"Praise and Hope - The Heart of the Psalms" (Salter) | Psalm 146

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A reading from Psalms 146.

I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man in whom there is no salvation.

When his breath departs, he returns to the earth.

On that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free.

The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.

The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down.

The Lord loves the righteous.

The Lord watches over his the sojourners.

He upholds the widow and the fatherless.

But the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The Lord will reign forever.

Your God, O Zion, to all generations.

Praise the Lord.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be to God.

Please be seated.

Well, this morning we conclude our series, The Summer and the Psalms, the second summer we've done that, and it's been another rich journey reading the Psalms through the summer, looking at it together.

And I hope you realize maybe by reading it, or perhaps you've never heard this, the Psalms are a book with a very intentional shape.

They were put together intentionally.

Psalm 1 and 2 are the two doors we walk through to enter the whole collection.

Psalm 1, if you remember in the introduction, sets two ways and two ends before us.

Blessed is the man, it says, who delights in the law of the Lord, and the way of the wicked will perish.

If you go back to earlier in the summer, Psalm 2 lifts the same picture, but to the level of thrones, where the kings of the earth rage against the Lord's anointed, and heaven laughs.

For God has set his king in Zion.

So there you have in the introduction two ways blessed and perishing.

Raging princes, enthroned king.

Wisdom in the Word, Psalm 1, Kingdom of the Son, Psalm 2.

That's how the book begins.

Well, how does the book end?

In praise.

The last five Psalms, Psalm 146 through Psalm 150, are its finale.

Each opening and closing with the same word.

Hallelujah.

Praise the Lord.

After all of the lament and tears of the Psalm, that begins each, and I hope you see, and there's five books in the Psalter.

Each of the five books begins with lament.

Each of the five books ends in praise.

All five books.

The entire Psalter does that.

After all the lament and all the tears, the book ends with this crescendo.

It's like a symphony.

In that the Psalms are a miniature of our story as a whole, because our story has been full of lament.

Here's the good news of the structure of the Psalms.

Our story will end in unbroken blessing and delight.

Hallelujah.

See, the shape tells the story.

And so we study this morning the head of the grand five-fold conclusion, Psalm 146.

And guess what it does?

It's going to gather up the themes of the introduction as the conclusion begins.

You're going to see this.

You're going to see again the blessed man.

You're going to hear of perishing.

You're going to hear of two ways.

You're going to hear of princes, Psalm 2, who plot in vain.

And above all, you're going to see there's an eternal reign of the king in Zion.

The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, to all generations.

So the Psalms begin and end on the same chord.

Isn't that marvelous?

But fashion to tell our story that ends in praise.

Two words can be used to describe this altar: praise and hope.

Praise and hope are at the heart of the whole book.

And this morning the psalm will deliver that.

It will call us to bless the Lord.

It'll warn us to beware of princes.

And then at its greatest length, it's going to lift our eyes to behold our God.

Bless, beware, behold.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you even for the shape, the sovereign shape of the Psalter.

Your hymn book, Jesus.

Our precious hymn book.

A hymn book that identifies with us in its tears and its sorrows and its questions.

But gives us the great confidence that it will end in praise.

That we are a people that will indeed move from lament to praise, from sorrow to hope.

We praise you.

Speak now.

Your servants are listening in Christ's name.

Amen.

We begin with bless the Lord.

The first two verses, you hear the summons to bless the Lord.

Notice how wide the summons is in verse 1, but also how personal.

Notice how wide.

Praise the Lord.

You may not see that, likely you don't, but that is a command in plural form.

It's not singular, it's a call to the people.

And even as Psalm 145 ends, it's a call to everything that has breath, all peoples.

It is a corporate summons to the community.

Praise the Lord.

But it's also in the same breath a very personal summons.

Did you see that in verse 1?

Praise the Lord, plural, O my soul.

Singular.

This summons to bless the Lord is something that is both summoned for us to do together and summoned for us to do privately and alone.

And notice how the summons in verse 2, how far the summons reaches.

I will praise the Lord as long as I live.

It reaches throughout the entirety of our life.

I will sing praises to my God while I have my being, which that, because of our hope, reaches into what?

Eternity.

Because in Christ we will have our being forever and ever risen in him.

And so you can see this praise.

It is personal, it is communal.

It extends as long as we have breath and beyond as we have our being.

It is now and it is forever.

This summons is a discipline that the psalmist lays on us on his own heart.

One Puritan theologian notes of this verse, I love this, of verse 2.

He says, This I will sing with you as long as my breath doth last.

And when I have no more breath, I shall do it better.

That's our hope.

