Psalm 129, if you are able, please stand again. The reading of our sermon text. Again, it is given the title, A Song of Ascents, as all of these, Psalms 120-134 are. This is, again, the word of the Lord. Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, let Israel now say. Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, Yet they have not prevailed against me. The plowers plowed upon my back. They made long their furrows. The Lord is righteous. He has cut the cords of the wicked. May all who hate Zion be put to shame and turn backward. Let them be like the grass on the housetops, which withers before it grows up. With which the reaper does not feel his hand, nor the binder of sheaves his arms. Nor do those who pass by say the blessing of the Lord be upon you. We bless you in the name of the Lord. Again, a reading of God's Holy Word. May He add His blessing to its reading and now to its preaching. You may be seated. And it was not consumed, that is the Latin of the English translation of the Latin title, the motto that has been and continues to be the motto of many Presbyterian churches in the world. It's from the old Scottish Kirk. The adult Sunday school class this morning learned John Knox in the beginning of the Scottish Reformation. That title, that saying, it was not consumed, is usually accompanied with the image of the burning bush, that bush that Moses saw in Exodus chapter 3. And though that burning bush that Moses saw and the revelation of God there was a revelation of God to Moses as the living one, his aseity, that is to say his independence from all things, the God who is, who lives apart from any dependence on anything, just as the fire burned independently of the bush, not needing it for fuel. And even though this is the main truth we learn from that, Christians have also been encouraged by the image in this way, the image of the bush not being consumed, that the church is often burning with suffering and persecution. And yet the church is not consumed in the sense that it has not been extinguished, as our Lord tells us, the gates of hell. shall not prevail against the church that he's building. It's not very popular to speak of the church's enemies today or the church having enemies. It doesn't seem to be conducive to evangelism. We want a seat at the table in the public square. We don't like to think of categories like us and them. We want there to be a dialogue. We want to engage the culture. And certainly you can understand the sentiment, can you not? Paul instructs us to speak the truth in love. He tells Timothy to be gentle, that he reprove his adversaries with patience. Perhaps God in his kindness would grant them repentance. The gospel in and of itself is offensive. You tell people that they are so sinful. They're under God's righteous wrath and judgment. And the only escape is by trusting in a Jewish man who was crucified. That doesn't do much for the ego. And so we don't want to be an offense. We want to let the cross itself be the offense. But at the same time, we cannot escape the reality of the conflict between good and evil. Even if we're not seeking it, the conflict is there. Even if we desire to flee from all forms of confrontation, the truth is, like it or not, the church has enemies. That was the truth in the prayer of preparation from the old Scottish Psalter 1595, praying the Lord will assist us with your favor and grace in such sort that we may overthrow all the enterprises of our enemies. The church has enemies and this psalm makes that very clear. Now we're continuing in the Psalms of Ascents, 15 of them from 120 to 134. Of course, we're getting near the end of them now, but we've seen this triad. Every three Psalms has what we've seen thus far at least, these themes that repeat with one another. And as we see this sometime, this collection of Psalms were put together after the exile to come in the form that we have them now. There seems to be a pattern. Psalm 120, remember, began with that distress. The psalmist was away from the city of God. But in Psalm 121, he is on his way to the city of God. He looks around the hills that surround Jerusalem. Where does my help come from? He confesses his security and his help that comes from the Lord. But then in 122, we saw that he was within the gates of Jerusalem and was rejoicing. He was resting in that. So distress, security, and then rest. And then 123 begins that cycle all over again. Distress, 124. Security, rest, 125. We saw that repetition again in 126, 127, 128. And as Kevin finished 128 last week, the Lord was blessing his people in verse 5 from the city of God, from Jerusalem. May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life. But then in 129, we begin that distress all over again. The enemies of God's people, the affliction of the church here. It acknowledges. The suffering of God's people. The suffering, particularly that they have faced at the hands of their enemies. The psalm confesses that the Lord is righteous and that it moves forward in hope. As the psalmist declares, what will come of the evil schemes of evil men? A psalm can fall into several categories. We might call it a psalm of lament. If we look at verses 1 and 2 and see all the things in verse 3 of what has been suffered, it could also be called a psalm of thanks for the