Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: The following is a legacy recording from the archives of the C.S. lewis Institute. While the audio quality of these recordings may vary, the content remains vital to the mission of the institute to develop disciples who can articulate, defend, and live faith in Christ through personal and public life.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Our psalm this Morning is Psalm 22, and I invite you to turn with me to the famous 22nd Psalm.
It's the psalm of david.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer by night and am not silent.
Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One. You are the praise of Israel.
In you our fathers put their trust. They trusted and you delivered them.
They cried to you and were saved.
[00:01:25] Speaker C: In you they trusted and were not disappointed.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people.
All who see me mock me. They hurl incense, shaking their heads. He trusts in the Lord.
[00:01:46] Speaker C: Let the Lord rescue him.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.
You brought me out of the womb.
You made me trust in you even at my mother's breast.
From birth I was cast upon you. From my mother's womb. You have been my God.
Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.
Many bulls surround me. Strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. Roaring lions tear their prey open their mouths wide against me.
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax. It has melted away within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You lay me in the dust of death.
Dogs have surrounded me. A band of evil men has encircled me. They have pierced my hands and my feet.
I can count all my bones. People stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.
But you, O Lord, be not far off. All my strength come quickly to help me deliver my life from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs.
Rescue me from the mouth of the lion. Save me from the horns of the wild oxen.
I will declare your name to my brothers in the congregation. I will praise you, you who fear the Lord. Praise him all you descendants of Jacob. Honor him, revere him, all you descendants of Israel.
For he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one. He has not hidden his face from him, but has listened to his cry for help.
From you comes my praise. In the great assembly, before those who fear you will I fulfill my vows.
The poor will eat and be satisfied. They who seek the Lord will praise him. May your hearts live forever.
All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him. For dominion belongs to the Lord, and
[00:03:51] Speaker C: he rules over the nations.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: All the rich of the earth will feast and worship. All who go down to the dust will kneel before him.
Those who cannot keep themselves alive, posterity will serve Him. Future generations will be told about the Lord.
[00:04:08] Speaker C: They will proclaim his righteousness to a
[00:04:11] Speaker B: people yet unborn, for he has done it thus far. We've seen in the first message that in order to gain the high road of petition and praise and worship in the Psalter, we must have gone through the wicket gate of Psalm 1, which entails the regenerate heart, which entails salvation, so that one delights in the law of the Lord and in the Word
[00:04:43] Speaker C: of God, and meditates on it day and night.
For always in Scripture, ethics has priority over worship.
We must first be through the word of God.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: For if we are disobedient to the
[00:05:00] Speaker C: Word of God, he does not hear our prayers and has no use for our worship at all.
That is the whole prophetic statement.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: You might see 1st Samuel, chapter 15, where Samuel makes that point to Samuel, who was offering up his Saul, who was offering up his worship. But God would have none of it.
1st Samuel 15:22. Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord.
To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
For rebellion is like the sin of divination and arrogance, like the evil of idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of
[00:05:49] Speaker C: the Lord, he has rejected you as king.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: We deceive ourselves if we think that by our singing and our praying we
[00:05:58] Speaker C: please God if our hearts are not submissive to do his will.
It's interesting that in the giving of
[00:06:07] Speaker B: the law, first came the Ten Commandments, and then came the Book of the
[00:06:11] Speaker C: Covenant and all that was ratified before he ever gave them any worship. The tabernacle, the priesthood, and all the ritual of worship.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: And while he's giving that revelation of worship, when the people were down in the camp being rebellious down in the valley, God said to Moses, get down off the mountain.
[00:06:30] Speaker C: There's sin in the camp.
And all of our worship is meaningless unless we are submissive through the Holy Spirit to do the word of God.
We only deceive ourselves.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: We must be through the first psalm before we can gain the high road
[00:06:53] Speaker C: of petition and praise. In the rest of the psalter, yesterday
[00:06:59] Speaker B: morning we saw that the captain who leads us on this road of petition and praise is the King.
God had said to his king's son, ask of me, my son, and I'll give you the heathen for your inheritance, the ends of the earth for your possession.
And in the rest of the psalter we hear the king in prayer and the people in concert with their king, praying for the establishment of God's kingdom upon this earth.
