The Lord Reigns (Psalm 93)

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. Welcome to The Wrap Report.

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I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport. Glad to have you with us today. What we have for you today is a sermon that I recently preached out of Psalm 93.

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This was a text that was provided to me for a church that I was speaking at,

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Grace Life Church, with Pastor David Cunningham. And this was dealing with the issue that the

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Lord reigns. If you have had struggles in your life, if you have had times where you're asking why

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God, this sermon may be something for you. I hope you enjoy this.

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And remember to go to strivingforeternity .org to check out all the things that we have there for you. This is a proud member of the

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Christian Podcast Community. Go to christianpodcastcommunity .org to check out all the podcasts that are there.

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I hope you enjoy this sermon. One, two, three! Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host,

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Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the

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Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org

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It is an honor to be behind Pastor Dave's pulpit. He has been a dear friend to me, has been instrumental in my life, and I don't know who the brother is that returned.

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I will say this, I've always said that we are never closer to the Lord than when we are reconciling with one another and offering forgiveness with one another.

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I'll mention more about resources we have toward the end, but Pastor Dave asked if I'd at least introduce myself and the ministry, since most of you probably don't know who

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I am. What interests people for some reason is I grew up in a Jewish home. I've been

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Bar Mitzvahed. I'm a Levite. I'm actually a Korhite, if you know what those are. We'd be the family that would take care of the temple.

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I came to Christ at 16. My parents went casket shopping. They were going to bury an empty casket.

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I'd be dead to them. I counted the cost in coming to Christ. I have a ministry,

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Striving for Eternity. We travel around and we provide discipleship materials. We disciple through a lot of different means, through coming into churches.

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We target small churches, actually, because those are ones that are really struggling. We try to help give them resources and training so that they could help to grow.

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We train through podcasting, through online courses and things like that. You could check that stuff out.

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I'll mention it a little bit later. You could go to the table. Let us do the most important thing we could do in a week and that is to open the

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Word of God. As we're continuing in your Summer in Psalms, Psalm 93.

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If you turn to Psalm 93, I don't know what your tradition may be, but my tradition being

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Jewish is we rise for the reading of God's Word. I'll ask if that's okay with you. If you can, if you wouldn't mind rising as I read

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God's Word for you. Force you all to practice my tradition, right?

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This is what the Psalmist said by the inspirational Holy Spirit in Psalm 93.

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The Lord reigns He is robed in majesty. The Lord is robed.

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He has put on strength as His belt. Yes, the world is established.

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It shall never be moved. Your throne is established from of old.

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You are from everlasting. The floods have lifted up,

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O Lord. The floods have lifted up their voice. The floods have lifted up their roaring.

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Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the

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Lord on high is mighty. Your decrees are very trustworthy.

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Holiness benefits your house, O Lord, forevermore. Let's pray.

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Lord, we are thankful for Your Word and we ask that in this time that You, by the person of the Holy Spirit, would illuminate

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Your Word to our understanding and the application thereof that we would live for You and You would be glorified in us.

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In Christ's name. Amen. You may be seated. Psalm 93 is the beginning of Book 4 of the

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Psalms. If you don't know, the Psalms are broken up into five books and there are many

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Psalms in each one. This is Book 4, which deals with the sovereignty of God. Psalm 93 deals with a very visual imagery on God's great power.

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Now, we don't know who wrote the Psalm. We don't see a title or an author, but the subject is quite clear.

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That is, as it says in the beginning, Yahweh reigns. As we look at this, let me start with giving you some ways to understand reading of Hebrew poetry.

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Because we're going to see this as it helps us to understand how to interpret the

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Psalm, many of the Psalms, and any of Hebrew poetry. Hebrew poetry is not like the poetry we would think of.

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It doesn't rhyme. You all know the poetry, roses are red, violets are blue, and then you find something that rhymes with you.

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That's not Hebrew poetry. Hebrew poetry is based on parallelism.

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You have line 1 and line 2, and there's some connection between them. That connection becomes important in trying to understand how to interpret the

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Psalm. Hebrew poetry, being that God knew his word would be translated into many languages, rhyming doesn't work when you translate it.

