Hello, you are listening to Second City Sermons,
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you enjoy this sermon. God bless. Let's pray.
Oh God, you are our King. We desire you above
all things. We ask that you would speak to us
today by the Word. Help us to have hearts and
ears open and ready to receive. Touch us, oh
Lord, by your Spirit. Do your work and your will,
we pray, in the name of Christ our Savior. Amen.
For about 30 years, in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, there was a brutally horrible
regime in the Congo, as a European rule in the
Congo. The Congo territory is very large, but
a relatively small amount of people were able
to take it over because they had vastly superior
weapons, and they would treacherously side with
one tribe against others and then switch alliances.
Historians estimate that somewhere between five
and ten million Congolese died during that 30
-year span, either from outright violence or
from starvation. And what's sort of horribly
interesting about this is that all of these deaths
weren't, at least in theory, based in race hatred
or governmental expansion. It was merely greed.
These were commercial interests, not state interests.
The nation of Belgium's King, Leopold II, sort
of hoodwinked the international community of
his day into thinking that the Congolese needed
protection from Arabic slavers, and that he was
benevolently willing to provide that protection.
And if everybody got some nice ivory out of the
deal, so much the better. Well, a few years into
this noble experiment, An English journalist
was at the docks and watching trade ships sail
out to Belgian -controlled Congo and he realized
that the ships weren't loading anything to trade.
They were only loading boxes and boxes of bullets.
Therefore, all of this ivory and later... rubber
that came out of the Congo during that time was
not sold by any stretch of the imagination by
the African people, it was merely stolen. A nasty
irony in the story is that the Belgian for -profit
company, which was doing the dirty work here,
the main investor in which was King Leopold himself,
employed forced labor of all of the natives that
it could catch. That is, the king claimed he
was going to protect the natives, from slave
traders and then functionally, even if not legally,
made them slaves himself. Why do I bring this
up? Well, the first spoken line in Joseph Conrad's
1901 book Heart of Darkness is as follows. And
this also has been one of the dark places of
the earth, which is an allusion to Psalm 74 and
verse 20. Have regard for the Covenant for the
dark places of the land are full of the habitations
of violence Habitations means living places environments,
right? The psalmist says that violence lives
in the darkness Heart of darkness is a famous
little book which describes the massive ivory
grab From the perspective of a guy who went out
there to join the noble cause to be a steamboat
captain. The narrator was one of the employees
of the company collecting the ivory and now he's
telling the story and the first thing he wants
to do is to say that London, where he is currently
at the beginning of the book, is not really very
different from the Congo. Why would that be?
Because the people's hearts are the same everywhere.
Remember the title of the book, it's Heart of
Darkness. Conrad implies, and using the language
of this psalm, that in each of us is a place
which, if we are left to ourselves in unhealthy
ways, can become full of the habitations of violence.
So I've taught Heart of Darkness to 10th graders
for the last five years, so I was sort of obliged
to make that connection. Flora, did you see that
coming? Yeah, she did. But while Heart of Darkness
is important, it's not a fun read. It's a real
downer of a book. I don't enjoy it. And this
psalm is kind of a downer too, isn't it? It's
a lament psalm. And as Peter has pointed out
to us, that's the largest genre of psalm in the
Psalter. And that makes sense. I opened the sermon
today by talking about a genocide which was largely
ignored in its own day and largely forgotten
today. There's a lot to lament in our world.
But I think if we are willing to read the Psalm
in its very broad context, which is to say its
place in the whole of the Bible, we will see
that this is not just a downer of a poem. It
looks like it's just lamenting a catastrophe.
But if we zoom way out, we can see that this
is the grounds for a painful but real celebration
of the goodness of God. So let's get some context.
Let's get some observation here. So as we talked
about last week, Psalm 73 begins Book 3 of the
Psalms. The Psalms are divided up into five books
and scholars suggest that those five books mirror
in some way the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch.
