Psalm 79:1-13 – Psalms In The Summer

It's written in Psalm seventy-nine.

It's a Psalm of Asaph.

O God, the nations have come to your inheritance.

They have defiled your holy temple.

They have laid Jerusalem in ruins.

They have given the bodies of your servants to the birds of the heavens for food.

The flesh are your faithful to the beasts of the earth.

They have poured out their blood like water all around Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them.

We have become a taunt to our neighbors, mocked and derided by those around us.

How long, O Lord, will you be angry forever?

Will your jealousy burn like fire?

Pour out your anger on the nations that do not know you, and on the kingdoms that do not call upon your name.

For they have devo devored Jacob and laid waste his habitation.

Do not remember against our former iniquities.

Let your compassion come speedily to meet us, for we are brought very low.

Help us, O God, of your salvation, for the glory of your name, deliver us and atone for our sins for your name's sake.

Why should the nation say, Where is their God?

Let the avenging of the outpour blood of your servants be known among the nations before our eyes.

Let the groans of the prisoners come before you, according to your great power, preserve those doomed to die.

Return sevenfold into the lap of our neighbors the taunts with which they have taunted you, O Lord.

But we, your people, the sheep of your pasture, will give thanks to you forever.

From generation to generation, we will recount your praise.

And so reads God's word.

My name is Peter.

I'm one of the leaders here at City Church.

Ben, I might get Ben.

Could I get another music stand?

Sorry.

Maybe it'll hold.

I don't know, will it?

No, bueno.

Thanks very much.

Take it back now.

So you're very welcome.

Sorry, my name is Peter.

I'm one of the leaders here at City Church.

It's great to be together.

I should probably we should probably ignore it carry on here.

Am I going to make you cry if I say if I tell everyone this is your last Sunday?

Thanks for reading.

Hopefully you can make it through the whole way.

We've been in there since what one did we start?

We started with a few weeks about a month ago, at the end of June, and we're carrying on until the end of August.

We're looking through Psalms.

And these Psalms, as I'll describe, as I'll say in a bit, they help us to relate rightly to God.

They help us to know what to do with our emotions.

And there's a wonderful Psalm.

It's a tough Psalm.

So strap yourself in, I guess.

As you might have seen in the Psalm, and actually, if you if so if you open up your own Bibles, whether you have a Bible in front of you or whether it's on your phone, just Google Psalm 79 ESV.

We're in the English Standard Version, just so that we're all on the same page.

Just to follow along.

And I'll actually be so I'll be going through the structure of it.

You'll see maybe in your uh maybe in your how it's written there, it should be written kind of in four stanzas, four sections, and we'll look at each verse.

We'll look at the sections kind of together, but we'll look at each verse and we'll expose and see what God is saying to us through this Psalm, the Psalm that Asaph has written.

Now, suffering is difficult.

That's kind of stating the obvious.

But sometimes it's harder than others.

It might be dependent on what exactly is happening in your life.

Sometimes our response is better, sometimes our response is worse.

Maybe you're the kind of person, if you're thinking of suffering either a recent suffering, whether big or small, whether it's uh suffering from a while ago, you might be the kind of person who jumps into action to try to deal with the suffering head on, to stop the source, or maybe you try and run as far away from it as quickly as possible.

Maybe you're the kind of person who loses hope that there'll be any sort of change anytime soon.

Maybe you look to other people or material things to either help uh to help you, you look for helping other people or even inside yourself.

Or maybe you just look to other things to distract you.

You might escape into social media, you might escape into alcohol, drugs, work, sport to try and numb the suffering.

God is acutely aware of our suffering and he has a purpose in it.

Even if it's not taken away in the end, it may not be.

Even if we don't look back on that suffering in the future, even if we don't look back on it and say, here's the three things that God taught me through my suffering in this specific hard time or whatever it might be.

He is working.

But in this Psalm, we want to see what God wants us to do with our suffering.

So the five points.

In your suffering, relate to God.

