Psalms together. And the Book
of Psalms, the first word, Psalm, means song. And this is 150 Psalms. The Orthodox Presbyterians, they
have a psaltery, and that's all they sang from. They sang from
the Psalms. And there's lots of hymns that's
written from the Psalms. Isaac Watts, I don't know how
many he wrote according to the Psalms, and so did John Newton.
But it's psalms. It's psalms. And it's the largest
book in God's blessed book. The largest. There's 150 psalms. The longest one is 119 psalms. I think it's 176 verses long. And I tell you, this blessed
book is probably the most loved book in the Bible. Probably the
most read book in the Bible is the psalms. Because it It describes
us. It deals with us, whatever spiritual
mood we're in. And we have spiritual moods just
like we have natural moods. We have spiritual moods. We have spiritual up moods, spiritual
down moods. We have spiritual joys. We have
spiritual depression. We have spiritual sorrow. We have victories. We have defeats. We have praise, and then sometimes
we have a very repentant heart. We have a very sorrowful heart.
Sometimes we have anger. We're in a spiritually angry
mood. Sometimes we're in a peaceful
mood. But whatever mood we're in, whatever spiritual mood we're
in, there's a psalm that speaks to that particular mood that
we're in. There's a psalm that answers what's going on in our
heart. That's why the scriptures tell us in the Psalms, heart
answers heart, as face does in the water. When you look in the
Psalms, you find your own experience, you find your own heart. This
is what you'd be saying if you was before the Lord. This is
what you'd be saying. And the Psalms magnify and praise
the Lord God Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ. It exalts all of
His attributes, exalts His names. I can't think of the psalm right
now. It may be 111th or 113th. But anyway, there's five titles
of the Lord in two verses. Five names of God in two verses. So that magnifies His name, magnifies
His word, magnifies His goodness, His long-suffering. There's two
different psalms in every verse. They say something, then, the
mercy of the Lord endureth forever. The mercy of the Lord endureth
forever. The mercy of the Lord endureth forever. And every human
experience is related to Him when you read this Bible. Every
human experience that we go through in our lives, whatever spiritual
mood we're in, whatever our experience is or spiritual experience, We
can find it, and it's all related to Him. Related to Him, when
you look at the Psalms. And we have 150 songs of praise
here, 150 songs to our God. And I'll tell you what, you know,
after describing Him in the first Psalm as the perfect man, second
Psalm declares Him to be the King. God said, I set my King
on my holy hill Zion. We're called to worship Him and
adore Him and bow to Him and call on Him and trust Him. And
as we go through the Psalms, we see that the Psalms teach
us to worship God. Here we're taught, especially
in the 119th Psalm, to treasure His Word. God said He magnified
His Word above His name. Now, why would He magnify His
Word above His name? Because, see, He can create another
world. In fact, He's going to create another world. He's going
to make a new heaven and a new earth where He dwells righteous
and destroy this. The one thing He cannot make
is another word. He'll never change His word.
He'll never change what His will is and what His word says. Never
change it. That's why He exalted it above
His own name. Because, beloved, and I tell
you what, we're taught to treasure His Word, delight in His blessed
providence, remember His works. You read in here, it all talks
about all the works of God, speaks of His greatness and His glory,
tells us to trust Him with all of our cares, tells us to glory
in the gospel and to praise Him continually. And every song that
begins with an expression of sorrow, And despondency and sadness
ends up in a praise and a thanksgiving and a adoration of God Himself,
except one, and that's the 88th Psalm. I read that today, and
that is one of the saddest, and as many times as I've read the
Psalm, I've never paid that much attention to it until today.
