I believe that these four words provide that progressive ascent from a psalm. I want to try to impart to you something of what I'm trying to learn about how to wrap my mind around a large and often quoted and beloved book of the Bible. One of the things I'm fascinated with, friends, is that wherever I've gone, People may not know how to sing the Psalms and certainly not in the version that I have learned how to sing the Psalms. But as the Psalms come up in conversation, God is using these 150 chapters of the Bible in a powerful way all over the world to remind people of who God is and how God works in the midst of our struggles. and trials. And so what I'd like to do, we'll have some other things as well, but over the remainder of this year, is to spend some time in the Psalter, looking at particular Psalms, but I hope accomplishing this four-layered climb out of a Psalm into asking the question, what is the Psalter doing structurally for someone who knows and loves the Word of God. That the Psalms are in fact rooted in our history, are anticipating our future, and preparing us for heaven. Our history, our future, and ultimately, friends, we can make a claim about our book that nobody else can. I'm confident we're gonna be singing these songs in heaven. This is preparation. We're again and again commanded to sing the Psalms in the Bible because the Psalms are the word of God. Because these words are living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword getting down to the very core of our being who we are. You may say, I'm not musical. Fine. I'll have some advice for you in just a few minutes. You may say, well, I carry a tune like I carry water in a bucket, sloshing out everywhere. That's okay. The Bible says, make a joyful noise. And the word translated noise in Hebrew, one of its meanings is the tumult of battle. So if you sing like warfare, that's okay. That's exactly what God expects from some people. My father always found that verse very comforting. So what I'd like to do just very briefly today is take these four steps together. So the points are, the first word for each of those, number one is structure. We're gonna come back to that in just a moment. Number two is setting. Number three is collection. And then the one that I have found most intriguing recently, and I'll be talking about this more in weeks to come, is the word book. One of the things that's challenging about the Psalter is it's not in a thematic order, at least not at first appearance, and it's certainly not in a chronological order. In fact, as we look at Psalm 3 today, it's interesting that this psalm, the very first Davidic psalm in the Bible, is one of these 14 Life of David psalms, but it's actually almost the last one. This is something that happened well into David's reign. And it's something that really was kind of a stain on the end of his reign. This is not what you would expect right at the beginning of the Psalter. And as we go on, I'll talk about why I think the Psalms ultimately came to take the shape that they did. But what I'd like us to see today is that when we sing, God expects our minds to be linking to the totality of His Word. Because the Psalms are in the Bible, the whole Bible is what God wants to be written on our hearts. And when we sing the Psalms, with some basic training, with some active brain cells, and with sometimes just a few little squiggles on a paper, or in your own psalter. Don't write in the psalters that are in the pews. That's not what I'm advocating for today. But if you have your own psalter, I have been tremendously blessed as I finally took that big step and started to write little notes in my psalter. My mom, she's written in hers for years in pencil. It always had to be in pencil. If she didn't have a pencil, she didn't write in her Psalter. Over time, each one of us needs to develop our own way of studying for depth, studying for structure, and then studying for linkage to these other parts of the Bible. So I want to give you very briefly an example of how I would think about Psalm 3 today. So first is structure. Notice that the psalm begins and ends with a key word, the word salvation. Verses 1 and 2, O Lord, how many are my foes? How many? Are we talking two? Are we talking 10? He'll make reference over in verse 6 to many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around. Remember, David is a king. David is not living in a home with a few other people. David is wrestling through thousands of people who are setting themselves all around him. He's surrounded. Many are rising up against me. Many are saying of my soul, there is no salvation for him in God. Isn't that kind of foolish, David? You're kind of all religious on us. There's no God. If there's no God, there's no salvation. If there's no salvation, there's no purpose. But I want you to see that this Psalm begins and ends with the word salvation. And my burden, again, I don't want to take a long time on this today, but I want you to see, by the way, in verse seven, the word save is used also. Arise, O Lord, save me, O my God. And all three of these words, verse two, verse seven, and