"Love Endures" Psalm 52 Sunday Morning Worship Service

This morning our text is Psalm 52, so let me begin our time by reading from God's Word.

Would you follow with me as I read Psalm 52?

Look down to your Bibles.

We'll hear the word of the Lord together.

Psalm 52.

To the choir master, a masculine of David, when Doeg the Edomite came and said to Saul, David has come to the house of Ahimelech.

Why do you boast of evil, O mighty man?

The steadfast love of God endures all the day.

Your tongue plots destruction like a sharp razor, you worker of deceit.

You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking what is right.

Selah.

You love all words that devour, O deceitful tongue, but God will break you down forever.

He will snatch you and tear you from your tent, he will uproot you from the land of the living, Selah.

The righteous shall see in fear, and shall laugh at him, saying, See the man who would not make God his refuge, but trusted in the abundance of his riches and sought refuge in his own destruction.

But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God.

I trust in the steadfast love of God for ever and ever.

I will thank you forever because you have done it.

I will wait for your name, for it is good in the presence of the godly.

This is the word of God.

I have an exceedingly basic question to ask you as we begin to think about Psalm 52 this morning.

Do you think that it matters in what order we read the nine verses that make up Psalm 52?

I think the answer to that question is so basic it you might wonder why do you even bother asking that question?

Of course, this is an intentional poetic composition.

Those nine verses need to be read in that order in order to understand Psalm 52.

If you rearrange them and scramble them in some other way, you'd no longer really have Psalm 52.

You'd have something different altogether.

We believe each of the 150 Psalms are intentional compositions inspired by the Holy Spirit that instruct us on how to live a life of worship.

But let's then expand that question a little bit broader and let's ask this question.

Not just are the verses in an individual psalm intentionally arranged, but are the 150 psalms that make up our Psalter intentionally arranged?

Or are the Psalms just kind of haphazardly jumbled together in no particular order, no intentionality?

Kind of like strolling through some kind of social media stream in which you see all kinds of different posts that maybe chronologically popped up, but you can't really tell any coherent order or narrative or structure.

They're just kind of there.

Is that the way the Psalter has been passed on to us?

Well, most interpreters through the years have seen that there is an intentionality, not just on the individual level of the psalm, but on the structural level of the whole Psalter.

These 150 Psalms were intentionally arranged.

You see that, and you've even heard it preached from our own pulpit, that the first two psalms are like the double-doored entrance into the Psalter.

And as you walk through the 150 Psalms and make up the Psalter, you learn how to live a life of worship, concluding with the 150th Psalm that declares, Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

So when you walk in through the double-doored entrance of the first two psalms, it teach you, if you want to worship God, you have to meditate on the law of God day and night, and you have to bow in worship to his King.

And then you'll learn to navigate all the seasons of life, concluding an ecstatic, universal worship with all of God's people.

But what about the middle?

What about everything in between Psalms 1 and 2 and Psalm 150?

Is there any intentionality in the way those Psalms were arranged?

And we can begin to answer this question just by asking another very simple question.

Are there any signs in the text that we have in the Psalter that was passed on to us that the Psalms are intentionally arranged?

And many of you have already thought about this question, but if you haven't, I just want to point out something from the very beginning.

When you first open the Psalter, in fact, do that.

Flip over to the beginning of the book of Psalms to Psalm 1.

And when you arrive at Psalm 1, just glance your eyes up a few millimeters, and what you will discover is that there is an introduction staring you in the face rather conspicuously before you even read Psalm 1.

Two little words.

Book 1.

What is this?

And as you read through the Psalms, there's no indication what is this book 1?

I don't know, until you get to Psalm 42.

So flip ahead in your Bible to Psalm 42.

And when you arrive at Psalm 42, you will again find two conspicuous words standing above Psalm 42 that read, Book 2.

What is this?

And as you keep reading, what you discover is that the Psalter is arranged in five books.

That's the first sign that there's intentional arrangement in the Psalter.

Here's another.

Look just up a verse from Psalm 42.

Look at the last verse of Psalm 41.

What you find is a doxology.

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting, amen and amen.

That doxology closes out book one of the Psalter, Psalms 1 to 41, have a unity, and they conclude with a doxology before entering into book two.

And what you find as you read through the Psalter is that every book has that same pattern.

