"Twas Grace That Brought Me Safe Thus Far" Psalm 124 Sunday Morning Worship Service

This morning though, Psalm 124.

Next Lord's Day will be Psalm 125, so we'll look at these in tandem.

They go so well together.

Let me read it for us as we begin, Psalm 124.

It's a song of ascent, the song of David.

If it had not been Yahweh who was on our side, let Israel now say, if it had not been Yahweh who was on our side when people rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us up alive when their anger was kindled against us, and the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us, and over us would have gone the raging waters.

Blessed be Yahweh, who has not given us as prey to their teeth.

We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers.

The snare is broken, and we have escaped.

Our help is in the name of Yahweh, who made heaven and earth.

This is a psalm that will turn a pessimist into an optimist.

This is a psalm that will make you understand how the Lord has been at work in your life.

If you are here this morning and your glass and your mind is half empty, I want to convince you that it's actually half full this morning.

This is a psalm that compels you to look over the last year of your life and to see how the Lord has been at work.

And it does so in this way.

I want you to right now look over the past year of your life, and I want you to imagine how things could have gone worse.

You pessimists in the congregation this morning are saying amen.

I want you to not just imagine how things could have gone worse, but I want you to actually think about how they should have gone worse.

How you deserved for them to go worse.

The Lord spared you from them.

This is a psalm that is about those things.

It's about compelling you to look back over your life and see how the Lord has been at work.

Let me give you an outline this morning.

Two certainties from 2019.

Two certainties as you look back at 2019.

One of those certainties is I will forget my remote.

Two certainties as you look back at 2019 to see how the Lord has been at work in your life.

Spurgeon calls this psalm a canticle of certainty, which just has a rhythm to it, a canticle of certainty.

This is a song that is about singing about the Lord's goodness in your life.

This is a very singing kind of song.

And in Hebrew, it even has more of a rhythmic fashion to it than it comes across in English.

And in Hebrew, the rhythm of this is evident.

It's designed to be sung, it's designed to be repeated.

And you catch that even at the beginning in verse 1.

If it had not been Yahweh who was on our side, and then that just trails off there.

If it hadn't been Yahweh who was on our side, and then it's as if the song leader can't even finish the sentence.

He just trails off thinking about what would have happened.

And then he turns his attention to the congregation and says, Let Israel now say.

And he repeats the same words again.

If it hadn't been Yahweh that was on our side.

Picture a DC up here leading you in singing, and this is not hard to imagine.

He's leading you in singing, then he just stops the song and says, No, you actually have to actually sing.

That's what this psalm begins with.

If it had not been Yahweh who was on our side, then just, no, come on, you all have to sing this.

If it hadn't been Yahweh on our side.

This is a Psalm of Ascent, by the way.

It's Psalms of Ascent or 15 Psalms, Psalm 130, I mean sorry, 120 to 134.

Those 15 songs are put together.

They're put together to be sung on your journey to the temple in Jerusalem.

They're written throughout all different ages, all different centuries, but Ezra, the scribe Ezra, put these 15 together so that people would sing them when they journeyed to Jerusalem.

Ezra, after the Babylonian exile, took over leading the corporate worship at the temple in Jerusalem, and he soon discovered that many of the people who were there for worship were not residents of Jerusalem.

They were journeying there from far-off lands.

Remember when the Babylonians took the Israelites into captivity?

They scattered them all over the place.

Many of them went to Babylon, but some went up into up into modern day Europe and the Baltic states.

Some went through Turkey, down to Persia, some went into Africa, all the way out to Sudan and modern-day Somalia and Eritrea in those areas.

There were exiles spread everywhere.

And they would journey back.

Some of them would journey back up to three times a year if they lived close enough for the different feasts.

Some of them would try to journey back once a year, particularly for Passover.

Some of them would try to journey back once in a lifetime if they were really far away and they could afford it.

And so Ezra takes these psalms, they're supposed to memorize them and sing them on their road trips.

They didn't have serious XM, and so this is what they had to do to get by.

They would sing these songs from the back of the camel on the way to Jerusalem.

The songs are about cover a range of issues that you would sing on your pilgrimage.

It describes going over the mountains, it describes the crest and seeing Jerusalem below you.

