"The Cup of Salvation" Psalm 116 Sunday Morning Worship Service

You can grab your Bibles and open them to Psalm 116.

A friend of mine who's uh a pastor, we text about preaching all the time, texted me last night and asked if I was gonna change what I was preaching on today.

And asked him why he was thinking about that, and he said a lot of people in this congregation are gonna be pretty jarred uh by what happened yesterday and gonna be asking questions, and he thinks it could be a moment to encourage them and other reasons.

And so I thought for a second about that and thought, you know, if I could choose any passage to preach on after a kind of near-death experience, I would choose Psalm 116.

Um, this would be the passage I would go to if I had to call an audible, and yet here we are.

I want to read it for us this morning to prepare our hearts before the Lord's table now.

The psalmist says, I love Yahweh because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy, because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live.

The snares of death encompassed me, the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me, I suffered distress and anguish, then I called upon the name of Yahweh, O Yahweh, I pray, deliver my soul.

Gracious is Yahweh and righteous.

Our God is merciful.

Yahweh preserves the simple.

When I was brought low, he saved me.

Return, O my soul, to your rest, for Yahweh has dealt bountifully with you.

For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.

I will walk before Yahweh in the land of the living.

I believed, even when I spoke, I'm greatly afflicted.

I said in my alarm, All mankind are liars.

What shall I render to Yahweh for all of his benefits to me?

I will lift up the cup of salvation, I will call upon the name of Yahweh, I will pay my vows to Yahweh in the presence of all his people.

Precious in the sight of Yahweh is the death of his saints.

O Yahweh, I'm your servant.

I am your servant, the son of your maidservant.

You've loosed my bonds, I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving, I will call upon the name of Yahweh, I will pay my vows to Yahweh in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the house of Yahweh, in your midst, O Jerusalem.

Praise Yahweh.

This is an appropriate psalm because the psalmist who's unnamed has a near-death experience.

I say near-death experience, the the cords of the grave have ensnared him.

He's wrapped up, his soul is feeling the pain of death.

So this is beyond physical death and into the spiritual world of the torment of hell.

That's what he's encountering.

This is a psalm that is for all occasions.

The author is not named, and that gives it a kind of universal applicability.

There's so much in the psalm that is obscure.

You don't know if he's facing physical death or spiritual death.

You don't know both, it appears.

He oscillates between one and the other.

They're interwoven, they can't be pulled apart.

You don't know if he's ultimately delivered or not.

It seems like he will be delivered from physical death.

He says he's going to walk again in the land of the living.

And yet that could easily be speaking of the resurrection of the dead.

Even verse 15, probably the most well-known verse of this psalm, precious in the sight of Yahweh is the death of his saints, is a verse that can be taken both ways.

You know, you see it on all the funeral bulletins.

It's on, you know, just about every funeral in the front of the bulletin.

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.

But in the Hebrew, it can easily be rendered the other way.

In fact, it's more likely rendered that the death of the saints is so valuable the Lord would keep it from happening.

The saint is about to die and cries out to the Lord, and the Lord sees how precious, how costly would be the word, how costly are the death of his saints.

And so he answers the prayer and spares the person's life.

It can go either way, and you can't tell.

There's not a secret in the language to unlock it.

It's intentionally ambiguous.

It can be that the person dies or the person lives.

It can be that the Lord looks at the person and says, I'll rescue you because your death would be too costly.

Or it could be the Lord looks at the person and says, How precious, how joyful it'd be to be reunited with you.

Either way.

You can't tell.

And that makes it a universally applicable psalm.

Somebody having a near-death experience can pray this prayer with confidence that it applies to them.

Perhaps you've heard it said that God helps those who help themselves.

Have you heard that before?

It's practically fortune cookie wisdom.

It's not biblical wisdom, of course.

If the Bible teaches anything, and the Bible teaches some things, if it teaches anything, it's that the Lord helps those who can't help themselves.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, not to the strong and defiant.

The Lord is here to the humble, not to the proud.

The Lord answers the prayers of the weak, not of the strong.

He doesn't respond to Pinaniah and 1 Samuel 1, the woman with all the children, but he does respond to Hannah, the broken and barren one.

The Lord takes the weak arrows and shoots them, not the Kevlar arrows.

The Lord responds to the prayers of those who are.

The word in this Psalm, Psalm 116, is to the simple.

