Psalm 98
Psalm 98 is our passage that
we’ll be exploring together this morning. And we have just sang
together a number of carols, a number of Christmas songs that
are no doubt very familiar to you. And we’re just coming off
of the Christmas holiday, the time where we celebrate the nativity
of our Lord. And you will notice that the
title of this sermon in your worship guide is entitled Joy
to the World. which is the same hymn, the same
carol that we’ll be singing as we close together this morning. And that carol that is so familiar
to us is in many respects based upon the psalm that we’ll be
looking at together, Psalm 98. And the message of Psalm 98 is
this. is that instead of receiving
the wrath of God that you and I deserve because of our sin
and our rebellion against the Lord, instead of getting that,
we get God’s mercy. We receive it as we lean upon
Christ alone as he is offered to us in the gospel. Jesus Christ
is the life giver. And what we find in the carol
that we’re gonna sing, Joy to the World, is this connection
between the coming of Jesus Christ and the restoration of all things. Of light coming into the darkness,
of renewal where there is decay, of grace where there is condemnation. And so because of that, we can
respond to God in praise and in joy. So let’s read Psalm 98,
and then we will pray. Psalm 98, a psalm. O sing to the Lord a new song,
for He has done marvelous things. His right hand and His holy arm
have worked salvation for Him. The Lord has made known His salvation. He has revealed His righteousness
in the sight of the nations. He has remembered His steadfast
love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends
of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. Make a joyful noise
to the Lord all the earth. Break forth into joyous song
and sing praises. Sing praises to the Lord with
a lyre, with a lyre and the sound of melody. With trumpets and
the sound of the horn, make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord. Let the sea roar and all that
fills it, the world and all who dwell in it. Let the rivers clap
their hands. Let the hills sing for joy together
before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge
the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity. Amen. This is God’s holy, inspired,
and inerrant word. May he write its eternal truth
upon all of our hearts. Let’s pray together. Father, we pray this morning
that you would indeed take your word, and write it upon our hearts. We know that your word is useful
for teaching and rebuking and correcting and training in the
way of righteousness so that we might be equipped for every
good work. And we believe that, and so we
pray that you would use it to that end this morning for the
joy of your people and for the sake of your glory. We pray it
in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen. Well, over the holiday
season, which seems to begin in the shopping world right around
Halloween time, but especially coming after Thanksgiving and
between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there are a number of noteworthy
dates. There is Black Friday, There’s
Cyber Monday, and there’s Giving Tuesday, and there’s probably
a whole host of others that I’m not totally aware of, but over
the next few years, there will probably be more that come onto
the scene that will rise to our attention. And they all lead
to Christmas, which is, as we sing and hear on the radio, the
most wonderful time of the year. That’s what Christmas and this
whole season is supposed to be, at least in terms of what is
commonplace in our culture. But not even a month after the
Christmas holiday, there is a date that has been designated as Blue
Monday. it is always the third Monday
of January. So this year it is January 20th. And Blue Monday is supposed to
be the most depressing day of the year, right? Just right after,
not even a month after the most wonderful time of the year. But
when you think about it, it kind of makes sense because January
20th is when the credit card bill comes in the mail, right?
And you realize that you have overspent during the Christmas
holidays, and you are racked with debt. And then you’ve made
all of these New Year’s resolutions, and you are determined that this
is gonna be the year that you keep them, but by January 20th,
you’ve blown them all. And then January 20th, oftentimes
seems to be just about the darkest, coldest, grayest, most uncomfortable
time of the winter. And so it makes sense that it
would be designated as the most depressing time of the year.
And Christians are not immune to this. I mean, we just read
out of the scriptures, Psalm 98, all of this talk about joy
and the Lord. And if you are even slightly
familiar with Christianity, you know that there is something
of joy that ought to emanate from the Christian’s life. But
it is commonplace in the life of the believer, not only on
January 20th, but all other days of the year, that we can be kind
of bogged down with feelings of depression or morbidity or
just the feeling that things are just out of sorts in our
lives and in the world. And when you look at your life,
maybe you sense that, right? A disconnect between your experience
and what we just read together in Psalm 98. They’re just not
really joined together that well. And if you’re a person who has
trusted in Christ alone, a person who knows you have been adopted
as his child, you realize that he calls you his friend. He’s
given you every spiritual blessing. He has given you an inheritance
that can never perish or spoil or fade. He’s given you the hope
of glory. He’s given you the promise that
He is with you to the very end of the age. I mean, what more
could God promise you? That He’s forgiven all of your
sins, and He’s given you all of the righteousness that you
need to stand before Him, and you have that promise, and that
should all fill us with immeasurable joy. But you don’t feel that, do you? There’s a sense in your heart
where that joy seems to be missing. And when you don’t have that
joy in the Lord, what you and I end up doing is we end up functioning,
not out of faith, but out of fear, or shame, or guilt, And
we seek to comfort ourselves and assuage those feelings by
sort of seeking out what is going to please us in the moment, what’s
going to just make us feel better. Or by pursuing the approval and
acceptance of others. or by trying to amass more power
over things, or more control over our life. We seek to order
our private world, and no matter how much of it we pursue, and
no matter how much of it we actually get, it just never seems to really
be enough. And this is why we need the scriptures. This is why we need God’s word.