But this particular one is a song of remembrance.

Looking back at the year behind, looking back at your life since the last time you went to Jerusalem, looking back at all that's taken place in your life since the last time you gathered with God's people, and just marveling, marveling, I tell you, at how kind it was for the Lord, how he cared for you in so many ways.

Well, the first certainty they sing about is that you would be lost apart from Christ.

The first certainty that is songworthy is that you would be lost apart from Christ.

If it had not been, it's one word in the Hebrew that begins verse 1.

It's you know five words in English if it had not been, but it's one word in Hebrew.

If it hadn't been, is how it's stranded, Yahweh, oh it's God, always God.

He's the one who cared for us.

I look back at my life.

I came to faith at the end of my senior year in high school, right before I graduated high school, and I think of just how my life would have been different if God didn't save me then.

If my friend that shared the gospel with me, if he didn't invite me to church and introduce me to Jesus Christ, what what would have happened to me?

I was going off to college where I didn't really know what I was going to do in life.

I loved soccer, I was worshiping the god of Baal or Baal is how some people pronounce it.

I think back to my friends.

I had many friends I I played soccer with in college, I had played with growing up.

I stay in touch with many of them today.

You know, I don't know of any of them that are married.

I don't know of any of them that are in what I would consider a stable place in life.

And that was the path that was set out for me.

It was charted out for me.

And I think even of what I was dreaming of my life becoming, like my goal.

Now I look at people that are living that out, and it makes me feel sorry for them.

I feel sad for them.

That you know, their best case scenario, I look at and just say, it's lost.

That's the way the Bible describes people apart from Christ is lost in darkness, lost in sins and trespasses, serving the prince of this world, the power of the heir of this world, wandering away.

You know what it means to be lost is to not know how to get where you're going.

For many people who are lost, they just don't know where they're going at all.

They don't know where they're going.

They don't know how to get there.

That's what it means to be lost.

If it hadn't been Yahweh's grace in your life, this would have been you.

You would be lost.

And that's why I said, imagine the last year of your life.

Imagine the Lord's kindness in your life.

We get so, we take for granted so much what it means to be a Christian because we're doing it.

We're going to church and we have Christian friends and raising Christian kids and all this, that we can so lose sight of just the blessing it is that God saved us.

What would your life have been like without that?

Where would you be?

Israel describes their miseries here in verse 2.

If it hadn't been Yahweh that was on our side when people rose up against us, they would have swallowed us up alive, David writes.

Just gulp.

The King James says they would have swallowed us up quick.

And when the King James uses quick, it doesn't mean speedily, it means alive.

It's a synonym for alive.

But it has to be sweetily.

If you're going to swallow somebody alive, you only get one gulp.

If they're chewing, no longer alive.

That's the image here.

If it hadn't been God that was with us, that would have been us.

We would have been swallowed up by the monster of death, swallowed up by the monster of opposition.

It's language in here that's used by the psalmist to describe Sheol, grave, the grave, the ground, oblivion.

It would have gulped us up.

How would we have been swallowed up by death and destruction?

Well, by the wrath of people, by our foes in verse 2.

Verse 3, their anger is kindled against us.

Now, this is a psalm of David.

He's the one who wrote this, and as I mentioned, Ezra compiled these psalms.

They're written throughout the centuries.

Ezra packaged them for the singing and the pilgrimage back to Jerusalem.

So it's interesting that he chose this psalm from David.

You know, almost a thousand years earlier.

Hundreds of years earlier, at least, 500 years.

David's writing about his own opposition, and David certainly had opposition.

This likely the occasion for this psalm from David's life could have been any number of occasions, but some commentators assume it's 2 Samuel 5, when David had just recently become king.

The Philistines laid a trap for David outside of the in the Jordan River Valley between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea.

This is a place that was David's stronghold before he became king.

The Philistines laid a trap for him there.

And David almost walked into their ambush.

It was like they laid a web for him to be stuck on.

David says he would have been swept away like a flood.

And perhaps he means even literally here.

That land is very hard.

There are sinkholes in it, but it's very hard, especially in the winter.

It's cracked because of how dry it is.

So much so that when it rains, flash flooding is the reality there.