He hears the prayers of the simple.

That's a word that is all over the book of Proverbs for meaning the unwise person, the foolish person, the person who falls into sin.

It's the word in Proverbs for the person, the young man who sees the adulteress and thinks, oh, I'm going to follow the adulteress and get close to the adulteress and I won't sin.

That's the simple person.

The stupid person, the foolish person, the person who thinks they can hold fire at their chest and not get burned.

That's this word.

And here the psalmist says, oh, praise God that he hears the prayers from that person.

That's this psalm.

The cords of death surround us because of their sin.

The cords of death surround us because of our own sin, the sin of our enemies.

Sometimes we suffer because we're in a fallen world.

Sometimes we suffer because we're stupid and respond to our sin in stupid ways.

Sometimes we suffer because people are sinning against us.

And sometimes we just suffer because we have no idea why.

But what is true in all of those circumstances is that the Lord is near to those who call on him and their suffering.

You want to take the main point of this prayer in one little phrase?

Godly people pray.

Godly people respond to suffering with prayer.

That's the main point of this psalm.

The godly person is going through trials and going through difficulty, and he responds by prayer.

And listen, prayer can sometimes be stilted or routine or run of the mill.

I mean, perhaps in your own life you think, oh, my prayer life is just blah.

I mean, there is nothing to jolt awake a stifled prayer life like a near-death experience, right?

Come within a millimeter of death, and that has a way of making you pray differently.

And that's where this psalmist is.

He says in verse 1, I love Yahweh because he's heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.

And the Sunday school teacher in me wants to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's wrong.

You don't say, I love the Lord because he heard my prayers.

No, you love the Lord whether or not he hears your prayers.

But the author of this psalm is not interested in parsing the cause and effect relationship here.

The author of this psalm is simply saying, I prayed and God answered, and because I know he answers me, I love him.

I was in trouble, I was gonna die, I called to him, he rescued me, so I love him a lot.

That's where he is.

I love the Lord because he listened to me when I pulled the fire alarm.

The psalm kind of breaks into two categories here.

The first stanza of it is describes what God gives the wounded.

That's verses two all the way down through eight.

What God gives the wounded.

It says in verse 2, because he inclined his ear to me.

That's a very precious phrase.

It's an idiom we don't really have in English.

In English, you might say, uh, can you lend me your ear, or can I bend your ear, or something?

But that almost makes the person sound reluctant.

Hebrew has this idiom for a father who like gets down on his knees to listen to his child.

You know, the child needs something, and the father kneels down and puts his ear close to the child.

That's this idiom.

I love the Lord because he inclined, or he lent, or he bended his ear down to me.

Our house has two stories on it, and perhaps Dee Jer and I could be downstairs in the living room, and the kids are upstairs in their bedroom, and we hear a crash upstairs.

Like the rat cage fell over, or the bunk bed collapsed, kind of sound.

You know that sound as your parent?

Upstairs, it sounds like the bunk bed just fell over.

And everything in the house gets quiet for that second, right?

It's silent upstairs, the cat is quiet, everything is quiet.

And Dieter and I would lean our ears towards the stair.

What's the next sound we're going to hear?

Is it like scuttling and the kids enter cover-up mode?

That means everything's okay.

Or is it shrieking and screaming, and that means one of us is running upstairs.

That's this image here.

The psalmist cries out to the Lord.

The crash has happened.

And he calls out for help to God.

And what does he find?

But the Lord's ear is extended to him.

The Lord stopped what he was doing in heaven.

He stopped everything around the thrones in heaven, it all stopped.

And the Lord leaned down to earth and extended his ear to this one person in trouble.

That's his experience.

Therefore, he says in verse 2, I'm going to call on him forever.

I'm never going to stop calling on him.

When I realized, when I was in my worst moment, when I thought I was going to die, when I thought I was going to be in hell, at that moment I called to God and I realized that his ear was right there.

He was listening.

He was waiting for me to call.

And so the only conclusion is the last part of verse 2.

I'm going to call on him forever.

I'm going to keep that on speed dial.

This is the moment of death, verse 3.

The snares of death encompassed me.

He feels like he's dying.

The pain of Sheol laid hold on me.

This is the psalmist who is feeling death.

Sheol is the afterlife.

In the Old Testament, when a person died, they went down.

If they were righteous, their soul went to rest.

And if they were unrighteous, their soul went to torment.

