Psalm 53
Let’s hear from God’s word together,
Psalm 53. The title says, to the choir
master, according to Mahalath, a masculine of David. The fool
in his heart says, there is no God. They are corrupt, doing
abominable iniquity. There is none who does good.
God looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if
there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have
all fallen away, together they have become corrupt. There is
none who does good, not even one. Have those who work evil
no knowledge, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not
call upon God. There they are in great terror,
where there is no terror. For God scatters the bones of
him who encamps against you. and you put them to shame for
God has rejected them. Oh, that salvation for Israel
would come out of Zion. When God restores the fortunes
of his people, let Jacob rejoice and let Israel be glad. How many
of you as a kid, or maybe you read to your kids the book, where
the wild things are. Remember that book? And what does that little boy
say when he becomes a monster? He says to the other monsters,
I will eat you up. That’s what Psalm 53 and Psalm
14 remind me of when it says in verse four, have those who
work evil, no knowledge who eat up my people as they eat bread. They do not call upon the name
of God. Remember the little boy and where
the wild things are, he was evil. He was terrible and he’ll eat
you up. Well, that’s sort of the, the
center of the wickedness of the people who are against God’s
people in Psalm 53. So, why Psalm 53 if you have
Psalm 54? I mean, we could just shut the
Bible, go home, be out of here a few minutes early and say we’ve
already been there, done that, got the notes and we’re all good
to go. Well, Psalm 53 is the same as
Psalm 54, but it’s a little different. So what are the differences?
Why would God repeat the same word or a similar word in the
scriptures when he’s already got it in Psalm 14? Well, one
fundamental difference to remember is placement in the Psalter.
Remember Psalm 53, Psalm 14 are in the whole Psalter, the whole
150 books of the Psalter. And Psalm 14 is in Book 1, Psalm
53 is in Book 2. So their placement in the Psalter
is one big difference. And you say, well, whoop-dee-doo.
One’s chapter X, one’s chapter that doesn’t make too big of
a difference. Well, there are a couple of differences. In book one,
where we have Psalm 14, you’ll find the Yush Yahweh, or the
Lord, the Lord in all caps. You’ll find it a couple of times
in Psalm 14, whereas in Psalm 53, which is in book two, you’ll
find the word Elohim, which is just the general term for God.
And so you have in book one, Psalms one through 41, you have
Yahweh as the center of the Psalms. And as you look in book two,
you have Elohim, just a different term for God. It’s not the divine
covenantal name, but it’s a different word for God. You’ll find that
as the center. So there’s one little difference. One basic
difference is that in chapter 14, Psalm 14, you have seven
verses and in chapter 53, Psalm 53, you have six verses. Another interesting little tidbit,
David, younger David in Psalm 14. He’s older, more sanctified
David, more life experience, and so you get early David, later
David, and so he knows he’s repeating himself. So you know that under
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he’s a king, a servant of God,
a wise man. He knows what he’s doing. He
hasn’t gotten old and senile, and it’s not that the What was
it they did with David? They put young maidens in his
bed to keep him warm. It’s not that he’s gotten old
and cold and can’t think straight. He knows what he’s doing, but
it’s just older David and later David, early David, later David.
Psalm 14 is an Israelite context. You know, it’s a little change
in pronouns, but there’s an Israelite context. The people doing evil
in Psalm 14 are Israelites, and when you get to Psalm 53, it’s
Gentiles. Some say it’s during Hezekiah’s time when Sennacherib,
the king of the Assyrians, came and attacked the people of God.
God scattered. the enemies of Sennacherib and
his wicked army. And so that may be the context
of Psalm 53, but the enemies are different. In 14, it’s an
Israelite internal bunch of enemies. And in 53, it’s the Gentiles.
It’s a couple of words that are different. Psalm 14 uses the
word deeds. They do wicked deeds. Psalm 53,
it’s wicked ways. It says, all have turned aside
in Psalm 14. In Psalm 53, it says, everyone
has turned away. And then in Psalm 14, it speaks
of evildoers. In 53, it says, the evildoers. And you know what happens when
you get a the in front of you. It intensifies it, it changes
things a little. But here’s the really big difference.
The really big difference is that verses five and six in Psalm
14 are replaced with verse five in Psalm 53. Psalm 53 verse 5
says, There they are in great terror where there is no terror. For God scatters the bones of
him who encamps against you. You put them to shame for God
has rejected them. And Psalm 14 has a little bit
different wording. But here’s the bottom line. I don’t want to go all too much
into the fool and godless. We we did that last time. You
you hear enough of that. Um I wanna encourage us with
the very ending of Psalm fifty-three. Verse six says these words, oh
that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion when God restores
the fortunes of his people. Let Jacob rejoice. Let Israel
be glad. So I just want to spend a minute
or two on this idea of faith in the midst of fools. Faith
in the midst of fools. Every Sunday when we come to
the pastoral prayer, I make some little statement that goes something
like this. Let’s ask for God’s help and blessing as we live
life in a fallen world and in the midst of a crooked Y’all
aren’t listening on Sunday morning, are ya? Y’all are asleep by that
point in time. Then the choir finishes you off. Let’s ask for
God’s help and blessing as we live life in the midst of a crooked
and depraved generation, as we live life in a fallen world.
Because it’s a hard place to live. Yes, we have our first
world problems, like the internet goes down, the carpet is outdated
two years after we put it in. We have those problems. But our
real problems are the world and the devil. Heard mention of that
earlier tonight in our creed. We have wicked people all around
us. We have fools who say there is
no God. We have fools who are out for our destruction. We have
fools who pull out stunts like Las Vegas. We have fools across
the world who are eating up people in other nations as bread. We
have fools who are wicked tyrannical regimes that keep Christian men
like Andrew Brunson in prison. We have fools all around us who
say there is no God, and they act as if there is no God, but
God is gonna show up. And as you read through the early
verses of Psalm 14, Psalm 53, we find out what God thinks about
them. We find out what the word says about them. But how are
we to live lives of faith in the midst of fools? Sin abounds all around us and
it pays dividends. Evil seems to be getting worse.