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Any of you that speak multiple languages, you may realize that. But when we look at this, as we look through this, we see several different types of poetry in here.

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So if you'll look, I just want to give you a means of overview of this. As we look at this first part, we see a type of poetry known as synthetic.

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This is the idea that they're saying a similar thing between line 1 and line 2.

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Now we see this when it says he is robed in majesty the

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Lord is robed, he has put on strength as a belt. Those are two similar thoughts.

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We'll see the same type of poetry in the next phrase where it says yes the world is established it shall never be moved your throne is established from old you are from everlasting.

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Many will see this as synthetic as the same. I actually think this may be what's called climactic where line 2 actually says what line 1 says and then emphasizes it.

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You'll see as we go through this why I think that. The next one is called a staircase. Look at it with me.

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You'll see a building up of things. It says the floods have lifted up oh Lord the floods have lifted up their voice the floods have lifted up their roaring.

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So we see him building up to something. What's he building up to? The very next one which is known as a synonymous.

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This is where line 1 and line 2 are saying the exact same thing and the idea here is mightier are the thunders of many waters mightier are the waves of the sea and he ends with another synthetic one saying your decrees are very trustworthy holiness benefits your house oh

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Lord forever more. Now many of you are going I never knew this about Hebrew. But the understanding of any kind of the

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Psalms you have to understand a little bit about the Hebrew poetry here because the way those verses will relate to one another will help us in understanding what the text is saying.

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We're going to go over and look at in this passage six different attributes of God.

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Different ways he is illuminating himself to us to let us know the ultimate thing that he starts with is the

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Lord reigns. He's starting with what we would call the conclusion. So the psalmist puts this right at the beginning and everything else in this psalm is to support the point that the

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Lord reigns. Now I don't know about you but if you happen to watch the news you might be wondering if that's true.

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It sure doesn't seem like the Lord is reigning when we watch the news and we shouldn't feel that we're alone because I think every culture has often thought that.

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And every culture will wonder if God is really in control. The psalmist here is letting us know that whatever is going on in our lives the

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Lord reigns. Whether we recognize it or not. So what the psalmist is doing is giving us some imagery of that.

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So he starts off. Look at what he says here. He is robed in majesty.

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Now we think of majesty and majesty we often would think of maybe a king and that is the idea here.

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It's very interesting though. This word appears eight times in the Hebrew and the Hebrew word for this is most often translated as pride and arrogance.

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You go huh. Those are usually not good things right? We often don't think of pride and arrogance as good things.

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Any of you that are parents maybe you can appreciate what this word would mean.

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Maybe you have said this to your children. Your children ask you why when you give them some instruction like why do

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I have to do this? And the phrase is and maybe many of you heard this as a child because I am your parent.

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Right? What are you really saying there? I have the authority by the position

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I have in your life to give you instruction. And as kids none of us enjoyed hearing that from our parent because it basically meant that's your answer and whether you are satisfied with it or not you are going to obey.

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Well that's what a king is. We don't really understand having a king, a sovereign in this country.

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We have had men in the White House who think they are kings but they are not. But the idea of a king is someone who by the nature of his position you are to obey them.

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Just because of their position. Now in light of the fact that this is the Lord it's a lot stronger because as great as a king may be the

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Lord is infinitely greater. He is the creator of everything.

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There is nothing that has been created that he did not create. So he has the ultimate right to tell us how to live and by his authority, by his position he could say he is clothed with this idea of majesty or pride and arrogance.

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That's not the pride and arrogance we would think of. It's the idea of coming with the position of a king.

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So he is clothed with this. He is clothed with the authority of a king but it's not just that.

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As we see it says that he is not just clothed with this but he is also clothed or robed and it says he puts on strength as a belt.

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Now to put on means to gird up. We would have a belt you put around a robe around you you put the belt to hold it together.

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It's the idea that he is not only does he have the position of king but the

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Lord has strength that he upholds himself with. So when you have a king in kingdoms there would be two types of kings typically.

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You have the king that is born a king and the king that people respect as king.

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The one that is born as king may not be the one who fights in battles but it's the one who fights in the battles that everyone looks up to and the idea that we end up seeing here and what you see in the psalmist when we look at the parallelism you can see it and it says the word robed ties these two together and so not only is he wearing because to be clothed means to put on.

