Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Let's look at psalm number nine tonight.
[00:00:04] Going right along in our walk through the book of psalms. I hope it's a blessing to you. And we will see what we can get into here. Let's look in starting verse number one. Psalm nine. Verse number one. To the chief musician upon muth Labanhood. A psalm of David.
[00:00:28] I will praise thee, O Lord, with my whole heart.
[00:00:32] I will show forth all thy marvelous works. I will be glad and rejoice in thee. I will sing praise to thy name. O thou most high.
[00:00:42] When mine enemies are turned back, they shall fall and perish at thy presence. For thou hast maintained my right and my cause. Thou sattest in the throne, judging right.
[00:00:58] Thou hast rebuked the heathen. Thou hast destroyed the wicked. Thou hast put out their name forever and ever. O thou enemy. Destructions are come to a perpetual end. And thou hast destroyed cities. Their memorial is perished with them. But the lord shall endure forever. He hath prepared his throne for judgment, and he shall judge the world in righteousness. He shall minister judgment to the people in uprightness. The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble. And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee. For thou, Lord, hast not forsaken them that seek thee. Sing praises to the Lord which dwelleth in Zion. Declare among the people his doings. When he maketh inquisition for blood. He remembereth them. He forgetteth not the cry of the humble.
[00:01:50] Have mercy upon me, O Lord. Consider my trouble which I suffer of them that hate me. Thou that liftest me up from the gates of death, that I may show forth all thy praise in the gates of the daughter of Zion. I will rejoice in thy salvation. The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made, and the net which they hid is their own foot taken.
[00:02:14] The Lord is known by the judgment which he executeth. The wicked is snared in the work of his own hands. Higgaion say the wicked shall be turned into hell. And all the nations that forget God for the needy shall not alway be forgotten. The expectation of the poor shall not perish forever. Arise, o lorde. Let not man prevail. Let the heathen be judged in thy sight. Put them in fear, O Lord, that the nations may know themselves to be but men. Let's pray together.
[00:02:48] Our Lord, we just want to come to you and thank you for the chance to meet together and to sing and to praise you, to share prayer requests and to study your word. Lord, I pray especially that you would make your word profitable to us tonight. It would be precious to us, and it would be a true help to us as we examine what you've said in these psalms through King David. And so bless our time in your word. Give me just exactly what everyone needs to hear, what I myself need to hear and be reminded of also. And bless your people through your word. We ask in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:03:26] In this psalm.
[00:03:28] We'll just kind of walk through it. Of course. The psalm begins in verse number one and verse number two. With. With the idea of praise. Notice what it says. I will praise thee, O Lord, with my whole heart. With my whole heart. This is.
[00:03:43] Anytime you see the word whole heart, it's going to be a reference to, of course, partial. You know, something partial. Which is hypocrisy. Which is hypocrisy. The idea of. And listen, what we say with our mouth and what we think and feel in our hearts should be the same. Right?
[00:04:07] How many of you know, or maybe you are that person. I know. I have been that person who. We learn to say the religious lingo. We learn to say, you know, the words. Preachers are the worst at it. Are they nothing? They know how to talk. They know how to gab. Right? Preachers know how to gab. And they just. They say, oh, praise the Lord, this and that. But you wonder often when it's out of place, you wonder, well, do they really mean that? But the Lord wants us, our praise to be with a whole heart without any hypocrisy, without any fakery. That is what's in our mouth and what's in our heart are the same thing. It says this, I will show forth all thy marvelous works. Now, you can see this in verse eleven. We're gonna jump around a little bit in the psalm here.
[00:04:55] Verse eleven says this. Sing praises to the Lord which dwelleth in Zion. Declare among the people his doings. Verse 14. That I may show forth all thy praise in the gates of the daughter of Zion. I will rejoice in thy salvation. So what does it mean to praise the Lord? Listen, praising the Lord is not about standing up and shouting in a church service.
[00:05:24] That's not what it's about. You know why?
