So we're going to Psalm 48. Psalm
48. So if you have your Bibles, turn
with me please to Psalm 48. And we will read from verse one. Psalm 48, reading from verse
one. A song and psalm for the sons
of Korah. Great is the Lord and greatly
to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of his
holiness. Beautiful for situation, the
joy of the whole earth is Mount Zion. On the sides of the north,
the city of the great king. God is known in her palaces for
a refuge, for lo the kings were assembled, they passed by together,
they saw it and so they marvelled, they were troubled and hasted
away. Fear took hold upon them there,
and pain, as of a woman in travail, Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish
with an east wind. As we have heard, so have we
seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our
God. God will establish it for ever.
Selah. We have thought of thy lovingkindness,
O God, in the midst of thy temple. According to thy name, O God,
so is thy praise unto the ends of the earth. Thy right hand
is full of righteousness. Let Mount Zion rejoice, let the
daughters of Judah be glad because of thy judgments. Walk about
Zion and go round about her, tell the towers thereof. Mark
ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces, that ye may tell
it to the generation following. For this God is our God for ever
and ever. He will be our guide even unto
death. Amen. May the Lord bless to us
this reading from his word. I wonder if, perhaps like me,
you find yourself concerned for the state of the church. We kind
of alluded to this a little bit earlier. Getting anxious for
the state of the gospel, and the future of the gospel, and
wondering whether anything that we do or say actually has any
real effect and impact on the world around about us. Week after week, month after
month, year after year, we endeavour to preach the gospel with all
the faithfulness that we can muster as the Lord has led us. And we wonder sometimes if we're
just preaching into a vacuum. We wonder sometimes if we're
just preaching into a big abyss. for the apparent lack of response
that there is around about us. And I know it's not always like
that, and we get encouragements along the way, but they seem
to be few and far between. And maybe sometimes we do fear,
and we do become anxious about what is happening. We see churches
getting older, as I was saying. We see churches getting older,
we see congregations thinning out, they become smaller. And the message that we try to
share is being drowned out in an increasingly noisy world filled
with false religion and anti-religion. I try not to let such ideas linger
in my head too long, but I confess they are an anxiety that I have. But I'm reminded, I'm reminded
of this fact, that as far as the true gospel is concerned,
it has always been thus. We can't look back at any time
in history and say, oh, those were the glory days, those were
the good days, because invariably the true gospel has always been
just a small work, just a limited activity, a hard pressed seed. And it has been almost, we might
say, a miracle of the Lord's doing that he has kept his people
and he has brought still today that testimony to the Lord Jesus
Christ to the ears and to the hearing of men and women throughout
the world. And I further am reminded when
I think of these things that any burden that I have and any
passion that I feel for the care of the Church pales into insignificance
beside the love and the holy jealousy which the Lord Jesus
himself harbours for the glory, security and well-being of his
people. Christ will have his church beautiful. Christ will have his church glorified. He is going to wed, he is going
to marry a beautiful, perfect bride. And what we are about
doing here is simply gathering in. Perhaps it is those last
few that will make up the perfection of that body, which is the bride
of Christ. So that in that consummation,
in that union that will take place when the Lord comes back
for his people, we will see that all of these things were working
together perfectly according to the Lord's will. And even
though we felt that the testimony was so tenuous, so weak, so suppressed,
Still, it will become clear that it was achieving the end and
the purpose that the Lord desired. Some of you are aware that I've
been preaching through the prophecy of Isaiah recently, and I've
been struck by the care that the prophet takes to comfort
the troubled people of God by preaching to them the gospel. I don't want to say that it was
an eye opener in the sense that I didn't know this. I did know
this. I knew that Christ was in the
whole of scripture. We've talked about that in the
past. We understand that. And when
we look at the Old Testament scriptures, we're looking for
Christ in them. But there is a sense in which
perhaps, to me as well, I learned that this wasn't just a case
of picking out pictures of the Lord throughout the Old Testament.
