Psalm 34
This is God’s holy word. This
is Psalm 34. It says, of David, when he changed
his behavior before Abimelech, so that he drove him out and
he went away. I will bless the Lord at all
times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes
its boast in the Lord. Let the humble hear and be glad.
Oh, magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name together.
I sought the Lord and he answered me. and delivered me from all
my fears. Those who look to him are radiant
and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried
and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and
delivers them. Oh, taste and see that the Lord
is good. Blessed is the man who takes
refuge in him. Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints,
for those who fear him have no lack. The young lions suffer
want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. Come, old children, listen to
me. I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is there
who desires life and loves many days that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil and
your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good.
Seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are toward
the righteous and his ears towards their cry. The face of the Lord
is against those who do evil to cut off the memory of them
from the earth. When the righteous cry for help,
the Lord hears, and he delivers them out of all their troubles.
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted. He saves the crushed in spirit.
Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers
him out of them all. He keeps all his bones, and not
a one of them is broken. Affliction will slay the wicked,
and those who hate the righteous will be condemned. The Lord redeems
the life of his servants. and none of those who take refuge
in him will be condemned. Amen. This is God’s holy and
inspired word. May he bless the truth to us. Do you know what it is to be
between a rock and a hard place? It’s You got two choices and
neither of them is really good. Neither outcome is really good.
Think of people in the Bible who got between a rock and a
hard place. Imagine the Israelites with Pharaoh’s
army behind them and the Dead Sea or the Red Sea in front of
them. But what did God do for them?
They didn’t have to turn back to be routed by an army, but
he opened the sea and made a way for them and they crossed on
dry land and God delivered them. Or how about Jacob? After he had fled from Esau and
moved to Laban, remember Laban, he worked seven years and got
one wife and that wasn’t the one he wanted, so he worked another
seven and got the other wife and ended up with two wives.
But after he left Laban, remember he raised a bunch of cattle and
put the sticks in the pen and all that and Laban chased him
because he thought he had stolen from him. And so he made an agreement
in Genesis where it says, may the Lord watch between you and
me. We think that’s a special little blessing, but it’s actually
you quit robbing me and I’ll quit robbing you and you stay
away from me and I’ll stay away from you. It’s not really a blessing,
but it’s used like that very often, but they put up a boundary. And so Jacob had between him
a boundary. He couldn’t cross or Laban was
going to be upset, but guess who was coming towards him the
other way? It was Esau who was angry. And
so what can Jacob do? He can only keep going back to
the promised land. And thankfully he meets Esau
and there’s peace between them. But he was between a rock and
a hard place. Well, there’s David tonight between a rock and a
hard place. He has Saul, the no longer king of Israel who
wants him dead. And then he’s got the Philistines
and a Himalaya on the other side. And so where does David go when
his circumstances require that he be on the run that he run
for his life. Well, he has to go to his enemies.
And in order to get into his enemies gates, he has to act
like a madman. He has to act like a fool, like
a crazy man in order to gain entry and protection and safety. And so here we have David between
a rock and a hard place. And I would imagine somewhere
along the way, you have found yourself in a difficult spot.
You go to the left or you go to the right, either way it’s
going to be bad. You go backwards or you go forwards, either way
it’s going to be difficult. And all you can do is trust in
God. All you can do is hope in Him. All you can do is rely fully
on Him. We’re pretty self-sufficient
people. We don’t like to think we ever get in these vines, but
where else do we have to go when these difficulties fall on us? We’re an odd bunch in this day.
just like David must have been during his time. We have nowhere
else to go but to God. We can’t rely on our resources.
We can’t rely on swords and chariots and horsemen and warriors. We
can only rely on God. And guess what? We’ll find out.
Just as King David found out and recounts to us in Psalm 34,
God will prove to be all that we need. And so David will say
to us, taste and see that the Lord is good. And so When hardship drives you
crazy, like it did David, it also drives you to God. It drives
you to the great throne of grace. Now this psalm is another of
the psalms that are acrostics. It’s one of those A to Z psalms.