This is why we need scripture and why we need song based upon
it to reorient our souls and lead us to the one who is the
object of our joy. And Psalm 98 does that for us. And in fact, it gives us a reason
why our lives can be filled with worship and in joy, not just
on Christmas during the most wonderful time of the year, but
during the entire year. And in fact, in just the first
three verses, you see six reasons why we can be filled with joy. And let me just briefly zero
in on those six reasons. First of all, A reason why we
can sing, a reason why our hearts can be full of joy is because
he has done marvelous things. And everywhere you look in scripture,
you start to see this, right? The narrative, the story of the
collective history of the Israelites would have been the Exodus, right?
that they had been under bondage for years and years, centuries. There was no one alive that could
even have the remotest sense of a time where they were under
freedom. And yet, The Lord released them
from that bondage. He released them from the bondage
of the Egyptians. He saves them from all of the
plagues that pummeled the Egyptians. He enabled the Israelites to
pass through the Red Sea, the Hebrews to pass through the Red
Sea, and swallows up those who were pursuing him. He defeats,
the Lord defeats the enemies of God’s people and he brings
them by grace into the land of promise, a land that was flowing
with milk and honey. And at every turn, the Old Testament
church could look back on their collective history and see how
God fought for them and how God delivered them, not because of
how great they were, they were a stiff-necked people. But despite
their sinfulness, Despite their rebellion and indifference, God
continues to pursue them and continues to liberate them and
continues to seek their joy and seek their blessing and seek
what is good for them despite all that is evil within them
and against the most insurmountable odds. And on this side of history,
on this side of the cross, we have an even greater privilege
and an even greater joy to be able to look back on what Christ
has done and see how he has delivered us from a much more hellish eternity
than even the Israelites experienced in Egypt. He’s ransomed, healed,
restored, forgiven us. He has broken down that wall
of hostility and established peace between us and Him. And He is continuing to do that
now in the lives of many people in our community and all throughout
the world. And we have not only the privilege
of looking back to His first coming, but we have the privilege
of looking forward. to the time where our souls and
our bodies will be glorified, will be with Him in glory, and
there will be no crying and no pain and no suffering and no
tears and no death and none of the miseries that life seems
to throw at us every day. These are the marvelous things
that the psalmist is talking about here. Things that ought
to stir up joy in our hearts. He’s done marvelous things. Secondly,
we discover that his right hand and his holy arm have worked
salvation for him. In other words, the people are
reminded here that their salvation and hope stems completely from
God. Completely from God and not from
themselves. He has done the work himself
in pursuing his people, and none of that salvation stems from
us. It’s all a work of sovereign, amazing grace. See, every family
has a set of unspoken rules, doesn’t it? I mean you grew up
in a family, you have a family where there are some unspoken
rules in the household, family rules that you just know about
because you’re part of that family. One of the rules in my household
growing up was that you were to work hard. working hard and
being diligent in your work was important. And my parents instilled
that into my sister and me because their parents, who were children
of the Great Depression, instilled that in them. Because when my
grandparents were growing up, if you didn’t work, you didn’t
eat. I mean, that was when you ate
the whole chicken. All of it. The liver, the whole
deal. And they ate that because they
needed it to survive and they had to work for it. It didn’t
just come, it just didn’t appear out of nowhere. And hard work,
I think that we can agree, is a good thing. That is a good
value, a good thing that my parents passed on to me and that their
parents passed on to them. But there’s something counterintuitive
about it when it comes to Christianity. Because with the gospel, it’s
more about resting than it is about working. It’s about resting
in the grace and in the merits and in the work of Jesus Christ
alone for you, rather than working to appease God. That’s Buddhism,
that’s not Christianity. It is about resting in the work
of Christ. You are saved entirely by works. Entirely by works, but it is
not your works that saves you, it is Christ’s work that saves
