If you’ll take your Bibles in hand and open to Psalm 30 in your pew Bible, that’s page 461; Psalm number 30.
Oftentimes in the psalms we find comparisons between different men. Psalm 1, the blessed man and wicked. Psalm 3, one who cries out to God and one who says there is no help in God. Psalm 4, those who pursue lies and those who pursue the Lord. We see the oppressed and the oppressor. We see the righteous and the wicked; ones who are honest and ones who slander. We see the proud and the humble. We see those who are just and those who unfairly oppress. And this is often how we look at the world. We see clear, dividing lines between the good guys and the bad guys. We see believers and unbelievers; those who are in the church and those who are outside of the church.
And of course, those distinctions do in fact exist, but this psalm highlights that between belief and unbelief, the line runs through every human heart; the line between belief and unbelief runs through every human heart. So this psalm is also a comparison. It compares the man who trusts in God and it compares him with the man who trusts his own self-sufficiency, and the two are the same man. The superscript, you’ll notice, tells us that this is a psalm of David. This is the one who killed Goliath. He was a conquering king that put armies to flight. He is a hero of the faith, a type of Christ, a man after God’s own heart. And so we see that even the holiest of men will struggle to put aside their own self-sufficiency and to put their faith and trust in the Lord. We’ll look at this psalm this evening in three sections. In verses 1 through 5, we’ll see how the psalmist gives us a report of restoration. Then in verses 6 and 7, we’ll see the peril of prosperity. And then in verses 8 to 12, we will see the celebration of salvation. But before we read the passage, let’s turn to the Lord in prayer. Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we are grateful for Your Word. We are grateful that You promised to give us wisdom when we lack it. And so we ask that You would do that now. We ask that You would send Your Holy Spirit, because without Him, this is fruitless. We ask that You would warm our hearts to hear what You would say this evening. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
Psalm 30. Hear now the Word of God:
“A psalm of David. A song at the dedication of the temple.
I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me. O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol; you restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit.
Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name. For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.
As for me, I said in my prosperity, ‘I shall never be moved.’ By your favor, O Lord, you made my mountain stand strong; you hid your face; I was dismayed.
To you, O Lord, I cry, and to the Lord I plead for mercy: ‘What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? Hear, O Lord, and be merciful to me! O Lord, be my helper!’
You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever!”
May God add His blessing to this, the reading and hearing of His holy and inerrant Word.
One of my favorite storytelling methods or techniques is the flashback. I love to see a movie or read a book that uses this method as the backstory; it can catch you off guard. The backstory can help illuminate elements of the story that you weren’t understanding before then. And in this psalm, David is using a similar technique. He begins with praise and thankfulness for being restored, and then we find out that there was more to his deliverance than we first understand. And then he goes back to pick up where he left off. We will begin our study where David begins with a report of restoration.
A Report of Restoration
There are different genres of psalms, and this one is a psalm of thanksgiving. This psalm begins with a report of restoration and offers thanks to the Lord for what He has done. You see, if you look down at verse 1, that he extols or lifts up the Lord for a reason that we see in verse 2. David was deathly ill and God healed him. He says in verse 1 that God has drawn him up. And the word picture here is of bringing water up out of the well. There is nothing in a well to grab onto for security. There is no way to climb out. It is a deep and narrow pit; the waters would surely overcome him. There is no way out and he is practically in the grave. Yet God has drawn him up. And that was really his only option at that point. Verse 2 tells us what the psalmist did when he found himself in the pit – he cried out to God. He cried out to God and God heard him.
And so what does the psalmist then do with this report of restoration? Look at verse 4. He addresses the saints and he says, “I just told you about the goodness of the Lord, so let’s all sing. Let’s all give thanks.” He not only extols God himself but he uses his testimony of God’s favor to multiply the praise given to God. Now I’ve never been a big fan of math, but this is the kind of a multiplication table that I can get behind. One report of God’s goodness ought not equal one instance of gratefulness. One report of God’s goodness ought not equal just one instance of gratefulness. The psalmist has now told the entire congregation. Interestingly, he has also written it down so that if it even animates our praise here this evening, this one report of God’s goodness has resulted in the gratefulness and praise of countless generations. And I wonder how often we see God’s mercy and kindness to us as a way to intentionally stoke the fire of praise in our fellow believers. How often do we forget to be thankful for what we have asked God to do for us in the first place when He answers our prayers, much less to use that answer to prayer to urge others on to fervently worship our Savior.