We said, it's not just Mr. Everyman
[00:07:35] Speaker C: that's praying, it's the covenant community under the kingship of the Christ who is in prayer.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: And the human king David is only
[00:07:45] Speaker C: a shadow of his greater son, Jesus the Christ.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: We said, we might have thought that this kingdom, with this captain king would have come in on a balmy breeze,
[00:07:57] Speaker C: but quite the opposite.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: He finds himself constantly in the realm of the wicked, constantly in the realm of the enemy, constantly encircled by death in a hostile realm.
And it's in that context of evil
[00:08:18] Speaker C: and wickedness and darkness in which he
[00:08:22] Speaker B: prays to be delivered in order that God's name may be magnified and the kingdom of God might be established.
We saw yesterday that the crucial word of Psalm 3 is deliverance, that God will intervene and deliver his king and his people out of this realm of death.
[00:08:43] Speaker C: And he will do it because it is right, we said.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: Now it might have seemed that as soon as the king prays, the prayer is answered.
[00:08:58] Speaker C: But we would make a mistake if we thought that always when we prayed, there was an immediate answer to prayer.
Because often it's a very protracted period before the prayer is answered.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: One hears the motif throughout the psalmist. O Lord, how long?
How long must I go on?
[00:09:20] Speaker C: And in Psalm 6 he talks about, I make my bed to swim with tears, I dissolve my couch with weeping and the oriental hyperbole.
Psalm 22 is such a prayer.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: The king and his people are in
[00:09:41] Speaker C: crisis, and we'll see its messianic import as we go along.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: And when they pray to be delivered,
[00:09:50] Speaker C: there is apparently no answer to the prayer.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Anyone who faces life objectively with honesty must admit that there are times when the righteous suffer in the hands of
[00:10:10] Speaker C: wickedness and death, and when they pray to be delivered, there is apparently no answer to that prayer.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: While I was doing my doctoral work,
[00:10:25] Speaker C: I pastored a church we supported a
[00:10:29] Speaker B: missionary in the Congo, and we had heard that he had been taken captive by the guerrillas, by the Congolese rebels.
And we realized his life was in jeopardy.
[00:10:44] Speaker C: We prayed earnestly for his salvation on a Sunday morning.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: That Sunday night, we had heard over the radio the news broadcast that he had been released.
[00:10:56] Speaker C: And we celebrated as a church.
But the next day we heard that he had been incarcerated, incarcerated once again.
And then he was shot.
And that week we saw in the magazines pictures of him wallowing in his blood in the ground of Africa.
It was devastating to us as a church.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: We prayed for his deliverance, but there
[00:11:24] Speaker C: was apparently no answer to our prayer.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: That whole realm of the enemy and the wicked and death. The Bible has really two realms. There's the realm of darkness, chaos, confusion,
[00:11:40] Speaker C: death versus the realm of cosmos, order, life, prosperity.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Indeed, when you transferred from the realm of death into the realm of life, one went through a ritual.
For example, if you were in the realm of death with leprosy, when you were healed, there had to be the priest with the hyssop with the blood and the water that pronounced you from the realm of death into the realm of life.
That ritual symbolized that it was only through blood that you could come from one realm into the other realm.
Or, for example, if you came across
[00:12:20] Speaker C: a carcass in the field, you were
[00:12:22] Speaker B: in the realm of death. You were defiled. You did not belong to the temple of the living. And so you had to be sprinkled with the ashes of the red heifer, which symbolized your transference from the realm of the wicked and darkness and death
[00:12:34] Speaker C: into the realm of wholeness and life and cosmos and temple from chaos to cosmos.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: There are times when we're in the realm of death.
God allows us in that situation, and we pray to be delivered.
[00:12:52] Speaker C: And there's apparently no answer to our prayer.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Now we resolve this tension, for it is a tension to us.
We look for explanations, and all too
[00:13:05] Speaker C: often we don't find explanations.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: But one of the explanations we commonly give is that we're in the realm of death because of sin, and we find no deliverance because our lives are less than perfect.
[00:13:20] Speaker C: For even your faith isn't perfect, and that's why you're there.
That's as old as Eliphaz in Job
[00:13:30] Speaker B: chapter four and verse seven, with their simplistic answers to life.