It was the prayer of the righteous that their soul would be at rest until the day of the resurrection.

Speaking of the resurrection of Christ.

And so here the psalmist feels him dying.

The psalmist is encountering death.

And what he feels at that moment is the torments of hell, the pangs of Sheol, and they are hurting him, they're burning him, they're ensnaring him.

The word can mean enveloping him.

The oxygen is drained from him.

He's feeling the suffering of God's judgment, and he's in distress.

Anguish.

He was hunted, hounded, trapped, tormented.

And he leans up to God and says, God, I'm dying.

It's over.

I feel like I'm dying right now.

Verse 4, he cries out to the Lord.

Oh Yahweh, I pray, deliver my soul.

Like I said, is he praying for physical deliverance or spiritual deliverance?

It's intentionally ambiguous.

He prays that his soul would be delivered.

It's a pretty strong argument that this is about physical death.

I mean spiritual death and spiritual judgment in the afterlife.

He prays that his soul would be delivered from the torments of Sheol.

That's his prayer.

That's really all he can do.

He can't talk himself out of the situation.

He can't pull himself up by his unbootstraps.

He can't be strong and courageous.

He can only be humble and broken and call on the Lord.

Now he has confidence in this because verse 5 says, Gracious is Yahweh and righteous.

Our God is merciful.

This is a truncated version of how the Lord revealed himself to Moses.

And you're supposed to keep the whole package deal in there from God's conversation with Moses.

God reveals himself to Moses as gracious and merciful, abounding in covenant love, slow to anger, merciful, all of that.

This is it's who Yahweh is.

The psalmist is reminding himself of that.

He doesn't need to repeat the whole thing.

He's just taking those covenant descriptions of God.

He is so gracious.

God is so covenantally righteous.

He's so merciful to his people.

That's why he feels he can call on him.

The Lord loves to show mercy.

Verse 6.

Yahweh preserves the simple.

That's that phrase.

It doesn't say the strong.

It doesn't say the mature.

It doesn't say the bold and the courageous.

No, Yahweh preserves.

God, because he's gracious and merciful, rescues the simple person, the naive person, the foolish person, the person who is dumb enough to follow the prostitutes to the street and gets ensnared in her house.

That's the person God rescues when the person cries out to him for deliverance.

Psalmist is confidence of that.

This is what David prayed.

At the end of Psalm 19, perhaps David's one of his most well-known psalms, he ends it by saying, The word of the Lord makes the simple person wise.

That's because God rescues the simple.

Moses died on the mountaintop, but he had to walk through the valley to get there.

This is the way Yahweh works.

He doesn't save you when you're at your strongest or when you're at your most mature, when you're at the height of yourself.

He saves you when you are low and broken and suffering.

He saves sinners.

The gospel is medicine for the sick, not a gym for the strong.

And so he prays to the Lord.

And notice how simply it says in verse 6.

It was at that point, the end of verse 6, he saved me.

That's what you get right there.

You don't get more details.

He saved me.

Well, how?

The Amalekites bail you out?

Did the Egyptians send an army?

Did an angel come?

Did you find manna on the ground?

I mean, we don't even know when the psalm was written.

How did the Lord save you?

And it's intentionally not revealed to you.

So you just get that.

You were suffering and you were dying and you felt like you were on your way to the hell, and you cried out to the Lord, and the Lord saved you.

So does that mean he spared you from hell and gave you heavenly rest?

Or does that mean that he gave you victory in this life and defeated your enemies?

Don't know.

But whatever he did, he was saved.

And so I think this is speaking in spiritual terms because of verse 7 return, O my soul, to your rest.

That again is very common Old Testament language.

The righteous soul that dies goes to Sheol and goes to rest.

The unrighteous soul that dies goes to Sheol and suffering.

And so ultimately this guy is praying.

He wants his soul to have rest in the Lord.

And he's also, in a sense, if it's physical life and physical world, telling his soul to chill out a second, too.

Relax, soul.

He did what he could do.

He prayed to the Lord.

That's all he can do.

He can't, you know, work himself out of his trouble.

All he can do, he's he's anxious, he's going through trauma and turmoil, he's just being overcome, enveloped by despair and suffering.

I mean, his life is falling apart at this moment.

It can't get any worse.

And it's at that moment he cries out to the Lord, and all he does is tells the Lord, Save me.

It's a very short prayer.

