Psalm 10

All right, Sultan, before I read our text, let me pray for us. Heavenly Father, thank You for Your Word. Would You open our ears and prepare our hearts for You to speak to us today? We ask that You had let Your Word fall on good soil and take root and produce good fruit. Rise, lift up your hand, and do not forget the humble and say, Jesus, name we pray. Amen. Before I read the text, the Psalms are repetitive, and as we move through them, we are through the book of Psalms, the books of Psalms. We are exposed to many of the same themes over and over. God is merciful to us, and He did not just give us one of each kind, one of each genre, and that would have been enough, but He didn't. He gave us the same things over and over and over throughout the books. They are full of theological gold that is meant not only to inform us, and to instruct us, and to correct us, but they are meant to penetrate to the very depths of our soul. The Psalms give knowledge and wisdom, which are the beginning of the fear of the Lord, but the fear of the Lord is also to hate evil. We are told in the Proverbs, if you are on the Bible reading plan, the same one as everybody else, you just read that. The fear of the Lord is to hate evil, and the Psalms masterfully teach us this as well. They train our hearts and our thoughts and our emotions. They supply us with the words to pray, to sing, to cry, to shout. God could have given us list after list of theological points to internalize. He could have done that, but that's not how He saw fit to communicate to mankind. Because He did not create us to just be thinking man. He created us to be worshipping man, to be whole-hearted worshippers. So He not only gives us ten words from Sinai, He gives us poetry and song. He flushes out, not just in the Psalms, but in lots of other places. He flushes out theology and doctrine with raw gut-wrenching emotion to inspire us, to love Him, to turn to Him the way He wants us to, to say the things He wants to hear us say to Him, to feel the way He wants us to feel. I am very grateful that in this congregation, men and women and even our children are learning to know that feelings make tyrannical cruel masters. I am grateful that so many of you are intentional and diligent to resist the temptations to let your emotions control you. You know that those kinds of emotions that do not flow from faith, you know the kinds of shipwreck they cause, those emotions that are untethered from truth and from reality. However, believing that we are handling emotions rightly, if we have adopted a kind of stoic posture, a kind of anti-emotion posture, that is also a real danger, that posture hinders us from approaching our Heavenly Father in a humble way, in an honest way. As we ought to. In other words, there is more than one way for us to let emotions master us. We can give in to the emotions and let them master us and we can go anti-emotion and let them control everything we do, just opposite, flip it. So we don't want to do that. Somebody once said that music is not the notes but the silence in between the notes, space in between the notes. That means that you can get the notes right but still miss the music. I think of that often when I read the songs. Because I think that there is like with Psalm 10, this is one by the way we chant every week, every month at Psalm 10. We are reading it in just a second. And I don't want us to hit the notes and miss the music to kind of see what it's saying, understand what it's saying, but then forget that we are supposed to feel what it's saying. So as we move through Psalm 10, I want us to see the deep longing and emotion of the Psalmist. And I hope that we are challenged as we read through it to not miss the music. So let's read it. Here are the words of the living God. Why do you stand afar off O Yahweh? Why do you hide in times of trouble? The wicked in his pride persecutes the poor. Let them be caught in the plots which they have devised. For the wicked boast of his heart's desire. He blesses the greedy and renounces the Lord. The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek God. God is in none of his thoughts. His ways are always prospering. Your judgments are far above out of his sight. As for all his enemies, he sneers at them. He has said in his heart, I shall not be moved. I shall never be in adversity. His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and oppression. Under his tongue is trouble and iniquity. He sits in the lurking places of the villages and the secret places he murders the innocent. His eyes are secretly fixed on the helpless. He lies and waits secretly as a lion in his den. He lies and waits to catch the poor. He catches the poor when he draws him into his net. So he crouches. He lies low that the helpless may fall by his strength. He has said in his heart, God has forgotten. He hides his face. He has never seen. Arise, O Yali. O God, lift up your hand. Do not forget the humble. Why do the wicked renounce God? He has said in his heart, you will not require an account. But you have seen, for you observe trouble and grief to repay it by your hand. The helpless commits himself to you. You are the helper of the fatherless. Break the arm of the wicked and the evil man. Seek out his wickedness until you find none. Yali is king forever and ever. The nations have perished out of his land. Yali, you have heard the desire of the humble. You will prepare their heart. You will cause your ear to hear, to do justice, to the fatherless and the oppressed. That the man of the earth may oppress no more. This is the word of the Lord. Verse 1, David cries out to Yali boldly asking why he stands afar off and hides in times of trouble. It is an audacious interrogation. And this should be read in light of verse 14, which is enough to make