Psalm 10

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Intro:

As we head toward Micha I thought it best to take a week or so and work through a couple Psalms again as I prepare to dive into Micha. We did this in the lead up to Hosea as well and we stopped after Psalm 9 which leads us into Psalm 10 this morning.
This Psalm is unbelievably pertinent to today! I guess you could say that it is pertinent in all times because there have always been evil people seeking to deny God’s rule and oppress God’s people but as you read this Psalm as we will do again in just a moment it is hard not to draw straight lines between the description that this Psalmist gives and the state of our world today.
If you remember, we have said that the Psalms are really given to us to be a companion to the rest of God’s word. As we read and study the scriptures the primary role of the Psalms is to take those truths that we learn and impress them deep into our hearts and minds through the meter and imagery of poetry and song.
Missoula is this week and one of the things that I cant stand about Missoula is getting the main song for the show stuck in my head. It happens every year and while I don't hate Missoula I do get so annoyed in the weeks after the show when I still find that song humming in my mind. It always happens! That is the power of music and meter. Just look at how quickly a child can pick up a song!
The Psalms do this, they take the truths of God’s word an impress them even deeper into our lives.
One of the effects of this that we have also leaned into in our time in the Psalms is that the truthful notes struck by these Psalms have a way to tuning our hearts. If the truths of a Psalm do not resonate with our hearts we ought to take time to double check that our hearts are not out of tune with God’s word. (Expound)
And finally, the Psalms also serve to present the glory of our great God to us. More often than not, as certainly we will see this today, the Psalmist will take what ever has occasioned the Psalm and hold that situation up before the glory of God by recounting in the Psalm truths about who God is and how He works in the world.
This is actually a good point that we all can learn from the Psalms. It is easy when we are faced with circumstances and situations in life to bring them before God in prayer, especially things that are challenging or painful. However, even more than simply asking God to intervene we ought to learn, in those moments, to recite truths that we know about God that are relevant to the situation we are facing. In this way we aren't just bringing our cares before God (which is a good thing to do, don't get me wrong) but we are also intentionally bringing God to bear on our situations!
So lets take a moment to pray and then read again this Psalm.

PRAY & READ

Why

We don't know who wrote this Psalm, we don't need to know who wrote it. This Psalm is wonderful in that it speaks so well into so many of the situations that God’s people may face in this world. (We have talked before about the wonderful general-ness of some of the Psalms)
This Psalm starts out with the question, Why?

Why, O LORD, do you stand far away?

Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

Sam Storms makes an interesting observation about this question. He notes:
Psalms Psalm 10

I know a little of what the psalmist meant when he cried out, “How long, O Lord, how long?” Sometimes the question, “How long?” does not spring from a speculative curiosity that says, “I want to know when,” but from an agitated conscience and a sense of moral outrage.

Psalms Psalm 10

This is the mood of Psalm 10. When the psalmist cries “Why?” it is not because of some personal harm that has come to him. It is not “Why did this happen to me?” but rather “Why would God allow such things to occur and do nothing, if indeed He is the King of all the earth?”

I think that Storms may be onto something here. Now, it could very well be that there was some wrong perpetrated against the Psalmist by wicked men that has occasioned this cry, Calvin takes this route. However, in this Psalm that the observations made in the following verses about how the wicked tend to act in this world are very general and no specific accusation of wrong or harm is made.
If Storms is correct then this indeed presents a great opportunity for us to ring the tune of this Psalm and ask ourselves if this resonates with our hearts. It is not hard to ask why when we have been assailed by wicked schemes. To ask, “How could God let this happen to me?” “When is God going to step in and deliver me?” However, it seems that here the Psalmist is more reflecting on the overall state of the wickedness that he sees around him and then turning to God and asking this question.
Do we find ourselves wearied by the wickedness in the world even when it doesn't have a direct affect on our lives. When things are going well and we aren't being immediately attacked by some wicked scheme do we still look around us and long for the evil and wickedness of the world to be gone, to be cast away for ever?
One of the true marks of a Godly soul is that you grow weary of the wickedness in the world even though it may at times not have a direct effect on your life.
We grow weary because we know who God is, we know of His goodness and His glory and we long to see as Isaiah did, “the whole earth full of the glory of the Lord” and as Habakkuk pined for, that the “whole earth would be filled with the knowledge of the Glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
When this is our default desire we will quickly weary of the wickedness and evil that fills our world even, as we have noted, at times when it is having very little immediate effect on our lives.
Now the question that the Psalmist asks as he experiences this weariness is this, “Why does God not move to make the longings of the hearts of the godly, and certainly the desired of His own heart as well a reality?”
Why does it seem like God is far away (even though the Psalmist knows that God is omnipresent!) How is it that God can be present in a place and see the wickedness taking place there and not immediately bring it to an end? It seems like God is distant! It seems like he is covering His face, the likely meaning of “hiding” Himself. If God saw then certainly He would act! But the Psalms well knows that God does indeed see all and yet seems to not be acting. Hopefully we can feel the wrestling that the Psalmist is undertaking here as he seeks to lay hold of what he knows to be true about God and yet hold that along side the reality that he sees around him in the world.