[00:13:35] Speaker C: These who used the proverbs foolishly and didn't understand how to use them, Eliphaz says to Job, consider now who being innocent has ever perished?
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Where were the upright, ever destroyed?
I will admit, and I gladly, cheerfully want to teach, that it's the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man that avails much.
God does want integrity, as we said
[00:14:09] Speaker C: in the very beginning.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: James 5 familiar words to us.
16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.
The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.
[00:14:34] Speaker C: Again he prayed and the heavens gave rain and the earth produced its crops.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: I want to say it is the prayer of a righteous man that's powerful.
[00:14:47] Speaker C: But you cannot draw the conclusion that all our sufferings and our lack of deliverance is due to the lack of righteousness in our lives.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: A more sophisticated answer is that we pray and find no deliverance because we ask with wrong motives that indeed we really are living in the realm of death and we only want the pleasure in the realm of death. We want to only satisfy and gratify our own desires.
James understands that. And I agree that often prayer is not answered because we ask with wrong motives. James, Chapter four, verse one. What causes fights and quarrels among you?
[00:15:30] Speaker C: Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?
[00:15:35] Speaker B: You want something, but you don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want.
You quarrel and fight, you do not have because you do not ask God. And when you ask, you do not
[00:15:49] Speaker C: receive because you ask with wrong motives
[00:15:54] Speaker B: that you may spend what you get
[00:15:56] Speaker C: on your own pleasures.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: And I must admit that all too often I treat God like the genie in Aladdin's lamp.
And I bring out my magic rings of and I pray and stroke the lamp, hoping God will appear as a genie to meet my needs.
[00:16:18] Speaker C: But the truth is I see myself as the master and God as my servant.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: Rather than understanding.
[00:16:28] Speaker C: He is God and I am his servant.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: I have a totally wrong orientation in prayer. I'm at the center.
[00:16:38] Speaker C: God is serving me rather than God being at the center, sovereign over all, and I am serving him.
I must agree, there are times that I ask for answered prayer and my motives are wrong.
But I will still insist, and this
[00:16:57] Speaker B: psalm is the clearest example of it, that righteous men, by God's grace and
[00:17:03] Speaker C: women by God's grace, touched with the
[00:17:06] Speaker B: Spirit of God, pray highly, righteously motivated prayers for the kingdom of God.
[00:17:15] Speaker C: And when they pray to be delivered from death, they apparently find no answer to their prayer.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: A clear example of A righteous man
[00:17:30] Speaker C: praying a righteous prayer is our Psalm, Psalm 22. And there is apparently no answer to his prayer.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: The Psalm falls into three parts.
In the first section, as I would understand it, verses 1 through 10, we have a hymn of lament and confidence.
And as we shall see, there are two stanzas to this hymn where he
[00:18:04] Speaker C: moves from lament to confidence, as we discussed those motifs yesterday.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: In the second stanza, now 11 verses, but these stanzas are about equal.
Verses 11 through 21, we have the hymn of Lament and Petition.
And finally in the last 10 verses,
[00:18:31] Speaker C: we have the hymn of praise, verses 22 through 31. And you can see the motifs.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: You actually start out with the address
[00:18:39] Speaker C: My God, My God.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: But it goes from lament and confidence
[00:18:44] Speaker C: to lament and petition and finally to praise.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: Let us look first of all then at the hymn of lament or complaint
[00:18:56] Speaker C: and confidence in these two stanzas.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: In the first stanza, he complains that he is abandoned by God, as he,
[00:19:07] Speaker C: in Dr. Husson's term, that we all have learned in his omnivolence
[00:19:14] Speaker B: says it all before God in complete ventilation of his feelings and his emotions. I feel I am abandoned by God.
[00:19:24] Speaker C: Verses 1 and 2.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
[00:19:33] Speaker B: Why are you so far from saving me?
So far from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer by night and am not silent. That is to say, I pray constantly day and night.
I do not cease praying, but there's
[00:19:55] Speaker C: apparently no answer to my prayer.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: If you've read C.S. lewis grief observed, he describes his experience
[00:20:04] Speaker C: as he watched his wife while I die of cancer.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: And he says, there are times when I come to God as Jesus bid
[00:20:12] Speaker C: me to come, to ask and seek and to knock.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: And I knock on the door of prayer, hoping God would open the door and answer me.
