Psalms about God

Introduction

Okay, by a show of hands. How many of you are music lovers? I’m talking about secular music. Whether you started out listening music that you downloaded or streamed, or maybe you first listened to music on the radio or a CD or a cassette or an eight-track or record player. Most of us love music, and I think just about, if not every hand went up. Music is special, isn’t it? Music’s a part of our life. In fact, you could say it’s been the soundtrack of our life. But have you ever contemplated why? Why you like music? Why music is a part of probably nearly every special event that you’ve been to? What is it about music that seems to be almost universal in its appeal? Music does a lot of things that attaches itself to the human heart.

Music evokes memory.

My second year at Florida College, every Sunday I would preach. And I would preach at Merritt Island. And so I would drive across the state of Florida every Sunday morning. And Deedra and I were dating, and she would ride with me. And we’d drive over Sunday morning and I would preach at Merritt Island. And we’d spend the afternoon either on the beach or with usually with one of the members there at Merritt Island. And then I would preach again Sunday night. And then we had a ritual driving home. I was rolling in the dough, so we usually would have supper by eating peanut butter crackers and a Coke on the drive back home to campus. And then in the 80s, there was a station, a radio station, and I don’t remember if it was a Merritt Island, it may have been an Orlando radio station that would play Sunday night oldies music.

Now, back then oldies music was the 50s and 60s music. And it was a syndicated radio show, and we would listen to that radio show on the drive back. To this day, 30 plus years later, if I hear a song from the 50s or the 60s, I think about that drive. I think about those Sundays that were so formative to my preaching career and so important, and the people over there that we grew to love and still talk about to this day. And all it takes is rock around the clock to come on the radio. And I think of those brethren and those Sundays and those drives, and I can taste the dry peanut butter crackers in my mouth. Music does that, doesn’t it? It evokes memories.

You hear a song, you think of an event or a time in your life, or maybe of a person. Songs are important and attach themselves to our heart so easily because they can express things that may be express things for us that maybe we can’t. There may be a song that you love because it says what you would say if you were gifted enough to write songs or to sing songs. And so you may just say, You want to know how I feel about you? Just listen to this song. Songs are good because they not only evoke memories, but they help in our memory. So many things that we’ve put to memory, we’ve put to memory in song. You may have learned the books of the Bible in a song, or the apostles in a song.

Singing those things kind of helps with the memory sometimes.

Sometimes there’s no words needed, just the tune. Can bring a smile or a tear to our eyes.

And songs have always been a vital part of that relationship to God and in our worship of God. That’s true in our New Testament worship. We’ve praised Him and spoke to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs this day, as we do every time we come together. And that was true in the Old Testament as well. The largest book of the Old Testament, the largest book of the Bible, is a song book. It’s a book of psalms of poetry that they themselves tell us were to be sung. To maybe to be sung at times in their everyday life, but certainly to be sung at the tabernacle in the temple as they worshiped God. And so let’s talk about those psalms. Book of the Old Testament that is probably the most meaningful book of the Old Testament to New Testament Christians.

You ever notice that you can’t hardly buy a New Testament that doesn’t also include the Psalms at the back.

And you want to do something different? We’ll do something different in this series of lessons. It’s going to be different in a couple ways that you’ll be able to easily detect. It’s going to be a series. And by the way, if you don’t like this series, it was requested. And so blame the person that requested it. But it’s going to be a different series. We’re not going to do it Sunday after Sunday as we normally do a series. One Sunday a month. We’ll do a sermon on the Psalms until we just kind of run out. And it’s going to be a little different because it’s going to feel and sound a little different than your normal sermons. It’s going to be kind of a blend between a sermon and a class and a lecture, and it’s just going to feel different.

1. The Psalms Are Poetry

But let’s go with it. And so let’s talk about the psalms and how they are a part of our worship as poetry and song is today. Let’s talk when what we’re going to do in the introduction to every one of these disjointed series of lessons, is that we’re going to first begin with some kind of introductory comments about Psalms, kind of some technical things that you maybe have studied before, but maybe not. And so let’s talk about when we talk about the introduction to the Psalms. First of all, the Psalms are poetry. You know that.