The Wicked

The Psalmist then recounts the observations he has made that have lead him to bringing this line of questioning to God: (Verses 2-11) READ
This Psalm really does give us a great understanding of the state of the wicked.
We see a lot of important truths here.
In verse 2 we see the arrogance of the wicked. Arrogance here carries the sense of pride, that the wicked thinks very highly of himself. The wicked pursue the poor because they have such high thoughts of themselves that they see others as simply means to accomplishing the end of further seeking to exhault themselves! They are always scheming of ways to get ahead, to get even more glory for themselves. What started in the garden as Eve scheming to take the fruit because she had the desire to be like God, to make her own rules, has been fully birthed into this world as we see the wicked embrace this arrogance and pride of seeking self exultation.
The Psalmist prays that these wicked men might be caught in the very schemes that they have devised to exhault themselves. (Great parallel to today as we hope that the incoherent social logic working its way through our world will collapse under the weight of its own insanity)
We see in verse 3 that the wicked are driven by their desires. So much so that they are not ashamed even to boast about the sinful things that they desire. The wicked man is greedy for gain and he curses renounces God. The meaning of renounce being that he treats God with contempt, hence the cursing. He has desires and he sees God and God’s righteous law standing in the way of fulfilling those wicked desires and so he placates himself as the next verses says by telling himself, “there is no God.”
It is not that the sinner does not know that there is a God. It is that he has pushed God to the edges of his mind seeking to believe that the very thought of God is, as Storms says here, “irrelevant.”
We must be careful in how we talk about those who do not know God. Too often we hear the language of the seeker. Now there is a sense in which when God begins in His grace to work in a sinners heart they do indeed begin to seek God. However, the Bible is very clear, Romans 1 tells us that all men know that God exists:

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

The problem for sinners is not that they do not know that God exists, it is that God has given them over to the desires of their hearts, He has allowed them to so by into this illusion that they try and tell themselves that there is no God, that He is irrelevant to any of the concerns of their lives. This is the sinners problem and it is rooted in their sin, their stony heart that seeks its own pleasures and desires and views the goodness and righteous ways of God as roadblocks to its fulfilment.
They are “Greedy for gain.”
The irony here is that as 1 Timothy 6:6 tells us:
1 Timothy 6:6 ESV
But godliness with contentment is great gain,
In verse 5 we see that the immediate results of this can often be prosperity. This is why prosperity is a horrible litmus test for faithfulness. The wicked can and often do prosper in the short term, which can be long by earthly standards.
“God’s judgments” we read, “are on high, out of his site.”
There is a great irony here. It is God’s judgments that make right and wrong. Presuppositional apologetics are all about this. When we remove ourselves from God’s standard of right and wrong, when the sinner removes them from his sight, he looses any ground from which to call something both evil and also good. In the absence of God there is no ultimate standard and in the absence of an ultimate standard every other standard that might be grasped at will fail. All that is left is might makes right, either physical or social might, whoever has the power to make the rules sets the standards. World history is replete with examples of how disastrous this is.
You wind up with people huffing, or puffin at each other, exactly what we see here.
Finally in verse 6 we see the false sense of permanence that the wicked believe they have:

He says in his heart, “I shall not be moved;

throughout all generations I shall not meet adversity.”

Has that ever worked for anyone? As the Psalmist reflects on who God is we will see just how temporal this wicked man is in his sinfully acquired gain,
We don't need to spend a great deal of time working our way through this rest of this description. We see that this internal state of the wicked mans heart reeks disastrous consequences on his interactions with other men.
READ 7-10 and comment if lead
Finally in verse 11 we see an interesting reality. The wicked man says something very similar to the Psalmist’s question from verse 1:

He says in his heart, “God has forgotten,

he has hidden his face, he will never see it.”