it clear to us that this is no haughty accusation. It is audacious. It is bold. But it is not an accusation made from pride. You have seen, he says, you observe trouble and grief to repay it by your hand. Verse 1 is no expression of doubt or despair. And yet there is real wrestling. The Psalms do not ever minimize theology. The Psalms do not minimize doctrinal truth or the vital necessity of unshakable faith. And at the same time, what the Psalms do is show us how it is to properly wrestle with God from the standpoint of our human experience. It shows us how to wrestle with God from the standpoint of our human earthly time constrained experiences, our observances in real time. And this is not incompatible with biblical faith. This is biblical faith. This is what faith is. We trust God who is who is to come while we are walking a linear time constrained dusty that is earthly path. A path that is filled with times of trouble and real wickedness. Remember Jesus promises in this life you will have tribulation. The trouble is a part of it. And so here the Psalmist feels the desperate longing for divine judgment for the wicked to be accountable. You ever wanted the wicked to be accountable so bad. And you just know that there is nothing you can do to make them accountable. Whether it's like personal in your life or you look at it at a huge scale, the injustice, and you want accountability for the wicked. This is where the Psalmist is at. He wants desperately divine judgment for the wicked to be accountable. And so what does he do? He goes to God. He goes to God honestly. It is completely outside of our ability to require the wicked to always give an account. It is certainly outside of our ability for the wicked to give an account when we want it. We cannot make that happen as much as we want to. And Psalm 10 we are reminded yet again who to cry to and how to cry. Shocking audacious interrogating questions we see in the verse one directed at the most high God. Belong in our mouths. They belong in our mouths as humble provoking. Provoking to God and provoking to ourselves. Humble, provoking, expressions of longing and desire here and now it should not be good enough for you to desire justice one day. That is not good enough for us. In fact we can think of all kinds of scenarios where that would be wicked. It is not good enough to desire justice one day. We want justice now. David is no stoic. I think David wrote this song but even if he did not, the Psalmist is no stoic. David is no stoic. Son of David is no stoic. And neither are we if the Psalms are in our mouths and in our souls the way they ought to be. We will not be able to avoid those emotions that the Psalms evoke and plant in us. Verse two the Psalmist spends multiple lines now vividly describing the wicked and their evil ways starting in verse two breathlessly moving through verse 11. Yahweh is king forever. He is the king who needs only to arise and lift up his hand for all things to be set right. We are his people, we are his children and we should long for this. We should strongly desire this when we see the wicked in his pride persecuting the poor. Psalmist is teaching us what to desire in those moments. What to desire in those moments. And here it is for wickedness to implode. That is what we should desire. We should desire wickedness to implode. That is we should desire the wicked to be caught in their own snares. In the plots that they devise, we want them to fall in them. In other words, you reap what you sow. We want wickedness to implode in on itself. Our response, our reaction, our reaction to injustice, then should be in the first place that we turn to God. And we turn to God and we tell him what we think and what we want him to do humbly and unambiguously. That is a part of the humility. Part of the humility is being unambiguous. When we confess sin, the humility is when we are not ambiguous. God, I know I was pretty sinful this week. So please forgive me of all those sins that you know and I'm not going to talk about them right now. The humility comes when we actually say the same thing God says. He's like, no, you know and I know, say it. Say it out loud. The humility is a part of being unambiguous with God. It's a part of the humility. It's important. The other thing is that we turn to God in our reaction. Our reaction is to turn to Him. Our response is to turn to Him. How many times have you caught yourself saying, well, I guess all we can do now is pray? What? That's the first thing we do. That's right. That's number one. We pray. And then we figure out if there's something else that we should do. We pray. But yet very, very often, for some reason, we flip that and we say, well, I guess all we could do now is pray. The wicked, verse three, the wicked, boast of his heart's desire. This is the polar opposite of the Christian. The wicked, boast of his heart's desire. We do not boast of our heart's desire. We bow and with fear and trembling, we lift up our hearts. What do we do at the beginning of the service? We lift up our hearts. We do not boast of our hearts desire. We boast where? We boast in the cross. And it is on the cross that we lift up our hearts to Yahweh. We lift up our hearts to God. We don't boast in our hearts. Instead of looking, verse four, instead of looking to the one true and living God where there is everlasting life and fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore, the wicked man turns his proud face from seeing God. He turns his face from seeing God. And then it says he banishes him from all of his thoughts. God is in none of his thoughts. They become futile in their thoughts as they struggle and vain to hide themselves from Christ, their king. They turn their face from God. They banish him from their thoughts. And they become futile. It