of God's Word to Psalm 116. Psalm 116. And we'll be reading verses 12 through 19 this evening. Psalm 116. Again, this is God's holy word. We'll begin in verse 12. What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. Lord, oh Lord, I am your servant. I am your servant, the son of your maidservant. You have loosed my bonds. I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the house of the Lord, In your midst, O Jerusalem, praise the Lord. Amen. This is God's word. Let's ask God's blessing now in the preaching of his word. Father, we come to you as fully and completely dependent upon you. not only the right preaching of the word, but the right hearing of the word. And we know that spiritual truths are spiritually understood. And so we're reliant tonight on you, Holy Spirit, to bring to our minds, to make application, to bring conviction where needed, that we might indeed hear the voice of Christ speaking to us from his word. We pray all of this in Christ's precious name. Amen. Well, we're not told who wrote this psalm. There's no superscription. But in comparing this with other psalms, it looks as if it comes from the period of the monarchy. There's a lot of similarities between Psalm 18, for instance, and this psalm, Psalm 116. And we know Psalm 18 was written by David. Scholars contend, including John Calvin, that this psalm was written by David. And it was written during the time of Absalom's rebellion. And this gives us particular insight into several of the verses here in our chapter. Look at verse six. The Lord preserves the simple. What is the psalmist referring to here? Well, I think the word in the Hebrew relates to that which is or who is foolish. We think about David and not properly admonishing, rebuking his own children. Ammon raping Tamar. David did nothing. Absalom killing Amnon. David did nothing. Or look at verse 11. I said in my alarm, all mankind are liars. Well, this makes sense in the light of the treachery of his son who sought to overthrow the kingdom. David is running for his life. He is being hunted. I thought of something that happened to me when I was five or six years old. My parents went to the airport to pick up a friend. I was tagging along. And as we come back to the parking lot, I escaped from my parents and shoot through the parked cars into an open lane and came within feet of being hit. And I remember the driver slumped over the steering wheel at the horror of almost killing me. And my dad told me later, well, God must not be finished with you because he spared your life. And this is what we see here in the psalm. David has been spared. He had a near death experience. Verse three, the snares of death encompassed me. The pangs of Sheol lay hold of me. I suffered distress and anguish. And yet the Lord gloriously delivers him. Verse eight. For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. How does David respond? As any of us should to the great salvation of our God in love and devotion. Verses one and two. And then we come to verse 15, and we scratch our heads. What is this? Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. David has been, he's just been given a great victory. He talks or writes about walking in the land of the living, and yet here we have a reference to death. And this is what I want us to look at tonight. How do we answer that question? What is the psalmist seeking to communicate? What is David seeking to communicate through the Holy Spirit? We know that all the Psalms are about Christ, but this one in particular is messianic. Plummer, in his commentary, writes that the majority consensus is that Psalm 116 relates wholly to the passion, death, and triumph of Christ. Most of the early church fathers were also of this opinion. But we don't have to take his word for it. As we just read in our scripture reading tonight from 2 Corinthians, Paul cites verse 10 and exegetes it for us. And aren't we so thrilled every time we see something in the New Testament where they're quoting from the old and we get the exegesis from the Holy Spirit. I want you to hear this again from 2 Corinthians 4, verse 14. And since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, I believed and therefore I spoke, that's verse 10, we also believe and therefore speak, knowing that he who raised up the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with Jesus and will present us with you. Paul is connecting faith with the resurrection. Why do we believe? knowing that he who raised up the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with him. Paul's interpretation gives us unique insight into this psalm. And I want us to approach the text tonight from two perspectives, faith and obedience, or faith and sacrifice. And we're gonna look at this under two headings. First, the precious faith of Christ. And second, the precious sacrifice of Christ. Let's begin with the precious faith of Christ in suffering. Psalm 116 takes on special significance because it's a song that we know that Jesus sung himself. Not only do we know that he sang it, but we know the occasion. And how do we know that? because Psalm 116 is a part of the Egyptian Hillel. These are the collection of Psalms 113 through 118 that were sung during the festivals, the Feast of Israel, and specifically the Passover. It's called Egyptian because of the reference in Psalm 114.1. when Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language. And yet Psalm 116 stands out even among those in the Egyptian Hillel. It is very personal in nature. We could even call it individualistic. Why? Well, the rest of the halal focuses on the corporate community. It uses personal pronouns. But here in our text, the author uses personal, not the plural, but the personal pronouns in every verse except three. Verses five, 15, and 19. There are over 40 references. to I, my, me or my. And we can only imagine as a boy, Jesus, as he's going up to Jerusalem, along with his family, singing these songs. These words are Christ's words. They would have been on his lips. These would have been on his mind as he departed the upper room the night that he was betrayed. And this also adds weight and special significance to this psalm as we consider Christ's thoughts on that night in his passion. The psalm opens, as we mentioned, with an expression of love and devotion. And really, it's a shorthand. for faith and obedience. You think about the Shema in Deuteronomy 6. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And Jesus is the epitome, the archetype of faith. But we don't often think about Christ and his faith, but it's appropriate to do so. In fact, Hermann Bavink in his Reformed Dogmatics writes, faith for Adam and Christ was nothing other than the act of clinging to the word and promises of God, a holding on to the invisible one. He adds that Reformed theologians have defended the view that Jesus was a pilgrim on the earth and that, quote, he walked by faith and hope, and not by sight. We get a front row seat as we consider Jesus in the garden as he's praying. Look at verse four. We can hear him praying. Then I called on the name of the Lord. Oh Lord, I pray deliver my soul. This word for prey in the Hebrew is what they call a particle of entreaty, or a particle of interjection. And that simply means that it's a sound, it's a vocalization, like oh or my, that comes from the soul. It's almost like a guffaw, except in laughter it would be pain and sorrow. And Jesus is in anguish in the garden, and as Luke records, his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground as Jesus was contemplating his suffering. We think about his physical suffering on the cross, that Roman instrument of torture that was designed to kill you slowly, to increase its pain to the maximum, not by loss of blood, but by through asphyxiation. They would lay you on the cross, they would drive a nail through your feet, and they would bend your legs so that you would have to push up with your feet in order to breathe. You can imagine the excruciating pain that our Savior went through in his suffering. But worse than that was that he faced the wrath of God in his body for the first time. In all of eternity did the Father turn His face away from the Son. Ian Gillis mentioned it as a stench. We open the garbage can and we turn our face away because it is so horrible and smells so bad. And this is what happened to our Savior who bore our sin, who became sin. He was such a stench to the Father, the Father had to turn His face away. And what was Jesus' response in all of this? You remember what he prayed? Oh Lord, if it is your will, take this cup from me, but not my will, but your will be done. We are looking to the Savior as that epitome, as that archetype of faith. As you are in your garden, you're all alone. You're struggling with faith. You're struggling to lay hold of the promises of God. And the text here is calling us, he's calling you to consider Christ as the exemplar of faith. Jesus trusts the Father. Verses eight and nine, for you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I will walk before the land of the living. Notice, you have delivered, is past tense. Christ is confident. He's assured of the glorious resurrection that God has promised to him. Psalm 16, verse 10, for you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your Holy One see corruption. I want you to consider yourself in the back seat of your father's car. Maybe you're 10 years old, and I want for a moment, maybe you didn't have a great earthly father. Maybe he wasn't a godly man. But your heavenly father is perfect. He loves you with an infinite, incomparable love. He cares for you. He wants your good. And what do we do as a 10-year-old in the back seat? Are we concerned when dad makes a wrong turn? No. What about the next meal? Am I concerning myself? Maybe I'm hungry. Maybe I say something to my father. And that's what we see Jesus do here. But I want you to consider the faith. that Jesus had in his father. I want you to put yourself in that car and trust your father implicitly. What a shame that we trust a taxi cab driver, that we trust an airline pilot whom we've never met, and yet we struggle to trust the triune God. Look to Christ as our example of faith. Let's look now, secondly, at the precious sacrifice of Christ. According to our confession, the covenant of grace was made with Christ and in Him all the elect, and Christ swears an oath in the covenant of redemption that He would bear the iniquities of His people. The Lord Jesus speaks twice here in our text of fulfilling His oath, fulfilling His vows to the Lord. Look at verses 14 and 18. And notice that this is an answer to a question in verse 12. In light of the promises that God has made to the Son before Christ even goes to the cross, He knows that He will be delivered. And these are Christ's words, what shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me? And he gives a threefold response. And I want us to look at that in verses 13 and 14, and then 17 and 18. And these are couplets. It's a Hebrew parallelism, which just means that in Hebrew, I'm going to write a statement and then I will repeat it. So in our vernacular, that would be like me texting my wife in all bold. And this is what repetition in the scriptures is meant to do. It's meant to get your