you. And we rest in what he has accomplished
for us and applied to us in the gospel. And it just is so counterintuitive
to the way in which we are wired. Now for sure, faith produces
good works. James talks about that. We know
that if you do not have works that honor and glorify the Lord,
then you do not have faith. It’s dead faith. But the only
reason why you get the faith in the first place is because
Jesus came and gave that to you. The Holy Spirit gave you the
faith, the ability to repent and believe in Him. And faith
is really about being dependent upon His promises, about resting
upon the work of Jesus Christ to you. And that faith that God
has given to His people is something that He uses to give us salvation. It is the means to the end that
Jesus has accomplished for us. He has done it and He has paid
it all. Jesus didn’t pay it most. He
didn’t pay it some. He didn’t pay it most of the
way. He paid it all. And that is the good news. And
that takes a huge burden off of our shoulders. His holy arm
and His right hand have worked salvation for Him. Thirdly, we
see in verse two that He has made known His salvation. God
has revealed Himself to us. That is another piece of good
news because it means that He’s personal. We don’t have this
distant, detached, aloof, disinterested God. He has personally made himself
known to his people, to you. And that’s why we can’t depersonalize
our worship and make it cold and sterile. God has made himself
known. But before the birth of Christ,
before Jesus was born, he made himself known through the prophets.
through the words and the mighty works of salvation. But the writer
of Hebrews, we see in Hebrews chapter one that in these days
he has made himself known through his son. And this is where Christmas
and the birth of Christ come into play because the incarnation,
the birth of Jesus Christ means that God has embodied himself
among us. He is with us, Emmanuel. He took on a real body. Fingers, toes, hands, arms, legs,
the whole deal. A real body, a real soul. He dwelt among us. He walked
in our shoes. He endured temptation. When he
was hungry and tired, by the way, which is when temptation
really seems to stir up. He went through things that you
and I go through, that people go through. He endured the temptation,
but he never succumbed to it. Only a God who becomes human
and is faithful at every point at which we have failed can actually
accomplish the salvation. Only a God where the punishment
that we deserve, that you deserve, is paid for, but not paid for
by you, but by Him, can accomplish this salvation. See, here’s the
deal. If the law demands perfection,
and you disobey it, then you get to endure the justice. You
have to either obey, or you get justice. But the gospel tells
us that the obedience that we need comes from a substitute. It comes from the sinless one,
it comes from Emmanuel, Jesus, God with us, who obeys for us. He gets what we deserve, which
is wrath, and we get what he deserves, which is grace and
glory and love. And the Father looks at his people
who are in Christ, and he is well pleased with them.
Not because of what you have done for him, but because of
what Jesus has done for you. And Psalm 98 points us to the
hope that one day there would be a Redeemer who would come
and take on that body and soul for us, and that is why Christmas
is so important. It’s the realization that his
salvation has been made known and the promised one has come
to deliver his people. And that’s why we sing joy to
the world. Fourth point is this. He has revealed his righteousness
in the sight of the nations. That means that while our faith
is personal, it’s not privatized. It doesn’t belong only in your
crowd, within the walls of this church, a bunch of your friends
within these walls. It is public. It is a public faith. There’s
an outward dimension to what Christ has done. is doing and
promises to do. The gospel is not something that
belongs just to one particular culture, to one particular type
of people. It’s for everyone, everywhere,
who will repent and believe in Jesus Christ alone. We hear in
our culture the word diversity cropping up a lot. Diversity
is a word that is just stirring around in the world all the time. It’s a very significant cultural
value. And it seems like a progressive
one. But what is the basis upon which we can understand people
of different languages, different ethnicities, different cultures,
different ages, and so forth? as being equal in dignity and
value to every one of us. It’s because when we look at
the pages of Scripture, we discover that every tongue, every tribe,
every nation, male, female, have been created by God in His image
and for His glory. See, Christianity isn’t just
the white man’s religion, as is sometimes said. Jesus, a Middle
Eastern Jew, was part of a family that sought refuge in North Africa.