[00:05:27] You know why? Because of verse one. Read what it says and I listen. I know I'm sipping on. Listen, I'm sipping on a little bit of southern christian culture, but. But look at what the Bible says to praise the Lord. It says, I will praise thee, o Lord, with my whole heart. I will show forth all thy marvelous works. So here's what that means. To praise the Lord means that you declare, and I declare and show forth what God has done. That's what it means to praise the Lord.
[00:06:01] It's not a shout. In other words, somebody coming up here to the front or coming up here behind the podium here and saying, let me tell you what the Lord did in my life in a calm, even monotone voice is more edifying than someone standing up and shouting. You know why? Because they're telling you what God has done. And that is really the core. That's the essence of praising the Lord. You don't have to listen. When you praise the Lord, you don't have to be excited. You don't have to be crying. That's all fine. If that's what you want to do, that's fine. But pray. The core of it, the essence of it, is telling forth what God has done.
[00:06:46] Telling what God has done that exalts the Lord. That's what it means in verse 14. That's a language that you'll see in the psalms later, he says that I may show forth all thy praise. What that means is showing forth what God has done that should prompt and deserves praise. And that's why it's so important. Listen. That's why it's so important that you and I, when we have a cause in our mind to praise God, we do not sit quiet and not do it. Because giving praise to God in the congregation, again, that's a theme in the psalms, is a valuable encouragement to one another.
[00:07:27] See, praise. Remember, we often mix both praise and worship. Right?
[00:07:35] Praise and worship music. We blend them together. But worship is not the same as praise. Worship is private. Worship is quiet. Worship is prostrate.
[00:07:48] That's what you see in scripture.
[00:07:51] Praise is public. In other words, you might say it like this, worship is God word. Praise is man word.
[00:08:00] When you worship, it's just you and God. You can worship in private.
[00:08:05] But when you praise, you want other people to hear and to see what God has done and who God is and how you know his glories.
[00:08:13] So to praise God in verse number one, I will praise thee, o Lord, with my whole heart. I will listen. Now, I will show forth all thy marvelous works. So if you're going to praise God, if we're going to praise God and show forth all his marvelous works, then that means we are going to have to recognize God's marvelous works. What do I mean by that? Recognize God's marvelous works.
[00:08:42] The Lord is doing a lot, far more things giving us far more blessings than we are cognizant of.
[00:08:56] And our society, our society has trained us to our society. You know, in the scientific world, and I like science, but in the scientific world, in society at large, in daily life, we are taught to. We are taught. It's almost subliminally, it's subconsciously. We are taught to sanitize God out of our thinking.
[00:09:27] Because you know how you know that? Because the moment you bring up the Lord in a group of people, everybody gets quiet and awkward, right?
[00:09:37] Because we've been taught that that's everything we talk about is supposed to be sanitized out of God. God is supposed to be kind of surgically removed from our thinking.
[00:09:51] And here's what that means. That means when things happen to us that are blessings to us, our society provides, especially as scientific knowledge increases, our society provides naturalistic explanations for everything.
[00:10:06] So you get sick, you go to the doctor. The doctor says, oh, well, I did a scan and we did. Took your. We did your blood work, right? And your blood work came back as this. We know you have an infection, so I'm going to give you. I'm going to call in a prescription for amoxicillin or Augmentin or whatever, and I'm going to go. You'll get. Go to the pharmacy, you'll take your round of Augmentin and you'll feel better.
[00:10:32] What did God do for me? You see?
[00:10:36] Do you see God in that? Now ask. I don't want anybody to answer, but ask yourself, do I see God in that?
[00:10:44] See, we've been trained not to.
[00:10:48] We've been trained not to.
[00:10:52] We've been trained to not see or not think about God's blessing in that.
[00:10:58] God is the one that heals our body.
[00:11:02] God is the one who gave the wisdom and knowledge to mankind to fight diseases with medicines. You know that?
[00:11:13] Did you know for most of human history, people got what are now common, simple diseases and died?
[00:11:24] Listen to this.
[00:11:26] Antibiotics were discovered in 1928 by. Anybody know David James? I want to hear it. Come on, now. Okay. Must not have been a question on the McAT, right?
[00:11:42] Huh?
