I invite you this evening to turn with me to Psalm 18. I will not be reading Romans 15 suggested in the bulletin, just Psalm 18 with you. Let me make a few comments before we rise to hear God's word. My wife grew up in a home that held a portrait of a 19th century Christian named James Garfield. Garfield was an elder in his local church. But in 1881, he was elected to a public office. He was elected to lead this country. And in planning his move to Washington, he said these words to his church, I resign the highest office of the land to become president of the United States of America. I was reminded of President Garfield's remarks because of the little foreword written for Psalm 18. To the choir master, a psalm of David, the servant of the Lord, who addressed the words of this song to the Lord on the day when the Lord rescued him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. How striking that David calls himself, as the king of Israel, the servant of the Lord. What a great way, what better way could there be to recalibrate our godly ambition than to lift up the privilege of being a servant of our great God? Well, this evening we have an opportunity to identify ourselves as servants by humbling ourselves under the word of God. In fact, we have lots of opportunity because Psalm 18 is not a short psalm. and it will take some effort to follow the whole of it carefully with a servant's heart. As you read with me this evening, look for at least five parts to this psalm. In verses 1 to 3, you'll see a call to worship. In verses 4 to 19, deliverance for David. In verses 20 to 30, a refuge for the righteous. In verses 31 to 45, deliverance through David. and then a doxology in verses 46 to 50. And after the scriptures are read and we have sung, we'll look at each of these parts of God's word in turn. Please rise for the reading of God's word. If at some point you need to sit down because you're weary, you of course may do so. God's word. I love you, oh Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. I call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies. The cords of death encompassed me. The torrents of destruction assailed me. The cords of Sheol entangled me. The snares of death confronted me. In my distress, I called upon the Lord. To my God, I cried for help. From His temple, He heard my voice, and my cry to Him reached His ears. Then the earth reeled and rocked. The foundations also of the mountains trembled and quaked because he was angry. Smoke went up from his nostrils and devouring fire from his mouth. Glowing coals flamed forth from him. He bowed the heavens and came down. Thick darkness was under his feet. He rode on a cherub and flew. He came swiftly on the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him. Thick clouds, dark with water. Out of the brightness before him, hailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds. The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his voice, hailstones and coals of fire. And he sent out his arrows and scattered them. He flashed forth lightnings and routed them. Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare, at your rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils. He sent from on high, he took me, he drew me out of many waters, he rescued me from my strong enemy and from those who hated me, for they were too mighty for me. They confronted me in the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my support. He brought me out into a broad place. He rescued me because He delighted in me. The Lord dealt with me according to my righteousness. According to the cleanness of my hands, He rewarded me. For I have kept the ways of the Lord and have not wickedly departed from my God. For all His rules were before me and His statutes I did not put away from me. I was blameless before him, and I kept myself from my guilt. He has rewarded me with my righteousness according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight. With the merciful, you show yourself merciful. With the blameless man, you show yourself blameless. With the purified, you show yourself pure. With the crooked, you make yourself seem torturous. For you save a humble people, but the haughty eyes you bring down. For it is you who light my lamp. The Lord my God lightens my darkness. For by you I can run against a troop, and by my God I can leap over a wall. This God, his way is perfect. The way of the Lord proves true. He is a shield for all who take refuge in him. Who is a rock except our God, the God who equipped me, made my way blameless. He made my feet like the feet of a deer. He set me secure in the heights. He trains my hands for war so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. You have given me the shield of your salvation, and your right hand supports me, and your gentleness made me great. You gave a wide place for my steps under me and my feet did not slip. I pursued my enemies and overtook them and did not turn back till they were consumed. I thrust them through so that they were not able to rise. They fell under my feet for you equipped me with strength for the battle. You made those who rise against me seek under