In your suffering, reckon with God's emotions.

We see God's emotions here in Psalm 79, and we need to figure out what's going on.

In your suffering, repent for his glory.

In your suffering, pray for justice and salvation, and in your suffering, praise him.

So three R's for us in our suffering and two P's.

Three R's relate to God, reckon with God's emotion, and repent for his glory.

And that leads us to two P's, maybe some obvious P's, prayer and praise.

In this Psalm in verse 1, if you see there, Jerusalem is in ruins.

There's destruction, there's suffering all around.

Situation is really bad.

People are dead with no one to bury them.

The birds and the beasts are feasting on the bodies because they've been left out.

The people have been utterly destroyed.

So much so that there's no one left to deal with the aftermath.

That's why the bodies are there.

Pretty dramatic start to the psalm.

And the people are suffering, they're suffering greatly, but they're turning to God.

And they're seeing their suffering through his eyes.

When you see evil done, the evil that you see is primarily against God.

And that's what the psalmist is doing.

And it's so important to realize and to see in the midst of our suffering.

Though this was where they lived that was destroyed, here it's identified as God's inheritance.

Evil has been committed yet against them, there's no question there, but they understand that the nations have carried out this destruction in opposition to God Himself.

That's always the way with humans.

Our evil thoughts, our evil words, our evil deeds, though they may be directed at other people, even ourselves, they are always against God.

And so it is when evil is done to us.

It's first and foremost against God.

So the Sama starts by setting the scene as it truly is.

The nations have come up against God, defiling his holy dwelling place, the temple.

Though human suffering is taken very seriously, and it's not that it's an either or, it's a both and.

Evil is primarily done against God, but it's committed against us too.

When you suffer, he suffers with you.

Let me say that again.

When you suffer, he suffers too.

He suffers with you.

In verse 2, the suffering people are identified with God.

Let me read.

They have given the bodies of your servants to the birds of the heavens for food, the flesh of your faithful to the beasts of the earth.

God is suffering with them, and he always suffers with us.

He knows the pain that we go through because he's gone through it himself.

Jesus knows what it's like to suffer like this.

His body was broken for us.

And he sympathizes with us in our brokenness, in our weakness, and in our suffering.

He's with us in it all.

And in verse 3, as if the suffering couldn't get any worse, it's utter destruction, like I mentioned already.

There's no one left to even attempt at salvaging anything after the defeat.

There isn't even anyone to remove the bodies from where they've been slain, to bury them.

Their blood, what gave them life and sustained them, has been poured out onto the streets across the whole city.

It wasn't just soldiers on the battlefield who died for their nation, for their honor.

It's everyone.

It's people everywhere.

It's catastrophic suffering in every corner.

Every facet of life has changed for the worse in this psalm.

Again, Jesus knows this suffering.

He knows it as he hung on the cross with his blood spilled as water when they spear when they pierced his side outside Jerusalem and it ran out.

A picture of his suffering.

A picture of his death.

And this is the kind of suffering, whether you thought you were coming to church to hear about that or not.

This is the kind of suffering, the reality that the Bible engages with.

It knows this is real for us.

It knows this is the world we inhabit.

And this Sam helps us to make sense of it at least a bit.

As we continue on into the end of this section, into verse four, we might think that the whole thing is bad enough.

But now the nations around are laughing at the suffering of his people.

They mock and deride.

Those around us won't save.

They may have thought that they could have gone to a neighbor for help, for aid, but the opposite is given.

They're just laughed at.

And we can't rely on those around us to save us either.

Maybe they won't laugh and deride us, but we can't rely.

Salvation is found in no one else.

There is only one who saves by his power.

And it's crucial that we turn to him in everything.

And it's crucial that we turn to him in our suffering, that we identify with him, knowing that others can't save us, but that he suffers with us, even when the worst of evil is committed against us.

Relate to and identify with God in your suffering because he's with you in it.

This next section in verse 5, we speak to God very, very candidly.

And the Psalms they often help us to bring exactly what we're feeling to God.

