Psalm 105
Let’s hear God’s word together.
Psalm 105, starting at verse one. Oh, give thanks to the Lord. Call upon his name. Make known
his deeds among the peoples. Sing to him, sing praises to
him. Tell of all his wondrous works. Glory in his holy name. Let the hearts of those who seek
the Lord rejoice. Seek the Lord in his strength.
Seek his presence continually. Remember the wondrous works that
he has done, his miracles and the judgments he uttered. Oh,
offspring of Abraham, his servant, children of Jacob, his chosen
ones. He is the Lord our God. His judgments
are in all the earth. He remembers his covenant forever.
The word that he commanded for a thousand generations, the covenant
he made with Abraham, His sworn promise to Isaac, which he confirmed
to Jacob as a statute, to Israel as an everlasting covenant, saying
to you, I will give the land of Canaan as your portion for
an inheritance. When they were few in number
of little account and sojourners in it, wandering from nation
to nation, from one kingdom to another people, he allowed no
one to oppress them. He rebuked kings on their account,
saying, touch not my anointed ones. Do my prophets no harm. When he summoned a famine on
the land and broke supply of bread, he sent a man ahead of
them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave. His feet were hurt with
fetters. His neck was put in a collar
of iron until what he had said had come to pass. The word of
the Lord tested him. King sent and released him. The
ruler of the people set him free. He made him lord of his house
and ruler of all his possessions to bind his princes at his pleasure
and to teach his elders wisdom. Then Israel came to Egypt. Jacob
sojourned in the land of Ham. And the Lord made his people
very fruitful, made them stronger than their foes. He turned their
hearts to hate his people, to deal craftily with his servants.
He sent Moses, his servant, and Aaron, whom he had chosen. They
performed his signs among them and miracles in the land of Ham.
He sent darkness and made the land dark. They did not rebel
against his words. He turned their waters into blood
and caused their fish to die. Their land swarmed with frogs,
even in their chambers of the kings. He spoke and there came
swarms of flies and gnats throughout their country. He gave them hail
for rain and fiery lightning bolts through their land. He
struck down their vines and their fig trees. He shattered the trees
of their country. He spoke and the locust came,
young locust without number, which devoured all the vegetation
in their land and ate up the fruit of their ground. He struck
down all the firstborn in their land, the first fruits of all
their strength. Then he brought out Israel with
silver and gold and there was none among his tribes who stumbled.
Egypt was glad when they departed for dread of them had fallen
upon it. He spread a cloud for a covering and fire to give light
by night. They asked and he brought quail
and gave them bread from heaven in abundance. He opened the rock
and water gushed out. It flowed through the desert
like a river. He remembered his holy promise, and Abraham his
servant. So he brought his people out
with joy, his chosen ones with singing, and he gave them the
lands of the nations. They took possession of the fruit
of the people’s toil, that they might keep his statutes and observe
his laws. Praise the Lord. Amen. This is God’s holy word for us. It’s been about two months ago
now, but on September 11, 2019, which would have been 18 years
of the anniversary of 9-11, they still do what they started to
do the next year after those terrible events. They read the
names of every single person who died. And you wonder, how
long will they keep that up? How long will they keep it up?
They’ll keep it up as long as the memory of those who died
to us is not in vain. It’s a memory, it’s a good remembrance
of what took place and that we should never forget things like
that. Sometimes you come to a Psalm
like 105, or next week 106, or 78, which we studied a long time
ago, and you start to read through it, and you say, why all the
Old Testament Bible stories in that Psalm? It gets a little
old. Or you come to the Psalter, to
our Songbook of the Faith, and you say, do we really have to
sing all those verses? And the answer is, no, you don’t
have to, but you should. lest you forget who God is and
what he’s done. I would imagine tonight, as we
read Hebrews 11, and as we’ve read Psalm 105, and as we sang
Psalm 105, it has jogged your memory in several ways, and you
probably heard names from Old Testament stories of the Bible
you haven’t heard in a while, but as those names came up, it
brought memories of, yes, God is faithful, God is good, and
those were generations of ago, and he is still being faithful
to us today. 105 is an exercise in remembering. It’s an exercise in being thankful. It’s an exercise in recounting
the goodness of God. Now, as we look at Psalm 105
tonight, we need to remember that it’s connected to the other
Psalms around it that are in this next to last book of the
Psalter, Psalms 105 and 106. are going to speak of the greatness
of God in his acts of redemptive history. So next week, when we
look at Psalm 106, it’s going to tell about the Exodus. It’s going to tell about some
of the time of God’s people in the wilderness. just as Psalm
105 is done tonight. But if you connect it to Psalm
104, you see the goodness of God and the failure of the people. And so sometimes these Psalms
can’t be taken as individuals that are isolated from others.
