Psalm 135 Sterling Version
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The Praise of the Lord vs Senseless Idols
# Introduction:
Good morning. It’s so great to be here with you and be able to celebrate all of the incredible things that God has done and is doing among both of our churches.
I should probably introduce myself. My name is Cal Callison and for the last three years I have been blessed to serve as the pastor of Hope Bible Fellowship in Dixon. I have been in pastoral ministry in one form or another for 23 years. My wife, Bethany is with me and we have also been married for 23 years. We have three sons, Javan who is 20 and a senior in college, Kenan who is 17 and a senior at Faith Christian School and here with us today, and Asher who is a 14 year old freshman at faith and is also with us. We are thrilled to be here and get to share in worship of our Lord Jesus with you.
I bring greetings from Hope Bible Fellowship with a heart full of deep gratitude for the generous and amazing gift that your congregation presented to ours a few weeks back. When I opened the envelope I just sat there dumbfounded by it. I’ve been in ministry a long time but God is even now showing me what it can really look like when His people stand together for the work of the kingdom and not for their own little fiefdoms. I was and am deeply moved by it. We are blessed by your friendship and partnership in the gospel. I am reminded of Paul’s words in the letter to the Philippians from chapter 1 verses 3-11.
3 I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, 4 always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. 6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. 7 It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace,[d] both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. 8 For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. 9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.
Amen and thank you once again from the brothers and sisters at Hope.
I’d like to pray for you and for the message today. Would you please bow with me?
**PRAY**
And now to Psalm 135. Let me begin with a question. Now don’t answer out loud or this is going to get weird. So just think up your answer.
Why is it that time and time again in scripture, God has to command His people to praise Him? After all we can see that He has done for them, why would they be lacking in this area?
We need to understand that this is a psalm is not only for the priests or levites but is a call to the entire community of followers of God to praise the Lord. There are strong exhortations made to praise the Lord and reasons for doing such.
Every verse in this Psalm either echoes or quotes or is quoted by some other part of scripture. This very truth is a reminder that Scripture itself is perfectly capable of supplying us with all the material, truth, theology, that we need to sing back to God in praise, to express our thanksgiving, and to come before Him and bless His holy name.
The author is giving the Israelites reasons why they should praise the Lord in the first section and then makes a rather intense declaration about the lack of value found in idols. He then leaves them with a closing exhortation to praise the Lord.
My goal here today is to walk us through the reasons that the author gives for why the Israelites should praise the Lord and the dangers of turning to false idols and then to challenge all of us to apply the praise of the Lord continually in our own lives. First let’s begin in verses 1 through 14 with reasons to praise the Lord.
I. Reasons to Praise the Lord (v.1-14 )
I. Reasons to Praise the Lord (v.1-14 )
Praise has many enemies but one of the main detractors from praise is ingratitude.
When we don’t understand how much we have to be thankful for, when we are ungrateful, we will veer away from praising the Lord. We will feel we have things under control and start to maybe think we had something to do with how great we have it.
Ultimately, this psalmist gives us four connected reasons for praising God. The first area that he focuses on is the goodness of God.
1. The Goodness of God (v. 3)
1. The Goodness of God (v. 3)
- Elsewhere in the Psalms we are told that praising the Lord is good or that the name of the Lord is good but here in 135 we find out that you should praise God because He is good in and of himself. And God isn’t just good but He is goodness itself.
- The first temptation was to plant a doubt in humanity about the goodness of God.
- Genesis 3:1-5
Genesis 3:1–5 ESV
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.
He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So a question you need to answer right now is this:
- Do you believe the Lord is good? Truly good? Right now, in this moment in your life?
- In any circumstance, even hard ones? Because the world is throwing all kinds of hard things at us right now and we are challenged to still believe that the Lord is good.
- The psalmist is telling them and us to praise the Lord because He is good. In order to do that, you have to actually believe that He is good. You need to feel it deep down into your bones that He is good. If you don’t really trust and believe that God is good you’re not going to be able to positively respond to what we read here. And the enemy goes directly after your belief that God is good. We need to give ourselves over to learning more about God’s goodness. We should marinade in it, in our study of the Word and the goodness of God.
The second reason given for praising God is because of the choice of God or the election of God.
2. The Choice of God (v. 4)
2. The Choice of God (v. 4)
If you have believed the gospel and surrendered your life to Jesus then God has chosen you. If you are a true Christian, you can know that you have been chosen by God. How can you know that this is true? Glad you asked. I have a Bible for this.
Romans 3:10–17 ESV
10 as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one;
11 no one understands; no one seeks for God.
12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
13 “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.”
14 “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 in their paths are ruin and misery,
17 and the way of peace they have not known.”
Ephesians 2:4–10 ESV
4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,
5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,
9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
One of my favorite living preachers is a guy named Ligon Duncan. When he was preaching on this passage he said this,
“It is a staggering thing, my friends, to think that the Lord has chosen you and chosen you for His own possession and His own heritage. On the basis of Scripture, in both the Old and New Testament, I can tell you, were you to draw near to the Lord in heaven tonight and were you to say to Him, “Lord, why is it, why is it that You did all this? What did You get out of this? What did You want out of the sending of Your Son into the world? What did You want out of His perfect life and His experience of the curse of sin and the pouring out of Your wrath on Him and His death and burial and resurrection? What was it that You wanted out of this plan which has stretched across all of human history from Adam to the very end of Your redemption? What is it that You wanted out of it?” The Scriptures, and this passage here, says that the Lord will look you in the eye and say, “What I wanted was you. I chose you and I chose you to be Mine, to belong to Me. You’re the inheritance that I want. You’re the heritage I want. You’re the possession I want. I'm going to give you everything in Christ, My Son, but what I want is you.”
