Well, good morning, Reformation Covenant. It's good to be with you again this morning. Now just, I believe, three weeks, four weeks removed from my last visit. And there are a lot of people here after family camp. I was expecting less. Y'all have a lot more endurance than I think I would. My family sends their greetings. They wish they could be here. My wife misses y'all a great deal. Hopefully, Lord willing, we'll be able to come out here again as a family. If you have your Bibles, I would invite you to turn first to Psalm 118. We're going to continue the reading that we began with the Psalm reading. We'll look at verses 22 through 29. So hear now the word of the Lord found in the 118th Psalm, verses 22 through 29. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Save us, we pray, O Lord. O Lord, we pray, give us success. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. We bless you from the house of the Lord. The Lord is God, and he has made his light to shine upon us. Bind the festal sacrifice with cords up to the horns of the altar. You are my God and I will give thanks to you. You are my God, I will extol you. I'll give thanks to the Lord for he is good. For his steadfast love endures forever. Now if you will turn to the gospel of Matthew, the first gospel. We'll read verses 20, excuse me, chapter 21, verses 33 through 46. This is Jesus speaking. Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a wine press in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants and went into another country. When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants, more than the first, and they did the same to them. Finally, he sent his son to them, saying, they will respect my son. But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, this is the heir. Come, let us kill him and take his inheritance. And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? They said to him, he will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons. Jesus said to them, have you never read in the scriptures The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in our eyes. Therefore, I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces. And when it falls on anyone, it will crush him. When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they perceived that He was speaking about them. And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds because they held him to be a prophet. This is the word of the Lord. Speak to God. Well, this morning we have the pleasure of considering Psalm 118. We're gonna spend almost all of our time there. We'll make recourse to a few passages in the New Testament. Psalm 118 is perhaps the most important psalm in the entire Psalter. To say it's one of the most, if not the most, is not to say it's more inspired or that it should necessarily hold a more prominent place in our devotional life. But for us, many of us may not even know Psalm 118 that well. We may know other Psalms, Psalm 23 or Psalm 51, Psalm 122, Psalm 136, but for Psalm 118, if I was to ask you what it was about, if I was to ask you to consider it, you might think that it had something to do with a rock and a stumbling block or something, but you may not actually know it that well. I certainly didn't. And yet for saints throughout the millennia, this particular psalm has been a touchstone for them, a north star as they went through their Christian lives. Martin Luther, for instance, said of this psalm, he said, this psalm is my psalm, my chosen psalm. This psalm is, and I have a peculiar right to call it mine. It has saved me from many oppressing danger from which neither emperor, nor kings, nor sages, nor saints could have saved me. It is my friend, dearer to me than all the honor and power of the earth. Martin Luther's life, of course, is famous for the persecutions, for the threats, for the dangers that he faced, and yet again and again, he found refuge, he found strength in this psalm, such that it became his dearest friend, more than any honor of the earth. So it offers us that. It offers us comfort. But Psalm 118 is more important than just that, more important than the words it gives us. And its importance lies in this, that for the New Testament authors, as they considered Christ, what Christ had done and what God had done through Christ, there was no other psalm that stood out more peculiarly to them than this psalm right here. It may be the most quoted and alluded to psalm in all of the New Testament. And so for the early church as they thought about Christ, as they tried to understand Christ, they again and again went back to this psalm right here. There's all the scriptures of course speak of Christ, but some of them whisper about him. Some of them just sketch him out, but there's other scriptures Let's speak of Him very clearly. Let's paint a very clear and vivid picture, and this is one such place. In order to understand it, in order to see what God is doing, we need to ask God to open our eyes, that we can see what He's done, that it might be marvelous to us. So let's pray and ask for the Lord's illumination. Father, we are so grateful. for your word and for the Psalms that you give us, these prayers that you put into our mouths to come before you. We ask, Lord, that even as we consider this, this text written some three millennia ago, that in its words, we would encounter Christ. Father, we would see Jesus. And we pray that even as we do, that we would see him not just rejected, not just crucified before our eyes, but rather seated before you, seated in glory. Father, we pray this for the sake of your son, Jesus, and we ask it in the Holy Spirit, amen. So Psalm 118, Thankfully, it's the psalm that gives us its main theme at the very beginning. The main point of this entire psalm is very straightforward. He gives it to us in the very first verse, and here it is. It's to give thanks to God, for He is good, and steadfast love endures forever. The hymn, it's what it is, it's a hymn, this particular genre. It can be broken down into four relatively easy sections, and the