So if this is true, Book 3 is in some way mirroring
Leviticus. That's the book in the Bible that's
most about ceremonial holiness and how you get
it. How do you live with a God who's holy if
you're not holy yourself, right? And the way
that works in the Psalms is that this book is
particularly about the temple, right? The temple
is the place that you go to be with God. The
New Testament scholar Michael Byrd says this,
quote, the temple in this period was of course
the heart and center of Judaism, the vital symbol
around which everything else circled. It was
supposed to be where Yahweh Himself dwelt, or
at least had dwelt, and would do so again. So,
this whole section of the Bible is dealing with
the temple and this poem is dealing with the
fact that the temple had been destroyed. God
had said in Deuteronomy, as we read this morning,
that He was going to give His chosen people a
promised land. And he was going to choose a particular
place there and he would make his name dwell
in it and he did that. That was the temple. We
see that in verse 7 of this. And when the temple
was built and Solomon, David's son, prayed over
it, this is a quote, fire came down from heaven
and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices
and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.
That's second Chronicles 7. God Himself had ordained
the temple, gave specifications for the design
and the decorations even, and He set His name
on it and He filled it with His visible glory.
And now bad guys break it down? Let's look at
the outline of the poem. First, you have a section
that starts with concern over the anger of God
for Israel and lament at what that anger looks
like. then it asks God to redirect his anger
against Israel's enemies. That's in verse 11.
Destroy them. The bad guys are out there, God.
They've smashed all our stuff. Don't you care?
The question is, why do you withdraw your hand,
even your right hand? What are you waiting for?
And the implied question behind this question,
of course, is if God isn't working, to vindicate
his people and his holiness, is he able to? Is
God powerless? And then the psalmist answers
this unspoken question in verse 12. He says,
yet God, my King, is from old working salvation
in the midst of the earth. God is real. His power
is evident in creation and the ordering of the
natural world. That's verses 13 through 17. I
wish I had time to talk about Leviathan." Then
he goes back to pleading with God to stop the
wicked people. Verse 18 and verse 21 both say
that the bad guys scoff against God and the poem
ends in verse 22 with the unacceptable clamor
of God's foes. So, how do we see God's goodness
in this psalm? It's a fair question. Follow my
interpretive reasoning here and we'll see if
you agree. First, the main point of this poem
is this. The temple is smashed and what are you
going to do about it, God? Are you even there?
Second, what we call covenant theology, which
the Reformed tradition broadly follows, says
that the whole Bible is about Jesus in one way
or another. It says that because Jesus says that.
And if that is true, this psalm is therefore
about Jesus in some way. Third, as we read this
morning from our Gospel text, Jesus speaks about
his body as the temple. So that means it's probably
fair to read Old Testament references to the
temple as being part of what Jesus understood
about himself and his mission. So the question
is, what can this poem teach us about Jesus?
And if you have followed me till now, perhaps
you will be happy to write down my main points,
which I will share with you. Alright, I think
that this text can teach us about, first, the
amazing providence of God, which we can understand
in his preparing the temple in Israel's history
as a type of Christ, the providence of God. Second,
the amazing humility of God, which we can see
in his willingness to let his temple be destroyed.
And third, we can see the amazing, unpredictable
benevolence of God, which we can see in the way
he deals with his people and also with his enemies.
So let's talk about the providence of God. When
Jesus talks about the temple of his body, as
we heard in John 2, he's not making this huge
break with the Old Testament. He's not saying,
forget all that old stuff, I'm here now. We didn't
read all of John 2, but the context in which
he says that he's going to raise the temple again
in three days is Jesus has just gone into the
actual rebuilt temple in Jerusalem and what he
does there in John 2 is remarkable. Jesus, who
is gentle and lowly in his own estimation, he's
not given to lashing out as we say, makes a whip
and he literally lashes out the money changers
from the temple. Jesus cares deeply about the
temple and its honor. His disciples then remember
the verse, zeal for your house consumes me. Jesus
was zealous for the temple, as were all pious
Jews. Why? Well, on the most basic level, you
could say, the temple was beautiful. If you look
at 1 Kings chapter 6, you'll see that the entire
inside of the temple was covered in cedar wood
and all of it was elaborately carved. In the
form of gourds and open flowers, it was like
a huge garden representing the garden of Eden
that had all been whittled. And if you look back
at one of the sad verses of Psalm 74 verse 6,
it says here. All its carved wood they broke
down. Right all the stuff that we worked so hard
on to make beautiful it's gone. We should remember
the time here that we're talking about wasn't
like ours with life was much harder. Beauty,
in the sense of artistic creation, was a much
rarer thing. Just an instance. In my classroom,
at school, I have a famous portrait of Gertrude
Stein done by her friend, Pablo Picasso. I have
this because I could print it off the internet
and frame it for low, low prices. This was not
an option for the Psalmist. Artistic beauty was
something precious, something comparatively hard
to come by. So hand in hand with the beauty of
the temple is the cost of the temple. Of course,
the man hours it took to whittle all of that
would have been staggering, but consider the
mere materials. First Chronicles 29 says that
5 ,000 talents and 10 ,000 derricks of gold were
used in the temple. I don't know how to do that
math, but one website I found said that would
be worth $200 billion. That's with a B, billion.
