Psalm 87
Let’s give our attention to God’s
word to Psalm 87. This is a psalm of the sons of
Korah, also a song. And if you’ll remember several
weeks back with Psalm 84, it connects to it as a Zion song. And it says, on the holy mount
stands the city he founded. The Lord loves the gates of Zion
more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things of
you are spoken, O city of God. Among those who know me, I mentioned
Rahab and Babylon, and behold, Philistia and Tyre with Cush. This one was born there, they
say, and of Zion it shall be said, this one and that one were
born in her, for the Most High himself will establish her. The Lord records as he registers
the peoples, this one was born there. Amen, this is God’s holy
and inspired word. Here’s a question for you. How
do you see the Lord’s church? Don’t answer out loud. How do
you see the Lord’s church? When the church is mentioned,
what do you see? What do you think about? Maybe it’s a memory. Maybe it’s
an address, a place that is. Maybe it’s a special season.
Maybe it’s things within the church. Maybe it’s faces. And
if you are thinking that way, you are thinking about what we
call in theology the visible church, the church that we can
see on earth in real places and in real spaces with real people
and real things that we can touch and see. We are part of the visible
church. But how does God see the church?
There’s a question for you. And we can get some answers from
various places in the Bible, including Psalm 87, but God sees
what we in theology call the invisible church. He sees the
real church. We see outward professions. We
see outward participation. but God at the end of the day
knows the human heart, and he knows truly who his elect are,
who his children are, who are indeed part of his church. And
so we understand just from that little bit of discussion that
there are all kinds of perspectives on the church or about the church.
How we answer the question, how do you see the Lord’s church,
can be answered all kinds of ways and from all kinds of perspectives
with our real eyes, with our hearts, biblically, theologically,
from our earthly perspective, but also from God’s heavenly
perspective. And so the answer to that question,
how do you see the church, could be really complex. It could be
a lot of different answers, and they all could be part of the
grand answer, which would be right, would be correct. Now
our view, is often very human. And it’s often very human with
some biblical themes mixed in. We probably see the church mostly
right, but with some human, maybe some human tainting involved.
But God’s view is ultimate. And God’s view, when our view
is skewed and tainted, when we’re not seeing as clearly as we should,
God’s view, which is ultimate, can give us hope. And so Psalm
87 is sort of like an eye check. It’s, you know, you go to the
eye doctor and you don’t realize how bad you are seeing the W’s
and the X’s and the O’s and the zeroes. You know, they’re a little
fuzzy and you’re seeing on the, what is it, the top line, the
big one? The bottom line’s the little one. You’re seeing on
the top line and hardly so. But God’s view is always 20-20.
And so when we come to the scripture and say, God, what do you see
when you look at your church? His answer is always best. And
so Psalm 87 is a Zion psalm. It’s a Zion psalm with, at least
in its immediate Words, if you took Psalm 87 without the rest
of the scripture or our theology or the fact that we’re in 2018
and not in Israel during the time of the sons of Korah who
wrote this, it has a very limited view. But if you consider maybe
John Newton’s hymn we just sang a little bit ago, Glorious Things
of Thee are Spoken, it gives a Psalm 87 view of the church
in light of all revelation that we now have in light of Christ
coming, In light of Pentecost, in light of the Gentiles being
included in the people of God, in light of the book of Revelation
being written with a viewpoint having been given to us about
what the church will ultimately look like in the New Jerusalem,
we are a very rich people in 2020. as we look at Jerusalem
through the history of the scriptures up to Psalm 87, and as we look
back at Psalm 87, maybe through the lens of Jesus and Pentecost,
2,000 years of church history, and the book of Revelation. And
so how do you see the Lord’s church really has to have a complex
and sophisticated answer. And so Psalm 87, in our study
tonight, may help that just a little bit. The godly of every age need
Psalm 87. The godly of every age need the
great hymn, glorious things of thee are spoken. Just the other
day, I was reading Calvin’s commentary on Psalm 87. And Calvin takes
a view that Psalm 87 was written at the time of the post-exilic return from
Babylon. So, you know, when Israel was
disobedient, the northern tribes were dragged away by the Assyrians
and the northern eleven tribes of Israel were, I don’t know
how you put it, carpetbaggers came in and lived in their homes,
the Samaritans, the others that Jews would hate during Jesus’
time, they came and sort of took over. And so the northern tribes
of Israel, dragged off by the Assyrians, the land there inhabited
by odds and ends of people with a mixed syncretistic religion.
