Psalm 92
Turn to Psalm 92 in your copy
of the scriptures. There are 15 verses and we’ll
read them all together. And then after our message tonight,
we’ll sing a portion of it too from our Psalter. This is Psalm
92 and it says a Psalm, a song for the Sabbath. It is good to
give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most
High, to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your
faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp
and to the melody of the lyre. For you, O Lord, have made me
glad by your work. At the works of your hands, I
sing for joy. How great are your works, O Lord.
Your thoughts are very deep. The stupid man cannot know. The
fool cannot understand this. that though the wicked sprout
like grass and all evildoers flourish, they are doomed to
destruction forever. But you, O Lord, are on high
forever. For behold, your enemies, O Lord,
for behold, your enemies shall perish. All evildoers shall be
scattered. But you have exalted my horn
like that of the wild ox. You have poured over me fresh
oil. My eyes have seen the downfall of my enemies. My ears have heard
the doom of my evil assailants. The righteous flourish like the
palm tree, and they grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are
planted in the house of the Lord. They flourish in the courts of
our God. They still bear fruit in old age. They are ever full
of sap, and they are green. To declare that the Lord is upright,
He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him. Amen. This is God’s holy and
inspired and inerrant word. May he bless its reading and
preaching to our hearts, our minds, and our lives. Well, Sundays,
we’ve talked a little bit about this today already with our passage
from Luke chapter six, but Sundays, are they a special day or are
they just another day? Is it a Sabbath day, a day of
rest and worship, or is it just Saturday part two? probably most
of the world, and I would guess most of the church would say
the latter. It’s Saturday, part two. But Sundays in the history
of the people of God, even in the history of most of the world
up until the last 50 or so years, Sundays have always been special. But that has waned. It has digressed. It has almost all but passed
away. And this Psalm shows us what
it’s like to be a righteous person, a person in the family of God
and have a precious day. But also it shows us a contrast,
what it’s like to be unrighteous or wicked and for Sunday just
to be another day. Now, mind you in Psalm 92, the
Sabbath was day seven, it was Saturday. For us, it’s shifted
to Sunday since the resurrection. So we may say some things that
are interchangeable, that kind of thing. But Sundays are supposed
to be special. And that began in creation. What did God do himself after
he made the world and everything in it in the space of six days?
He rested and he commanded that there be a Sabbath for rest.
And so it’s been an ordinance. It’s been a special day since
creation. It was reestablished in the commandments
that God gave to Moses on Sinai, the fourth commandment. Remember
the Sabbath day and keep it holy so that you might serve the Lord.
If you look in the back of your hymnal, I’ll find the page number
here as I flip, but it’s in the section on the larger catechism
related to the fourth commandment. Question 115, so it’s probably
around page 940. Nope, 954. It asks, which is the fourth
commandment? In 115 of the larger. And then
it goes on in 116 after it states the commandment, what is required?
The fourth commandment requireth. of all men the sanctifying or
keeping holy to God such set times as he hath appointed in
his word expressly one whole day and seven, which was the
seventh from the beginning of the world to the resurrection
of Christ and the first day of the week ever since. And so to
continue to the end of the world, which is the Christian Sabbath
in the New Testament, it’s called the Lord’s day. Then it goes
on to ask this question, how is the Sabbath or the Lord’s
day to be sanctified? And the answer you’ll see on
page 955 in question 117 is this, the Sabbath day or the Lord’s
day is to be sanctified by a holy resting all the day. Not only
from such works as are at all times sinful, but even from such
worldly employments and recreations as are on other days lawful.