And after his ascension, where does the gospel go? To the ends
of the earth. It goes out of that little sliver
of land in the Middle East, and it just spreads everywhere. It goes to Europe. It goes to
Asia. It goes to Africa. It goes to
North America, to South America. In fact, the places today where
the gospel is expanding the most happen to be in Africa, in Asia,
in Latin America. There are more Presbyterians
in the little African country of Malawi than there are in the
United States of America. Did you know that? There are
more Anglicans in Nigeria than there are in England, where the
Church of England, the Anglicans, came from. And some of the largest
gatherings in our major cities of believers Even here in our
own country are people whose mother tongue is Spanish and
Korean and Mandarin and Portuguese and a whole host of African and
Asian languages. See, what that means is that
God is gathering his people of every stripe, every tongue and
tribe and nation and uniting us under one head, Jesus Christ.
And that means the church can speak with a clear voice about
God, to our community, even in the midst of all of our differences.
Here’s the fifth point. Fifth point in verse 3, He has
revealed His righteousness in the sight of the nations to the
house of Israel. I don’t know about you, but I
forget God’s love. I don’t forget it intellectually.
I’ve got that down. I understand that that is what’s
in the Bible. I believe that the Bible teaches
that God loves his people and that he loves me personally. But inward, on the inside, I
forget that. I lose sight of the fact that
he has made me secure by what he has done for me. I lose sight
of the fact that in the midst of all of the chaos and challenges
that life seems to face, that He’s actually pursuing my best
interests. That He’s leading me onto a path
that will bring me joy. And when I forget that, I seek
out my own path for joy instead. I forget His love and His faithfulness,
and you forget it too, if you’re honest. I forget it all the time,
but you know what? God has not forgotten His love
and His faithfulness to you and me. I forget it, He never forgets
it, ever. And the birth of Jesus Christ
shows us that. Jesus shows us that, that despite our forgetfulness
and our failure, He has still come to bring grace and peace
to us. There’s never one second when
the love of God takes even the slightest step. And here’s the last reason why
we can sing for joy. In verse three, all of the ends
of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. You know, at the
time that Psalm 98 was written, it is almost a certainty that
your ancestors and my ancestors, wherever they may have come from,
looking back 3,000 years, wherever those ancestors may have come
from were probably pagan, godless, idolatrous, barbaric people. That’s your heritage. That’s
my heritage. That’s the reality. They were,
as Paul says in Ephesians 2, without hope and without God
in the world. And somehow against the odds,
somehow against the odds, the gospel made its way to us. The
gospel made its way to you, despite how antagonistic and how much
pushback there was against the Gospel, and even today in our
own community, in our own world in general, God is continuing
to pursue His people. He’s continuing to do it, just
as He did to those who came before us, just as He did to you and
to me. And so here’s the point. When
you’re feeling like you’re kind of sullen and in the doldrums
and you don’t know what to pray about and give thanks for, turn
in your Bible to Psalm 98 and just read the first three verses
and look back to that and let that marinate in your soul for
a little bit. Let that renew your passion and
your zeal and your thankfulness for His mercies. because we are
so prone to wonder, Lord we feel it, prone to leave the God we
love. See, it’s there for us so that
we would know a sense of joy in our communion with God. And if you rarely or ever experience
that joy, If you rarely or ever are moved, as we will see in
just a few minutes, by the glories of His righteousness and the
wonders of His love, then that’s something you probably ought
to get checked out. See, if your sight is going bad
or your hearing is going bad, that’s probably something you
ought to get checked out. you probably ought to see someone
about that. If you lose your taste for God,
if you have very little appetite for him, that’s something you
should get checked out. You should connect with his people.
You should key into his word privately in gathered worship
and say, God, make yourself known to me. Move in my soul. Show
me the clutter. that is interfering with my joy
in you. It’s okay to seek help. It’s
okay to seek the Lord and to be honest about the fact that
there might be a lack of a taste for Him, a lack of ears and eyes
to hear and see Him. It’s okay to be thirsty. It’s
not okay to fail to ask for the drink. All of these things in the first
three verses here are not merely products of coincidence. They’re wonderful, merciful works
of God, showing His grace to His people. There’s a freshness
to His mercies that are new every morning, and they’re meant to
stir our hearts, to join with the sea, and the rivers, and
the mountains, to lift our hearts in praise to Him. But it’s right after Christmas,
and we’re wondering when we’re gonna get to that. Because Blue
Monday is coming. And when you look at this passage,
this is where the more familiar stanzas of joy to the world come
in. They creep into the picture.