Now you might be thinking, “Wow, a community that is overflowing with contagious thanksgiving and praise, that sounds great! Where is this type of multiplication of God’s glory happening at First Presbyterian Church?” Well I’m so glad you asked! In this building as we worship together, we are encouraging one another. There is something about being here with fellow believers, seeing everyone stand, singing along. We sing more loudly when we are together. It’s an encouragement. We are teaching each other the truths that we are singing. At General Assembly this week there were several worship services. At one of them, Dasha, the kids and I, we were right in the middle of where everyone was seated. And when everybody stands up to sing, you can’t help but stand up. When everyone is singing at the top of their lungs, you can’t help but sing along. And you’ll sing louder than you would otherwise. Later on in the week, the business concluded pretty close to when the worship service started, so we went out to get some food before the worship service started and realized we wouldn’t be able to eat it before the service began, so we sat in the back. It was separated from all the chairs were for those attending so we were a little off in the back looking forward at the worship service. And even being in the same room and looking forward at those worshiping, it was easier to say, “Well we can just stay seated. We can just sit back here by these tables.” Or, “We won’t sing quite as loudly because it’s just the four of us back here.” So being together is important.
Surely we all notice this as we worshiped over livestream over the past couple of years. You might have started by standing up when the pastor said, “Now let’s stand and sing such-and-such hymn.” But before long, that might have gotten more difficult. “Why are we standing? We are in our house. The couch is more comfortable. Why are we singing loudly?” You know we would hit on the remote, get that volume up as loud as we could for the singing, but still, without being in the same room with fellow believers, our worship was not multiplied in the same way. Where else does this happen? It happens when we are here for worship services and we see the Lord Jesus mark out His people through baptism, when we hear a missions report from the Gideons about how His Word is being placed in places all around the globe. We see this in particular at Sunday School as we gather together to share prayer requests and we ask, “How did God answer that prayer later?” and “What is going on in your life? Tell me about what Christ has done for you.” This happens on Wednesday nights as we gather as a church and as we share a meal together and we enjoy each other’s company and we learn about each other and hear what God is doing in our lives. And then we go to our D-groups or choir rehearsals or to the seminars that we have. These are all ways that we are encouraged. As you practice hospitality even in your own homes and as you have spontaneous conversations about spiritual things with neighbors, with coworkers and family members. Thomas Goodwin wrote that, “Those blessings are sweetest that are won with prayer and worn with thanks.” And so brothers and sisters, if you are not availing yourselves of these opportunities to share and be shared with, you are missing out on some of the very sweetest blessings.
But the psalmist doesn’t just stop there. He uses his experience to also offer encouragement as he reminds God’s people in verse 5 that, “weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” He doesn’t deny the reality of suffering, but he reminds them that our suffering, even though it is real, even though it is frustrating, even though it is often confusing, even though it is truly painful, our suffering is little more than an overnight guest when compared with the joy that comes from God’s favor. Paradoxically, God uses suffering, even suffering, to expand the joy of the believer.
I wonder if the apostle Paul was actually riffing on Psalm 30 as he wrote his second letter to the Corinthians. In 2 Corinthians 4:15, he writes about suffering. He writes about believing the Gospel and then speaking the Gospel and says that, “It is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people, it may increase thanksgiving to the glory of God.” That sounds like praise multiplying. And then in verse 17, “For this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” That sounds an awful lot like, “His anger is but for a moment, but His favor is for a lifetime.” Through suffering, God draws Christ’s image more sharply upon us. We are enabled to sing His praises and give thanks even more joyfully. We are able to sing God’s praises all the more, even through and after our suffering when we view them, as Paul told us, in light of eternity. And we are of course conformed to the image of God’s Son who was no stranger to suffering. A moment of suffering becomes a lifetime of joy. A puritan wrote, “God’s afflicting rod has honey at the end of it.”