That this praise rings while we have breath all the way into eternity.

And I want you to see there's also mercy in the mandate.

How many of you have kept this psalm perfectly?

Have praised the Lord with all your soul, with all your breath.

Not one of us.

But you know who has honored and blessed and glorified the Lord with all his breath through all eternity is our Lord Jesus.

Who we are in.

He glorified the Father perfectly.

He honored him all the way to the cross until what?

He breathed his last.

And you know what?

He still leads us in song as our risen Lord.

Why don't you see that when we praise God, we praise God in Jesus and through Jesus, and thus our praise is carried to and acceptable to God.

Our heart, our hope for keeping the summons is that we are in our Savior who keeps it perfectly.

C.

S.

Lewis in his book on the Psalms admitted that when he first heard the command to praise God, it baffled him.

It sounded to him at first like a vain person fishing for compliments.

And then Lewis noted that all through the world, people praise whatever they enjoy.

People praise and urge others to join in.

It happened Friday night as we gathered around my perfectly prepared beef tenderloin.

You weren't enjoying that until you praised it.

And until you invited others to enjoy it.

It was completed there in the praise.

See, Lewis says, you don't merely enjoy a thing, you complete the joy by praising it.

He wrote, Praise does not merely express but completes the enjoyment.

It is its appointed consummation.

So I want you to see.

Verses one through two do not lay upon you a duty that is somehow going to rob you of your gladness.

No.

It lays upon you a summons to bless that is simply your gladness completed.

Joy in God is not finished until it becomes praise.

Do you see that?

So I want this to land in our life.

I would encourage us to consider this morning naming our neglect.

Of all the things we give ourselves to, I would propose this morning we give the least to the one thing we will do forever.

Praise now is a rehearsal for glory.

And so I would ask us, are you practicing?

Are you getting ready for what will mark us forever?

The completion of our joy in praise.

Then the harder test.

Anyone can praise on a good day.

Will you praise him in the hard ones?

At all times.

With all your being.

When the week this week turns against you, will you still resolve?

Bless the Lord.

Praise the Lord, O my soul.

And then we turn in the Psalm from bless the Lord to beware.

Beware of princes, verses three through four.

It's an interesting turn.

The temptation is exposed with a sharp turn in verse 3.

Did you see that?

Put not your trust in princes.

This section is sort of a dark backdrop against which everything else will shine.

The princes, yes, they're royal figures, but this is also a metaphor for this.

Think about this.

The princes are the impressive, the influential, the capable, the ones with the means to help you or rescue.

And you know what?

That's why we lean on them.

That's why we put our hope or our trust in them.

Surely we think, they of all people, the resourced and the powerful, they can do something for me.

Our pool, listen, our pool is never toward the worst of men, right?

I'm going to put my hope in the worst of men.

Our pool is always towards the best of them.

Whose very splendor makes it look like we might can trust in them.

We might can hope in them.

The danger is not that we hope in the worst of men, it is that we hope in the best of them too much.

You see that?

Understand what kind of temptation this is.

It is an it's not an occasional lapse, it is a bent we have been born with.

Ever since Eden, the human heart has looked for its security in what it can see and touch, right?

What it can hire, what it can elect, what is near and impressive, what is mortal.

Why do we keep resting?

The whole weight of our lives on things that are never able to bear that weight.

That is the folly of these two verses that it drags into the light, and thus it corrects us in the latter part of three and on into four.

Verse three says, Put not your trust in princes in a son of man.

You see what he just did there?

He widened that past the powerful to include any human at all.

Any child of Adam.

Why can no man, no human, no created thing for that matter, finally save you?

Why should it not be the thing you lean upon with all your hopes?

Simply this.

We are all passing away.

We sang it.

We're feeble as frail.

The psalm presses that point in verse four.

When his breath departs, son of man, princes, he returns to the earth, and on that very day his plans perish.

Adam, that's the word for man in Hebrew, Adam, returns to the land.

Adama.

Adam goes back to Adama, the place where he came from.

That's sobering, isn't it?

Whatever any man meant to do for us goes into the grave with him.

He dies, he decays, and thus the defeat of all of our hopes if they were placed in that person.

For that reason, the psalmist will not let us look away.

He wants us to be sobered this morning.

An old pastor once told Al Moeller a sobering truth with a smile, and it made me smile and laugh and face reality as I read it this week.

The old pastor said, one day they'll put us in a box.

They'll lower us to the ground.

They'll throw some dirt over us.

And everybody will go back to church and eat potato salad.

She's right.

It's kind of sobering, isn't it?

They'll all go back and eat potato salad.