first is verses one through four. And here, like I said, is where the theme is simply stated. Where God's steadfast love is declared and they're called on him, excuse me, they're called on, the people of Israel are, to give thanks to God. The next section is verses five through 13. And here in most hymns in the Psalter, they work according to a specific logic. They command the people of Israel to do something, and then they give a reason for why they're meant to do that. And here in this next section, the psalmist is simply giving us the reasons for why the people of Israel are meant to call on, excuse me, give thanks to the Lord. He tells of his testimony of being in distress, of being hard pressed, and how God delivered him from his enemies. The next section, the third section, verses 14 through 24, here the psalmist simply declares as fact what God has done, who he is, and what he will do. No more past tense, just present tense and future tense here. And then finally, the last section, verses 25 through 29, where again, they circle back around to this theme, the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever, and he doubles down on what we should do, namely, give thanks. So when that says, this psalm is very easy for us to understand. It's not too difficult to know what the psalmist wants us to do, even as new covenant people. God is faithful. throughout all time, that's His overarching concern. From beginning to end, God is faithful. He is faithful to His people, He is faithful to you, and His steadfast love endures forever. Now, in light of the fact, as I mentioned, that this psalm has such a prominent place in the New Testament, rather than go through this psalm verse by verse, as I would love to, because there are so many riches here that we could just spend hours talking about, I want to look at this psalm as a whole, just to consider its theme and how it moves and flows and how the Old Testament people, the Old Covenant people, would have read it. That's the first thing I want us to see, is just the psalm itself. The second thing I want us to see in this psalm is how it speaks of Christ. How does it speak of Christ, and why did the apostles, why did Christ himself, as we saw in Matthew, consider this to be so important as they thought of Jesus? And then finally, and for a conclusion, I'm gonna lead us in a little bit of a reflection of how we as New Covenant Saints can pray this psalm today. So if you wanted to jot down the three-part structure of this sermon, it would simply be the psalm, how it speaks of Christ, and how we sing it today. The psalm, how it speaks of Christ, and how we sing it today. Now, the psalm itself, there's actually a great deal that we don't know about this psalm. The historical details evade us. Its author, although purported to be David in tradition, remains anonymous. There's no real reason to think this was David, necessarily. So we don't know who wrote it. We don't know what its context was. And we don't know what the circumstances were that instigated it. We don't know what the stress was that our saint endured. We don't know how the Lord rescued him. So in many ways, the details of this psalm remain a mystery to us. But thankfully, as I've already said several times, our psalmist is very clear about the point he wants us to take away. And because of that, we actually don't need any of that. We don't need to know who wrote it. We don't need to necessarily know what situation they found themselves in. All we need to know is this point, the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever. That's the big takeaway, like I've said, of what the psalmist wants us to see. It's likely a phrase, the steadfast love of the Lord. It's a phrase that you're probably familiar with if you've read your Bible at all. If there's any word to know in the Old Testament in order to understand the Old Testament and the New Testament, it's this word right here. And even in English, it's two words, steadfast love. In Hebrew, it's one word, chesed. It's what older translators, if you were raised on the King James, you might know the word loving kindness. That might be coming to mind for you. Miles Coverdale, when he translated in the 16th century, that's the word he created. He coined to try to best to express what this word chesed meant. ESV translates it, steadfast love, and his recent book, or excuse me, Michael Card's recent book, the book is called Inexpressible, he talks about, and it's just on this one word, he talks about that this word, even though we translate it as love, as steadfast love, as loving kindness, to understand its depth, its profundity, it is a word that remains, despite our best attempts, ultimately inexpressible. It's something that one word can't really condense. Because when it's used of God, and many of you may already know this, when it's used of God, chesed doesn't just refer to love, and it doesn't just refer to faithfulness, it refers to a very specific kind of faithfulness. It refers to this faithfulness that God has to you as his covenant people, because of the covenant he's made with you. It's hard to put that down into one word. It's the immovable and inviolable love and commitment to you that God has because of the covenant he's made. That's how to understand that word. And so when the psalmist tells the people of Israel to give thanks to the Lord for his steadfast love endures forever, the thing that they would be thinking when they heard that was this, the God who was faithful to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, the God who gave us the law on Sinai, the God who led the Israelites out of Egypt, The God who rescued us out of all of our calamity, that's the God who's acting right here. And so even before the psalmist begins to tell his story of what God has done, the psalmist is already putting into their minds, this is what God has done, this is what you need to do, and remember that he has been faithful to us from the very beginning. And this psalmist's story is simply an extension of this steadfast