Lord's care. At the end of verse 2, they have not prevailed against me. In verse 4, the Lord is righteous. He has cut the cords of the wicked. And then again, it could be called a psalm of confidence. Verses 5 through 8 tell us again what will come of the wicked, that their plans ultimately will not prosper. They will be fruitless. fruitless in their effort to stamp out the people of God. It is a lost cause because the Lord cares for His church. Well, in all of our afflictions, what we find in this psalm is that the people of God must trust in their Lord and not lose hope. In all our afflictions, the people of God must trust in their Lord and not lose hope. I want you to see that truth in three ways this evening. First, in verses 1 through 3, We'll see the forces against Zion. Forces against Zion. And using Zion in this sense, yes, it does refer to that physical mountain, but as we've seen throughout these Psalms, in verse 5, may all who hate Zion be put to shame and turn backwards. Hebrews tells us, Galatians tells us, that Jerusalem, Zion, has gone out into all the world. It is the city of God. The forces against Zion, verses 1 through 3. We'll see in verse 4, the faithfulness of the God of Zion. And then in verses 5 through 8, the futility of the enemies of Zion. So forces, faithfulness, and futility. The forces against Zion, the faithfulness of Zion's God, the futility of Zion's enemies. We'll see first of all the forces against Zion in the first three verses here. And verse 1 opens up as an acknowledgement of the affliction that they're facing, that they have faced. If you look at verse 1, it's a call for Israel to acknowledge their affliction. Let Israel now say, greatly have they afflicted me from my youth. Let Israel now say, it's as though it's a cantor. a percentor, leading, as it were, a responsive reading or singing or chant. And the person says this, greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, and calls Israel to say this as well. Let Israel now say it. Now, the whole congregation of God's people joins in. Verse 2, greatly have they afflicted me from my youth. We know from Scripture man is but a few days and full of trouble. Paul and Barnabas on their visits back after their first missionary journey, they showed the churches how through much tribulation we must press into the kingdom of God. Suffering is unavoidable. We know it's a byproduct of the fall of man into sin because of our guilt and corruption. It's life in a fallen, sin-cursed world. But along with general suffering, there's also the intense and particular suffering that we see here in this psalm. And that has to do with The suffering that the people of God endure due to the cosmic battle between the serpent and the seed of the woman. This is the direct opposition of God's enemies against His church. And the affliction here is described in a couple of ways. It's described as being long and great. The word in verses 1 and 2 that the ESV translates greatly, some of your translations, I think that King James has it, the older ones, as something like, long have they afflicted me, or often have they afflicted me. And certainly the long-lasting nature of this affliction is seen in this, in that it's repeated twice, greatly have they afflicted me from my youth. Again, that could go back to the idea of Genesis 3.15. The curse there, the enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of Satan that's after Genesis 3 is beginning to be played out in Genesis 4 as Cain rises up as the seed of the serpent and kills Abel, his brother, the seed of the woman, the righteous one. But from my youth, that is a description in the Old Testament that has to do with Israel's rescue from bondage in Egypt and their founding as a nation in covenant with God. God says in Ezekiel, for instance, I found you and you were a babe orphaned, left alone. One who would grow up from this youth. So this conflict is not new. It's ancient. Long afflicted, but also painfully afflicted. We see verse three, the plowers plowed upon my back, they made long their furrows. I used to have it in my mind as I would read the suffering described in the scriptures. And I started to think of it sort of in this way because I would hear things like Paul say, or read things like Paul saying that the apostles suffer. Like he says to the Corinthians, we're suffering in the outer man, but we're growing stronger in the inward man. Or I would read things like the apostles counting it themselves worthy to suffer shame for the name of Christ when they were ordered not to preach in the name of Christ any longer. So I sort of thought that suffering was counterbalanced or even outweighed by the Lord's blessing in this way, that even in the moments of intense suffering, not that it could be enjoyable, that it couldn't really penetrate us though internally. Now, I've not suffered, of course, as intensely as so many have, but I have lived long enough and I have suffered enough to know that it hurts. The people of God aren't numb to the affliction that's being described here. It really hurts. We look to God through the pain. We do, as the hymn writer says, we trace the rainbow through the rain. And the intensity of the affliction is described here in this vivid imagery of plowing rows upon the back, in verse 3. These