The difference between these two is the heart from which they say these things. The wicked man looks at the circumstance of his life and is pleased with how he is attaining the desires of his sinful heart and though he knows what God requires he has no desire to follow him, he has made God irrelevant in his mind and he sees that God hasn't done anything and so he boastfully says “God has forgotten, he isn’t looking, He will never see.”
In a moment we will see the heart from which the Psalmist has asked his question. However, before we move on we need to point out how this picture of wickedness is so similar to the world in which we live!
Russia
New Atheism with its disdain for God
LGBTQ
Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality
The desires to make our own rules and live our own way!
We really ought to turn here and read Romans 1:18-32 in its entirety because it is so similar to the observations of this Psalmist and so revealing of the sin that is wreaking havoc in our world today:
Romans 1:18–32 ESV
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

Verses 12-18

But now in the last 7 verses of this Psalm we see the Psalmist do as we said he would, take this situation that he sees in the world and even his original questions and he brings what he knows by faith to be true about God to bear on this whole thing. This is the heart of the Psalmist and it is vastly different from the heart of the wicked, even if their statements are similar.
Arise!
This is not a statement of presumption as if the Psalmist could some how command or convince God to do something. The Psalmist isn't telling God to move, rather he is anticipating the inevitability that God will move.
We know this from what follows.

Why does the wicked renounce God

and say in his heart, “You will not call to account”?

Why does the wicked do this the Psalmist asks but here is is now asking this in light of what he knows to be true about His God!
“YOU DO SEE”
This statement drops like a hammer blow, this is the blow that splits the rick, this is the explosion that sinks the ship and ends the war, this is the blast that breaks open a hole in the wall, this is the trumpet blast that sounded as the walls of Jericho fell, this is triumph. GOD SEES!
“Note” here is a very important word because it describes what God does when He sees. The sense of the word is “to observe or pay lose attention to.” God doesn't just casually see all this wickedness he is paying close attention to it and in the next line He takes it into His hands!
Calvin says here:

The Psalmist also adds, that God does not look down from heaven upon the conduct of men here below as an idle and unconcerned spectator, but that it is his work to pass judgment upon it; for to take the matter into his own hand, is nothing else than duly and effectually to examine and determine it as a judge.

There are not a more capable pair of hands in the whole entire universe for this task, God is the ruler of all, the judge over all the earth, He will hold them accountable for each an every wrong. That is the implication of the last line of verse 15:

call his wickedness to account till you find none.

There will not be one sinful act that passes beyond the judgement of God, there is not a divine rug under which those deeds that we might dean as trivial are swept. God sees them all, has noted them, and will bring His judgement to bear on them.
GOSPEL!
There are those who turn to God, who trust in Him, those who realize as verse 14 says, that they are helpless, commit themselves to God. The wicked will not do this, they are self sufficient, they believe that they will endure, that they will live life to the full chasing down each and every one of their desires.
The whole point of the gospel is to show us that we are helpless in this regard. If God marks sin as he is said to here we will all, in the words of Romans, have fallen short. We all deserve to have our arms broken, meaning to be shown to be powerless under the righteous judgment of God!
And finally we see the Psalmist proclaim God’s right to make the judgement!

The LORD is king forever and ever;

In contrast to the One who reigns for all of eternity:

the nations perish from his land.

Not only is God King but the land is His, Psalm 24 proclaims “The Earth is the Lords!”
The wicked think that they will continue on but in actuality it is God, the very God who they have pushed to the edges of their minds and sought to claim as irrelevant who will reign forever, the earth is His and they will perish from it!
Finally the Psalmist brings to bear one final truth about God on this situation:

O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted;

you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear

18  to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed,

so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.

What terror can their be in the hearts of God’s children in the presence of wicked men and in the throws of their wicked schemes and mistreatment when we have truly internalized these truths that God hears the desires of the afflicted, those desires by they way aren't just to be released from affliction but rather they are that God might be vindicated, that He would arise as the Psalmist says in verse 12 and move to bring about the reality of a world filled with His glory! God gives the afflicted strength, a strength needed to continue to endure life in this wicked world a strength that ultimately comes from truly believing these truths that the Psalmist is rehearsing before His mind and ours. God will bring justice! Not some pitiful earthly social justice that will never be satisfying but full and eternal justice!

Closing:

Now as we close we need to go back to the original question and as why is it that the Lord waits so long to bring these things about, to pour out His justice?
Romans 2:4–6 ESV
Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. He will render to each one according to his works:
A time of mercy and a time of waiting till wrath has been filled up to the full
2 Peter 3:9 ESV
The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
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