People die all the time in the flash floods, the winter floods outside of that area.

Oftentimes tourists who rent Land Rovers and go out in the wilderness there.

I don't know why.

But when it rains, there's no escape from the floods.

They get swept away, even to this very day.

That's where the Philistines had laid an ambush for David.

And he looks back at it and says, if it wasn't for God, he would have fallen into it.

They would have swept him away in verse 4, like a torrent that's gone over us.

Verse 5, then over us would have gone the raging waters.

This is the language of drowning.

He would have drowned in opposition, David says.

This same verse is quoted by Jonah when Jonah was in the belly of the whale.

Remember, I said that Jonah, most of Jonah chapter 2 is quotations from Psalms, and this is one of them.

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

Jonah says, the seaweed is choking him out, and then he quotes this passage: the raging water is going over his head.

This is what life is apart from Christ.

David had so many examples to choose from.

2 Samuel 5 is one, but there were others, of course.

David began his ministry confronting Goliath.

The two armies were separated.

Each side was supposed to choose one to go forward.

It was supposed to spare everybody the bloodshed.

David, of course, did defeat Goliath, but then the Israelites found themselves outnumbered, outmatched anyway, because the Philistines came after them, even though Goliath was slain.

Later his enemies turned from being foreign to domestic.

Saul tried to put him to death.

Saul almost speared him to a wall.

One time Saul sent his police force to go arrest David.

David's wife, who happened to be Saul's daughter, put a mannequin in bed to disguise it.

As David snuck out the window, the police kick in the door, David escapes.

This is his normal life.

Another time, Saul's army almost captured David.

He was hiding on the top of a rocky crag there, and the soldiers surrounded him and started to ascend.

And it was just the last moment they heard a rumor that their own, the soldiers' own hometown, had fallen to enemy forces, and so they withdrew to go help their families.

It was time and time again.

David was exiled, do you remember?

He got thrown out of Jerusalem towards the end of his life after he'd been king for decades.

The Jews revolted and threw him out of the city.

When he came back, he almost had a military revolt on his hands.

His military turned against him.

David had constant opposition.

So this song could have been written in any of those points.

The thread through all of them is David looks back at it and says he can't figure out how he was spared all of those things.

It was just the Lord's kindness.

Without that, David says he would have been lost.

Now this is how it connects to us.

I want you to ask how you would have been this year without from Christ.

And it's always a danger to take something written to national Israel and to apply it to us.

So let me tell you some wrong ways to apply it to us.

These are national enemies to Israel.

That doesn't mean that the psalm applies to national enemies to the United States.

It's not a good way to study the Old Testament.

Don't do control F Israel replace US.

Doesn't work.

Don't view this politically.

It's so easy to do it politically and say, oh, you know, our enemies is that other political party.

They almost won that vote too.

Lord spared us from that at the last minute.

Praise God.

Yeehaw.

No.

But the right way to see this is that Israel had enemies because Israel had the promise of the Savior.

The world hates the promise of the Savior because of the exclusive nature of that.

So they turned their hatred towards Israel.

The world hates the church and hates believers because we are in the Savior.

They hate Christ, and so they hate those who are in Christ.

So that's the connection.

And with that in mind, it is worth looking at.

How did the world take out their hatred on God's people?

What were the tools of attack that David is describing here in this psalm?

Well, there's a couple.

This is the language of Proverbs chapter 1, verse 10.

Proverbs 1:10

My son, Solomon writes, if sinners entice you, don't consent.

If they say, come lie and wait with us for blood, let us ambush the innocent without reason.

Like Sheol, let Sheol swallow them up alive, which is another reference to the same language in Psalm 124.

Come, my friend, let's ambush people.

Let death swallow them up.

That's the way that sinners entice believers.

They attack believers by luring them into sin.

And Solomon says, don't fall for it.

And so look back at your year this year and think of temptations, temptations to sin that you didn't fall for.

Sin that you almost did, and the Lord closed the door.

And just give thanks to God because if it hadn't been for Christ, you would have fallen for it.

If it hadn't been for the kindness of God, you would have fallen into sin.

Well, the battle against temptation is just one weapon the enemy has against the church and against Old Testament Israel.

Another weapon is that they lie.