We should praise God because we love Him, yes, but ultimately, we praise God _because He loved us first_. When we were not worthy, when we were still sinners, when we were at war with God, we were enemies with God, He chose us.
He had someone set before us the glorious truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Someone told us that Jesus died in our place, for our sin, as a substitutionary sacrifice on our behalf. They told us he died for our sin and was raised from the dead by the power of God and will return for His church someday.
God chose us to hear and respond to this message and because He loved you before you ever knew Him, you sit here today. How incredible! We praise God because according to scripture, He has chosen us. **Dwell on that and it will bring you humbly to praise of the one who loved you first.**
My guy, Charles Spurgeon said it this way:
...I am quite sure that if God had not chosen me I should never have chosen him; and I am sure he chose me before I was born, or else he never would have chosen me afterwards; and he must have elected me for reasons unknown to me, for I never could find any reason in myself why he should have looked upon me with special love. - Charles Spurgeon
This is such sweet reason to praise the Lord!
The third reason given is the sovereignty of God.
3. The Sovereignty of God (v. 6 )
3. The Sovereignty of God (v. 6 )
He is in control of all things. He is the maker of heaven and earth, the divine creator. This very understanding will lead you to praise the Lord and will sustain you even in dark times of the soul. I have told more than one person that in times where I have been uncertain of life circumstances, I have fallen back onto my belief and understanding of God’s sovereignty. It is a warm comfort to a weary soul and moves us to praise His Holy Name.
A well known pastor had a family in his church that had three of the five members of the family with cancer. This pastor said that Henri, one of the family members said this, ““Our verse is Romans 8:28 — God works all things together for good for those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose.” The pastor adds, “This is an Old Testament declaration of that truth (from Romans 8) that God does what He pleases, but the psalmist knows that what God pleases is always for the good of His people. And so he calls on us to praise the Lord because He's sovereign.” God does what He pleases and that is the best possible thing for us.
And the fourth reason we find in Psalm 135 for the people of God to praise God is the redemption that God has worked for His people.
4. The Redemption of God (v. 8-14)
4. The Redemption of God (v. 8-14)
Here specifically, we have reasons given from Israel’s past. We see a recounting of ways that God had preserved and protected His people. It was reason enough for the Israelites to praise the Lord. They should have responded to His deeds with worship of HIm. And yet, they continually have to be told to praise Him. I know many of us think that if we saw what many of them had seen we would of course, readily worship the Lord freely. But we would not. Our sin nature and our flesh fights against it.
But God…
Now, we have great personal reason to praise the Lord, because Jesus has redeemed the people of God, the church. We are not simply a nation but a universal church, a group of redeemed people that spans races and nations and times in history. We praise because Jesus has redeemed us by His finished work on the cross and restored us to right relationship with God. He rose from the dead on the third day and sits at the right hand of God where He will eventually return to earth for His church.
We have much reason to praise and to worship Him on high. But why are we lacking in our worship? Where had the people turned to worship instead of the Lord? Where do we turn to worship instead of the Lord?
In contrast to the active and saving work of God that he has just recounted, you have the non-activity of inanimate idols. The psalmist wants his audience to reject the worship of false idols.
II. Reject the worship of false idols. (V. 15-18)
II. Reject the worship of false idols. (V. 15-18)
We must reject the worship of false idols. Let’s look at these idols.
- They are deaf
- They are lifeless
- No life
- Idols are created by another creation
- They have no senses and no ability to do anything
- No life - key
- No ability to create or provide life
- You become like that which you worship. You cannot understate this. In Biblical Counseling we have a sentence we use to answer the questions “why do I do this, or why do I do what I do?”
- You do what you do, because you want what you want, because you worship what you worship.
The psalmist closes out the passage with yet another exhortation to praise the Lord.
III. So, praise the Lord. (V. 19-21 )
III. So, praise the Lord. (V. 19-21 )
A.W. Tozer has a very well known quote that says,
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” - A.W. Tozer
Our worship will hinge on what we think about God. What we think about God will reveal much about us.
Will we worship the true God that saves? Or will we worship a God we have created in our own minds?
The god you create in your mind is an idol that will lead you to nothingness even though you think it will lead you into more. Idolatry is deceptive like that.
To worship the true God, you need to know the true God. So make your life be about the business of knowing God. The way you do this is you have to be in the Bible because the Word of God is where He tells us who He is. You learn about what God is like in His Word. He reveals Himself to us by the Word of God. Learning who He is and what He is like on a continual basis will help us worship Him and not some idol that we dreamed up on our own.
Questions to ask ourselves to help us apply this and root out idolatry:
- What are the idols in our lives?
- How do we worship them?
- How do we make them?
- What does it mean that they are deaf, dumb, and mute?
- Why would we chase after and worship such absurd idols when we have incomparable power and goodness of God in the gospel?
- How do we reason this out in our brains and make sense of or justify this?
To get back to a question I asked at the beginning of this message: Why does scripture again and again remind us and exhort us to praise the Lord?
Because of the depth of our fallen nature. We are what Plummer calls “criminally indisposed” to this activity. He wrote the sad commentary that angels in heaven don’t need this kind of exhortation to worship the One who created them. We’re sinful and our attention is turned back in on ourselves.
We tend to make a god that looks like us and worship that. We worship ourselves when that worship is due someone else.
We should encourage one another to praise the Lord with these reasons in the same way that the author exhorts us. We should.
And even when things are hard we should still praise Him for He is good, He is sovereign, He has chosen us, and He redeems us for Himself. Praise the Lord.
**Pray**