me. You made my enemies turn their backs to me and those who hated me I destroyed. They cried for help, but there was none to save. They cried to the Lord, but he did not answer them. I beat them fine as dust before the wind. I cast them out like the mire of the streets. You delivered me from strife with the people. You made me the head of the nations. People whom I had not known served me. As soon as they heard of me, they obeyed me. Foreigners came cringing to me. Foreigners lost heart and came trembling out of their fortresses. The Lord lives, and blessed be my rock, and exalted be the God of my salvation, the God who gave me vengeance and subdued peoples under me, who delivered me from my enemies. Yes, you exalted me above those who rose against me. You rescued me from the man of violence. For this, I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations and sing to your name. Great salvation he brings to his king and shows steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his offspring forever. This is God's word. Great Spirit, will you open our eyes this evening Open wide our hearts to receive Your Word. We pray that You would be the key that opens to us the treasures to be found in Your Scriptures. Help us to approach this psalm with eagerness. And we ask that You would richly reward us for our faith and hope through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Jesus once said to his friends, if you don't understand this parable, how will you understand any parable? I want to ask that question this evening of Psalm 18. If we don't understand this psalm, how will we understand any psalm? Like all the Psalms, Psalm 18 constantly uses poetic imagery that we must not read rigidly. The Lord is a rock, David says. But of course, it would be a mistake to think that God is made of stone. Like all the Psalms, Psalm 18 has a personal author in a historic context. And although the context of some Psalms remains shrouded in mystery, this one does not. David wrote it after he was finally freed from his many foes. Like many psalms, Psalm 18 highlights main points through a careful structure. If you don't mind hearing this so close to dinner time, this particular psalm is shaped something like a hamburger. At the center of the psalm, we find its meat, a point or puzzle which we're not supposed to miss. Here in verses 20 to 30, we're told that the Lord offers refuge for the righteous. Then on both sides of the center, we see another pair of points, points that are similar but different. I don't want my hamburger metaphor to get too cheesy, so I'll let you imagine the next layers yourself. The idea is that the psalmist has a message that gets repeated on either side of the center, but with a twist. Here, verses four to 19 tell us that God works deliverance for David. And then in verses 31 to 45, we see that God works deliverance through David, similar but different. Finally, on the outside of the poetic hamburger, top and bottom, we have the bread. Here we find an opening and closing theme. That theme is shaped a little differently on these two ends. On top, verses one to three, the psalm gives a call to worship or encouragement to worship. And on the bottom, verses 46 to 50, we're given a doxology, some final words of worship for God's people. Let us start on the top this evening where you'll notice a repeated phrase, a phrase which sandwiches the psalm as a whole. The Lord is a rock. What that means, if I can be prosaic, is that the Lord is the solid one. He's the steady one, the ancient one. And we need him to be a rock for us, as we can see from verses four all the way to 45. The rest of the Psalm is winding, reeling, twisting, swirling. It's a Psalm that describes David's world as never still, never certain, never safe. But praise the Lord. David has a rock in the Lord. This beginning to the Psalms is a call to worship. It's like joyful church bells on a Sunday morning. Just listen to David. He heaps up titles for God. He peels out places and times where God has been there for him. Although he sometimes hid in caves and castles, he did not lose sight of the fact that all along, God, the Lord, was his true fortress, his actual stronghold. The Lord is the rock. If these opening verses ring like church bells, the opening line kind of rings like a wedding bell. It offers David's ardent declaration of love. This is a psalm about a heartfelt commitment to the Lord. If we can't learn to love God through this psalm, how will we learn to love him in any psalm? So let us let David teach us how to love God, and let us learn why we're to love God from these verses. The why behind David's praises, behind his love, of course, has to do with this deliverance. And lest you be alarmed to see that only now we're turning to verse four in our tour of a 50-verse psalm, let me assure you that the front hall of the sermon is lopsidedly large compared to the other rooms. Well, if you know your Old Testament well, you'll be familiar with the prose history that gives some sense of David's difficulties and God's deliverances. But it's the poetry that tells it all. How desperate was David on his run from Saul? Well, look