We can say exactly how we see things to Him.

He can handle it.

That's what we've been encouraged to do quite often through the Psalms that we've been in, is to speak directly to God about how you feel.

Don't need to hold it back.

And what we're encouraged to do here is to ask God to ask God what's going on in our suffering.

We're encouraged to ask, how long, oh Lord?

Will you be angry forever?

Will your jealousy burn like fire?

And as you do that, you're not only bringing your emotions to God, which we should do, but you also begin to reckon with his emotions.

That's the next point.

In your suffering, reckon with God's emotions.

There's two emotions here: anger and jealousy.

And for God and for us, emotions communicate what we value.

I'm going to take a moment to think about our anger and relate our anger and that feeling of anger to what we value, and a little bit of jealousy, and we'll come back to what it might say about God's values in just a moment.

Whether it was good or bad, I'd like you to try and think of the last time, maybe the last time or one of the last times that you were angry, whether good or bad.

Because I want you to see that it shows that something that you care about deeply was in danger.

Oftentimes it shows for me that I care way too deeply about the wrong thing.

I'll probably hit a nerve for a few of you here because I'm going to speak about being angry when you're driving.

Maybe you can relate.

And when I get angry at other drivers on the road, what I wrote down first was that my motivation is often something to do with me being more important than the other person.

But I've written down it's always to do with the fact that I think I'm more important.

It exposes that I value, I value getting to wherever I want to on time.

I value having a straight, clear road in front of me.

I value not having to hit the brake when I don't want to.

Above the other person's safety, above the other person's like their time.

You can see how that emotion, that anger, is fueled by a wayward value.

And it's not long before that gets to hate.

That's what Jesus says that when we hate, it's murder in our heart.

Nicole and I witnessed uh two cars in Washington, D.C.

when we were on a uh holiday vacation over there a few years ago in slow-moving traffic.

And there were two cars.

I have two stories about this, one that I heard and one that I experienced.

Um, there was two cars trying to merge, trying to come off a slip road, but the lanes were merging.

And they really wanted to get, they they so valued, you can see, like you can see that if you talk to them in the moment, they they wouldn't be able to talk, like they wouldn't be able to talk to you in the moment, but you can see that what they valued was getting in front so much, it was going to make no difference to them getting to their destination on time.

But one of the drivers, and they were going down the slipway, and it was just slow-moving traffic.

One of them rolled down their window and shoved the other one's wing mirror in so he couldn't use it properly.

That's pretty bad.

I heard about another story again in the US, nothing against the US, just where these stories seem to come from.

It's a higher population, it's more likely to happen.

Um, but there was another one with it that genuinely ended with someone being shot.

It was the same story.

Two people coming, and one of the drivers took out a gun from his glove box.

The values that are so, so, so, so awry.

But it quickly goes from trying to get in front to hating your brother to murder.

And I say all this to warn you, just from using using this Psalm, using anger here, God's anger, to justify your own anger and to be self-righteous in it.

Anger isn't necessarily wrong, but we're usually wrong for sorry, we're usually angry for non-righteous reasons.

I heard a 70-year-old man recently speaking about anger, and he said he thinks that he might have been righteously angered twice in his life.

That helps me to gauge how often I should be angry.

Maybe never.

But regardless of your own anger, verses five and six are speaking of God's anger and jealousy, which are always perfect.

And we do well to see what ang what angers him and what makes him jealous.

God acts out of his perfect character and his emotions align perfectly with it.

And in our suffering, we should try and see this.

In Song of Solomon, chapter 8, verse 6, jealousy for a spouse is described as being fierce as the grave.

Song of Solomon 8:6

Within a faithful marriage, we should rightly be jealous for the love and affection of our spouse.

Again, like with anger, that can so easily go wrong.

But there should be a desire to feel the love of a spouse in a healthy way.

And how natural is it for a child to be jealous for his father's affection when he sees it being given elsewhere?

The same is true of parents, maybe when children don't love them back.