They’re connected in different ways, and they tell the whole
story of God and His covenant. Well, what do we want to learn
from tonight’s Psalm? What do we want to learn from
Psalm 106. A couple things come to mind
as you look at the passage and what it teaches. And the first
that we find in the first six verses, we’ll call it this, we’ll
call it after the name of one of our favorite John Newton hymns,
we’ll call it, Let Us Love and Sing and Wonder. verses one to
six, call us as Christians, calls us as God’s people to love and
sing and wonder at the goodness of our great God. And so let
us love and sing and wonder is the theme of the first six verses.
The first six verses give us specific commands and give us
specific ways to fulfill those commands. But I want you to think
before we dive into those few verses, is worship, is thanksgiving,
is serving God, are these optional? And of course the answer is what?
No. But sometimes our lives show
that we believe they’re optional. Sometimes we just simply don’t
come to worship. Sometimes we just simply forget to give thanks.
Sometimes we forget to serve God. Other times, we just skip
the event altogether, right? What if we said this year, we’re
gonna cut out Thanksgiving, Black Friday’s overrun it anyway, so
we might as well have Black Thursday as well. No turkey, no stuffing,
no family events, it’s just gonna be a regular day. We would forget
to give thanks, wouldn’t we? We would forget, and what happens
when we forget to show up on the Lord’s Day? We forget to
worship, we forget to give thanks and serve God. we treat it as
optional. And I want to point out to you
that the first six verses of this passage are full of imperatives. If you look particularly at verse
one, there’s three imperatives right then and there. Oh, give
thanks to the Lord. That’s the first one. Gotta give
thanks to Yahweh. The second imperative is call
upon his name. And then the third is make his
deeds known among the peoples. So we are commanded by Almighty
God to give thanks, to call on his name, and to make his deeds
known to others. Maybe some of you are sports
nuts and you watch SportsCenter. What does SportsCenter do? Well,
after every game, after every sporting event, they give thanks. They call on the name of the
sports heroes, and they make known their deeds through sports
highlights. And you can tune in to SportsCenter,
what, every 30 minutes on ESPN? You can watch it bright and early.
You can watch it nice and late and all day in between. And so
the pagan world is very good at giving thanks and calling
on the names of their heroes and making their deeds known.
Or maybe to put it in a different perspective, the cable news network. give thanks to their respective
messiahs. They call on their respective
messiah’s name and they make that respective messiah’s deeds
known to the watching world who tune in 24 hours a day to hear
the same things over and over again. The world is very good
at it, but is the church good at it? I had a friend who recently
said something like this about modern churches. He said, their
worship. Oh yeah, I know who this was.
This is a friend of mine in Greensboro. The church he goes to, he loves
everything about it except their worship. And he says, we just
sing, I love you, Jesus. Thank you, baby, every week.
And he says, I can’t stand it. He said, but that’s what they
do. And there’s so much more to say. I bet none of you before
tonight have ever sung Psalm 105. But wasn’t it pretty sweet
to do it? It was wonderful to sing of who
God is and what he’s done, his covenant love and faithfulness,
and our required response. But is the church? leading people
to love and sing and wonder. Is the church leading people
to worship, to give thanks and to serve Almighty God? Are we
saying, oh, it’s optional, do it if you like? No, we’re commanded
by God to give thanks, call on his name and make his deeds known. And so we’ll keep at it and hopefully
others will join in with us. And our example will be a good
one. So how do you worship? How do
you give thanks? How do you call on his name?
Well, it gives a couple ways to do that. You pick up in verse
two, it says, sing to him. Sing praises to him. Tell of
his wondrous works. Make a list. With glory in his
name, we let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. We
seek the Lord in his strength. We seek his presence continually.