is a futile effort. It's like the kid. You can't see me. Their hearts are darkened as they turn their face away from the light. Their eyes are darkened as they turn their face away from the light. Verse five, part of the darkened state of the wicked, part of the darkened state is that all their ways seem to be prospering. It seems to be working in his favor. He's getting what he believes he wants. As far as the wicked is concerned, he prospers even to us, even to us, for at a certain point, from a certain vantage point, it looks like the wicked win for a time. It looks like they get away with it for a time. Maybe sometimes for a long time. Maybe even it looks like they got away with it all the way to the end. And they sneer at their enemies. But there is no lasting victory for the wicked. His is a fatal miscalculation that fails to account for judgment that is far above his head. Judgment is far above the wicked's head. And they do not take that into account. The wicked who turn their face against God, sneer at their enemies as they get what they want. But in the end, that thing that they get will only destroy them utterly. Verse 6, he has said in his heart, I shall not be moved. I shall never be an adversity. Everyone who has read the right kind of stories knows what comes after somebody says that. I will never have a problem. I will never be an adversity. I shall not be moved. Everybody knows what comes next. And it is the epic fall. That kind of pride and that kind of arrogance can only lead one place. And it is to the epic destruction and fall of the wicked. We call that a reckoning or we call that poetic justice very often. You can think of lots of examples, golem, finally getting the ring at the end, finally getting that thing that he had wanted all this time. And it being the very thing that destroys him. J.D.S. finally getting the traitor, finally getting the key to kill Aslan. And it being the exact thing that is her destruction. That breaks the curse. It has satan crucifying the Son of God. And so we must not for one moment give into the bitter temptation and agree with the wicked delusions. And we will as crazy as it sounds, we will be tempted to. Verse 7, Paul cites this verse in Romans 3, 14, just before the very often memorized verse. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That is Romans 3, 23. Just a few verses before that is Paul is talking about laying out total depravity. He cites Psalm 10, 7. But I want us to be careful to understand that Paul is not cherry picking this verse from its context in the Psalm to blur the line between the wicked man that the psalmist is complaining about and the psalmist. Under our tongue is trouble and iniquity true. This is true of the wicked in Psalm 10. And it would be true. It's true of all of us. It would be true of the psalmist if God had not put his spirit, breathed his life, filled his heart and his mouth with truth. What truth? Even the truth of the very words of the psalm. That Paul quotes. In Psalm 10, if we look at the very end of the psalm, we see that it is the man of the earth that will bear vengeance from the king. From God, who does not forget the humble. Paul is jumping up and down on this reality in Psalm 3, he's quoting psalms and the prophets. He's jumping up on this as he sat the verse after verse, demonstrating that all men of the earth, all men of the earth, all sons of Adam fall short of God's glory. And the point in Romans, Paul is making is that apart from the heavenly man come down apart from the life giving last Adam, Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15, all men oppressors and oppressed alike are under the curse. Paul is all short of God's glory. That is true. The scriptures are clear that mankind is totally depraved. There is no goodness in us. And so salvation must come from the Lord, or we are hopelessly condemned and praise be to God that righteousness and salvation have come in Jesus. Verses 8 through 10, the wicked work in the shadows, they work in darkness, they ambush, they hide in the secret places to murder the innocent, they have turned their faces from seeking God verse 4. And now where do they look? Where do they look toward? They fix their eyes on the helpless to catch and devour them like a roaring lion. Truly they are of their father, the devil who roars around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. These wicked ones notice are inside the walls. They are inside the walls. They are inside the villages. Their ambushes are set up inside the villages. That means that in the light they may not look dangerous. In some ways that we can see them in the villages and they may not always look dangerous. But in the dark and the secret places, eventually their true nature, their true allegiance, their loyalty to Satan is manifest. Pay attention how the way of the wicked is to the way of the Christian, the way of Christ. Their way is dark, covert, out of sight, they crouch, they lie low to devour, contrast with the way of Christ. We live in the light, we live knowing that everything we think and say and do is before a witness. There is no hiding it. We live Choram Dayo, we live before the face of God in his sight. He sees it. We stand upright. We love our neighbor, we don't devour. Verse 11, the wicked says in his heart, God has forgotten. He hides his face. He will never see. Remember it is the wicked who have turned their face away from God. They turn their face away from God and now here in verse 11, they say, God has forgotten. He hides his face. He will never see. It is the wicked who turn away from God. It is the wicked who banish God from all of their thoughts and then say, God forgot. God will never see. They are the fools who say that it is God who cannot see them. The wicked ones will often project their own