Psalm 84 – Psalms In The Summer

Psalm eighty-four to the choir master, according to the gilet, a psalm of the songs of Torah.

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts.

My soul longs, yes, pains for the cord to the Lord.

My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.

Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

As they go through the valley of Bacchar, they make it a place of strength.

The early rain also covers it with pools.

They go from strength to strength.

Each one appears before God in Zion.

O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer, keep here, O God of Jacob.

Behold our shield, O God.

Look on the face of your anointed.

For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of weakness.

For the Lord God is a son and shield.

The Lord bestows favor and honor.

No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.

O Lord of host, blessed is the one who trusts in you.

And so reads God's word.

Well, good morning.

Go ahead and have a seat there.

My name is Ben.

I'm the executive pastor here at City Church.

We can keep Psalm 84 open in front of you, which precious just read for us a few minutes ago.

We're going to be referring back to that as we go.

We are into our summer psalm series.

This is the second summer psalm series sermon.

I hope there's a layer symbols for the morning.

But um I gotta say, I have been preaching psalms at City Church in the summertime for a number of years now.

I did Psalm 39, Psalm 44, Psalm 49, Psalm 57, Psalm 69, Psalm 81, and Psalm 82.

I also did Psalm 2 and Psalm 9, but that was in Redeemer.

Um, lots of songs, and this one right here, this might just well be my first happy psalm.

Okay.

Remember, the psalms are the song book of the people of God, and so they look at all the various experiences of life, right?

And so this one is like this one is an upbeat, it's a banger, it's a summer jam.

We might be standing up here singing.

Yeah, it's a party in Jerusalem.

Don't do that.

Um, but the idea of the Psalms that we have here is that all of these different experiences they're being brought into the context of who God is and who he's made us to be.

Right?

So if if the psalm is a really happy and energetic psalm, like we seem to have this morning, well, then my response to that is to praise God.

My response to that is to rejoice that he has allowed this to be.

If it's a sad, lamenting psalm, then my response is to go to God and seek his uh reconciliation, his resolution, I should say, uh, in the situation of whatever it might be.

Right?

In any of these things, it's all to bring us back to the Lord.

Now, today's psalm is is upbeat on its surface there, and uh it is a pilgrimage psalm.

So it's a psalm that uh tries to contextualize this idea of going places, right?

And so the first thing that came to mind as I was as I was putting this together was do we have any road trip aficionados out there?

Any people who love the open road, the call of the highway, the allure of the open road there, anybody out there?

It's okay, it's okay.

I won't work back.

I love the open road.

You could ask Doreen about it, um, maybe to her annoyance at some times.

I love a good road trip.

I can remember being being a small child and you know riding around in the backseat of cars.

And I remember going, I get my driver's license.

I want to see that road.

When I when I when I get my driver's license, I'm gonna go to this place.

I'm gonna go and it was just so exciting to me.

And I made good on it as a young man.

Uh, we went all kinds of places together.

The first year or two of our marriage, I think we spent most of it in the car.

It was great.

You know, day trips, long weekends, holidays, going to visit family, whatever.

I would pour over maps, right?

Paper maps, you remember?

Pour over these maps and just look, you know, we're going here, so if we go this way on the way down and this way on the way back, we'll get to see this, we'll get to go on this road that we've never been on.

So exciting, right?

We had this, we had this big regional map that was up on our wall.

And every time we went on a road that we hadn't been on before, highlighter came out.

There was a lot of highlighter on that map by the time we moved away, right?

But the truth of the matter is, no matter how much you love the road, no matter how much you're you're down for the journey and you enjoy going places, there comes a point where the road just gets long.

You know, especially as as we got older and we started to have children, our kids were great passengers.

So I don't want to give you the wrong idea, they weren't whiny, they were they were great in the car.

But even at that, they get to a point in the day where they start to squirm in the sea, get that, you know, that voice goes up, maybe an octave or something.

How much longer?

Almost there.

We're getting close, kind of thing.