We remember his works. That’s why Psalm 105 is a good
psalm. It remembers some of his works. We remember his miracles. We remember his judgments. We
exercise our minds and our hearts. I think last week with Psalm
105, we mentioned the old hymn, count your blessings, name them
one by one, and you will see what the Lord has done. Some
of y’all got this week the letter from the Piedmont Rescue Mission
that was on the front of their newsletter. It’s a good exercise
to write down what God has done for us. So that’s what the first
six verses teach us. We’re supposed to love, and sing
and wonder. Verses seven to 11 teach us about
the Lord’s Word. And I’ve got there the Lord,
capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, the Lord’s Word.
Or you could say it this way, it’s the Covenant Lord’s Word. When you see Lord in all caps, it represents
Yahweh, which is his covenant name, the name by which he swears. to accomplish what he promises.
So verses seven to 11, the Lord’s word, notice what it says, verse
seven, he says, he is the Lord, our God. His judgments are in
all the earth. He remembers his covenant forever,
a word that he commanded for a thousand generations. The covenant
that he made with Abraham has sworn promise to Isaac, which
he confirmed to Jacob as a statute to Israel as an everlasting covenant
saying to you, I will give the land of Canaan as your portion
for an inheritance. The Lord’s word is his covenant,
and maybe you’ve learned the children’s catechism. A covenant
is a relationship that God establishes with us and guarantees by his
word. It’s a promise, an oath. His covenant is a relationship
that he enters into with us. Now, in the Old Testament world,
in the ancient Near East, a covenant sometimes was a two-way agreement
between two kings. I’ll quit raiding your land and
you quit raiding my land. And in exchange for me not raiding
your land and you not raiding my land, we’ll send you grapes
because we’ve got too many. And we’ll send you olives because
we’ve got too many. And so the grapeless king gets
grapes and the oliveless king and his land gets olives. And
they also quit raiding each other’s land. They’ve made a covenant,
right? Maybe you have this between your neighbors. You put up a
fence to keep their dog out of your yard. Or you put up a fence
to keep your own dog in your yard. That kind of thing. We
have covenants. Maybe you have a neighborhood
covenant. No motorhomes in the front yard. No fishing boats
resting in the backyard. If you build a shed, it’s a certain
size. You promise to take in your garbage
cans every week and not perpetually leave them at the street. That
kind of thing. We live in covenant with one another. These verses
teach us about the Lord’s word, the Lord’s covenant. We’re covenant
breakers. We leave our trash cans out perpetually.
Shame on you if you do. We’re covenant breakers, but
God is a covenant keeper. And that’s the root of his name,
capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, Lord or Yahweh,
his covenant name. He swears and makes his own promises
by himself. And it reminds us that he made
a promise to Abraham to be his God, to save his offspring, to
let them outnumber the land or the sand on the seashore, the
stars and the heaven, and to give them a promised land. And
by faith, the book of Galatians says, we who trust in Jesus are
children or offspring of Abraham. But we have to remember that
when God swears, when God gives his word, when he makes an oath,
he does it by his own name, which is perfect, but he also does
it by the blood of his own son. We sing, a wonderful hymn about
our Christian faith. His oath, his covenant, his blood,
support me neath the whelming flood. When all around my soul
gives way, he alone is my hope. in my stay, one of the things
we got to remember as Christians is the world may fall apart,
our bodies may fall apart, but God’s promises will always remain. His blood reminds us of that.
The word of the living God reminds us of that. And so whatever situation
you find yourself in, God will remain constant and true and
he will support you. God always keeps his covenant.