This is why God is jealous.

His people, who are described elsewhere in the Bible as his wife, went off with other gods.

And the iniquity and sin of the people it's spoken about just later on in verses eight and nine, which we'll get to.

God is jealous for his people.

Verse 6 helps us to see more of why God is angry.

It's because he values being known and the honor of his name.

The psalmist asks God to move his anger from them to, if you look in verse 6, to the nations that do not know you and on the kingdoms that do not call upon your name.

We're starting to see the motivation, what God values.

You see, God created all things out of love and joy as an expression of himself.

He didn't need to, he doesn't need us.

But in his glory, he created the universe and all that's in it.

And he created it for us to enjoy.

And not only to enjoy those things, the things he made, but to enjoy him and to glory in him.

Yet we so often don't do that, do we?

We seek our own glory.

We don't think it's worth calling on his name.

I've heard it described kind of like this before.

Maybe you go to the cliffs of Moer or some other uh wonderful, um, marvelous, natural wonder in the world.

It would be crazy, it would be preposterous to go there and not to behold, not to see, to be blind to the glory of that place because you're so enraptured by your own glory.

Imagine getting a two-hour bus journey across the cliffs of Mora, maybe further longer, and you're just glorying in yourself.

That's what the nations are doing, and the people of Israel were doing it a bit too, but that's what the nations are doing.

They're looking at God and his people and they're saying, we don't need him.

We can do it ourselves.

And that's good for no one.

It brings dishonor to God, but it it brings it's not good for those people either.

So the psalmist rightly says that God cares about the honor of his name and that he should deal accordingly with those who dishonor him.

And in verse 7, we see that though God is angry with his people, he's jealous for their love.

And the psalmist appeals to God to show his anger on their behalf.

Again, in their suffering, they are coming to God and they're they're asking him to act.

In your suffering, come before God.

Reckon with his emotion, see his perfect anger and jealousy.

Know that he values being known by you.

He values having his name honored by you.

Know that, like a good husband, he's jealous for your love.

We've seen how the people are suffering terribly at the hands of the nations.

Many, if not all of you, have been thinking already this morning, as we've been looking at at this, about your own lives and how you've suffered.

As I said at the top, and as we often say, the Psalms teach us to emote rightly, to have right emotions.

What should we do with our emotions?

Especially, how should we relate to God?

And so as we continue through this Psalm, we're thinking about how our suffering should cause us to relate to God.

We're going to continue doing that.

As we've been reading through this Psalm, you can see the evil of the nations, but also God's presence and his hand throughout.

God is in control of all things.

He's sovereign.

Even over these nations who were so dramatically introduced at the top of the Psalm in verse 1.

But why did all this happen?

We know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Romans 8.

So how can this be?

How can this be for the good of his people?

In verse 8, we begin to see the good.

Our next point is in your suffering, repent for his glory.

Let's follow what the people did.

The people humbly come before God, confessing their sin.

And this is good.

This is their good.

They were going their other way, following after other gods, which was harmful for them, and it was dishonoring to God.

And it's one big reason that later on in verse 10 the nations say, Where is their that where is their God?

His own people didn't recognize him properly.

They didn't honor him, they didn't display his glory for the world to see as they were meant to, so that all will come to him, so that all will be blessed through them, so that God will be glorified by all.

So they were brought very low.

And now they're back, relating to God as they ought, with a contrite heart.

So you might think, were they being punished?

No.

They were graciously being shepherded back to the good pasture.

They were being disciplined in a good and caring way by their loving father.

And we experienced this same loving discipline.

God graciously uses suffering and hardship for our good and for his glory.

It's magnificent that he can use evil against itself to bring us back over and over again.

And the people knew that as they confessed their sin before Almighty God, that they were coming before a compassionate God.

And not one who's slow to be merciful, but one whose compassion comes speedily.

The Lord is gracious and kind, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

So come before God regularly, humbly confessing your sin, knowing that He's ready to show compassion.

This is so marvelous.

