If you’ll take your Bibles in hand please and turn to Psalm chapter 11. This is our last sermon in our series of sermons all coming from the first book of the Psalter. All the sermons you’ve heard over the summer have come from Psalms 1 to 41 and this first book has many of the greatest hits. Psalms 1 and 2 start the book off with a bang. You have Psalm 8, Psalm 19, the famous 23rd Psalm. There are Messianic psalms. There’s word pictures that we love like “the shadow of God’s wings” and familiar phrases like, “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” and “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” We find the King of Glory, the one who asks why he is forsaken, the blessed man, the Good Shepherd.
Psalm 11, however, does not fall into that category necessarily of the greatest hits. I looked it up on our website and could not find any record of a sermon being preached on this psalm, which may mean you are about to hear the best sermon that has ever been preached on this psalm at First Presbyterian Church. So it may indeed be a lesser known psalm, but I hope that as we open up this text and think about its message that it will become one that you turn to. It teaches us where to turn when it seems like the very foundations of our lives are destroyed. It teaches us that God is the supreme Judge and that He is on His throne. And we know that this is a psalm of David but we don’t have any other context; we don’t have any backstory to go along with it. It’s only two short stanzas. The first stanza, if you look at the chapter there, it’s from verses 1 to 3. And if you’re using the pew Bible, another ESV Bible, you’ll see a gap between verse 3 and verse 4, indicating where the next stanza starts. So the second stanza begins in verse 4 and goes through to the end of the chapter. And we’ll use those stanza divisions as the outline. So first, we’ll see David’s dilemma in the first stanza, and in the second stanza we’ll see definite destinies. Before we read this psalm, however, let’s go to the Lord in prayer.
Heavenly Father, we need You. We need Your Holy Spirit as we come to Your Word. Won’t You please pour out Your Spirit upon us that we might have eyes that see and ears that hear. It’s in Jesus’ name that we pray, amen.
Psalm 11. Hear now the Word of God:
“To the choirmaster. Of David.
In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to my soul, ‘Flee like a bird to your mountain, for behold, the wicked bend the bow; they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart; if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?’
The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. Let him rain coals on the wicked; fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. For the Lord is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.”
May God add His blessing to this, the reading and hearing of His holy Word.
David’s Dilemma
Well it’s hard to go a single day without hearing or receiving some kind of advice. We may call our parents for advice; we may ask our teachers for advice. All the advertisements we see every day are advice for what we should buy. We pay for medical advice; we pay for legal advice. There’s good advice; there’s bad advice. We get unsolicited advice. Right after Lydian was born, our oldest, my favorite genre of advice was parental advice or parenting advice, especially that advice that came from friends who did not have children yet. They would say things like, “Sleep when the baby sleeps.” And I really do agree with that in principle, that’s wonderful, just so long as we can clean when the baby cleans and go to work when the baby goes to work! We get so much advice that we even have familiar phrases for how we deal with advice. Some advice we should “take with a grain of salt,” which is just more advice about how we should take the advice that we are receiving!
But none of this is new. In this first stanza, David is receiving advice. In fact, it’s part of his dilemma. If you look down at verse 1 you can see where the quotation marks start, and that’s where the voice of David’s counselor begins. He is reporting this speech. And while we don’t have all the context, as I said, of this psalm, these verses help us to kind of reconstruct what’s going on. So first it seems like David is receiving this advice from friends and from well- meaning people. Look down at verse 2 and you’ll see that his counselor says, “Behold the wicked bend the bow.” So the speaker is differentiating himself from the wicked. He is a good guy, maybe a friend who is offering this advice, and he certainly seems to have good reasons to give this advice. Look again at verse 2 where it says, “The wicked bend the bow; they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart; if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” So this counselor is telling David, “You are in their crosshairs. There is nothing left for you to do because the foundations are crumbling around you. So to the one giving the advice, his solution seems like the only obvious choice.
But David has a different take on this advice. Look at how David introduces the counsel in verse 1. He says, “How can you say this to my soul?” He’s saying, “What are you talking about? How in the world can this be your advice?” David clearly sees this as poor advice and it’s poor enough that David believes it could be taking him out of God’s will for his life. It would be causing him to stray.
So before continuing, let me pause and draw out an obvious but necessary point of application. It doesn’t matter who is offering you advice or how well-meaning they may be. If the advice is in conflict with the known will of God, you cannot follow it. So grappling with this advice is part of David’s dilemma. The other part is the actual circumstance in which he finds himself. His enemies are lurking in the darkness with their arrows on their bowstrings. And one of the foundational principles of Biblical interpretation since the Reformation has been to determine the plain meaning of the text. And we don’t mean by that the literal meaning of the text, because we have to look at the genre, and we’re looking at poetry here, and we need to realize that symbolic language might have a plain meaning that is different from its literal meaning. You can see that right here in verse 1. None of us would argue that the plain meaning of “flee like a bird to your mountain” would be for David to sprout wings and fly away. The plain meaning is that he needs to retreat, he needs to run away and find a safe haven.