And as parents, we have we have great tools in our toolbox that allow us to keep the road trip going and keep kids from getting too cranky.

One of them, of course, is you know, car games, right?

I spy with my little eye.

What do I see?

Something green, something blue.

Who can spot a yellow car?

Who can spot a car with an out-of-state license plate registration, right?

We can sing repetitive and slightly annoying songs.

How many times in a row can you sing the wheels on the bus?

Ask me later, because I know.

Okay.

But I think probably uh one of one of the more as the kids got older, we were able to help them on the long and weary journey was to help them start to think through, not just I'm annoyed being in the car and I'm starting to get tired of being in here, but to turn their eyes on the destination, right?

One of the things, one of the places we love to go was to visit my aunt, my Aunt Mary.

We would go and see her, and so you know, we start to get that that point in the journey where where the kids are just like, are we almost there?

Okay, guys, where are we going?

Where are we going?

We're going to At Mary's house.

Isn't that so exciting?

Do you remember the last time we were at Mary's house?

Do you remember what we did?

What was your favorite thing there?

What are you looking forward to when we go this time?

What are you gonna do?

Who are you gonna see?

Who are you gonna spend time with?

What do you what do you think might happen?

Quite often involved uh baby goats, but that's all right.

But I think Psalm 84 at some level is is kind of in this same boat here, right?

We're encouraging weary travelers.

It's not like the Psalms of Ascent, you know, you get Psalm 120 to I think 134, these are psalms that would have been sung on the road up to Jerusalem.

But there's there's there's a sense in which it's it's a similar theme.

Psalm 84 has some has some different layers in it, but whether it's written with pilgrims, you know, on the road up to Jerusalem for religious festival, or maybe to exiles longing to make the journey, or even to people like you and me just going through life, I think the message is the same.

All right, shift your gaze, lift your eyes.

The journey is only temporary, so let's just keep going towards our destination.

We'll start with the idea of making a pilgrimage, right?

What do I mean by this?

Well, we're in the Old Testament, the old system here.

There were certain festivals, certain holy days that the people of God were expected to make a journey up to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem sits on a on a plateau, it's it's it's uh it's a climb to get there.

They would journey up to Jerusalem, to the to the holy city, to the temple, right?

The the very presence of God in the world.

And you can you can imagine pilgrims making this journey, you know, who needed this reminder going forward of why they're on this journey in the first place.

And as we read it through together, we'll see three things that the psalmist is pointing us towards in terms of the destination, right?

First, God's place, second, God's protection, and third, God's presence.

All right, we'll take a look.

So the first thing we see here is God's place.

God's house seems a little bit too common to say God's gath, but if you like that, that's helpful.

But we're talking about the temple here, we're talking about where people will go to worship God, right?

Verse one starts off very, very obvious here.

How lovely is your dwelling place, the Lord of hosts.

Verse 2, my my soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord.

Verse 4, blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise.

The house, the courts, the dwelling place of the Lord, these all point to God's place.

And you look at how the psalmist describes them, how he talks about them.

He says, My soul longs, faints, right?

My heart and my flesh sing for joy.

So the soul, heart, the flesh, this is like saying, every bit of me.

This is like a threefold indicator of the self here.

Every bit of me is just taken with the idea of going there.

He just he just longs to be there, longs to arrive.

Now, to help ourselves get into this headspace, can you think of a place in the world that maybe you just would love to be?

A place that you would long to go to.

I I thought about it, and uh, probably the best that I can come up with here is when I was 12, maybe.

12-year-old Ben would have just loved to make a pilgrimage to Dodger Stadium.

Would have loved to go visit the home of my favorite baseball team.

Now, it wouldn't have mattered to me if we were going to see, you know, an important championship game or just some you know run-of-the-mill match midweek against a mediocre team.

Wouldn't have even mattered if we were going for a for a game at all, right?

Just to be there, just to smell the grass and to see everything and to have that that connection to the team and the players and the history would have been so thrilling.

Even if you'd said, we've got this this event and we need you to help serve drinks at it or something like that.