at verses 4 and 5. Death is tightening around him like a noose around his neck, like a cobra coiling around his body. Destruction threatens him like a torrential storm. Maybe some of you know what it's like to feel choked, chests tight with fear, sinking, drowning, living as though dying. This is what explains David's intense language, the terror and the noise in his life. If intense language describes David's desperation and characterizes David's prayers, immense language describes his deliverance and his praises. The Lord is presented like an earthquake that morphs into a dragon that spins into a storm that erupts like a mountain on fire. Images rush together. That, David says in verses 6 to 19, is what it's sometimes like. to see the deliverance of God. Now even a quick look at this psalm shows that this is extraordinary language, extraordinary images, almost too grand for anything we know about in David's life. And yet we sometimes do talk in this grand way. I remember speaking with a friend who gave a public address that ended kind of badly. He likened his lecture to like a ship dead in the water with a well-timed question during the Q&A period, a streaking towards him like a torpedo, zeroing in on the weakest point of his address. When it was over, he said all he could do was just to watch the two halves of his paper just float away and sink. Well, it's just one kind of emotional moment in this professor's life, and my point is that we sometimes use wild, forceful language to describe our difficult experiences. David's personal deliverance is here, portrayed using grand words, words so large that they remind me, and perhaps remind you, of lines in the Bible used to describe the deliverance of the whole nation of Israel, and not just David. Well, after the call to worship in verses one to three, and the description of David's deliverance in the following verses, David says at the close of verse 13, that all this was done because God delighted in him. This takes us to the center point of the psalm, because in verses 20 to 30, David insists that the Lord offers a refuge for the righteous. How are we to understand David four announcements that he was helped according to his righteousness or blamelessness? How are we to understand his five claims that he kept or did not break God's law? Or how are we to understand the handful of statements that God gives to people what they deserve? For example, he's merciful to the merciful. I ask this because this song was first recorded in 2 Samuel, a book which says that David lied, took extra wives, mismanaged his family, failed to punish murderers, committed adultery, and killed a friend. I ask this because we routinely call out to God, not because we've succeeded, but because we failed. I ask this because these kinds of comments are common in all the Psalms. So if we don't understand this psalm, how will we understand any psalm? Well, one way to understand such statements is that David is claiming to be blameless on a specific point. For example, David is simply saying he didn't commit treason against Saul, and so he didn't deserve Saul's enmity. The problem with that kind of reading is that David's claims in the Psalms are very wide. He does not appear to be claiming innocence about one or two particular matters only. Another way of understanding David's comments about law-keeping is to remember that inside the books of the Old Testament, we find news about the gospel. That's what the sacrifices and the tabernacle were all about. Maybe in saying he's keeping the law, David's also professing to be faithful to God in all the sacrifices he's offered, thus kind of acknowledging his need for a savior. That's a more subtle answer, but it has a more obvious problem. You see, when the Bible speaks about obedience, it rarely generalizes it in the way that I just said. The Bible disentangles the law and the gospel, faithfulness and faith. Surely when David's saying he's obedient, it's not quite the same thing as saying he's believing. I think the most intuitive way and the right way to understand what David is saying is that he was, in spite of those failures, generally following God, and when not following God, repenting of his failures. And so in general, he did not deserve to suffer. As David says here, to the blameless man, God shows himself blameless, but to the crooked, God makes a way that is torturous. He's offering a general description of his life. general rule that God loves and cares for his children and that their relationship with God is a good one when they're seeking to follow God. Now David's life is full of counter examples again to such a general rule. There were hard times when God tested David, even when David was behaving. Later, there were hard times when David's sin resulted in unpleasant consequences as God chastised him to draw him back. But David knew that God was working all these things for his good. I certainly think it would be unfair to David to read his words as though he thought he was earning his own salvation. David is describing the life of, the character of a child of God, not a method for becoming a child of God. If David was to come into the palace one morning and a prophet was to give him his catechism question of the day, how do you become a child of God? I don't know exactly what the holy city catechism of David's day might say, but it'd be something like, well, we become children of God by a substitutionary sacrifice. not by following rules or statutes. Or we become children of God by faith and not by obedience. But once we are his children, then we are to become more and more characterized by obedience and faithfulness. We ought to have a way of life that can be described by others around us as blameless. We ought to have good reputations. When we're talking about those who are the Lord's children, one can say, blessed are the pure in heart. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the poor in spirit, as Jesus puts it. Or, delivered are the clean of hands. Rewarded are the righteous. Rescued are the humble, as David puts it here. It's because God is faithful to his own patterns of promises that even today we should be quick to come to him with the things that encompass us, assail us, entangle us, and confront us, and say, we are your children. We love you, however imperfectly. Please save us. The Lord will present himself as the rock in which we can trust. He will offer a shield, utter His voice, blast a rebuke, pluck us out of the raging sea. This is what God does for His children. And Psalm 18 tells us so. Verses 20 to 30 are the high point of the psalm. They remind us why we pray, why we ought to have confidence in our God. Beginning in verse 31, David returns to the theme of God's deliverance. But as advertised, there are some differences between this and the earlier retelling of David's deliverance. First, the crash and bang of verses 4 to 19 are not present in verses 31 to 45. Gone are the titanic images of David's battles. Remaining are recognizable images of normal warfare. Second, We now see that God works deliverance, not only for David, but through David. This was hinted at in the middle portion of the Psalm, and you probably noticed that earlier, but we see it everywhere in this long section. David was actively involved in the battle. He did not just lie down in a grassy meadow and watch the clouds, hoping God would deliver him. He did not let go and let God. There was deliverance for him, but God worked that deliverance through him. God still works this way when we ask him for his help. And when the Lord answers our own prayers, always in his own way and in his own time, we have every reason to be thankful. And that is the note on which David ends in verses 46 to 50. The Lord lives. He's the rock. Everything that David has said only confirms that God is worthy of love, worthy of praise. And he says so here once more. I think we can see why David begins and ends as he does, calling us to worship and ending with doxology for the Lord who is our rock. This must have been one of David's treasured psalms. As I was considering this psalm, I was reminded of how something dear to one person can become the property of many. Take Jackie Robinson, a spectacularly good ballplayer and a man of good character as an example. Hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, he was the first black baseball player in the major leagues. The number on Robinson's jersey was 42. And in thankfulness for the end of decades of racial segregation in baseball, two traditions developed. First, the league decided that no single ball player will ever again have the number 42. It is Jackie's number only. But later, the league decided that all players would get the number 42. It's every player's number. You see, on the anniversary of Jackie's entrance into the big leagues, now called Jackie Robinson Day, every person on every major league ball field, from coast to coast, players, coaches, even umpires, wear the number 42 on their jerseys. Because something dear to one person has become the property of many people. I mention this because the song we consider this evening has a two-stage history. We actually first see this psalm appear in 2 Samuel 22. Later, we find it in the book of Psalms. Placed in 2 Samuel 22, we're to learn from David's song. Of course we are. It's holy scripture, but it is David's song. Placed in Psalm 18, we're now called to own the psalm as ours. Psalm 18 is every Christian's number. We're to see something in this psalm that applies to all of us. That's how the Apostle Paul read Psalm 18. In Romans 15, the apostles explaining how all nations are to be welcomed into the church and how this was always God's plan. And to prove his point, the apostle Paul cites a battery of prophecies and his first quotation comes from Psalm 18, verse 49. And if you look at that verse, you'll see David singing of God's deliverance in the presence of all the nations. The apostle realized that the voice of David, in verse 49, becomes the voice of all believing peoples, but with a twist. You see, we are no longer triumphing over the nations when we sing. We are triumphing with them. This is what I'm saying. Through Christ, the experience of David and all the Israelites gets transformed, and it now belongs to all Christians, through