Turn to Us, O Lord

Psalm 6, verses 1 to 10.

Psalms 6 · chapter mention

I'll read it out loud for us.

To the choir master, with stringed instruments,

according to the Shemineth, a psalm of David.

Turn, O Lord, deliver my life.

Save me for the sake of your steadfast love.

For in death there is no remembrance of you.

In Sheol, who will give you praise?

I am weary with my moaning.

Every night I flood my bed with tears.

I drench my couch with my weeping.

My eye wastes away because of grief.

It grows weak because of all my foes.

Depart from me, all you workers of evil,

for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.

The Lord has heard my plea.

The Lord accepts my prayer.

All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly troubled.

They shall turn back and be put to shame in a moment.

The word of the Lord.

Now, we are physical beings.

As we talked about this past Sunday,

because we're physical beings with creatures

affected by our senses,

our souls are therefore affected

by the things that affect our bodies.

So often, sometimes when we're physically ill,

that could also affect how we feel spiritually.

And it does not mean necessarily

that we will struggle spiritually

if we're struggling physically,

but it can affect how we feel spiritually.

In a similar way,

when we're spiritually sick,

plagued by guilt and an unrepentant sin

or anxiety,

that could also affect us physically as well.

And we find a similar situation here in Psalm 6.

So, he is in trouble.

It says in verse 2,

it says,

I am languishing.

Heal me, O Lord,

for my bones are troubled.

It says in verse 2.

But it's not just his bones that are in trouble,

which represents his body,

but also his soul.

It says in verse 3,

my soul also is greatly troubled.

And there's probably some kind of sin involved

with the psalmist.

You can see a hint of that in verse 1,

where he says,

O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger,

nor discipline me in your wrath.

So, the psalmist is making a connection

between his current predicament,

where he is ailing in bone and soul.

He's being assailed by his enemies.

He feels alienated from God.

And he's tying that to God's discipline,

that God may be disciplining him,

rebuking him for his sin and his anger.

And what's remarkable about this

is that even though he feels

like he's alienated from God

and God's attacking him,

not attacking him,

but rebuking him,

disciplining him at this juncture,

he doesn't withdraw from God

in fear because of this punishment,

but rather this becomes an occasion

for him to draw nearer to God.

So, he prays in verse 2,

Be gracious to me, O Lord,

for I am languishing.

Heal me, O Lord,

for my bones are troubled.

And he cries out in verses 3 to 4,

But you, O Lord, how long?

Turn, O Lord, deliver my life.

Save me for the sake of your steadfast love.

And the basis for the psalmist's prayer,

the reason why he's able to approach him

is because God's gracious, right?

It says in verse 2,

it's his grace,

and in verse 4,

it's his steadfast love.

They're very closely related ideas

to God's graciousness

and his steadfast love.

And this is reminiscent of what Job says.

You guys know the story of Job.

He's afflicted,

allowed to be afflicted by Satan,

by the sovereign God.

He says of God in chapter 13,

verse 15 of Job,

Though he slay me,

I will hope in him.

So, even though he says,

God slay me,

but I will hope in him.

So, though God's letting him suffer,

Job's putting his hope in him,

and that should be our disposition also

as we look at this psalm.

Even though we may feel like

God's disciplining us,

even though we may feel like

God's distant from us,

alienated from us,

the temptation,

when we feel that way,

is to draw further away from him.

When we're suffering,

the temptation is to draw,

isolate ourselves from God.

And after we have sinned

and feel guilty,

the temptation is to say,

oh, well, I'm not worthy

to go to God right now.

I'm going to stay away from him,

do my own thing.

That's the temptation.

But because we have a God

who is gracious,

as this psalm said,

and because we have a God

who is a God of steadfast love,

rather, when we feel that way

in suffering and sin,

that's more of an occasion

for us to approach God

and draw near to him.

Like Job's saying,

even though you slay me,

I hope in you.

Even though you afflict us,

God, Lord,

we turn to you.

We hope in you.

We trust in you.

And that's actually

what our children do

when we discipline them appropriately.

I see this in my daughter,

Ine.

Like when,

and I mean,

I hate to discipline her

in one sense

because I love her

and I hate to,

it pains me to see her

in pain,

in discipline.