It was a systematic unfolding of the plan and purpose of God
in Christ for the salvation of his people. And that these Old
Testament believers, this remnant people that Isaiah speaks about,
these Old Testament believers were themselves being informed
about the Lord Jesus Christ. all through the centuries before
he came, a thousand years, two thousand years before he came,
they were understanding spiritual things. Yes, they saw it through
the lens of practical religious activity, so the sacrifices. But the sacrifices were not the
sacrifices of animals and the shedding of blood on an altar
as an end in itself. It was a vehicle, it was a channel
through which the Lord Jesus Christ was being focused upon. Now I am sure that there were
many, many people for whom that experience was, you kill an animal
and that's you done your religious duty. But surely that wasn't
the case for those who thought about what was happening. They
saw that that animal was representative of them. They saw that that animal
was in place of their life and was shedding its blood so that
they wouldn't have to shed theirs. And as they looked forward and
as the Lord's prophets spoke about these things, unveiled
the purposes of God, revealed what was going to happen. They
saw and they understand and understood that the Messiah's coming would
be for the salvation of his people. What they looked forward to and
focused upon and believed in is what we look back upon and
focus upon and believe in. It's the same faith in the same
person to the same end. I've been preaching through Isaiah
and it has been a revelation to me just how much care the
Prophet takes to comfort the troubled people of God. And it
was troubled. They had so many enemies. That
was when the Amalekites were invading the country. and the
Babylonians came after them. Their cities were destroyed,
their families were broken up, they were taken into exile. It
was a horrendous time of instability in that period in Israel. And
in the midst of that, the prophet is speaking about Christ and
His coming. Why? To comfort the people during
their time of trial. That was his aim, that was his
purpose. He was constantly turning the
gaze of the Old Testament people, the remnant people, to the promises
of God concerning the coming Messiah. He preached Christ because
he knew that nothing blesses, nothing comforts, Nothing more
encourages the Lord's people in times of trial than the message
of salvation by God's free grace in Jesus Christ. And I was reminded
of this again when I was reading Psalm 48. And I'd like to speak
on that psalm for a little while now and leave a few thoughts
with you in hope that they might be an encouragement to you too. So I have five things in this
little psalm that the church, the church, and that's the church
in the Old Testament, the church in the New Testament, the church
today, the church in every age. We who are the body of Christ,
we who are the little flock, we are the church. those who have faith in the Lord
Jesus Christ. And there are five things that
the church knows concerning our God. The first one that I have
for you is this. It's the opening verse in this
chapter. Great is the Lord. The church knows that. The church
knows that the Lord is great. Great is the Lord and greatly
to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of His
holiness. Now the city of our God and the
mountain of His holiness is Old Testament language for the Church
of Jesus Christ. We are the city of God. We are the mountain of His holiness. And It's an amazing thing that
the people of God, because we don't feel holy, do we? We don't
feel perfect and righteous and holy and just before God, but
that's how He views us. That's how He's always viewed
His precious city, His precious people, His flock. That's how
He's always viewed us because He's always viewed us in the
Lord Jesus Christ. Our righteousness, our justification
is Christ's righteousness and the perfection that we have,
the holiness that we have is Christ's holiness. So this is
the church that we're speaking about and the church says that,
as the psalmist reminds us, that the first purpose of the church
is to praise the greatness of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Okay, so that's the first purpose
of the church. When you gather here, let's hone
in on this, let's drill down on this. When you gather here
on a Sunday morning, your first purpose is to Praise the greatness
of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's what you're here for.
Some folks think that the first priority of the church is to
gain new members, or to build bigger buildings, or in some
way to initiate more social projects and become a greater influence
in the community. But the psalmist understood that
the true spiritual role of the church is to worship God. And
that is our foremost offering. When we come into his presence,
it's his glory that is the principle theme of our praise. So the Lord's
glory, let's just think about that for a moment. Our Lord Jesus
Christ is in himself great. In his person as the God-man,
there is a greatness. He's the eternal God manifested
in human flesh. He has all the attributes of
the eternal God, all the majesty, all the glory of the eternal
God. In him dwelt all the glory of the triune God in his human
flesh. And he is equal with the Father.