dollars today. So the point here, so the temple
was hugely costly, hugely beautiful, and when
we think that Jesus is in some way the truth
the temple was pointing to, we will see that
he is more beautiful, more costly even than the
temple itself, and we will gaze on him with wonder.
1 Peter 1 says that we were quote, ransomed by
the precious blood of Christ. Friend, His blood
is precious. It is costly. To put it in flat
economic terms, it had enormous purchasing power.
It bought Him the souls of all the redeemed.
So, we're talking about Jesus' blood. Let's go
to our second point, which is the humility of
God. So, the temple, which is the place in His
providence where His name dwells, that's verse
seven again, the dwelling place of Your name.
It gets smashed by the pagan bad guys. And then
Jesus, who is the true temple, who has been given
the name above every name, gets smashed by the
pagan bad guys. This is a pattern. And it's a
pattern of intense, unbelievable humility in
God. Think about it. Psalm 74 is recounting the
fact that God allowed the destruction of his
temple, which doesn't make any sense. Going into
a temple, and smashing it is a sort of demonstration
that the god the temple is associated with is
actually powerless. This is Indiana Jones stuff.
If I don't believe in the god of the temple,
I can go in and steal the stuff because it belongs
in the museum. Or consider the more Christian
story of Saint Boniface who lived in the 8th
century. He is known as the apostle to the Germans.
He is said to have, as part of his missionary
journeys, chopped down the sacred oak of Thor.
He wasn't smited for this act or smitten or smote.
No tense of smite occurred to him. And therefore,
he proved his point that the old gods had no
power. And the people, that's the pagans that
he was preaching to, converted en masse to Christianity.
It's a crude kind of apologetics, but it worked
for him. So think about this. The God of the
Bible in Psalm 73 allows the Boniface treatment
against himself, right? The pagan bad guys are
saying, your God doesn't have any power, let
me smash his holy stuff, and God allows it. He
doesn't smite them back. So the question is,
can we trust him? Simply put, is he strong enough?
Is he even real? God has chosen to look weak,
but the weakness of God is stronger than men.
1 Corinthians 1. The theological answer to this
is kind of startling. It's that God does not
just let his temple be destroyed. He causes his
temple to be destroyed. And the psalmist knows
that this unthinkable problem has to do with
God's anger. Verse 1, oh God, why do you cast
us off forever? Why does the anger smoke against
the sheep of your pasture? This is powerful language,
isn't it? The Solomonic temple was destroyed
about 200 years after David himself was alive,
which means that at this time, the people of
God had been singing David's Psalm 23 for 200
years. The Lord is my shepherd, Psalm 23, I shall
not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures.
And now 200 years later, this Psalm seems to
reach directly back to be in contrast with that
one. Why does your anger smoke against the sheep?
God, I thought you were a shepherd. Doesn't the
shepherd protect his sheep? Aren't your rod and
staff supposed to comfort me? This is a real
question, is it? What is God doing? How are we
supposed to trust that he's good if he won't
protect his people? What evidence do we have
that he is worth our time in our worship? What's
the answer here? We're in a Christian church.