It's like one of the best prayers in the New Testament, Peter saying, Lord, help.

Love that prayer.

That's this prayer.

Save me.

And God saves him.

But first he tells his soul.

Soul?

I love it when the Bible writers talk to their soul.

Soul?

Calm down.

Tranquilo, soul.

Relax.

That's all you can do.

There's no sense getting wrapped up with your anxiety, wrapped up with all that you're going through.

I mean, what can you do with your anxiety?

What can you do with it?

You can say, Lord, help, and then tell your soul, hey, I did what I can do.

Remember last week in Philippians 4, I said a basic, basic component of spiritual maturity is recognizing you can be responsible for what you're responsible for, and don't get wrapped up with all the other junk in this life.

And that's where the psalmist is.

He's not responsible for what the Lord does, he's not responsible for how he gets out of this mess.

All he can do is say, God help.

And then he looks at his soul.

Soul, I've done what I can do.

So take a nap.

Rest.

Chill out.

That's tremendous confidence in the Lord's ability.

That is a mature person's confidence.

So how do you go from being the simple person to the mature person?

By trusting the Lord.

So often we encounter people in this life that want the maturity of verse 7, want maturity and confidence and contentment in God, but they don't have the prayers and the faith of verse 4.

You gotta have the prayers of verse 4 and the faith of verse 4 to get to the confidence of verse 7.

Or let me put it like this.

You wonder why your life is overcome with anxiety and despair and everything.

Are you praying?

You can't push through the anxiety and the turmoil and the trauma of this life just with your own willpower.

It comes through faith and prayer.

Trying to have this kind of verse 7 contentment without the prayers of the psalm is like trying to be full without eating.

But this psalmist feasts on the Lord.

Verse 8 describes as answered prayer You've delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.

That phrase, my feet from stumbling, it's from Deuteronomy.

It's from Moses' song in Deuteronomy.

Remember the unrighteous people, their foot is slipping, they will slide in due time.

It speaks of divine judgment.

The unrighteous person is going to slip and stumble into hell.

And they don't even know when it's going to happen.

Their foot is slipping every moment.

It's only the grace of God that holds them up, and eventually God will turn them over to their desires and they will be plunged into hell.

Here the psalmist says his grace and his mercy and his righteousness has kept my foot from sliding into hell.

He's dried my eyes from tears.

That's got to remind you of Revelation, doesn't it?

Where in the future kingdom and in the eternal state, God will dry the tears from our eyes.

That's a reference to Psalm 116.

When the Lord saves someone, he delivers their soul from hell, he dries their eyes from their tears, and he preserves them from stumbling.

Therefore, verse 9, I'm going to walk before Yahweh in the land of the living.

That leads to the second part of this Psalm, what the rescued give to God.

The first half is what God gives to the wounded, and the second half is what the rescued person gives back to God.

And he starts, now that he's been rescued here, he starts by making a vow to the Lord, I'm going to walk before you in the land of the living.

He says, I'm going to be, now that I'm rescued, I'm going to spend my life serving you.

Walking before someone just means I'm going to live my life aware that you're watching.

If you thought the Lord was watching you, you would sin less.

You know, you you sin when you think the Lord doesn't see or the Lord doesn't care, the Lord doesn't know.

Here the psalmist says, I'm gonna I'm gonna walk in a way that I know the Lord is looking at me right now.

That's how I'm gonna lead my life.

I'm gonna leave that, I wanna lead that kind of life, walking in obedience before the Lord.

And that's his vow.

It's like Luther, who was you know in the in the lightning storm before his conversion, and he he said, St.

Anne, if you protect me from lightning, I will become a monk.

This is the Protestant version of that.

God, you rescue me.

If you extend my life, I will serve you for the rest of my life.

That's the prayer.

That's the prayer.

Why would he do that?

Because obedience is all you can give to the Lord.

What do you have to give back to the Lord?

You don't repay the Lord like you repay a banker.

You didn't take, you know, you pray and God answers your prayer.

It doesn't mean you now owe him some kind of material benefit.

I think a very helpful analogy is how do you repay, you know, a mountain?

You see a beautiful mountain, it's lovely and beautiful.

How do you want to repay the mountain for its beauty?

Well, you enjoy it, you take a picture at it, you tell your friends about it.

You don't take dirt and give it back.

How do you enjoy a fountain?

You drink it and you delight from it.

