Have you ever felt as if everything is against you? As if everything you touch goes wrong? As if you’re experiencing difficulties from which there is no way out? Felt the pressure of people who are determined to stand in your way and make your life difficult, and you’re just powerless to clear your own path?
I know some of you have been there, because you’ve shared that with me. I’ve certainly been there.
It can be a black place to be, hemmed in, with others deliberately making things difficult.
What makes it worse is that you start to question your own faith. Normally, as a Christian, you’d lean on God to see you through those times. But eventually you start to doubt whether God will step in to intervene. And once you start to feel that even God has forgotten you, you’re in a black place indeed.
If you have ever felt like that, you’re not alone. You’re in good company. The great king David, who ruled over Israel about 1000 BC knew what that felt like. And Jesus of Nazareth knew what that felt like too.
We’re learning how to pray at the 10.30 service at the moment. We’re working our way through the first few psalms in the book of Psalms. The whole Bible is God’s word to us. But the Psalms also contains our words to God – they’re songs and prayers for the people of God. They’re God giving us words to use to speak to him.
So they’re very precious as we learn to pray. If we get to know the psalms, and drink them in deeply, the words we use instinctively will be words in tune with God’s own heart.
Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 were introductory. They helped us get our approach to life right as we come to pray. If you missed the sermon on either of those, they’re on our website.
Today we come to the first proper psalm – the first one that’s actually a prayer to God.
If you look at the top of the psalm, you’ll see there’s a heading. The editors of our English Bibles regularly insert headings to help us find our way around. They’re not part of the text. They’re not divinely inspired. So we don’t normally read them. But in the Psalms you often have an italicised heading. That is part of the original text.
Ours reads: “A psalm of David. When he fled from his son Absalom.” That tells us who wrote the psalm – king David. And it tells you when he wrote it. He had to flee Jerusalem because his own son tried to steal the throne. More and more of the city allied itself with Absalom, and he just got out in time.
But as I say, this is the first proper psalm. It comes at the head of the book of Psalms, and most of it is not tied at all to that original context. It’s there as a prayer for the people of God whenever they feel hemmed in and trapped, hunted and abandoned.
We’re going to divide the psalm into 3 sections. If you look at the end of verse 2, you’ll see there’s a footnote in the Bible, letter ‘b’. Look at the bottom of the page, and it says: “The Hebrew has Selah (a word of uncertain meaning) here and at the end of verses 4 and 8.”
Nobody knows what that word means, which is why our Bibles don’t translate it at all. But it is probably some kind of musical notation. A place to pause, or change key, or something like that. And more often than not, psalms divide nicely into sections where you get those Selah markers.
So we’ll look at 1-2, 3-4 and 5-8. And each section has a different focus.
1-2 focusses on the enemies.
3-4 focusses on God.
And 5-8 focusses on David’s response.
The Enemies: Many and Malicious
First then, verses 1-2. The enemies: many and malicious. The enemies: many and malicious.
As I say, they are many. “Lord, how many are my foes!”.
Not only many, but malicious: “How many rise up against me!” They’re not just many. They’re rising up, causing trouble, opposing David.
Most wounding of all is not actually what they do. It’s what they say. “Many are saying of me, ‘God will not deliver him.’” “He’s hung you out to dry, David. You’re waiting for a rescue, but nobody’s coming.”
Picture the hopelessness of the mountaineer who has a fall down a gully. They left detailed route plans and timings before they left, so that if they didn’t return, help could be called. But as the hours pass and darkness falls, despair sets in. They stop listening for the helicopter. “Nobody’s coming to get me!”
It’s not that God does not exist. It’s not that God does not rescue. David and his opponents probably agreed that there is a rescuing God out there. The emphasis here is on the word “him”. God will not deliver him.
Those words sting. “Many are saying of me”. The word there is the word for someone’s inner being. The real them. The words strike to the core of David’s being. He is shaken to his core beliefs. His core identity is being undermined. To the core of his being he trusts in God. The suggestion that his God has abandoned him really hurts. It stings.
It’s important to notice that it’s what they say that hurts the most. Otherwise we might find this a hard psalm to relate to. Not many of us have served in the armed forces, and know what it is to be opposed by a physical, military, enemy. But many of us have felt the jibe that nobody will come to our rescue, whatever the crisis was that we needed rescuing from. It’s that feeling of people against you, and that feeling of being abandoned by God, that this psalm picks up.