In fact, let's just do this little exercise.

Let's flip in our Bibles to book two.

That is Psalm 73 of the Psalter.

Psalm 73 begins, Book 2 of the Psalter.

And if you look up to the last verses of Psalm 72, you'll find another doxology in verse 18.

Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things.

Blessed be his glorious name forever.

May the whole earth be filled with his glory.

Amen and amen.

The prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended.

Book three.

So we see another doxology closing the second book of the Psalter.

Let's move forward a little bit more.

Look at Psalms 89 and 90.

The seam of the next book has another doxology to close the third book of the Psalter.

Look at Psalm 89 and verse 52.

We read this doxology: Blessed be the Lord forever.

Amen and amen.

Then book four.

And lastly, look at Psalm 106 and 107.

In the last verse of Psalm 106, the last verse of the fourth book of the Psalter reads, Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting, and let all the people say, Amen, praise the Lord.

Then we get book five.

And you would ask, is there a doxology to close book five of the Psalter?

And indeed there is, not just one or two verses, but in fact six Psalms, Psalm 145 to Psalm 150, or nothing but doxology, concluding with that climactic announcement, let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

And this little exercise is just intended to just begin to help us think about the ways in which the Psalter was intentionally arranged.

This is not just some scribe had a few scrolls, spilled them, and said, Well, I guess that's the way the Psalter's going to work.

There was intentionality in the arrangement of the Psalter that has been handed down to us as part of Holy Scripture.

So if you flip back to Psalm 52, our text for this morning, let's ask Is there anything that we can learn from the arrangement of the Psalter that would help us to interpret individual Psalms?

Psalm 52 and the Psalms that we'll be studying in our worship for the next few weeks are all part of Book 2 of the Psalter.

So is there any intentional arrangement, any theological goals that the arrangement of the Psalter intended to communicate to us?

And I want to be, at the outset here, I want to be a little bit careful of overreading the arrangement of the Psalter.

In fact, one I think judicious warning comes to us from an early Jewish interpretation of the Psalms, found in the Midrash in Psalm 3, that says the exact order of David's Psalms is not found in Scripture as it stands.

In fact, when Rabbi Yahushua bin Levi sought to arrange the Psalms in their proper order, a heavenly voice came forth and commanded, do not rouse that which slumbers.

I think that's a good warning to recognize that even those people who have through the ages poured their life over the scripture, it's difficult to see a very clear and obvious, detailed way in which the Psalms were arranged.

But at risk of evoking a heavenly voice this morning, I would like to venture at rousing that which slumbers.

I think that there are at least a few things that we can say that are evident about the way the Psalms have been arranged.

Here are a couple things that seem to be, I think, fairly transparent.

And that is, first of all, that the Psalms are arranged in such a way as to lead you towards leading a life of worship in all seasons of life.

And in particular, the way in which you learn how to live a life of worship is read against the background of the story of Israel.

So if the Psalter is arranged in five books, you can kind of look book by book and see that the Psalter is arranged in such a way that you can read the Psalter against the backdrop of the story of Israel.

Here's what I mean.

The heart of the story of Israel is the story of how God is redeeming a people for himself through a nation, and specifically through a king, a kingly line in that nation, the kingdom, a kingly line of David.

We know from 2 Samuel chapter 7 that God established a covenant with David and said, From your line is going to come a king who will reign over my kingdom forever and ever.

2 Samuel 7 · chapter mention

But by the time you get to Psalm, excuse me, you get to 2 Kings, you find that the kingdom of David comes to an end in 586, and the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem, raise the temple and the palace, and it seems the Davidic line has come to an end, and God's covenant promises seem to be in jeopardy.

And if you read through the first three books of the Psalter, that is Psalms 1 through 89, they seem to be arranged in such a way that they stand out against the background of the story of Israel up to that point.

That is, the beginning of the Psalter starts, Psalm 1 and Psalm 2, with this establishment that if you want to be a rightly related person to God, you have to meditate on the law of the Lord day and night and bow to God's established king.

And book one of the Psalter, every single psalm is a Psalm of David.

This seems to establish God's covenant loyalty through David is the means by which he's going to establish his kingdom on the earth.

But by the time you get to Psalms 88 and 89, there's a cry of despondency.

Is God's promise actually going to be fulfilled?