sin onto others. Have you ever noticed that? This is what the wicked do here. God has turned his face away. God has forgotten. No. Verses 12 and 13. For the first time now in the Psalm, the Psalmist directly and zealously petitions Yahweh for action. Arise, oh Yahweh. Arise Yahweh. Oh God, lift up your hand. Do not forget the humble, unlike the proud who hides themselves, who cling to sin, hoping and vain that God forgets. What is our cry? What is the cry of the humble? The humble say, God, don't forget. God, remember. Remember what? I think there is a lot we could say to that. A lot of answers to that. But one of the things that I don't want us to forget in this context is remember that we want sin to be dealt with. We want sin to be dealt with where? Wherever it is found. That is the cry of the humble. We say, God, do not forget about the humble. Yes, we want deliverance from outside. We want deliverance from the evil, the wicked ones who assail. But do not forget the humble. We want deliverance from our own sin too. We reject the proud hypocrisy that justifies and tolerates sin anywhere. Anywhere. Remember it is the Pharisee who says, at least I am not as bad as that guy. The problem with that prayer is it fails to start with the speck in his own eye. The humble do not tolerate sin anywhere. So we cry to God, don't forget the humble. Don't forget our cry. We want deliverance from the wicked. Yes, but we want deliverance from sin everywhere. Everywhere it is found. So from here the psalmist then moves the focus to the actions of Yahweh, verse 13, notably accepted, which I think is somehow connected. It is related to the first lines where the psalm says why this verse 13 is another echo of why. And maybe it is the team our perspective, again, the team our perspective to remember that an account is coming. In our posture should always be one of waiting patiently on the Lord. Waiting patiently on the Lord does not exclude the question that says how long? That is a part of our patient waiting, used to say how long? We may strongly desire that which is not yet come. We should strongly desire that which is not yet come. But we must not join with the wicked to say in our heart God will never require an account that he will not act. We want to keep our hearts, not just our mouths, we want to keep our hearts from entertaining, from tolerating doubt. And in times of trouble one way we must do this, one way we should do this is by taking refuge in the psalms, taking refuge in the psalms and letting the spirits words fill our mouth and our mind and our soul. Verse 14, God sees he will repay. The psalmist began with the question why it is good and right it is necessary to bear your soul to your heavenly father. It is right it is necessary to bear your fears and your feelings to him to constantly to openly commit your ways and yourself to him. And one of the reasons that's important is because God sees. He knows and when we are sailed by sin and wickedness we can take great comfort in the fact that God sees and he will repay. The hopeless commits himself to God. His picture is one of leaving behind or setting free. It's not a picture of stopping off or a charge up, fill up and then getting back out there to get it done. It is a picture of continuous total abandonment, abandonment of self, abandonment of your own strength, of self will, will to power to the will of God. God is the power of the helper of the fatherless. He is the one with the power to help the fatherless. Verse 15, break the arm of the wicked and evil man. If you give that two thoughts you realize how graphic of a prayer that is. Break their arm. God, break the arm of the wicked and evil man so they can no longer do wickedness. However much they may want to continue to do wickedness make it painfully impossible for them to do so. That should be one of our prayers. Break their teeth, break their arm. But remember that grudging compliance is not the end goal. It's not God's end goal. When we get grudging compliance when the guys are rested and still spewing the vitriol that's not the end goal. The end goal is the end of wickedness. The end goal is that God will seek out the wickedness of the wicked until there is no more. And so we don't stop crying out. Not just until there is compliance. We don't stop crying out until there is no more wickedness in the earth. Sometimes that can feel to us like in gratitude but do not buy that lie. Hasn't God given you enough? Stop going to hand. Stop asking for more. I mean he's giving you daily bread for how many days in a row now? You probably have asked enough times. No. Don't believe that lie. We do not stop crying out. We do not stop going to our heavenly father until wickedness is no more. Verse 16. Yahweh is king forever and ever for all time and ever. One may be able by an act of sheer will and strength. We've seen this all throughout human history. By an act of sheer will and strength we can at times achieve a kind of peace or a kind of calm. We can achieve what looks like a victory but in the end it is either Christ or it is death. It is either Christ or chaos. Doug Wilson says, we will not grow complacent. We must not settle for a Christ less anything. Yahweh is king forever. Christ is the king and the nations have perished out of His land. Christ divine kingship is not a disembodied, nostic idea. It involves real land. So remember Psalm 2, Psalm 2 sets up the book of the Psalms that sets up the entire. All of the rest of the Psalm, Psalm 1 and 2 are kind of the beginning of the foundation for the books of Psalms that we have. And remember what it tells us that Yahweh is king and the nations are His inheritance and the ends of the earth are His possession. Are the nations God's inheritance or do they perish from His land, Psalm 10? The answer