Psalm 81 – Psalms In The Summer

Sing aloud to God our strength, shout for joy to the God of Jacob, raise a song, sound the tambourine, the sweet lar with the harp, blow the trumpet at the new moon, at the full moon on our feast day.

For it is a statute for Israel, a rule of the God of Jacob.

He made it a decree in Joseph when he went out over the land of Egypt.

I hear a language I had not known.

I relieved your shoulder of the burden, your hands were freed from the bask.

In distress you called, and I delivered you.

I answered you in the secret place of thunder.

I tested you with the waters of Meribah.

Hear, O my people, while I admonish you.

O Israel, if you would but listen to me, there shall be no strange god among you.

You shall not bow down to a foreign god.

I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.

Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.

But my people did not listen to my voice.

Israel would not submit to me.

So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own counsels.

Oh that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways, I would soon subdue their enemies and turn my hand against their foes.

Those who hate the Lord would cr would cringe toward him, and their fate would last forever.

But he would feed you with the finest of the wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.

And so reads God's word.

Nobody wants that.

I was a kid once, if you can believe that.

And uh when I was a kid, I can remember my mother, my mom, she was always big on when it's dinner time, you eat what's on your plate, right?

Whether that's, you know, meat, potatoes, vegetables.

I was good with the meat, happy enough with the potatoes.

The veg, I was a little dodgy, a little sketchy on there.

But she'd always say, eat your vegetables, they're good for you.

And I I didn't really uh buy into that necessarily as a small child.

In fact, I can remember the first time that I ever remember getting an actual green salad on my plate as a child.

I was probably four or five years old, and I was looking at this going, this is grown-up food.

This is not like, you know, five-year-old food.

And I literally remember sitting there at the table, and I looked out at the reflection of myself in the window, as if I was a character on a sitcom, breaking the fourth wall, looking for some support.

It didn't help.

I still had to eat my salad.

But mom, mom was very, very unrelenting on this.

Eat your vegetables, they're good for you.

Not just that they're good for you, you know, today and here and now, but also that they help to build habits that are good, right?

Balanced meals and healthy nutrition, healthy habits, all of those things.

Even the idea, you know, Mark, Mark talks about, you know, not liking the the raw tomatoes.

I I'm all over that.

All over that.

But because I was the oldest of three, it was always well, you need to eat that so that you're a good example to your brothers.

But I learned, you know, if there's something as toxic as a tomato on my plate, it was not going to kill me if I had to choke a few of them down.

Then there was my dad.

My dad, very different uh set of set of values than my mom in this regard, because he didn't really push the vegetables on me, but he pushed the chores.

Dad was all about the chores.

So whether it was, you know, stacking firewood, whether it was cutting the grass, washing the dishes, all of these things, he'd say, you know, do your chores.

It builds character.

It's good for you.

And again, I don't think he was just looking at that particular moment in time, but how, you know, as you do these things, it builds, you know, good habits in your life, good disciplines, work ethic, valuing a job well done, all of this good stuff.

All of these things have filtered down through the decades of my life and made me who I am today.

And I can tell you, you know, whether it was, you know, eating my greens, doing my homework, stopping, you know, annoying my siblings, those kind of things, I learned a great deal.

And I can tell you one thing, as I stand before you here today on this beautiful day, I still don't like doing those things.

But I can see that there's value in them.

I can see that all of those lessons that my mom and my dad were instilling in me growing up have filtered down and made me who I am today.

And so I think that this this passage that we have before us today, the Psalm 81, you know, it's it's a lot of this same idea.

You can see if you've got the ESV Bible, you can see that the translator's title for this is, you know, Oh That My People Would Listen to Me.

Now, I don't think this is an exasperated God just completely angry and like, ugh, why will my children not listen to me?

I think it's more fatherly.

I think it's more compassionate and gentle.

And I think it's like when a parent sees a child doing something that's gonna bring harm.

You just want to get them out of that.

You want them to do things that will be good for them in the long run.

So God wants our obedience.

Yes, he does.

Because that's right and because that's good, but also because that obedience is what's best for us.

Of course, I don't mean this in some kind of a prosperity gospel kind of thing.

We obey God so that He'll He'll bless us.

When I was when I was washing those dishes night after night after night.

It's not like, you know, dad was there with a with a treat for me at the end of it.

Far from it.

But this is not shallow obedience to reap a selfish reward.