love. So he calls on the people of Israel to join him, saying that God's steadfast love endures forever. He then moves into what happened exactly. Now we don't know, like I said, but he called on the Lord in distress and the Lord answered him, he says, and set me free. In the Hebrew, this word set me free. It's actually this, it's the Lord answered with a broad place. The Lord answered with a broad place. He's contrasting this distress, which really pictures being hemmed in on every side, being pressed in, like when your dad gives you a big hug and you can't breathe. That's the picture that's being given here in distress. You're hemmed in on every side, you can't breathe, you can't move. You're stuck. And God is going to answer you with a broad place. He brings you, he brings our saint into a place where he can breathe, where he's not crowded by enemies and oppressors. And it goes on, how does God's covenant love manifest for our saint? But because God is on his side, he does not fear. He says this, the Lord is on my side as my helper. I shall look in triumph on those who hate me. Because God is who he says he is, because God has been faithful from the beginning and will continue to be faithful to him, now he's able to say, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of what happens, I'm gonna look in triumph on my enemies. Not because of me, but because of God and what he's done and what he said he will do. And he gets a little bit more specific. He says this, that I was surrounded on every side. And he repeats that three times. I was surrounded on every side. In the name of the Lord, I cut them off. And each of those times where he's saying, I was surrounded, and then saying, I cut them off, that's supposed to mirror the repetition that we saw earlier. Where Israel is to say three times, the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever. that with each reminder that the enemies surrounded him, he's reminding himself again and again, God's steadfast love endures forever. Therefore, I can conquer my enemies. Therefore, I will be in triumph. And this steadfast love for the psalmist is such that he calls God his strength and his song. That God has become for him, not just a savior, not just a deliverer, but salvation itself. That God's covenant to him is so real, it's so tangible, it's so immediate. that God is not just a savior to him, but his salvation itself. And this gives him confidence beyond measure. As he says in verse 17, with some boldness, I shall not die, but I shall live and recount the deeds of the Lord. It's bold to say that since we all will die, to say, I'm not going to die. And then he doubles down, the Lord has disciplined me severely but he has not given me over to death. We could go on and see how the psalmist speaks of God's steadfast love in his life. But we're gonna look at the rest of the psalm in a few different ways later on. So it's important for us to see here is that as the old covenant people would read this, as they would approach this psalm, they would simply see again and again the guarantee that God is who he says he is. God is who he says he is. Not all the Israelites would have shared the experience of our psalmist. Not all of them would have experienced pressure like him, having been circumscribed by his foes. Some of them probably lived rather posh lifestyles. And some of them may have experienced far worse than what our psalmist describes, but nevertheless, for them, what they're saying is that the fundamental fact for our lives, whether we're in Jerusalem, whether we're in exile, whether we're in rich or in want, in pain or in joy, the fundamental fact of all of our lives, corporately and individually, is this, that the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever. That's the basic thing that they know. And that's how they live their lives. Grounded in the promise that God is who he says he is. So that's the psalm in the Old Testament. That's how the old covenant saints would have sung this. That's how they would have understood this. Basically, as a continuity with all the magnificent acts that God had done already in the Old Testament. just a follow through of God's saving activity. So if that's how they read it, if that's how they understood it, the next question is for us, how does this speak of Christ and more specifically, why did the apostles find this Psalm to be so fitting? Now, as we saw in our New Testament reading, Christ himself, took these words, verse 22 and 23, to describe what he came to do in the parable of the tenants. And this parable appears in all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But other parts of this psalm appear regularly throughout the New Testament. In the triumphal entry, it's these words, save us, Lord, we pray, that the people of Jerusalem take up when they see Jesus coming in. In Acts 4, when Peter was preaching after he healed the lame man, he says to the Jews around him, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, this man, by him, this man is standing before you well. Here's the key, this Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. It was a proof text for the resurrection. We're gonna go back to that in just a little bit. But for Peter, this particular verse was a proof text for what Jesus did. And then later on in his ministry, Peter again would take up this verse in a completely different context. In first Peter two, he says this, as you come to him, a living stone rejected by men, but in the sight of God chosen and precious. So for Peter, it not only is about the resurrection, it's about the church, but what Christ did to found the church. And Paul too found plenty of fodder here for his own Christology. As in Ephesians, when he says that Christ is the cornerstone on which the apostles and the prophets and the rest of the church are founded, it's this particular Psalm that he went to, that he was thinking of. So for us, as we look back on Psalm 118, resemblance is pretty clear. But we have inspired scripture helping us along. We have the