He is equal with God, the Holy Spirit, and he is dearly beloved
of both. He's perfect in his attributes
of glory, power, wisdom, might, holiness, goodness. All of these
things, his faithfulness, his truth, all of these things are
perfected in the Lord Jesus Christ. And we can only look upon him
and think how great he is, how glorious he is. And his love,
his love is glorious. He loves us with a perfect, unchangeable
and everlasting love. So in himself and in his attributes,
our Lord Jesus Christ is great and greatly to be praised. And
he's great in his works, not only in his person, but in his
works, his works of creation, his works of providence. Great
in his wonderful words that he has spoken. The works that he
performed on earth, the miracles that he performed when he was
on earth reflect that greatness. He undertook and he fulfilled
the great task to redeem God's chosen people from their sins
and to secure a great redemption and a great salvation. And he fulfils those covenant
offices that were laid to him. All the tasks, all the jobs,
all the responsibilities and duties that were laid upon him
in the covenant of grace and peace. All these covenant offices
and roles as prophet, as priest, as king. a prophet who declares,
who speaks out, a priest who represents and offers and is
indeed that which is offered as the sacrificial lamb, a king
who reigns and rules in his kingdom. The Lord Jesus Christ fulfils
all of these covenant roles to perfection. Great is the Lord
and greatly to be praised. He feeds, He refreshes, He nourishes,
He cares for His church and His people. He represents us even
now in heaven. What is the Lord Jesus Christ
doing? He is representing us. He is mediating between the Father
and His people here upon earth. He is interceding for us. And
in every conceivable way, the Lord's people give assent to
the psalmist's sentiment here. We confess, as our parents did
and our grandparents did, who were truly believers in Christ,
and the generations before them, all the way back to the time
of Christ, all the way back to the time of Isaiah, all the way
back to the time of Abraham, all the way back to the time
of Adam and Eve and Abel in the garden. All of those who were
the Lord's true people acknowledged, great is the Lord and greatly
to be praised. The Lord is great. But I want
us to know something too. Knowledge of the Lord's greatness
lays an obligation upon the church to worship the Lord by faith,
to praise and to honour the Lord in spirit and truth, who is both
great in himself and for all the things that he has done.
Knowing the greatness of God, the fact that we know how great
the Lord is, we cannot remain silent. just as the angels in
heaven cannot remain silent. Their role is to praise the Lord
for the majesty and glory that they view constantly before their
eyes. And it is our role by faith to
emulate those angels, to do as they're doing, We don't see physically
by sight the glory of God, but we see it by faith, and by faith
we worship him in spirit and in truth. We say with the hymn
writer, tell out my soul the greatness of the Lord. So that's
the first thing that we see from this psalm, that the church understands
the greatness of the Lord. The second thing that we see,
and I'm just going to drop down a few verses now, from verses
three to six that we read together. God is known in her palaces,
that's in the palaces of the church, in the rooms and the
palaces of the church. God is known in her palaces for
a refuge. We understand that the Lord is
great, And we understand that the Lord is a refuge. And that's what these verses
are speaking about. The Lord, our refuge. Again,
the Old Testament, Abraham knew. that the Lord was his shield
and his exceeding great reward. And that's what a shield is.
A shield defends us, a shield protects us, a shield is a refuge
we can stand beside. And as a refuge, God's people
are able to withstand the attacks of the devil and their enemies
in this life. Hebrews, the book of Hebrews
speaks of those who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the
hope set before us. We flee to Christ for refuge,
for help, for protection, for deliverance. and we flee to him
because he has been set before us as the only hope for our souls. Christ is all the believers hope
and every believer lays hold upon the Lord Jesus Christ. So
what did we say at the beginning? The church knows that the Lord
is great, that God is great. That is a characteristic of the
church. If you're a member of the church,
if you're a member of the body of Christ, you know that God
is great. If you're a member of the body of Christ, you know
that Christ is a refuge. You know that your soul is only
protected in Him. The psalmist tells us here in
this chapter that the kings of the earth assembled to war, the
kings of the earth assembled to war against Christ and against
his bride, against Christ and against his holy city. They assembled
themselves against the church, but the saviour has proven to
be a suitable refuge for them. We find refuge in His blood,
in His righteousness, in His faithfulness, in His strength.