[00:11:43] No. Good try, though. You want to try again?
[00:11:48] Discovered in 1928. Listen now. By Alexander Fleming, a scottish bacterologist.
[00:11:57] Now listen now, this is interesting. He observed that a mold called penicillium notatum had keyword, accidentally contaminated a petri dish of staphyloco. Help me now.
[00:12:20] Thank you.
[00:12:22] Staph. That's easy.
[00:12:26] It had accidentally contaminated a petri dish of staph bacteria. In his lab, and the mold inhibited the growth of the bacteria. This led to the discovery of penicillin, the first true antibiotic, which was later developed into a drug by scientists like Howard Florey and Ernest Boris chain, revolutionizing medicine by effectively treating bacterial infections. Have you ever heard of scarlet fever?
[00:12:56] Scarlet fever was deadly.
[00:13:00] Have you ever heard of bubonic plague?
[00:13:04] Deadly.
[00:13:05] Killed a third of Europe in the Middle Ages.
[00:13:09] Both easily treatable by a simple antibiotic.
[00:13:18] You know what we should say?
[00:13:20] Thank God, right?
[00:13:23] Well, the scientists, Alexander Fleming.
[00:13:29] It was not through his ingenuity that he accidentally stumbled upon something that would fight bacteria and inhibit its growth. Oh, no, that was by accident.
[00:13:40] It wasn't his knowledge.
[00:13:43] The Lord caused him to stumble upon it.
[00:13:47] And so, look, even in stuff like that, even things as simple as one of the primary symbols or metaphors for blessings, the blessings of God in the Bible is what does anybody know?
[00:13:59] It's easy one. It's rain. It's rain.
[00:14:05] It's one of the common natural blessings. And we think of rain as a blessing. How? Well, we think of rain because, you know, our flowers need garden, our gardens need. Our flowers need garden, our flowers need water, or our grass is brown like my grass right now. It's browning out. And if it doesn't rain soon, it's going to actually go dormant. Bermuda grass goes dormant without rain. Okay, it's going to go dormant. I'm. Oh, no. I hope I get rain, but it's not that big of a deal. I couldn't care less, really, because eventually it'll rain all that. We don't even think of rain as a blessing, do we?
[00:14:37] And we look at our weather patterns and we look at our, you know, our meteorologists, who are hardly ever accurate, but anyway, we look at them and they know when it's going to happen and they know why the rain comes and the humidity and the dewpoint and the clouds and the fronts and all those things. We know all those things, and we have natural, scientific explanations for it all. And that erases God out of our memory on those things.
[00:15:05] For most of human history, if it didn't rain, you might not be able to eat. And so you know what you did? You went out to the God of heaven, you went out to your field and you sowed in tears. Psalm 126. Right?
[00:15:22] You sowed in tears. God, please, please send this rain.
[00:15:29] But God is the same today as he was then, and we still depend on the rain. We just. We're so. Our society is so far removed from it that we don't even know we do. But this is why when we, when we eat our food, we bow our head not to pray. No, we bow our head to thank God.
[00:15:50] All right, so part of verse number one, I will show forth all thy marvelous works, is recognizing God's marvelous works in everyday common things. And of course, we can go into marvelous works. You can go into the cross, the resurrection, how the Lord saved our soul and forgave our sin as individually. You can talk about how God rescued you or protected you from this or from, for instance, when Joshua had his car accident not too long ago, that was direct protection from the Lord. And it was a way, the Lord provided a new vehicle for him when he needed a vehicle and didn't know how he was going to get it. Those kinds of things, those are all. But see, we have to train our hearts and minds with a godly, biblical worldview to recognize God's blessings and then say, even in the common things, God, you do marvelous works.
[00:16:47] Listen to this. Psalm 136 25 says this, speaking of God, who giveth food to all flesh. God didn't give me food. I went to the store. Well, he gave you the money. No, he did not work for it. See, that is a. Listen, that is a godless worldview that refuses to acknowledge the wonderful works God has done.