verse eight, are the word in Hebrew, Yeshu. And so, I've heard the argument, well, I don't like to sing the Psalms because we don't get to sing about Jesus. Well, you get to sing his name. That's pretty cool. And especially if you can make these transpositions between languages, then you can understand, again, the word Y-S-U, that's the verb that's being used here that then is turned into a noun, the word salvation. The Psalm presents David as under attack. And what's really under attack is his claim of salvation in Yahweh. What is the claim that we're mocked for? Our claim that Jesus is in Yahweh. Jesus is God. This word salvation is, in Hebrew, the word Jesus. It is the word that Jesus then takes on himself, like that man named Doron, his name means gift. And when people understand that link, they're calling him gift, and they're remembering that his name has significance. It's the same way with the word Yeshu, or probably more accurately, Yeshu. Yeshua means literally, YA is the short form of the covenant name of God. The Lord, Yeshua, saves. This is the structure of this psalm. And so, again, there's many more things that could be said, but I'm thinking of this today, like bookends of the psalm. There is no salvation for him in God. Verse 8, salvation belongs to Yahweh. Your blessing be on your people. Friends, here's the two extremes of life. Then, I'll point out that there's at least three steps in between. The first is the word shield. But you are, O Lord, are a shield around me, protecting me from the flaming darts, if you will, of the enemy. In verse five, the Lord sustained me. The Lord is my shield, the Lord sustained me. Here we see God's upholding, his providential provision for his people. And finally, in verse seven, arise, O Lord, save me, O my God, for you strike all my enemies on the cheek. Here is the just retribution of God. The Proverbs say, if you dig a pit, you'll fall into it yourself. The Bible talks again and again about how God brings the wicked down through their own wickedness. So, the shield, the sustaining, and the striking, these are all things that are on David's mind and for which he is praising the Lord. Alright, so that's just a little bit about the structure. But look up the word salvation. It occurs 72 times in the book of Psalms in the ESV. The word save in its various forms occurs 51 times. It's amazing to begin to think about, oh, and when you're singing this part, you're singing about Christ and the work that he does. So that's at the level of the runway. But now our plane takes off and now point number two, the setting. We wanna understand something of a structure of a psalm and then we wanna look at it in its setting. And here we need to see that this is penned in David's reign. We need to see that this is a psalm of David and specifically when he fled from Absalom, his son. And so the challenge here, and I felt that challenge a little bit today as Kyle jumped into reading 2 Samuel chapter 15. I hope you kind of felt like you were dropped in in the middle of a very complex event. When was the last time you studied about the Gittites or about Ittai? And all of a sudden there's all these names and all these people and what's happening here? Well, that's our lives. And it's in the midst of the complexity of life that we have to learn to praise God. It's in the midst of all of the running that there has to be a time where we put that out of our minds and where we focus on the Lord. In other words, there's a relationship between history and praise. between living our lives and loving our God. And my observation is that in today's world where you carry this television in front of your face more often than you don't, friends, this is what's getting squeezed out of our lives. I want to challenge you to recover times of devotion. If you believe that you're created by God for a purpose, if you believe that your primary purpose is to glorify God, then why are you staring at your phone? Glorify God! And one of the ways that we can do that, and here now I'm going to go over and I'm going to grab what is my current favorite edition of the Psalter. The way I glorify God is by meditating upon his character and upon what he has done. And those are two of the central things in the Psalter. So what I have here, this is called the Book of Psalms for Worship, the words only edition. And what I love is it's taken out all the busyness of the Psalter. And what you're left with is a good, solid translation of the Bible in poetic form. And what I love about this is that now we can begin to think and feel the Psalms not merely as a musical thing, but as poetry. And poetry, some of you know what I'm talking about, that poetry touches our souls. Poetry is all through the Bible, but what's so difficult is what's poetic in Hebrew is not poetic in English. And so if you notice in most of the translations that we use, those words that are poetic will be indented, and it's communicating. Now we're not in the realm of let me tell you a story. Now we're in the realm of poetry. And particularly when you have a whole book that is nothing but poetry, it's powerful to