We don’t, but he does. And so thank goodness God’s covenant
keeping doesn’t depend on Abraham. He was unfaithful. It doesn’t
depend on David. No, he was unfaithful. It doesn’t
depend on Adam. He was unfaithful. And it doesn’t
depend on us for we’re unfaithful. So the Lord’s word is a good
word. The next thing, which will cover
about 30 verses, verses 12 to 41, is you’ve got Genesis in
the Psalms. You’ve got the story of Abraham,
the story of Joseph, the story of the Exodus, the story of wilderness,
and the story of Canaan. You really actually have Genesis,
Exodus, and maybe some of Numbers in the Psalms, but I’ll call
this Just for simplicity’s sake, Genesis in the Psalms, verses
12 to 41. We won’t read every verse, and
we won’t explain every meaning, but you would do well to go home
and read Genesis and say, God’s a covenant-making, covenant-keeping
God, and remember the stories. If the Apostle Paul says something
in Romans 15, 4, he says, whatever was written in the former days,
Old Testament, was written for our instruction. A lot of times
we’re New Testament people, aren’t we? We just read the epistles,
we read the gospels, and we’re happy there. But the Old Testament
is so full of God’s faithfulness, we miss out on the Old Testament
riches. And so here you have Genesis
and maybe Exodus and Leviticus in the Psalms. But you have example
after example of God preserving Israel, whom he had chosen. I can remember the first time
I heard the story of Joseph being sold into slavery to the Midianites
by his brothers, thinking what a horrible thing that was. You
thought that too, didn’t you? How horrible. Your own flesh
and blood, they hate you because of your fancy coat. They throw
you in a pit and they get you out when the Midianites come
by and they sell you. That’s only stuff we threaten
to do to each other. But they made it come to pass. And there
he went off with the Midianites. He made his way to Egypt. And
where did he end up? He ended up in Potiphar’s house. And what
did he end up doing after the imprisonment and after all those
things? He ended up saving Israel. And so we see over and over through
examples like that, God has a plan and he keeps his promises to
his people. He preserves Israel, whom he
had chosen. He didn’t choose them because
they were great or would be special or do great things. He just simply
chose them because he wanted to love them. And so scripture
after scripture, we see examples of that here in verses 12 to
41 of the Psalms. Another thing that this Genesis
and the Psalms teaches us is that scripture helps us interpret
other passages. So if you’re reading along through
Genesis and you read about Jacob, for example, what’s another way
you can interpret those passages? Well, you can come to Psalm 105
and say, oh, well, verses 18 and 19 seem to speak of his life,
and that can help you understand. So it also reminds us that scripture
helps shed light on other scriptures. The same with Hebrews 11 we read
earlier. It can help us understand some
of the Old Testament passages of the scriptures. And so scripture
helps us. interpret other places of scripture. The final thing we want to think
about from the passage is the very last verse. And the question
is, will you keep your covenant obligations? Anytime there’s
a covenant made, there’s obligations. Obligations on both parties.
My kingdom won’t raid your kingdom anymore. My kingdom will give
you olives. My kingdom will give you grapes.
Or maybe other covenants we remember between, say, Jacob and his father-in-law,
is it Laban? What did they make a promise
when they put that rock somewhere out in the middle of nowhere
between Laban’s home and Esau’s home, or Jacob’s home? They basically
said, we will not rob each other’s flocks anymore. And if you pass
this rock to my side or I pass the rock to your side, God will
judge us. And so there’s obligations. Stay
on your side of the rock. Pay up with your grapes, pay
up with your olives. Well, what do we owe God for
his covenant love? Verse 45 points out to us what
we owe him. He did all of this redemptive
work so that we might keep his statutes and observe his laws. That’s a pretty powerful little
verse, isn’t it? After all these verses, all these
44 verses of Psalm 105, you say, so what’s the point? Well, the point is a big one.
God saves you so that you will obey him. He saves you that you’ll
bring glory to his name. He saves you that you might keep
faithfulness. So the reason we named our message
tonight on Psalm 105, a peculiar people who live peculiarly, that’s
a mouthful, is simply this. God has chosen us to be his children. God has sustained us as his chosen
race. And we are to live not as the
world, but we are to live according to God’s word. He’s a holy God,
we’re his holy people. And so we’re to live up to his
holy standard. And we wanna be reminded tonight
that we are saved to live for God. And so out of gratitude
to all that God has done in keeping his covenant love, we want to
serve him and to bring glory to his name. Let’s go before
him and thank him and pray. Lord, we thank you for this psalm
that recounts your goodness to Israel in the past. And we’re
reminded how good you’ve been to us in the present. Help us
to love and sing and wonder of all that you’ve done. Help us
to tell others in the congregation, others in our family, what a
wonderful God you are. Help us to tell our friends and
neighbors. Help us to tell the world. And most of all, let them
see our gratitude to you by the way we live and let our lives
reflect how much we are blessed by your redemption. Hear us as
we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.