[00:17:15] So in order to give God praise for his wonderful works and to show forth them, we have to recognize them. And then once we recognize them, we have to be willing to open our mouth and tell other people, listen, the Lord, how many of you can identify with this? The Lord will remind you who should get the praise when you're telling other people about what he has done. You know what I'm talking about. You'll be just talking along, talking along. And you'll say, like, for instance, Sister Betty has tests and things like that, and she'll be going along. Or as maybe another example, that's a little more dramatic, probably with Woody, with his cancer, right. Is they might be tempted to say, well, his cancer appears to be in remission, and we're so thankful. But right then the Lord would be like, who did that?
[00:18:16] And that's when you say, I thank the Lord that God did wonderful things for him.
[00:18:22] Right.
[00:18:23] And that's not to the exclusion of what man does and medicines and things. No, we thank God for that, too.
[00:18:31] The Lord's normal method of blessing us is using means. That's his normal way of doing it. Supernatural things are not normal. They're supernatural. Right. The Lord's normal pattern is to use natural things. But even when he does, we should be able to recognize his hand and his works. If we don't, we will not be able to praise him. Verse two. I will be glad and rejoice in thee. I will sing praise to thy name, o thou most high. The effect. Listen now. The effect of having our faith surgically removed from our thinking in this way is our joy is dead because we don't see the Lord's hand in things that we should see.
[00:19:19] He says, I will be glad and rejoice in thee. I will sing praise to thy name. Notice an act of the will, a choice.
[00:19:28] You know, a lot of times, gladness and joy, we say, we'll be glad. We will rejoice when we feel like it. The Lord in this verse, he says, I will be glad. I will rejoice.
[00:19:43] You see that sometimes what we need to do is not wait. And if you have. Listen, if you have emotion, you have feeling, you're overwhelmed and you want to rejoice and you're glad. That's awesome.
[00:19:54] But even if you don't, even if I don't, we choose to rejoice in the Lord. And when we do, what we find is that the feelings we desire to be there.
[00:20:09] Follow.
[00:20:11] How many of you have heard, heard the little statement, fact, faith, feeling. Fact, faith, feeling. Feelings always last. It's always last.
[00:20:21] Let's keep reading here. Verse number three. He goes into a thing about his enemies are turned back. Look at verse number four. For thou has maintained my right and my cause. Thou sattest in the throne, judging. Right? Several times in this passage, he talks about judgment. Now pause a second. Judgment is this. Here's the definition.
[00:20:40] The formation of an opinion or conclusion concerning something, especially following careful consideration or deliberation.
[00:20:49] So at its core, to judge means you're forming an opinion, right? That's what it means. Is it wrong to judge?
[00:20:57] Is it wrong to judge church? No.
[00:21:01] No.
[00:21:02] As long as you judge righteously and as long as you apply the same judgment to yourself as you apply to others. Right? That's, well, judge not. Well, that's just part of the verse, right? Judging is, you know, when you go to the store and pick one apple over another or one tomato over another, you're judging. You're forming an opinion and then making a decision. And that's what judging is.
[00:21:29] Look at this. Verse number.
[00:21:32] I lost my place here. Look at verse number seven.
[00:21:36] You see a judgment again. But the Lord shall endure forever. He hath prepared his throne for judgment. Verse eight. He shall judge the world in righteousness. He shall minister judgment to the people in uprightness. Verse 16.
[00:21:51] The Lord is known by the judgment which he executeth.
[00:21:56] Verse number 18.
[00:21:58] Or I'm sorry, verse number 19. Arise, o Lord. Let not man prevail. Let the heathen be judged in thy sight.
[00:22:08] In these verses, what is the main point of criteria for judgment?
[00:22:17] Righteousness.
[00:22:21] God forms opinions and executes those opinions based upon righteousness. But whose standard?
[00:22:33] Because, hey, what I say is right. It's not necessarily what you say is right.
[00:22:38] Whose standard? He judges by his own standard of righteousness, not ours.
[00:22:45] And the good thing is, he has revealed his standard of righteousness to us. So it's not like we're in the dark.
[00:22:52] Listen to these verses. Psalm 98, verse nine.