Jesus knew the Psalms well. He’d have been taught to pray them as a boy. On the cross, we know he prayed Psalm 22. And we can well hear him praying this psalm.
As Jesus hung on the cross, the priests and teachers of the law tormented him with these words, Matthew 27, verse 43: “He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him.”
There was Jesus. Many rising against him. The Jewish religious leaders. The Roman civil leaders. The crowds. And these were the words that sting: “Let God rescue him now if he wants him.” There’s the doubt to lodge in Jesus’ mind. Does God want him?
“Many are saying of me, ‘God will not deliver him.’”
The enemies: many and malicious.
God: Restoring and Responding
Then we move into verses 3 and 4. The focus is now not the enemies. The focus is God himself. Verse 3 opens with the words “But you”. So much for those who rise against me. Now let’s talk about you, Lord.
Verses 1 and 2: The enemies: many and malicious.
Verses 3 and 4: God: restoring and responding. God: restoring and responding.
God is a God who restores. “But you, Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, the One who lifts my head high.”
God is described in 3 ways in this verse, and each one is more wonderful, more fully formed, than the one before.
A shield keeps you safe. If you’re under attack, that’s a pretty good minimum. God is a special kind of shield. He is a shield around you. Complete wrap-around care, protects you on every side. No real shield does that. With God you are completely safe, whatever comes against you.
But more than that, he is your glory. David’s dignity had been undermined. When his enemies’ words struck to the core of his being, he lost any sense that he was a human being with a valuable contribution to make. But God restores that. There is no greater glory, no greater dignity, than to be a servant of the Living God. God does not just keep David safe. He is his glory.
And then, better still, he lifts his head high. The person who’s on a complete downer, who has no self-esteem, cannot lift their head high. They walk with head drooped. They avoid eye contact. Until God restores them. And then he gently lifts your head back until you’re looking straight ahead. “Better?”, he says.
God is a God who restores. He turns David from someone vulnerable to attack, robbed of his dignity, no self-esteem, into somebody protected on all sides, honoured to have his identity in the Lord his God, who can walk with head held high.
Restoring.
And responding.
Verse 4: “I call out to the Lord, and he answers me from his holy mountain.” David reminds himself of his regular habit. He calls out to the Lord. Literally calls out, out loud. He vocalises his prayers.
But this section is not about David, it’s about God. And God’s regular habit is to answer.
And the answer comes from God’s holy mountain. That’s where the temple was in Jerusalem. That’s the place David could no longer visit, since he’d had to flee as king. But it’s still where David’s answer comes from. Even in exile, even when God’s king no longer rules in Jerusalem, even then God’s answer comes, and it comes from his holy mountain.
This is the God we have. A God who restores, and a God who responds when we call upon him.
And now that Jesus has come, this God is our God all the more.
In Jesus, we have a God who restores. He’s our shield. He keeps us safe. Paul said in Romans 8: “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” Jude closes his letter with praise to the God who is “able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy”.
But he does not just protect us. He restores our honour, our dignity, our humanity. He invites us to come up higher than we belong; he makes us sons of his Father in heaven, and his own brothers. And when Simon Peter did fall, the Lord Jesus lovingly restored him.
But in Jesus we also have the God who answers, who responds. From his holy mountain. Because we no longer need to go to the city of Jerusalem to pray. The Lord Jesus is the place where God lives on the earth, and the Spirit of Jesus lives in the hearts of every believer. So it is that Jesus can promise his disciples, and he can promise us “Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.”
In the Lord Jesus, David’s God is our God. We have a God who restores. And we have a God who responds to us.
Our Response: Calm and Calling on the Lord
So that’s verses 1 and 2: The enemies: many and malicious.
Verses 3 and 4: God: restoring and responding. God: restoring and responding.
Then lastly, verses 5 to 8: Our response: calm and calling on the Lord. Our response: calm and calling on the Lord.
The focus turns to David himself. Verse 3, “but you”.
Verse 5 starts emphatically, “but I”.
Each verse gives one part of David’s response to his God. One part of our response to our God.
Verse 5: Calm sleep. “I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me.”