And making it our delight to spend the whole time except so
much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy,
in the public and private exercises of God’s worship. And to that
end, we are to prepare our hearts and with such foresight, diligent
and moderation to dispose and seasonably dispatch our worldly
business that we may be the more free and fit for the duties of
that day. And it goes on to explain a little
bit more about the Sabbath. But you see, even in our post-Reformation
church history, even our own heritage, the Westminster Larger
Catechism, part of our Associate Reform Presbyterian Standards,
we see Sunday, we see the Lord’s Day, we see the Sabbath as a
special day. It’s a day for rest. It’s a day
for worship. It’s a day to get the other six
days out of the way to work, work, work, sweat, sweat, sweat,
get things done, run around like a, what do we say, like a chicken
with its head cut off, burn our candles with both ends, at both
ends, but on Sunday we stop. And we stop in order to worship
the Lord, to hear from him, to speak to him, to rest, not just
a holy nap. I think that’s a good Sabbath
exercise. I took a two hour, 20 minute one today and it felt
really good. But rest there doesn’t mean nap. Remember in the Old
Testament, when the people of God were slaves, Under Pharaoh,
and what was their taskmaster? He was a wicked Pharaoh. And
what did he make them do? Work, work, work, work. And so don’t you think it was
a delight to the Israelites when God said to them from the mountain
through Moses, you get a day off every week. Don’t you think
they were pretty excited? Don’t you think they were full
of great joy? And how is it that now we just go, go, go eight
days a week? We go and we go and we go. And
the Lord’s day is hardly the Lord’s day. It’s hardly the Lord’s
hour. And how does the joke go? If
Chick-fil-A has a higher view of the Lord’s day than you do,
then maybe you need to reevaluate your view of the Lord’s day. We just, go and we go nonstop,
but rest is intended for us both physically and spiritually. We desperately need it. And so
Sundays ought to be different. They ought to be special, set
apart for rest, worship, growth, and for service. And we leave
the work of the other six days behind. Well, I want us to see
this passage in three slices. The first, portion we find in
verses 1 through 4, and we’ll call this heading, A Precious
Day. Verses 1 through 4 say this,
it is good to give thanks to the Lord. It is good to sing
praises to your name, O Most High, to declare your steadfast
love in the morning and your faithfulness by night. To the
music of the lute, and to the harp, and to the melody of the
lyre, Why? Why should we do this? Or why
is it good? For you, O Lord, have made me
glad by your work and at the works of your hands. I sing for
joy. I don’t know how y’all are with
your week, but most of us are cyclical. We need our eight hours
of sleep. We need our workday. We need
our routine. We need our Mondays and our Tuesdays and our Wednesdays
and our Thursdays and our Fridays and our Saturdays. We do certain
things certain days, but Sunday is a day to stop. And our lives
need that cycle, both physically and spiritually. And so Psalm
92 gives us a picture of a precious day. We have all choices of what
we will do with our time. We all have seven days. We all
have 24 hour days. We all have the same hours in
the week. And when we look at the choices
for what we can do with our time, we can look at good things, better
things, and the best things. And the highest and best use
of our time, especially on Sundays, is in service to the Lord, our
God, and to worship him. some years ago when football,
particularly the NFL, was Monday night football, they decided
maybe we should put some football on Sunday. And someone told the
powers that be that if you put football on Sunday, at least
in the Southern United States, probably because of the Southern
Baptist influence and still maybe some of the remaining Sabbatarian
views, it was told to these folks, you won’t have a viewing audience.
Well, guess what? They have a viewing audience.
And Sunday football has probably stripped a lot of people of the
Christian faith from a precious day. There’s a joke. I think
maybe the constables had sent it to us, a little video of virtual
church. You put on these virtual glasses
and The preacher can look like anything you want him to look
like. He doesn’t have to look like this middle-aged bald guy
who’s gaining weight like me. He can wear skinny jeans. He
can have a cool hairdo. He has some hair to do. You can
design church to be what you want, but also you can have the
scores of your favorite football teams scroll across your virtual
church classes because, heaven forbid, you miss the big game. And so we’ve had distractions
come and steal this day from us. We mentioned this morning,
Sunday Blue Laws, and how it used to be. Do y’all remember
that? Sunday Blue Laws? If you wanted groceries, gas,
trade, commerce, whatever, you better do it in six days, because
on the 7th, it was not possible. And all that for sure has changed. But these have stolen our precious
day from us, or maybe a better way to put it is, we’ve let it
steal our precious day. from us, but we have the choice
to do good, to do better, or to do the best. And God says
to us, one whole day in seven is a best choice to worship,
rest, worship, and serve others. So it’s a duty. It is our duty. to worship God. It is our duty
to take a whole day in seven. Just as we bring our offerings,
just as we give of our time and our talents and our treasures,
it is our duty to give God a day. It is our duty to, on that day,
bring to him his praises and to declare to him his worth. It’s one of the sad things about
the modern church today. The modern church has changed
the pronouns in the songs to being man-centered, people-centered. It’s mostly songs about how we,
or I, the worshiper, feel. but we must remember worship
is for God. And as our Psalm says, it’s good
to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to his name, to
declare his steadfast love and his faithfulness. So it’s a precious
day with a duty, but the duty also ought to be a delight. A
well-spent Sunday is a great gift. It’s a foretaste of what
is to come, that last hymn that we sang, seemed to mention a
bit of that. Lord of the Sabbath, hear us
pray on page 151 in our hymnal, spoke of the glimpse of Christ. the best is yet to come. Your
earthly Sabbath, Lord, we love, but there’s a nobler rest above. To that our laboring souls aspire
with ardent hope and strong desire.” There’s a sense where we ought
to see church on Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the day of rest and
worship, the day of rest and gladness, the market day of the
soul, we ought to see it as a down payment, a glimpse of what is
to come. In fact, one modern day theologian
has said this, if you don’t like church, you’re not gonna like
heaven. And that’s true, isn’t it? If
we don’t delight in the presence of God, the worship of God, the
company of saints, the gathering together with God’s people, we’re
not gonna like heaven much because that’s what it’ll be like. for eternity. It ought to be
a delight. It ought to be a day that helps
us get ready to have a very good week, whatever that week may
bring us. And so notice what the Psalmist
says, it is good. It’s got a benediction. It is good to give thanks to
the Lord, to Yahweh. It is good to sing his praises.