The answer is Jesus. John 10 verse 11, Jesus
says, I am the good shepherd, right? Jesus says
all that stuff about the shepherd. Can you trust
the shepherd? Yeah, that's me. And then what
does he say in the very next line, right? The
good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,
right? I am going to take the destruction of
the temple. on myself, right? The answer is that
God has allowed his temple to be destroyed, to
show the depths of his wrath against sin. He's
willing to destroy his own holy place in order
to show how much he hates sin. And this destruction
points forward to Jesus, who endures the same
fate as the temple. For the very people God was
wrathful against. So the fall of the temple was
a tragedy, but it was a tragedy pointing forward
to the great rescue that God was going to make
for his people by the fall of the true temple.
The psalmist wants God to be a shepherd and protect
his flock. God does this, but in a very unexpected
way. He protects the flock from their deepest
enemy, which is sin and eternal death. And he
does this by humbly allowing the place where
his name dwells to be destroyed. On to my last
point. Look again at verse 11. Why do you hold
back your right hand? Take it from the fold of
your garment and destroy them. Why does God wait
to judge the evildoers? I think the answer is
the relentless unpredictable benevolence of God.
What would happen to the bad guys if the psalmist
were in charge? It's not much of a question,
right? Destroy them. There's an interesting textual
point here. If you're reading a different version,
particularly the King James, your text actually
doesn't have the phrase destroy them. That's
because the Hebrew here is really hard to read,
says a commentary. All Hebrew is difficult to
read for me. The Hebrew apparently is very disjointed.
It's almost like the emotion of the speaker is
too great and he can't even speak in complete
sentences. The Hebrew for verse 11 literally
just reads, From the midst of thy bosom destroy.
And different versions translate that in different
ways, but I think it's pretty obvious that what
the psalmist wants destroyed is the enemy. So
keep going in the text. Verses 18 and 22, both
ask the Lord to remember that the enemy scoff.
This is how you identify a biblical bad guy.
He scoffs. Think of Psalm 1. Blessed is the man
who does not sit in the seat of the scoffer.
This scoffing is intolerable to the Psalm writer
and he thinks it ought to be for God as well.
Arise, O God, he says, and I think the Psalmist's
judgment is right. His judgment is morally just.
The bad guys should be struck down, but there's
a problem with this, isn't there? The people
who smashed the temple, guys, that's you and
me. Without the grace of God and given the right
opportunity, we would have broken down the walls
of Jerusalem. We would have left not one stone
on top of each other. How do I know? Well, the
Bible's really clear that it's God's grace that
keeps us from being awful. It talks in Deuteronomy
about how, quote, tender and refined women will
fight each other over food if they're hungry
enough. And if you know the text I'm referring
to, you know that I'm soft -pedaling that a little
bit. Romans 5 says that we were enemies of God.
Without the grace of God, there is drastic evil
in our hearts. And without his preventative kindness,
we would express it in drastic ways. You and
I, friend, minus the grace of God, we would certainly
have crucified the Lord Jesus. Spiritually speaking,
we did. In Acts 2, in Peter's Pentecost sermon,
he says this, this Jesus delivered up according
to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,
that's providence again, you crucified and killed
by the hands of lawless men. Even if you didn't
do it yourself, you did it through others. Remember
the words of the Getty hymn? Ashamed, I hear
my mocking voice call out among the scoffers.
We sit in the seat of the scoffers. We are the
temple breakers. It was our sins that held him
there until it was accomplished. And how does
the Lord respond to our violence against him?
He has every right to say just what the psalmist
does here, destroy, destroy them. Yet what do
we hear from the cross? Forgive them. Father
forgive them for they know not what they do.
We were enemies of God and without hope in the
world and in Christ, God forgives us and makes
us holy. And then what? There's more. We're more
than just forgiven. What happens to us temple
breakers and torch throwers and axe wielders?