The Peril of Prosperity
So we have seen the report of restoration, and now we’ll turn to the peril of prosperity. Look with me at verses 6 and 7. “As for me, I said in my prosperity, ‘I shall never be moved.’ By your favor, O Lord, you made my mountain stand strong; you hid your face; I was dismayed.” This is quite a jarring turn in this psalm. We go from encouragement and thankfulness to something quite different because this is the flashback. This is the backstory to the psalmist’s sickness. So why was he afflicted? We see in these verses that the psalmist was puffed up with his own pride and self-sufficiency. Last week, Billy took us through Psalm 10 that gives a frightening portrait of a wicked and arrogant man. And what is it that Psalm 10 says that the wicked and arrogant man says? It’s actually the exact same phrase that we find here in verse 6. “I will never be moved.” David is so confident in his prosperity and his self-sufficiency that this hero of the faith has become that very arrogant man from Psalm 10. Prosperity is a dangerous thing. He had reached the pinnacle, his dwelling place was like a mountain that could not be shaken. He had reached the top, and even though he admits that it was God’s favor that got him there, he begins to rely on himself. He begins to rely on his own prosperity.
Last month, our student choir went on a trip to Chicago, and while there we visited the Willis Tower, formerly known as the Sears Tower when it was built. And when it was built, it was the largest or the tallest building in the world and it held that record for almost twenty-five years. It’s 108 floors high and we went up to the top with the whole choir, up to the sky deck, and we spent a long time up there as a group looking out, looking down, and taking pictures of everything. There’s actually these glass boxes that you can walk out into and look straight down and see nothing between you and the ground below. But it’s interesting, nobody, none of us spent any time there looking up. We had reached the pinnacle. We were at the top of the world, as it were, so we stopped looking up.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes about the dangers of prosperity and self-sufficiency and pride. He writes, “A proud man is always looking down on things and people and of course as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” In this psalm, David had reached the top and he can’t see anything or anyone above him. The result is that God hides His face from him. Look at verse 7. It says that David was dismayed, but that word doesn’t convey much to us today, I don’t think. The sense of this word is that David was totally terrified. He was horrified. He was completely undone. And why shouldn’t he be? Think about the blessing we heard this morning, the blessing that we just heard pronounced this evening and that we will hear again this evening, the blessing that Aaron pronounced over the people in the book of Numbers. He says that, “The Lord made His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.” So God’s face shining upon David is His display of grace and peace. So David is right to be utterly terrified when God hides His face, and it ought to terrify us as well.
We know that Jesus went to the temple and that He sang psalms. Have you ever thought what it must have been like for Jesus to sing these words? In this psalm, David says that the removal of the comfort of God’s favorable gaze upon him terrified him. And we know that Jesus was unwavering to His Father in His obedience, but that as not only fully God but also fully man, He experienced feelings of turmoil before the cross. Jesus prayed that, if possible the cup for Him might pass from Him – and Luke of course records that His sweat was like drops of blood. The psychological suffering of our Savior was profound and really impossible for us to even imagine. But we must remember that Christ’s sufferings did not begin on Passion Week. His whole life was one of suffering. And so imagine what would be going through His mind as our Savior sang, “You hide Your face. I was dismayed.” He knew that His Father in heaven is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and yet the very reason that Jesus had come was to be identified with the evil of human sin and its guilt. So imagine, imagine His terror at the foreshadowing as He sang, knowing what was to come, and that the Father would hide His face and His favor, and then on the cross, rather than sensing the Father’s arms drawing Him up from the pit, His Father’s hand was instead pressed against Him, for it was the will of the Lord to crush Him. He has put Him to grief. And rather than sensing the comfort of His heavenly Father’s face, He felt that He was forsaken.
B. B. Warfield writes that, “In the presence of this mental anguish, the physical tortures of the crucifixion retire into the background and we may well believe that our Lord, though He died on the cross, yet died not of the cross, but as we commonly say, of a broken heart. That is to say, of the strain of His mental suffering.” The terror is far greater than the psalmist could have understood or what you and I could understand, and yet Christ willingly endured that physical and psychological suffering for you and for me. He endured the turning away of the Father’s face so that the Father’s face might shine upon us in mercy and in grace. It is only as we abide in the shadow of the cross that we are able to receive the sunshine of the Father’s face. Hallelujah, what a Savior!