Steve Brown had his own version.

That deep voiced, wonderful preacher, you met him.

Here's my professor.

He used to always say to us in seminary with a bluntness that was always strangely freeing.

He'd say, Men, God buries his workmen and goes on with his work.

Get over it.

Okay.

Thought I was here to do something, to contribute something.

I thought I was the deal.

He'll bury you and he'll keep on going.

That's why you don't put your ultimate trust in any workman.

Put it in the one who buries his workman and goes on with his work into eternity.

Think about this.

200 years ago, the poet Percy Shelley wrote 14 lines about a broken statue in a desert.

It was Ramesses the Great, the Pharaoh.

The Greeks called him Ozymandeus, one of the most powerful figures who ever lived.

The poet tells of a traveler who describes what he found in the desert.

He found the wreck of a giant statue of the Pharaoh.

Two vast stone legs broken off at the knee and a shattered stone face half sunk in the sand.

The sneer of the command still visible on the pedestal, saying, My name is Ozzy Mandias, King of Kings.

Look on my works, ye mighty ones, and despair for yourselves.

Well, he ordered the world to remember him forever, and the desert never got the message.

He had no city, he had no empire, just a broken stone flat in sand.

Sobering, isn't it?

And yet there is glory in this guarding against the trap of false hope in ourselves or in princes.

Verse 3 says, In a son of man there is no salvation.

Here's the hope of that.

There is one Son of Man in whom there is salvation, not because he is Son of Man, but because he is Son of Man and Son of God.

The second Adam.

His breath departed too.

On the cross, he bowed his head, he gave up his spirit.

But the one grave that could not keep its tenet was his.

The grave couldn't hold him.

So the Son of Man and the Son of God, by virtue of his resurrection, can say to all of us, There is salvation in no other but in him.

Every son of Adam goes back to the dust, but here is the second Adam, the last Adam, who went down into the ground but did not stay, and all who are in him will rise.

Why would you put your hope anywhere else?

Could you name the prince you're tempted to trust this week, right now?

Could you name the person or the institution, the political outcome, the number in your bank account that would give you enough hope to place all your weight of your life there?

Could you name that before the Lord?

And then ask the honest question Why am I asking it to save me when only God can?

Bless the Lord, beware of princes.

Now the heart, the meat of the psalm is behold your God, the only one worthy of the weight of your life.

Verse 5 shows the gladness of praise over against the dead end of hope.

Blessed, blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope in the Lord his God.

It's the last time the Psalter will use that word blessed.

It reaches back to the first Psalm where the book began, what?

Blessed is the man.

Here at the end, as at the beginning, the glad state of blessedness is described, and it is not the absence of need.

Think about that.

Blessedness is not the absence of need.

It's that the one in need has help and has hope.

Do you see that?

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God.

That's blessedness.

It's to have need and have help and hope.

And don't miss that he said, the God of Jacob.

I've said this before.

Every time you read that phrase, the God of Jacob, you should scream, amazing grace.

The God of Jacob?

Do y'all know Jacob was a scoundrel?

That's the God of grace.

He's a help and a hope for sinners in their need.

His gladness, therefore, that's a psalmist's gladness, is piled up because of his help in the present and his hope for the future.

That's blessedness.

Help in the present, hope for the future in the God of Jacob, the Lord his God.

And now in verses 6 through 10, the psalmist does something wonderful.

He spends the whole second half simply telling us what our God is like.

It gives grounds for his gladness, God's character.

As Ligandun so helpfully notes, this is a great phrase.

Doxology is about theology.

That's a good one to put in your back pocket.

Doxology, we sang it.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Praise flows from theology.

Doxology is about theology.

Why?

Because theology supplies the substance of praise and the motivation of praise.

It tells you who God is.

Some people think it's a bad word.

I don't do theology, I just follow Jesus.

Then you don't praise him because you don't know him.

Theology is knowing him.

Twelve short lines of rich theology, one after another, in verses six through ten.

And what this is, these are not occasional favors that God grants to us every now and then, depending on how he feels.

This is who he is by nature.

This is what he's always about.

Praise him.

Verse 6.

It begins at the world's beginning, not ours, not his beginning, but the world's.

Verse 6.

Praise the Lord who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever.

Since the God you trust is the maker of everything, you and I can hand him the running of our life without fear.

He made the world.

Since he made heaven and earth, the government of our small life is no strain to him at all.

And that one thought is enough to swallow up a great many fears.

Do not rush past the inclusion of the word, the sea, who made the heaven and the earth.

And then the psalmist throws in the sea and all that is in them.

Why?

