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Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus

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Christ. Amen.

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The text for today is actually Psalm 138.

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I invite you to look in your Bibles and critique it with me as I go through it.

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Last week I started reading Psalm 138 in preparation for this homily, but in the process I got

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frustrated because the forward direction of my reading kept getting interrupted, not by

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beautiful pearls of thought seducing me into lingering, but rather by syntactical and lexical

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puzzles that I needed to solve.

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I kept running into stuff that drove me to Gazzanius, Waltke, O'Connor, and Joan, the

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Holy Trinity of Hebrew Grammars, and B.D.B., H.A.L.O.T., and D.C.H., the Holy Trinity of

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Hebrew Lexicons.

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Now I know that these guys are not on the top of everybody's guest list to your next

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Let's Meditate on the Psalms party.

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But these are my good friends, and yet even they finally overstayed their welcome, even

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for me.

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I lost track of time like a kid in a candy store until the stern voice of reason intruded

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into my playtime.

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Stop messing around, it said.

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You have to preach on this psalm, so just pick something and get on with it.

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So I left the playground of my mind, well sort of as you will see, and I picked something

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that I hope will work for all of you today.

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However for you to see it, I have to start with a really annoying correction.

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You need to know that translations such as the ESV make a mistake in the way that they

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translate the first line of the psalm.

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The ESV has, I give you thanks, O Lord, with my whole heart.

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It's the O Lord that is wrong and messes up the dynamic of the psalm.

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O Lord is actually not in the Masoretic text.

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The translators unwisely took it from the Greek translation, the Septuagint, and some

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other versions.

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So you need to erase it from your minds as you read the first line.

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When you do that, you can see that in verses 1 through 3, God's name, Yahweh, translated

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as Lord, does not appear.

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What you get is a bunch of pronouns, yous and yours, but never Yahweh.

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Now that changes dramatically in verses 4 through 6.

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As you can see, the Lord appears four times in three verses, flashing like lightning across

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a dark sky.

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Now that move from Yahweh hidden to Yahweh revealed, embedded in the grammar of the psalm,

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caught my attention and started me thinking.

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So I thought I'd share some of my thinking with you.

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You of course are free to think what you want.

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When I looked again at verses 1 through 3, in addition to the fact that Yahweh is not

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mentioned by name, I also noticed who was mentioned.

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Other gods.

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Before the gods, I will sing your praise.

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Before the gods, or maybe opposed to the gods, I will sing your praise.

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That's really an unusual thing to say.

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And I wondered what it meant.

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Before the gods, it sounds like he's describing a physical experience.

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And given Israel's idolatrous history and the ancient near east in general, that makes

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sense.

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Whether in pagan lands or often even in Israel, other gods, not Yahweh, were a felt presence.

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Their temples and their altars dotted the landscape.

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Their priests offered prayers and sacrifices to satisfy their gods.

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If you live in a pagan territory, the reigning assumption is that these are the gods that

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must be worshipped, not Yahweh.

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These are the gods who can bring prosperity and victory to the people, not Yahweh.

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Then I noticed that in contrast to the way Yahweh appears in other psalms, here Yahweh

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doesn't appear to be a threat to the gods or anything else.

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In fact, he is hidden behind all those pronouns.

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He's the object of one's private devotion, perhaps, and that's about it.

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So in the opening verses of this psalm, there is a tension between the gods who are seen

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and the actions of the psalmist who in the presence of other gods worships a god who

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remains unseen.

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It has to be hard to keep your faith in a place where other gods reign.

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It had to be hard to worship Yahweh when he was distant and the other gods were so close

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at hand.

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Nevertheless, that's what David does.

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He trusts Yahweh's love and faithfulness even in front of the gods.

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What about me?

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I wondered to myself.

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Today our problem is not the felt presence of other gods, it's the felt absence of any

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god whatsoever.

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We live in a land where it is easy to live and believe as if there is no god or gods.

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Our beliefs are contested all the time.

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The gods have faded away and so has the belief of many people in God or even in gods.