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Not only is he wearing majesty but he holds up his majesty by his strength.

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So what he's trying to say here is that the Lord reigns that he is not just one who is in the authority position to be reigning but he reigns by holding up his majesty with his strength.

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So the first element that we see here if you're looking and taking notes is the Lord is majestic.

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We see that in verse one. The second that we see here is the Lord is strong.

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We also see in verse one these are the ideas that we see he is both majestic and he upholds his majesty with his strength.

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Basically he's trying to say that he is king. He has the rightful position in our lives but one of the things we don't really think about with kings many people think of a king as someone who's just going to give rules and authorities and here's the law and you have to obey it but the role of a king was supposed to be one who actually cares for those that are his subjects.

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That becomes important because if the Lord is king, if his role is to care for us he's saying that he has the strength to do it.

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In fact, he has more strength than anybody to care for us. He's omnipotent.

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He's all powerful. There is no one stronger. I know that if you follow different ministries both

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Pastor Dave and I have a mutual friend that looks at these ministries and goes after the word of faith and the new apostolic reformation and you hear them speak and they're always making it sound as if God is subservient to the devil or God is subservient to them sometimes.

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That God is sitting there waiting for us to tell God what to do. Well, I got news for you.

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God doesn't need us to tell him what to do. Actually, in fact, God doesn't need us at all.

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He's God. He is the all -powerful one. There is no one that is stronger.

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That, when we think about the fact that God reigns in our life it is not just that he has the position to have authority in our life and to care for us but he has the power to do so.

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That's encouraging. It's encouraging when we go through trials. It's encouraging when your car breaks down or you lose your job or things look like everything in your life may be a mess.

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You lose a family member and people ask, why

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Lord? Why is this happening? The Lord reigns. He reigns.

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We may not always understand what he's doing but he reigns and he has the strength to do what he cares to do.

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What brings him glory. Not only that but the next element we see is that he is everlasting.

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We see this in verse 2. The Lord is everlasting. What he mentions here and you can see there's a parallelism here where it says the word established.

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That's what's going to tie these together. He says, the world is established. It shall never be moved.

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The idea of moved here is to be not shaken or swayed. Unmovable. He says the world is unmovable.

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What we see here is that God is in control. There's nothing that God is not in control of.

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Let me just turn to Colossians 1. This is what Colossians, what Paul says about this.

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He says, for by him, this is Colossians 1, 16 and 17, for by him all things were created in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible.

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Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him and he is before all things and in him all things are held together.

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It's an interesting phrase to say that all things are held together. Do you know that you're made up mostly of nothing?

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There's a bunch of air between you. Every single cell in your body is made up of atoms and atoms are mostly just space, this nothingness.

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And yet we have material. How does that work? How does air have this material element to it?

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I mean, we're mostly nothing. Well, without Christ, we actually are nothing. But the reality is that God holds all that together.

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Think of the universe and how vast it is. Speaking with a brother earlier here who likes astronomy, it's neat to just look at the stars and be amazed.

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And you know, for thousands of years, no one understood all the beauty of the stars that we see today with telescopes.

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The only one who saw that was God. Maybe the angels. Thousands of years later, we get to see the beauty of that.

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Just this past week or so, we got to see some new things with a new telescope that's in space, never seen before.

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And that was just there because God wanted to. Because He could. Because He's in control.

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So when it says that the world is established, it shall not be moved, it's a strange thing to think about because what is the earth standing on?

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Nothing. It's just hovering in space. As Job would say.

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Held together by the power of God. Now, some would say gravity, but the question there is as well, who created gravity?

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Even that we can't fully comprehend. But the reason I think this is more climactic of one is because as we look at the second phrase to this, we see that the world is not moved.

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But as we look at the next, He says, your throne is established from old. For you, you are from everlasting.

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There's an idea here where what He's doing is saying, it's not just the world. The creation, but His throne.

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This is the idea, again, of a king that would be established and sitting on a throne. Well, where is God's throne?

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God's throne is outside of His creation. So it's beyond just the world.