But then Judah, the southern kingdom, Jerusalem, fell to the
Babylonians about a century later. And some believe that Psalm 87
was written to the exiles who returned from Babylon. And so
Calvin writes about that in his commentary on Psalm 87, and he
says all kinds of wonderful things about the church. And so somebody,
don’t try to guess who, don’t try to think about it, somebody
the other day started talking poo-poo on the church to me.
And I had just the hour before read Calvin’s commentary on Psalm
87, so I was not in the mood to hear anybody say poo-poo about
the church, because Calvin on Psalm 87 was great. But it is
a Zion song, and if the Lord loves his church, should not
we also love the church? Now, some of y’all may have grown
up in a house with a sister, and some of you may have had
to defend your sister’s honor and you chase off the boys who
come over, you get the baseball bats or your 12-gauge or whatever.
We need to think about that way with the church. When we hear
people take God’s name in vain, and when we hear people say,
oh, the church is as nothing, those ought to be fighting words
to us. Remember when Nehemiah returned with the exiles, and
there was Sanballat, and there was Tobiah, and they were following
the workers of Israel around the city saying, oh, look at
that little wall you’re building. It’s a weak wall. And if a little
fox would trot upon the top of that wall, it would just crumble
down. And what did Nehemiah say? Well, let’s go back to Babylon.
No, he said, strap on your swords. And you have a trowel in this
hand and you have a sword in that hand and you build that
wall and you build it for the Lord. And if an enemy comes and
he says a fox would knock that wall over, you put that sword
in his chest. That’s how the people of God
are to think of Zion because that is how God thinks of her. And so whether this Psalm is
pre-exilic or post-exilic or during the exile, whether we’re
reading it in 2018 or whether it was Martin Luther and the
people at the time of the Reformation reading it or the people during
the Dark Ages, the godly of every age need a dose of Psalm 87 so
that we think properly about the church and we think well
of her. Now, the commentary that Calvin
gave on Psalm 87 is wonderful, and I wanna give you a handful
of bits and pieces of it. He says things about the church
like this. We should not be deceived or
discouraged by what we see, but we should be encouraged by what
God sees. For the church is watched over,
protected, and governed by Christ. The world shakes, and it will
go away, but not so the church. Do we understand that? The church
will never ever go away. America might. Rome did. China may. Where is Iran as we
knew it 10, 12 years ago? And on and on we could go, but
the church will never ever go away. Calvin didn’t bring up
Iran because he didn’t know about it. But we may toil, we may struggle,
we may go through hardship, we may go through warfare, we may
be tossed, and we may be overwhelmed. And we may, as the church, feel
low and despised, but the world cannot despise her. The world
offers, very often, a view that the church ought to be shiny
and grand. But do you know when the church,
throughout history, most often flourished? It did so in persecution. And so our brothers and sisters
in China, they have to fight to go to church. They have to
decide whether they want to die or not or go to jail or not.
