Waterways
Pastor Marq Toombs • August 22, 2021
Sermon Overview
PSALM 77
In this sermon we read this psalm as though it were a prayer of Jesus to look at it from a deeper perspective. We learn that memory and meditation go hand-in-hand when we experience distress. One of the most powerful things we can do is to remember what God has done.
Sermon Transcript
Grace and peace be with you from the Lord Jesus Christ.
It's good to be with you today as we continue our series Beside Still Waters.
We go back into the Psalms and we get to hear what Christ our Lord prayed for us and what Christ has for us in the Psalms. The Psalm that I've selected today is what you might call a deep cut, it comes from the vault. For those of you who like music, you know that when you become a fan of a band or a musician or some artist, you know that many other people know the greatest hits of those artists and you take great pride and joy knowing that you've dug deep into the vault, deep into all of the tracks, and you've dug out some gems. Well today's Psalm is one of those gems that comes from the vault. It's not a Psalm that's very well known, but it's a Psalm that is going to help us re-frame our life and get us thinking more clearly about who we are in Christ. And so I want you to think about this Psalm from the perspective of Jesus.
Each week when we began working on any passage of Scripture, we go through three layers of readings. The first reading has to do with what does the Bible say in its Canonical context? What's happening in the Psalm? What's the situation? What's happening with David or whoever the Psalm happens to be about? And then we dig a little bit deeper in the second reading and we say, well, what does this Psalm have to do with us? Where is my place in the Psalm? And we began to find connections and see that the Psalm relates to us and we relate to the Psalm. But there's a third reading that we need to get to, and that's the one I'm actually going to focus on today, and that is the reading that has to do with Jesus. What does this Psalm have to do with Jesus?
And the reason I mentioned this to you is not just to give you a peek behind the curtain and to show you how the meal is made, but to get you to understand that when we read the Bible, there are a lot of different ways, a lot of different ways to read the Bible, different angles we come from.
And so, when reading a Psalm like this, if you read the commentaries, the commentators will tell you things like the historical context is X, Y, and Z, and they will focus on what was happening in the past. "That was then, This is now", and there's a great chasm that's fixed between us and them and it can sort of lock the Psalm into the past and where it feels like it doesn't have anything to do with us. And then you have another group of people that tend to psychologize the Psalms, and they want to find out how the Psalmist felt, and do you feel the way the Psalmist felt? And can you relate to the psalmist? And both of those are very good readings and very important readings of the Psalm, but if we're not careful, we end up locking the Psalms into a distant past, or we end up making the Psalms too much about ourselves and not enough about Christ.
And so, what I want you to do today is to approach this Psalm with me by using a bit of your sanctified imagination. What if we read this Psalm and listened to this Psalm as if it were a prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ? What if you put the words of this Psalm into the heart and the mouth of Jesus, how would you read it differently? What would you hear? What would you feel as you make your way through the Psalm?
The Psalm is divided basically into two parts: The first 10 verses of the Psalm deal with disorientation. It's disorientation that comes from the fact that the psalmist is looking at himself, he's looking at his situation, the world around him. The second part of the Psalm is basically the last 10 verses where you have reorientation, and the psalmist is then looking out to God and paying attention to the wonders and the works of God that transcend himself and his circumstances. But there's a turning point in the middle of the Psalm, something changes in the life of this psalmist. And when you take that story of the Psalm and you put it in the life and ministry of Jesus, it begins to take on a whole new meaning and a whole new shape.
And so, I want you to do something with me, use your imagination and travel back with me to the Garden of Gethsemane with Jesus. And you know what happened. It's the night before Jesus was crucified. It's the night that Jesus was betrayed. It's the night that Jesus agonizes in prayer over what is about to come.
Now, the reason I want us to read the Psalm in this way is because of something Jesus says in his life and ministry after the resurrection. So, I'm saying this to you so you'll know I'm not just pulling this out of thin air, and it's not just for novelty's sake that I want us to read this Psalm in this way. Jesus said on the road to Emmaus as He spoke to some of His followers that the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms all spoke about the suffering and the death of the Christ, and how it was necessary for those things to happen, and how it was also necessary that repentance would be preached to the nations of the world. And Jesus began to unpack for them how the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms all pointed to him. And so when you ask, What is the Old Testament about? What are the Psalms about? Well, the Psalms -- at their deepest and truest level -- are all about Jesus.
The Early Church considered the Psalms to be the Prayer Book of Christ and the church, the Prayer Book of Christ and the church, because Christ first prayed them for himself, but also prays them for his church, and prays them with his church when we pray the Psalms. And so Christ is praying with us and for us, and we're praying with him and in him offering up these same prayers.