But it's as though the door never opens.
[00:20:26] Speaker C: In fact, it's double locked. It's double bolted.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: As I thought about that. Yes, there are times when I come
[00:20:34] Speaker C: to God in prayer and I knock
[00:20:36] Speaker B: on the door that God would give me salvation and deliverance. There's no answer.
[00:20:42] Speaker C: And when I step back and I
[00:20:44] Speaker B: look upstairs, it's as though all the
[00:20:46] Speaker C: lights are out and nobody's at home.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Why are you so far from helping me?
[00:20:57] Speaker C: You could put your accent differently here.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: So far from the words of my groaning, oh my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer by night and am not sick.
And now, in the next three verses,
[00:21:10] Speaker C: he gives the confidence in the midst of this darkness, the light that will illuminate him and give him hope.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: In the midst of this apparent abandonment,
[00:21:20] Speaker C: namely God's past faithfulness to the fathers,
[00:21:25] Speaker B: yet you are enthroned as the Holy One.
You are the praise of Israel.
In you our fathers put their trust. They trusted and you delivered them. They cried to you and were saved. In you they trusted and were not disappointed.
And as so often in the Psalter,
[00:21:43] Speaker C: his memory serves as a handmaiden to
[00:21:47] Speaker B: his faith, and he reflects upon the wonderful history of God's people.
When God did hear and God did answer prayer, perhaps he would think of times like Abraham, who God said to Abraham that in you and in your seed.
And he had in mind there Sarah as well, a seed of promise. All the world would be blessed. And there was Sarah in Pharaoh's harem.
And the matriarchal seed was jeopardized, and Abraham was about to be killed.
[00:22:29] Speaker C: And he prayed and he found deliverance. And that happened three times, as you know, with the patriarchs.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: They found themselves. The matriarch found herself in the harem.
[00:22:41] Speaker C: The patriarch is in jeopardy. And God's sake might have thought about Moses, the deliverer of his people.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: All the male children were under an
[00:22:51] Speaker C: edict of death, yet God miraculously raised up a Moses.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: There was the time of David himself, when the Philistines, the uncircumcised, ungodly Philistines, had set up garrisons throughout the land. They eventually had defeated Israel.
And out of that nadir of hopelessness,
[00:23:11] Speaker C: David arose as a savior. In the midst of it.
It's a tremendous track record.
He looks back to the books of Genesis and Exodus and Joshua and Judges,
[00:23:27] Speaker B: and even up to his own lifetime,
[00:23:29] Speaker C: even as we do.
And that history is and encouragement to him.
God's past faithfulness sustains him.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: In the second stanza, he now laments not that he's abandoned by God, but that he's abandoned by men.
[00:23:51] Speaker C: Everybody laughs and scoffs at him for his childlike faith. In the midst of this trial, as
[00:23:58] Speaker B: in Psalm 3, God will not deliver him.
[00:24:01] Speaker C: They are cynical, despairing and unbelieving.
He says in verse six, three verses.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: But I am a worm and not a man. Scorned by men and despised by the people.
All who see me mock me. They hurl insults, shaking their heads.
He trusts in the Lord. Let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him. We see here that he's rejected by men, and they laugh at him for
[00:24:28] Speaker C: his childlike faith in the crisis. Let's see God deliver him.
There's apparently no answer to the prayer and the unbelieving rejoice now he finds
[00:24:42] Speaker B: his confidence in God's past faithfulness to him. He reflects upon his whole childhood experience. He was a covenantal child who had been taught from the womb how to
[00:24:53] Speaker C: trust and lean upon God.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: He had been raised in a godly home, and that background stands him in.
[00:24:59] Speaker C: In good stead at this point.
Verse 9.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Yet you brought me out of the womb, you made me trust in you, even at my mother's breast. He was nurtured and succoured in the whole realm of faith from birth. I was cast upon you from my mother's womb. You have been my God.
[00:25:19] Speaker C: And all of us, I think, to
[00:25:22] Speaker B: some extent, can look back upon God's
[00:25:25] Speaker C: past faithfulness to us.