Think about our brothers and sisters in Eritrea. Now I’m saying
this to the faithful few that come on Sunday night. And don’t
take what I’m saying as too negative or too harsh, but we decide sometimes
whether we’re gonna go to the mountains instead of coming to
church. We decide whether another trip
to the beach is suitable for us, and there’s appropriate times
for all that. We decide whether we want to sleep in and get to
feeling better. Yet we have brothers and sisters
who may, on their way to church, taste death. And so we ought
to remember there is a lot of other perspectives to be had
from God and from other saints about the church. The church
should stand fast. It should stand tall. recognize
that it is part of a worldwide movement that has extended beyond
the borders of Israel, and it looks to a Mount Zion from above
and not on a low elevation mountain in the land of Palestine. We
should understand that the church is rich with gifts, it is rich
with the Holy Spirit, and it is rich with people who have
been called into Christ and given the abilities to serve her in
many ways. And when we gather each Lord’s
Day together in union with those in heaven and on earth who call
on the name of Jesus, we should be privileged, as Psalm 87 will
teach us, to be numbered and named among the people of Almighty
God. we should recognize that we are
part of something greater than anything in the world, something
enduring that will last longer than anything else. It is a kingdom
full of everlasting joy. Some of you’ve watched a little
television this weekend and you’ve seen all kinds of commercials
for things that offer you pleasure. You can go get your nails done,
you can get your teeth whitened, you can have food and drink,
you can go, don’t those, Offerings of blue Caribbean waters look
interesting this time of year when it’s starting to get chilly
outside, dark early. But then you gotta come home,
right? But with the church, with the kingdom of God, there is
everlasting joy that will never end. And we will have in the
church good days, glorious days, wondrous days, but we will also
go through hardship, testing, and possibly even martyrdom. So what does Psalm 87 teach us
about the church What does it teach us about God’s view of
the church? Well, I want us to look at four
things very quickly, and I want us to look at it through the
lens of hymn number 403, Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken. And
the first thing we find in verses one and two really tracks with
the phrase, on the rock of ages founded. So Psalm 87 begins this
way, on the holy mount stands the city he founded. The Lord
loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places
of Jacob. If you’ve been to the promised
land, you’ve been to Israel or maybe seen pictures or watched
it on some television show, you understand that around Jerusalem,
there are lots of mountains. And around Jerusalem, there are
lots of mountains taller than Jerusalem itself. But God has
picked Mount Zion. God has picked that mountain.
And so in a sense, you could say all the other mountains may
be jealous. All the other mountains may rather
be the city of God because they’re greater or taller, but God chose
Mount Zion. And on that particular rock in
the Middle East, he established his church. He established his
dwelling place. And so we understand from Psalm
87 that God has established his church. It is not man who has
established it. It is not a local church that has established her.
It is not a denomination that has established her. It is God
himself on the Holy Mount stands the city he founded. And he loves the gates of Zion.
And he loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places
of Jacob. Glorious things of you are spoken,
O city of God. Now in Jerusalem, during David’s
time, Solomon’s time, Even the time up to the exile and the
destruction of Jerusalem, the city of Jerusalem was everything.
And so you might say to yourself, well, golly gee, Jerusalem is
really important. Jerusalem is so important that
there is no other place as important as Jerusalem. But we need to
be reminded of this. Even Abraham, who lived almost
2,500 years, let’s say, or 1,800 years, maybe 2,000 years before
the establishment of Jebus, the city of the Jebusites, by David
as Jerusalem. About 2,000 years before that,
Abraham lived. And what does Hebrews tell us about Abraham?
He looked past Zion’s Jerusalem to a city that had foundations
not on earth, but in heaven. And so we need to remember, and
sometimes we hear all this hullabaloo about Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
that really Jerusalem from above is where we need to set our sights.
Yes, Jerusalem and Israel, a beautiful place. God has dwelt there specifically
and specially and all the rest, but we look to a greater Jerusalem
and we look to the one that is in heaven and that will one day
come down. That’s what our father Abraham
did. And so we need to do that ourselves. But here’s the question. Should we love our church? Should
we love First ARP Church on Saddle Club Road? Should we love the
Associate Reformed Presbyterian Denomination? Should we love
the PCA, the OPC? Should we love our sister Presbyterian
Reformed Denomination? Should we love the Greater Church?
Absolutely, we should. But we need to realize this.