You read that Psalm when you get home, and all it is, is someone
pouring out their heart to God, and it seems as if God's not
answering. If God's not answering, I mean,
pours it out and says some of the, oh, his heart is hurt, his
soul is breaking, his fear in him, anxiety, depression, everything
you can imagine he's going through in the 88th Psalm. And it's all
solid. And this probably talks about
the inmost sorrow of our Savior as He suffered the wrath of God
for us when He was made to be sin for us. And He became the
object of God's wrath as our substitute, and He found nothing
in Himself to comfort Himself as God forsook Him on that cross. Now, the author of the Psalms,
there's more than one author. And when you look in the Scriptures,
there's 243 quotations from the Old Testament and the New Testament.
And 116 of these comes from the Psalms. When Peter preached on
the day of Pentecost, I don't know how many Psalms he quoted
from on the day of Pentecost when he preached his first message.
He quoted, I don't know how many Psalms. And there's 116 of these
that's in the New Testament coming from the Psalms. And they were
written over a period of 900 years, long before David was
born. And David, you know, Korah and
his family, they wrote a bunch of come his descendants did.
And most half of them were written by David. And when you read,
it'll tell you who they're written from. Here this 25th Psalm is
a Psalm of David, 23rd Psalm, 24th Psalm. And all these Psalms,
it'll tell you. It'll tell you if they're Asaph
or whether they're Haman or whether they're Moses or whoever it is. And 50 of them that nobody knows
who wrote because it doesn't have who they wrote them by.
But there's five divisions in the book of Psalms. You have
what we call the Davidic Psalms. There's the Psalms that David
wrote. And then there's Levitical Psalms. That's the Psalms that
some of the priests wrote and worshiped God and approached
Him and talked about the sacrifices. Then there were the Psalms in
the time of Hezekiah the king. And then that was the Psalms
that was before they were taken into Babylonian captivity, before
they were taken into the Assyrian captivity, and then you have
the Psalms that after they come back from the captivity, after
they come back, Remember I read here the other day where they
said they hung their harps on a willow, when those in Babylon
said, sing us a song of Zion. Sing us one of your pretty songs.
You say you're such good singers, and you sing praises to God,
and you glorify God, and you love your God. He said, sing
us some of them pretty songs. And they said, we couldn't. We
hung our harps on a willow. Because we couldn't sing songs
of praise to our God. We're in bondage. We're in captivity. We have nothing joyful to sing
about. And then you look through these
songs and you come up with personal experiences. Oh, how many personal
experiences. But though they speak of the
Lord Jesus Christ, they also express the feelings of men's
hearts in the experience of those who wrote them. David wrote,
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me in the 22nd Psalm?
And that was no doubt about our Lord Jesus Christ, spoken exactly
what He would say on the cross. But yet it was also an expression
of David's own heart and soul and what he was going through
at that particular time. And whatever condition we're
in, we'll find it in the Psalms. And I'll tell you, we don't want
to just look at it as a historical thing. The Psalms speak of the
Lord Jesus Christ Himself. You remember when He told His
disciples on that on the Emmaus road. After he was on the Emmaus
road, many appeared to him, and they went back to Jerusalem.
And he said in Luke 24, 44, he says, These are the words which
I spake unto you, while I was with you, that all things must
be fulfilled, which were written of me in the law of Moses, that's
the first five books, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms
concerning me. And then you know what he did?
He opened their understanding, starting in the Book of Moses,
in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms,
the thanks concerning himself, and showed them how it thus behooved
Christ to suffer and to rise from the third day. And the Psalms,
beloved, oh my, how they tell about our Lord Jesus Christ.
You read Psalm 2, it talks about God setting him high on his holy
hill of Zion. It's all about, he was the, this
day of our begotten day. And then he talked about how,
kiss the son lest he be angry with thee. I remember Scott Richardson,
he's got on that all the time. Kiss the son lest he be angry
with you. And the Psalms talk about the
incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Talk about the deity
of Christ. Talk about the sonship, the eternal
sonship of Christ. The offices of our Lord Jesus
Christ, His prophet. He'll be a prophet forever after
the order of Melchizedek. He's the priest. And the high
priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. A prophet like
Moses. A king and the king of kings.