It is good to declare his steadfast love. And it speaks of doing
so in the morning. It is good to make music to Almighty
God. And so we worship God with joy,
with music, for his steadfast love and his faithfulness. And so it’s a precious day for
us who believe. It ought not be a hardship. It
ought not be a burden. But look, if you will, at verses
five through nine. Not a precious day, but it’s
just another day for those who do not love the Lord. He begins
this section by saying, how great are your works, O Lord. Your
thoughts are very deep. Sort of like Romans chapter one,
the stupid man cannot know. The fool cannot understand this,
that though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers
flourish, they are doomed to destruction forever. But you,
O Lord, you’re on high forever, for behold, your enemies, O Lord,
for behold, your enemies shall perish and all evildoers shall
be scattered. These are those who do not know
God or what He has done. And so for them, Sunday, for
them the Sabbath is just Saturday part two. It was that way in
the old covenant and it’s that way now. we should take delight
in the Sabbath, but the senseless man, the stupid man, the foolish
man, the wicked man, the evildoer does not do so. And there’s a sense where the
psalmist is saying, and that’s, by the way, sub-human. When we watch the news at night
or we pick up our local copy of the paper and we read the
crime report and we see senseless acts, we say of What something
someone has done is this, it’s not human, it’s inhumane. Who would do such a thing? And
that’s really what the psalmist is saying here about the person
who sees it as just another day, the godless, the senseless, the
wicked. He says in verse six, the stupid man cannot know. Maybe
some of you have a translation that says the brute cannot know. This person he’s describing is
like an animal. They do not bear the image of
God well. Remember God made man in his
own image and he made us in his image to reflect it in knowledge
and in righteousness and in holiness and to give us dominion over
the creatures and to be in a finite sort of way God-like. God is love and we can be love.
God is holy, we can be holy. Now God is omni in all these
things. He is super, you know, in his
knowledge and his presence and in his abilities. But in a finite
way, we can bear and reflect the image of Almighty God. And
what is he saying here in this Psalm? They don’t do any of that. And that really makes them subhuman.
They’re like the beast of the field. They’re like the brutish
animals. And so the senseless, the stupid,
the fool, the wicked, the evildoer is subhuman and does not reflect
the glory or the image of Almighty God. It’s very close in connection,
I think, to Romans chapter one, where the apostle Paul says the
godless person does not acknowledge God, or what he has done in this
world. And so this person not only spends
their Sundays, as it were, their Sabbaths, but they really spend
their whole life in senseless living, in restless living, in
wandering, and in, as what the wisdom literature of the Bible,
like Ecclesiastes and the writers of Proverbs say, a futile life,
a life that has no meaning and no value. They are restless and
they are wandering. And so the Psalm shows us that
to the righteous, this is a precious day, the Lord’s day. To the unrighteous,
it’s just another day. And then how does he end the
Psalm? How does he wrap this up? Well, in verses 10 through
15, he tells us the end of the wicked and the end of the righteous. The wisdom literature, the Psalms
are very good at this of saying, if you live a good life, a righteous
life, you’ll have these blessings. But if you live an unrighteous
life, ungodly life, you’ll have these curses. You see it in Psalm
1, blessed is the man who does not sit, walk or stand in the
way of the godly. But he delights in the law of
the Lord on it. He meditates day and night. He is like the
tree that’s planted by the streams of water. All that he does prospers,
he flourishes, but it’s not so with the wicked. The wicked,
they grow, but they’re like the chaff which the wind blows away. One stands before God, the other
does not. And that’s, in a sense, what
verses 10 through 15 teach us here, this contrast. He says
in verse 10, you have exalted my horn like that of the wild
ox. You have poured oil over me, fresh oil. My eyes have seen
the downfall of my enemies. My ears have heard the doom of
my evil assailants. The righteous flourish like the
palm tree. They grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted
in the house of the Lord. They flourish in the courts of
our God. They still bear fruit in old age. They are ever full
of sap and are green to declare that the Lord is upright. He
is my rock and there is no unrighteousness in him.” He speaks in this psalm
of how the wicked, they’re like grass. It pops up, it’s green
for a little while. It’s even enjoyable. It’s a thing
of beauty. but then it’s gone. But not so
the righteous. They flourish like a palm tree.”
Remember the ancient Near Eastern was kind of a desert. It was… What do you call it? An arid region. And so to see
a palm tree was to see an oasis. It was to see an odd, strange
sight. And so the righteous flourish
like the palm tree, or they flourish like the cedars that are of Lebanon.