These are but outposts of heaven. These are but little glimpses
of the greater church and the eternal church. And so the first
thing we learn from Psalm 87 is that it is founded on the
rock of ages. The second thing we find in verse
three, and it follows in our hymn, glorious things of thee
are spoken. Zion, city of our God. Yes, we
want to love Jerusalem. Yes, we want to love Mount Zion,
but we want to love heaven. better. And I’ll tell you what,
people will say things about the church. And they’ll say things
in particular about the church because it’s not as shiny as
it could be, or it’s not as big as it could be, it’s not as grand
as it could be. And I’ll tell you, you can go in some pretty
grand churches. You can go just up the road to a certain chapel
on a certain university and find some of the greatest beauty in
the world, but what will you find coming from its pulpit?
Zero. But you may go to a little bitty
frame building out in the country that doesn’t look all that impressive,
but you’ll find one in its pulpit consecrated by God who studied
and prayed and prepared, and he can’t wait but to get up and
to preach his heart out and to encourage the saints. And so
we need to be careful not to ourselves despise the day of
small things or the appearance of small things, and we need
to also be careful not to set our expectations on bricks and
mortar and metrics and things that do not compute into God’s
calculations of the church. But we need to take care to take
the view that God does. Glorious things of you, Jerusalem,
church, are spoken. We need to remember that the
church is the bride of Christ. It is where the glory of God
dwells in the midst of a people and that God has gathered this
here. Sometimes we say, And pastors
can feel this way from time to time. We can get the blues, whether
as pastors or the congregation, we can get the blues and say,
well, there’s not that many people here. That’s a valid thing to
say, isn’t it? We’d always like more. We enjoyed
church today, right? We had a lot of visitors. We
had a lot of people with us today, and that was a good thing. But
here’s the way to think about it. God gathers whom he will
gather. And when his spirit has moved
in the hearts of his elect and he has drawn them into the church
to sit under her ordinances, shouldn’t we be thankful at that,
that God has been pleased? Because God in his mercy, or
God in his wrath could have said, fine, you people, right? Stay
in your sins. Stay in your trespasses. Stay
in your graves. but he decided to be merciful.
And so that the church even has one person in it ought to amaze
us. And so we need to take great
care on how we think about the Lord’s bride and the Lord’s people
as it gathers. There’s a third thing that comes
from verses four through six. Gentiles and Jews in Jesus’ fold. Now this is not a line from Newton’s
hymn, Following James Montgomery Boyce’s outline, this is a line
from a different hymn, but it shows us what takes place in
Psalm 87, an amazing turn of events. You recognize some names
in these verses. You recognize them in verses
four through six. Some not so great names. Rahab. It stands for Egypt. Babylon. Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t that
the country we tried to get out of to go back and rebuild? And
how about Philistia? Didn’t we sling some stones at
one of them and kill him? And cut off his head and put
it up on a post for all to see that Yahweh is king in Israel
and the Philistines are not? And what about Tyre, those northerners? And what about Cush, Ethiopia?
It goes on to say this one was born there, they say. This is
a good time to ask the question I usually like to ask when we
start feeling some national pride and say, well, I’m a Christian,
I must be an Israelite. Are any of you Jewish? Not really. Every one of us is
a Cushite, a Tyrian, an Ethiopian, a Rehobite. What else are we? You go through the list. And
so to be included in the list of the names of the people of
God is a blessing. And in this little couple of
verses, in verses four through six, it speaks of those who have
been born from above and whose names are written in the Lamb’s
book of life. we have been established into
the church by the Most High himself. Verse 5 tells us. And so Gentiles
and Jews alike have been added. And so we think of the surrounding
nations, the wonderful event of Pentecost and we realize that
those who call on the name of the Lord, those who acknowledge
God, those who are established by God, those who are born in
Zion by the heavenly birth, by the birth of the Holy Spirit,
we recognize that we have been included by grace and by mercy. Well, there’s a fourth thing
that comes in verse seven, and we can look at it through the
lens of the line in verse two of glorious things. See the streams
of living waters. We talk a lot about how we live
and move and have our being in God. Apart from Christ, we can
do nothing. He is the vine, we are the branches.