But at the same time,

because I love her,

precisely because I love her

and I don't want her

to grow up in selfishness

and selflessness,

as I discipline her.

And when I discipline her,

you would think

that she would run from me,

but actually she,

like,

extends her arm out like this

and tries to come to me.

She wants to hug me.

And as I'm disciplining her.

And I think she does that

because she instinctively knows

that by doing something wrong,

by her wrongdoing,

she has alienated herself from me.

And so she feels

that there is a gap

and that she's,

and it's,

she's to be blamed for it.

And in order to right that wrong,

she wants to embrace me.

She wants me to forgive her

and to be reconciled to me.

And that's why,

so she comes to me

even as I'm disciplining her.

And I think that's kind of a picture

of what God's calling us to be.

Like the children

who come to him

even as he's disciplining us,

we come to him

because we know

that that's our sin,

that's done it,

and we know that he's gracious toward us.

So we turn to him

even in the midst of our sin

and suffering.

And so it's with this basis

that the psalmist says in verse four,

turn, O Lord,

deliver my life,

save me for the sake

of your steadfast love.

And later,

he goes on to say

in verse five,

four and five,

read with me in verse four and five.

It says,

turn, O Lord,

deliver my life,

save me for the sake

of your steadfast love.

For in death,

there is no remembrance of you.

In Sheol,

who will give you praise?

And to us as Christians,

that might seem

kind of sub-Christian

to ask in such desperation

to be saved from death

because we think of what Paul says

and for example,

in Philippians 1,

21, 25,

for to me,

to live is Christ

and to die is gain.

And then he says later,

it's far better for me

to depart

and be with Christ.

So we think of that

and say,

well,

why is this psalmist

then so desperate to live?

Isn't it better for him to die

and be with God?

But we have to remember that

by this point

of God's revelation,

that the Jews

in this time

understand death

to be final.

They believe in

the life with God

to be this physical life.

And that's why

he's so desperate here.

And it's not until

Jesus comes

in his clear teaching,

his example of

giving people

spiritual life

that we see

that there's spiritual life

even after death.

And this is what

theologians call

progressive revelation,

that the revelation of God,

he didn't give it all at once,

but from the Old Testament

to the New Testament,

there's a certain progress.

He reveals more and more

and Christ is the final,

ultimate revelation.

And so we see that

in the example of,

for example,

Israel's promised land.

So they thought

that promised land

was that physical land

of Israel

in the Middle East.

So that's what

they longed for.

But when Jesus comes

and he teaches us,

we realize that

the real promised land

is our inheritance

in heaven with God,

the spiritual land.

And then in a similar way,

we see that in the Old Testament,

the Jews believed

that God's people

were people who were

physically descended

from Abraham.

But in the New Testament,

through Christ's teaching

and through Paul's writing

in Romans 9,

we see that actually

God's people are those

who are spiritually descended

from Abraham through faith.

And even in the Old Testament,

that was the case,

as Paul argues in Romans 9.

And then finally here,

as seen in this psalm,

Jews believed that

their life with God

consisted primarily

of the physical life

here and now.

But in the New Testament,

through Christ,

we learn that first

and foremost,

the life he gives us

in parts was a spiritual life.

And later,

that life will be combined

with the resurrection

of the body

of the second coming.

So that's the progression.

And I read a poem

by Emily Dickinson

when I was in college

that really helped me grasp,

get my head around

this idea of progressive revelation.

It's called

Tell All the Truth,

But Tell It Slant.

And it goes like this.

It says,

Tell all the truth,

but tell it slant.

Success in circuit lies.

Too bright for our infirm delight,

the truth's superb surprise.

As lightning to the children

eased with explanation kind,

the truth must dazzle gradually,

or every man be blind.

So she's arguing that

you can't explain lightning to children.

You explain that in an easy way

for them to understand

as an expression of kindness.

And in the same way,

the truth dazzles us gradually

so that we don't go blind

and are overwhelmed

by the force of it

or the beauty of it.

And Jesus,

or God,

in a gracious way,

in his sovereign wisdom,

reveals his truth

to us progressively.

And so that's what we see here.

And Sheol is simply

realm of the dead.

It's what,

in the New Testament,

is called Hades.

So that's what he's saying,

save me from Sheol,

because in death

there is no remembrance of you.

He wants to praise God,

continue to live,

and live for him.