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And He's emphasizing that by saying, not just that it's from old, but that this Lord who reigns is from everlasting.

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Another attribute, that He's everlasting, or another word that we could use for this is eternal.

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He had no beginning and no end. This is the God who is reigning.

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This is the God who will care for us in our times of need. Whatever is happening in life,

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God is an immovable force because He is the eternal

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God who reigns in this universe. We think of the vastness of this universe, we're a really small element of it.

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If any of you get the privilege of going to the Creation Museum and you go to the planetarium, and I encourage you to do that, and see their show they have called

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Created Cosmos, you will get an appreciation of just how little we are.

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It takes you out to the vastness of the universe, and then starts bringing you back in to show you just how big this universe really is, how small we are, and yet as small as we are,

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God came into this creation on this planet to be part of His own creation, human beings, to die on a cross on our behalf.

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It shows you that even though we're small in the vastness of His creation, the value

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He puts on human beings. What He does here then moves to, as we look,

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He's going to move to the fourth element, is that the Lord is mighty. As we look at this, this is verses 3 and 4 here, and what we see here is this staircase that I told you about.

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Let me explain this, what the psalmist is doing. What the psalmist does here is he says, with the combination of these three phrases that you see, the floods have lifted up, the floods have lifted up, floods lift up.

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What he describes here is the idea of water. Now, we can travel around the world in these really large ships.

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They did not have that in their time. They did not have the ability to go onto the weather channel and check the weather before going out to sea and knowing how to avoid storms.

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Water in the first century was something to be feared. If you ever go to Israel, I'll be leading a team in there this next year if COVID doesn't cancel it again.

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But what we end up seeing, if you go there and you go to the Sea of Galilee, where many of the, we see much in the

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New Testament, we'll talk of the Sea of Galilee, and it talks about storms at the Sea of Galilee.

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The thing you could see at the Sea of Galilee is you see that it's in a valley. Why does that become important?

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Because you can't see a storm that comes over the mountain until it's over the mountain range.

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In other words, when you think about the disciples that were fishermen at the Sea of Galilee and they're scared in a storm, it's because of the fact that they would be used to being in the sea when storms seemingly come out of nowhere.

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And so they would be caught in a storm very often. But when you're used to being at sea, you get used to being in storms.

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So when you think about the disciples being very much afraid in a storm, it's because it's a very fearful storm.

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I grew up on a ship. My father was a professional captain of his own boat.

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So I grew up at sea. I can remember there was only one time I was really afraid at sea.

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My father had to go downstairs and he put me at the bridge and he said, listen, whatever you do, make sure you drive straight into the waves, otherwise we capsize.

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We're about 25 miles off the coast. So no one was going to find us if we capsized. And I'm literally standing, piloting the ship, and I'm looking at the bottom of one wave and I'm looking at the peak of the next wave and it's taller than the boat.

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We're about 30 feet above the sea level. That's a big wave. And we're just going up and down.

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And you get an appreciation for what could happen with one slight turn. That's the idea that you have here with what

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Psalmist is trying to tell us. What you have here is he first just says that the waters are lifted up. And we've seen a wave.

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We've seen waves before. They start to lift up. It's actually the wind pushing them. And they start to rise up.

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And then he talks about hearing their voice. What's the voice? That's that roaring sound that you hear when you're at sea.

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You hear that, maybe you go to the beach and you see the waves coming in and you start to hear it as it's starting to rise and it starts to make that roaring sound.

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And then what does it do as we see where this verse says it's the roaring. That word here for roaring is only used here once in the

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Old Testament. But it's the word for crushing or pounding. What's that?

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That's when the wave now you hear that roar and it collapses in. I don't know if any of you have been caught in a wave in an undertow.

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It can be very strong sometimes. And so this is the idea of what he's saying is here you have this huge wave coming in.

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Think back to Christmas several years ago with the tsunami that hit the islands over in the Philippines or Indonesia.

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Right? Came in just demolished entire buildings. The strength of water.

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And in that culture water would be feared because of the damage it could do.

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I mean recently they had pictures of a wedding in Hawaii that was ruined by floodwaters.

