Hello, you are listening to Second City Sermons,
a ministry of Second City Church in Midtown Harrisburg.
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sermon. God Bless. Oh Lord God, your name is
great through all the earth. You are good to
all those things that you have made. We praise
you for your fatherly care. We praise you that
you have embraced the church as your bride. We
ask now that you would open our hearts and our
minds to hear your word. May the words of my
mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing.
In your sight, O Lord, a rock and a redeemer.
Amen. Four score and seven months ago, and another
four years because that's only about seven years,
our passer brought forth in this church building
a new sermon schedule. conceived in liberty,
because nobody made him do it, and dedicated
to the proposition that we would study the Bible
in its various parts in more or less equal intervals.
That is, when Peter took this job, initially,
he started doing these quarterly teaching series
and began doing Psalms in the summers. And today,
in God's goodness, and with God's sense of humor,
which we've already heard a little bit about
today, we are going to study Psalm 76 eight days
after we celebrated the 250th anniversary of
the signing of the Declaration of Independence
in 1776. When we're done here, if you're feeling
especially patriotic, you can jump on Interstate
76 and drive down to Philadelphia and take a
picture in front of the Liberty Bell. And it's
an interesting thing that we're studying 76 so
close to the celebration of 76. I'll just tell
you, this is not something that Peter had planned
11 years ago. We didn't know as a church about
a month ago that this coincidence was occurring
and we all sort of giggled about it. It was just
accidentally the next thing on the schedule once
Peter had got done with his series on the Ten
Commandments last week, which by the way, I thought
was excellent. And I think we should think about
this coincidence a little bit because if you
believe in an omnipotent God, you believe that
his plan and his providence extends to all things.
And so when you get a coincidence or a small
providence like this one, you have to think about
how to think about it, right? The poet Robert
Frost has this great line where he asks quote
if design govern in a thing so small Does design
govern in a little thing like this, right? What's
the point of seeing? Claiming that you see providence
at work if you can't see that there's any sort
of providential point in the action What's my
contention? Excuse me. It's the manner in which
I conducted my study of this particular psalm
that when we see one of these small providences,
something that we know theologically to be part
of God's plan, even if we can't understand the
purpose of it, if it seems like a small thing,
well that should drive us to prayer. That should
drive us to receptivity toward God. Maybe he's
teaching us something. Maybe he's strengthening
our faith. Maybe he's showing he loves us. Maybe
he just wants us to be on our toes spiritually
speaking. So in the spirit of prayer and Receptivity
and being on our toes. I want to talk about 76
and 76 today I want to talk about America as
a historical phenomenon, which I think we can
all agree to be part of God's Providence one
way or another then I want to talk about history
as such in really big picture terms and Because
I'm taking a wide angle on the text today. I'm
not going to talk about a number of things that
I would like to. I have a list of these things.
It's written here. The things that I'm not going
to be able to get to. Feel free to come and ask
me after the service if your unanswered question
is on my list. So after that big picture stuff,
I want to zero in on a song and ask what it has
to say about history and Providence and us as
a congregation. If you want points. If you want
to write down alliterative points, I have got
them for you. My points today are going to be
history, humility, and hierarchy. History, humility,
hierarchy. So let's get into the first point,
history 76 and 76. So I think it's a good and
spiritually mature thing to be interested in
the customs and the traditions of your country.
And I think it's undeniably a mark of holiness,
to be grateful to God for the good gifts that
He gives through all the different facets of
our lives. If you think about the blessings and
curses in Deuteronomy 28, for example, which
go on for a long time, one of the more chilling
parts of this whole litany of curses, it says,
all the cursings come, it says, because, quote,
you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness,
and gladness of heart because of his great gifts.
Being ungrateful to God is a mark of great sin.
It is spiritual foolishness not to give thanks
to God for his blessings. And this poem is helpful
for us in remembering that. So Matthew Henry,
who was not an American, when he writes about
this poem, he says, quote, It is a psalm proper
to a Thanksgiving day. that is for all people,
for whatever particular gifts they have received
from God, and I think he's right. So in our context,
I'm pleased that our denomination, the Presbyterian
Church in America, at the last General Assembly,
had no less than three overtures recommending
that we, as a group, solemnly thank God for our
country. The one that passed, one did pass, was
from the Philadelphia Presbytery, and it introduced
itself in these words. Whereas, hold on, whereas,
God's word calls his church, oh, give thanks
unto the Lord for his mercy and doors forever
in whatsoever comes to pass according to Jesus
Christ's sovereign rule and reign over all men
and nations. In other words, it is right always
and at all times to give thanks and praise to
the Lord, right? But of course, there's more
to it just than that. So the overture writers,
And I think that this country has been the instrument
through which God has provided immense blessings
to many people. Consider we have a very large
degree of religious liberty here. I read a book
once where the author who was a missionary was
talking to a guy after a service and he was lamenting
that American Christians were so lukewarm in
their faith. And the guy that he was talking
to who was a Christian from the Middle East.
and was visiting here, he said, this morning
I saw a public baptism conducted openly and without
fear. I saw hundreds of people worshiping God
openly without fear of governmental retribution.