begin think and feel and see the rhythm and the rhyme of a song that is penned in praise to God. So, this needs to be connected then to the facts of history. Whether that's going back, so for example, this phrase, when he fled from Absalom, this takes us back to 2 Samuel 15-17. This is when David is on the run. He with his entire family have up and they've run out of Jerusalem, the capital, hopefully so Absalom won't catch them and hopefully also so he won't attack the city of Jerusalem. It's a crisis. It's one of the greatest crises in the time of David. And that's the setting in which David is writing. If you miss that, you miss something about the significance of this psalm. Who are the thousands who have set themselves against David? They're the traitors, including guys like the priest Ahithophel, who had been a confidant of David for years and now had abandoned him and gone over to Absalom. The thousands includes Absalom himself. His own son, who now is fighting against Him to take over the kingdom. It's a very, very significant time. And if you can make that link, then every time you sing Psalm 3, which we're going to do in just a few minutes, you can have some of those details of that history in your mind. Well, this then leads us to the third point this morning, and that is the word collection. And here, again, I'm imagining we started out zoomed in on Psalm 3, the structure of this particular psalm. This is where we need to let the Bible tell us what it's about before we then begin to pull back. And we think about, okay, well, this psalm with this structure is in this setting. And many of the psalms have a setting. The setting is different depending on which psalm you're looking at. There's a complexity to the settings in which the individual psalms are written. But now we want to pull back even one more to the word that I'm using is the word collection. And you should know that 14 Psalms in the Psalter contain inscriptions that explicitly tie those Psalms to events in David's life. The Psalter over and over again uses what I'm calling example of David stories to instruct us in right expressions of faith in the midst of suffering. Friends, why is it that when people suffer in their lives, they think it's God's fault? Like, we've completely forgotten the basic doctrine of sin. God created the world good, there was no sin, and then Adam and Eve disobeyed God, turned their backs, rebelled against Him, and that condition has endured to the present. This is not rocket science. But friends, if you don't have the experience of walking in trial and remembering, but there is a righteous king, there's a messianic king named David. What did he do in a situation like this? What did he do when there were snipers outside his house ready to take his life? We sang in Psalm 59, that by the way is the earliest of the life of David's Psalms. It's fascinating to begin to take these 14 Psalms and see similarities within them. To arrange them chronologically and as I mentioned, Psalm 3 is actually the 11th of those 14 Psalms chronologically. It's very interesting to begin to think about. And again, friends, part of my burden, and I want you to carry this burden with me, is how do we put just enough information so that when we're singing, our mind can be going back to our history and forward to our hope and ultimately to heaven. The Psalms are leading us in all of these different directions. So there is a collection, and this is one of many collections, and depending on which commentator you read, there's dozens of different collections. Some of them, I think, are a bit of a reach, but some of them, like this category, the Life of David Psalms, are very clear. There are 14 of these that, right in their inscription, are telling you this is when this psalm was written. Now my question is, Why don't we have that in our Psalter? Well, for a long time, you need to know, there has been discussion and debate about the inscriptions. Well, those inscriptions were probably added hundreds or thousands of years later. Okay, what evidence do you have of that? And now, as we found copies of the Psalter in the Dead Sea Scrolls, some dating to hundreds of years before Christ, we see that they also contain these inscriptions that are in the Hebrew Bible. And so through archaeological research, there is a whole new respect that scholars have, that interpreters have for these inscriptions. And so I believe you'll find across our denomination that there's more and more attention paid to them. And one of the reasons that I like this words only edition is It doesn't include all of the other stuff, but it gives the Psalter the psalm number, and then it has the inscription right there at the beginning. So consider how is it that we can be thinking more and more about the Psalter in terms of various collections, and what I hope to do is In weeks to come, the Psalms that we'll be studying will be illustrations of those various collections, and you can begin to become aware of some of those. This leads us then to the fourth point this morning, and that is the book. Here's the most challenging one, and I can only touch