And so they are poetry, and again, poetry has certain characteristics. Now, we’ll talk in a less later lesson about how Hebrew poetry, which the Psalms are, differs from our English language poetry. There’s some differences, there’s also some similarities. But it’s still poetry. And poetry has a couple universal characteristics. Number one, generally speaking, the poet tries to use as many words as he can to say what could be said in far fewer words. Annals of poets have written pages, pages of one so one poem to simply say three words. I love you. But it took him three pages to say, I love you. Poems are the opposite. I tried to think of the opposite extreme of poetry when we had an economy of words, and this illustration is getting very dated and maybe already close to obsolete.

But you ever put a one ad in the paper? That’s the epitome of the economy of words because you’re paying by the word or sometimes by the letter, and so you make that ad as small as you can, so much so that you’ll even abbreviate. If you try to read a real estate ad and you’re not familiar with the abbreviations, you have no idea what that house has. It has three B R, two B D, an A T and a C T. We just we try to save and put as into fewer words as possible. Poetry is the opposite extreme of that. Poetry also has, and why it needs sometimes words and the excess of words, is because poetry is going to say it in a very different way.

We may call it a very flowery way. Turn with me, if you will. Let’s look at an example of this. And by the way, we’re not going to the Psalms. You know, not all the Psalms are found in the book of Psalms. Let’s go to the book of Exodus. Exodus chapter 14 and 15 tell of the same events. They tell, not surprisingly, of the Exodus. And I want you to read with me a couple verses here, a few verses. Exodus 14. Look at the kind of this the historical narrative of what happened. Exodus 14, read with me, verse 26, beginning. Then the Lord said to Moses, Stretch out your hand over the sea, that the waters may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots and on their horsemen.

And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and when the morning appeared, the sea returned to its full depth, while the Egyptians were fleeing into it. So the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea. Then the waters returned and covered the chariots, the horsemen and all the army of the Pharaoh that came into the sea after them. Not so much as one of them remained. But the children of Israel walked on dry land in the midst of the sea. And the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. So the Lord saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. There we just have the facts.

That’s like a news report. Here’s what happened at the crossing of the Red Sea and the destruction of the Egyptian army in that same Red Sea. The very next chapter, we have a psalm. Or a song. It’s called the Song of Moses. They’ve crossed that Red Sea. And now they’re going to sing about it. And notice how the psalm, though it’s telling of the same event, reads very differently than the news report of the event. Read with me again, this time in Psalm, or excuse me, Exodus 15, beginning in verse 1. Then Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to the Lord and spoke, saying, I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.

The Lord is my strength and song, and he has become my salvation. He is my song and I will praise him. He is my father’s God and I will exalt him. The Lord is a man of war, the Lord is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he has cast into the sea.

2. They Were Intended to Be Sung

The depths have covered them. They sank to the bottom like a stone. You see the difference in that? Telling of the same event, but very different readings and the song that integrates the poetry, the melodic nature of a song, but also integrates the praise into that. And so these psalms are poetry. And again, in a later lesson, we’ll talk more about maybe the mechanics of Hebrew poetry. They were also songs. They were intended to be sung. They were intended to be sung, and maybe one of the reasons, and this is just speculation, by the way, but maybe one of the reasons the psalms were poems and songs is because in that era not everybody had a copy of the law. And so how are you going to know the law and be able to recall the law in your daily life?

A song will help. Because maybe you couldn’t memorize three chapters of the book of Deuteronomy. But you could remember the song that told of the same thing. Now, one thing that is lost on us is we don’t know what these songs sounded like. Lost is any kind of record of the style of music. We assume they didn’t sing a four-part harmony and like a Stamps Baxter kind of movement like we sing today, but we really don’t know what they sang or how they sang and what it sounded like. And some of the psalms include some words that like sila that maybe are some kind of musical notation that again is lost based upon the time that has transpired. But we know, we don’t know how and what it sounded like, but we know they sang these psalms as their praise and worship to God.

3. These Psalms Were Intended to Teach

We also know that these psalms were intended to teach. They were didactic in their nature. They were to learn something. That’s why so many of the psalms include a history lesson in them. Now, this is important because New Testament worship, we sing, and our songs are intended to teach, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. And so maybe this Old Testament history lesson serves as a reminder to New Testament Christians today that our songs in worship aren’t to be just modes and means of entertainment, but they’re to teach. And so we need to pay attention to the words so that we can learn, because that was one of the intended purposes of Psalms then and now. All right, this is a rhetorical question, but what’s your favorite psalm?