Now, some of you who have a little more white on top of the mountain,
a little more gray on your head than some of others of us, you
can probably say in good conscience, the world isn’t like it used
to be. I can remember when I could send
my kids out on their bicycles and send them out after school
and they didn’t come home the dark and they were just fine. Nobody
was in the woods after them and all that kind of business. But
the world seems to be getting progressively worse. And so how
do we live life of faith in the midst of fools? Well, God’s people
have always lived with Philistines and Canaanites and Assyrians
and Babylonians. They lived in the New Testament
era with the Romans. And they lived with many of the
similar problems that we live with today here in the 21st century.
We have people all around us that hate God. They hate God’s
people. They hate God’s church. They
hate Christians. And so how do we live a life
of faith in the midst of fools? Well, verse six can help us with
that. It’s a wish. It’s a prayer. It’s
a ask for God’s blessing has been a diction. We pray that
salvation for Israel would come out of Zion. Now, at the time
this was written, where was Zion? It was at a mountain in Jerusalem. And Jesus had not yet come. But
we live on the other side of Jesus coming into this world.
We live on the other side of the cross. We live on the other
side of all the promises that God has given to his church.
And so where will our salvation out of Zion come? will come out
of heaven. It’ll come out of the New Jerusalem.
It’ll come out of not an earthly Zion, but a heavenly, a mountain
of Zion that will come down out of heaven. And so we pray for
the second coming of Jesus. How do we live faith, a life
of faith in the midst of fools? Well, we do it with one eye on
the coming the Lord Jesus. It’s a reason that there’s a
good reason Jesus wrote the book of Revelation through John. It
wasn’t to confuse us. It wasn’t to make Hal Lindsey
and all these other guys rich who write all these wonderful
fantastical books about things. Jesus wrote the Revelation to
encourage saints. that Jesus comes, Jesus wins,
and that you will have everlasting life if you have faith in him. And he calls us to persevere.
He calls us to remain constant in our faith. He calls us to
continue to share the light of the gospel, the hope of Jesus
into the world. So he says in this prayer, verse
six, oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion when God
restores the fortunes of his people. Some of you may have
read in your literature classes, Paradise Lost and then Paradise
Regained. And that is a hope that we are
longing for. We want the Garden of Eden again. We want the unbroken fellowship
that we once had with God. We want it back again. We want
God to restore the fortunes of his people. And this is not a
return from exile to Babylon, like maybe our forebears prayed
for. This is not a deliverance out of Egypt that the early people
of God looked for. This is not something on this
earth. We can’t wait for God to bring
in the new heavens and the new earth and to restore the fortunes
of his people. And then notice how the end of
verse six, it speaks of our response. It may be dark all around us.
Uh, the fools may be winning. Uh, we may seem, uh, it may seem
like we’re living in a wasteland that culture couldn’t get any
more rotten than it is. The politics couldn’t get any
thicker. The, People couldn’t be more privileged and eat us
up as if we’re bread and wipe their mouths and act as if nothing
has happened. But it says, let Jacob rejoice. Let Israel be glad. There’s a good message for the
church in that, you know, so many people as Christians just
bemoan culture. Oh, there’s another bad movie
coming out. Well, what do you expect? Read Romans one. They’re
going to keep putting out bad movies until Jesus comes. Or
they say, what about politics? Oh, the politics are so bad.
Well, turn off your Fox news and watch something else. Maybe
not ESPN. Um, but what, what, you know,
we got, we got to get a little perspective change. We, we, we
sometimes as Christians can be so, absolutely pessimistic about
how dark it is, but just think about how much the gospel is
doing in the world. We need to hear more good news
stories, because the news and whatever else is depressing,
but this is a good command to us. Let Jacob rejoice. Let Israel
be glad. Some of you vacation every year. You have a little trip to see
your family, or maybe you get to go see your grandchildren,
or you go back to your home place, or the beach, whatever it may
be. Disney? Who knows? and you get
excited about it and you put a little mark on your calendar.
It’s another day sooner. It’s another day sooner. Don’t
you think we ought to be doing that with another day sooner
until Jesus may return, until he may take us home. And so we
have so much to rejoice and be glad about because God, even
in the midst of us living lives of faith in the midst of fools,
it is dark, it is hard, but Jesus will make us glad. He will restore
our fortunes. And so we ought to be a little
more optimistic, a little more happy about our condition because
it’s gonna get better. and God is going to come and
make all things new. So let’s pause together and pray.
We do thank you, our Lord and God, for this little passage
of scripture that teaches us truth about the world and the
way it is, but it also teaches us about ourselves and how we
live in light of the glorious hope of the Lord Jesus. We long
for the day when He comes to make all things new. We long
for the day when all wrong is made right, when justice is served,
and where you avenge the deaths of those who have died on account
of your gospel. Lord, we pray that we would be
glad, that we would rejoice, that we would live out of the
truths that are on the pages of scripture. Though reality
around us may seem dark, though the fools around us may seem
to be winning and to be pressing us down, We know the truth that
Jesus wins and that the days will get brighter and the shadows
will flee and that we will enjoy your blessed presence forever
and ever. And we do pray that we would be glad and rejoice
and that as we are glad and rejoice that the nations would be glad
and that more and more men and women and boys and girls may
come to faith in Jesus and have this hope that is ours in Christ.
We ask and pray it in his name. Amen.