Because as we saw in 2 Kings, the line of David seems to come to an end.

And God's promise that through the line of David He would establish a universal reign and establish a kingdom without end seems to be in jeopardy.

That seems to be the background for the first three books of the Psalter.

Books four and five then come in with this ecstatic note that God's faithfulness will be established not just through David, but over all the nations.

So that books four and five establish the theme of God's faithfulness bringing the reign of Yahweh as King over all the earth.

That's kind of the background against which you can read the Psalter.

So as we come to the second book of the Psalter, there's a number of thematic elements that will be helpful for context to shape the way we read an individual psalm.

So for example, I mentioned a moment ago that in Psalm 1, that is Psalm, excuse me, Book 1 of the Psalter, that's Psalms 1 through 41, all of those are Psalms of David.

And there's a particular angle that that book of the Psalter seems to be coming at relationship with God.

That is, all of the ways that those Psalms address God highlight the use of the name Yahweh.

Yahweh is the covenant name for God.

The way that God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush, the way he wants to relate to his people is as a savior and a redeemer.

That's how he revealed himself to David, as a redeeming God who, through the line of David, will redeem his people and establish a kingdom where they can dwell with him forever.

That's the way that God is addressed in the first 41 Psalms.

But when you hit book two of the Psalter, there's a change in focus in the way those Psalms deal with the relationship between God and man.

That is, the name Yahweh drops off the page.

And what you have now is the psalmist addressing God with the common name for God in Hebrew, Elohim.

And what seems to be emphasized now is God's sovereignty to establish his promises, even though the world is very, very, very messy, and the people through whom he's working are very, very faulted.

So when you hit Psalm 42, the first Psalm in the book of uh the second book of the Psalter, you no longer have David as the focus.

Psalms 42 to 49 are psalms of Korah.

And their Psalms begin with a plea for God to establish his universal reign over the world.

And then Psalm 50, we have a Psalm of Asaph that introduces the theme of sacrifice as the way that human beings can be rightly related to the God who's sovereign over all the nations.

It's then in Psalm 51 that David's reintroduced into this altar, and the note that sounded in his reintroduction is one of confession of sin, not of a perfect Savior king, but as a confessing contrite king.

You know, Psalm 51 is the famous Psalm of David's repentance after his sin with Uriah and Bathsheba.

After Psalm 51, David confesses his sin.

At the end of that Psalm, you can see this down in your Bible, Psalm 51, verse 13, David then makes a turn and says, Now I can teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.

Psalms 51:13

And that seems to frame the context in which we can read Psalm 52, which tells us there's only two ways to live, because God is going to bring a judgment.

You're either going to be rightly related to him through confession of your sin, or you're going to stand accountable for your sin when God brings judgment.

And then David affirms the universal judgment of God in Psalms 58 and 59 and says, God will establish his kingdom through judgment.

But Psalms 60 to 68 tell us that God in the meantime allows great calamity on the earth, so that his godly ones will learn to fear him and trust him in the midst of a mucky fallen world.

Finally, Book 2 closes with this note of a hope for restoration, Psalm 72, through a king in the line of David, who will bring the glory of God to fruition over the whole earth.

So if we're going to think of Book Two as kind of a unified composition, here is what I would suggest as a way for reading Book Two of the Psalter.

Two of the Psalter affirms all of God's promises through David to establish his reign on the earth are true, but it's not going to be clean and simple and easy.

The world in which God's people live in now is filled with evil and disaster and disappointment.

And if you want to live a life of worship, you have to learn how to confess your sins, trust in God's word, and hope in God's King in the midst of a fallen world.

That's what Book Two of the Psalter teaches God's people to do: to live a life of worship by confessing our sins, trusting in God's word, and hoping in God's King.

And right in the middle of Book Two of the Psalter, we find Psalm 52.

This is a Psalm right at the heart of that theme that teaches us in the midst of a fallen world where we face enemies and disappointment in the present, we have to look beyond our present to the future and remember that the God who is sovereign over the world will bring judgment, which will mean salvation for his people.

That enables us to put our trust in him in the present and our hope in him for the future.

So let's walk through Psalm 52.

All of that was just prefatory to get to Psalm 52.

Now, now the sermon is starting.

Look down at Psalm 52, you'll notice that there is a title for this Psalm, one of these historical background titles.

