Sermon Tone Analysis

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:

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.

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:

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.”