[00:22:57] For he cometh to judge the earth with righteousness. Shall he judge the world and the people with equity. Psalm. I'm sorry. Proverbs 31 nine. Open thy mouth and judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. John 724. Judge not. Jesus says, according to appearance, to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment. The key factor in judgment is righteousness, and that is the key factor in God's judgment.
[00:23:29] Now look at verse number seven, if you would. Again, it says this, but the Lord shall endure forever. He hath prepared his throne for judgment. Now, when you think of a throne of judgment, what do you automatically think of?
[00:23:45] Hmm? What's that? Judgment. Exactly. You think of the final judgment, right? Revelation, chapter 20.
[00:23:53] Revelation, chapter 20. You think of that?
[00:23:57] Take a peek at psalm 96, if you would. I want to show you this. This is pretty interesting. Psalm 96, verse number 13.
[00:24:17] Or verse twelve.
[00:24:19] Psalm 90, 612. Let the field be joyful in all that is therein. Then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice before the Lord. Notice it says this. Look at it very carefully.
[00:24:32] For he cometh. Who's he?
[00:24:36] The Lord. That's Jehovah. Right? For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth.
[00:24:44] He shall judge the world with righteousness and the people with his truth. You notice this thing. He shall judge the world with righteousness. Is almost exactly quoted by Paul in acts 17. Talking to the Athenians, he says, speaking of Christ, he shall judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained.
[00:25:07] Paul basically quoted psalm 96 when he was preaching, and we didn't even know it.
[00:25:14] Now here's the thing about judgment in righteousness, and this is verse 13 here in psalm 96. It's talking about when Jesus comes.
[00:25:24] A lot of times we think of, and we talked about this when we went through our Sunday school series a long time ago on the coming of Christ, we think of the coming of Christ in terms of the rapture of the church, right? Where the Lord protects the church from judgment, right? But really, the coming of Christ in all of the Bible is more about judgment than it is about the church. The church is just kind of a side thing. He protects us from judgment. But this is what it's really about. In verse 13, he cometh to judge.
[00:25:58] Now, that should strike a little bit of fear in everyone that hears it. You know why? Because God is not judging according to our standard of righteousness. He's judging according to his own.
[00:26:12] He's not tipping his hat for anybody's standard of what they think is right and wrong.
[00:26:18] He doesn't care what you think is right and wrong. He doesn't care what I think is right and wrong. You see, his righteousness and his judgment is based on his very own character, right? All morality is supposed to be based on God's character at its core.
[00:26:33] When God comes to judge, there's gonna be a lot of people who thought everything was good, what they were doing was okay, and it's not right.
[00:26:43] And there's gonna be a lot of people thinking that what they were doing was good, and God's gonna say it wasn't good because God judges by his own standard. This is what gets people so messed up back in psalm 96 there. I'll just read it very quickly. One little mortal tidbit there.
[00:27:10] It says this, for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth. He shall judge the world with righteousness and the people with. What's that say? His truth, not my truth. Not your truth. You know, that's the thing. My truth.
[00:27:25] He'll use his own character, his own standard to judge.
[00:27:31] God is a God of judgment. Look back in our psalm number nine. Look at verse five.
[00:27:41] It says this. Thou hast rebuked the heathen. Thou hast destroyed the wicked. Thou hast put out their name forever and ever. O thou enemy. Destructions are come to a perpetual end. And thou hast destroyed cities. Their memorial is perished with them. But the Lord shall endure forever. He hath prepared his throne for judgment, and he shall judge the world in righteousness and shall minister judgment to the people in uprightness. Now, while you're there, look at verse number 15.
[00:28:07] Notice the heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made. Notice the word heathen.
[00:28:14] Verse 17.
[00:28:16] The wicked shall be turned into hell. And all the nations that forget God, that's the same as the word heathen. It means the same thing.
[00:28:25] Verse number 19. Arise, o Lord. Let not man prevail. Let the. What's the word? Heathen be judged in thy sight. Verse 20. Put them in fear, Lord, that the nations.
[00:28:37] Now, this is a.
[00:28:39] Verses five through eight have.