The Celebration of Salvation
We have seen the reports of restoration and the peril of prosperity, and now we’ll lastly turn to the celebration of salvation. Look with me at verses 8 and 9. “To you, O Lord, I cry, and to the Lord I plead for mercy: ‘What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?’” Here again David had returned to rehearsing his story of salvation. And his story of salvation begins where you must begin if you have a story of salvation. “To you, O Lord, I cry, and to the Lord I plead for mercy.” He begins with a plea for mercy and then begins to build his argument, to build his case with these rhetorical questions. He is in essence saying, “God, if You let me die, You are going to have a deficit in worship.” It’s a bold prayer. David, as it turns out, was a Shorter Catechism boy. He knew that his chief end was to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. You all have heard the Shorter Catechism boy story that Warfield recounts about the two men on the train platform, so I won’t repeat that one but I’ll give you one like it.
While on my recent trip to Ukraine earlier this year, I went out to dinner with two of the other guys who drove convoy vans together. And after a long day of driving and deliveries, we went out to dinner. We were in Lviv, Ukraine, and we were in the main square at a restaurant that is actually in a basement. There are no signs outside the door. You have to just know it’s there. And when you arrive, you have to knock on the door and you have to give a password in Ukrainian. So there we are, three Americans in a country at war in a dimly lit basement restaurant and people are coming and going. And I hear someone at a table off in a corner speaking English. We were speaking English too, it wasn’t that strange, but still it was strange that somebody else would be there doing the same. And apparently he heard us speaking English as well and asked us what we were doing there. And we told him we had just delivered some humanitarian aid to the Reformed Church in Lviv. And he immediately stopped us, he cut us off, kind of gave us a suspicious look and said, “What is the chief end of man?” He, it turns out, was a catechism boy. He later went on to tell us that he had actually become a Unitarian. So he was a catechism boy, but unfortunately he had not become a catechism man, and yet he cannot make himself forget what his chief end is – to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
In this psalm, David has strayed from relying on the Lord. He is relying on his own self, his own self-sufficiency. But now as he bargains with the Lord for his life, he is a catechism man who knows what his chief end is. And that’s the ground for his argument; that’s the ground for these questions. He says, “The whole point of my life is praise, God, and if I die, You’ll be in a praise deficit.” Well if we are calling David Shorter Catechism boy and we’re being anachronistic, might I add that he also knew his New Testament well because Jesus said this is exactly what the Father is seeking. Jesus said, “The hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him.”
But it is not just that he is a worshiper. Look at the second question in verse 9. He asks, “Will it,” that is, the dust, “tell of Your faithfulness?” So David also understands that one of the ways he glorifies God, one of the ways he is to multiply that glory and praise, is to tell others about God’s faithfulness. And so members of First Presbyterian Church, let me ask you an uncomfortable question. If you were to become a pile of dust today, would God find Himself in a praise deficit in your absence? Can you honestly pray this prayer along with David? And again, if you were to become dust today, would there be less people joyfully telling others about the faithfulness of God? First Presbyterian Church of Jackson exists to glorify God by making disciples in our neighborhood, our communities, and the world. That’s the mission of our church. And I think these two rhetorical questions of this psalm give us a couple of soul-searching questions to help us see how we are doing in that mission.
So what might it look like for us to be a church that is locked in to its mission, that is mobilizing in our neighborhood, communities and the world, that is telling others of God’s faithfulness and erupting in multiplying praise in the celebration of salvation? Look with me at verse 11. “You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever!” Because of his great salvation, David goes from dirge to dancing and from sackcloth to gladness. And you’ll notice that both of these are outward, visible expressions. They are recognizable. They are things that people around you will notice. Now this may come as a surprise to you, but I am not much of a dancer, but even on that rare occasion when I am against my will, by my wife pulled onto a dance floor and I’m doing whatever kind of attempt at dancing I am doing, I think in general it’s recognizable to be dancing, whatever that attempt is. There’s no confusion about the fact that I am at least attempting to dance!
And so as we see David’s example here, my prayer is that even if it is awkward at times, that we will be recognizable as a church and as individuals, as ones who celebrate our salvation whose favorite day is Sunday, who can’t wait for every opportunity to be together within these walls to speak and hear of God’s goodness and who leave here clothed in gladness, excited to pursue every opportunity, whether locally or globally, to multiply God’s praise by telling others of His wonderful salvation.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we are grateful for redemption. We ask that You would help us to be more grateful, that You would help us to multiply our praise and thanksgiving amongst ourselves here and outside these walls. We thank You for all that You have done and we thank You in anticipation of what You will continue to do. It’s in Jesus’ name that we pray, amen.