This is the type of miracle we've been praying
about for years. How about that? Many people
around the world right now cannot worship God
the way they feel is right. There are many people
connected with our own congregation. who have
had to get away from religious persecution in
their country of origin, right? We ought to give
thanks to God that we can worship freely here.
Additionally, peaceful living! has been historically
possible here for a large percent of families,
such that many of us have been able to live quietly
and mind our own affairs, as Paul says in 1 Timothy.
This country and its stability has been a huge
common grace kindness from God to this people.
And I think we should thank the Lord for his
gifts. All of this is not to say that this country
doesn't still have very large problems and doesn't
have huge historical sins in its past that we're
still working through as a country and as a church.
But if we're thinking historically, I think we
need to think as people with a historical sense,
not just as impatient moral idealists. Here's
an example of what I mean. I think it is scandalous.
that women did not have the right to vote in
this country until 1920. I think that was a flawed
judgment on the part of our forefathers. I think
that's all true. It is a bad lack of judgment.
But we should consider what's happening in the
rest of the world at that same time, right? None
of the other large democracies allowed women
the vote in 1920. America beat England. to granting
women suffrage by eight years. It beat France
by 25 years. Really surprisingly, in Bolshevik
Russia, women did have the right to vote. But
just like men, they did not have a legal right
to free speech. They did not have the right to
form an independent political party. So they
were allowed to vote, but only for the person,
the state. chose to be voted for, right? And
soon that was going to be a guy named Joseph
Stalin who famously said it's not who votes that
counts, it's who counts the votes. So there's
that. Then, of course, there's the issue of racial
slavery and following the Civil War racial discrimination,
which is an enduring and awful evil. But again,
we should consider how the US was able, in some
sense, to deal with some of its unjust laws.
The historian John Meacham says, quote, in our
living memory, Christianity has been deployed
as a means of liberation and progress in that
issue. He's talking about the 1960s civil rights
movement, of course, which was primarily the
work of the black church asking the white church
to get the memo. the White Church finally listening
up and voting accordingly. And think about how
the nonviolent protest movement was able to get
things done here in this country. So Martin Luther
King Jr. famously said, quote, we will wear you
down by our capacity to suffer. Do to us what
you will and we will continue to love you. He
said that in 1957. which was the same year that
Eisenhower needed to deploy the National Guard
to protect black students as they walked to school.
And, here's the remarkable thing about all of
this, King's nonviolent Christian approach worked.
Right? Appealing to the consciences of our people,
eventually, gradually, grudgingly, worked. And
I think we should thank God for this. Again,
consider the alternative, right? If you tried
that with Stalin, he would say, you're gonna
wear me down by your capacity to suffer? See,
you try. Here's a quote from Russell Moore, and
I think this gets the balance that we should
have just right. Quote, our patriotism is the
kind that needs our country to be our country,
not our messiah. We have another king for that.
We love our country best when we don't expect
it to be our final city on a hill. So that was
the intro to my history points. Anyway, I want
to go back to Psalm 76 I want to go back to 1776
in 1776 the Continental Army was really destroyed
on several different occasions They were outmanned
by the British who had the largest most well
-funded and most professional army in the world
Supported by the strongest Navy in the world
In fact, the American Revolution came so close
to being snuffed out almost immediately that
the people at the time and smart people since
have talked about God's special providence favoring
the Americans. Here's a quote from a Massachusetts
newspaper in that year, quote, we have thought
that God was for us and had given many and signal
instances of his power. mercy in our favor and
had greatly frowned upon and disappointed our
enemies and verily it has been so." The author
goes on to say that the people needed to give
God the glory for his work and pray for his continuing
favor. Even the cautious historian David McCulloch
says that the outcome of the war quote seemed
little short of a miracle especially for those
who knew what a close call it was. in the beginning.
So when we think about the revolution of 1776,
we're thinking about a bunch of smart guys who
started a war they did not have a great chance
of winning, but which they did win partially
by accident. That's the haughty defiance of 76
that Walt Whitman, our great poet of democracy,
talks about, which I quoted in your bulletin.
But I want to turn back to our actual sermon
text this morning. Psalm 76 is a war song But
in a very strange sense, isn't it? Look with
me at the text. What does it say? What does it
say in essence? What's the main point of it?