on this today, but I'm persuaded that the Psalter is actually in a purposeful order. I've been persuaded of this by O. Palmer Robertson, who has written a book that I would commend to you if you want to do some deep diving called The Flow of the Psalms. And this book, it's a very significant, very heavy book to read, but Robertson makes the case that there is, in fact, a flow and a purposeful structure to the Psalter. Now, I'm not going to defend that today, but I simply want to state that. And the first division we see within the Book of Psalms is these five books. And he believes that these five books are put there by the one who brought the Book of Psalms into its final order. And so, there's five books, and here's where I want to just state these for you. So I think you should have, I think they're written out. Yeah, so book one today, and that's really the one that we're wanting to focus on, Psalms one through 41, the word there is confrontation. The first 40 chapters of the Psalms are written with a view to the conflict that goes on around. It's fascinating for us to see and to think about what does this mean for us practically today. The Lord God Almighty rules eternally over heaven and earth, but the mystery of iniquity has arisen seeking to throw off his sovereignty among humanity. In response to this challenge through covenant and promise, God has committed himself to redeem an innumerable host from every nation, tribe, people, and language. The instrument that God has chosen to accomplish this salvation is one that Robertson calls a singular saving hero, who at the right time will enter into moral conflict with Satan himself. As a consequence, confrontation will characterize the whole of human history until the consummation. In the days of Israel's kingship, this confrontation manifested itself through the struggle of Israel's messianic king to establish his kingdom of righteousness and peace. David, the son of Jesse, was the man chosen by God to fulfill this redemptive role. Surrounded on every side by foes and enemies, David's divine calling required him to be constantly on guard to be patient, sometimes even to be violent. We need to remember, friends, that we live in a fallen, broken, sinful world. That the Christian life is one of confrontation. Confrontation in the midst of attack. In the midst of injustice. in the midst of violence. David was not going forth and just slaughtering everybody, but David lived in a place where he had to have his sword strapped to his thigh, where he had to be ready to stand firm in the midst of wickedness, in the midst of cultural collapse, in the midst of mocking, in the midst of fear. Friends, do you see how Psalm 3 fits into this larger redemptive plan of God? Part of that plan is stand firm. Stand firm in the midst of the attacks of the enemy. Stand firm in the midst of people ignoring or even mocking the Creator God. Friends, we need to see that this confrontation is real and that every day in one way or another we are being beckoned by the world to abandon our Master. You can't love the world and love God. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. And friends, that confrontation cuts through every facet of life in this world because the world does not know God. Because the world does not love God. Because the world has been seduced into thinking that the world is God. And they worship and serve the created things rather than the creator. Oh friends, let us be those who cry out to God. Oh Lord, my foes are many. Oh Lord, you are a shield about me. Oh Lord, I woke again because you sustained me. O Lord, you strike all my enemies. Salvation belongs to the Lord. Your blessing be on your people. Let us pray. O Lord, how we thank you for this example of a psalm that has so much meaning embedded in it. Lord, help us to make the myriad of links between individual psalms in the Psalter and the history and the hope, and ultimately heaven, that your people can remember. Lord, I pray that you would help us to see this book of the Bible, as Martin Luther called it, a little Bible, Lord, that's filled with the promises, filled with the commands that you have given to us. Lord, lead us and guide us in these things. Help us to see the fullness of our salvation through the lens of the Davidic covenant. We'll give you thanks in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, now I want to sing this psalm. If you would take your psalter and turn with me to Psalm 3, Selection B. Psalm 3, Selection B. So think about what are you thinking about while you sing the psalm. Think about those various flight levels, whether down at the very bottom, the structure of the psalm. Notice that the word here is deliverance, down in stanza five, he works salvation. There's the word, the name for Christ as he will. And then also then work your way up and think about these others. Let me say them. One more time, just so they're clearly in front of us. The structure of the psalm, the setting of the psalm, the collection of the psalm, and then ultimately the book of the Psalter in which that psalm remains. Let's stand and we'll sing Psalm 3a.