attention. Let's look at the first one. And notice, each one of these is related to corporate sacrifice or worship. The Lord Jesus declares, I will lift up the cup of salvation, verse 13. Now draw your eye, you may have to turn the page, look at verse 17, the parallel, I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving. Well, that's different, but yet they're synonymous. is synonymous with sacrifice. According to Jewish tradition, there were four cups in the Passover cedar. And this tradition, as early as we have it, is Gamaliel, who writes about this in 90 BC. The first cup is the cup of sanctification. So the ceremony would start with them cleansing their hands. They would eat a portion of the meal, And then finally, someone would tell the story of the Passover, the exodus from Egypt. The second cup is the cup of plagues. The family would recite the plagues and recall the great victory and deliverance of God from Egypt. They would then drink the cup, and then they would eat the Passover meal. And it's important to know that two cups are used before the meal, and two cups are used after. And Psalm 116 would have been sung after those first two cups. We have a reference to these different cups in Luke's gospel. Turn to Luke chapter 22. We're not going to spend much time here, but I just want you to see this. Luke chapter 22, and go down to verse 17. And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he said, take this and divide it among yourselves. Let's go ahead and read this section for context. For I tell you that from now on, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." Verse 20, And likewise the cup. after they had eaten, saying, This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood." This third cup, notice in our text, the cup of salvation, verse 13. It's a reference to the sacrifice or the drink offering associated with a sacrifice. According to the Old Testament law, there was not to be a sacrifice without a drink offering. Jesus is saying, I am that sacrifice. I am pouring out the cup, my blood, as well as giving my life as the lamb. This is what Jesus is doing for us. He's making this connection with the cup. and his first promise to be that propitiatory sacrifice, that sacrifice that takes away the wrath of God. Let's look secondly, his response. He calls on the name of the Lord. This phrase is identical in both verses 13 and 17. It's used four times in this chapter. Two are private, two are public. And we know this phrase, it's used repeatedly throughout the scripture. Calling on the name of the Lord was always accompanied by sacrifice. Genesis 13, four, to the place where he made an altar at the first, and Abram, excuse me, and there Abram called upon the name of the Lord. Again, associated with public sacrifice. And then third, he promises to pay his vows to the Lord. This again is identical in verses 14 and verse 18. What is he doing? He's bolding this type font. He's using all caps to get our attention. And I don't know if you've noticed or not, but these parallelisms surround verses 15 and 16. It's as if there's a border of neon lights, and it's calling our attention to verses 15 and 16. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. We understand this as the singular sacrifice of Christ. the once for all sacrifice. Christ in his office as mediator was made under the law and who kept the law perfectly. I want you to hear this from our confession, chapter eight, section four. The confession states that he endured most grievous torments immediately in his soul and most painful sufferings in his body. was crucified and died, was buried and remained under the power of death, and yet saw no corruption. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. Maybe we change saints to use a capital S. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saint. The Hebrew word for precious can be translated rare or costly. It was costly because it took the life of our precious Savior. It was costly because His death paid for the sins of the whole world. Salvation is free, but it's not cheap. It costs Jesus His life. It's rare Why? Because Jesus came to die for sinners. Can we understand that? I struggle in my own family, and yet they're not my enemy. But the scripture is very clear that while we were yet still enemies, Christ died for us. This is the gospel. that we preach. Christ came to die for the ungodly. This is you. This is me. The father loved you with an eternal love. He gave his son a sacrifice for your sin. And because Christ is, and we heard this this morning, A perfectly exquisite specimen because of his infinite worth. You also are precious in his sight. I don't want us to miss that. You are precious in his sight. Tab is precious in his sight. Why? because she died in Christ. She is in union with Christ. Not only her spirit and her soul, but her body is in union with Christ. If you are in Christ tonight, you are in union with him. His death was your death. His life is your life. And He's calling you to live for Him because of His great salvation. Let's pray. Father, this is such a weighty matter. This text about Christ and His singular sacrifice His death for the unrighteous. And Father, that's who we are in this room. And we stand as trophies of His great grace because of your amazing power and because of your sacrifice that hasn't been imputed to us. And we stand now before you as righteous in your sight. because we, those of us who are trusting in Christ tonight, we are in union with you. We rejoice and give thanks to you for your great sacrifice and for Christ's great faith. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.