I would have that's that's so exciting.

I had a I had a good friend uh in our 20s, he got to work security at that baseball game.

That's the coolest thing ever.

But what's that place for you?

What's that place for you?

Would it be maybe like a palace or a presidential residence, maybe a celebrity's house, maybe some landmark, maybe a particular city, maybe a historical site.

Use that idea to help you get into what the psalmist is communicating here about being in God's place.

He has so much joy at just the thought of being there, so much anticipation.

Take a look at verse 3.

It says, even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow and nests for herself, where she may lay her young at your altars, oh Lord of hosts.

My king and my God.

This image brings to mind like a bird, right?

Who builds a nest in the eaves of a house.

You've seen this before, probably.

You can imagine that this bird isn't even really inside the house, it's just underneath the roof.

Psalmist is saying, even that is better than to be out and away.

He's identifying with this bird.

He feels like you know, he's floating around out in the world, but he's just longing for that sense of being under God's roof.

Now, a couple of things I'll point out in this section because we'll see them again as we go through.

The first one is this name of God, this this idea of the Lord of hosts.

We see this a lot in the psalm.

It's in verse 1, verse 3, verse 8, and verse 12.

And this is a military term.

Okay, this is like God, the commander of the host of heaven, right?

All the angels in heaven.

This is like, so when we're thinking about God's place, the Lord of hosts, right?

This is like the command post, right?

It's a very safe place.

The other thing we see is a is a statement of blessing.

We can call this like a beatitude, right?

In the midst of all of these ideas of God, there's also this sense of blessing.

God is a God of blessing.

Blessing, blessed are those who dwell in your house, verse 4.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, verse 6.

Blessed is the one who trusts in you, verse 12.

If we want to live that hashtag blessed life, gotta be going God's way.

So in verse 4, the psalmist seems to have had in mind people who would have served in the temple, right?

Performing acts of worship and leading the people in that way.

And I just want to point out that we don't have this same system today.

We're in the new covenant here.

But in the New Testament, we see that in Christ and because of Jesus, every Christian is part of that royal priesthood.

Every Christian is part of the household and family of God.

So if you're a follower of Christ, if you're walking with Him as as Lord and Savior, then you yourself are blessed.

So, do you get this sense that he just has this longing to be there?

It's so badly that even the miles aren't even a thing.

There's no reference at all to the road being long or the journey being hard.

He's just so excited where he's headed.

And we, us here in the 21st century, might not be making a literal pilgrimage today, but the term that's so often used in scripture to describe the Christian life is that of a walk.

Right?

We're called to walk in love, we're called to walk by the Spirit, we're called to walk in the light.

Literally, dozens of references like this in scripture.

And this kind of walk, just like a literal walk, it makes us tired, wears us out, wearies us.

So if we are to apply this first section to our own lives, I think the best way we can put it is to cast our gaze not at the road, but at the destination.

In Christ, we have a glorious hope, a secure and eternal future, the ultimate fulfillment of God's place.

We look ahead to the destination.

So on those days when the Christian walk is wearing us out, we shift our gaze.

Those times when we maybe feel left out, we lift our eyes.

When friends or family just don't understand why we're that weird Christian in their lives.

When we're disheartened, wondering if it's all worth it, or frustrated with each other, struggling to get along.

When we're 48 years old and the old body just doesn't work like it used to, I may be just referring to myself there.

We shift our gaze, lift our eyes.

Not because the road isn't hard, not because we want to pretend that everything is cheery and happy clappy.

No, it's because the destination is so much better.

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul writes, the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us.

Now, if you know anything about the Apostle Paul, he knew a little bit about suffering for the gospel.

He knew a little bit about the road being long and weary and difficult.

So he understood this idea of shifting his gaze and keeping the destination in mind.

Friends, lift your eyes.

We're on the way to God's place.

Second point in the second section here, we are going in God's protection.

Okay?

Here we're seeing a bit of an escalation of these ideas from the first section.

We're not just birds making a nest under the eaves of the Lord's house.