Now go back with me to the Garden of Gethsemane and think of what's happening here. The Scripture said that Jesus was making his way out of the city and up into the garden, just on the edge of town. Gethsemane means 'olive press' or the place where oil was pressed out of olives. It's a place of pressure, it's a place of stress, and Jesus is about to feel every bit of that. He begins to be sorrowful and troubled. It's important to know that he didn't just feel sorrowful or feel troubled, but he has entered into a state of being where he is sorrowful, he is troubled. He says, "My soul is very sorrowful even to the point of death." And he asked his friends to stay and pray with him, to watch with him in the night. And then he goes away from them, farther up and further in to the blackness and the emptiness of the garden to be squeezed under the pressing weight of divine grace and the human grief and sin. He's overwhelmed with the weight of this burden and so overwhelmed that he falls on his face into the dirt and the grass of the garden, and he grabs the earth and he begins to pray.
And what does he pray?
Well, the gospel writers tell us a couple of brief prayers that he offered, but knowing what we know of Jesus and knowing how he prayed the Psalms and how they were part of the fabric and texture of his life and shaped him spiritually, he began to pray the Psalms. This is the most disorienting experience of his life up to this point. Nothing else compares to what he is entering into at this time. And so in the terrors of the night watches, what do we find Jesus doing? We find Jesus lying prostrate before the Lord, agonizing, crying out to God, screaming and yelling with loud prayers with groans and many tears.
And what is he saying as he stretches out his hand and holds it, waiting for God to take it? The psalmist says in Psalm 77, that 'he cried a loud, aloud to the Lord'. And the Hebrew begins with jumbled sentences, trying to capture the emotion, the feeling of the one who is so disoriented that he is screaming out to God for help. Some commentators say, as they read the Psalm, that this is a Psalm where the psalmist opens with self-pity, that he's simply throwing a tantrum and making a lot of noise because he wants to draw attention to himself and get God's attention and get God to respond the way children might do as they pitch little fits and scream and wail in the store where they don't get their way. But I want to reject that reading and push it out of your mind because when you put this Psalm in the mouth of Jesus and the heart of Jesus, you don't get the picture of someone who is drumming their heels on the floor trying to get God's attention. You get a picture of the God-man, who is in such a state of agony and despair that he cries out to God from the depths of his soul and the depths of his heart, he agonizes and he moans when he remembers God.
Memories of God and the meditations that follow move him body and soul, and he begins to faint and to fade away. He says, "My soul is miserable, my mouth is speechless." His body begins to unravel and out of the pores of his body began to drip, and then flow blood, sweat, and tears. He is turning inside out. He is beginning to dis-integrate in many ways. And it's there and then that he begins to pray, "My Father, my Father." And he holds out his hand waiting and wondering if the Father will take it. His friends abandoned him to the darkness, they fall asleep. Their bellies were full, they had just enjoyed a feast. The Scripture says, "their eyes were heavy." But Jesus does not enjoy the luxury of sleep this night, no matter how heavy his eyes get, he cannot close them. He cannot sleep because as the psalmist says, "God has grabbed hold of his eyelids" and is holding them open. Why would he hold his eyes open? It's not just to keep Him from dozing off, from drifting away, or from catching a few winks. He holds his eyes open so that he can see every horrible and terrible thing that is coming his way. He's not allowed to look away even for a moment. He must see the horrors, the disorienting terrors that are lurking in the shadows and coming upon him.
And what we learn in this Psalm, what we learn in this prayer of Jesus, is that memory and meditation go hand in hand. Repeatedly throughout the prayer the psalmist says, "I remember and I reflect. I remember and I reflect." He remembers something about God and who God is and what God has done and he reflects up on it. No matter how painful, no matter how difficult he reflects upon it. It just so happens that on this night, Jesus is able to remember and reflect upon the songs in the night. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that as Jesus and his disciples made their way out of the upper room and moved towards the Garden of Gethsemane, right before they did that, they sang a hymn. And Jesus remembers that music, He's reflecting upon those lyrics. He's thinking about those redemption songs and seeking to understand their truth.