He is our strength. He strengthens us. We gain comfort
and hope and certainty from Him, so much so that our enemies are
scattered before us. It was the Assyrians because
they're in my head because we've been thinking about Isaiah. But
we could go back earlier and think about, I don't know, the
Midianites and the Amalekites. It was the Ammonites as far as
Saul was concerned and Samuel. But it doesn't matter where you
want to go in the Bible. There's always been an enemy. There's always been an enemy
of the Lord's people. It was the Amalekites in the
days of Isaiah and then the Babylonians following them. There's always
been an enemy to frighten the church, to try and stomp out
the testimony, to try and be rid of that people. And the Lord Jesus Christ has
always been their refuge. He has always preserved and protected
that seed, that remnant through which the Messiah would come
and by which the gospel would be maintained and proclaimed
down through the ages of the church. So these kings came against
the church and what happens? Christ defends us. I don't know
what he does. I can't begin to tell you all
the various ways in which Christ defends his people. Sometimes
he sent hail on them. And the people of God didn't
even have to draw their swords. Their enemies were killed in
front of them because of a hailstorm. Sometimes it was an angel of
the Lord that passed through the midst of the camp and the
people heard a noise and they woke up and they stabbed one
another. That's what happened to the Amalekites. As far as
Babylon was concerned, it was a king that was put in place
that said, you know what, I'm going to send all these exiled
people back to their own homes. And that's what happened with
the Babylonians. The Lord has the king's heart
in his hands and he turns it in whichever direction he wants
and he can destroy our enemies or he can cause them to have
a change of mind and they do something that is entirely inconsistent
with what we would expect them to do and yet the result is always
the same, the preservation of the church of Jesus Christ because
the Lord is in the business and he frustrates their plans. He
protects and he covers his people under the wings of his care and
he frustrates the plans of the enemy. He goes forth to fight
and to conquer on our behalf. The Lord is powerful in battle
and he shall have the victory because we know he's great. And he sends an east wind to
destroy the strength of his enemies. Or he sends locusts in amongst
them and they eat all their crops. The number of ways that the Lord
preserves his people are legion. But preserves them he does. And Christ is our saviour. And
in his covenant role, he is our refuge and strength. Isaiah 32
verse 2 says, and a man shall be as a hiding place from the
wind and a cover from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place,
as a shadow of a great rock in a weary land. And here too the church has a
role and activity. Verse 9 tells us in the chapter,
So we know in the palaces of the the city of God, we know that
Christ is our refuge. And in the temple of the city
of God, so we've got these figurative buildings within this city being
used to express the idea of the Lord's people coming together,
meditating upon spiritual things and understanding what it is
that God is and who he is. We discover his loving kindness.
We've discovered the love of God towards us. And we see that
manifested in the Lord Jesus Christ and in his sacrifice in
coming for his people. So Paul writes, We are more than
conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the
love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. What a catalogue
that is. What a catalogue of extremes of outer limits. Nothing, doesn't matter who,
where, when, nothing is going to be able to separate us from
the love of Christ. Not height, not depth, not breadth,
not anything. The Lord is great and the Lord
is our refuge and the church of Jesus Christ knows that. Here's
the third thing that the Church of Jesus Christ knows. We know
that the Lord is gracious. We know He's gracious. We know
that He's gracious to supply all our needs. Look at verse
10. According to thy name, O God,
so is thy praise unto the ends of the earth. Thy right hand
is full of righteousness. See the right hand of the Lord.
