Psalm 81
Let’s hear from God’s word. This
is Psalm 81, and it has the introduction to the choir master according
to the Gethsemane of Asaph. And at verse one, it begins this
way. Sing aloud to God our strength. Shout for joy to the God of Jacob.
Raise a song. Sound the tambourine. The sweet
lyre with the harp. Blow the trumpet at the new moon,
at the full moon on our feast day. For it is a statute for
Israel, a rule of the God of Jacob. He made it a decree in
Joseph when he went over the land of Egypt. I hear a language
I had not known. I relieved your shoulder of the
burden. Your hands were freed from the
basket in distress. You called and I delivered you.
I answered you in the secret place of thunder. I tested you
at the waters of Meribah. Hear all my people while I admonish
you. Oh Israel, if you would but listen
to me, there shall be no strange God among you. You shall not
bow down to a foreign God. I am the Lord your God who brought
you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide and I will
fill it. But my people did not listen
to my voice. Israel would not submit to me.
So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their
own counsels. Oh, that my people would listen
to me, that Israel would walk in my ways. I would soon subdue
their enemies and turn my hand against their foes. Those who
hate the Lord would cringe toward him and their fate would last
forever. But he would feed you with the
finest of the wheat. And with the honey from the rock,
I would satisfy you. Amen. This is God’s holy and
inspired and inerrant word. May he bless it to our minds
and hearts. In the Christian faith we have
some strange ceremonies. There’s the Lord’s Supper where
we take a little bitty teeny wafer of bread and a little bitty
thimble full of juice and we use it to remember what the Lord
did not only at the Passover but what he did on the night
he ate the Passover with his disciples and then in the coming
days with what he did at the cross. And it’s strange I’m sure
to outsiders that we would take that little bitty bit of food
and drink and consider it a feast and that would be our way of
observing one of the great works of redemption. Take baptism though,
too. You take, at least in our Presbyterian circles, a little
bitty baby and you put water on their head. And sometimes
you do it three times and you say some words and that’s that. Or how about maybe in the Israelite
history, the Feast of Booths, where you moved out of your perfectly
good houses and you lived in a tent. And you remembered what
it was like to be a sojourner in Egypt, in the wilderness.
And you remember what it was like for God to provide for you
in the desert. Well, strange religious ceremonies
are our lot. And Psalm 81 is written in the
context of Israel remembering who God is and what he’s done
and who they are and what they failed to do. And then a warning
issued to God’s people to not fall into that same mess, that
same trap. So Psalm 81, of all things, is
a call to worship. Psalm 81, of all things, is a
history lesson. And then importantly, Psalm 81
is also a call for God’s people to repent. So those are the three
ways we want to look at it. First, verses 1 through 5, a
call to worship. And it may seem a little bit
odd to you that God would have to compel his people to worship.
But remember that God calls us not only to worship God in all
our life, not only to bring glory to His name in what we do on
a daily and moment-by-moment basis, but there are set times
appointed by God or by the elders of the church where the people
of God gather for corporate worship. And this is an echo of God reminding
his people that he called them to worship after his great act
of deliverance. And this call to worship now
that includes the Feast of Booths is a call to worship to be reminded
that God saves, God puts up with our sin, and God offers us mercy. Today’s world, we go to church
sometimes, and maybe if you have been in the modern evangelical
American church. We don’t want to have anything sad. We hate
to depress the people. We’d hate to cause them to cry
in church or be upset about anything. But this is a worship service
that probably would not fly. in the American mainstream culture
because it reminds them that they did some wicked things and
then it caused them to repent. And oh, how depressing that would
be. Who’d want to go to a church like that? Well, that’s what
God does here. He calls them to worship. And
you notice in verse one, he speaks to the people and he uses all
of the worship words of the Psalms. Sing aloud, shout for joy, raise
a song, blow the trumpet. Verse one, he calls the congregation
to praise God, to sing, to shout. Verse two, you might think he
calls the Levites, the official singers, to raise a song, sound
the tambourine. And then he calls the priest
to blow the trumpet or the shofar. And at the new moon that is mentioned
there, at the full moon, it’s around the time of the day of
atonement, a couple of feasts get ramped up and started and
a couple or sometime in, that’s when they celebrate the Feast
of Booths, when Israel lived in tents, but also at the time
of the full moon and the harvest. And so you hear these worship
words, you hear these worship commands, and you notice in verses
four and five, he says, this call to worship is a statute
for Israel. It’s a rule of the God of Jacob.
He made it a decree in Joseph, and it went out as they went
out of the land of Egypt. This whole idea of called worship,
of set times of worship, of the congregation gathering, for us
it’s each week morning and evening. But how sad it is we live in
a culture, maybe much like the context of this psalm, where
people may hear the call to worship, Or maybe they don’t know it’s
one. And what do they do? They weigh their options. Well,
I could take another weekend off. The kids have sports teams. On and on and on and on we could
go. And so we have, maybe in our ears, the sound of a call
to worship, but we have become deaf to it even in the American
church. And so you say, oh, this is Psalm
81. This is back in Israelite times.
What in the world could it say to me? Well, are we not tempted
like Israel? to forsake the assembling together
of the saints of God. And so it’s a good reminder that
God wants us to gather with his people in his house to worship
him. Well, there’s a history lesson
in this passage, and it’s not a good history lesson. It’s a
rather sad history lesson, and it picks up in verse six. It
picks up in verse six, but before I read those few verses, I want
you to think about this. If you had known it would have
been easy to simply be obedient and be
blessed, would you go back and do that? But think about that
in light of Adam and Eve. If Adam and Eve had just obeyed
God, or if Israel in the wilderness had just obeyed God, how quickly
they would have been in the promised land, how quickly Adam and Eve
would have lived forever in fellowship with God in a beautiful garden.