[00:28:46] Maybe it's best if I show you verse six.
[00:28:50] O thou enemy.
[00:28:51] Destructions are come to a perpetual end, and thou hast destroyed cities. Pause there. Now, David's writing. Who are these enemies, you think? In the context?
[00:29:05] Okay, we don't know exactly, but you're on the right track. Right?
[00:29:10] When David talks about the heathen in this and the wicked and the nations and his enemies in this passage, he uses those terms interchangeably. Now, I just want you to help you understand this kind of. This understanding of the psalms.
[00:29:29] Picture yourself as David in the kingdom, right? Your kingdom. You worship the true God, right? That is your national God, the nation next to you. The Philistines, has a God. Their God is.
[00:29:44] Was it.
[00:29:46] Was it Dagon? That's it. I get him confused. Sorry, I don't have my God's memorized.
[00:29:55] The Philistines are not Jews. They're the nations. They're the heathen. Right.
[00:30:00] But they have their own God too. You remember in the battle between David and Goliath.
[00:30:06] You remember that Goliath stood up and he cursed David by. What does it say? By his gods.
[00:30:17] This is a lot different sounding than christian vocabulary we're used to, is it not?
[00:30:25] Here's what I'm trying to show you.
[00:30:29] This is a, you might say, a dispensational text of scripture. So when David talks about his enemies, he is actually referring to the neighboring nations who are enemies with Israel.
[00:30:42] He calls them wicked, he calls them heathen. And we think, oh, man. Well, that's not very nice. I mean, they're just trying to live. No, no, no. It was more than that. You see, they lived under their false gods, and they counted Israel as enemies. And they wanted not only to destroy Israel, they wanted to destroy Israel and Israel's God. You see? So the whole, like, the whole framework for the way that they viewed spirituality was different. If you wanted to approach the Lord, if you wanted to approach the true God, you had to do it by means of Israel, right?
[00:31:14] You remember Ruth. You remember Rahab. These are ladies who were not of Israel. But when they approached Israel, when they approached God, they did so through the nation with which God had his covenant, Israel.
[00:31:32] Now, why am I saying all this? I just want you to understand from David's, perspective. He viewed those enemies not only as national enemies. In America, we neatly divide our enemies, but we understand they're not. We have political problems between us. But that was not the case at this time in history. In God's economy back then, is when he viewed those nations. He called those nations wicked because they were wicked.
[00:31:58] They worshiped false gods, and as a result, they were very immoral and wicked, and they hated God's people, and they hated the God of Israel also. So it wasn't just a national thing. It was also a spiritual thing. It was together.
[00:32:13] That's not the way it is for us. Right? We understand we're Americans, but we understand that's a. That's different. You know, there's people in Iran and North Korea, even though those might be enemy nations with the United States, they're not our enemy, right? As a christian, they're christians there. That's not the way it was here.
[00:32:32] So he uses the term enemy and heathen in interchangeable ways.
[00:32:46] But in verse number seven, look what it says.
[00:32:49] He talks about how God judges the nations. And then in verse seven and eight, he says, but the Lord shall endure forever. He hath prepared his throne for judgment. He shall judge the world in righteousness and shall minister judgment to the people in uprightness. So, okay, so listen now. So in the context of David and his enemies, remember, he didn't view those enemies as just national enemies. He viewed them as the enemies of God, right? Russia is not an enemy.
[00:33:17] Might be an enemy or an adversary of the United States, but Russia is not the enemy of God because it's an enemy of the United States. Do you understand that? There are God's people in Russia, right?
[00:33:28] You understand? So you can't. What I'm saying is you can't apply these things to us like that, right?
[00:33:37] But in this economy, at this period in time, this is exactly how it was. It was a theocracy. God was king of Israel, you know, from Moses on down through the. Through the. Through the time, you know, and so that's why God sent them out to war. That's why he viewed them as enemies. Goliath was their enemy because he was also an enemy of God. At the same time, this was the way God had set it up in the nation of Israel. Now you come to the New Testament, it's completely different.