When people are lured, enticed to sin, the next step is lying about them.

And I think just real quickly of Balaam here.

Remember the Israelites crossing the wilderness and they were trying to get into Israel and they met their enemies and their enemies trying to figure out how to defeat Israel.

And so they paid Balaam for advice, and Balaam was the military consultant, and they asked Balaam, how do we defeat Israel in war?

And Balaam says, You can't defeat Israel in war.

They've got Yahweh on their side.

But I'll tell you what you can do: lure them to sin.

Introduce your concubines to them.

Introduce your gods to them, your women to them, and they'll fall right into that trap.

That's the normal way the world attacks believers is by enticing them.

And when that fails, the next step is lying about them, and that's certainly what the Israelites experienced.

When they didn't fall into sin, they were just simply lied about.

Slander is what took them down.

And that is the devil's oldest trick to lie, to give the opposite of the truth and let that do its work in the world.

That's what happened in the garden.

Lies about God were told, lies about God were believed.

That's alluded to back up in verse 2.

If it hadn't been Yahweh who was on our side when people rose up against us.

In Hebrew, it's if it had not been as the first word, Yahweh is the second word.

The last word of verse 2 is the word Adam.

It's translated as people here, but it's an intentional allusion to the fact that lies are an assault upon God's people.

Lies were spread in the garden, lies were believed in the garden, and if it had not been for Yahweh's grace, lies would have ruined the earth.

The devil's been a liar since the beginning, and he attacks God's people by lying about them.

When God's people resist sin, they're then simply slandered, lied about.

Lies create division in the world.

Lies are used to pit people against people, to cause conflicts and fights.

Lies are weaponized against God's people.

This is how David was exiled.

Remember, Absalom hung out at the city gates telling lies about David.

Enough people believed them.

They finally threw David out of Jerusalem.

Saul lied about David and his attack on David.

And today people lie about the church to harm the church because they want to harm Christ.

Lies are never on the side of truth, they're always on the side of unrighteousness, and lies spread so quickly and with such speed.

And you think, why do people believe lies?

Why are they gullible enough to believe a lie that in retrospect is pretty far-fetched?

But at the time they believe it.

Why are they naive enough to believe it?

Because they're naive.

People are sinful, they think wrong thoughts.

And when I say people, I'm talking about you.

That's why you believe lies.

Because you hear a lie and it feeds a narrative that you like.

It feeds something dark inside of you that you kind of secretly want to believe.

It makes you feel good about yourself to believe it.

And so you believe a lie that you should be able to see through.

There's no defense against lies like that because they just run, they pick up such speed around the world.

When a lie like that catches on, it just goes and goes and goes.

Lies like that destroy people's lives, destroys people's ministries.

And they're always on the side of unrighteousness, never on the side of truth.

And they're so difficult to deal with because you can't defend yourself against a lie.

You can't.

Because you don't know where it's coming from.

You don't know who shot the arrow.

There's no way to put the arrow back in the quiver.

You can't defend yourself against a lie.

So you just have to take it.

You have to be falsely accused.

That's how the Bible teaches believers respond to lies.

You lead a life of integrity, and then you let the Lord defend you.

You can't go after the person lying because it seems like you're punching down.

And so you just have to take it and you say, What am I just supposed to stand here and be falsely accused?

Yeah.

And let the Lord defend you.

That's what you're supposed to do.

That's what David did.

Remember, David was being exiled from Jerusalem.

He's being basically frog marched out of the city.

And his friends who believe him and trust him are saying, David, why don't you defend yourself?

Why don't you tell people these are all lies?

And David says, I can't defend myself.

They're throwing rocks at him, remember, they're spitting at him.

And David says, The Lord will defend me.

In fact, David even speaks of a deeper truth.

He says, even though what they're saying is lies, the Lord knows the truth.

The truth is probably worse than the lie is.

The Lord sees the heart.

Yeah, those people don't know what they're talking about, but the Lord knows that I'm worse than that.

The Lord wants to defend me, he can defend me.

That's David, who's writing the psalm that went through that.

All you can do is I lead a life of integrity.

I'm so thankful.

I think of men in the faith that I respect that have had a lifetime of fruitful ministry, and how the Lord has in kindness spared them of these kind of lies.