We don't come before a cold judge begging for mercy, groveling at his feet in hopes that he might not condemn us.

Rather, we come before our Father who loves to be gracious.

He loves to be kind to us, who loves to forgive, and who wants us to be restored and to be at home with him.

That's why we, after we confessed our sin together earlier in that confession, immediately after that, we sang, His mercy is more.

Praise the Lord, his mercy is more.

Maybe we could add a line: Praise the Lord, his compassion comes speedily.

Let your suffering, hard that it may, that it might be, hard that it is, let your suffering drive you home to your compassionate God in humble confession.

And let your suffering drive you to ask for help.

Be confident that he can and he will help because he is the God of our salvation.

That's part of his identity.

He's the God of our salvation.

When suffering brings us to our wits' end, when we've tried every other avenue for help, he's ready and willing to save us because that's who he is.

Learn to be quicker in asking him for help.

You'll probably save yourself a lot of hardship.

And when you ask for help, let others see.

Let others around you see that you're asking for help.

Ask them to pray for you for help.

Because when others see us asking for help from him, he's glorified.

When they see him help us, then he's glorified.

We've asked for God's help lots over these past few months as we've tried to find a new building.

This is just one, maybe it's a big example.

Feels like actually a little bit of exam, uh a smaller example given the suffering that's going on in our lives.

But we've asked for a lot of help from God in that.

And I hope you've seen how his glory has been displayed in lots of ways already.

Though we don't, though we're still here, which that's wonderful in and of itself.

But I hope you've been glorifying him for how he's sustained us.

And he's even caused us to grow as a body as we've been waiting.

He's been growing us in our dependency on him.

He's been growing us in our satisfaction in him, and he's been growing us in many other ways.

All glory to God for this work amongst us.

Make much of his name.

Pray for deliverance for his name's sake, too.

Ask him to deliver you in times of suffering.

Pray regularly, as Jesus taught, to be delivered from evil.

Both from evil within that will cause us to sin and the evil coming at us from without.

And again, this is for his name's sake, so that he will be honored.

Pray for his honor.

And this is closely tied to asking to have our sins atoned for.

Pray for your sin to be dealt with for his name's sake.

We all need our sin to be dealt with.

We all need our sin to be atoned for.

We need to be made right with God.

But our sin, it stands in the way.

And wonderfully, Jesus did indeed deal with it on the cross.

And in atoning for our sin, it's God who's glorified.

We're saved, but God is glorified.

How wonderful, how marvelous the gospel of the Lord Jesus is.

And we should pray for justice for his honor.

The psalmist encourages us, as he does in the next few verses, too, to ask God to bring about justice, to avenge the outpoured blood of his servants.

That's verse 10.

And this is important for a number of reasons.

It's important that the psalmist prays for justice.

Firstly, he's leaving it to God.

Though great evil has been done against him, though great evil has been done against the people, he brings his petition to God.

He's not looking to the other kings and nations around.

He's not trying to scheme himself about how to get back and exact revenge on his enemies.

He entrusts it to God.

It's God who brings about justice on behalf of his people.

Leave the enactment of justice to God.

Secondly, like at the beginning of the Psalm, he identifies with the God of suffering.

He says, Your servants.

That's the whole a lot of the way through.

But in verse 10, he talks about your servants.

Aesap, the psalmist, is appealing to the honor of God's name.

God has wrapped himself up in the welfare of his people.

And so when injustice is carried out against them, it's carried out against God Himself, as I said before.

So of course it's right to pray to God for justice in your life.

Thirdly, he knows that when God brings judgment on the nations, it will cause them never again to say, Where is their God?

We should pray that God would hasten the day when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

In your suffering, pray for justice, for his honor.

In verses 11 and 12, Asaph encourages us to continue praying for salvation and to continue praying for justice.

Even in our suffering.

He's reinforcing lots of what he's written already.

We've already seen the horrific circumstances that people are in from verses 1 to 4.

But now, in verse 11, we meet prisoners on death row, those doomed to die.