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And I have folks that I know that are from Hawaii and they've told me yeah we get those twice a year. It was no big deal for the regulars.

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For the people that know they just know okay yeah the waters come in like that. But for the people that didn't know they were very much afraid.

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They hadn't seen water do that. And water can do that. But look at what he then says. He keeps with this same thought.

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He builds up this staircase to say that God is mightier than the waters in the next verse.

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He says mightier are the thunders of many waters. Mightier are the waves of the sea.

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So he's making the connection here between the word mighty. Now this actually this word mighty actually is the word we would think of majesty or magnificence.

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This is the idea that he's saying is that God is greater than the waters.

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He's saying that the Lord the people would fear water. He's trying to say here that the

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Lord is mightier than the water. We see this a similar thing.

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I'll just read for you in Psalm 19 verse 6. But this is what it says.

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Then I heard what seemed to be like the voice of a great multitude like a roar of many waters and like the sound of many perils the thundering cry out.

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That's the idea that the where the many think the John is getting that idea from is this

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Psalm. So we need not fear water. An earlier

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Psalm, Psalm 46 says this God is our refuge and strength in a very present help in trouble.

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Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea though its waters roar and foam though the mountain trembles at its swelling.

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It's the same idea that this Psalmist has here is the idea that the water

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God is mightier than the water. The idea that as we would think about our lives and we think about this culture and we see the ungodly who seem and I say seem like they are being blessed.

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It may seem that way but God is greater than all the ungodly.

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The ungodly are just noise. When we focus on the fact that the

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Lord reigns this ungodly world is just noise.

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It's just the roaring of a sea. He says here mightier than the thunders of the water mightier than the waves of the sea.

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Let me quote from Spurgeon on this. He says the ungodly are all foam and fury noise and bluster during their little hour and then the tide turns or the storm is hushed and we hear no more of them while the kingdom of the eternal abides in its grandeur of its power.

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The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters. The utmost of their power is to him but a sound but a sound and he can readily master it.

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Therefore he calls it noise by way of contempt when men combined to overthrow the kingdom of Jesus plot secretly and by and by rage openly the

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Lord thinks no more of it than so much noise upon the sea breach.

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Jehovah the self existent and omnipotent cares not for the opposition of dying men whoever however many or mighty they may be.

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Unquote. That's the idea that we see. We so focus sometimes on the world around us on the trials we're going through but the psalmist wants us to know that the

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Lord reigns in our life. That there's nothing that he can't do.

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The things that we think are so encompassing of us whatever it may be and I understand that I don't know each of you personally but I can know that in a room this size that each of you that most of you at least are struggling with something and whatever it may be as much as it seems like so all consuming in our lives to God it is nothing but noise that he can silence and I like how

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Spurgeon said it because it is only for a little while that this world and this ungodly world will reign.

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It has its time. There will be a time that God will bring all things under his control and we will see what he's been doing all along.

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Many times we think we know what God is doing and we don't.

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Many times we ask what is God doing? We don't understand and we hope that on the other side of heaven we'll start to see some of those things and there will be things that we see that we didn't even know.

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We weren't even aware that something you may have done had an impact on someone else and though you struggled with something that struggle may lead to someone else coming to know

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Christ or someone being sanctified. We may not know on this side of heaven.

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I know a gentleman who went out to Washington State to visit his mother. I knew him because I used to do counseling.

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If any of you are familiar with America's Keswick, it's an addiction recovery center. I used to counsel there and he went through the program and then was a guy who worked at the ministry and he went out to visit his mother.

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Because he had a very early flight he figured he'd get a hotel the night before so he didn't have to wake his mother up and he goes to the hotel, figures he'll go to 7 -Eleven, get himself a cup of coffee the night before and he's just walking back and some guy comes up to him and asks him if he had something.

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I forget what it was, a match or the time, something like that. And just as he does, two police officers on bikes ride up to him and come right next to him and they basically tell both guys to put their hands on the car.

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And so as they're searching this guy, this homeless looking guy that came up to my friend they start emptying his pockets and they're finding blank credit cards so the guy had blank credit cards to make credit cards with someone else's.