This is heart-level obedience that God uses to transform us over time, to make us more and more who He's actually made us to be.

So let's dig into this here.

But before we look at the text as a whole here, I just want us to take a moment to appreciate it.

There's a lot of layers here.

It's a reflection on God's work in the world and in history.

It's not just speaking about God, but it's God speaking through it, and God speaking directly through the psalmist here.

We can see that.

It's closely associated with Old Testament festivals, and like every psalm, it points us to Jesus.

So there's a lot going on here.

We're gonna see ideas that are echoed and escalated and fulfilled in Christ.

So let's dig into it.

Our first point, first thing that we're gonna see here is because God is faithful, we praise him.

That's our right response.

So if you take a look at the passage with me here, and mine's awkwardly on two different pages, so you'll have to bear with me as I do that.

But we can see a lot of things that point us specifically to music, music unto the Lord.

Verse one talks about, you know, sing and shout.

Verse two, raise a song.

And this points us to a lot of other references with instruments.

We've got a tambourine, we've got a lyre, we've got a harp, we've got a trumpet.

I suggested all of those instruments for Peter this morning.

He didn't go for it.

But all of this praise is aimed towards God, our strength, the God of Jacob.

We see all of this just right in verse one.

Verse three, flipping over here, calls us to uh to raise this song at the new moon, at the full moon, and on our feast day.

Now, we look at that and that just what is what is that all about?

New moon, full moon, feast day.

But to the first readers, the first hearers of this psalm, that would have had a very specific thing in mind.

Probably would have brought to mind the seventh month of the old Hebrew calendar.

That would have been around September, October.

And this would have been kind of their festival season.

I don't mean like electric picnic, don't mean like longitude here.

We're not uh calling people to face point face paint, we're not calling people to glow sticks.

But the first day of the month of this seventh month, the new moon.

This is the lunar calendar, so the first day was the new moon.

This is the feast of trumpets.

Okay?

This is a day of rest that's punctuated by loud blasts on the trumpet.

This was a day that was for remembering God's work and for coming together in worship.

In the middle of that month, you get down to the full moon, so that's half a month later.

You've got the beginning of the festival of tabernacles or the feast of booths.

And this is a weeklong remembrance.

This is kind of like, you know, Israelite glamping, because they all built tents and they all lived in them for a week.

But this is a remembrance of God delivering them from slavery in Egypt.

If you saw the chosen, you probably saw this.

I think it was in the second season.

They observed this and they talked about it.

They said everyone spends a week in a tent to remind them of God's help while they were escaping the Egyptians, as well as their constant dependence upon him.

So, yeah, we have a call to praise God, but it's in light of his work.

We see that as we trace through the next few verses, you look at verse five, that talks about God going over or against Egypt.

We see references to burden and distress.

This is in verse six.

And verse seven.

God's response in the situation is very active.

He says in verse six, I relieved your shoulder of the burden, and your hands were freed from the basket.

Verse 7 says, In distress you called and I delivered you, and I answered you in the secret place of thunder.

So God himself relieved, freed, and delivered.

He answered in ways that only he would be able to accomplish.

The Psalm starts off telling the listener what to do, praise God, and why they should do it.

So the idea of remembering the Lord's good work toward us, it's a common theme in the Psalms.

You see it all throughout the Psalms, you see it all over scripture, really.

But the idea there is that those who remember the Lord's good work, well, they're the most able to praise him.

Those who don't remember the Lord's work are, as our song just talked about there, are prone to wander.

And I think that really matches our own experience.

I don't know about you, but I know I can get bogged down in my day, I can get stuck in my work, my own experience, in my in my just routines there.

And I can fail to remember God's work in my life.

And when when I find myself in that spot, it's where I'm least likely to offer thanks, least likely to offer praise.

But when I do sit down and remember him, that's where, you know, the thoughts and the actions of my life more closely reflect who he's made me.

So we can always look back and see things that Jesus and the Lord has done in our lives.

I can think back to low points in my own life where God showed me more of him, times where I knew from experience, like it says in Psalm 34, that the Lord is near the brokenhearted and he saves the crushed in spirit.

I think we can all remember back to 2020, right?

That was a that was a rough time for a lot of us.

But I remember in my family it was it was particularly challenging.

We had some particularly difficult days and nights going on with some of us there.

But I can remember in that time, God was very near.