You don't give the water back.

That's gross.

How do you enjoy and delight in the Lord?

How do you give back to the Lord?

By drinking the cup of salvation is the language.

Now, verse 10 is a little bit of an awkward verse, and the way it's translated in the ESV, anyway, I believed even when I spoke.

I'm greatly afflicted.

Fortunately, the New Testament uses this verse in context and helps you understand how Paul understood it anyway.

In the New Testament, Paul is surrounded by people lying about him and slandering him, and he says, you know what, I'm still gonna walk in faith.

I don't care what you liar say, I believed even when I spoke.

In other words, Paul is saying, even if I'm not delivered from this rescue, I still believe in the Lord when I'm praying.

That's how Paul uses it in 2 Corinthians 4.

I'm suffering, but I believe I'm gonna walk by faith, in other words.

I'm gonna walk by faith in obedience and joy, regardless of how the Lord answers this prayer.

I'm locked in.

I believed.

Even when I spoke, I'm greatly afflicted.

And when you think about it, that starts to make sense.

He's being afflicted, and at that moment that he's being afflicted, he believes his words that he's gonna walk before the Lord in the land of the living.

He believes in God even though he's suffering.

I set in my alarm, all mankind are liars.

Another New Testament reference from the book of Romans.

People are liars, people are sinners, and you sometimes respond to them in sinful ways because they're lying about you.

And here he uses the word I set in my alarm.

That word alarm is the word for trauma, would be another way to translate it.

It's something traumatic is happening to the person because of the lies and the assaults from other people, because of whatever circumstance he's in, it's traumatizing.

And alarm is a fine translation, right?

You're sleeping at night and the fire alarm goes off, you're like a jolty awake, it's panic time.

That's that's that's trauma.

That's what the person is going through.

And so he's suffering, he's at near death, he's feeling pain, he prays to the Lord, and he is surrounded by liars.

Some of his suffering is probably because of how he responded to the liars.

Some of his suffering is self-inflicted, some of his suffering is because he lives in a fallen world.

You don't even need to parse it all out.

And the psalmist doesn't.

He just says, Listen, I believed, I'm walking by faith, even though everybody around me is lying.

Because they're all liars, including himself.

That's where he ends up.

He puts his eyes on the Lord even though those around him are lying about him.

And here's this little piece of advice.

I think that a lot of us would have a way more mature spiritual life if we didn't care what other people said, especially people that are lying about us.

We can get so wrapped up around people that are lying about us or don't like us or whatever, and your life gets consumed because you're you're not responsible for those people.

If they're lying about you, whatever.

Who cares?

Let them lie about you.

You don't need to fix that.

You don't need to mend that.

Just you put your eyes on the Lord.

Let liars lie, let dogs bark.

That's what you can do.

You get your eyes in the Lord, and so you can say what the psalmist says here.

I believed even when I spoke.

People are liars, but I am gonna walk by faith.

Verse 12 gets back to the trajectory here.

What am I gonna give God?

Like I just vowed I'm gonna walk before him.

I just vowed I'm gonna render obedience to him.

What can I give him?

And that's this question in verse 12.

What shall I render to Yahweh for all his benefits to me?

What does God need?

Does he need 10,000 rivers of oil?

Does he need a lamb or a goat or 10,000 goats?

Does he need, should I give my firstborn son to him?

Is that what I should do to repay him for answering me?

And he says in verse 13, all I can do is lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of Yahweh and pay my vows to Yahweh in the presence of all his people.

So this is a distant world from us, the Old Testament sacrificial world.

The cup of salvation is the cup of uh it's the libation offering.

You would bring a sacrifice to the temple and you would offer it, and you would take a drink and you would pour it out on the offering in the temple.

But it's called the libation offering because if you couldn't get to Jerusalem to make the sacrifice, you could do it at your own house.

In fact, you don't even need the sacrifice.

At your own house, Deuteronomy authorizes you to just make your own beer or get your own wine and drink in your own house for the joy of the Lord instead of going to Jerusalem.

So it's kind of the lazy man's offering.

And here he says, I am delivered, so I am going to take that cup, take that offering, and I'm going to get my feet to Jerusalem and offer it in front of everybody.

I want everybody to see, I'm not just saying, hey, I'm out in the wilderness here.

I'm going to the temple.

Verse 19 picks it up again.

I'm going to the house of Yahweh.