We become the temple of God ourselves. and know
you not that you are the temple of the Holy Ghost
which is within you, for you are brought with
a price." 1 Corinthians 6. God himself will come
to make his home in us, John 14. We are being
built together into a dwelling place for God
by the spirit, Ephesians 2. This is a relentless
benevolence in God. We were his enemies and he
defeats us by making us friends. He allows us
to destroy his precious things, and then he makes
us precious in return. How long will your anger
burn against the sheep of your pasture, the poem
asks, and the Lord responds by becoming the lamb
of God that takes away the sins of the world.
God's anger flared against the sheep, and Jesus
Christ was this sheep. And in doing this, he
leads us all beside still waters. Okay, that's
all over the place. That's landing very heavily
in the New Testament. I want to tie this back
to this text and to finish up with some applications.
The truth of this is complicated a little bit,
right? Because as Jesus says, his kingdom is
not of this world. God does not operate on our
rules or our timing or our sense of what's fitting.
One commentator says, sometimes even the staunchest
believer finds that the two really mystifying
things about the way God works are his reasons
and his timetable. We need to remember, even
as we look at Christ and adore Him for His otherworldly
goodness, that this is not a comfortable doctrine
in the world. The temple getting broken down
comes with massive loss of life and political
liberty for Israel. Jesus' followers do get persecuted.
Our own bodies, which the Bible says are the
temple of God, break down by age and sickness,
if nothing else. God will eventually restore
all losses, but in the meantime, the world can
be awful. As we see here in Psalm 74, God has
chosen in most of history, at most times, to
act as if He doesn't exist. I'll take this a
step further. Let's get even more uncomfortable.
I want to return to the horrible man -made loss
of life in the Congo that I started things with.
The Belgian commercial rule there? It was supposedly
a Christian thing. In Heart of Darkness, the
narrator says that when he's willing to go over
and help the noble cause, people think of him
as, quote, a sort of minor apostle. One of the
more heartbreaking things I read while I was
studying this was that during this period when
actual missionaries were over there trying to
tell the natives about the gospel, they would
often hear this, quote, Can this Jesus you tell
us about save us from the ivory trouble? Which
is to say, can Jesus Christ save us from the
Christians? And I think that is nothing less
than a desecration itself. The name of Christ
the Savior used to gain power and trample other
people down, it's another vision of the temple
being broken. And what I want to think for a
moment here, is how Psalm 74 contributes to our
vision of Christ's work. And I think it can make
us see how profoundly relieved we should be for
Jesus and his forgiveness. Look again at verse
22. the prayer of the solemnist, the prayer of
all his beaten down people. This prayer is in
this book for a reason. God collects the prayers
of his saints like incense, says the book of
Revelation. One day God will destroy all his
enemies, either by making them friends or by
removing them from the universe. And who shall
stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's
fire. Brother, if you're in Christ, thank him.
that he has taken the holy wrath of God for your
sins. If you have not trusted in Christ, if you
are not sure that you who were his enemy are
now his friend, I implore you to think about
this. Reconsider your standing with him. Draw
near to him and he will draw near to you. Friend,
Jesus who is dead at the hands of lawless men
is alive and one day he will make all things
new, but for now the temple is broken and the
world is confusing and sad. So, applications.
Let's pray for a faith that's strong enough to
endure sadness and confusion. If our faith only
makes sense when everything's going great, we're
in big trouble. Because as the psalm reminds
us, everything's not going to go great. then
let's praise the Lord that when we go into sadness
and confusion, we can meet Jesus there because
he goes there before us in otherworldly humility
and benevolence and he will never leave us or
forsake us. I want to close with a little part
of a poem from the great preacher Charles Spurgeon.
It says, for this long light, excuse me, For
this life's long night of sadness, he will give
us peace and gladness. Soul, remember in thy
pains, God or all forever reigns. Amen. Let's
pray. Oh Lord God, we praise you that you are
our King, that you are the lover of our souls,
that you come to comfort the weak, and the needy,
that you have a special place in your heart for
those that the world forgets and thinks are worthless.
Help us, Lord, to be more like you. Help us to
be forgivers. Help us to be compassionate. Help
us to run to you for sanctuary from the world's
woes and also from our own sin. Lord, be our
great King, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen. Thank
you for listening to Second City Sermons podcast.
We hope this sermon has encouraged you to worship
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