His Love Endures Forever Psalm 118 December 29, 2013 On the back page of your bulletin, Ada printed a list she found of the top ten most-read Bible verses of 2013. And the most interesting to me were #1 and #10: Psalm 23 was the most-read passage of the year. To me, Psalm 23 represents life as it SHOULD be: The Lord is my Shepherd, I have everything I need. I m lying down in green pastures and walking beside the quiet waters, Sure, there are some enemies around, but my table is FULL and my cup is OVERFLOWING. God is good and life is great! That s the way we imagine life should always be for us as Christians, isn t it?! But James 1 was the 10 th most-read passage, and it s there, I suspect, because it represents what life is really like for most of us! Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance We may NOT consider it pure joy, but we re trying to make sense of it! So, we re HOPING for green pastures, but in the meantime, we re trying to figure out all the brick walls and weeds and thorns all the trials that life is throwing our way! I say all this by way of introduction to Psalm 118, which, in some ways, COMBINES both Psalm 23 and James 1. It begins and ends with exuberant praise to God: Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever, but in between, it gives a pretty down-to-earth appraisal of how life works on the street: Enemies lurk and things go wrong, but in the end somehow God manages to WIN! And, again, I love how true-to-life the Psalms manage to be. 1
Psalm 23 is STILL TRUE! Especially when we remember the part about God being with us in the deepest, darkest valleys But so is Psalm 118 God is good and his faithful love sticks with us even when life is NOT so good! It s a great New Years lesson! But what made Psalm 118 really LIVE for me as I re-read it last Monday was thinking about when it was written. Psalm 118 and, indeed, nearly ALL the Psalms at the end of the book are almost certainly what scholars call post-exilic Psalms. That is, they were written after Israel had returned from that 70-year exile in Babylon. And if you read it with that history in mind, it s like NEON LIGHTS come on when you read the words, Give thanks to the Lord, his love endures FOREVER! I ve included an insert in your bulletins with a simple diagram of Israel s history. The diagram is not original with me, but I ve had it so long, I don t remember where I got it! But if you look at the annotations on the right, you can follow the progress of Israel s history first as an extended family (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), then as a kind of confederation of tribes (Moses, the Exodus, and the Judges) and then as a small kingdom (David and Solomon). But notice that after Solomon dies, the kingdom DIVIDES into Judah (on the left) and Israel (on the right). Israel (which consisted of the 10 northern tribes) had no godly kings and in 722 BC, as a direct punishment from God, the Assyrians carry off a great number of the people, and Israel as a nation ceases to exist. Those people never return to the land and simply assimilate into the cultures of the places where they were taken. Judah (along with Benjamin), the two southern tribes, have a mixture of good and bad kings, so God puts up with them a bit longer. But eventually, God allows the Babylonians to conquer them. They, too, take people into captivity in three separate waves, culminating in 586 BC when Jerusalem is sacked and the temple is destroyed. 2
It is easily the lowest possible point in Israel s history, and those who survived must have wondered if God had totally forsaken them. One of the most poignant Psalms to come out of that experience was Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. for there our captors asked us for songs, [but] How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land? So, here were the people of God, living in exile far from home in a foreign land, despairing of ever seeing their homeland again! And knowing that they had been exiled not so much because Babylon had a better ARMY than they But because their God their HOLY God was disciplining them for their unfaithfulness and sin. He was punishing them because they had for so long ignored the prophets He had sent who called them to return to Him and they had gone their own way, convinced somehow that God would ignore their disobedience. So these exiled Jews were not just living in a God-forsaken PLACE, they literally felt as though God had forsaken THEM! That He was DONE with them! But, of course, God had NOT forgotten them. He was NOT done with them! In an unimaginable historical surprise, the Babylonian Empire (which had seemed so impregnable and eternal) fell to the Medo-Persians, and King Cyrus gave the Jews permission and even the funds to return home and rebuild their temple! It was an incredible historical turn-around. And Psalm 118 captures some of the WONDER that people felt. With all that history in mind, I simply want to go through a few of these verses so you can see how well they fit into that setting, and then I ll try and tie it all together for us today. It begins (vs. 1), Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures FOREVER. It s not just that God is good, or that He loves us but that His LOVE keeps loving us! Look at the next three verses: Let ISRAEL say, His love endures forever. Let the house of AARON say, His love endures forever. Let those who fear the Lord say, His love endures forever! 3
Can you BELIEVE it! Despite all we ve DONE, despite all we ve BEEN THROUGH, God still loves us!! In vs. 5, I was in ANGUISH I was ready to give up but God set me FREE! And the lesson he draws from that: The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid. What can MAN do to me? And what a great lesson! When we fear GOD (in the sense of that holy, awesome trust), we don t have to be afraid of PEOPLE! But maybe we can feel secure if we have the STRONGEST ARMY and the MOST ADVANCE WEAPONRY in the whole world? Isn t that a good description of the United States today? I have the greatest respect for our Armed Forces, and I am in AWE of what they can do. But BABYLON was the superpower of it s day, and look what happened to them. Apparently, (vs. 8), It s better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. It s better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes. I wonder sometimes, where OUR faith really is. Vs. 15 is almost like a YouTube video of the people returning to Jerusalem: Shouts of joy and victory resound in the tents of the righteous: The Lord s right hand has done mighty things. [vs. 19] Open for me the gates of righteousness [because, of course, the actual gates of the city had been destroyed by Babylonian armies!] I will enter and give thanks to the Lord! And Vs. 22 27 resonate with us today in so many ways: The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Later in vs. 25 they sing, Lord, save us! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! As those Jews sang this song, they were singing of the nation of Israel: It was a piddling and unimportant 10 th -rate country, hardly worthy of the name, nation, and the empire-builders of the ancient world ran all over it. It wasn t even worthy of negotiating with! 4
But the God of Israel RESTORED it! He made it the CAPSTONE the centerpiece of the nations! At least that s what the Jews SANG! But DID God make Israel a capstone among the nations? Israel never attainted any standing as a world power far from it. Throughout the rest of her history she was subject to whatever power happened to be in control at that particular moment. So, how could she be, in any sense, the CAPSTONE of the nations?? Well, as our New Testament lesson reminds us, Jesus quotes from this Psalm in His Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. The Lord, Save Us, of Psalm 118 is the Hosanna of Matthew 21! Israel as a nation would never be great in the eyes of the world, but as we have just celebrated she would give birth to a KING of Kings who would rule the nations. But even that King as we now know would begin in humiliation before He returns in glory and triumph. So, as we approach this New Year of 2014, I hope you will take this great Psalm with you. I hope you will etch in your hearts the truth that God s love for you endures forever. Despite what you may have done or may yet do despite what trials life throws your way He is good; his love endures forever! And I hope you will remember that your ultimate hope is in no one else or nothing else but Jesus. Not in the world s strongest ARMY. Not in how much MONEY you have squirreled away. Not in how SECURE you feel about the future. Not in whether one political party or the other is running the show! My hope is built on nothing less than JESUS blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on JESUS name! Rev. Robert Smallman Bible Presbyterian Church (Presbyterian Church in America) 1605 Highway G Merrill, WI 54452 www.biblepreschurch.org 5