It says this, God is in control. The strong,
the well -armed, the warlords, they can't stand
before God. God breaks the flashing arrows. That's
verse three. He sinks the stout -hearted into
sleep. The men of war are paralyzed, that's verse
five. At your rebuke, O God of Jacob, both rider
and horse lay stunned, verse six. God smashes
up the tanks, we might say. God confounds the
helicopters, right? Here's an interesting thing.
The word arrows in Hebrew is actually the word
thunderbolts. That's why it says flashing arrows.
So the bad guys are guys who think that they
have God -like power, which seems a lot like
most of the governments today, right? By the
way, did you know that the initial tests for
the atom bomb that were conducted in New Mexico
were called the Trinity tests? That's kind of
strange, isn't it? But God shrugs off all human
weaponry. Think about what's being said in this
poem. Here's our poet. He lives in a very tumultuous
time. Think about the records in Kings and Chronicles.
They make you exhausted. He says that it doesn't
matter how big the enemy armies are. Why? Because
God is bigger. We could call this the haughty
defiance of Psalm 76. Against all the materialists,
against all the people who think they can play
God if they just get together a big enough army,
this Psalm is shouting, nope. God is in control.
He will decide the battles that decide the fates
of nations. God will be glorified. His name is
great in Israel. God's faithful people will continue
to praise him, and they can know without hesitation
that he is the boss, even in the face of political
or military opposition. So that's my first point,
or half of it. So God is in control of actual
history, the stuff that actually happens in the
world. God is intensely concerned with what happens
here. And he is at work to bring salvation to
his people and glory to himself. Think about
what we say every week in the Apostles' Creed.
Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate. That's a
particular person. God did not snap his fingers
outside of time and physical reality. No, he
entered into history and Psalms like this one
say that he has been involved in history since
the beginning. This is the doctrine of Providence.
The Philadelphia Presbytery, when they made their
overture to the General Assembly this year, referenced
a guy named John Witherspoon, who was a minister
as well as a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
from a sermon which he preached on Psalm 76 in
the year 1776. So I'm going to quote his main
point from that sermon. He says, That is... God
is in control even in the evil of history. He
restrains that evil to show mercy, and He allows
that evil in order to bring about His plans and
to let the evildoers store up wrath for the day
of judgment. And we see this supremely, of course,
in the judicial murder of Christ. He was killed
by the ambition of mistaken princes, the cunning
and cruelty of oppressive and corrupt ministers,
and even the inhumanity of brutal soldiers. All
of these things were instruments that got used
in the human life and death of Jesus to bring
about his great redemption. God is at work in
history, even though it's messy. So I want to
come back to that. But first, here's the other
half of this first point. God is not just the
God of actual history. He's the God of all history.
Think about what it means that we're reading
this text here in 2026, right? Many scholars
think that this Psalm was written in celebration
of the destruction of the armies of the Assyrian
warlord Sennacherib. This is a pretty famous
thing. You can find accounts of this in Isaiah,
for instance. The English poet Lord Byron wrote
a poem about this incident. The last two lines
are, and the might of the Gentile, unsmoked by
the sword, hath melted like snow in the glance
of the Lord. It's a pretty good line. Poem is
generally considered to be a part of a classic
romantic literature, right? Well, here's the
thing. Byron was born in 1788, which is the year
before George Washington became president. Byron
writes glowingly about Washington as news. We
think of Byron as old. The English language as
we speak it is maybe 500 years old, depending
on how you want to measure early modern English.
The Assyrian attack on Jerusalem, which is being
celebrated in this poem, was in 701 BC. That
is. At the time of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem,
this poem was already older than our language
is. Considered just in terms of antiquity, this
poem is to Shakespeare as I am to my daughter,
Bella, who turns three today. Wish her a happy
birthday. She's in the nursery. This poem is
at least 10 times older than the United States
of America. Generations have trod, have trod,
have trod, civilizations have risen and fallen,
but this poem celebrating the acts of God in
history is still here. It has weathered all of
history from then till now. All flesh is as grass
and the glory of man is the flower of grass,
but the grass withers, the flower falls, but
the word of the Lord endures forever. Friend,
this word is a rock. It has been a light to all
generations. If you want something that will
last, if you want something bigger than yourself,
you've got it in your hands. Treasure this word.
Treasure the God who gave us this word so that
we can know Him, us, and our children and our
children's children. That was all point one.
God is the God of history. He controls it. He
always has. He's the ancient of days. He has
determined the periods and the boundaries of
the dwelling places of nations as we wrote about
in Acts. Let's move to point two, which is much
simpler. So what do we do as people living in
history, knowing that God rules all of history?
Make it practical. Fill in the blank for me here,
right? Think about the song that we've read.
God rules all history, therefore I should...
What? Right? There's a lot of good answers to
this question, of course. If this was a test,
and my students were raising their hands and
making that look on their face, I would say,
I'll take a lot of... answers. There's a lot
of ways to get full credit, but you need to explain
yourself the reference to the text. Here's what
I think we should take practically from this.