That's where I'm going to do this offering.

He says he's going to pay his vow.

Verse 14.

Vows in the Old Testament were voluntary.

You could make a vow or you could not make a vow, no big deal.

However, if you made a vow, you had to keep it unless it was a sinful vow, of course.

If a wife made a vow, she had to keep it unless her husband revoked it in the same day.

So the idea is that you don't have to make a vow, but if you do, you better keep it unless it's a sinful vow.

Think of Jehu.

Bad.

But you make a vow, keep it.

And so here the psalmist says, I vow I'm going to walk in obedience and joy and get my feet to the temple to worship God in front of everybody.

In the presence, verse 14 says, Of all my people, of all his people.

That's the goal.

He wants his worship to be public.

Now we don't journey to Jerusalem, but here's the most basic way we can apply this.

Don't let your worship of the Lord be purely a private affair.

Tell somebody you love the Lord.

Tell somebody you're going to serve the Lord with your life.

Tell your friends or your coworkers that you love Jesus and you're going to spend your life serving them.

It's such a simple thing.

We often think that's like almost childish, but this is where the psalmist is.

I want my friends, I want my neighbors to know that as for me and my house, we serve the Lord.

And we'll do it in front of other people.

We will hold our hands up in worship.

We will worship with a loud voice and a pure heart.

That's what we're going to do, and we, in a sense, want to be seen by the world.

That's where verse 15 comes.

Precious in the sight of Yahweh is the death of his saints.

Like I said, that's a confusing verse right there.

Does it mean that he's ultimately rescued?

It seems not.

Unless you take it the other way, that costly to the Lord is the death of his saints.

The reality is it goes either way.

It's Philippians 1, where Paul says, To live is Christ, to die is.

So which is it?

And Paul says, I don't know which it is.

Remember Paul in Philippians 1?

I don't know.

So which is better, Paul?

I don't know.

That's where the psalmist ends.

Did he survive this trial?

We don't know.

We know he's not alive now, so at some point his luck ran out.

Precious in the sight of Yahweh is the death of his saints.

And then he says, Oh Lord, Yahweh, I'm your servant.

I am your servant, the son of your maidservant.

That is a very odd thing to throw into the passage, isn't it?

Yahweh, I want you to know I'm your servant.

Of course he is, and I'm only a human.

I'm only born to another servant.

I'm just a human being.

A very odd thing to have thrown in there, but he's placing himself as a human being.

And he says, God, you loosed my bonds.

In other words, I was dying and you loosed the bonds of sin.

You loose the bonds of suffering.

Therefore, verse 17, I'll offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving.

I will call upon Yahweh's name.

I will pay my vows to Yahweh.

He repeats that again in the presence of all his people.

So this psalm ends by him saying, I'm only a human, but I'm going to pay my vow.

I will present the offering for sin to the world.

And I'm going to make that offering in Jerusalem.

Praise Yahweh.

What a powerful psalm.

Do you know anyone who's prayed this psalm?

Jonah prayed this psalm.

Jonah 2 and 4 quote this psalm.

Now I don't know if Jonah wrote the psalm.

Did Jonah write Psalm 116 after his experience?

Based upon his prayer in the fish?

Or did Jonah know Psalm 116 before he went in the fish, and that's why he prayed it?

Impossible to tell.

And again, that's the point of the psalm.

Jonah is running from the Lord.

The Lord told him to go this way, and Jonah went that way, and he was running from the Lord in the cardinal direction.

In other words, he went away from Jerusalem, but he's also running from the Lord in obedience and in his heart.

And the Lord had him thrown overboard and swallowed by a fish.

He went to the bottom of the sea.

So now Jonah could not be further from the ear of the Lord.

Could he?

He went in the wrong direction and he's underwater in an animal.

Like that's it's over.

But he cries to the Lord, and what does he tell the Lord?

Jonah 2, verse 3.

Jonah 2:3

Jonah tells the Lord, the snares of death are around me, the pangs of Sheol are holding on to me like seaweed.

But I'm going to call to you and you'll hear me from the belly of the whale.

And that's what happens.

He calls to Yahweh, and Yahweh hears him.

Yahweh extended his ear all the way to Tarshish, all the way through the water, all the way to the fish.

Hears Jonah.

The fish throws Jonah up on the shore.

And what does Jonah do?

I'm going to keep my word now.