The king that would sit on that hill that God put him on. And
it tells us about the betrayal of Christ. It tells us that it
wasn't my familiar friend, it wasn't an enemy that raised up
his heel against me, it was my own familiar friend that did
this. And it talks about the agony
that our Lord Jesus went through. Oh, the sufferings that he went
through. It talks about the trial of our
Lord Jesus Christ, and how men were hired to be false witnesses
against Him in the 35th Psalm. And, oh beloved, it talks about
the rejection of Christ. They mocked Him and scorned Him
and rejected Him. It talks about His crucifixion
and what He was doing, and all the things that He would say,
and the pain He would suffer, and the ridicule that He would
suffer there. And it tells about the resurrection. He says, Thou
wilt not leave My soul in hell, neither wilt I suffer Thine holy
one to seek corruption. It talks about the ascension.
And the exaltation. David, you know, our Lord, I
read to you Sunday morning, where David calls Him Lord, and said,
unto my Lord, sit thou here at my right hand. That's His exaltation,
until I make thee enemies of your footstool. So it tells us
about Christ. It tells us about His holiness,
His heart, His life. It talks about the one who is
infinitely, perfectly holy and sinless, the only sinless, perfect
man in the history of this world. The only one that's ever been
without sin, without fault, without blemish, is our Lord Jesus Christ. And it tells us of His righteousness,
and the only righteous man who ever lived. It tells us about
the enemies of the righteous, of our Lord Jesus Christ. It
talks about those that hate Him without a cause. He said they're
more than the hairs of His head. It tells us of the punishment
of the wicked, and guess who's going to punish them? Christ,
the Judge of all. He Himself is going to do it.
And He's called the Covenant God of the true Israel. Now,
I tell you, beloved, the Gospels tell us about the Kingdom of
God. But the psalm, Psalms, tells us about Christ, who is the King,
the one who God sent inside. And He's going to rule this world
one of these days with a rod of iron. One of these days, all
these enemies, all of these people that ridicule Him, make fun of
Him, say the Scriptures ain't so. Todd Knifer was telling me
a day when he was in college, he was just first year in college, And he said, a fellow told him,
he said, he knowed the Bible wasn't the Word of God because
when he read Esther, he said, it didn't have God in it, so
it couldn't be the Word of God. He said, any book that didn't
have supposed to have God in it, he said, that was just the
history of the Jews. Glorified the history of the Jews. And
Todd says, you know, I was only 18, 19 years old. He said, it
really bothered me. It really bothered me. He said, it worried
me. He said, it just threw me a loop. No wonder. You know, he's just a young anti-believer,
even though he sat under a solid ministry for years and years. But he found out, he read it
himself, and he's seen God everywhere in it, God's providence, God's
glory in it. Yeah, I tell you, there's times
that the enemy will come, and he'll cast a doubt sometimes,
or he'll bring a doubt. He'll bring a doubt to your mind.
Does God really exist? Is there really an afterlife?
Is God's Word really true? Did God really kill all those
people in the Old Testament? Or is there really a garden of
Eden? Did God really put one man in that garden? Did that
man really see it? Was Jesus Christ really the Son
of God, or is He just an historical figure? Did he really, when he
suffered on that cross, did he suffer because they thought he
was a blasphemer? Or was he truly suffering there
on the behalf of his elect people, those given to him in a covenant
of grace? Now, can't be no middle ground.
Either he is or he ain't. And the psalm sets him forth
as he is. The gospels record the history
of our Lord's life while he is in this world. records his coming
into this world through the womb of a virgin, records his family
from both sides of his mother and father. It reveals and shows
us his works, his doctrine, his death, his burial, his resurrection. Now you send it back up and sit
down at the right hand of God. But when we read the Psalms,
they're a record of our Savior's inmost heart and inmost being,
the feelings of our Savior, the passions of our Savior, the experiences
of His heart and soul, who was attempted in all points like
as we are, yet without sin. And then we have what we call
the Messianic Psalms. And there are some that, I mean,
it's just so obvious, so obvious. But I'm telling you, they are
something. Man, you read the 89th Psalm,
the 69th Psalm, the 88th Psalm, the 68th, the 22nd. Oh my, just
on and on, and the 110th. And I tell you, you know, I'll
just give you a few things that it says about Christ in the Book
of Psalms. God says, I set my Son, my Holy
Son, upon my holy hill sign. This day of my begotten day.