As Art was talking last night about revival, I'd been sharing this with Amy and Ron that last year when I was out in the Liberal Presbyterian Church, I still remember those four Pentecostal ladies and a man who came an hour
[00:25:42] Speaker B: before the service and laid their hands on me. And they prayed that I'd be able
[00:25:47] Speaker C: to preach a sermon on justification.
And I must say, heaven came down in that sermon and people were blessed and touched.
And I knew the source of the strength of that sermon was the prayers of those ladies and that man.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: And those experiences in life sustain you.
[00:26:09] Speaker C: They encourage you. They stand behind you, encouraging us in
[00:26:13] Speaker B: our faith when we go through trials,
[00:26:16] Speaker C: when there's apparently no answer to our prayer.
That then is the hymn of confidence and lament. Abandoned by God, abandoned by men, yet trusting.
Because God, if you don't mind the jargon, has a great track record standing behind him, worthy of trust and faith.
Now comes the lament.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: He moves here in the lament section, in verses 12 through 18 and again two cycles.
He describes the wicked in zoomorphic terms. He likens them to animals.
[00:26:59] Speaker C: And then he will describe himself how he feels in the midst of it.
[00:27:05] Speaker B: Verses 12 and 13. He likens his enemy to bulls and to lions.
Many bulls surround me. Strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. That is, they are rich, strong, powerful, affluent.
They're like the fattest bulls on earth.
[00:27:27] Speaker C: But they're animalistic.
They have no feelings of tender mercy.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: They have no clear morality. They just titillate their appetites. They're like bulls in the field. All they do is eat and reproduce.
There's nothing more to them.
[00:27:44] Speaker C: They're insensitive to all that's Holy in it, beyond the physical.
They're more than bulls, they're lions.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: They're rapacious, they're strong, they're fierce, insensitively, cruel. They devour the wicked, roaring lions, tearing their prey open, their mouths wide against me.
[00:28:06] Speaker C: Then he describes how I am in the midst of. Of this.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: I'm like water poured out like water.
That is all. My bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax. It has melted away within me. That is, it's lost its firm, clear bead. It's palpitating rapidly. There's no real heartbeat left within me.
[00:28:30] Speaker C: My strength is dried up like a potsherd.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth as I'm going into the
[00:28:36] Speaker C: dust of death itself.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Then the second stanza here now he uses that these are not only powerful, rich, affluent in all that the world calls success, and they're strong and rapacious as a lion, but they're unclean, they're evil. This is the realm of darkness in which I find myself. This is wickedness personified. These are dogs, uncleanness in itself, all forms of perversion and immorality.
Dogs have surrounded me. It's a band of evil men has encircled me.
[00:29:10] Speaker C: They have pierced my hands and my feet.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: Then he describes himself.
[00:29:15] Speaker C: I can count all my bones. People stare and gloat over me in his ignominy and shame.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: They divide my garments among them and
[00:29:26] Speaker C: cast lots for my clothing.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: I think it's almost beyond dispute that
[00:29:35] Speaker C: we're hearing the prayers of Jesus here upon a cross.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: The language transcends David's experiences, so that David, in his sufferings and rejection and abandonment by God and abandonment by men, is not only a type of Christ upon the cross when he is abandoned by God and abandoned by men, but he uses vocabulary that transcends his own
[00:30:07] Speaker C: experience and finds a unique fulfillment in Christ upon the cross.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: So that the church has always felt and recognized we are hearing the prayer
[00:30:18] Speaker C: of Jesus upon the cross in his abandonment and his rejection.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: For example, if you look at the lament section, he seems to be dying
[00:30:30] Speaker C: in crucifixion, verse 14, I am poured
[00:30:35] Speaker B: out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.
Which, as I understand, is exactly what
[00:30:43] Speaker C: happens in crucifixion, that one actually dies by asphyxiation. It's a very cruel death that because
[00:30:54] Speaker B: you're hanging there, all the bones are out of joint and the whole diaphragmatic
[00:30:58] Speaker C: action of breathing is affected until eventually you can't breathe any longer.
His heartbeat is gone.
[00:31:08] Speaker B: And then, as a result of gasping for air.
He says, my strength is dried up like a potsherd. My tongue sticks to the roof of
[00:31:18] Speaker C: my mouth, which, as we call Jesus
[00:31:21] Speaker B: on the cross, is crying out.