aren't surface wounds. They're not scratches. They're not paper cuts. They are wounds that penetrate deeply. And again, the image is pretty vivid. You think of a plow tilling up, tearing up the ground. What was neat on the surface is now overturned. What was underneath is now on top. And you look where the plow is gone and perhaps you see roots sticking up and severed from where the plow has cut them. And these rows are deep, ready now to be planted. Land is made for this, not people, not a person's back. And so it's not a pretty image when we think about having to endure such affliction. And this affliction, again, is not general suffering. It's affliction at the hands of the wicked, the enemies of the people of God. So it is a call to acknowledge the affliction. Let Israel now say. But I also want you to see that despite the affliction, There is a continuance, a perseverance of the people of God here. The end of verse two, yet they have not prevailed against me. If this psalm had a musical genre, it would be the blues. You know, you can sing the blues as a Christian. Many of the psalms are just that, aren't they? The Psalms give us really the full spectrum of our human emotional and the experience of what it is to be redeemed in a fallen world. I'm not ready to give up the hymns at all. I think we ought to sing them. Then we ought to compose, continue to compose poetic expressions to be sung. But the more I read the Psalms, the more I want to sing the Psalms. So this affliction has been often, it's been long, it's been great, it's been painful, it's wearying. Sinclair Ferguson points out how evil forces sometimes it seems that they have the ability to just keep on fighting to try to wear down the people of God. They're satisfied with incremental victories until the righteous are so weary that maybe they're ready to give up. It's like having a big fish on the line. You go offshore and get one of those big kingfish, and you hear the whir of the drag, and you fight that thing all the way up to the boat. And it's been the fight of your life. You've wondered, are you ever going to get this thing up here? And then you think it's worn out. It sees the boat, and it flips out again. And then you continue to wear it down till finally you're able to get it in the boat. That's how they hunt gators in Florida, too. It's much like fishing. How do you get a big beast like that in the boat? Well, part of it is you wear it down, wear it down. And continued affliction of any sort, but especially of the malicious type, is wearying to the soul. But again, notice the end of verse two. Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me." The people of God, the church of Christ is still standing. Do you ever think, despite the affliction, the suffering that you've faced, have you ever been amazed by the fact that I'm still here? I'm still believing. My faith is hanging by a thread, as it seems, but I'm still trusting in Christ. It's like Captain America. When he should be down and out, as he says in the movies, I can do this all day. It may not feel like doing this all day, but you're amazed. That you're still in the fight. And how are the righteous still standing? Well, the answer is in verse 4. The Lord is righteous. He has cut the cords of the wicked. We've seen the forces against Zion. Now we see the faithfulness of Zion's God. It's all owing to the Lord. If it had not been the Lord, right? We saw in 124. It had not been the Lord who was on our side when our enemies rose up against us. Surely we would have perished. Surely we would have been caught in the snare of the fowler, in the hunter's trap. But the Lord delivers us from all of our afflictions. It's all owing to Him. The Lord remains righteous. He remained righteous in their Egyptian sojourn, in their Babylonian sojourn. In the scattering of the New Testament church, He remained righteous when Christians were being fed to lions. And all the persecution that Christians have faced, His people have faced. Right in the middle of this psalm, in these afflictions, we find a sure anchor for the soul. Despite where the winds and waves are shifting and taking us, the Lord is righteous. No, we're not being fed to lions currently. We're not facing, as the Hebrew Christians were, the plundering of our property. But I know many of you are concerned over the increasing threat against your liberties and especially your religious liberties, even in this nation. And God forbid that persecution should come. God forbid that our liberties be taken away. But even if that should happen, verse four is still true. The Lord is righteous. Jesus, despite what comes, Jesus has not abdicated his throne. There's no power struggle between COVID and Christ, between tyrannical governors and Christ. We're in an election year and a lot comes with that, doesn't it? But Christ is not up for reelection. He is King of kings and Lord of lords. The Lord is righteous. And notice, Christian, the assurance that comes from your righteous Lord. The Lord is righteous. He has cut the cords of the wicked. He will not suffer His people to be forever bound by their enemies. It's like a disappointed fisherman who thinks he's got a giant fish on the line and he finds out the line has been broken. The fish got off. The enemies of God, the enemies of His