Just really experienced his presence through his people, through his word, through times in prayer.

Was really aware of him being there.

He was conspicuously present with us.

And so when I think back on that, that is a time for me to remember and say, yeah, I remember that.

I remember that time when God was with me there.

And so I can praise him, I can thank him, I can I can come before him and be thankful.

And is that something that we can all do?

I mean, I'm sure we can all take time to review God's faithfulness in our own lives.

I mean, just in general, as followers of Jesus, we all have something to be to be thankful for.

We have something in common that we celebrate as a community that God, by his great love, reached out to broken and sinful people, people who had nothing to offer him and saved us anyway.

It's really good to be able to celebrate that together, and I love doing that on a Sunday morning.

But are there also other times perhaps specific to your own life, your own experience?

Something that God particularly brought you through.

Let's not leave those memories in the recesses of our soul, but let's bring those back up.

Not to relive them and not to go back to them, but to remember and look back and see what God's done.

Bring them back before Him.

Let them reinforce what we already know to be true.

That He's worthy of praise because He's faithful.

And that's our first point.

Because God is faithful, we praise Him.

Second thing that we see in here, skipping right along, just like Mark made us do here.

Um God is faithful, but we are often faithless.

Alright, we see this in here.

Another way to look at this is maybe that our faithlessness is made all the more evident when we consider God's faithfulness.

God doesn't change.

He doesn't turn away even when we're disobedient.

And according to these verses, we are disobedient quite a lot.

If we take a look here from verse 8 forward, we can see this is where God is speaking directly through the psalmist here.

God is speaking for himself.

He's admonishing the people here.

This comes on the heels of a reference in verse 7 about the people having been tested at the waters of Meribah.

Now, just to give you a bit of background on that, this is again looking back to the Exodus when the people of Israel were escaping from slavery in Egypt, and they're wandering through the wilderness.

You can read about this in the book of Numbers, just so you know I'm not making it up.

But the basics of the story are this.

They're going through this desert.

There's no water.

Now, these people, the same people who saw the Red Sea part and they got to walk through on dry land, they got to escape Pharaoh's army that way, the same people who experienced God's presence, leading them as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, the same people who experienced God's provision in the form of manna that fed them every day in the middle of the wilderness.

These same people began to grumble that they would have been better off staying in Egypt than dying out here of thirst in the desert.

Really seems they needed to remember God's faithfulness.

Of course, God didn't just bring them out into the wilderness that they would all die of thirst.

Of course, he had a means and a plan to keep them all hydrated.

But it seems this was a test, and the people failed it.

Even Moses.

Moses, this very faithful man of God who spoke to God face to face like no one ever since, he failed the test too.

And you know what?

If if if Moses can fail the test, I think you and I can fail the test too.

If he needed to be admonished, so do we.

Verse 8 it says, if you would but listen to me.

And this idea is repeated again in verse 9, uh 11, sorry.

Verse 9 talks about strange gods, foreign gods.

So there's a sense of idolatry.

This is this is not remembering God's faithfulness to such a degree that the one who saved you, the one who has rescued you and done all for you, is being replaced by lifeless, powerless idols, those with no power to save or to heal.

We even see God reminding them in verse 10 it says, I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.

It's like he's saying, You have these idols that do nothing for you.

You've put them in the place of the God who did everything for you.

It makes no sense.

It does no good.

At the end of verse 10, it says, you know, open your mouth wide, and I'll fill it.

Remember, in the wilderness, in the Exodus, God fed them every day, made provision for them.

Every person had enough to eat in the middle of the wilderness.

But the picture that we get here is this idea of a person being offered a wealth of food and refusing to open their mouth.

The verse that's very telling in my mind is verse 12, where it says, You know, I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own counsels.

Now, if you're new to the God of the Bible, maybe a little bit uh different than you'd expect.

You might expect, you know, they're disobeying God, so he sent some plague or some pestilence or, you know, struck them down.

But God's solution to their disobedience is to say, if that's what you think you want, go for it.

Give the people over to what they want in the hopes that they'll recognize that too much of life apart from God is no life at all.

You can think of the legend of King Midas, right?

King Midas wanted everything he touched to turn to gold, which seemed like such a great idea until he had to eat dinner that night.

You know, there's Oscar Wilde said in this world there's only two tragedies.

One is getting what one wants and the other is getting it.

But I think my favorite one is the old parenting trick.