We're now inside, under the protection of our Lord.

Take a look at some of these images that point to God, the great protector.

Right?

Verse 5, and this is this is our second beatitude here.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you.

Verse 7, they go from strength to strength.

Verse 8 again talks of the Lord God of hosts.

So we have all of these images here.

God's protection isn't wishy-washy, God's protection isn't without teeth.

It's a real deal.

To be under God's protection is to be guarded by God's mighty power.

And the idea of God of Jacob, we see that in in verse 8.

The idea of the God of Jacob anchors this psalm to the God who, centuries before this, would have made promises.

Promises to Jacob.

Jacob was also known as Israel, right?

He made promises to Jacob and his offspring, the God who delivered the people out of slavery in Egypt, the God who brought the people into a land that he promised them, the God who made his dwelling among them, the God who even sent Jesus so that outsiders, like you and me, could be brought inside.

So whether it's pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem or 21st century Christians on God's journey through the world, the point is his protection.

The Apostle Peter in his New Testament treatise on suffering talks about Christians being guarded by God's power through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

So this is a hope that looks ahead, but it's also a hope that's in the here and now.

Now I know we've been talking a lot about the idea of destination, of when we get there, but it's clear the psalmist doesn't see God's protection as something that's waiting at the end of the journey.

Take a look at verse 6.

Might have clocked this one when uh when Precious was reading it, right?

As they go through the valley of Bacar, they make it a place of springs, the early rain also covers it with pools.

This is looking at a place along the journey, right?

We're not to Jerusalem yet, guys.

But it's a it might be a literal place, it might just be a difficult part of the pilgrimage.

The translation there, if you if you were to translate that, it means the valley of weeping.

And yet, in the middle of this desert valley, this dry and parched place, this valley of tears, we see that God's people are so protected that it becomes a place of springs, right?

Water rising out of the ground.

So as we go, we're trusting in the strength of the Lord to be our protection.

And this should really be nothing new to us 21st century types, right?

I hop on Dublin bus all the time.

Never worry about whether we're gonna get to where we're going or not.

Fly on Ryanair, never worry about the plane gonna be fumbling out of the sky.

I'm happy to put my trust in the strength of another.

I'm happy to put my headphones on and close my eyes and open.

And if I'm willing to do that when, to be honest, I know Dublin Bus doesn't always get there.

I know Ryanair could divert or get lost or fall out of the sky, heaven forbid.

If I'm willing to trust in strength that's imperfect, how much more should I be willing to trust the protection of the eternal and almighty Lord of hosts?

Am I willing to trust his path, his course, his way?

Have another look at that second Beatitude in verse 5.

It says, Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

Now, if you're reading the ESD like I am, you might see the footnote there.

It says that the words to Zion are actually in the original text.

So if the psalmist isn't necessarily talking about a literal road to Jerusalem, what can you mean?

And I think the answer has to be that we are blessed when our hearts are set on God's ways.

Where he leads us.

So again, shift your gaze.

Lift your eyes, we're going in God's protection.

Third point we have God's presence.

Verse 9 talks about God, our shield, and we see this again in verse 11.

Now, yes, a shield points us to protection, but it's it's very personal protection.

It's not just a general sense of God Himself as our shield, close and personal, right?

City walls or fortress.

Walls would be general and personal protection.

But a shield that's different.

Imagine I'm up here, maybe I'm talking too long.

Somebody up there starts shooting arrows, right?

And I had a shield, and I'm just stuck in behind that shield.

I have to be close to that shield.

I have to be tight in with it there to realize that protection.

God, our shield, this necessarily brings us into his presence.

Going on in verse 9, it says, look on the face of your anointed.

That's quite personal as well.

You might get a tour of the Aris, you know, the presidential residence here in Dublin, but you might not get to look at Michael D.

in the face.

Verse 10, a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.

I'd rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.

The psalmist is saying, I don't want to be in wickedness.

I don't want to be separated from God.

I want to live where he is.

Verse 11, no good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.