church, they find, though they thought they had bound them, they're actually holding to empty reins. God has cut the cords of the wicked, but, believer, know this, He has not severed the cords of Christ, you as a member of his body still remain united to the head. And despite what you suffer, as you are united to the one who suffered himself such hostility from sinners for our sake, so too will we be raised to reign with him. So because God has cut the cords of the wicked, the plans of the wicked are futile. the forces against Zion, the faithfulness of Zion's God. And then in these remaining verses, five through eight, we find the futility of Zion's enemies. May all who hate Zion be put to shame and turned backward. Let them be like the grass on the housetops which withers before it grows up. Sometimes in the Hebrew language, what is a future tense, as we would say, it can be translated in one of two ways, either as a desire, like a prayer, as it is here, or as something sure. And when we read verses 5 through 8, both of these things are true. These are imprecations, that is, imprecatory prayers. against the enemies of God's people but it also accurately describes the future of those who oppose the Lord. It is a desire, these are prayers, wishes as it were and the sense of desire but at the same time it is a sure of what will happen to them, what will be their ultimate outcome as well as what we ask for. Do you have room in your theology for imprecations? Prayers that call down the wrath of God on the enemies, his enemies and the enemies of his church. I hope you do, because when we sing this psalm in a moment, we're going to be singing these imprecations. What is this anyway? What are imprecatory prayers? Well, they're prayers against the wicked in their plans. There are prayers against those who explicitly oppose God, His people and His anointed King. That's what we find in the Psalms. The nation's rage, the people's plot in vain. They've set themselves against the Lord and against His Christ, His anointed King. The Lord holds them in derision. The Lord laughs as the one who sits in the heavens. He will break them with the rod of iron. So they set themselves against the Lord and His Christ and, of course, those united to Him. His church. These aren't prayers to be prayed in our neighborly disputes. Or when we are in a traffic jam and the person cuts us off. This is not what these imprecations are for. To call him curses from heaven. No, no. But when there is particular high handed opposition to God, Usually by those in power. And not just because we disagree with someone in power. But high-handed opposition against God and His King and His Church. Prayers like this may be our prayers. And in doing so, we are simply asking God to fulfill His promise to Abraham. That He would bless those who bless Him and He would curse those who curse Him. The saints in heaven in the book of Revelation pray such prayers. They ask God how long. They ask God to come and judge the earth. We see the Apostle Paul say things like those who refuse to name the Lord Jesus Christ, may they be accursed. We might wonder, though, how we can pray such prayers when our Lord Jesus told us to pray for our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, not in a negative way, but in a positive way. As Paul says in Romans 12, that we are to bless and not curse. There's a lot that can be said, but a simple answer is just following up on what we discussed this morning. When you think about your own self, the enemy within, not the part of you that is born anew, born from above, born again, but that old man that resides there. Do you not pray for the Lord to assist you in putting to death everything within you that opposes Him? That's what we're praying for in such prayers. And yet we want the best for ourselves. That's what we're asking, that the Lord would put an end to everything that opposes Him. And you can pray such prayers and at the same time be concerned for someone's salvation even as you pray those prayers. It may be that the Lord puts an end to this opposition through swift judgment. It could lead to their salvation, but it may lead to their destruction. Those prayers could be answered by the Lord, and it is his pleasure as to how he does so, but it could be answered by the Lord as he did with the Apostle Paul, with Saul of Tarsus, one who was breathing out threats and persecutions and pleased with such things. How the Lord converted him. Or it could be that the Lord answers those prayers and that they are like Herod, whom the Lord took away instantly and was eaten of worms. Pastor Gavin Beers said this, in his wisdom and kindness, God gave us war songs. Speaking of these psalms, such as this one, imprecations are weapons we are to use in that fight. The prayer here is that their plans would come to naught, that they would be fruitless in their endeavors. As we see in verse 5, may all who hate Zion be put to shame and turn backward. Let them be like the grass on the housetops which withers before it grows up. Men, don't you get frustrated. You care for your lawn, you nurture it and fertilize it and water it, and you've got all these brown spots or patchy spots, and you turn around and you see the weeds in the cracks of your driveway that seem to be thriving. But you