You think of somebody who's in heaven already, Billy Graham, you know, one father.

False accusation, one lie about him that would have caught speed and been believed could have just ruined his ministry.

And God spared him from that.

Why did God spare him from that?

Just because of God's love.

Just because of God's love.

But if it had not been for God's love, think of what could have happened.

And that's true with people who are alive in ministry to this day.

It's just easier to name someone who's whose book is closed, who's already in heaven.

You know what I mean?

If it hadn't been for the Lord, David says, we would have been swept away by lies, we would have been swept away by the enticement of our enemies.

But the second truth, in Christ, you have been found.

If it had not been for Yahweh, and then verse 6 picks up, but it was for Yahweh.

If it hadn't been for him, we would have been lost.

But verse 6, blessed be Yahweh, who has not given us as prey to their teeth.

He didn't feed us to the wild beasts.

We are prey, and God didn't feed us to the predators.

And that's the way the food chain works.

You know, predators do eat prey all the time.

That's the way the world works.

And so David here is saying, it's not that there's anything in us that kept us from being fed to the wolves.

It's just God's protection.

That's it.

There's no explanation.

We're the mice in this story.

There's no explanation for why the coyotes didn't eat us other than the fact that God spared us.

That's it.

It's not that we outwitted them.

It's not that we outmaneuvered them.

It's not that we were strong enough to fight against the devil and the opposition.

None of that is true, even.

It's only that God didn't hand us over to their teeth.

Instead, verse 7, we've escaped like a bird.

We've escaped like a bird.

And you can picture the joyfulness of people singing this song on their way to the temple.

We should have been delivered.

Remember, they're coming back from exile.

They're in a land surrounded by people who lied about them.

And remember the story of Ezra.

They started rebuilding the temple, and the nations there first tried to entice them to sin, saying, come worship our gods with us, and the Israelites said no.

Step two, the nations and the Samaritans lied about them building the temple and told the emperor of Persia, they're going to revolt against you.

He even issued an edict that the Jews be plundered and decimated because the emperor believed the lie.

But God unwound it all, remember?

Unwound it all.

Haman was hung, the lie was exposed.

Sixteen years went by, though.

Sixteen years went by with people believing the Jews were building the temple to revolt against Persia.

Sixteen years.

Some of us have a hard time biting our tongue for 16 seconds.

And the Jews rolled with it for 16 years.

But then, freedom.

The rope was cut.

They escaped like a bird.

Now the image of a bird here is an interesting one.

The fowler collects lots of birds.

Fowlers collect birds by laying a net on the ground.

The birds land on the net, they bring the net up with ropes, usually through trees or from some kind of leverage, it snaps all you can catch a flock of birds at once.

Sometimes you can drop the rope, I mean the net from above and it captures them.

They can't fly away.

Birds can't fly through it.

If a bird is caught in the net, there's no escape.

There's no escape.

The bird can't chew his way out of a net.

He can't beak or peck his way out of a net.

The only hope for freedom is if the fowler changes his mind and loosens the net.

That's the only hope for freedom.

And that's what happens.

The bird wakes up one day, verse 7, in the snare of the fowler, and instead the snare is broken.

And just notice the joy at the end of verse 7.

We have escaped.

We have escaped.

Imagine the bird surprise.

He's caught in the trap, he's caught in the net, the fowler picks him up, and the next thing he knows, he's flying through the air.

What happens?

The one who caught us freed us, it says.

And we have escaped.

I remember David, 2 Samuel 5.

The Philistines laid the trap for him.

David's walking into the trap.

His eyes are open to it.

He prays to the Lord and says, Lord, what should I do?

What should I do?

And God says, Go attack them, go against them, and I'll deliver them into your hands.

And so the Philistines were plotting to take David over like a flood, but 2 Samuel 5, like verse 20 or so, David says, I took them over like a flood.

I swept them away.

The tables were turned, so to speak.

And they were swept away like the bursting of a flood.

We know something of this as well.

Psalm 94, verse 17.

Psalms 94:17

If Yahweh had not been my help, my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence.

Do you picture it?

If it hadn't been for Yahweh, I would have been stuck in the land of silence.

God wouldn't have been speaking to me.