It's a terrible and dire situation again, but we should cry out for salvation even in dire need.

Sometimes I know your suffering can get so acute and so difficult, and things can seem so hopeless that you don't cry out to God.

In the most dire of situations, cry out to Him for salvation.

He's powerful to keep us in the worst of situations, even when we're staring death in the face.

He'll preserve all those who are his.

Even beyond the grave.

In verse 12, he again calls on God to bring about justice and to make wrongs right.

One day God will do just that.

And we wait until then patiently, praying for his justice.

We pray for his name to be honored, as in the rest of the Psalm.

Aesaph knows that the evil done against God's people is done against him.

When they suffer, he suffers.

Now, in verse 12, he makes that even more clear.

So if you look at verse 12 and then look back up to verse 4, so in verse 4, Asaph talks about being a taunt to our neighbors, mocked and derided by those around us.

But then jump down to verse 12 again.

It changes a bit.

Now he speaks of those same taunts being taunts with which they have taunted you, O Lord.

The evil and suffering you face is evil against him.

And suffering that he suffers, he suffers with you.

Cry out to him for justice for the sake of his name.

Finally, this last verse.

In your suffering, praise him.

And praise him as his people.

We'll see a number of things here.

Praise him as his people.

Praise him as his sheep.

Praise him forever and praise him while passing it on.

So in your suffering, praise him as his people.

Verse 13 says, But we, your people, will give thanks to you.

Join with God's people to praise him.

We're one people and we should give thanks to him together.

That's what we're doing here on Sunday morning.

I'm kind of preaching to the choir, I guess.

That's why we sing together with one voice.

But in your suffering, you will find it hard to praise him.

You'll find it hard to praise him on your own.

So be helped by your brothers and sisters.

Even if you come on a Sunday morning and you don't feel like you'll be able to actually sing, actually vocalize your praise, that you won't be able to get the words out because of that acute suffering.

Come and be with his people as we give him thanks together.

Praise him as his sheep.

God cares for his people as a shepherd with sheep.

He provides for us all that we need, and so we should give thanks.

He brings us to good pasture.

So we should we should give thanks.

And praise him.

Of course, we take such comfort in these words, knowing that God is with us, that he cares for us, that he knows our frailty, yet he is strong and powerful.

We praise him because our good shepherd, the Lord Jesus, laid down his life for us.

And we will praise him forever.

It will be endless thanksgiving for a number of reasons.

Firstly, God is worthy of praise forever.

Who he is, what he's done, that warrants thanksgiving by all for all time.

We'll also live with him forever.

We'll be able to praise him forever.

Because he's given us eternal life.

And this changes our perspective on suffering.

Imagine being that prisoner doomed to die.

Imagine looking out on your desolate city where the dead bodies lie.

These are dreadful thoughts.

But the hope of the gospel is that we will be with our God in his glorious presence for all eternity.

And that hope for the future, it lifts our eyes from our suffering, though it is still very real and very difficult.

And we praise him while passing it on.

It's so important that we tell the next generation of all the wondrous things God has done.

Parents, you have a big charge on your lives.

But one that God is with you in and he wants to help you.

You are instrumental in teaching your children to praise God.

And you must live lives of praise in front of them for them to see.

It's so important that they see us praising God.

And I don't just mean as we sing here on a Sunday morning, and I and I don't just mean parents, though, you have a particular charge and call on your life.

And it's not just for those who are working with the kids.

The next generation should hear us all recounting God's praise all the time.

As we greet each other, let's make sure the children of City hear us talking about God as He's been with us in our suffering.

Every one of you has a responsibility to teach the next generation.

So suffering is difficult.

And it is a reality.

And towards Him.

Allow your suffering to drive you to God.

Allow your suffering to let you know Him more.

Allow your suffering to help you experience the joy of repentance.

In your suffering, pray for justice and salvation.

And in your suffering, praise God as His people, as His sheep forever while passing it on to the next generation.

Let's pray.