It follows the Hebrew alphabet. A couple other psalms we’ve looked
at do that, Psalm 119 does. It follows the alphabet in Hebrew
pretty close. And so you may look and say it
has, It has a lot of little ones and two verses that sort of work
together, so it might have, there’s 22 verses, it might have a dozen
or better little statements, little pithy proverbs and wisdom.
As I said earlier, it’s verses one through 10 are like a sermon,
or a hymn, and then verses 11 through 22 are like a sermon. That was Spurgeon’s insight into
this. Two places in the New Testament
where we find this used. One is Peter uses it in 1 Peter
3-10, he quotes verses 12-16. What man is there who desires
life and loves many days, that he may see good? How do you have
a good life? Well, keep your tongue from evil,
turn away from evil, pursue good, live a righteous life. That’s
Peter’s admonition to the exiled church. And then in John 19,
John’s gospel, makes the reference to Jesus that’s found in verse
20. He keeps all his bones, not a one of them is broken. Remember
that in Roman crucifixion, they generally broke the bones of
the person on the cross and that kept them from being able to
push their body up and breathe. So they would break their bones
so that they would be asphyxiated. But when they went to break the
bones of Jesus in order to keep the prophecy that not a one of
his bones would be broken, not only did they find out he was
already dead, but instead they pierced his side which of course
fulfilled the prophecy in Isaiah. He was pierced for our iniquities. So there’s just a quick little
overview of some of the things about Psalms. Now, I want to
look at it very quickly in the short time we have. Thinking
of those headings that Spurgeon gives us, verses 1 through 10
are like a hymn. David is going to praise God,
and then he’s going to say, you praise God with me. And then
verses 11 through 22, he’s gonna say, look, in my hardship, I’ve
learned some wise things and I want to share them with you.
So look quickly at verses one through three. It says, I will
bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually
be in my mouth. My soul makes his boast in the
Lord. Let the humble here and be glad. And oh, magnify the
Lord with me. Let us exalt his name together. It’s interesting. that David,
in the midst of hardship, can still praise God. Y’all see that
old bumper sticker or t-shirt or little saying that says, praise
the Lord anyhow? Y’all seen that over the years?
That ought to be our attitude. We ought to praise God in all
circumstances. Paul does so from the jail when
he writes in Philippians that we should be full of joy. He
speaks of being content in all kinds of circumstances. We need
to understand that God is always at work. Even when his providences
are dark and difficult and hard, God is always at work and we
always have reason to praise him. Now that sounds completely
strange to the world, but if you’re a Christian and a person
of faith and you read God’s word, you understand that God is always
up to something and we can praise him. And that’s David’s attitude.
here in the Psalms, in good and in bad, in life and in death.
We’re connected to Christ and we can praise him. In verses
four through seven, David’s gonna tell his story, but without the
details. We read the details in 1 Samuel,
but in verse four, he says, I sought the Lord and he answered me.
He delivered me from all of my fears. Now that’s an understatement. David hasn’t filled in the details,
but you understand David left With Saul and his whole army
after David, David had no bodyguards, he had no soldiers. Now, God
would provide all that later. David would have several hundred
men who would run with him as they gathered at the cave of
Abdolam later in Samuel’s telling of the story. But David was in
a bad, bad spot. Y’all seen in the news lately,
our president is about to get a new limousine. They call that
thing the Beast, and they’ve been making this thing for several
years. But in that car, it has everything a president needs
for the nation coming under attack. It has some extra blood of his
own. They can do all kinds of things
to keep the president, the most powerful man in the free world,
alive. Well, you can imagine David’s fear. He doesn’t have
any of that. No secret service, no men with nine millimeter guns,
no machine guns, no armored car. David has none of that. He just
goes out on his own, yet he knows he has the Lord. I sought the
Lord and he answered me. He delivered me from all my fears.
And then he says in verse five, those who look to him are radiant,
their faces, their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man
cried and the Lord heard him. He saved him out of all his troubles.
And then he gives a wonderful little Peace in verse seven,
the angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and
delivers them. Do you remember when God’s people
were under attack? Was it the great army of Assyria? And God
showed the Lord of hosts and all his vast army up on the hills.