After the first Passover in Exodus, it was Moses who asked to see God's glory. He went up on a mountain, God promised to reveal his glory to him, and he did so but not in the way that Moses expected. Moses goes up on the mountain expecting to see something majestic and magnificent, and immediately God takes him and hides him in the cleft of a rock and puts him behind himself under His hand to shield and protect him from the glory of God. You can only catch a glimpse, Moses, if you see more than that, you'll die and I don't want you to die. And the glory of the Lord passed by. And what was the glory of the Lord? It was the name of the Lord. It was the name of the Lord proclaimed to Moses. The name of this covenant making God who said to him, "the Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, the God who forgives iniquity and sin." The glory of the Lord was bound up in His name and in His character. And this must be echoing in the heart and mind of Christ because in Gethsemane praying Psalm 77, thinking through the disorientation, trying to move to reorientation, He begins to ask questions about God's name and about God's character. Did you hear it? He begins to ask,
"Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable?
Has His steadfast love forever seized?
Are His promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
Has He in anger shut up His compassion?"
These are the questions wrecking Jesus' heart in Gethsemane while he's laying prostrate on the ground in the darkness contemplating the unfolding, terrible, horrible events that are facing Him. This happens after the last Passover and at the beginning of this new Exodus. It's on the eve of merciless scourging, relentless mocking, and pitiless crucifixion.
Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up His compassion? These are the kinds of questions we might ask, these are the kinds of questions we ask when we're faced with the darkness, when we're confronted with death, when we feel dread growing up in our hearts. Where is God when it hurts? In our mouths these questions might seem cynical, but not in the mouth of Jesus. In the mouth of Jesus, these are simply rhetorical questions. He's not wallowing in doubt, he's not wavering in despair at this point, He's remembering the glory of the Lord, in the Name of God, compassionate, gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. He's reminding himself of the truth of the grace and the mercy of God. He's preaching the gospel to himself and answering these rhetorical questions with a resounding, no.
How could he do this?
Everything he is experiencing at this moment seems to contradict who God is and who God declares himself to be. And all of the shame and the sorrow he's experiencing seems to contradict the glory and the grace of God. How does he live in that tension? Here's the turning point in the Psalm as he moves from disorientation to reorientation. He says, "I will appeal to the years of the right hand of my heavenly Father." The answer does not lie within himself, the answer does not lie within the circumstances surrounding him, the answer lies in the truth of who God is and the reality of His glory and grace. I remember the Psalm starts with a cry, aloud cry, and Jesus' stretched out hand waiting to see, will the Father take his hand. The Hebrew word for stretched out there means, it's poured out, it's gone as far as it can go, it's beginning to undo itself. But he's not gonna put it down, he's not taking it back, he's waiting and watching for his Father. And it's interesting because in the narrative of the story of Gethsemane, the word hand appears very many times, it just keeps coming at you and you feel the sharp contrast between Jesus' outstretched hand waiting to see if the Father will take it versus all of the other hands that appear. And this is what happens, when the hour was at hand and Jesus' betrayer was at hand, and the Son of Man was betrayed into the hands of sinners, it was the Father's right hand that took Jesus by the hand and held Him close and never let Him go.
You see, the Father did come, and it was the Father's right hand that reassured Jesus that this was all unfolding according to their plan, all unfolding according to their purpose, all unfolding according to their promises made to each other and to the world. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are working all things together in love for the life and the salvation of the world. And in order to do that, they must go into this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place called the cross.
So Jesus prays through the night watches, He's reoriented now around who God is. He's reminded of God's grace, God's mercy, God's love. He's reminded of God's character in his name, and he prays through the night watches trusting that the same hand that created all things will now care for him, and trusting that the same hand and the mighty arm that delivered his people and rescued them out of Egypt will also deliver him and rescue him out of death. He appeals to the years, the experience, the resume of the Lord's right hand. And in that he finds hope.
Memory and meditation go hand in hand, and so when Jesus in this prayer turns his eyes away from his circumstances, turns his eyes away from his own agony and by the threats and dangers posed against him and he turns his eyes upon the glory of God, the disorientation gives way to reorientation, and he masters the courage of convictions to make a true confession of faith. Imagine this, in the darkness of Gethsemane, with all the world opposed to him and his friends having abandoned him, he's able to shout out into the darkness and raise his cry up to the sky and say,
"Your way, O God is holy.
What god is great like God?
You are the God who works wonders."
It takes an incredible immeasurable faith to make that kind of confession in the middle of dire circumstances. It's easy to make it when times are comfortable, it's hard to make it in times of conflict and controversy, and yet it's out of that, that Jesus makes this declaration of faith.
And as he prays Psalm 77, he remembers the works of God, but not just in general, not just that God is good and God is great and God does good things, but he narrows it down and focuses on one specific thing that God has done. And you see this towards the end of the Psalm where Jesus in the Psalm is reflecting on the wonders of the first Exodus, especially the cross scene of the Red Sea.