And so this is a good lesson for us

as well as we cry out to him

in our sin and suffering

as we turn to him,

because it doesn't mean that,

it shows us that we don't have

to sanitize our feelings

and only say nice and rosy things to God.

Because this psalm,

his cry is pleased really raw

and authentic and vulnerable

and honest.

So he says in verses 6 to 7,

I am weary with my moaning.

Every night I flood my bed with tears.

I drench my couch with my weeping.

My eye wastes away because of grief.

It grows weak because of all my foes.

So this is very,

it's not a pretty picture

of how he's doing.

He's really struggling

and he lets God know

that he's just really having a hard time.

Every night I flood my bed with tears.

The literal expression in Hebrew

is that he caused his bed to swim.

So it's a hyperbole

that talks about how much he's crying.

And he's wasting away.

His eyes are wasting away.

And eyes,

the healthy eyes are indicative

of a healthy body

throughout the Old Testament.

So when in Deuteronomy 34, 7

to describe Moses' supernatural health

when he's in his ripe old age of 120,

it says that his eyes were undimmed.

So here, in contrast,

the psalmist's eyes are wasting away.

That means he's in the throes of death.

He's about to die.

His body's wasting away.

And he lets God know

that's how he's struggling.

But there's an amazing turn

in verse 7,

between verse 7 and verse 8.

So psalmist is pouring out his heart to God,

heart and soul to God,

but he appears to have found

some kind of comfort and faith

because he says,

in verses 8 to 10,

that God's answered his prayer,

that he's heard him.

And this shows us that

it's when we have

really expressed our lostness

and admitted our hopelessness before God,

that's when we're found by him

and filled with hope.

It's when we confess our faithlessness to him honestly,

that's when God renews our faith in him.

And so this is,

Psalm 6 is just a really powerful picture

of what an intimate relationship

with God looks like.

And so the psalmist turned to God

in his suffering and sin,

and then now God turns to him in his grace.

So that's what we see,

that there's a turn here in the psalm

in verses 8 and 10.

And we see that because

there's several words in verses 8 and 10

that mirror verses 1 to 7

is to show that God answers the psalmist's prayer.

So for example, verses 2 to 3,

it says,

that his bones and soul were troubled.

And the same word troubled is used in verse 10,

but this time it's his enemies

who will be troubled.

Because God has answered his prayer,

now he's no longer troubled,

his enemies are going to be troubled.

And in verse 2,

the psalmist asks God,

be gracious to me.

And then in verse 9,

he says,

the Lord has heard my plea.

And the word plea

literally means in Hebrew,

a plea for grace.

That's what,

it comes from the same root

as the word grace.

So he's saying that

he cried out to God

to be gracious to him

and the Lord has heard

his plea for grace.

Verse 2

and then verse 9.

And then finally in verse 4,

he had asked God,

turn,

oh Lord,

deliver my life.

He asked God to turn to him.

And then in verse 10,

because God has turned to him

and delivered him,

now he's able to say to his enemies,

turn back and be put to shame.

Same word,

turn.

So,

and because God has turned to him,

his enemies will turn from him.

So we see it in all this,

this kind of symmetrical structure

that God's answered us on his prayer.

So when we turn to God in our suffering

and say,

God turns to us in grace.

But for us,

we have an even surer basis

for this,

that God's grace

than even the psalmist.

And the reason for that is

because Jesus has come.

And because he quotes this,

actually,

Psalm verse 3,

where it says,

my soul also is greatly troubled.

Jesus quotes this

when he's speaking of his impending death

in John 12, 27.

And he says,

now is my soul troubled.

And what shall I say?

Father, save me from this hour.

But for this purpose,

I have come to this hour.

So,

Jesus is saying that now his soul is troubled.

And the reason why,

in the midst of our trouble,

when we're in our suffering and sin,

we can be assured

that God's going to be gracious to us.

Ultimately,

for us,

as Christians,

it's because Jesus,

his soul was troubled.

It's because he endured suffering.

It's because he bore our sin.

So that's why all the more we have,

because we've seen the ultimate demonstration

of God's grace

and steadfast love in Jesus,

we can turn to him

in our suffering and sin,

knowing that he will turn to us

in grace.

So,

with that in mind,

let's turn to God

and pray.

Pray to him.

Mind.

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