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He had a crack pipe on him he had some crack he had some pot and all of a sudden as he's telling one officer's telling the other officer what they're finding all of a sudden the other officer says that's okay, let him go, we want the other guy.

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My friend is thinking like okay, what do you got on me? And they said they had a warrant for his arrest in the state of Washington.

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Well, he ended up that night in the jail and because it was a holiday weekend he stayed over until Tuesday before they can arraign him.

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And so what you ended up seeing is he goes into jail, he's sitting there with a bunch of guys, first thing he does is he walks in and sees a cot and on the cot is an open bible and what he did was pick up that bible from the verse that it was open to in Romans and start preaching the gospel to the men in prison.

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By Tuesday when his arraignment came, they came in to announce to him that they were letting him go.

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No need for arraignment because they couldn't find any charge on the record.

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They couldn't figure out what the officer saw that they arrested him. His name had nothing in their system.

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And people might ask, well why was he in jail? Very simple reason as he told me. He was in jail for a very simple reason.

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Three gentlemen who needed to get saved. Because that's what happened over those three days.

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And you sit there and go, at a time like that I'm in jail. This is a horrible thing. This is just noise.

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But if we focus on the Lord who reigns we can see what God is doing through that noise.

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The Lord is mighty. Wrapping up as we see here, he then says in verse 5, he says the

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Lord is trustworthy. That is your fifth thing. He says your decrees are very trustworthy.

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The word decree here in Hebrew is the idea of a witness or testimony or laws. It's sometimes referred to as the

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Ten Commandments, this word. The idea of trustworthy is to be proven to be firm.

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To be faithful. Be permanent. So he's saying that the laws of God, the witness of God, is trustworthy.

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We would say it this way, the word of God that we have in our hands is trustworthy.

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Why is that important? Very simply, if you are going through trials, especially trials that can seem all encompassing, that you think there's no way you can move forward.

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There's no way you can even live. The psalmist is saying the

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Lord reigns and how do we know of the Lord? Well, he's told us. This is the value of his word.

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It's sad that we live in a country where many of us may not only have a Bible, many of us have maybe dozens of Bibles in our home that don't get read.

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I've traveled to countries where if they have part of a Bible, they value it greatly because that may be all they have.

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I remember being in a church where they didn't have a completed Bible. They had parts of the

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New Testament and some of the Psalms and that's all they had. They would read it, they'd share it amongst each other because that's all they could have.

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And yet we have a completed word of God and we sit there and struggle and say, woe is me.

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What's happening in my life? This Lord who reigns has told us, given us his word so that we can know what he is doing in the world.

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He may not answer our specific things but you know what this word tells us? We can look through all 66 books and see that God can be trusted.

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He's faithful. One of the verses that many people memorize, it's replaced

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John 3 .16 as people's life verse. Many of you are probably already thinking what it may be.

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Jeremiah 29 .11 Oh, everyone loves that verse. Oh, the

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Lord knows the plans he has for us, plans to prosper. Why does nobody look just six, seven verses later where it says, the

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Lord knows the plans he has for you, plans of destruction and famine and pestilence. No one has that on their refrigerator.

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I mean, wouldn't it be nice if God told us who he was speaking of in Jeremiah 29 .11?

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Well, actually he did. In Jeremiah 29 .10 he's speaking to those who lived through the 70 year

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Babylonian captivity. Do you think after 70 years of captivity that maybe people would question, where is

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God? Is he really going to keep his promises to us? He promised all these things and Jeremiah says he will keep those promises.

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And after 70 years, the people who lived through that looked back and said, God was faithful.

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So though we don't look at Jeremiah 29 .11 and say that's for me, that's a promise for me but it is.

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It's a promise that God will be just as faithful as he was to Israel.

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He will be faithful to us. So when he says he has a home waiting for us in heaven, guess what?

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He has a home waiting for you in heaven. So when we look at this, we realize he's saying the

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Lord reigns and he is trustworthy. The idea of he's very trustworthy, the word for very there is the idea of strength or power.

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He's not just trustworthy but he is super trustworthy. In fact, he was the most trustworthy.

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He's where we would get the idea of what trustworthiness is. It comes from his nature. That is important when we are struggling with things to realize not just that God reigns but this element that the imagery that he is trustworthy.

