whoever forces them to confront it.

You and I who have the spirit of the living God by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, we can go humbly to God and to that person who helped us in a God-honoring way. You know, sometimes a brother or sister by their own good and godly conduct might expose in us a resident sin that while we haven't extended our hand to take hold of it demands repentance and mortification.

And so we need to be those who understand that one of the purposes we have together is to set that good example for one another, to be a light for another. And if it exposes a darkness that remains within us, thank God for that and even maybe thank that person.

I wonder if this could have been Saul's cause against David. His faithfulness was exposed before David was anointed. I should say his faithlessness. Saul's faithlessness was exposed before David was anointed.

Matter of fact, it was Saul's faithlessness which was the instigating factor that caused God to tell Samuel to go find this one, David, and anoint him the next king of Israel. But once the light of God in the person of David came to court, the madness could no longer be held back or disguised.

Rather than repent though, what did Saul choose? He chose violence. He chose false accusation. He chose murder. He chose every way to defend the ground that darkness, that evil had within him. He hung on to it jealously, refusing at all costs to repent.

And if you know this story throughout 1 Samuel, did not Saul have many opportunities to repent? I think of especially the time when David twice had Saul at his mercy and just cut that little piece of cloth off his cloak and showed him and said, where did this come from?

And if I have this, and of course I'm paraphrasing, could I not have killed you? And if I held back my hand from killing you, even though you're totally at my mercy, does that not prove my innocence? Saul would agree, but only for a time.

Something about being in the presence of godliness that exacerbates the wickedness in men. And here we can only fall down humbly and thank God for his mercy, because is that not all of us? Are we all not like Cush, the Benjamite, who would feed Saul's jealousy?

Perhaps Cush was jealous of him also, seeing him rise up in popularity amongst the people. Something about goodness just brings out the wickedness. And brethren, if we have repented, if we know the Lord Jesus Christ, does this not indicate that it's all of grace?

That God in his mercy has saved us, not by righteous works, which we have done, but according to his mercy, by the washing regeneration of the Holy Spirit. The call of our Lord to us is to obey that mode of life that meets with our transformation by him, by the Holy Spirit.

We so often remind ourselves that we are saved by grace and not by works. And let us remember this wonderful truth, because it's too often ignored or maligned as men in their pride insist that they took some part, be it ever so small, some part in their salvation, which of course no one did.

But sometimes it's highlighted to the point that we forget the gospel. We forget that the gospel fully envisioned by God the Father to be accomplished by God the Son and applied to those for whom it was intended by God the Holy Spirit.

This gospel demands a certain ethical conduct, an ethical response in us. An ordering of our life in accordance with the precepts and the commands of God, which of course would lead to what? Innocence.

Like what David is pleading here in Psalm 7. Not perfect, total, from the heart out innocence, because none of us have that, nor will we until we are glorified and see Jesus. But innocence of the acts.

Innocence of having not done this thing. The evidence must be against the accusation. So with his conscience clean, with his conscience bared before God, he can now, David can now speak of the fate of his enemies.

In verses 3 to 5, he invited sin's consequences upon himself. Now he ponders in verses 14 and 15, the fate of the wicked. Behold, the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies.

He makes a pit, digging it out and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head and on his own skull, his violence descends. The sheer intensity of those words, I think, speak very well for themselves.

Verse 14 is very telling. The wicked man is likened to a pregnancy. He conceives not life, but evil. He is pregnant, not with the gift of life, but with mischief. He brings only trouble, toil, hard labor.

And what he has conceived is what he eventually brings forth. He gives birth to, which is lies. Remember Jesus' words in Matthew's gospel? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart. And this defiles a person.

For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. What does David say here when he says, behold the wicked? He says, behold him, take a look, see and observe, says the Holy Spirit behind David's pen.

Stop and muse upon this. Consider, if you will. He falls into his own trap. The pit he digs is disguised so someone might fall in it and be robbed or held for ransom. That's some of the worst crimes of the Mosaic Code.

All he intended for ill against others comes upon him in full measure. Of course, as we'll find next week, what David is anticipating here, what David is speaking here is by God. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.