You rescued me somehow.

I mean, nobody will believe this, and I'm going to take my soggy feet all the way to Nineveh and preach exactly what you told me to preach, Lord.

And he does, remember?

Nineveh repents.

Jonah sits down in Jonah chapter 4, and God shows mercy to them.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

Remember what Jonah says?

He says, what?

Verse 5.

I knew you were gracious.

I knew you were righteous.

I knew you were merciful.

I knew, verse 6, that you would preserve the simple.

Jonah turns it into an accusation.

I knew what that Psalm said.

Ah.

Man, God is the nerve of God to answer my prayer.

And he says, I wish I would have died now.

Remember where the Lord says to him, Is it right for me to let the simple person suffer?

Shouldn't I show him mercy?

That's Psalm 116.

The prodigal son prayed this prayer.

Of course, the fictional prodigal son, invented by Jesus, but he ran from the Lord, represented as the father in the story.

He ran from the Lord to the pagan world.

He threw himself into sin.

He had the snares of death around him.

He was starving to death.

He was on death's door.

And do you remember what he did?

He came to his senses.

He called out to his father from a distant land.

He came home.

The father inclined his ear and ran out to him, inclined his feet and went out to him, embraced him, brought him in.

He said, I'm going to pay my vow to you.

I'm going to be a servant to you.

And the father said, No, you're not.

And absolves him of the vow, dresses him in the robe, gives him the ring.

He's still surrounded by liars.

The son brings accusations, the other son brings accusations against him, lies about him.

No matter.

He's received with celebration in the courts of the house of Yahweh, in the midst of Jerusalem.

Praise Yahweh.

I've prayed this prayer.

In my own sin, living for myself, afraid of death, not knowing what would happen to me when I died.

Living a life apart from Christ, confronted with the gospel.

I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and I call out to God for forgiveness, and He hears my prayer and forgives me of my sin.

Rescues me, turns me into a pastor of all things.

Have you prayed this prayer?

Have you come face to face with your own sin, knowing that you deserve God's judgment?

You deserve hell for your sin, and you can even taste it and smell it, and you cry out for forgiveness from it, and he hears you and answers you because of his own righteousness and rescues you?

One more person prayed this prayer.

The Lord Jesus literally sang this psalm on Thursday night, leaving the Passover, would have sung through the Halail.

Mark tells you he sang the song before he prayed in the garden, singing this song and praying to the Lord, praying this prayer.

The snares of death encompass me, the pangs of Sheol, the pangs of the grave lay hold on me.

Verse 4, I cry to Yahweh, deliver my soul.

This is essentially what Jesus prayed.

He tells his soul to be quiet.

He asks for the cup to pass from him.

He reminds himself and he reminds the Lord he's only human.

This is verse 16.

I'm only a human.

Jesus in his humanity here says, Let this cup pass from me, but he submits his human will to the divine will and says, Your will be done.

He goes from the garden, he's surrounded by liars.

Judas is betraying him, Peter is denying him.

He's lifted up on the cross where he offers the drink offering of salvation to the world.

It is the cup of salvation that is lifted up.

Luke 22, verse 44 says he was praying earnestly because he was at the point of death.

Luke 22:44

Matthew 26, verse 30 is where we get that he's saying, sorrowful to the point of death.

Matthew 26:30

He flips the script in verse 7, return, O my soul, to your rest.

Instead, his soul does go down to Sheol, but it doesn't rest in Sheol, it does work in Sheol.

He goes down to the grave, releases those who died in faith in the Old Testament, sends them up to heaven, and then he does rise from the grave and walk again in the land of the living.

Acts chapter 2, verse 24, Peter takes this psalm, quotes it, and applies it to Jesus Christ, saying, God raised him up, loosing the pangs of Sheol, because it was not possible for him to be held by the grave.

Acts 2:24

And Jesus pays his vows to the Lord in full.

He descended into the grave, triumphing over the grave, and walked again in the land of the living.

He was only human, as they say.

And yet he was truly God.

Grateful for his life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension back to heaven, where he reigns now as the God man, forever in authority over the universe.

He is the one that extends his ear to hear our prayers.

We have a high priest.

The vows of Psalms 116 are fulfilled in him, the cup is fulfilled in him.

The cries are modeled by him.

Our answered prayers are ensured by him.

We're grateful for his ear.

We give you thanks for it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, DC area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.