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Not only that, we look at the last, so we see the Lord is majestic, the Lord is strong, the

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Lord is everlasting, the Lord is mighty, the Lord is trustworthy and lastly, the

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Lord is holy. It says here, holiness benefits your house, oh

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Lord, forevermore. The idea there where it says benefits, it's the idea of pleasing or delight.

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You can see this translated in Song of Solomon as lovely. The idea of holiness, we don't have a real appreciation for this though.

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Holiness is the idea of being completely separate. Now in Israel they had an imagery of what this was.

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Maybe some of you have read through the Bible and you see the tabernacle or the temple grounds and you'd see the discussion the way the temple was laid out, was on purpose.

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What you had was an outermost court. In the time of Herod's temple they referred to it as the court of the

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Gentiles where everybody could go. Anyone could be in the outermost court, the court of Gentiles.

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Inside of there they'd have the court of the women. Where only those Hebrew women would be allowed, all the

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Hebrew men and women could go. And so at that point no Gentile would be able to enter into the court of the women.

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Beyond that was a court for the men. Where now the women were not allowed to go.

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And it would be a court just for Hebrew men to be able to go. But within that was an area where only the

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Levites could go. Only one family of the twelve families, so only the men that were of Levi were allowed to enter there.

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Within there was a holy place. And within the holy place only one family of the line of Levi was allowed to go, the

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Korhites. Within there was an area called the holy of holies.

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Where only one man could go in once a year that would be the high priest.

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And he would go in there to offer atonement for the nation of Israel. The whole picture of that is the idea that God is completely separated from the people.

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In the sense that he is not like us. He is completely and utterly separate from sin.

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In depicting that he comes down in the holy of holies. That's where he would reside.

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And one man out of all the nation of Israel would be able to go once a year.

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The whole idea of that was the picture to show that God was not like us.

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He is utterly different than us. We are completely unlike him. Yes, there are some ways we are like him.

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We have attributes when we say that we are made in the image of God. It's the idea that we have certain attributes that God has.

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We have emotions. I know guys, you think that's a bad thing when your wives have them. I get it.

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But we have emotions. We have intellect. We have certain attributes that God has that are communicated to us.

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That's what it means when it says we are created in the image of God. But there are attributes we do not have.

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Like omniscience. And every husband here wishes we had an understanding of our wives.

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Right? And we wish our wives didn't have omniscience. The reality is we cannot understand what it's like to know everything.

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Do you know that God never had a bright idea in his life? He never observed something and went ooh, that's new.

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He just knows it all. Not only does he know it all, but as we saw, he's eternal.

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That's a hard concept to wrap our heads around. Because everything with us is bound by time. We do things in progression.

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To God, everything would be like an eternal now. Because he created the whole time -space continuum.

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He's outside of it. He knows everything. And he sees it all as if it's the same second.

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And this is the God who reigns. You know why God can speak about future things, future to us, with such absoluteness?

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Because to God, it already happened. It is. And he knows it. He is so unlike us.

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We cannot begin to conceive and understand him. We cannot, for all eternity, fully understand the mind of the infinite.

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And then we struggle with something. And we say, Lord, you just can't deal with this. You don't understand what

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I'm going through, Lord. Really? The omniscient ruler of the universe does not understand what you're going through.

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I have news for us. Not only did he know you would go through that, he already knows the outcome of it.

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And for those who are in Christ, he already knows what you're going to be like in your glorified state.

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This life and our trials, what, 70, 80, 100 years? I have a friend of mine whose father is soon to be the oldest living man, or actually the oldest man ever in America.

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He's about to turn 114. They actually don't have a birthday for him. Back then, they didn't do dates.

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They only know the year he was born. So every January, that's how they end up doing it. But what is that?

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114 years? What is 114 years compared to 10 hundred billion years?

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It's a blip. It's a blip of time. When we're in Christ, all the trials and struggles we're going through, all the things that we think are so important in this life, 10 ,000 years from now, we're not going to care.

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It's going to be nothing. All we're going to do is we're going to look at Christ. We're going to look at the

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Lord who reigns and see how holy he is. And we're going to rejoice. As the psalmist gave at the beginning, what we would think of as the conclusion, the

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Lord reigns. He gives this imagery of the Lord reigning. He is majestic.