God rules all history, therefore I should be
thoughtfully nice. That's how I would fill in
the blanks. Let me show you how I got this. Look
again at the poem. Go to verse seven. It says,
but you You are to be feared. Who can stand before
you when once your anger is aroused? From the
heavens you uttered judgment. The earth feared
and was still. When God arose to establish judgment
to save all the humble of the earth. Selah. You'll
remember that Selah is kind of a mysterious term.
That's why it's left untranslated. That's the
English version of the Hebrew word. Our best
guess is it's some kind of musical term meaning
pause. Stop, breathe, think about that a second.
That's what we should do here. God is in control
of all things. No one can stand against him and
he is a judging God and he is going to judge
in anger in order to what? Save the humble of
the earth. My point too today is humility. The
God of history is on the side of the humble.
What does this mean? Well, it means for our own
good, we need to be on the side of the humble.
We have this phrase in our society that's kind
of this moral prod. We say we want to be on the
right side of history, right? People say that
when they want you to vote for them. And I think
what they're saying is right, but they're not
saying it with the meaning that this text has.
People today seem to mean that in, you know,
if you get things wrong today. In 50 years some
teacher with a book in his hand is going to be
shaking his head and saying, well those guys
were wrong and we will feel shame in our grave
or in our old folks home or something like that.
It's a pretty windy judgment really. This text
says something very different. It says that God
intervenes in history and when he does he is
on the side of the humble. The word translated
humble here means what you think it means in
the context of history. In different places it's
translated meek. poor, lowly, oppressed. When
Jesus says that the meek will inherit the earth,
he's probably thinking of verses like this. Matthew
Henry says, quote, though the meek of the earth
are by their meekness exposed to injury, yet
God will sooner or later appear for their salvation.
And so when we read this text, knowing that we
are those who are favored by history generally,
we need to put ourselves on the side of the poor
and the humble. Don't be an oppressor. Be kind
in a thoughtful way. Be on the right side of
the history and for the right reason. I think
there is messiness, there is injustice, there
is enormous pain in history, but God is not complacent.
God sees the ugliness of history and it makes
him angry. The oppressors of history aren't just
going to get away with it. God is on the side
of the poor and the meek and the humble and we
want to think about who those people are and
make sure we are nice to them. So that was point
two. My last point is hierarchy, and it's related
to both previous points. Let's look at the last
few verses of this poem quickly for my last point
here. Verse 11. Who should we serve? Well, it's
God, obviously, right? But then look at verse
12. Who else should fear God? Princes and kings,
right? The people who in a traditional society,
everybody else is supposed to fear and serve,
right? So there's a sense of course in which
we're all equal before God. God's chose no favoritism
or partiality as Peter says in Acts. A beggar
woman can be the spiritual peer of the disciples
as Jesus shows, but there's this still a sense
and a very obvious sense in which a beggar woman
and a king are different, right? One has money
and power, one doesn't. This poem is saying that
everybody on the earthly totem pole, everybody
in every part of the social ladder will answer
to God and the ones at the top are going to answer
the most. They need to fear him. Let's put all
of this together, and here's what I'm suggesting.
I think we need to train ourselves to have concentric
loyalties, or layered loyalties, right? Broadly,
right? We should be loyal to ourselves. That's
part of being a creature. But our loyalty to
ourselves need to be bounded very tightly to
our loyalty to those around us. And there's family
loyalty, there's social loyalty, there's loyalty
to one's country. And I think that's a good and
healthy thing. Loyalty to this state is good,
right? When it's correctly possible. And then
of course there's loyalty to God who expresses
himself most fully in Christ. And that's the
hierarchy that should most concern us. God is
at the top. and everything else, every other
loyalty, no matter how real, needs to be subordinate
to that. I think we need to be a thoughtful people.
We should thank God for his grace, I think, in
giving us this country. We should thank God for
his grace in giving us this word. I think we
can praise God freely in this country, and we
should praise God for that. And further, we can
praise this country under God because God is
over. this country just as he's over everything
else in all of history. Let's pray. Oh Lord God,
your might is evident throughout all the world.
You come in weakness when you come in the person
of Jesus. We praise you that you are on the side,
not of the warlords, of the poor. not humble.
And each of us, Lord, in our sin is poor and
humble. Come to each of us, Lord, bind our wounds.
Help us to look to you in gladness, knowing that
you are good, that your mercy endures, that you
will be God to us. Help us, Lord, to love you
and do your work. We pray these things in Jesus'
name. Amen. Thank you for listening to Second
City Sermons podcast. We hope this sermon has
encouraged you to worship God and to celebrate
the gospel of Jesus. Please consider subscribing
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bless.