And then they would have, through being fruitful and multiplying,
extended that garden across the land. But we disobey, don’t we? We disobey, and so verses six
through 10 are a reminder of that. The Lord says, speaking
of Israel in Egypt, he says, I relieved your shoulder of the
burden. I relieved your hands. They were
freed from the basket. In distress, you called, and
I delivered. I answered you in the secret
place of thunder, that’s Mount Sinai. I tested you at the waters
of Meribah. Here, O my people, will I admonish
you. O Israel, if you would but listen, there shall be no strange
God among you, nor shall you bow down to a foreign God, for
I am the Lord your God. I brought you up out of the land
of Egypt. Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.” There’s
a history lesson. a history lesson of oppression,
God hearing their cry, Him answering, them putting God to the test
with idolatry, God giving them His law, and Him, in a sense,
reminding us, if you had just but listened, we could have done
this the easy way. Maybe you parents thought that
with your children, if they would have just done it the easy way,
wouldn’t it have been better for them, for us, and for everyone? And so there’s a quick history
lesson in the psalm, but also there’s a call to repentance.
We find it in verses 11 through 16. A call to repentance. And remember, before we read
these few verses, that sometimes when we hear a call to repentance,
we think, oh, that’s about those people. They need to repent.
But think about where you or we may fit in. But my people
did not listen to my voice. Israel would not submit to me,
so I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their
own counsels. Oh, that my people would listen
to me, that Israel would walk in my ways. I would soon subdue
their enemies and turn my hand against their foes. Those who
hate the Lord would cringe toward him and their fate would last
forever. But he would feed you with the
finest of wheat and with honey from the rock. I would satisfy
you. There’s a call here to repentance. Maybe some of you parents remember
some situation with your kid and say, well, if that’s what
they want, that’s what they’re going to get. And you just say,
have at it. Think of the biblical story of
the prodigal son. Father, give me my inheritance.
Father gives it. He knows it’s a stupid thing,
but he gives it to him. The kid goes off and he parties.
He finds himself eating the food that he’s slopping to the pigs.
And he remembers that even the servants in his father’s house
have it good. So he says, I’ll arise. I will go to my father.
I’ll tell him of sin against him and against heaven and against
earth. And maybe my father will receive me as a servant. And sometimes that’s what a good
father does. That’s what a good parent does.
They say, fine, if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll
get. And maybe you’ll come to your senses. That’s a terrible
lesson to learn. It’s terrible to be the parent
in that sort of situation, but it’s what God, our heavenly father,
does for us so often. He gives us over to our sins
in order that we see the foolishness, the folly, of it, and he lets
us have what we want. But there’s a note of mercy in
this, don’t you see? It’s not just God wipes his hands
and says, let them have it. Verse 12, he says, I’ve given
them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own counsels.
But look at the mercy in verse 13. Oh, that my people would
listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways. I would soon
subdue their enemies. I would turn my hand against
their foes. It has echoes, doesn’t it? In
the words of, or maybe foreshadowing here in the words of Jesus, when
he looked over Jerusalem and he wept over Jerusalem and said,
Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you know, I would have saved you.
I would have redeemed you, but you would not have me. And so
Jesus, in his judgment, also has echoes of pity. And we probably
know that many of us as parents and grandparents, we’ve seen
it. You know, Israel, if you think
about it, in the wilderness, they would have been shortly
in the promised land. Wouldn’t have taken that long, just a little
trot across the desert. a few weeks maybe, a few months
at most, and they would have gone to the promised land, the
land that flowed with milk and honey. And how often is it on
our journey? I mean, even between Sundays
when we say, God has forgotten us. God is not good. He’s not giving me what I asked
for. He certainly doesn’t love me. He’s not blessing me, especially
not in the ways I want. And between Sundays even, we
don’t even have to be out in the desert. Weekend began to
turn. to other gods and say, if only,
if only, if only. And thanks be to God that he
is gracious and merciful towards us. Well, this psalm ends with
a call to repentance. It ends with verse 11 saying,
my people did not listen to my voice. Verse 13. Oh, that my
people would listen to me. that we would walk in their ways.
And that is the promise, verse 16. He would feed us with the
finest of wheat, with honey from the rock, I would satisfy you. You know, this is a good reminder
for us in the American church. We think God owes us something.
We think we’ve done something and he owes us. We think that,
that if we’re not prospering the way maybe others are, that
maybe something’s wrong with God. And what is God always calling
us to? A humble reliance on Him where
we seek His face and we desire to worship Him. you know, in
the American Christian culture, in the American church culture,
I would rather take small and steady and strong than big and
flash in the pan. And even what we might say is
weak. And that’s what God is calling
us to, just simple faithfulness to him, just ordinary following
him day by day, week by week, coming and worshiping, coming
and repenting, and coming and even feeling sorrow for the ways
that we have turned against his goodness. Aren’t we thankful
that God in Christ has been merciful to us, that he has given us opportunity
to follow him. And so let’s pray together and
give thanks for that. Our Lord and God, we’re grateful
that in your mercy, you have taken us, a stubborn people,
and you have given us tender hearts to love you and to serve
you and to follow you. and yet you know that we’re forgetful,
you know that we are prone to wonder, and you know that we’re
just like our ancestors, the Israelites, who, when having
just eaten aplenty, have looked to you and said, what will you
feed us next? Lord, forgive us for that attitude.
Let us see the goodness and the bounty that you have provided
for us, and let us live lives of worship because of all that
you have done. Let us live with attentive hearts,
being ready to repent when we fall short, when we seek after
other gods. Help us in this, we do ask and
pray in Christ’s name. Amen.