That part of your text that's all in capital letters in English is part of the inspired text of Scripture, and it tells us kind of background to read this psalm against.

And it says to the choir master, a masculine of David, when Doeg the Edomite came and told Saul, David has come to the house of Ahimelech.

Now, that story is recounted to us in the book of 1 Samuel, chapters 21 and 22.

1 Samuel 21 · chapter mention

In that story, this is a time in David's life where he's not yet king.

Saul is still king, and Saul wants to kill David, and so David goes on the run.

On his way out into the wilderness, he stops in a city called Nob, where there is a tabernacle, and there are priests worshiping the Lord.

And he speaks to the priest, Ahimelech, and he asks him if he can give him any provisions.

And Ahimelech gives him food and the sword of Goliath, and then David scurries off into the wilderness to escape Saul.

And there's this side comment at the end of this section, 1 Samuel 21, that tells us Doeg the Edomite, who was in charge of Saul's flocks, was there.

A little foreboding is the way that note sounds as you're reading the passage.

And then you move on to the next chapter.

And some time has passed, and then in 1 Samuel chapter 22, we read that Saul has gathered his counselors and he's airing his grievances and expressing how frustrated he is that David has eluded him and he wants to kill that David.

1 Samuel 22 · chapter mention

If only someone were loyal enough to tell him where David had fled.

Well, Doeg sees an opportunity to get into Saul's good graces, so he says, Ooh, ooh, I know.

I saw him at Nob talking to Ahimelech.

So Saul summons Ahimelech and the other priests, inquires of them what happened to David, then flies off the handle and commands the slaughter of these priests.

Now, David, excuse me, Saul's bodyguards, as corrupt as they were, recognized you don't kill priests.

But Doeg, seeing another opportunity to get even deeper into Saul's good graces, says, I'll do it.

And executes the slaughter of the priests, and the text says, Then he executes not only the slaughter of the priests, but the whole city, man, woman, and child.

That's what's in the title, is we're supposed to read Psalm 52 against that background.

In other words, what's supposed to kind of form the backdrop as we're reading Psalm 52 is this reality that we live in a world that sometimes is characterized by unspeakable, unfathomable evil.

Everything from the slaughter of women and children all the way down to just the mundane, unmet expectations that you experience when you're living in a fallen world.

That's the backdrop for reading Psalm 52.

And what Psalm 52 teaches you is how to live a life of worship in those circumstances.

It teaches you that in cases where you experience present enemies, you look through your enemies into the future and you look at the face of God and you remember what you know is true about God, who he is and what he will do, that will give you resolve and a ballast to live with trust and faith and hope in the present.

So let's walk through Psalm 52 and it unfolds in three scenes.

First, David tells us, When you have an enemy and a present problem, this is what you do.

Look down at your text at verse 1.

David says, Why do you boast, oh why do you boast of evil, O mighty man?

That phrase mighty man is a specific cultural term.

It's used for those warriors who have achieved victory and established glory for themselves and their people.

So at the end of David's story in 2 Samuel chapter 23, there's a whole chapter that lists all the mighty men of David.

2 Samuel 23 · chapter mention

These are the heroes of Israel, the people who had saved the nation.

It's somebody who would have all kinds of cultural acclaim, and they deserved it.

But here, David is using that title of Doeg ironically.

You say you're a mighty man.

But really all you've done is slaughter innocent women and children.

Actually, you're no mighty men at all.

You boast an evil.

Now we could just pause just for a moment, and this is a little bit of a side note, but it seems basic to us that what Doeg did was evil.

He slaughtered innocent women and children.

But in Doeg's mind, he had a good rationale for what he was doing.

He had a good justification.

The end would justify the means in Doeg's mind and those of his compatriots.

You know, if there is no divine standard, if there's no standard that comes from heaven that rises above civilizations and rises above cultures and societies, then who's to say Doeg was wrong?

If there's no divine standard, then all there is is power in this world.

But the Word of God, the Scripture, is a divine source of truth.

It doesn't arise from culture, it comes down from heaven and stands in judgment on every civilization, on every culture, and on every human in that culture.

The Word of God gives us a higher reference point by which we can view the actions of others, and perhaps more importantly, our own actions, and we can say, what that is, is it's evil.