And he says that all things, he said, I'll make you enemies,
you fustos, and though I'll make you a little lord in the angels,
I'll give you rule over everything, and all things will be put under
your feet. He says, I myself am not holy
one to see corruption, nor leave his soul in hell. And it tells
us in Psalm 22, it says that God will forsake you. My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me? It said he'll be scorned
and mocked, and they mocked him and scorned him and had him in
derision. It says in Psalm 22, that his
hands and feet, it said he'll pierce his hand. They looked
at his hands and feet, and they would pierce them. It says that
they would gamble for my clothes, and my garments would be cast
lots for, and they would gamble for my garments. They said that,
he says, not one of his bones would be broken. They said that
there would be false witnesses hard to lie against him in Psalm
35. It says that he'll be hated without
a cause in Psalm 35. It says he delighted to come
to do the will of God and he came into this world to do God's
blessed will. Said that it would be a familiar
friend that would lift up his heel against him. And God said
that he would set him on his throne, and his throne would
be forever and ever, and his scepter would be a scepter of
righteousness. And then, beloved, he said he
would ascend to the right hand of God on high, and he would
leave captivity captive when he ascended up. He said, he said,
he come in here and said, the seal of that house has eaten
me up. And when he cried out, he was
thirsty, he says, they gave me a bid for my drink and called
for my drink. And then it tells us that he
would pray for his enemies. He said, Father, forgive them.
They know not what they do. And it talked about how his betrayer
Judas would have his office taken away from him and given to someone
else. His bridge of bricks would be
taken away and given to another. He said all of his enemies would
be made subject to him. He said, God said, you sit right
here and I'll make all your enemies your footstool. He said he'll
be a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. He said
the stone was the builder's objective. He himself, God said, will make
him the cornerstone. And then when he comes again
to judge the world in righteousness, you know what he said? He'll
be the one to come to judgment. He will. And that's just getting
hot spots. Oh, my. When you look at Him
in the Psalms, you see Him as the Redeemer, Savior, Lord, the
Rock, the Refuge, the Shepherd, our Shield, our Fortress, the
High Tower of His people. And then you have the Psalms
where there's Folks whose heart are broken, they've got sin,
and they repent. And Bavis, Psalm 51, is the perfect
instance of that. Psalm 51. But he says there that
God found no pleasure in the sacrifices. He said, Bavis, if
you delighted in lambs and burnt offerings, I'd offer that. But
he said, that's not what you delight in. He said, that's not
what you delight in. You delight in a broken heart
and a contrite spirit. That's not what you delight in.
And God found that broken heart and contrite spirit perfectly,
perfectly in His blessed Son. Our spirit and heart has never
been broken enough, and our heart's never been broken enough, our
spirit's never been contrite enough to make God accept any
offering that we'd bring. Only Christ can. And then you
have what they call the Shepherd Psalms, Psalm 22 through 23 and
24. And they all speak of our Lord
Jesus Christ as the Shepherd. But you read the 22nd Psalm and
Isaiah 53 together, and you'll see the sufferings of our blessed
Redeemer. And that's where you see the
crucifixion. so vividly portrayed hundreds
and hundreds of years before it took place, right down to
the minutest details. And then you read the 22nd Psalm
and the 69th Psalm together, and you'll see another prophetic
picture of our Lord Jesus Christ's suffering. And Psalm 22 is mentioned
in all four of the Gospels. All four of the Gospels, all
of them. And I tell you, beloved, they
that pass by, says so many places, they that pass by reviled and
wagged their heads. They told him, said, he trusted
in God, let him deliver him now, if you'll have him free. He said,
I'm the son of God. They gave me gall for my meat,
my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink. And, oh, beloved, he
had such a broken heart. You know what actually happened
to him on that cross? His heart exploded and burned.