is that God is creating in Christ one new man from the two Ephesians 2, 15. In Christ we are a chosen generation. This is Peter. We are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. His own special people that you may proclaim, the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Paul later joins this nationalistic refrain when he declares in Philippians 3,20. For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Yahweh is king, this is His land, this is His earth. Nations here in Psalm 2 and in Psalm 10 is gory and as unfortunate as it is that folks lately, lots of folks lately, discussions about nations and Christianity, lots of folks lately have sought to regressively complicate the way that Christians understand nations. To regressively complicate the understanding here in a situation that kind of fractures this verse, helpfully in Psalm 2, helpfully and simply divides believer from unbeliever. Worshiper of Jesus the King, worshipper of the Creator, worshipper of the Most High God on the one hand and everyone else who perishes from the earth on the other. There is an easy place to start and when it starts to get way too complicated, let's hide in the Bible right there. Yahweh is king forever and ever, the nations have perished out of His land and then immediately following this declaration of victory comes verse 17. Yahweh hears the desire of the humble, he hears the desire of the humble, he does not hear the desire of the perfect, he does not hear the desire of the powerful, he hears the desire of the humble and he does what? He prepares their heart, prepares their heart for what? He prepares their heart for Him to hear their cries and to answer them. He hears the cry of the humble and he prepares their heart. He prepares our hearts because he will answer us and his answers, I don't know if you've experienced this, as much as others or as much as we see throughout the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation, but God's answers very often come in unexpected ways, don't they? We have a Messiah, promised Messiah and the Jews have it in their head exactly what it's going to look like and God comes just like he promised and he hears the cries and he answers them. God hears the cry of the children of Israel in Egypt, cry for deliverance and what does He do? He sends them a stuttering Moses and in order to make bricks without straw. Sorry, did you hear us, God? We wanted deliverance. Who made you judge over us, Moses? We want deliverance, God, bricks without straw. Evil oppression is beaten back and overcome, not through human strength or cunning. It is not through the will to power. It is through hearts full of faith and love. That can, I understand, that can sound like a cop out to a certain kind of Christian. The kind of Christian that rejected Jesus because He wasn't zealous like they were. The kind of Christian that said, I've got to kill the followers of this guy for the Lord. Evil oppression is beaten back and overcome, not through human strength and cunning. It will never come from human strength and cunning. It will never come through our will to power. No, as much as the fools online tell you that we can just do things. We can just will it. No, you can't. You cannot. Unless the Lord builds the house, your willing is vanity and it is hubris and it is pride and it will get your teeth and your arms broken. No, we can't just do things. Our job is to turn to the one who can and humbly wait for him to act. That is not a cop out. That is no more of a cop out than the Son of God going humbly, silently to the cross where He would in the most epic show of divine power die. Be pierced. Be hung up. Be taken down. Be wrapped up by two men and placed inside of a rock. And then wake up. Defeat death. Unless you think you are greater than your master, your victory will come through sacrifice. And if you think you are greater than your master, you don't serve Jesus. Danger before deliverance, suffering before salvation, trial before triumph. That is how God usually works. The greatest must be slave of all. That was a liberal I think who said that right. That was a pacifist who said that right. A weakling who said that right. No. That was Jesus as he is undressing himself to bow before his traitors, his fickle friends to wash their feet. Kings are first in last out. We are taught by C.S. Lewis and the rest of the Bible. They are the ones who laugh the loudest in the darkest times. Seeds go to the ground to produce fruit. Life can only be found by those who lose it. This is God's way. This is how we win. This is not a gospel of suffering. This is not a gospel of losing. This is victory. This is where the true strength is. This is how we win. Verse 18, God does justice. He defends. He vindicates the fatherless and the oppressed. Because fundamentally it's not only that he is just. It's that he is a merciful father. Adam. The man of the earth failed. His image and his likeness is bent and broken. It is destructively contorted and turned into itself. A life less shell of destruction. Our first father, Adam, sold himself along with his progeny to another father to be slave sons for a morsel. From that moment of oppression, the man of the earth has been plunged into the vicious cycle of oppression. Oppression gets oppression. Death gets death. Slavery gets slavery. That is the human story. This is our story. Oppressed oppressors. Rebel slaves. But Christ came to set us free, to reconcile us to the heavenly father who disarms rebels at the cross. And he adopts slaves as sons and co-airs with Christ the King whose victory is advancing here in this land, even through the warring worship and humble prayers and cries of citizens of his kingdom today. Right here. Praise be to God. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.