What the reformers were opposing was the type of allegorical interpretation that finds some hidden or mystical sense in every verse or word. So reformed pastors and teachers and church members have alarms going off, they have red flags going off whenever they catch a hint of that type of Biblical interpretation. But I have to confess to you, that whenever I would see descriptions of warfare, I would invariably see them as something spiritual. Attacks of the enemies I would think of as vague trials of life. Or that arrows had a spiritual sense only like the darts of Satan. That error of my interpretation became very apparent to me on February 24th when the war in Ukraine began. And I hope you will forgive me for seeing application in Ukraine for this psalm and looking at it through this lens. It’s hard for me not to read this type of psalm without that scenario coming to mind.
The text itself, even the Hebrew text, doesn’t do any favors to me. The Hebrew word for the “wicked” in verse 2, “the wicked bend the bow,” the Hebrew word is “rashah.” So I can’t get away from it even in the Hebrew text! But what a comfort, what a comfort it is in this psalm and in many others to know what our Lord is not indifferent to our physical, bodily well-being. God made us with bodies. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, took to Himself not just a reasonable soul but a true body. Indeed, He is still united to that body, albeit a glorified body in heaven and for eternity. God saw fit for a body to be involved as our salvation was accomplished and our Savior knows what it is like to have a body, a body that was broken by violence and by torture; a body that was broken for you and for me. So what a comfort it is to know that when we face unimaginable peril, we can pray prayers even for our physical safety and the safety of our friends and family and for the health of our bodies. And this is a matter that is important to God. He does care for us both body and soul.
And so David is facing both the advice and the dangerous circumstances. What does he do next? And I think that’s actually the wrong question we should ask. We need to ask, “What did David do before?” Look back at verse 1 at how this psalm begins. “In the Lord I take refuge.” I think it’s significant that David begins the psalm with this statement. The present perfect nuance of the verb, “I take refuge,” stresses the fact that trust is something that has been in David’s life for his whole life. It has been something that has been continuing for David’s whole life. From the beginning, that much is settled. Before he gets into his dilemma, before we hear about enemies – “In the Lord I take refuge.”
Many of you have faced overwhelming distress and danger and disease and death. And if you haven’t faced those things yet, praise the Lord, but I hate to tell you, you will. And you will face those moments when it seems like the foundations are crumbling and those are not the moments to begin working out your theology. When the wicked bend their bow, when your country has been invaded, when you receive that phone call that you have been dreading, when your family is falling apart, when a dear saint in our church is taken away before we expect it, these are not the best times to begin working on your theology. This week, the Day School is about to be in session, and not long after the kids return to the building and get settled in their classrooms for the start of the school year, it’s all going to get disrupted by a fire drill. We don’t wait for the fire to figure out where we are going, but we put a plan in place so that we are ready when the time comes.
And in the same way, before he mentions any trouble in his life, David has settled this theological point – “In the Lord I take refuge.” The refuge is the place to which we run. We go because He is all powerful. We go because He is all knowing. We go because He is the LORD, Yahweh, our covenant making and covenant keeping God. We go because He loves us. He is good. We go because there is nowhere else to go. We go because He is righteous and He is just, He is wise and absolute. We go because He is our God and we are His people. He is our refuge and those truths ought to be settled from the beginning. “In the Lord I take refuge.”
Definite Destinies
We’ve seen now David’s dilemma; now we’ll turn to our second point – definite destinies. Look with me at verse 4. “The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man.” So David begins this stanza just like he begins the first stanza. He begins by looking to the Lord. And because we think of earthly rulers, we are in danger of misunderstanding those first two phrases. We are in danger of misunderstanding what David is saying. To our ears, they make it sound like God is being passive, like He is somewhere far off in His holy temple, on His throne, and in heaven far away. That He is removed from us and from our concerns. But that is not what David means. He is saying that God is on His throne. He is actively ruling and He is King and all is under His control.
Oftentimes in Hebrew poetry the second line of a verse helps to interpret the first line. And this is a great example. Look at the next line. It says, “his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man.” This is what God is doing on His throne. God is watching, and not just watching but He is testing. He is examining the children of man. And what a strange turn of phrase it is to say that “His eyelids test the children of man.” This is likely referring to squinting, focusing, trying to see deep and far into what’s before him. He is paying attention. He is straining to watch, in a sense. It’s an active watching, even when we don’t sense it.