[00:31:23] Speaker C: I thirst as he goes into the dust of death itself.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: If we go with the translations, he
[00:31:33] Speaker C: goes on to say, they pierced my heads and my feet, though there is something of a textual problem there.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: But I cannot escape that this individual
[00:31:45] Speaker C: is dying by crucifixion.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: And indeed all the accompanying circumstances are those of Jesus upon the cross.
For example, the words that introduce the SOB are the words of our Lord upon the cross as we hear them in Matthew chapter 27 and verse 46. Rama rama sa
[00:32:07] Speaker C: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Which was the words of Jesus as he prays these my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
[00:32:19] Speaker B: Why are you so far from saving me? And in that experience of apparently no answer to our prayers, Jesus identifies with
[00:32:28] Speaker C: us when we too feel like there's nobody upstairs.
Abandoned. He feels abandoned upon that cross, as we feel abandoned as well.
One almost hears the Messiah, or one
[00:32:46] Speaker B: does hear the Messiah in verse 8, which is quoted in Matthew 27:42. He trusts in the Lord, Let the Lord rescue him, let him deliver him, since he delights in him. And that's exactly what they hurled at
[00:32:57] Speaker C: Jesus upon the cross.
The capstone is in verse 18, picked up by John, which says, this is
[00:33:04] Speaker B: that Jesus experience at the cross is the fulfillment of this prophecy that divide
[00:33:10] Speaker C: my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: And In John chapter 19 and verse 24, John says that they did that to the garments and clothing of Jesus in fulfillment of this sacrifice.
When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four chairs, one for each of them, with the undergarment remaining. The garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to body. Let's not tear it, they said to one another. Let's decide by lot who will get it.
[00:33:44] Speaker C: This happened that the Scripture might be fulfilled, which said, they divided my garments among them and care slots for my clothing.
I take it then, that in its fulfillment this is the prayer of Jesus hanging upon the cross.
But there was apparently no answer to his prayer.
[00:34:09] Speaker B: For if you read the psalm he petitions in verses 19 through 21, but you, O Lord, be not far off. All my strength come quickly to help me deliver my life from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs. Rescue me from the mouths of the lions.
[00:34:25] Speaker C: Save me from the horns of the wild oxen.
[00:34:27] Speaker B: As he moves back through that whole
[00:34:29] Speaker C: zoomorphic imagery, going from dogs to lions to the wild oxen praying to be delivered.
But you and I know he died.
There was apparently no answer to his prayer, no deliverance. He went into death itself.
[00:34:51] Speaker B: Now, we respond to this in different ways. This reality that God doesn't answer prayer as we thought he would or should.
One way is to say God is
[00:35:01] Speaker C: as the unbelieving world is, that God is dead.
He really doesn't intervene.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: There is no God.
God is far from us. If there is a God.
I told you last year about the
[00:35:14] Speaker C: rabbi who had memorized the entire scripture.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: He had become an atheist. What made him an atheist? He said to me he had gone
[00:35:20] Speaker C: through all the Hitler programs. He said to me, bruce, if you had been there, as I was, and
[00:35:27] Speaker B: you had heard the prayers of the
[00:35:28] Speaker C: Jews for deliverance, and you saw us go into death, you too would be an atheist.
You too would not believe God is dead.
Christians haven't drawn that conclusion.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: Christians have subliminally drawn a different conclusion.
[00:35:48] Speaker C: Nobody says it, but our practice betrays it. We've drawn the conclusion God is deaf.
We don't come to prayer meetings. We don't gather for prayer.
You have to have a Bible study to attract people, some kind of testimony,
[00:36:05] Speaker B: something to excite us. But prayer, how boring can you get?
[00:36:11] Speaker C: We really don't take it seriously. So I put it very crassly that subliminally we've concluded God is deaf. He really doesn't answer.
Our psalmist did not draw that conclusion.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: Our psalmist drew the conclusion God hears. God answers prayer. If you look at 2224, for example,
[00:36:32] Speaker C: addressing the community of f faith, he
[00:36:36] Speaker B: has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one. He has not hidden his face from
[00:36:41] Speaker C: him, but has listened to his cry for help.