It's not just my preference, it's not just that I don't like it, but it's genuinely evil because it's evil before the God.

That gives us a divine law.

In fact, that's what David says in verse 1.

You are boasting in evil.

And then the second line draws a contrast with the character with the character of Doeg.

The steadfast love, verse 1 says, the steadfast love of God endures all the day.

So he's drawing a contrast between the evil actions of Doeg and the steadfast love of God.

And there's something in the text that I want you to notice.

There's no what we call a conjunction in between these two lines.

Why do you boast of evil, O man?

And you would expect some kind of transition, but for something like that, but there isn't any.

This is what we call in grammar an ascendeton.

It's a little trivia for you just to tuck in your back pocket to impress people later.

If you're talking to someone who's impressed by that, they are a bona fide nerd.

You use this in the literature when you want to draw a stark contrast between two things.

Just leave them hanging.

And that's what David has done here.

Here's Doek and his culturally affirmed slaughter.

But then on the other side, there is the steadfast love of God that endures forever and ever.

And what he wants to do is he wants to cause us to think about the difference between the way human beings act in this world and the way God is, the character of God.

And when you put those two in juxtaposition, it should create at least a couple thoughts in your mind.

On the one hand, you should be able to look at the evil actions in the world and not envy them and think, man, if I would were free from the straitjacket of God's moral requirements and I could just do whatever it took in order to get ahead in this world, my life would be so much better.

No.

Rather, the steadfast love of God enables you to look at the evil in the world and say, that's evil and it's foolish because God sees it and he's going to hold you to account.

And on the other hand, it enables you, looking at the steadfast love of God, that will have the last say, to feel comforted that because God is going to bring a judgment, because God will bring a reckoning, because God will right every wrong, as much as that things are upside down in this world, there's going to be a day when God will vindicate me.

There's going to be a day when God will deliver me from the evil of this world and bring me into his kingdom.

That's kind of the psalm in miniature, what we have in verse one.

But then David goes on in verses two through four to draw out some more of the characteristics of Doeg's evil actions.

So look down at verse two of your text.

In verse 2 we read, Your tongue plots destruction like a sharp razor, you worker of deceit.

You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking what is right.

You love all words that devour, O deceitful tongue.

Notice the language that David uses to characterize this man's actions.

Speaks of his tongue twice.

He says his tongue loves destruction, deceit twice in verse 2 and verse 4.

It's characterized by lying and devouring.

This is the world's mighty man.

This is the person who gets ahead in society.

But I think there's something worth asking as we're looking at this text.

David twice calls him a man of deceit.

He says he has a lying tongue.

But remember what Doeg said.

When Saul asked if any of his men had seen David, Doeg simply said, I have seen him.

So did he lie?

David calls him a liar.

But what he said to Saul was factually true.

So in what sense is he a liar?

I think everybody from five years old and up knows.

In our house we have a rule.

No tattling.

One of my kids comes and says, My brother did this.

With the expectation that now he's going down.

That child needs to learn not to expect praise and adulation.

Good job getting your brother in trouble.

Rather, our kids need to learn that you should love your brother as yourself.

And I don't think that's what you're doing right now.

We know that our words don't matter just in terms of the factual accuracy, but also what matters is the heart that's launching those words out into the world.

You know this from the time you're a little kid all the way through the rest of your life.

That God doesn't just look at the factual truth of the account you give, but he also looks at the motive as to why you are giving it.

And that's what Doeg did.

Doeg gave this report in order to kill people.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism and question 145, answering the question, what are the sins forbidden in the Ninth Commandment?

Ninth Commandment is you shall not bear false witness.

And among the sins forbidden in the ninth commandment are this speaking the truth unseasonably or maliciously to a wrong end.

That's what Doeg was doing.

That's what so many of us have been guilty of doing.

And what the scripture says is the scripture stands in judgment of that kind of speech and says, actually, though it may be factually accurate on the surface level, what God's doing in judging you and I is looking on our heart and says, I see that from your heart you're loving evil.

Look at verse 3.

You love evil more than good.

Verse 4, you love words that devour.

God's looking to the heart and judging the motive as to why you say what you say.

Just one other note I think worth mentioning before we pass these verses, and that is twice the word love is used in order to emphasize this element of God's judgment extends to the heart.