And that's what we would have to wait for. We might call it a comeuppance, but that trivializes the matter. God will judge and he will punish rightly. According to truth. Deuteronomy 19, 17 to 19, where it says, our false accusations return upon us.

That should make us shudder. That should make us slow down. Take a breath. Like I always like to say, take a breath, relax a minute. Let's think this through. Let's go back to Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount and get that log out of our eye.

So we go to God, we say, as much as I'm able to in this tent in which I sojourn in this world, I have, Lord, examined my conscience. I've examined my conduct. And now I come to you. There's a great example of this idea of evil plans falling upon the evil planner in the Bible.

You remember the book of Esther, in which there was a wicked courtier in the court named Haman who hated Mordecai and all the Jews because of Mordecai's success with the king and other reasons. And to just come quickly to the point here, you'll recall that in his fury against Haman, his unfounded, unjust, wrongful accusation, fury against Mordecai.

I said, Haman, I'm at Mordecai. He found a way to have him hanged. And he built that gallows. It was right outside of his house. And as things developed, eventually he had to plead for his life before the king.

And the king goes out. He was having a dinner with the king and his wife, Esther, and there was Haman. And the king wanted to go and think about things for a bit. And Haman realizes he's in trouble and he falls down on Esther's lap and begs for mercy.

And that's when the king walks in and sees this man accosting his wife. And so he decides to have him executed. And one of his guards in the palace says, oh, by the way, king, you know, this can be done very handily because there happens to be a gallows right outside here.

By the way, the one that Haman had built intending to hang Mordecai on it. And it's a very good example of this idea that David gives us. Now, we may have to wait for the final judgment, at which time I think that this would sort of pale in terms of the priority it is with us.

We may not see it now the way Mordecai did, but we serve a God who eventually make all things right. Just this idea of this retribution falling back upon the one who makes the false accusation should really get us to slow down a bit and to really look at ourselves first.

Another thing we see here in David's prayer and seeking for their evil to fall upon them, them to fall upon into the pit that they themselves dug. A fellow fire pastor, and I can't quote him directly, but I will give attribution.

It was Brian Borgman up there in Minden, Nevada. When he looked at this psalm, he was saying that, you know, there's such a soft, gentle Christianity in the world out there. Sort of that limp wrist kind of Christianity where there's no strength, there's no real commitment behind it.

There's no understanding that we serve a just God who is angry at sinners every day as we pray as if God is love and God is only love and we just need to pray these soft, almost mawkish kind of prayers.

And Brian made the point here from what David prays in Psalm 7 that it is right to pray that evildoers get their comeuppance here and now. That, for example, when our famous SEAL team number six or whatever that super secret SEAL team is goes off after the terrorists, men who line up innocent people, innocent in the human sense, and decapitate them.

There's nothing unchristian to pray, Lord, may our SEAL team get in there, do business, and come out safely having left behind proper retribution. We can pray that the evildoers repent. And that's not inconsistent with praying also that God's justice be done here on earth.

That's very consistent with the Lord's prayer. That doesn't mean we insist or we stop believing or we lose faith if God doesn't act now so we can see it while we are here. But I like what Pastor Borgman said about this.

There's nothing wrong with praying these strong prayers and asking for God's justice to be done in the here and now. Vengeance is his. We don't take part in it. Not in that way. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that prayer.

And I think that's what David is praying here. To think of a sinner falling into the hands of an angry God to borrow from Jonathan Edwards. This should make us fear him who's able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

But for man's wicked plans to turn against him in this life might actually be a blessing from the hand of God. If he should repent, that is. We look around at the world out there and see the wickedness that is indulged.

We see the consequences for sin coming upon them even now in this life. Let us pray that the pit they dug for someone else is not so deep that they can't see their way out of it. Let us pray that they reach out and beg Jesus' forgiveness for their sins even as they endure God's justice in this life.

Let us be those who take a great store of our conduct who make sure that when we go to God and give him these complaints as David complains here in Psalm 7 about his enemy, let's be sure that we are innocent of what we're being accused of.

What is our task if we are not? If the log just cannot come out, perhaps we're the ones who have to humble ourselves and repent. And this would be to God's glory. This would be by faith in his promises.

But let us do look to our own conduct and be those who can, in the sense that David did here, claim innocence. Amen.