It's full of righteousness. There is a plentitude in the
hand of God to supply good things, good things for his people. and
our God is gracious. He is abundant. There's a cornucopia
of good things in the Lord to give to his people. We will never
be jeopardised as the Church of Jesus Christ. Troubled as
we are with the affairs of this life, with the weaknesses of
our bodies, with the trials that we have to face, we will never
be jeopardised because we always have the Lord on our side. And
what did we sing earlier? Great is thy faithfulness. Great
is thy faithfulness. So there is so much. We have
so much. There's an abundance of good
things in the right hand of the Lord to supply the need of his
people, even to the ends of the earth. Now you can think about
that as far as all the earth's resources are concerned. The
earth's resources are at our disposal. We're not the rich
people in this world. Not many rich, not many powerful. It's the poor people. that the
Lord calls to himself. And yet this whole world, the
resources of this world are at our disposal insofar as they
are in the Lord's hands to be employed for the preservation,
protection and deliverance of his people. And that's what he
is doing in this world. The Old Testament remnant, that
idea of the ends of the earth, let me just also say this, that
idea of the ends of the earth was also a repeated theme in
the prophecy of Isaiah because Isaiah was always telling the
remnant and there was, you know what a remnant is? Yeah. The remnant's the little bit
that's cut off at the end when you're making something. When
you're making something nice, you don't want it looking baggy
and saggy, so you trim it. And the little bit of trim that
comes off at the end is the remnant. And that's what God called his
Old Testament people, the remnant people, because they were so
little, because they were so insignificant, because they were
the bit that was thrown away. When people in the world thought
that they were making something nice, they discarded the Lord's
people, the off-scouring of the earth. And the Lord says, no,
I'm going to look after you. You're precious to me. You're
my remnant. And the remnant, the little bit,
was always encouraged in the Old Testament with this idea
that when the Messiah came, his influence was going to go to
the ends of the world, the ends of the earth. And that's where
this reference keeps coming back to us, that to the ends of the
earth, the Lord's provision will go amongst the Gentiles. And
this worldwide movement So what was just a few people in Israel
until the coming of Christ became a worldwide movement as the gospel
was taken by the early apostles and the preachers and went out
into the towns and the cities and
onto the trade routes and spread right around the world. And the
Lord has always preserved that message, always preserved his
testimony, always preserved his people. There's never been a
greater opportunity for the church to reach the ends of the earth
with the gospel than we have today. We are the first generation. And this is why I'm going back
to that first paragraph that I had in my thinking where I
said, you know, We could look at this and we could narrow our
thoughts and think, oh, things are getting really bad and things
are getting really hard. Everybody's getting so old and
where's the gospel going to go? There's never been a better time
to be preaching the gospel than it is today. We can go into every
single person's house with the gospel. through the technology
that is available for us today. They used to have to get into
boats, they used to have to ride camels, they used to have to
walk hundreds of miles in order to preach the gospel. Now we just click a button and
we're in somebody's house on the other side of the world with
the message. And we just, you know the verse
about casting your bread on the water after many days it'll return. We just cast the bread. That's
what we're doing. It's like standing at the harbour
and feeding the seagulls. You just throw it out there. and the Lord will take that message
and he will send it to the person that needs to hear it. Why? Because
that's the business he's in. He is bringing his church into
a knowledge of the truth. So here we find once again that
the Old Testament people understood the fact that the Lord was gracious
and has Isaiah preached and as Paul preached and as we preach
today, we are carrying the same message, different means, different
technology, certainly, but the same message which has always
touched the Lord's people and changed their lives. Here's the
fourth point. Our Lord is a righteous judge. Verse 11 tells us, let Mount
Zion rejoice, let the daughters of Judah be glad because of thy
judgments. So once again We know that the
Lord is great. We know that the Lord is our
refuge. He's our salvation. We know that
the Lord is gracious with plenty of good things in his hands to
give us. And we know that he's a righteous
judge. We know that there is a righteousness
about our God. There's a joy and a satisfaction
on the part of the Lord's people, on the part of the church, in
anticipating his righteous judgments. We look around us in the world
today and we think to ourselves, these guys are getting away with
murder, sometimes literally. These nations are doing terrible
things. These autocrats are holding whole
nations to ransom. They're persecuting tens of thousands,
hundreds, maybe millions of people. They are able to, by a political
expedient decision, make somebody's life horrendous just because
it suits them to do it, because they've got these megalomaniacal
ideas that they want to be great. And we've found that in the history
all through history. And we see it even today. You
know what? God is not mocked. Whatsoever
a man soweth, that shall he also reap. There is a day of accountability
coming, and the church knows that. It knows that vengeance
is mine. I shall repaceth the Lord. So
we don't need to lift our hands, we don't need to draw our swords,
we don't need to arm our guns, because these things are in the
hands of God. And he can take that autocrat
away in a moment. People say, oh, Mr. Putin, what's he going to do?