You notice that in verse 3, God says, you love evil.

God's calling Doeg's love evil.

Doeg may well say that this is me.

It's natural.

What I'm doing just comes naturally and it's justified for all kinds of different reasons.

What I'm doing is okay.

But God says, I look at your love and I call your love evil.

So let me ask you a simple question.

Do you think it is possible for love to be evil?

Can love ever be evil?

And if your inclination is to say, no, love can never be evil, love is always, always a virtue, then just recognize that your inclination is contradicted by the scriptures.

If God says that love can be evil, what matters is the object of your affection.

What do you love?

And the love for ex-object may come as natural as your desire to drink water.

But if that love stands against the character of God, if your love is for a forbidden object, then your love is evil, and there is a divine standard, there is a lawgiver, there is a God in heaven who stands in judgment even upon our perverse loves.

That's what God is declaring in these verses, and that's what David is reminding himself of.

He's looking at evil in the face, and he's saying, I know that you will not have the final word.

There is a God in heaven who sees and who will stand in judgment over your evil loves and evil actions and evil words.

So what does David then do, having reminded himself that this is just evil, this isn't just, I don't like this, but this is genuinely evil because God says it's evil.

Well, then, having looked at his present problem, he looks through his present problem to the face of God and reminds himself that God will stand in judgment of these actions.

And you see that in verse 5.

Look at verse 5 where we read, But God will break you down forever.

He will snatch and tear you from your tent, he will uproot you from the land of the living.

That is some strong language.

That word that's translated, break you down forever, that's the word that's used for tearing down cities.

And here, David is saying that's the kind of judgment God is going to bring upon evildoers.

He's going to tear them down forever.

And then he says, So uproot you from the land of the living, word that's used for tearing out ancient strong trees, ripping them out.

This is powerful language, and David is reminding himself of these realities to remind himself evil will not have the final word.

This is just the first quarter.

And I know how the game will end.

And he's reminding himself of the end, where he says, look at verse 6 the righteous shall see and fear, and shall laugh, saying, See the man who would not make God his refuge, but trusted in the abundance of his riches, and sought refuge in his own destruction.

That will be the end for me.

The wicked will be gone, and I will stand in the presence of God.

My story will have a good end.

This is the constant teaching of Scripture.

We see this everywhere in the scriptures, particularly in the Psalms.

For example, Psalm 37 says the wicked plots against the righteous and gnashes his teeth at him, but the Lord laughs at the wicked, for he sees that his day is coming.

You know, the word laugh is used several times in the Psalms, and every time, except Psalm 52, it's describing God standing in judgment over sinners and laughing at the foolish ways in which they rebel against the God who made them.

The first time we see the word laugh is in Psalm 2, that says, God has established his king on his holy hill, but the kings of the earth come together and conspire and say, Let us throw off the shackles of God's commandments and live our life our own way.

And then the text in Psalm 2 says, God sits in heaven and laughs.

He holds them in derision because he will bring them into judgment.

And what Psalm 52 is saying is there's going to come a day if you are rightly related to God where you will get to share in God's laughter.

Now, the sense in which we share in God's laughter is not haughty, I'm better than you.

Rather, it's the kind of rejoicing that you see in the book of Revelation, where the angels rejoice over God's judgment.

A way to think about it is this 1 John chapter 3 and verse 2 says that when we see him, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is, in our glorified state, pure from sin, redeemed from any corruption, we will see evil the way God does.

1 John 3 · chapter mention

And we will see the just way that God deals with sin, and we will rejoice at God's justice.

So the Psalm in verse, excuse me, Psalm 37 concludes this way: fret not yourself because of evildoers.

Be not envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb.

That's the end of your story.

Fix your eyes on that is what David is doing.

Or we could say it another way.

In Psalm in 58, David announces, Mankind will say, Surely there is a reward for the righteous.

Surely there is a God who judges on earth.

That's the end of this story, and fix your eyes on that.

But I think there's a second way in which we could think about this.

A second way in which we could think about our laughter being joined with God.

Because there's another text in the scriptures that speaks of God's people coming through judgment and laughing at the end of it.

And it's in Jeremiah chapter 31, which is a prophetic text speaking about the new covenant that the Messiah brought, Jesus inaugurated through his death and resurrection.