I would have been lost in the darkness.

But then I thought, I'm falling.

My foot slips.

I'm falling into hell.

I'm falling into she-hole.

It was at that moment that God's love held me up.

Yahweh's covenant love, it says, steadfast love.

That word for covenant love.

God grabbed hold of his children.

They were falling into the grave.

They were falling into judgment.

God grabs them because of his love and pulls them out of the pit and holds onto them.

Doesn't let them fall.

How does God save them?

Well, Psalm 119 describes how.

If your law had not been my delight, the same Hebrew word again, if it had not been, if it had not been, this time it's not Yahweh, it's your law.

If God's law hadn't been my delight, then I would have perished.

So notice the imagery here.

The bird is trapped, God frees the bird, and the God thinks, How did I get freed?

And the first way is because God loved you, he freed you.

And the second way is he freed you by giving you a love for his word.

God rescues his children by putting his love upon them, and then by loving his children, their hearts then fall in love with God's word.

God loves us, we love his word, we have freedom.

It's a remarkable turn of events because if you think about it, the very thing we were afraid of before was God's word.

God's word exposes our sin.

God's word is the mirror that judges us.

God's word is a schoolmaster that shows our inadequacy.

God's word is what is convicting us of our unrighteousness.

God's word convinces us that we deserve judgment.

We're afraid of God's holiness and afraid of his wrath is revealed through his word.

And what does God use to spare us?

His word.

By giving us a love for it.

There used to be a cat in our neighborhood named Lily Cat.

Lily Cat was a neighborhood cat, belonged communally to everybody, just roamed the cul-de-sac with impunity.

Until one of our other neighbors got a dog.

Is this dog's name?

Jag was specifically genetically bred to eat Lily Cat, I think.

And the only times I ever saw Lily Cat run was either for a bird or from Jag.

One day we come home and it's pouring rain outside, and we hear Jag yelping in our neighbor's front porch.

It's rain outside, and there's Jag on the front porch giving a little, you know, dog lassie style yelp.

And we go over there, and there is the cat, Lily Cat, stuck on a swing in the front porch, claw tangled up in this cloth swing, hanging down, no way to rescue herself.

And what did Jag do except prop himself underneath the cat to support the cat while giving yelps out for a human with opposable thumbs to come rescue the cat?

And you think, what is the emotional roller coaster that's going through the cat's minds?

The cat was probably stuck because the dog was chasing it.

And then the dog wants to help it.

This is our life.

We run from God's holiness.

We're convicted by the law, and then what does God use to save us?

He sends his law.

He sends his son who fulfills his law in our place and who rescues us from the trap.

And behold, the snare is broken.

The snare is broken, and we have escaped.

How did we escape?

By the kindness of Christ, who gives us his righteousness, who takes God's wrath in himself.

I mentioned it's so hard to connect Old Testament Israel to us in the church, but I want to give you one little piece of evidence here that will make this psalm become your psalm.

Every single illusion and illustration in this psalm from Israel's enemies is repeated, do you know where?

In the New Testament and described as the devil's attack against the church.

Every one of them.

Revelation 12, verse 5 describes the devil as a serpent up in the mountains who opens his mouth to attack believers to sweep them away like a flood, John writes.

Revelation 12:5

1 Peter 5, verse 8.

1 Peter 5:8

The devil roams about this earth like a lion looking for someone to devour.

1 Timothy 2, verse 25 says the servant of the Lord, the Lord's qualification for elders, must not be quarrelsome, so that he can correct his opponents with gentleness to help them escape the snare of the devil.

The same word from verse 7.

You're called to stand firm in the faith so that you can resist.

This is Ephesians 6.

Resist the schemes of the devil.

The New Testament takes this psalm and goes systematically through it and says, this is how the devil is attacking believers.

Laying snares for you to fall in.

The snare is the false doctrine, Paul says in 1 Timothy.

The snares of the love of money, he says in 2 Timothy.

False doctrine, the love of money, the opposition of the devil, falling victim to the lies of the devil, 1 John says.

The devil would sweep us away like a flood, Revelation says.

The devil brings his power to bear against the church, against believers.

And you think, but why would the devil attack me?

You know, the devil's not omnipresent.

He can only attack one person at a time.