Because in verses four through nine, we start to see echoes
of that carol. Just real fast, I wanna show
this to you. In fact, you may wanna look at
that carol in your hymnal. It may help you. Joy to the world,
the Lord is come. Let earth receive her King. This,
of course, is based off of the sixth verse of Psalm 98, where
we’re called to make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord. Now, we are Americans, and Americans
don’t do kings. In fact, we had a rather noteworthy
war about that back in the late 1700s, right? We don’t like kings
because our founding fathers knew that the first rule of politics
actually applies, that power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely. The best of kings are corrupt.
David was the best king that Israel ever had. and he was still
corrupt. We know about those corruptions. Kings are oftentimes wildly ruthless
towards their subjects. And so there’s something ingrained
even in the American psyche that is distrustful of government
and distrustful of any kind of absolute rule. But when Jesus
was born, a new kingdom dawned. And it dawned with an eternal,
benevolent, gracious king that has fought to the point of death
to not only make us his people, but to constantly pursue our
good, to constantly pursue our joy, and to deliver us from his
and our enemies, just as he did to the Hebrews during the Exodus. Kings never go to the front lines
for their people. They never do that. But that’s
exactly what Jesus Christ, our King, has done for us to make
us His own. As the carol says, He rules the
world. with truth and grace and makes
the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and wonders
of his love. That’s the king that you have.
That’s the king that Christians worship, the God that we can
believe and trust in, the person upon whom our hope and our confidence
and our identity is built. When Isaac Watts wrote this carol,
it’s generally agreed upon that he had the second coming of Christ
in view more than the first coming, more than Christmas. But whether
you sing this song with the view of the completion of the kingdom
of God, when he will come again, when Jesus will come again and
reign and rule and bring about the new heavens and new earth
and all things will be made new, or if you read this, song, this
carol in light of Jesus’s first coming on Christmas with the
incarnation of Jesus in mind. Either way the song works. Either
way it works because in both instances the same King has come
to fight for and achieve the eternal joy of his people. And that’s why we can sing, as
the carol says, that the whole earth can receive her king. And
that’s why the song calls every heart, every heart to prepare
him room. The king has come on Christmas,
and he will make everything right. And verse nine says he’ll come
again to judge the world in righteousness and the peoples with equity.
And you know, there is no more terrifying thing in the world
to hear than that. There is no more terrifying thing
to hear and a horrible thing to experience than being judged
by God if you are someone who has rejected Him as King. If you have not prepared Him
room in your heart, there is no more horrible thing to fall
into, but there is no more wonderful thing to know. then if you have
received the king, you will be judged on the merits of the one
who was born of a virgin in a cattle stall to live for us, to pay
for our sins through his death, and to bring us new and eternal
life through his resurrection, to be judged on his merits rather
than our own. My friends, this is the message
of the gospel. He’s removed our condemnation
because of Christ’s work for us. And he’s also gonna come
again to remove the curse and make all things new. No more
let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He’s
come to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found. And I think that forces you and
me to ask ourselves, do we really believe in Him? Because perhaps you’re more familiar
with your successes and your failures than you are with the
success of Jesus Christ for you in the Gospel. The grid through
which you read your life is the grid of what you have accomplished
in all kinds of different spheres of your life. And your self-definition
is built upon that. But the call of Psalm 98 and
the call of joy to the world and of the very gospel is not
to build your life upon your successes, but to build your
life upon the success of Jesus Christ for you. There is no ultimate
joy by looking within. None. That’s not where your hope is
to be found. The call here is to build your
hope and your joy on the newborn King. That Christ has come and
He’s coming again. And that He would be known as
beautiful as He truly is in your soul. And that you would find
joy and peace by delighting yourself in Him. All creation speaks of
His beauty. while fields and floods, rocks,
hills, and plains repeat the sounding joy. And the only way
we’re gonna know true joy in this life and in the next is
if we begin to find ourself satisfied in Him as well. So a new year
is coming in just a few days. And it’s my desire, and I pray
that it’s your desire, that above all that we pursue in 2020, The
main thrust of our lives would be to treasure Jesus, his ongoing
work for us in the gospel, and his grace, and the glories of
his righteousness, and the wonders of his love. Amen. Let’s pray. Jesus, we thank you
for your word. write it upon our hearts. Let
us not believe it merely in our heads, but in our souls. We pray
this for the sake of Your glory, the sake of our joy, and the
sake of those who have yet to come to know You. We pray this
in the name of Him who came such a distance for us, our Lord Jesus
Christ. Amen.