[00:34:06] You have people of all nations that are all in this body of Christ, right, that have put their faith in Jesus. That's totally different. That's totally different.
[00:34:16] But how does this matter to you and me.
[00:34:20] You see, in verse eight, he extends the enemies and the judgment of God. So you could talk about God's going to judge these nations because they're coming against goddess people, Israel, right? You follow what I'm saying? So David, many times in the psalms, asked God to judge his enemies because they're coming to fight against God's people, Israel. Now, they were God's people, remember? They were God's people by birth, not like us.
[00:34:46] And so they coming to attack Israel was coming to attack God's people, God's heritage. And so David prayed against his enemies, destroy them and all those things. Okay?
[00:34:58] And then he extends it out in verse number eight to not only that, but he says he shall judge the world.
[00:35:06] So he took that truth and he extends it out not only to God judging them in the battle, right? Because they're fighting against the Lord, but judging all the nations. And this is where we get what we might call New Testament truth, that God will judge the nations.
[00:35:25] So how does this apply to us? Because I've described everything being so much different than it is with us.
[00:35:32] See, with us, the nations. In the psalms, it references people who are unbelievers, right? The wicked, it's not without regard to their national heritage, their national origin. It references their relation to God. It references their relation to God. Here's what I mean. I'm hurrying to the end here.
[00:35:55] We'll go on down. I'm going to skip a bunch of stuff. But look at verse 17.
[00:36:02] The wicked shall be turned into hell and all the nations that forget God.
[00:36:10] You see why he says that? All the nations that forget God because they were surrounded by nations who had false gods and they hated Israel and Israel's God. You see, that's the way they viewed it.
[00:36:23] But notice what the Lord says.
[00:36:26] Those who are turned into hell, the wicked and the nations that forget God are turned into hell not just because of their sin, but because of their relation to goddess, the nations that forget God. Spurgeon had an excellent. He had a paragraph here I want to read to you. It says this on this psalm. He says this. How solemn is the 17th verse, especially in its warning to forgetters of God. The moral who are. Listen now. The moral who are not devout, the honest who are not prayerful, the benevolent who are not believing, the amiable who are not converted. These must all have their portion with the openly wicked in the hell which is prepared for the devil and his angels. Think about that.
[00:37:16] They go to hell not because of, not, not because of their gross immorality. But because of their relation to God, they forgot him.
[00:37:28] He could forgive them for all the sin, but they forgot him.
[00:37:34] Right? What sin can the Lord not forgive? Right?
[00:37:39] But if you reject Christ, you've rejected the source of forgiveness.
[00:37:43] Right? That's why he that hath a son hath life. He that hath not the son of God hath not life.
[00:37:52] And then we get to the end here. Just to hasten to close, he says in verse number 20. Put them in fear, o Lorde. That the nations may know themselves to be but men. Again, we're talking about the nations. You imagine, the Philistines. They're like our gods. We are like gods. We can destroy Israel and take their land. That's the way they think. That's the way they thought. It was closely associated with their religion, with their spirituality.
[00:38:17] And the Lord's like, lord. Put them in fear. Make them to see that they're nothing but Mendez.
[00:38:24] That they're not supernatural. They don't have unlimited power. You think of those Egyptians and the soothsayers and the magicians that did miracles with Moses. You think of that, right? They thought they were godlike. Their pharaoh was like a God.
[00:38:44] So God had to show him what? When he killed the firstborn? He had to show them that he was just a man.
[00:38:51] You see how all that ties together? Show them that they are but men. And, you know, there's a little bit of mercy in this verse. As much as there's talk of enemies and that kind of thing. It's a little bit of mercies. You know why?
[00:39:04] Because if at last, finally. They do see themselves as men.
[00:39:09] And they see their gods are no gods.
[00:39:12] Maybe, just maybe. They'll seek after the true God.
[00:39:19] Show them in verse 20. He doesn't ask them for destruction.
[00:39:24] He says, make them afraid.
[00:39:27] That's far better in destruction. I would say so. That they see themselves to be but men. The fear of God will put a man or a woman in a right place to respond to the Lord.
[00:39:41] Let's pray together.