How can that be?
I think the only plausible answer is that God answered his prayer in resurrection from the dead.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: The whole logic of the psalm demands is Christ going to a cross, but his prayer is heard and answered. Not this side of the grave, of which is only a shadow along the
[00:37:09] Speaker C: trail, but it's heard beyond the grave, which is the fate of all true believers.
[00:37:18] Speaker B: We've all been influenced far more by wealth and prosperity who want the kingdom now without the grave and death and the cross without understanding.
[00:37:29] Speaker C: The hope of the believer lies in a certain future, a bright tableland that lies even beyond the black gorge of death itself.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: Hebrews, chapter two. If you look at how the praise begins in verse 22, I will declare your name to my brothers in the congregation. I will praise you. That section of the Psalm 2 is identified as the words of Jesus, as you know, in Hebrews chapter 2 and verse 12.
[00:37:58] Speaker C: If you wish to just confirm that where the New Testament interprets the praise as also the praise of Jesus, Hebrews
[00:38:07] Speaker B: chapter 2 and verse 12.
[00:38:10] Speaker C: Well, beginning verse 10.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.
Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. He says, I will declare your name to my brothers.
[00:38:36] Speaker C: In the presence of the congregation, I will sing your praises.
[00:38:42] Speaker B: So this praise is the praise of
[00:38:44] Speaker C: Jesus in part to the community of faith.
[00:38:49] Speaker B: He does exceedingly, abundantly, above all that
[00:38:54] Speaker C: we ask or think.
[00:38:56] Speaker B: We want to dictate the time of salvation, we want to dictate the manner of salvation.
[00:39:03] Speaker C: But he does beyond what we ask or we think, and it lies in a certain future, in this case, in a future that outlasts death itself.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: The hymn of praise falls into two parts, five verses. He addresses the community of faith, assuring them that God hears and God answers prayer. So be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in
[00:39:31] Speaker C: the work of the Lord.
Verses 22 through 26. As he addresses the brothers and the sisters, I will declare your name to my brothers in the congregation.
[00:39:46] Speaker B: I will praise you, you who fear
[00:39:49] Speaker C: the Lord, that's us.
[00:39:52] Speaker B: Praise him all you descendants of Jacob, that's us.
Because we are in Christ, who is Jacob and Israel.
We have been baptized into his body,
[00:40:06] Speaker C: so that we are the seed of Jacob in Christ.
We are the true in that sense, Israel.
[00:40:15] Speaker B: All you descendants of Jacob, honor him, revere him, all you descendants of Israel. For he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one. He has not hidden his face from
[00:40:26] Speaker C: him, but has listened to his cry for help.
[00:40:30] Speaker B: From you comes my praise. In the great assembly before those who fear you will I fulfill my vows.
[00:40:35] Speaker C: As he uses Old Testament ways of
[00:40:37] Speaker B: expressing himself, the poor, the afflicted, the humble, will eat and be satisfied.
They who seek the Lord will praise him.
[00:40:47] Speaker C: May your hearts live forever in the light of answered prayer and in the light of resurrection power.
[00:40:56] Speaker B: But what does it mean to the
[00:40:58] Speaker C: ends of the earth?
[00:40:59] Speaker B: This salvation, he says, will affect all nations, all strata of society, for all time.
[00:41:08] Speaker C: Whose deliverance could that be?
[00:41:11] Speaker B: That all the ends of the earth
[00:41:13] Speaker C: will come to worship God because of this Deliverance. Hear him.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: And this is exactly what is the
[00:41:20] Speaker C: result of God's raising Jesus from the dead.
[00:41:24] Speaker B: All the ends of the earth will remember what God did in this salvation and turn to the Lord.
[00:41:33] Speaker C: On this Lord's day.
All over the world, on the first day of the week, all nations remember that Jesus is risen from the dead.
It's fulfilled right before our eyes right now. All over the earth. Here we are out here in Cedar Point.
Small group praising God, remembering the resurrection.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord. All the families of the nations will bow down before him. For dominion belongs to the Lord. And he rules over the nations as
[00:42:11] Speaker C: he brings them to this faith. There is authority today over all nations to bring them to faith in this resurrection.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: Not only all nations, but every strata
[00:42:23] Speaker C: of society will be affected by it.