inspired interpretation of the Holy Spirit giving us a key. As the apostles were writing, they had the Old Testament. So why would they think that Psalm 118 was so special, so important? There's a lot of things we could say here. I'm not gonna give a hermeneutics class today. But there's a lot of things we could say about why they chose us. I'm gonna focus on one particular point, and that is simply the way that Jews in the day of Jesus would have understood this, this one particular section on the rejected rock. By the time of Jesus in the first century, this particular psalm had a special place in the worship of Jews. It had been collated, put together with Psalms 113 through 17 for a six-psalm collection of what became known as the Egyptian Hallel Psalms. Egyptian Hallel just means Egyptian praise songs, basically. And they were called these Egyptian Hallels because of Psalm 114 that talked about God bringing his people out of Egypt. And every year at Passover, I want you to remember that, okay? That's really important. Every year at Passover, the Jews would sing these six Psalms. They'd sing the first two before they began their liturgy, and then as they were concluding, they would sing the last four. So this psalm, Psalm 118, was for the Jewish people of the first century, the psalm that they were thinking as they concluded their Passover. As they were thinking about what God had done to rescue his people out of Egypt, they thought Psalm 118. And the reason they concluded with Psalm 18 is because they saw in Psalm 118 the picture of the one who was going to rescue them again, who was going to lead them again into a new exodus. Remember, if you know your first century history, the Jews, they're enslaved by the Romans, they've had multiple attempts to bring themselves back up under the Maccabeans and others, and every single time they've been crushed. They're awaiting their king, they're awaiting a new temple. So, first century Jews saw in 118 the picture of who it was that was coming to rescue them. This rejected rock, this one who became the cornerstone, even the one singing this entire psalm was the one that they called Messiah. They looked at 118 and they said, this is Messiah right here. It's who we're waiting for, it's who we're longing for. So if we can understand that, then we can begin to understand a bit more. It's messianic. It's why, again, like I said before, the people of Jerusalem, when Jesus came in riding the donkey, they yelled out, Hosanna, Lord, Hosanna. Because they looked at Psalm 118, they saw Jesus, and they thought, that looks like our guy right here. He's not well liked. Maybe he's going to be the one. So that makes sense, sort of. But here's the thing we need to remember, what does the psalmist say in verses 17 and 18? He says this, I shall not die, but I shall live. And then a verse later, he says, the Lord has not given me over to death. Do you see the problem of applying this psalm to Jesus? Because Jesus did die. Jesus was given over to death. The Jews thought rejection meant maybe ostracization. They thought it meant political unrest, low approval ratings. But they could see very clearly that, no, no, no, this guy's not gonna die. He's not gonna die. That's why when Paul talks about the cross of Christ, he calls it, A rock of offense, an offense to Jews because for them, the Messiah that they were waiting for, the Messiah that was going to prove again and again, God's covenant faithfulness was the Messiah that wasn't going to die. And yet the apostles, they looked at Jesus, the one who did die, and they said, no, it's actually him. It's actually him. Because for the apostles, what they realized and what Christ knew was that the rejection that our psalmist foresaw and experienced, nevertheless prophesied about, was actually death. It wasn't just disapproval. It was the curse that was laid on him. What the apostle realized when they looked at Christ and they read Psalm 118, they realized that the salvation that God worked was not salvation from death, like they had thought for a very long time. It was salvation through death. It was rescue by rejection. That's what they began to understand. They understood that on the other side of rejection, on the other side of destruction, is where their redemption lied. They realized that at the point when the forces of death and chaos and evil seemed strongest, is when they were in fact the most impotent. They realized at the very moment that God seemed most distant, most removed from everything he had promised Israel was when he was actually fulfilling the very word he said he would at the beginning. They realized that when God's covenant faithfulness was most in jeopardy, When there was no way that God could prove himself faithful to this man who became a curse, that he was working in him the promise he had made from the beginning of time. See Christ died, he was rejected, he was smitten, he was stricken, he was afflicted, he was despised by men, but God was faithful to him. He was considered cursed by men. But God became for him his salvation. He had no beauty that we should look on him. And yet the psalmist says that this is the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in our eyes. And even with Christ, that message of the psalmist It doesn't change, it just gets reinterpreted. It's still about the steadfast love of the Lord. But here's the thing that Christ's resurrection changes just a little bit. And here I'm gonna steal a line, just something from Winnie the Pooh. I'm not gonna give this story of Winnie the Pooh, but it's taking a line from him. The cross proves, what the resurrection proves, what the apostles saw in Christ was that the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever. And even longer than that. Some of you may know. It runs from the very beginning of time and because Christ has already died and because he will never die again, the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever and even beyond that. our brothers and sisters in Christ, this should change the way