What does it mean to walk uprightly?

Is this a statement of being perfect and never doing anything wrong?

No, definitely not, because otherwise no one will qualify.

I think this idea is amplified and reflected in verse 12, where it says, Oh Lord of hosts, blessed is the one who trusts in me.

Same idea we've been seeing throughout.

Are we placing our hope in the Lord?

Are we delighting in his path, in his way?

Are we on a journey with him wherever and however he leads?

If this is what it is to walk uprightly, then we have this great principle that the Lord withholds no good thing from his people.

Now, this doesn't mean we won't have hard times.

This doesn't mean we'll all be millionaires, doesn't mean we won't face suffering, difficulty, sickness, strife.

That's just all kind of the terms and conditions of living in this fallen world.

But what it does mean is that even in the midst of all the ugliness that we see, we have God's promise that he won't let any of it go to waste.

He'll make good of even the bad stuff.

We may not see how, we may not understand it now, we may not understand it ever, but we can trust that God is for us.

We can trust that he's not withholding good from us even as we go through trials and tribulations.

Shift your gaze, lift your eyes.

We're in the Lord's presence.

Now, if you think back to when I started here, I said this was a happy psalm.

And I'm gonna have to shift that just a little bit here, give us a bit of a blue lens to see this through my apologies.

The way we've just discussed this psalm is the way it would have been understood during the age of the temple and the kings and the kingdom of Israel.

But scholars believe this psalm may have been written during the age of the exile.

Now, not to dig too deeply into the history of the Israelites, but there was a time when they were defeated, they were conquered, and they were imprisoned and carried out of their lands and deported to Babylon, modern-day Iraq.

Right?

And if you read it with that in mind, the psalm takes on a very different vibe, a very different feeling.

Right?

God's place, yeah.

We can't get there.

We're barred.

So that idea of the soul and heart and flesh crying out feels different.

It's like a longing that can't be satisfied.

The image of the bird with her nest hits more like I don't even have what a bird has.

No place I can fly home to.

Verse 10 a day in your place is better than a thousand elsewhere.

Yeah, I know this because I've had thousands of days.

That's right.

So this is a psalm that rejoices looking back to what was, making what is into something of a space for mourning.

Kind of a downer for a summer bot.

But hold up because the story doesn't end there.

If the people in the exile were denied access to God's place, they were able to replace that with another key.

God's promise.

You see, God didn't just let them go into exile and leave it at that.

He promised this exile would be temporary, that the people would be returned to their homeland after an appointed time.

We can read about this in Isaiah, which was written a century or two before the exile.

And a repeated image in Isaiah's book talks about highways in the wilderness.

So many people returning from exile, there would be highways in the desert.

What does verse 5 of our Psalm talk about, right?

We saw this already.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you and whose heart are highways, says I have.

To the day when this exile will end, to the day when the people will once again make their pilgrimage to the holy city.

Now, how does this idea of exile help us?

I think there's a pretty clear connection to Jesus.

Again, looking at the Apostle Peter in the New Testament, he calls Christians, he calls people who are trusting Jesus as Lord and Savior of their lives.

He calls them exiled.

And he doesn't mean this in a political sense, doesn't mean this in a geographic sense.

He means it in the sense that to be a follower of Jesus in a world that opposes him, it's always going to make us outsiders, always gonna make us foreigners, exiles.

God has promised that we'll be with him bodily and physically one day, but we're not now.

So this goes along with what the apostle Paul wrote to the Philippian church.

He says, uh, you know, our citizenship is in heaven and we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

We as Christians, we look ahead to the new world, to the new place that God has promised.

A place that is free of the sin and death that's around us here.

And just like those exiles read this psalm all those centuries ago, we can look forward to being in God's place.

But remember, we still live in God's protection.

And because of the Holy Spirit, we live in God's presence even now.

The encouragement from this psalm is the same today as it was the day it was written.

Shift your gaze, lift your eyes.

Yeah, the road is hard, the journey is long, but we'll go into God's place.

We have His promise.

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