THE LORD DELIVERS
Psalm 34: 15-22
|
A PRESBYTERIAN PSALTER - by Pastor Max A Forsythe |
If you have been following this short series on Psalm 34 you may well wonder why the first portion was entitled "God Delivers" and this third portion "The Lord Delivers". Certainly in David's mind there would be no difference. However, in my mind I would see more than a subtle difference in David's walk with his Sovereign. If you think carefully about your own Christian life, there are times when the Creator is quite simply our God, and then there are other times when He is indeed our Lord and our God. If we learn nothing else from David's report of his life experience in this psalm, it is this, sometimes the elect are closer in their relationship with the God of heaven than others.
Why else, like David, would we continue to sin if we every day had the mind of Christ solidly before us every minute of every hour? We would in fact be just like the worldly crowd who barely acknowledge that there is a God in heaven. Most of the pollsters find that almost 95% of the population believes that there is a God. But, then only 40% will acknowledge Him as Lord by showing up in church on Sunday to give Him the worship due His Name! At the height of the Reformation, when pressed, John Calvin supposed that perhaps 25% of the population seriously belonged to Christ and lived a life in minimal obedience to His commands. Yes, there is a difference between how we began this study and how we end it!
Will you learn from David's experience the necessity to cry out to the Lord so that He can hear you? Of course we see the blessing always implied in verse fifteen:
The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their cry.
Even though we do not think as much of the Lord as we ought, He always keeps us in mind wherever we go in thought, word or deed. But this is not so for the worldly crowd who do not even acknowledge Him as God of the universe! We see their relationship in the next verse:
The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth.
We see here that the worldly are the enemies of Christ whose memory will even be one day destroyed. Think of the Eastern cultures who make so much of remembering their ancestors. For as long as the ancestors are remembered, they may have some form of happiness. A few years ago, there was a popular "Christian" song that dwelt too much on the memory of friends and relatives in Christ. When there was a local tragedy and several students were killed, that song was the comforting balm passed around in our New Age era. Just remember those who died and all will be all right!
But what does the Scripture say here, God will forget those who do evil in ignoring Himself. He would not be a God alone, but Lord and Savior. Those who are saved by grace, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit will cry out for salvation to cover their sins. In verses seventeen and eighteen we see God's precious promise for those who belong to Him:
The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
How wonderful is that balm of Gilead, as the Old Covenant saints would count it. The Sovereign God of the universe will hear the cries of His elect and turn His face towards us. Every once in a while, my left ear plugs up and I cannot hear as well. So when I listen to someone I have to turn my head carefully. Once, when people were conditioned to that action, I had had tubes put in my ears and for a while people who knew me kept asking if I were even listening, since I wasn't acting in the normal manner!
May we be confirmed in our calling by knowing that the Lord does indeed incline His perfectly tuned ear towards us and does indeed hear us and knows what we need even before we ask. Yes, we may like David have many troubles, some of which we do call upon ourselves by unwise decisions and actions. Yet the Lord has promised us through David's revelation that:
the Lord delivers him from them all; he protects all his bones, not one of them will be broken.
Ah, the beauty of the words of the Spirit spoken through David the King. Here in verses nineteen and twenty there is not only a loving assurance that David's greater Son will not be broken on the cross as was the common custom, but also that in Him we also have a special protection. In case you haven't heard this before, this prediction that Christ's bones would not be broken was miraculously fulfilled on the cross. The usual practice for the Romans was to break the leg bones to hasten the death by suffocation of those crucified. By the time, the death squad was ready to do so, Christ had already given up His Spirit, and instead of breaking His legs, they thrust a spear into His chest cavity, where water mixed with blood poured out.
Not only does the Lord promise David divine protection here, but He also shows us something about the One who will deliver us - Jesus Christ. Not only does God create us and call us to Himself, He makes certain of our salvation by and through the death of His perfect servant, the greatest Son of David. If you doubt that the redemption story is disclosed to the eyes of faith in this passage, look on to the last two verses to see the end of the wicked and the promise of redemption!
The Lord redeems his servants, no one will be condemned who takes refuge in him.
Redemption clearly stated even before the plan for redemption was revealed. How much more we can know of our precious Savior than David did, yet how far and wide still we stray from our God who dearly wants us to know Him as Lord. May it please Him that in this revelation psalm of David, that we can not only see Him, but call out and cry to Him not only in our times of trouble, but in those moments when our hearts and minds are far from Him. Amen.
|
|
Resources Used: |
|
|
Kidner, Derek. |
Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries: Psalms. | |
|
Spurgeon, C.H. |
The Treasury of David. | |
|
The Holy Bible, New International Version. International Bible Society (1973, 1978, 1984) | ||
|
Psm 34d |
08 March 98 | |