all nations. Now, why did the Apostle Paul quote Psalm 18? The way I see it is that the Apostle thought of Jesus' work in verse 49 because he was reminded of Jesus' person in verse 50. Salvation for the King, for the anointed, love for the offspring of David. reminds Christians of salvation through the King, through the anointed, through the offspring of David. It reminds us of Jesus and of how what belonged to one person now belongs to all Christians. But maybe the Apostle Paul sees that Psalm 18 is for every believer because he's also reading that whole Psalm very carefully. Do you remember just a few moments ago, when we saw David's powerful pictures to describe his deliverance. He uses words for his rescue similar in the Bible to descriptions of the rescue of all God's people on other occasions. In fact, many readers of Psalm 18 have noticed lines that seem to contain, in no particular order, echoes of the epic events of Israel's national history. The storms that God sent to deliver his people, the darkness of the 10 plagues, the cloud and fire, the sea laid bare, a mountain shaking. Now, read on its own terms, it almost seems like David makes too much of his own deliverances. I mean, he's using the language of the history of a nation and applying it to himself. What would we think of an American who described his sorrows through a song about the Boston Massacre, his tense moments in terms of Paul Revere's ride, his hopes of overcoming enemies using the words of the Star Spangled Banner. We think that was a little over the top, a little bit self-centered perhaps in his explanation of how he saved. But that's the point. David speaks like this in Psalm 18 for a reason. Because as a prophet, he does have more than his deliverance in view. Why does he use language fitting for epic events and apply it to himself? because David is a prophet and not only a prophet. David also is a type of Christ, a type of the one who had come to save the nations. As King of Israel, as the anointed one, as the one through whom the offspring of promise would come, David was a picture of the one to come. One who would take on the sufferings, who would work the deliverance for all of God's people. You see, Psalm 18 teaches us that the deliverance of a whole people can be described as one man's, because it was one man who was delivered for the whole people. For can we not hear how the very life and death of our Lord is also echoed in this Psalm? After all, who was encompassed by the cords of death, assailed by torrents of destruction and the cords of Sheol? Was it not Jesus in his suffering and death, who having taken our sin, also took upon himself all that we deserved as natural enemies of the Lord? Did not the Judge of all bow the heavens and come down with thick darkness under His feet? Did He not make darkness a covering and canopy around the cross of our Savior Christ? Did not Jesus bear in His soul the marks of hailstones, the coals of fire, the arrows of God's wrath against sinners, the blast of the breath of God's nostrils as He took upon Himself the very hellish torments that each one of us deserve. Surely Jesus bore more completely, more fully the brunt of the fury of God than any enemy in David's death. And Jesus more than David experienced on our behalf, a dramatic rescue from death, a deliverance because God delighted in David's offspring much more than he ever delighted in David himself. Truly, did not God pluck his son from the grave according to Christ's own righteousness, his true blamelessness? Surely here, not as a general idea, but as an absolute rule, we see that Jesus was rewarded according to what he deserved. Can you see this tonight? Is this what you believe? Let us thank God this evening for this psalm, for David's psalm, that has become our psalm about our Savior. Let us be thankful that number 18 is the property of all God's people. This is how we are to read each of the psalms. We are to see that God is our rock too, that He can save us in our deepest need. He alone can help a church, a people, a nation in crisis. So let us learn to pray to Him, to trust Him truly and wholly. And then to say with David, I love you, O Lord. Let us pray. Our Father in heaven, we pray that the deliverance that you once worked for a nation, the nation of Israel, and for a saint, David, your servant, would be a deliverance that you would work for us. Father, you know our struggles. You know the temptations that we face. You know the way in which so many of us are rocked and turned and twisted in this life. We pray that you would be our rock, the one to whom we could cling, our fortress, the steady one in the midst of all our storms, and help us to see each one of us here. And we pray the same for our friends and our neighbors and for those who are far off, that Jesus Christ is a strong, unmovable deliverer, a refuge for those who are weary, The Messiah, for all who call to Him, teach us to trust in Him more fully and more truly. Do this by your mighty Spirit, we ask, as we pray this in our Savior's strong and sufficient name. Amen. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all now and forevermore. Amen.