Psalm 97
Let’s hear from God’s word, Psalm
97, and it begins this way. The Lord reigns. Let the earth
rejoice. Let the many coastlands be glad. Clouds and thick darkness are
all around him, righteousness and justice. are the foundation
of his throne. Fire goes before him and burns
up his adversaries all around. His lightnings light up the world,
the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax before
the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth. The heavens proclaim
his righteousness, and all the people see his glory. All worshipers
of images are put to shame, who make their boast in worthless
idols. Worship him, all you gods. Zion
hears and is glad, and the daughters of Judah rejoice because of your
judgments, O Lord. For you, O Lord, are most high
over all the earth. You are exalted far above all
gods. Oh, you who love the Lord hate
evil. He preserves the lives of his saints. He delivers them
from the hands of the wicked. Light is sown for the righteous
and joy for the upright in heart. Rejoice in the Lord. Oh, you
righteous and give thanks to his holy name. Amen. In the last couple of weeks,
we’ve looked at Psalms 93 and now through 97. And remember
that these are what are called the kingship Psalms. And one
of the common phrases that you’ll find in these Psalms is this
little phrase, Yahweh reigns. The Lord, if you have it in your
Bibles in front of you, in all caps, the Lord reigns. That’s why these are called kingship
psalms. And in these kingship psalms,
one of the things you probably noticed as a pattern is it speaks
of the benefits to the righteous of having God as king. Think
about it this way. If God is our king, we have good
roads, we have low taxes, we have all the food we want to
eat. Crime is at a low rate. It sort of sounds like a presidential
campaign, doesn’t it? That’s a lot of times how we
speak of the kingship of someone. But in Psalm 97, it’s going to
turn a little bit different, and it’s going to speak about
the negative aspect of God as King for the unrighteous. God is going to come and for
the unrighteous, His coming as King or His reigning as King
is not a good thing. It’s a day of righteousness.
It’s a day of justice. Now, as you pick apart Psalm
97, which we want to do for just a few minutes, there’s really
five ways to look at it, five ways it breaks apart. A couple
of them are just one verse sections, and then some have two or three
or four verses. But we want to begin by looking
at verse one, which is the first And it simply says, the Lord
reigns, let the earth rejoice, let the many coastlands be glad. What does it mean that Yahweh
reigns? What does it mean that he rules? What does it mean that,
maybe to say it a different way, he is sovereign, he is king over
all. We like to say that God is sovereign. We like to say that he rules
over his kingdom. But then when our human nature
starts to think about it too much, we really don’t like the
fact that God is completely sovereign. You’ve heard the arguments in
the discussion about salvation. Is God completely sovereign in
salvation? Does man have anything to do
with his salvation? Is it 50% God, 50% man or 80-20? What’s the ratio? Or sometimes
we say we live in the world and God is king over it. And we hear
people say, but he’s not in control of everything. And for sure,
natural disasters or terrorism or those sorts of things, those
aren’t under God’s sovereignty. Well, let me suggest this to
you. God is either sovereign or he’s not. Okay, it’s not a
80-20, it’s not a 90-10 or a 95-5 or a 99-1 proposition. He is either completely sovereign
or not. What happens if you have a God
who is all-powerful? but he’s not all sovereign. What
happens if you have a God who is all knowing or all seeing
or all loving, but he’s not completely sovereign. You’ve just knocked
a hole in who God is. And therefore, as you’ll see
from our study of Psalm 97, if you knock a hole in who God is,
you knock a hole in our confidence in him. Most of you got in your
cars this evening and you put the key in the ignition and you
turned it and it worked. But I’m sure some of you, particularly
those of you who’ve lived up in the north, you’ve gotten in
your car before and you’ve stuck the key in and it did nothing.
And you lost your confidence. All of a sudden, your Chevrolet
or your Ford or your Toyota or your Honda wasn’t what it always
was. Reliable. But we have to understand
when the Bible teaches that God is sovereign, God is king, he
is king and he is sovereign over all. And so verse one is not
a statement to be overlooked. It is a massive and monumental
statement. It is a key phrase for us as
Christians. The Lord reigns. And who should rejoice? Well,
the whole earth should rejoice. and the many coastlands should
be glad.” This piece of theology, this piece of doctrine, this
piece of Bible truth in verse one of Psalm 97 is really the,
it’s the epicenter, it’s the center of gravity for who we
are as Christians. If we don’t believe in the sovereignty
of God, then we have begun to do what today is known as Open
theism or we might call it in a maybe a little bit more vernacular
jargon We’ve created a designer God. He’s the God we want But
he is not the God who is well Psalm 97 takes us to the God
who is in verse 1 Tells us that he is sovereign Well, if you
look at the second part of this psalm, which you’ll find in verses
2 through 6 you’ll see the second aspect of of who God is. Look at how it puts this description. Clouds and thick darkness are
all around him. Righteousness and justice are
the foundation of his throne. Fire goes before him and burns
up his adversaries all around. His lightnings light up the world.
The earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax before
the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth. The heavens proclaim
his righteousness and all the peoples see his glory. If the first section describes
his sovereignty, this second section describes his righteousness. And anytime we come to a theophany
or an appearance of God in the Bible, usually the righteousness
or the holiness of God are on display and it manifests itself
in natural things, in thunder and lightning and roaring and
shaking and quaking. This is true for Isaiah in chapter
six, when he meets the Lord high and lifted up and the train of
his glory filling the temple. This is the same when John, the
writer of Revelation, sees into heaven in the last book of the
Bible, and he hears lightning and thunder and peals of thunder
as he catches a glimpse of what is taking place in the heavenly
realm. And so you read a passage like
Psalm 97 and you think, well, that’s interesting. It doesn’t
really help me much. Well, here’s how it helps you. In our modern day age, how do
we approach God? Well, we come to church. A lot
of times we come late. A lot of times we come to church
and we haven’t really thought about who God is and what he’s
done. And so we come to church sort of half-hearted. We come
to church thinking it’s my duty for the week. And it’s a little
more serious than that, I know. But we could do better, couldn’t
we? And we come to church and we
come to church and approach God on our terms. God, I want to
sing the songs I want to sing. I want to feel the way I want
to feel. But how is God viewed here? How
is God viewed in other places in the Bible where he puts himself
on display? He’s scary. He’s inapproachable. He’s full of fire and thunder
and clouds of thick darkness surround him. You remember when
Moses, the man of God, wanted to see God face to face? God
said, no, you can’t, you can’t handle it. You can’t see me and
live. And so he hid Moses in the cleft
of a rock and Moses, or God passed by the back side. of Moses. Even someone as close to God
as Moses could not see the face of God and live. And so we don’t
think about that often. We don’t think about that when
we come into the house of God every week, we only come by and
through the blood of Jesus. We only approach his throne of
grace because a great high priest has approached him and he’s approached
him with a sacrifice that put his wrath away. And so we ought to approach God
in a serious way, in a way that recognizes who he is and how
terrible and awful and awesome he is. You remember little Lucy
in the story of Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe, when speaking of
Aslan, she was asked, about Aslan, the representation of God, and
her response was this, he’s good, but he is not safe. And the book
of Hebrews reminds us that it is a terrible thing to fall into
the hands of the living God. And so maybe it helps us as we
read these few verses, verses two through six, and think about
the righteousness of almighty God. and how the heavens proclaim
it, how the peoples see his glory, how it made people in the Bible
fall over on their faces as though dead. They proclaimed curses
upon themselves because they realized they had unclean lips. How do we approach God? Do we
see him as righteous? Do we see him as holy? The third
part of the psalm comes in verse seven. And if the first verse,
first section talked of his sovereignty, the second section spoke of his
righteousness. This third section is a little
odd and you see it as you read verse seven, all worshipers of
images are put to shame who make their boast in worthless idols. And then it has a statement,
worship him all you gods. This section here speaks of God
is the superior God. God is the God who is alone to
be worshiped. If you worship images, you’re
gonna be put to shame. You remember, was it the Ark
of the Covenant? It was stolen by the Philistines
and they took it in the Temple of Dagon. And every morning the
Philistines would come in and they would find Dagon had fallen
over on his face in front of the Ark of the Covenant. They’d
prop him back up, they’d give him his sacrificial food and
rations for the day and they would leave. The next morning
they would come back in and where was Dagon? He was on his face
again before the Ark of the Covenant of Almighty God. And anytime
you read about a comparison of Almighty God compared to the
idols, it’s sort of poking fun. It’s like Elijah on Mount Carmel. Well, how come you can’t call
down fire? And even at one point, what does Elijah say? Maybe your
gods have gone to the restroom. Maybe they needed a little break,
a little refresher, and then they’ll come back to this sacrifice. But almighty God’s fire came
from heaven and not only did it lick up the sacrifice, but
the altar and all the water that had been poured out around it.