Jeremiah 31 · chapter mention

And in describing the new covenant God will bring, Jeremiah says these words.

That word translated merrymakers in the Hebrew is the same word of laughter, or we could translate it as the laughers.

It just sounds funny in English to say laughers.

Merrymakers works better in English.

But do you see the concept here?

Is there's an illusion to just as God redeemed the people of Israel in the Exodus.

That's the illusion at these first verses.

The people who survived the sword, that is, the people who pass through judgment into redemption are filled with gladness and laughing at having escaped judgment and being brought to safety.

And you see the illusion here, the people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness.

That's an illusion to the Exodus, where God constituted Israel as a nation, where God brought judgment in Egypt.

But on every home in which the blood of the Lamb was smeared, God passed over that house, and those people were brought through God's judgment, then through the Red Sea, then Miriam and the women broke out their tambourines, and they celebrated it, and they laughed at having escaped God's judgment and having found themselves delivered.

And God is saying, kind of like that is what it will be like when I bring you through the final judgment.

When you pass through the final judgment, you will stand on the other side laughing at the reality that you escaped judgment.

Here's a way I think you could conceptualize that.

A time in which I was aware, in which I came closest to death, occurred when I was 17 years old on a trip to the Grand Canyon, and I was hiking the Grand Canyon with my dad and my brother, and we were on a very narrow path, just a kind of dirt path.

On one side was a kind of hill sloped up to a larger paved path with a fence, and my mother and my sisters were on that path, and my dad and my brother, we were on this unpaved, unguarded, unfenced path.

And on the right side was a sheer cliff face, like a hundred feet.

If you fall, you're dead.

Now it's perfectly safe enough that if you exercise some common sense, then you'd be perfectly fine.

Fortunately, I was 17 years old and full of common sense.

So for some reason, I decided I'd like to clamber up this hill on my other side and go talk to my mom for a moment, and then as I came back down to the unpaved path, my foot slipped and began to slide down the rocks.

And for this, what seemed like an eternity, I'm trying to dig my heels in, grab a root, anything that will stop my fall.

And I slide down and my butt comes to a stop right on the flat path with my feet right there on the edge, just a few inches from death.

And when I picked myself up, do you know what I did?

I laughed! What are you supposed to do after that?

You're this close to death and you escaped it?

I laughed.

When you pass through the final judgment and the fullness of an infinite God who is so inexplicably, incomprehensibly holy, pours his judgment upon evil, and you know that you deserve that, but somehow, somehow, you slip through it and find yourself on the other side in the presence of eternal joy forever?

What do you think you're gonna do?

I'll do a lot of things, but one of those things is I think I'm gonna laugh at having been delivered through judgment into redemption.

David's reminding himself of that.

In the face of his present experience, he's looking through judgment to the deliverance that God will bring him, and reminding himself, one day I'm going to laugh.

Now there's one other feature of this text we should notice.

In verse 6, or rather in verse 5, there's a feature that should cue us into an answer to this question.

That is, I mentioned a moment ago, somehow, somehow you pass through the judgment.

So we should remind ourselves, well, what is that way?

How is it that you can pass through the judgment?

Because if you're honest with yourself for more than two seconds, you would recognize that I deserve the judgment of God too.

This is Youth Serve Sunday, and there's youth serving all over the place, and I have the privilege of getting to serve as the youth pastor to Emmanuel.

And often when people discover what I do is I work with teenagers, they say, man, that's hard.

Teenagers are hard.

Well, why is it that they're so hard?

I'll sometimes ask people and they'll say something like, Oh, they're stubborn, or you know, they don't listen, or they're so selfish.

Well, there's a one-word summary for why that's hard.

They sinners.

Sin.

But do you know so are you?

Working with adults isn't easier.

You're just more sophisticated in the way you deal with it.

You know, if you are honest with yourself, that if God is gonna bring divine judgment upon all evil, then he has to bring it on you.

Not just the evil outside of you you don't like, but the evil inside of you that you do like.

So how can you pass through this judgment into deliverance?

And there's a cue in the text in verse 5.

Look at the end of verse 5.

He will uproot you from the land of the living.

That's the judgment God is gonna bring upon sinners.

Uproot them from the land of the living and bring them into eternal judgment.

There's another place in Scripture where that phrase occurs.