So if he's attacking me, he's not attacking you.

So you think, why would he attack me?

Well, I'll tell you why.

Because if he can get, he's not after the strongest believer in the world, he's not after the most high-profile believer in the world, because he I think I think the devil is likely after the weakest believer in the world and the most immature believer in the world.

Because if the devil can get one immature weak believer to fall, if he can get one immature weak believer out of the clutches of the Lord, then he exposes the Lord as powerless against the devil.

If he can trap the weakest believer, he shows that the Lord cannot protect his own.

And so look back at your life.

Look back at this year and think it's just the goodness of God that kept me from the devil.

That's it.

It's the goodness of God.

It's Romans 8, verse 31.

Romans 8:31

If God is for us, who can be against us?

Can anyone bring a charge against God's elect?

The answer is no.

You can't bring a charge against God's elect.

You can lie about God's elect, but the court of appeals for God's elect is the throne room of heaven itself, and God dismisses all cases for lack of standing.

Can't bring a charge against God's elect to God Himself.

He is the one who loves, He's the one who chooses, He's the one who saves.

That's why this Psalm ends in verse 8 with a verse that seems almost out of place.

Our help is in the name of Yahweh who made heaven and earth.

That's a very generic declaration about God being the creator of the whole universe.

What's it doing at the end of a psalm of ascent?

Well, it's there because imagine the encouragement people would get from singing this.

They're walking through the land of their enemies.

They're walking through a land where people are actively at that present moment conspiring and lying about the Jews building the temple.

They're singing a song about how they're going to the temple to worship, and it's helpful for them to remember, you know what?

The God of the Persians is the God who made the universe.

They may not know it, they may not worship him, but it is.

Even our enemies, this becomes a statement about the umbrella sovereignty of God.

Even our enemies who conspire and lie and want to sweep us away like a flood, they are operating under the sovereign rule of God.

Anybody in heaven?

Any demon, any devil in the heavens is under the sovereignty of God.

Any liar and conspirator and enemy of the cross on earth is under the sovereignty of God.

If you're in heaven or if you're on earth, you're in a place that God made and God owns.

So that should be encouraging to you.

No one's going to attack you that's not doing so in a place that's God's home court.

And so we can declare our help is in the name of the Lord.

This is why Martin Luther ends the hymn, A Mighty Fortresses Our God.

He writes, Our helper, he amid the flood.

And that language from Psalm 124 again, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.

For still our ancient foe does seek to work us woe.

The devil is still after us, desiring to work us woe.

The body they may kill, but God's truth abideth still.

Now, even though this is a general declaration here at the end of this Psalm, even though it's a general declaration that God is going to care for his people, it's not a general declaration for everyone in the world.

If you are outside of Christ, you cannot claim the protections of Psalm 124 as yours.

This is only for those who are connected to Christ.

Because God doesn't defend his people because of anything good in us.

He defends his people because we are in Christ and He defends his son, he defends himself.

And so, Psalms 124, as you look back at this past year and you see God's provision and his protection of you, it's only because you're in Christ.

And if you're outside of Christ, this protection is not yours, but it could be by joining yourself to Christ.

It could be by confessing your sins and recognizing that you deserve the kind of judgment that this, you deserve the flood to take you away.

You deserve to go to Sheol and to the grave.

You deserve for it to open its mouth and to swallow you whole.

That's what you deserve because of your sin.

And yet God has poured out that wrath on his son instead.

And by believing in that message, by placing your faith in Jesus Christ, you can have your sins forgiven.

And you can have God's wrath taken away, and the very law that used to pursue you now props you up and holds you.

Because Christ will rescue you.

I love that we sang this morning.

This is my father's world.

And though the wrong, though the wrong off seems so strong, remember, God is the ruler still.

Lord, we're thankful that you do rule this world.

That you are the maker of heaven and earth, and you're the protector of those who are in Christ.

I pray for anyone here this morning who has never given you their life.

I pray this morning they would look to Christ and see their Savior.

That they would have their sins forgiven.

That they would believe the gospel message.

We're grateful for the love that you've shown us in Christ Jesus, for the protection you've given us this past year.

And we look forward to seeing it again in the year to come.

We give you thanks for this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.