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The Lord is strong. The Lord is everlasting. The Lord is mighty. The Lord is trustworthy.

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And the Lord is holy. God is matchless in his perfect trustworthiness and holiness.

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And there is no trial, no suffering that we can go through that he is not aware of.

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I say this because I've been saying this for about two decades now, and people have thought

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I was nuts until about a year ago or so, two years ago. Being raised in a

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Jewish home a generation after the Holocaust, when I would be in Hebrew school, they would teach us the signs of the

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Holocaust. To know what to look for, because the teachers would always say, there will be another

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Holocaust coming, and if you can recognize the signs, maybe your generation can prevent it. I've been looking at signs for 20 years, and I've been saying, there's a

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Holocaust coming in America, but it's not the Jewish people. It's the

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Christians. We are going to go through, I believe, and people thought I was nuts until a couple years ago, and all of a sudden they're going, wait.

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I went to a church about two years ago. I said, five years ago you were here, and you almost predicted what we're seeing.

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It's not that I predicted it. It's called history. It repeats. And as we go through, if we do go through a time of persecution in this country, there are many who profess the name of Christ that we're going to watch just walk away because they did not have a genuine faith.

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There's going to be many that just, they're going to deny Christ as they did in the first century because they just are trying to get by, and the reality is they look at their trials and the circumstance and go, well, it just looks too hard.

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And maybe they'll be like Peter and just deny Christ for a time. But what the psalmist here wants us to know is that even if we do go through persecution, the

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Lord, the creator of the universe, reigns. The Lord reigns.

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Well, before I close in prayers, I know that the choir will come up. Pastor Jim, let me mention some of the things we have at the resources table.

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I'll just give you two. I will say that we have some free stuff. That might seem strange to someone who's Jewish, giving away free stuff.

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Okay, I get it. I do that on the streets.

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I'm an open air evangelist. I'm known for my evangelism. I had a guy once, he said prove God exists. I said, well, what would you want as proof?

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He goes, show me a miracle. I said, well, okay, define a miracle. He goes, if God puts a hamburger in my hand right now, that would be a miracle.

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I said, well, what if God put the money for a hamburger in your hand right now? Would that be a miracle? He goes, yes. I took five dollars out and went, there you go, bow your knee.

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He goes, you did that. I said, yeah. I said, a Jewish guy giving away money, that's not a miracle? But we have a newsletter.

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If you want to find out more about our ministry, pick that up. If any of you listen to podcasts, we also,

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Striving for Caring runs a Christian podcast community. So we have those. Two books that I authored. One is, my first one was on world religions.

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So the major Western religions. What this does is this is going to go through and systematize the major Western religions, tell you what they believe.

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I'm not trying to refute them. I'm not trying to tell you how to debate them. What I'm telling you is what they actually believe so that when you speak to someone who's a

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Muslim or Roman Catholic or someone like that, you will be seen as credible because you're not misrepresenting them.

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I find it infuriating when I speak to a Muslim and they tell me they understand Christianity, you believe in three gods.

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And everything they say after that, I go, yeah, no. But what is it we believe? Well, that's what this book is.

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Now, you've seen systematic theologies maybe that are all yo thick. This is not. You can actually get through this.

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I wrote this so people wouldn't be scared of theology. And so those are out on the table along with some other resources we have.

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We have an academy and we have the syllabuses. The academy is free. You can watch it on YouTube.

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That's how we make our money. We give it away for free. Wait, there's something wrong with that. No, we actually have monthly donors.

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There's a thing on the table if you want to help us support that. And we have syllabuses that you can pay for. But let's close in order of prayer.

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Heavenly Father, we come before you and we rejoice with the psalmist for you reign.

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And in our deepest struggles and our deepest sufferings, we can rest on what your word says that you, the holy and trustworthy one, the creator of the universe, you reign.

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We are grateful for that, Lord, and we ask that we'd fixate our minds on you knowing that you reign in our lives.

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In Christ's name. Amen. Everybody's choosy about something. It might be your favorite snack.

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