Without him, we are nothing and can do nothing. And so in verse
two of the hymn, it says, see the streams of living waters
springing from eternal love. Well supply thy sons and daughters
and all fear of want remove. Who can faint? while such a river
ever flows their thirst to assuage. Grace, which like the Lord, the
giver, never fails from age to age. And so we see from Psalm
87, we see from verse two of this John Newton hymn, We see
that the church for us is a place of grace. The church is our source. Paul tells Timothy the church
is the pillar and the buttress of truth. Paul tells the Galatians
that the church, Jerusalem, which is from above, is our mother. And so we recognize that we have
no birth and no life apart from the church of the living God. It is our place of grace. It
is our market day where we can feed our soul on the Lord’s day. God, through the church, feeds
us from his river of life. I love that line, it says, who
can faint? How does it say, who can faint while such river ever
flows their thirst to assuage.” What was the problem with the
Israelites in the wilderness? They said something like this,
can Yahweh spread a table in the wilderness? And he can. It
may be manna, but it will be enough for the day and enough
for the strength that you need. Can he give water? He can. He
can give it from a rock and he can give it from his own living
source. Some of you a couple weeks ago
went to hear, I believe it was Dennis Swanberg at the Piedmont
Rescue Mission Banquet, pretty funny fella. And he gives a little
talk that I heard years ago about how sometimes we in the church,
we get stuck in the past. And he uses this passage when
he gives this talk, the passage where it says, Moses, my servant
is dead. Okay, if Moses is dead, it’s
kind of hard to be a Moses man, right? I’m a Moses man. Well,
if Moses is dead, you better look to Joshua. He’s the next
one God has raised up. And he talks about how there
must’ve been some good old bubba’s in the church back then that
says, I’m a Moses man and I’ll never be a Joshua man. And he
talks about how through history, everybody who’s a whatever man
from the past needs to get with the program. And he talked about
how back in the day, his dad was an Arnold Palmer man. Arnold
Palmer, Arnold Palmer. And he had to tell his dad one
day, dad, there is a tiger on the loose. And you might want
to become a tiger man. Because over time, things change.
And Tiger may have won a recent golf tournament, but it was his
first in a long time. We’re looking at Rory’s. whatever
other names now on the golf circuit. And so sometimes we in the church,
what Swanberg is trying to say is we need to get out of the
past and think about the present and what God has provided now. And so God has provided for us
in his church, he’s provided for us Jesus. And we may have
ministers come and go, we may have prophets come and go as
Israel did, we may have R.C. Sprouls and Martin Luther’s come
and go, but Jesus never goes and he loves his church and so
should we. Let us pause and pray together.
Our Lord and God, we thank you for this, your word from this
psalm and we pray that it would comfort us, that it would change
how we feel and even what we see, to see what you see and
how you feel about your church. Glorious things of thee are spoken,
Zion, city of our God. Help us to see and to think and
to feel that way because you do. And help us to do so from
your holy word. And we pray that our love for
the church would spread and increase and that others may come to taste
a glimpse, a hint, a foretaste of the Zion from above here in
this place. We ask and pray it in Jesus name.
Amen. God’s own city God’s own city
God’s own city ♪ We tell ♪ ♪ I will name as those
who know me ♪ ♪ Egypt, Tyre, and Babylon ♪ ♪ They will say
of Gush and Rahab ♪ ♪ This one was its die and born ♪ God Almighty,
God Almighty, God Almighty. ♪ And the Lord shall count the
nations ♪ ♪ Sons and daughters he shall sing ♪ ♪ Born to endless
life in Zion ♪ ♪ And their joyful song shall ring ♪ ♪ Blessed Zion,
blessed Zion ♪ Amen. Go in peace.