The sea once was a symbol of chaos and threat.

It was a symbol of the dark, the evil.

You know what he says?

It's his.

He says, Praise the Lord.

He's the judge of all the earth, and he has already taken the case.

You can be sure.

Who gives food to the hungry?

Did you know God stands behind every meal you've ever eaten?

He's the giver of daily bread, and we often forgive it precisely because he's so faithful to give it.

Right?

We can forget he's the giver of daily bread because he's so faithful to give it, we forget it.

So what do we do?

Praise him for it.

Justice for the oppressed, food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free.

We heard in the prayer this morning, he opens every kind of cell.

August 23rd, Joe Edwards is going to join us in all our services to tell you how he liberated him in the midst of being a prisoner.

He opens the iron cells, but he also opens the cells that we build in ourselves in slavery to sin, and he sets us free.

Praise him.

The Lord, verse 8, opens the eyes of the blind.

This is the only time the word blind is used in the entire 150 Psalms.

The significance of that is it's pointing directly at the only miracle in Scripture where the blind receive sight.

Who is that done by?

Jesus.

And what does that point us to?

Something Paul highlights, an even greater miracle, that the God of this world blinds the minds of unbelievers to prevent them from seeing the gospel of Christ's glory, who is the image of God.

And yet Paul says this: God opens our blind eyes that we might see the glory of God in the face of Christ.

We were blind.

Christ, God opened our eyes to see Christ.

Praise him.

Praise him for his justice in giving food and setting prisoners free, opening the eyes of the blind.

And then verses eight and nine.

The grounds continue.

They have application for all of us.

There's not a burden person in this room this psalm does not name.

The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down.

The Lord loves the righteous.

The Lord watches over the sojourners.

He upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

Don't miss the world that all of this assumes.

The psalm is not describing a tidy, comfortable world.

Notice it names oppression and hunger and prison and blindness, the bowed down, the stranger, the widow, the fatherless, the wicked.

This is the world east of Eden, with the wreckage of the fall lying all over it.

And here is the wonder.

Our God did not make this world and then back away from it.

He came down into the ruin, into the wreckage.

He is the maker in verse 6 creation.

He is redemptively present in the fallen world in verse 7 through 9, as he bends himself to the brokenness to feel free, heal, and lift us.

And then we see in verse 10, he is the glorious king in his consummated kingdom.

The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, to all generations.

Praise the Lord.

Verse 10 is the direct answer to verses 3 through 4.

The breath of mere humans departs, their plans perish, but this king never dies.

He never abdicates, he never loses his throne.

And that is why the psalm can end no other way than it began.

Praise the Lord.

This king outlasts every prince, and his praise will outlast every grief.

That king is Jesus.

And he will reign forever when the brokenness is over because he will end it.

Creation, fall, redemption, consummation.

The praise of our great God runs the entire length of the story.

So I want you to see as we wrap up that Jesus is the one who perfectly embodies the whole list.

Then he handed it back, sat down, and said, Today the scripture's been fulfilled in your hearing.

Do you remember that?

Does that sound familiar?

The very one who's just been described in Psalm 46, God, is Jesus.

Jesus stood up and claimed those traits as his own because he is God in the flesh.

Why else do you think they wanted to run him off the cliff after he said that?

If you want to know this God of Psalm 46, you must look to Jesus because, like Father, like Son.

Jesus is the one who keeps faith forever.

Revelation 19, 11 calls him faithful and true.

His own breath did depart, but his plans didn't perish.

He rose and he is the king.

And so when Psalm 146 introduces us to our God, it points us to Jesus.

Praise him.

So let's bring the summer in the Psalms to a close.

You and I were made to bless the Lord all of our life with all of our heart.

We have been warned to beware of princes, placing our hope in anyone, in any created thing that cannot save us.

And we have been lifted up to behold our God, the Maker who keeps faith forever and reigns without end.

The one we praise will still be on his throne when everything is gone.

Our help and our hope have a name.

His name is Jesus.

People, we do not belong to the city that is doomed to perish.

We belong to Zion.

The city that will still be standing and still be singing.

When every other kingdom has gone down back to the dust.

And so Spurgeon will get the last word for this summer.

He ends his notes on Psalm 146 like this.

Here endeth this happy psalm.

But here endeth not the praise of the Lord, which shall ascend forever and ever and ever.

Let's pray.

Praise the Lord.

Help us praise.

Help us practice for our eternity.

Help us put the full weight of our hopes on you, for you are worthy as we have seen, and there is no human, no institution, no created thing that is worthy of all of our hope.

We praise you.

In Christ's name.

Amen.