That's where all that water and blood come out of. When they
pierced it, that heart, the way it was, the broken heart was
the salt, the cause of our death, of our Lord Jesus Christ. And
he said in the 22nd Psalm, I'm poured out like water. All my
bones are out of joy. My heart is like wax. It's melted
in the midst of my vows. And he said six times in the
69th Psalm, the word reproach, six times. He bore the reproaches, our reproaches
that we reproach God, he bore them himself. He bore reproach,
he bore shame, dishonor, not for himself, but for others.
Bearing our shame, bearing our sin, his father hiding his face
on our account, that's what broke his heart. And, O Beloved, I tell you, the
way into the holiest of all is open for us through the broken
heart of God's Son. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, Thou
gavest my soul, my darling and my soul, over to the dogs. That's
what He said about Him. And I tell you, the only way
into the presence of the holiest of holies is through the blessed
heart of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's the sinner's Savior, the
sinner's hope, the sinner's gospel. And then in Psalm 22 and 23 and
24, we have our Lord Jesus Christ represented as a Savior. You've
heard these many times before. In Psalm 22, He's the Good Shepherd,
who gave His life for the sheep, laid down His life for the sheep.
In Psalm 23, He's the Great Shepherd. We see a risen, living, reigning
Shepherd, and He says there, you know that He as the reigning
shepherd that he would not lose any of his sheep. He'd keep all
of his sheep. He'd preserve his sheep. He'd
give his sheep life. And then he's the good shepherd,
the chief shepherd, that shall come again. And that's why Peter
said, you know, when the chief shepherd shall appear, You'll receive a crown of glory
that fadeth not away. That's what we're going to get
when He comes again. He's going to give all of His people a crown
of glory. We're going to be crowned with
glory. And then the last thing that He asks is this. The 24th
Psalm asks this question. Who shall ascend into the hill
of the Lord? Who shall stand in His holy place?
He that hath clean hands and a pure heart. He who hath not
lifted up his soul under bandaging or sworn deceitfully, he, that
man, shall receive the blessing of the Lord and righteousness
from the God of his salvation." Now, you know there's people
who believe they meet that criteria. There's people who believe they
meet that criteria. But I only know one person who
meets that. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? who
shall stand in his holy place, he that hath clean hands." Now,
when he talks about clean hands, that means to be innocent of
all blood. When he talks about clean hands,
he's not talking about working with water. He's talking about
having hands, clean hands that ain't never, ever done anything
wrong with them. And when he talks about a pure
heart, he's talking about a heart that has no sin in it. that loved
God, loved his neighbor, pure from all imperfections. And he has a soul who has not
lifted himself up to that. He never lifted himself up to
be something when he's nothing. Lifting himself up to present
himself to be something that he's not, nor sworn deceitfully. That man shall receive the blessing
from the Lord, the righteousness of the God of his salvation.
But let me tell you something. I stand in Christ, so I can do the same thing. I'm going to
stop standing in His holy place. We're at in the blessed Redeemer.
I've got clean hands and a pure heart. We're at in my Redeemer.
I've not lifted up my soul, underbanding, nor sworn deceitfully. Christ
represented me, and when He done that, He represented you, and
all of His perfections is ours. And when He stands there, we
stand in Him. When He stands there, we stand in Him. And when
He comes again, we're going to go right there and be with Him.
We stand right this minute in the holy place itself. And I'll
tell you, that's why the psalm says, this is the generation
that seek Him, that seek thy face. Oh, Jacob, the God of Jacob. God help us to always seek Him.
Told you I'd get through that in just a little while. I do
it when I need to. I hope it's a blessing to you.