You all have one. You may go the easy route and say Psalm 23. But we all probably have a favorite psalm, our psalms. But what’s interesting is, as when you’re going to see that as we go through this series, is that your favorite psalm is probably atypal of what most of the psalms are like.

4. Psalms About God: Psalm 90

But so many of the psalms were negative in their nature. Asking God to do something horrible to somebody else. And we’ll talk about those. But the psalms mean so much to us. And they can teach us so much. And so let’s talk this morning in the time that we have remaining about some psalms. What we’re going to do is we’re going to do a little introduction like that in every one of these lessons. And then we’re going to talk about a category of psalms. And so the first category I wanted us to talk about are psalms about God. So many of the psalms have God as their subject matter. And that’s not surprising, but it’s interesting and it’s important because so many times what we know about God comes from the Psalms.

We’ve talked about this so many times, but it bears repeating this morning. One of the main reasons you need to be reading and studying your Bible, because in that Bible is God. And the information about God. Yes, we read the Bible to know what we need to do in order to be saved, to read the thou shalt and the thou shalt not. So we know which commandments not to break. But first and most fundamental, we read the scriptures to learn about God. Because the more we know about God, the closer we’ll be drawn to Him. Sean read in our Bible reading this morning, Psalm 90. Let’s go back there and look at Psalm 90 and how Psalm 90 tells us about God. Psalm 90 is considered to be the oldest Psalm in the Psalter.

If you’ve turned to Psalm 90, you notice it has a heading. And it says the prayer of Moses, the man of God. We normally think of these Psalms as being by David, and David is the most prolific of all the psalm writers. But this one goes back way before David. This is a psalm penned by Moses about God. And let’s outline this psalm as we go, but but let’s first recognize that these psalms that talk about God and either introduce or reacquaint us with God are going to use these Hebrew terms for God. And you may remember that there’s three terms that are used in the Bible. The word El or Elohim is just kind of the generic word for God of deity. But then his personal name that speaks of his relationship to his people as well as his eternity is the word Yahweh, or sometimes translated Jehovah, or maybe in your Bible it’s translated Lord in all capital letters.

When you see that, if you have a translation, it does that. If Lord is in all capital letters, L-O-R-D, all capital, that’s a translation of the Hebrew word Yahweh. And then we have the word Adonai, which again, if you see that, it’s going to be Lord with just the L capitalized. This speaks of the idea of the rule or the majesty of God. Now, the Psalms in our Bibles are broken down into five books. You’ve probably noticed that. At the heading at the Psalm 1, it’ll say Book 1, and then there’s a book two, all the way through five books. We don’t really know the significance of that, other than maybe it made the volumes more manageable to carry around, book one, book two, book three.

But we do make this observation that the term Elohim is used more often in books three and four, kind of the middle part of the Psalms, and the word Jehovah or Yahweh is used more frequently in the other Psalms. One, two, and five. Now the significance of that again is somewhat lost on us, but that’s the best that we can come up with is kind of the grouping, or maybe some reasoning behind the grouping. So maybe books one, two, and five of the Psalms, that would be the beginning Psalms and the last section of Psalms, are maybe more personal in nature to speaking of God and his relationship to Israel. But let’s look at Psalm 90 and kind of outline it this morning. It begins in verses one through six and talking about man’s frailty before God.

Let’s read that one again. Psalm 90 says, Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. And so we see the character of God, the power and the majesty and the might of who God is as an eternal being who simply spoke into existence all that we can see and know. And then we see in relationship to him our frailty. Verse 3, you turn man to destruction. And say, Return, O children of men. For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and are like a watch in the night. You carry them away like a flood.

They are like a sh ley are like sleep in the morning. They are like grass which grows up in the morning, it flourishes and grows up in the evening, it is cut down in its withers. A thousand years in your sight is just like yesterday. Speaking of the contrast of the frailty of man and the limitation of man with the unlimited potential and power and eternity of God. Then the next section, verses 7 through 12, speaks of man’s sin against this holy and powerful being. For you we have been consumed by your anger, and by your wrath we are terrified. You’ve set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. In other words, the sins that we thought we had hidden in the darkness are right there in front of your face.