Now to us, we hear the crossing of the Red Sea, and we think one thing, but in the Ancient Near East, everyone would have heard, God led His people through the abyss, through chaos, and through death and destruction — because that's how they viewed large bodies of water. Not as places to go and fish, not as places to go and bask in the sun and ride on your boat and have a party, but as places of terror, places of evil and darkness. And so, what they hear when they hear that God brought his people through the Red Sea, is that God has overcome evil. And Jesus reflects upon this, and notice what the Psalm says about how the waters responded to him.
When the water saw the people of God standing on the shore, what did they do? They boasted in their arrogance. They weren't moved at all by the presence of Moses and Israel, but when the waters saw the invisible God drawing near, and when they felt the breadth of God blowing upon them, they were terrified. They trembled from the depths. In fact, they stood aside and stood at attention and gave him the right of way. They backed down. They flinched. The waters did that. The waters did that and they allowed God their Maker to have his way with them, and they stood still for the people of God. And thus it was that the Lord led his people besides still waters.
The people of God followed the unseen footprints of God on his holy path through the waters from below. The wind blew, the sky ripped open, the rain poured down, the glory of God shown from the cloud, and it was God that led them beside the still waters and we learn from the apostles that it was in this moment that all Israel were baptized into Moses.
So, just as God the Father has moved heaven and earth and sea in order to redeem his people and deliver them out of sin and death and bring them into life, Jesus in praying the Psalm and contemplating his own fate in the cross — crucifixion and burial and resurrection — rests in the promises of God that he will be delivered in the same way.
And so in the end, it was prayer and the Spirit that reoriented Jesus' disoriented heart to his Father's purpose and promises and power. Jesus was so fortified by these things that when his enemies came to take him by force, he stood his ground and he looked them square in the face and he said with all the conviction and the confidence in the world, "All of this is happening to fulfill the Scriptures of the prophets." He didn't back down. He didn't flinch because he was reoriented to the purposes of God.
Now as the Lord continues to lead us through still waters, I want to encourage you to do what Jesus did, what the psalmist did in Psalm 77. I want you to remember your baptism, I want you to reflect on the meaning of it, I want you to couple memory and meditation together. You might not remember all of the circumstances of your baptism, you might not remember how old you were or how you felt or what happened in those moments, but what you need to know is what God was doing for you in that time, that God is the one who was making promises to you, that God is the one who was demonstrating his power to you, that God is the one who was putting his name on you, that God is the one who was delivering you from the world, the flesh, and the devil, and bringing you to himself, giving you a new identity in his Son, Jesus. That's the turning point of your life.
Oftentimes as a pastor and a parent, I find myself trying to grab people by their baptism and to perform a little baptismal therapy. People come to visit in the office and they talk about how disoriented they are, what a mess their life is, how broken the world is, how they can't seem to get their balance or bearings, and one of the things that we will often do is remind them of their baptism, remind them of what God has promised for them, remind them that they have been adopted into God's family, remind them that they have a place in this house because they have a place in the heart of God — and it has an incredible power to reshape someone's life and experience.
As a parent I've done this. From early on with my kids, I would say to my kids as they left the house, there was a routine we'd go through, especially if they were going on a trip or I was not gonna see them for a while, or if I thought they were going to some sort of risque place and I was nervous about it, I would say to them, "Remember these things, remember you're a baptized Christian, and your only comfort in life and in death is that you are not your own, you belong body and soul to your faithful Savior Jesus Christ."
A few days ago, our youngest daughter was loaded up and ready to go back to San Antonio. And we hugged and kissed and did the whole farewell and shed a few tears and she got in the car, and I walked out to the car with her and I said, "Hey, before you go," and before I could go on, she said, "I'm a baptized Christian and Jesus is my only comfort in life and in death."
These aren't magic words, but they are meaningful words. And when you find yourself disoriented in life you might remember this, that you belong to Christ, that you were baptized into him, that he made you his own. And perhaps in remembering that, you will find yourself getting reoriented to the purposes of God.
So like our forefathers, you were washed clean from the world, the flesh, and the devil by means of baptism. You were washed clean by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit because they love you and they wanted you to be a part of their family. The Apostle Paul says this, "By one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body, whether Jew, Greek, slave, free." In other places he said, "whether male or female, whether children or adults, by one Spirit, you were baptized into one body, and you were all given the one Spirit to drink."
So God doesn't just bring you in, he doesn't just begin to work in you, he sustains that work and brings it to completion and you have a new identity in Christ.
“Only love can bring the rain
that makes you yearn to the sky,
only love can bring the rain
that falls like tears from on high,
and that's why we pray
“Love, reign over me, rain on me!” (The Who)
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Let us pray.