that we fundamentally pray this. We still pray this as God's, a promise of God's steadfast love. We still see this as the assurance that God is who he says he is and that God will be faithful to his covenant. But the way this changes it for us is that we see that this Psalm is not fundamentally about us. In one sense, this Psalm has nothing to do with you. Okay? If you look back, you might have seen, as we read, the changes in pronouns. There's really two voices. People disagree over this. There's the singular voice, I have done this, I have done that, God has done this for me. And then there's these plural voices, save us, we pray. Oh Lord, we pray, give us success. You see the singular voice is not you, at least not directly. A singular voice is Christ. It's him. It's he's the one who prays this most properly. You in this Psalm, you're the ones who ask for deliverance. You're the ones whose voices stand on the periphery. You're the we and the us. We get to witness what Christ has done. We get to rejoice in what God has done in him. And our thanksgiving and our joy comes as a response to what God has done to Christ first and foremost. So like I said, I'll just repeat myself. This Psalm in one way has nothing to do with you. That doesn't mean that the only bits of this psalm that we get to pray stand on the periphery. It doesn't mean that we have to read verses one through four and then be silent for a while and then come back to verse 25 and pick up. Martin Luther was not wrong to say that he had a peculiar claim to this psalm. But the reason we can pray this is because Christ himself first prayed this. Going back to first Peter real quickly, where Peter cites this, when he calls Christ the living stone rejected by men, he then says this, he says, you yourselves like living stones. are being built up as a spiritual house. Christ is the living stone, and because you're in him, you become a living stone. So because Christ prayed this prayer, we can pray this prayer. It's what Augustine called the totus Christus, the whole Christ, that what the head prays, the body can pray too. But the body only gets to pray it in as much as the head prays it. So what does that mean? It means the very same thing it did for Christ. That when we say, I will not die, but I shall live, what we're actually saying is this, I've already died and I will never die again, but I will live. It also means this, That rejection and slander and distress and oppression, if you are in the Lord Jesus Christ, are no longer a sign of God's displeasure. They're no longer evidences that you've done something to upset him. They're actually signs that God loves you more than you could possibly imagine. That in you, he is working out the story of redemption that he promised The very beginning. So are you rejected? So is Christ. Do you feel like you've been given over to the hands of death? So did Christ. Those moments are not moments of abandonment. They're proof that God's steadfast love endures forever. And to pray it this way is to see death all of a sudden no longer as defeat, but as victory. It means going confidently into whatever the Lord has for you, regardless of what may come. Because every moment in the victories and the losses and the oppression, God is working to bring about in you his covenant faithfulness. It would mean looking at a world that hates you, that persecutes you, that slanders you, that reviles you, and going out with joy to serve them. Because you get to be rejected like Jesus. Because you get to count a joy to suffer for the name of Jesus. When you get that phone call, you've been dreading. When the people are supposed to protect you, harm you, even then, you remain assured that God's faithfulness guides you through it all. and that in your life he is working something that will be marvelous in your eyes. If you'll remember, I told you to keep your ears perked when I said that they sang it at Passover. If you were attentive, you might have realized then that Christ himself prayed this psalm. In fact, this was the very last psalm that Christ would have prayed. before he went to the cross. As he was in the upper room, as he concluded his service with his disciples, he, along with the 11 at that point, would have sang this psalm. And he prayed, knowing full well what laid before him. He said this, he said, I shall not die, but I shall live and recount the deeds of the Lord. And then he went to the cross. He's saying with his disciples, the Lord has disciplined me severely, but he has not given me over to death. And then he was bound. He was flogged. He was crowned with thorns. He died the death that you should have died. He was rejected so that you could be accepted. And then he was buried. But the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever. And the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. And now because of that, because of that, we get to pray. I shall not die, but I shall live. And I shall recount the deeds of the Lord. Why? You should know the answer by now. It's because the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever. And even longer than that, Let's pray. Oh Father, we come to you as people who are forgetful. We come to you as people who, in the course of our lives, are thrown off and disrupted because of our circumstance. And yet when we come to you, We get not a harsh word. We do not get rebuked. We get a careful and gentle reminder that your steadfast love endures forever in the Lord Jesus. We pray Lord that as we go out from here, that you would keep in our minds this word, that you love us with an everlasting love, that you have sealed that in Christ and because he has died and has been raised and now sits with you, that we have complete confidence that our rejection, our pain, Our misery, they are tokens of your love. Lord, we pray with the saints of Psalm 118 that you would save us, O Lord, and send us success. Lord, this is your doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. We pray you would seal it on our hearts in the name of Jesus. Amen.