And so verse seven is like one of those typical taunts, one
of those standard statements to idolaters. All worshipers
of images will be put to shame. Your God can’t save you. You
worship it, but it cannot love you or save you. Your idols are
worthless. And he’s saying here in this
last little statement, worship him, all you gods. He’s saying
to foreign kings, he’s saying to foreign religions, he’s saying
to the pagans of the world, everyone who doesn’t bow the knee to Yahweh
who reigns, you worship God Almighty. Otherwise, your religion is worthless. Well, there’s a challenge for
us in this. You think we get off scot-free
here and say, well, we don’t worship idols. We worship the
one true and living God. Well, maybe you do. But what
about when our worship gets mixed with our false beliefs? Or maybe we come to church and
we’ve not read our Bibles enough. Or maybe we come to church and
we walk out the door and we say, I don’t know if I really got
anything out of church today. Well, think about Psalm 100.
I think that was our call to worship today. Talks about entering
his gates with thanksgiving, entering his courts with praise.
And it has a wonderful little statement. Know that the Lord,
he is God. It is he who made us. We are
his sheep. We are the sheep of his pasture, the sheep of his
hand. And going to church. Hang with me on this one. Going
to church is like going to a sports event, sporting event. You get
one of those programs, right? When you go to the ball game.
And as you read through the program, say it’s a football game, you
read up on who are the linebackers, who’s the quarterback, who’s
the place kicker, who’s on special teams. Because if you want to
sit and watch a game, you also want to cheer. And if you want
to cheer, you want to know who number 83 is. or number 16 is,
or who number one is, when somebody does something good, you want
to be able to cheer for the home team, and so you get the program.
You learn about them, and then you can cheer well for them.
Well, it’s a lot like that in worship. We can cheer or worship
Almighty God so much better when we know our scriptures. Today,
I was thinking about that very fact when we sang, come thou
fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace, and
then there’s that odd little phrase, here I raise my Ebenezer. And if you’ve not read 2 Samuel,
and you haven’t been around the Old Testament Sunday school block,
You don’t know what an Ebenezer is, but an Ebenezer in biblical
language is a important thing. It’s a rock, an Eben, a rock,
an Ezer, a helper. That’s the word for wife, Eve,
a rock. So here I raise my Ebenezer.
What are we singing about? God is the rock of our help.
And so you see how a little knowledge helps. We come to worship with
our minds engaged. We come ready to worship God. intelligently. And so there’s
a call in verse seven for us to be careful that we’ve not
come into the house of God to worship a God that doesn’t exist
because either we’ve been careless to know God or we’ve believed
things that are not true about him. Then there’s the fourth
section of this passage you find in verse eight and nine. And
it says, Zion hears and is glad. The daughters of Judah rejoice
because of your judgments, O Lord. For you, O Lord, are most high
over all the earth. You are exalted far above all
gods. Well, this little section speaks
to Israel, it speaks to Judah, it speaks to the nation, and
it speaks to them about why they should be glad that God is king,
that Yahweh is sovereign. Why should they be glad? Why
should Zion hear and be glad? Why should the daughters of Judah
rejoice? Well, it’s because God the king,
God the sovereign, Yahweh, who reigns and sits on his throne,
it’s because his judgments, His judgments will make all things
right. He is most high over all the
earth and His judgments will make all things right. And so as you sit and count on
your fingers, All the unrighteous things on the evening newscast
as you look around the world and you see wrongs, you see as
some of you heard in Sunday school this morning in this room about
the spread, the rapid spread of evil after Adam and Eve and
Cain and after sin. And you see the rapid spread
of evil that led up to the flood. And you look at the rapid spread
of evil now and you see people are only sitting around thinking
about how to do evil even better. and to get better at doing worse. These are some verses for you.
We hear, and we don’t get depressed. Some of you probably watch a
little of the news too much, right? I hear the chuckles. And
you can get the Fox News blues if you’re not careful. Because
you can forget that God lives. You can forget that God reigns.
You can forget that Even if they didn’t report it, all this stuff
would be going on and we would know it. We wouldn’t know the
specifics where it happened or why it happened or the incessant
news reel. But we understand because we’re
Christians, because we believe in the sovereignty of God and
his rule and reign, we believe that someday he’s going to come
take all the wrongs and make them right. He’ll do some of
it in this life. But when he doesn’t and he waits
for his own glorious reasons, there will be a day when he comes
and he makes all things new. And he will rule and reign in
such a way that all evil will be put away and it will be no
more. And that is why in verses eight
and nine, we can read that Zion hears and is glad. And we as
the daughters of Judah can rejoice because the sovereign most high
God over all the earth He’s far above all gods. His judgments
ought to bring us joy. And so don’t get the Fox News
blues. Maybe change the channel. Watch a little TV Land or something
happy. But don’t get the Fox News blues.