And the next verse tells us what it is that God is looking for. It says, “The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.” What do we do with this? What does it mean that God hates the wicked? We can surely say that it’s not some type of uncontrolled, emotional outburst or reaction to people not doing the things that He likes. No, this is the settled, unwavering disposition of a God who is both perfectly holy and perfectly just. God does what He does because He is who He is. God does what He does because He is who He is.
We also see that from God’s perspective there are only two types of people in the world. There are the righteous and there are the wicked. And this second stanza ends with showing us the ultimate destiny of these two types of people. First, it deals with the wicked. Look down at verse 6. “Let him rain coals on the wicked; fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.” This is clearly a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, which is one of the clearest examples of God’s judgment in the Old Testament, indeed in the whole Bible. It’s a sure thing that the wicked will be judged. It’s a sobering reminder that consequences for sin and the wrath of God are real and that wrath, that judgment is the ultimate and eternal destiny for the wicked. It’s a terrifying prospect.
Now each of you has a picture in your mind of the wicked one who deserves this type of terrible judgment, but the reality is, that this judgment is what each of our sins deserves. What we deserve is what the wicked receive in this psalm; that is the reality of the heinousness of each one of our sins. It’s a terrifying thought and one that we probably would rather not have; we would rather not think about it. Well what we find in this verse is that the danger of eternal damnation is real and it is what we deserve because “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” But for those who repent and believe, we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. There is also a way in which this verse is actually a comfort to us as Christians. When the wicked seem to prosper and continue to put their arrow to the bowstring, when we are truly defenseless in the face of violence and evil, it can begin to feel like God does not hear our prayers, that He does not answer or that He does not care. But the Lord is on His throne. And even if we do not see it in our lifetime, the Lord will ultimately conquer all of His and our enemies. His righteousness will prevail over all the earth, in part by His judging of the wicked.
Our catechisms teach us these things. This is one of the ways in which Christ executes His office as a King, the Shorter Catechism says, is “He restrains and conquers all His and our enemies.” And the Larger Catechism says that He exercises or “He executes the office of a King in taking vengeance on the rest who know not God and obey not the Gospel.” Judgment is not up to us, but we can rest knowing that it belongs to the Lord and that it will surely come to pass.
But there is an alternative destiny to the one of eternal judgment. Look with me at verse 7. “For the Lord is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.” This is a picture of heaven. We will see His face. Our view may be obscured and unclear now as the apostle Paul wrote, “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” This is a picture of heaven. And when at long last all things are made new, those who have received the righteousness of Christ will see Him face to face. The reward for the righteous is eternity with our Savior. Derek Kidner wrote on this psalm that, “If the first line of the psalm showed where the believer’s safety lies, the last line shows where his heart should be. God as refuge may be sought for motives that are all too self-regarding, but to behold His face is a goal in which only love has any interest.” And what a glorious day that will be.
Years ago there was a story in The Presbyterian Journal about a man named William Dyke. He was born in Great Britain and he was blinded as a young child in an accident. He went through his whole life after that blind with no hope of that changing. And despite his disability, he was a hard worker and a good student. He developed a wonderful academic record and he also began dating a beautiful girl. He proposed to her and she agreed to marry him in spite of his blindness and the challenges that they both knew they would face. After they were engaged but before they were married, Dyke’s case was brought before a surgeon who believed that he could restore Dyke’s sight. And Dyke determined that there was nothing to lose at this point and elected to go through with the surgery. It wasn’t until the day of their wedding that the bandages were removed and they discovered that the surgery had been successful in restoring his sight. And so it happened that the first time he saw his bride’s face was when the doors in the back of the sanctuary swung open and they saw each other face to face for the first time in the front of that church. He knew her, he had held her hand, he had heard her voice, but only now did he see her face to face. And what a joy that would have been.
You can imagine that joy, which is just a glimpse of the joy that we will have when we see our Savior face to face. We know Him, we’ve heard His voice, but what a joy and reward it will be to see Him face to face. And so when all is dark, when the wicked bend the bow, when it seems like the foundations are being destroyed, the Lord’s throne is in heaven and His eyes see. He is not only your refuge but your love and the upright shall behold His face. Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, how grateful we are for a beautiful Savior. We thank You for being our refuge and strength, for being the One to whom we can turn no matter the circumstance. We ask for Your blessing as we go back into the world today. Apply these truths to our hearts. Help us to settle these theological points and know that You truly are our God and we are Your people. It’s in Jesus’ name that we pray, amen.