[00:42:26] Speaker B: The rich and the poor, the highest and the lowest, will find salvation.
[00:42:32] Speaker C: Verse 29.
[00:42:33] Speaker B: All the rich of the earth will feast and worship.
[00:42:37] Speaker C: And the most miserable are those that are now dying in this world. And yet they're claiming these promises.
[00:42:44] Speaker B: All who go down to the dust will kneel before him. Those who cannot keep themselves alive, from the richest and most prosperous to the
[00:42:52] Speaker C: poorest and most miserable, they will all worship.
And this will be for all time.
[00:42:59] Speaker B: Posterity will serve him. Future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness to a
[00:43:06] Speaker C: people yet unborn, for he has done it.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: And that baton of faith has been
[00:43:12] Speaker C: handed on for generation to generation to generation. And each generation of the elect has received it and entered into that faith.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: What salvation is this that affects all nations, all strata of society, for all time?
[00:43:30] Speaker C: But the resurrection of Jesus, he answered his prayer at the best time and in the best way.
But let your hearts live.
[00:43:43] Speaker B: One time I was having dinner with
[00:43:45] Speaker C: Elaine in Victoria, and I was arrested by a painting in the restaurant.
[00:43:53] Speaker B: It was a painting in the background.
[00:43:56] Speaker C: There was a hearth burning brightly.
[00:44:03] Speaker B: And before the hearth, with all the
[00:44:06] Speaker C: accoutrements of a blacksmith shop, the bellows and so forth, there stood a new cannon that had just been forged.
[00:44:14] Speaker B: In front of it stood the blacksmiths
[00:44:17] Speaker C: in their aprons, three of them standing there.
And in front of them was a dismounted officer, horse on the right. There he stood, reading a proclamation.
Consternation, horror was written all over the face of the blacksmiths.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: I asked the proprietor of the inn
[00:44:40] Speaker C: to tell me what this painting was about.
[00:44:43] Speaker B: What brought this consternation?
[00:44:45] Speaker C: What's the proclamation that's being read?
[00:44:48] Speaker B: And she recited to me a story that I had heard.
[00:44:51] Speaker C: It was the story of after the battle of Waterloo, when the Iron Duke Wellington had contested with Napoleon for the fate of Europe.
[00:45:04] Speaker B: The story is that when the word of the outcome of the battle was communicated by semaphore across the English Channel
[00:45:14] Speaker C: on lanterns, on ships from Calais in France to Dover, England, that the message that was being communicated was Wellington defeated.
[00:45:25] Speaker B: And with that came in a heavy
[00:45:27] Speaker C: fog and that's all that was seen.
Wellington defeated.
[00:45:33] Speaker B: That was the word that spread all
[00:45:35] Speaker C: over the isles of the United Kingdom today. And that's what this picture was representing. The consternation on the faces of the blacksmiths who were making the weaponry for the war.
Wellington defeated. It was hopeless.
When the fog lifted, the full message was Wellington defeated the enemy.
[00:45:59] Speaker B: And what we're looking at is Jesus on the cross.
[00:46:02] Speaker C: Wellington defeated. Christ defeated.
But in the resurrection, Christ defeated the enemy.
Let your hearts live forever.
For our God does indeed hear and
[00:46:19] Speaker B: answer prayer so that we can freely
[00:46:22] Speaker C: risk obedience into his merciful strong hands to our sovereign God. We can risk trusting him and not
[00:46:34] Speaker B: navigating in our self will and self
[00:46:37] Speaker C: understanding and always ending up in death and death and death, but always in trust, walking in the midst of darkness.
And he saves and he delivers.
Shall we pray?
[00:46:55] Speaker B: Father, we thank you for the message of the psalm. Thank you for such a sure faith as ours. Thank you for the work of your
[00:47:02] Speaker C: Spirit that seals into our hearts.
In Jesus name, Amen.
[00:47:09] Speaker A: The proceeding was a presentation of the C.S. lewis Institute. In the legacy of C.S. lewis, the institute endeavors to develop disciples who can articulate, defend and live faith in Christ through personal and public life. For more information please visit our website at www.cslewisinstitute.org.
[00:47:29] Speaker C: thank you, Sam.