Or North Korea, what are they going to do? Or what's going
to happen in Iran? And they're gone. They're gone. We're not going to worry. We
know the Lord is righteous. We know that the Lord is a righteous
judge. And yes, we feel anxiety, but there is a day of judgment
coming. Let me just put another spin on that, if I may, to maybe just strip that back
a bit, because it's all very well us saying, These wicked people will be judged
and God will take his part. But you know what? There's another
layer of anxiety comes in at that stage as well because some
of us know and some of us love some of these people who don't
have Christ. What about in our own family? We know that there
is a righteous judgment coming from God We know that there is
a day coming when every single person will stand before God
and give an account for the things that they have done. Now, for
the church, that is all going to be dealt with in the Lord
Jesus Christ. Their account is going to be clear. God doesn't
find any sin in his people. But we have loved ones. And yet this verse tells us that
the righteous judge of all the earth will bring his right judgments
to bear upon the wicked in a great act of righteousness, justice
and wrath. We have to take a step back and
we have to say, as far as the Lord is concerned, he shall do
right And we long for our loved ones. We long for those that
we care for to come to our knowledge of Christ. And yet we are also
aware that the Lord's will will be done in this matter. And this
is what is going to take us on to our final thoughts here. All
these facts, all these truths testify to the glory of the Lord
Jesus Christ. and they echo and re-echo in
the praise of the Church down through the ages for the glory
of God and his ways. Our role as the Church of Jesus
Christ is not to accomplish the great things for Christ, but
to rehearse and relate and repeat and retell the great accomplishments
of Christ. It's not our role in this world
to be doing great things for Christ, it's our role in this
world to be retelling the great things that Christ has done.
That's it, that's it. We are to, listen, this is lovely. We are to walk about Zion and
go round about her. Tell the towers thereof. Tell
means to count. Tell the towers thereof. Become
familiar with the experiences of God's people. Count our blessings. study the dimensions of God's
love and all the number of evidences of His goodness and His grace,
that we may declare it and tell it to the generation following. That's our role, just to keep
telling to the generation following the great things that the Lord
has done. And I'm always gladdened to see
the number of young people in this congregation, as I've said.
This is the generation following. In this place, in this moment,
this is the generation following. And it's our privilege, it's our obligation to be faithful
witnesses to them. We're older, aren't we? We're
getting old. What have we got to offer to
this world? The testimony that we bear to
these children. We tell them about the good things
that the Lord has done for us. We tell them about what we understand
of his grace and his mercy. And that's how the Lord carries
this gospel down through the ages. This is the generation and it's
our privilege to preach the message and to witness to them the things
of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the free righteousness that
is to be obtained in him. May the Lord give us a burden
to declare his greatness, to speak about his salvation, role as a refuge for his people,
his grace and his coming judgment. John the Baptist said to the
people, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? We tell
them that there is a judgment coming as well. We tell them
about the effects of sin and what is going to happen. except
we find the Lord Jesus Christ to be our saviour. This is the
message that we have to preach. This is the things that we have
to declare. And may the Lord be gracious
to apply this witness spiritually and effectually to their hearts
and to our hearts as the gospel is preached amongst us. Amen.