And it occurs in Isaiah 53, the text that's promising a future-coming Messiah Redeemer, a suffering servant.

And in verse 8, we find this in Isaiah 53, by oppression and judgment he was taken away.

And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living?

That's the judgment that God is bringing upon the suffering servant, cutting him off out of the land of the living, bringing divine judgment upon him.

But there's a difference between the way the evildoers in Psalm 52 experience that judgment and the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 experiences that judgment.

In the Psalm, they experience that judgment because of their sin.

It's just judgment.

But in Isaiah 53, look at the last line.

He's not stricken for his transgression, rather, stricken for the transgression of my people.

That's the message of Isaiah 53 in the whole Bible, that the only way you can pass through that judgment is if someone else bears it for you, in your place.

That's what Christ did.

On the cross, the fullness of divine judgment falls upon him in your place.

So that if by repentance and faith you're united to him, just as he comes up from the grave in his resurrection, so you too, by your union with him, will pass through the judgment into deliverance in the resurrected world.

That's what David's reminding himself of in this text, and that's what he's training us to do when we experience enemies in the present, we look through the present to God and remind ourselves of the future, when God will punish evil and deliver us.

Finally, there's a third thing David teaches us in this text, and that is if we look through the present into the future, then we can trust God and hope in the future.

Look at verse 8 and 9.

David says, But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God.

I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.

I will thank you forever because you have done it.

I will wait for your name, for it is good in the presence of the godly.

That's where David has found himself, reoriented in light of his present circumstances.

Nothing's changed.

He's still looking in the face of evil, he's still looking at a fallen world.

But having reminded himself of what God is going to do, he now has a renewed strength to trust in God in the present and hope in him for the future.

You notice the refrain in verses eight and nine, it's the same throughout the Psalm.

Just read this text again with me.

I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.

I will thank you forever.

Four times in this passage, just in these few verses, the word forever is used.

That's the way we're supposed to approach our lives.

Whatever your problem is, it is not forever.

No matter your circumstances, they are not forever.

There is a forever.

In this text, there are two possibilities.

In verse one, there's the steadfast love of God that endures forever and ever.

That's one possibility.

If you trust in God forever, if you enjoy God, if your hope is in God, then the steadfast love of God will be your reward forever and ever.

And in verse four, there's the judgment of God uprooting you from the land of the living, breaking you down forever and ever.

Those are the two forevers.

Whatever your present is, it's not forever.

There's judgment and there's eternal joy.

Those are the forevers.

When you anchor your heart to those, it enables you to endure the winter.

Winter is a theme in our house.

When I look outside, I see.

Some of you crazy people think it's beautiful.

I just see nothing.

White wintry tundra.

I see death.

I feel like I will never be warm ever again.

All of nature has perished.

But I know that's not true.

I know that one day the earth will renew itself.

Spring will come, and the trees will clothe themselves with leaves again, and the birds will reappear and resume their joyous song.

I know that the earth will renew itself.

I know it will come.

Likewise, when you look at your life sometimes, it seems that it's an endless winter.

There are enemies around, there are circumstances that seem forever.

But this text is training you to remember that's not true.

There is a forever.

And if your trust is in the Messiah, the resurrected Jesus Christ, then your forever is guaranteed.

It is a new spring for your life, where you will be resurrected anew in the presence of God with all of his people, and you will, like David, be able to sing in the presence of God forever and ever.

Or like the Psalms, the whole Psalter ends.

It's all driving towards this as we learn to trust God in the present.

It's driving us towards the climax of our worship, which is summed up in Psalm 145.

I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever.

Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever.

Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.

That's my forever.

My mouth will speak of the praise of the Lord.

Let all flesh bless his holy name forever and ever.

Amen.

That's your forever.

Psalm 52 is training you to anchor your soul to that.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Father in heaven, we do pray that you would give us eyes of faith to look beyond our present into the future, to anchor ourselves to what is sure and to what is eternal, looking not to the things that are transient, but to the things that are unfading.

We ask that you would send us into the world, confident in you, able to be ambassadors for your glory and for your name.

We pray that you would give us increased affections and stronger trust, that you will bring us through into the resurrection.

Pray that you would give us clear eyes of faith to behold Christ and to hold fast to him.

I pray this in his name.

Amen.

Would you please stand for the benediction?

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

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.