It’s not gonna be this way forever. It’s not gonna be this way for
eternity. Zion hears and is glad. And then the last The last unit
of the Psalm, the last section, you find in verses 10 through
12. O you who love the Lord, hate
evil. He preserves the lives of his
saints. He delivers them from the hand
of the wicked. Light is sown for the righteous
and joy for the upright in heart. Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous,
and give thanks to his holy name. This is, in a sense, a call for
us to worship God. This is for us a call to remember
all the benefits that we have in the Lord. This is a call for
us to hate evil. This is a call for us to double
down and to stand for what God stands for. This is a call for
us to rejoice. It’s a sort of a twofold challenge. We want to hate evil. Yet at
the same time, we want to rejoice in the Lord and give thanks to
him. Sadly, though, you see this in
American Christianity in the last 100, 150 years, we’ve hated
evil less and less. When you think about the late
1800s and the Enlightenment, you think about the into the
early 1900s with what was called the modernist movement. You think
about where many of you grew up in church in the 1950s and
60s and 70s when the inerrancy of the scripture went out the
door, when the glorious atonement of Jesus that paid for the sins
of his children became an option, a way to get to heaven. And you
think about where we are now, where the church is embracing
abortion. The church is no longer embracing
marriage. The church is now embracing unions
and other relationships that God does not sanction or bless. And the list could go on. If
I’m not careful, I’ll give you the Fox News blues. But verses
10 through 12 help us rebuild that challenge. We need
to hate evil. I mean, how else plainer can
you put it? If God says it’s evil, it’s evil. And what should
we do if it’s evil? We should hate it. But we’ve
seen a day where the church condones it. Don’t know if the church
wants to be popular or the church wants to keep its doors open
and have enough money in the plate or have some sort of social
justice warrior mission. But we ought to be very different
than the world. If God calls it evil, we should call it evil.
If he treats it as wicked, we should treat it as wicked, O
you who love the Lord, hate evil. What does he promise if we hate
evil? He promises to preserve the lives
of his saints. You think sometimes if I hate
evil, if I take a stand, particularly if you’re in a country like China
or Eritrea, might not go well for me. I might lose my life,
but what does God say? I’ll preserve the lives of the
saints. I’ll deliver them from the hand
of the wicked. Sometimes it’s costly to love
the Lord and hate evil, but that’s what we’re called to do. He promises
to put light on our path. He promises to put joy in our
hearts. And so we should not fear. When
God calls us to hate evil, we should not fear. What does the
word say? We should not have a spirit of
timidity. but with faith we should persevere
in holding forth and holding fast to the truth. We should
not shrink back. And then in verse 12, rejoice
in the Lord, O you his righteous, and give thanks to his holy name. There’s a something in here,
a twofold call to Christians, hate evil, double down on it,
but worship or rejoice in the Lord. What’s that little statement
we think about sometimes? It’s John Piper’s statement about
missions. Missions exist because worship
does not. Missions exist because worship
does not. And what does a dark and dying
world need more than anything? It needs for the saints of God
who hate evil. and trust in the sovereign king,
to rejoice in the Lord and to give thanks to his holy name.
Just think about you all for a second. Up until we started
in on Psalm 97, we sat for 30 minutes and we gave thanks to
the Lord. We prayed to the Lord. We went
before the throne of grace. How different and strange that
is. What else have we done today?
Oh, we sang a weird Psalm, or at least not a weird song, but
a weird Psalm tune. We had church this morning, we
ate together. These are the things that God
calls us to do. And it’s strange, it’s different
from the world, but God promises to bless it. How do we think
about all of this? How do we think about the wickedness
of the world and even the Fox News blues, as it were? in light
of the sovereignty of God. Well, think about it this way.
God is going to send his son, Jesus, to make all things new. He’s gonna come as the king,
he’s gonna come on his horse, he’s gonna come with his sword,
and he is gonna come and put away his enemies and bring his
righteous to be home with him. And he is going to put away all
the evil, all the idolatry. But until then, we’ve got to
hate evil and rejoice in the Lord Jesus Christ. So let’s say
a prayer together. Lord, we are grateful that in
your love and mercy, you remind us that in this dark and dying
world, you still sit on your throne. We do not see it, but
your word and our experience confirm it to us. Help us not
to forget in spite of all that is going on, that King Jesus
reigns and King Jesus rules and King Jesus judges and King Jesus
will set all things right. Remind us of this as we sometimes
see the news or we see the world and think it’s gotten darker,
it’s gotten deadlier, and maybe there is no hope. We are reminded
that there is great hope for we put our trust in the Lord
who reigns and so let us rejoice and be glad and we pray all this
in the name of.