Now, if you don't have kids, you won't know this is gonna sound mean, but it's it's it's a very effective one.

If you've got small children, I'll I'll wait for your amen on this one.

But um, you know, imagine that you're out with your kids, you're at a play place, or you're out doing something fun, and you say, well, it's time to go, and they're like, No, I don't want to go.

So you say, All right, I'm out, I'll see you later.

And then you start to pack up your stuff and go.

Well, how quickly those kids will be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'll go with you.

And you have to think this is the same idea here with God.

God is saying, hey, you know what?

You think this is this disobedience, this rebellion, this idolatry, this is all gonna make you happy?

Let me show you.

It's not.

So, what can we take on board for ourselves in this section?

Well, we may not be the Israelites, a millennium before the time of Jesus, but I'm sure we can see something of ourselves in this section.

Do we fail to listen to the Lord sometimes?

Of course.

Do we substitute worship of Him for worship of idols of our own hearts?

Yeah.

Do we always submit, heart, mind, and body, to God's direction?

I don't listen and submit.

It sounds like the old song, Trust and Obey.

Old, old uh Baptist hymn we used to sing when I was a kid.

Trust and obey, for there's no other way.

It's so simple and yet so challenging.

Our affections are broken.

Our worship is misdirected.

It was true of the Israelites in the Exodus, and they had visible, tangible reminders of God's presence.

It was true centuries later when this psalm was written, and it's true of us today.

Even if we've trusted Jesus with our lives, if we've obeyed and followed him in faith, we still wander from him.

How foolish can we be?

Yet we see in the text here this is not a tone that is meant to be shameful, that's meant to bring shame upon us.

We see the patience of God.

He says, Hear, O my people, if you would but listen to me.

There's a fatherly care here, there's a compassion.

I remember our kitchen growing up had an electric hob.

And I knew that when when someone was cooking on that, that uh hob would glow red.

And I remember my mom told me, it sometimes is still hot, even if it's not red.

I had to find out for myself.

I didn't trust, I didn't obey, and I waited until that hob wasn't red anymore, and I touched it.

Guess what?

It was still hot.

But when I was left with a little burn on my finger, my mom didn't condemn me for it.

She didn't bring me to shame.

She responded with compassion, bound up my wounds, and encouraged me to learn from that mistake.

Which for the most part in my life I've not done.

So no, I have done.

Um, so what does God want us to do when we when we've burned our hands, spiritually speaking?

Does he want us to sit in our shame?

Does he want us to, you know, sackcloth and ashes, mourning?

No.

He wants our repentance, and that's the truth.

But let's not get hung up on how the world sees that word.

Repentance is not some big act of penance to make up for the sin.

You know, repentance just means we confess, we agree.

What I just did there, what I just said there, what I was dwelling on in my heart and in my mind there was not of you, it was not right.

I'm agreeing with you, Lord, and I'm going to repent, which means to turn away from that.

Gonna change direction.

And not just any direction.

I'm gonna go God's direction.

Trust and obey.

There's no other way.

And that brings us to our third and final point for the psalm.

And that brings us back to what I was talking about at the beginning.

That we trust and obey because it's good for us.

Follow me through the last few verses of the text here.

Verse 13 says, Oh, that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways.

Listen and walk, trust and obey.

God longs to see his people doing this, and then he elaborates on how he'll respond.

Look at verse 14.

It says, I would soon subdue their enemies.

I would turn my hand against their foes.

Verse 16, but he would feed you with the finest of the wheat and with honey from the rock, I would satisfy you.

This last verse kind of reflects or echoes verse 10 where it talks about, you know, open your mouth wide and I'll fill it.

Just put yourself in a position to let the Lord care for you.

Listen and submit.

Walk in his ways.

There is blessing in trusting and obeying.

Now I think there's there's kind of two ditches we could fall off on this particular point here.

So let me just call them out here.

First thing you could do is you could you could see God as this kind of cruel taskmaster who's just, he's got all these blessings, but he's gonna hold them back and he's gonna withhold them from his children until they till they get in line.

And I don't think that's really what this is what this is pointing to.

On the other hand, you might see God like in a in a in a video game, right?

He's got all of these little side quests for you to go do so that you can get, what do you get in video games?

You get like armor or coins.

I played wards with friends, so um, that's all I know.

But you know, that you see God is this, you know, we're gonna we're gonna send you off on this obedience journey, and then and then you're gonna get all these blessings.