And they said, look, we’re not alone here. God is with us. And
David knows that for sure. And so we may not have all the
resources of earth at our disposal, but we have the resources of
heaven and God can surely save us. And he, David speaks in verse
eight of God’s goodness. Taste and see that the Lord is
good. Try him on for size. See if God isn’t good for you.
I think some of you sat in this room this morning and listened
to a little talk on evangelism and how the church together evangelizes. But there’s also a personal aspect
of evangelism. And one of the ways you can evangelize
is you can say to somebody, you know, you interact with coworkers
and friends and walking buddies and whoever else, and they’re
saying life gets hard, you can say, why don’t you try my God?
Taste and see if he is not good. What a wonderful tool of evangelism
to tell how God has been at work in your life and how God has
saved and delivered you. That’s what David does. That
is a good example for us. Verse nine, he picks up, fear
the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack.
The wild beast, the young lions, they suffer want, but those who
seek the Lord lack no good thing. And so David here in this recounting
of his experience, he’s praising God and says, come and join with
me. One of the great things that
we have the chance to do week after week in worship is we get
to tell God how great he is and how wonderful he is. We get to
recount to him all his wonderful good things. And we have things
to help us. We have hymns to sing that help
us do that. But we can add our own heartfelt
joy. We might sing a hymn that was
written several hundred years ago, but it might prompt our
hearts and minds to say, what has God done for me that I might
add to that? I may not say it aloud, but I
may think it in my heart. And as I worship God with these
others, our hearts are overfilled with joy for what God has done
for us. So the first half of Psalm 34 is like a hymn. And the second part, beginning
at verse 11, is like a sermon. It’s like wisdom literature.
If you go read Proverbs, maybe say one and two and three, you’ll
see some similarities. He says, beginning in verse 11,
come, old children, quite parallel to Solomon in the Proverbs saying,
my son, give your attention to what I have to say. Come, old
children, listen to me, and I’ll teach you the fear of the Lord.
What man is there who desires life and loves many days that
he may see good? So if you want to have a good
life, keep your tongue from evil. Don’t bad mouth. Keep your lips
from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil, do good.
Seek peace and pursue it. Remember wisdom, like Psalm 1,
is if you want to have a righteous and blessed life, be obedient,
be happy, be holy, be helpful. Serve the Lord. And that’s what
David is saying here, is if you wanna have a good life, follow
the Lord, turn away from evil, do good. Verse 15 says, the eyes
of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears are toward their
cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil to
cut off the memory of them from the earth. Do we ever hear scripture
that’s from the pen of King Saul? Nope, Saul ended up hanging from
a tree, didn’t he? But we hear a lot from David.
He was a man of God. He was a righteous man, a man
God used, and he wrote many good things for us to hear from and
listen, and so that’s very true. Then it goes on to say, the righteous
cry for help. The Lord hears and he delivers
them. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted. He saves the crushed
in spirit. I’ll tell you, anytime you get
in a hard place, you or your family or a loved one, Read the
Psalms, because the Psalms hit on every single emotion. Wouldn’t
it be comforting just to read, the righteous cry for help and
the Lord hears, verse 17, and he delivers them out of all their
troubles. He’s near to the brokenhearted. He saves the crushed in the spirit.
What wonderful words of grace those are. And then in verse
20, to speak of how he kept Christ, he keeps all his bones and not
a one of them will be broken. So what is it we should take
from a psalm like this? Here is David between a rock
and a hard place, and where does he go? He goes to God, and God
saves and delivers him. And what does David do with that
deliverance from God? One is he praises, and second,
he teaches wisdom. And there’s a good example for
us in the faith, that as long as God gives us breath, as long
as God has given us escape from sin and death and the snares
of this life, We can praise him and we can teach others to do
the same and to live for almighty God. Let’s pause and pray together.
Our Lord, we thank you that in Christ Jesus, we have all the
blessing we need. We’ve been saved from the great
enemies that have sought to kill us and destroy us. And we thank
you for King David, for this psalm, for this example of what
it is to live through hardship and to come out on the other
side and to praise you. and to teach others what it is
to be wise. Help us to see and live this
way through Christ Jesus and for his sake and glory we pray
in his name, amen.