For all our days have passed away in your wrath. We finish our years like a sigh. The days of our life are seventy years, and if by reason of strength they’re eighty years. Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow, for it soon cut off and we fly away. Who knows the power of your anger? For is the fear of you, so is the wrath. So teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Teach us to count our days, to number our days, not just to understand this brevity of our life in relationship to someone to whom a thousand years is like just the blink of the eye. But teach us to number our years that we may gain a heart of wisdom in regard to our relationship to an eternal God.

And the atrocities of our sin against that God. The last section in verses 13 through 17 speak of man’s appeal then to God. Return, O Lord. God has gone away, or God has sent us away in that middle section because of our sin. And now the appeal, the cry is please come back, God. How long? And have compassion on your servants. Oh, satisfy us early with your mercy. In other words, come back and don’t wait. Come back now, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days in which you have afflicted us, the years in which we have seen evil. Let your work appear to your servants and your glory to their children, and let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of the hands.

5. Psalm 139: The Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omnipotence of God

Yes, establish the work of our hands. And so the psalmist contrast the majesty of God with the frailty of God of man, and man therefore crying out to the only one to whom he can appeal for that help. You see how we learn about God and about his relationship to us. Psalm 139 is another psalm that tells us about God. Look at Psalm 139. Psalm 139 is just kind of a good primer, if you will, into who God is. It’s the elementary book, if you will, of the Psalms about God. And so let’s look at the outline of Psalm 139. He’s going to talk to us about the omniscience of God, the omnipresence of God, and the omnipotence of God. Look at Psalm 139, verses 1 through 6.

O Lord, you’ve searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all of my ways. For there’s not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You’ve hedged me behind and before, and you’ve laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high, and I cannot attain it. God knows everything.

By simply saying, You know everything, and I can’t understand that. We’re baffled by the omniscience of God. How it is possible that God can know everything about everybody. And so we’re not just introduced to the knowledge and the ever-present knowledge of God, but we’re introduced with our inability to fully grasp it. Then he talks about the omnipresence of God. In other words, God is everywhere. Look at beginning in verse 7. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you’re there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell into the othermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall fall on me, even the night shall be light about me. Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from you, but the night shines as the day, and darkness and light are both alike to you. And so we have the omnipresence of God. Or again, more simply put, God is everywhere. Now, I don’t know that there’s a whole lot of difference between the omnipresence of God and the omniscience of God. They kind of speak of the same thing, don’t they? The omnipresence of God, he’s saying, I can’t go anywhere that you’re not there, that you can’t see me and know about me. And so it seems to me that the omnipresence of God, the fact that God is everywhere, is just kind of almost a subset of the omniscience, that he knows everything.

If he knows everything and sees everything, then he knows everywhere and sees everywhere, right? So God knows everything, God sees everywhere, and then we have the omnipotence of God. And that is that God can do anything. Look beginning in verse 13 of Psalm 139. For you formed my inward parts, you’ve covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed, and in your book they are all written. The days fashioned for me when as yet they were none of them.

Conclusion

How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God. How great is the sum of them. If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I am awake, I am still with you. God can do everything. The God who is everywhere and knows everything. The Psalms tell us about God. They tell us about our relationship to God. And so I want to encourage you to do what you already do. And that is to love the Psalms. And to read the Psalms. You want to know about God? Obviously go to the scriptures. Maybe the first place to go in those scriptures is to the Psalms. God is telling you about Himself. These are just a few of the Psalms about God.

Next time, sometime in the month of June, we’ll talk about Psalms dealing with man. You want to know about mankind and human beings. Go to the Psalms. They tell us about who we are, who God is, and what that relationship between those two beings is to be.

Worship, the greatest act of reverence and praise that you can offer to this magnificent God before whom we are so frail is to do what he says, to obey his gospel. Would you come to that awesome God this morning and obey him and give your life to the most powerful, ever present, all knowing being in the universe? Can we help you in that this morning? Would you come as together we stand and as we stand?