He’s fled the city. His enemies are plotting. So David goes to bed and sleeps like a baby. Sure enough, he doesn’t die in his sleep, he wakes up again. He doesn’t have to be awake every hour. God has things in hand. God is watching over him, even while he sleeps.
Do you ever find that anxiety costs you sleep? I do. If I’m worried about something, I sometimes wake in the middle of the night thinking about it, and it takes me ages to go back to sleep. My worst was to get 2 hours sleep all night.
Verse 5 paints a beautiful picture. Knowing God is on our side means we can sleep soundly in the midst of chaos. Something Jesus exhibited beautifully as he slept through a lethal storm.
Calm sleep.
Then verse 6: No fear. “I will not fear though tens of thousands assail me on every side.” There are echoes back to the first verse. The many have become tens of thousands. The “rise up against me” has become “assail me on every side”. But David knows he has a God who restores and responds. So he refuses to fear.
Calm sleep. No fear. Then call on the Lord. Verse 7: “Arise, Lord! Deliver me, my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked.”
He cries out to his God to intervene and help. And what he asks matches both his need and the taunt of his enemies.
So, verse 1, many rise up against him. Verse 7, “Arise”.
Verse 2, “God will not deliver him”. Verse 7, “Deliver me, my God”.
But the deliverance he asks for may startle us, and may feel a little uncomfortable.
“Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked.”
If we’re here to learn how to pray, praying for God to smash the teeth of our enemies may not be what we were expecting. After all, Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. But this is probably not what he meant by praying for them!
There are two things to remember here.
The first is that this is a picture from the natural world. It’s a scene you might see played out on National Geographic. A predator grabs a small animal and runs off with it in its jaws. Lunchtime.
It’s a scene David would have been familiar with. Remember the battle between David and Goliath. David, the little shepherd boy, had to convince King Saul that he was the one to go into battle on behalf of the nation. And he says this to Saul: “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth.”
If the predator has a sheep in its jaws, you need to strike its jaw and break its teeth to rescue it.
David is the hunted. The oppressed. It’s bigger than that. It’s not just that David has some personal enemies. David is God’s chosen king. So those who oppose his rule are called “the wicked” in verse 7.
In a broken world where people are cruel and oppressive, they need to be dealt with in order for others to be rescued. The focus here is not on being vindictive. This is about rescuing sheep from the mouth of the lion.
We have a phrase in English that someone is harmless as a toothless tiger. That’s the picture here. These vicious people have been rendered toothless.
The second thing to remember is that David prays to God to act. So this is not David taking revenge on his own enemies. In fact, if you know the story, Absalom his son did die in battle. But David had not ordered it, and David wept and wept when he learned what had happened. David is not vengeful and neither should we be. We leave things to God. And that is precisely what David does in this psalm.
So 3 angles to David’s response to his God, in this situation with these enemies.
Calm sleep.
No fear.
Call on the Lord to act.
Conclusion: Deliverance from the Lord
This psalm tackles that desperate feeling that our God will not intervene to help us. That whatever the crisis is, God will not deliver us.
The psalm ends with a fantastic triumphant verse that proclaims that God does stand with his people and deliver them.
Verse 8: “From the Lord comes deliverance. May your blessing be on your people.”
So many enemies. Not just the seasons when it feels the world is against us. Above all our own sin, and the suffering and death that causes.
In the Lord Jesus, we have a God who restores, who protects, who dignifies, who lifts our heads, who sees us in our misery, who hears, who answers.
So like David, we can sleep, we can refuse to give into fear, we can bring our cares before the Lord.
Our God is a delivering God. Deliverance belongs to him. Day by day he delivers us from all kinds of things. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God has acted to deliver us. One day, Jesus will return. He will smash the jaws of everything that is wrong and oppressive in this world. We his people will be delivered.
There is no greater blessing than to be numbered amongst the people of God. To be one of those who has put their trust in the Lord Jesus, who has made the Great Deliverer into their deliverer.
As King David took refuge in God when surrounded by enemies. As the Lord Jesus took refuge in God when surrounded by enemies. So we can take our refuge in God. And we can prove for ourselves that verse 2 is a lie. “God will not deliver him.”
Instead we live in the world of verse 8: “From the Lord comes deliverance. May your blessing be on your people.”