Remember the cedars of Lebanon? What were they used for? To build
the temple, to build the palace of King David. They were tall,
strong, thick, heavy trees. They were useful. And so the
righteous person, even in old age, bears fruit. The wicked
die out, but the righteous are blessed. They do well. And there’s
three things at the end of the Psalm it speaks about with the
righteous, particularly the older, righteous person. One thing that
the older, righteous person does is they grow old in the Lord. You may age and you may age with
grace, You may be aging and have all of your movements. You can
still wiggle and run and do all the things. Or you could be aging
and maybe confined to a chair. You may be physically weak. You
may be physically strong. But what God promises here is
to be spiritually growing, to be spiritually flourishing like
a palm tree, like And so that’s encouragement to us, isn’t it?
Spiritually speaking, the best is yet to come. We grow old,
and if we grow old in the Lord, we will bear fruit in old age. Sometimes, this has been my experience
as a kid growing up in the church, but as a pastor as well, sometimes
you hear older people in the congregation say, I’ve done my
time, I’ve done my service. And what that means is I’m too
old to keep nursery. but they’re not too old to influence
the children of the church, the teenagers of the church, the
middle-aged people of the church. Even into old age, as God grows
us in grace, the best is yet to come for those who walk in
the Lord. And it can be a great blessing
to the church. So we grow old in the Lord, but
also we are fruitful in the Lord in our old age. We can sit, we
can tell, we can speak of the goodness of Almighty God. We
can tell the next generations who God is and what he’s done.
We think of grandparents, we think of aged saints who may
not be able to do much physically, but they can speak much spiritually. And we ought to be listeners
to them. but we in our old age ought to
realize we are not yet done serving the Lord. If you look at Psalm
71, verse 18, there’s a wonderful prayer, and this is a good prayer
to us as we age. It says in Psalm 71, 18, so even
to old age and gray hairs, oh God, do not forsake me until
I proclaim your might to another generation and your power to
all those who come. Sometimes we forget that the
Christian faith, the family of God is to be generational. And
we ought to remember really well that if God gives us more years,
and say you’re a grandmother or a grandfather, and then you
become a great-grandmother or a great-grandfather, you should
see that as a gift to the Lord, because there’s another generation
that gets to hear you sing God’s praises and speak of His wonderful
majesty and grace, and especially in the person of the Lord Jesus
Christ. As you get older, and as you get older in the Lord,
you’ve got something to say it’s wonderful to be part of a inter
and multi-generational church where we’re not all young, we’re
not all old, we’re not all middle-aged. We’ve got some of every decade
and that’s a real blessing. The last thing it speaks of for
the benefit of those who grow old in the Lord is really a duty. It’s our duty, of course, to
worship God on the Sabbath, but he seems to say here that as
we grow old in the Lord, as we bear fruit in old age, that we
must speak or give testimony to the goodness of God. You find
that in the last verse, verse 15. It’s our duty to declare
that the Lord is upright. He is my rock. He is my God,
and there is no unrighteousness in him. It’s our forever work. It’s our work that we do on this
earth that will last. It will bear long lasting fruit.
Think for a moment of somebody who in the Christian faith took
the time to speak to you God’s word, God’s wisdom, God’s grace,
and how it has lasted. it stuck with you. And that could
be someone who really spoke to you, it could be someone from
your church experience, but it could be a saint who wrote on
the pages of a book. We think of Elizabeth Elliot,
who recently passed away in the last handful of years. She has
spoken to so many through her pen, her life experience. She’s given testimony that the
Lord is upright, that he was her rock, he was her fortress. And so we can leave a heritage
with our words. We can leave long lasting, even
eternal fruit, declaring that the Lord is upright. He is not
sinful. He is not evil or wicked. There
is no fault to be found in him. He is our rock. our firm foundation. We can trust in him and never
be moved. There’s no unrighteousness whatsoever
in him. As we end this psalm, but also
end the Lord’s Day, as we thought twice about Sundays, think about
this for just a moment. How much do we value Sunday,
and why do we value it? That’s a good question, isn’t
it? How much, or two questions. How much do we value Sunday and
then why is it that we value it? Do we value it because we
get to stop? Because we get to rest? Because
we get to fill our tank with God’s grace? Do we value it because
we get to tell God what we’ve forgotten to tell him all week
because we’ve been, well, kind of busy? Or do we value it because
it’s a day to catch up? It’s a day to finish the chore
list that didn’t get finished Saturday. It’s a day to get ready
for Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. Why is Sunday important and why
do we value it? Well, God willing, our prayer
ought to be because it is good to give thanks to the Lord and
to sing praise to your name, O Most High. Let’s stop and pray. Lord, we give you thanks.