Both of those extremes there, they're focused so much on the blessing, and they're not focused on who God is.

You know, they put all that blessing, all that, all that focus on the gifts.

When really our call to trust and obey should bring us to the goodness and sufficiency of God Himself.

Another way we could fall off on this one is what I might call the postmodern view.

Right?

I used to have a friend years ago who said something like, Yeah, I know the Bible says that what I'm thinking about doing here is wrong.

But God would want me to be happy.

So, I mean, that brings us to the question: does God want us to be happy?

And I think the answer there is definitely, yes, God does want us to be happy, but not in the way that my friend meant it.

Not in the sense of, you know, I want this fleeting momentary good in my life at the expense of everything that God has for me as I obey.

Not these empty and lifeless idols that promise big and deliver little, but to come to the Lord as the source and the sustainer of life.

And as we trust and obey, we start to see more and more in practice, in experience, and in our own lives that his way is best.

Moment by moment, day by day, we see things start to change in the way that we look at life.

We see our affections change.

What perhaps used to bring us joy gives way, is replaced by true and lasting joy.

Now, I'm not saying this happens all at once, of course.

I don't think it's any accident that verse 13 talks about, you know, oh, that Israel would walk in my ways.

Walking is a slow way to get around.

Especially in our day and age with planes and trains and buses and trams and automobiles.

But that slow progress over time, step by step, day by day, God uses that to make real change in us.

Yeah, we're gonna stumble.

We're gonna sometimes go down wrong roads.

But we walk with him over the course of a lifetime.

We find his way is the better way.

His way is the right way.

Obedience is the training ground for our sanctification.

Sanctification is just a big Jesus word there that means we're growing in our faith, in our heart, and in our mind and in our body.

We're all we're coming to that point of being more and more like Jesus.

Trust and obey, for there's no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.

So let's trust the process as we trust the one behind it.

So, how does this psalm point us to Jesus?

Because all psalms point us to Jesus one way or another.

There's ideas here that are echoed or escalated or fulfilled in Jesus, his person and his work.

There's a lot of stuff here we could look at.

The theme kind of matches up with Jesus' lament over Jerusalem, where he says, you know, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones, those who were sent to it.

How often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.

There's also these ideas of rescue and blessing and deliverance that we see from the Exodus.

Obviously, those are made so much fuller and so much bigger in Christ.

Jesus didn't just come to bring about mere political deliverance, mere physical deliverance, but to bring us to true and eternal rest in Him.

The enemies that He came to subdue, like we see in verse 14, they're not foreign powers with armies, but sin and death themselves.

Whatever incentive the original hearers of this psalm had to trust and obey, we have so much more on this side of the cross.

We can look back on the person and work of Jesus.

We can look back on the cross, and we can see how he fulfills and completes these ideas.

We have assurance that just as he was raised to new life, we will also be raised to new life.

We have the promise of the Holy Spirit who not only guides and helps, but empowers us to obey God heart, mind, and body.

Just like our song.

I'll do the motions later if you want.

We have so many blessings in Christ.

Let's open ourselves wide and be filled with the bread of life.

So, like I was saying at the beginning, this psalm points us to the idea that trusting and obeying God is something that we as Christians do that is good for us.

So, how can we encourage each other in this?

How can we as a church, as a family under the gospel, encourage each other in this?

Well, I think we can model obedience in community.

When we come together, we point each other towards obeying God even when it's hard.

But we can also model repentance.

I think if we only model our obedience, if I only tell you about where I'm succeeding, where I'm being a good follower of Jesus, well, that can make us feel like I don't really want to share about my struggles.

I don't really want to share about my failings.

Could drive all of that underground.

At the same time, if I only tell you about where I'm struggling and where I'm messing up and letting everybody down, well, we can fail to see what God is doing to grow us together.

So let's be real on both fronts.

Let's be open with that.

I don't mean we need to be telling every person, every detail of our lives.

Boundaries are a very good thing, ladies and gentlemen.

But to find that community, find those people that you can journey together with, that you can walk with, you know, step by step, day by day, like we were talking about there.

People who will point us to Jesus, people that we can do life together with.

We can have that patience with each other as we take that long view on walking.

And we keep moving forward, strengthened by the Holy Spirit, letting the word of Christ dwell richly in us, and entrusting ourselves to the Father for the long road ahead.

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