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As I thought about my own spiritual life in relation to this voice in Psalm 138, I realized

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that I needed the words of this psalm to remind me of my own identity under the unique pressures

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of the foreign land in which I live.

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The psalmist determinedly worships and trusts in the god he knows is faithful.

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Even when it is counterintuitive and uncomfortable and his determination encourages me to do

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the same.

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When I doubt, when my trust grows weak, when the Lord seems to have vanished from the scene.

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This psalm reminds me that the life of faith is a life of dogged trust in and worship of

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a god that cannot be seen.

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Trust in God's love and faithfulness in the face of visible evidence to the contrary.

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And by the end of verse 3, I am hoping for the strength of soul that God gave David here.

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Strength for the road ahead.

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And then in verses 4 through 6 things change.

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The speaker moves from the present to the future and Yahweh suddenly appears.

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And my reading experience in finally seeing Yahweh come out from behind all those pronouns

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gave me this little moment of delight.

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I actually thought, oh there's Yahweh.

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He showed up.

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That's pretty cool.

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It's pretty cool that the psalmist set me up for that moment of insight and pleasure.

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And then I imagined that my simple delight in seeing the name Yahweh appear in verses

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4 through 6 is the smallest of small tastes of delight that I will feel when Yahweh does

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actually come again at the end of time.

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When our Lord does actually show himself and I will bow before him.

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Oh wow, that's our Lord.

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That's really cool.

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Notice also that the name Yahweh when it appears is not in the mouth of the speaker.

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It is in the mouth of the kings of the earth.

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And they are not cursing Yahweh.

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They are worshiping him.

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They are thanking him and singing of his ways.

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And the gods whom they once worshiped have disappeared entirely from the scene.

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It's an incredible reversal of the way things presently look.

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These verses promise a day when everyone will know that Yahweh, not any other god, rules

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all things.

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Like Isaiah says, thus says the Lord, the redeemer of Israel and his holy one to one

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deeply despised, abhorred by the nation, the servant of rulers.

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Kings shall see and arise, princes and they shall prostrate themselves because of the

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Lord who is faithful, the holy one of Israel who has chosen you.

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Or as Paul says in some famous words about our Lord Jesus who is despised, abhorred by

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the nation and a servant of rulers.

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Therefore God has highly exalted Him and given Him a name that is above every name.

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That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

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And every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

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Now after mulling over these things for a while I read through the last verses of this

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psalm.

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And that future hope which the psalm promises remained in my heart.

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The Lord reigns.

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Even as the psalmist took me back to this present age in the midst of trouble he says

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in verse 7, you preserve my life.

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Back to the life of faith.

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But remember the Lord reigns.

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One last thing to wrap up.

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At the end of the psalm Yahweh makes another appearance you will notice.

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But now on the lips of the psalmist and after traveling through this psalm along the path

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that I have taken I can resonate a little more with the tension created between the

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confident conviction of the speaker when he says the Lord will fulfill his purpose for

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me.

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Your steadfast love O Lord endures forever.

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And his final plea which reveals his ongoing need.

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Do not forsake the work of your hands.

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Now I have to tell you that's a really interesting way to end a psalm.

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As you know in the Old Testament idols, the false gods are ridiculed as the work of the

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hands of men.

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In contrast in the Old Testament the works of the hands of Yahweh almost always refer

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to two things.

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The creation which you might expect and the people of Israel which you might not have

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expected.

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Israel is the work of God's hands.

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What an ironic twist.

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The gods in the first verse of the psalm are the works of the hands of men and they are

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doomed to disappear.

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What about the works of God's hands?

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Will God forsake them?

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Of course he will not.

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He made Israel to live forever.

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One thing you need to remember is that that is who you are.

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You are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus Paul says.

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You are all the work of His hands and He loves you too much.

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He loves the work that he has created too much to ever abandon you, to ever forsake

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you.

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Do not forsake the work of your hands we pray.

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I respond don't worry he won't. Amen.

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Now may the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ which passes all our understanding keep your

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hearts and minds together in Christ Jesus.

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Amen.