know that won't last, right? When I was doing the internship here We were cleaning up some debris after Hurricane Matthew, it must have been, and I was up on the roof here of the fellowship hall, and there was some grass, mostly algae, but some grass growing on top of the roof. We took a shovel up there and were scraping it off, but we knew ultimately that when it got hot, there's no place for those roots to penetrate in those shingles to find soil for nourishment. It wouldn't last. Well, this is what this is calling here. for those who are opposing God and his people, that they be like that grass on the rooftops, fruitless. Be like that grass instead of like the one that the reaper fills his hand with. You don't go to the rooftops for that sort of grass to fill your hand from the crop, the binder of sheaves in his arm. No, let them be fruitless. It's a continued illustration here. The reaper, the binder of sheaves in verses 7 and 8. They're going forth to bring a harvest, but no, the desire is here. No, let them not come back with one. Let them be fruitless. Let them come up empty in all their pursuits. And then there's the blessing of verse 8. Don't let them be like those who pass by and say the blessing of the Lord be upon you. We bless you in the name of the Lord. If that sounds familiar, it's from the book of Ruth. The end of chapter 1, the beginning of chapter 2, we're introduced to Boaz, a righteous man who redeemed Ruth. And there he comes and his servants are in the field and they greet one another with this blessing. The psalmist is saying here, don't let it be like that. It's acknowledging that God is the one who blesses, that He causes our fields, our efforts, our labors to be fruitful. So don't let their efforts be fruitful, O Lord. They've set themselves against God and against His people, so may they come up empty, may they be turned backward, may they be put to shame, may they make no progress, may they fall into their own traps, be hung upon their own gallows like wicked Haman in the book of Esther. Thank God for these weapons of our warfare. When Christians, when God's people, when Zion is suffering attacks, affliction against the city walls, we have a place to appeal. We call upon the sovereign king of heaven and earth. And when we pray, we're asking the Lord in such prayers to crush idols, to remove the teeth of wolves, to put the serpent scales under our feet. This is the outcome. No matter what tyrant exalts himself against the city of God, this is the outcome for all who hate the church of Christ. For all who hate the heavenly Jerusalem now spread throughout all the earth. They will be put to shame. Their cords will be cut. They will be cursed. In the end, it will result in the blessing of God's people. And there's nothing in all the world more important than having his blessing, than having God's favor. There's nothing more terrifying in all the world than having God against us and being under his curse. Like Balaam's attempt to curse Israel, this is a lost cause for those who oppose the city of God. This week at Presbytery, Chuck Colson, the pastor over at Christ Church Presbyterian in Mandarin, in the sermon, he mentioned his daughter, Mackenzie. She's a voracious reader. He said the way she likes to read a book is She likes to read the first chapter and then she immediately turns to the end and reads the last few pages or the last chapter. And he asked her, why do you do this? She said, well, I like to open it up and get to know some of the characters and then I like to see how it all turns out so that when I read everything in the middle, I don't have such anxiety from all the drama and everything that's going on there. She said, if I know what happens at the end, I can deal better, better deal with everything in between. Dear Christian, there's plenty of things to be anxious about with the ordinary. weightiness of life, much less the affliction that we see here that is so intensified that the church has faced throughout redemptive history and persecution and affliction. But it does help, doesn't it? To deal with all the stuff in the middle, if you know what the end will be. So in all our afflictions, the people of God must trust in their Lord and not lose hope. Amen. I can't help but to think with, as we close, the language of verse 3. The plowers plowed upon my back, they made long their furrows. Perhaps I'm sure it has come to mind of many of you as well. Now Israel has been having their back plowed here. I can't help but think, can you, of how the true Israel was literally striped for our healing. With his wounds, Isaiah says, we are healed. They lashed him with a Roman scourge. that whip with pieces of metal and bone sink into the flesh of someone's back and then being pulled away, sometimes even exposing not only the flesh and bone, but even the kidneys, we're told. Through the plowing of his back and that same back then being made to carry until he fell under it, a Roman cross, and then laid upon that cross, that plowing of his back resulted in the sowing and reaping of a fruitful harvest, the raising up of you and me from death to life in union with the crucified and risen Lord. So no matter what the assaults of the enemies of God and of his Christ and of his people, no matter what they come against us with, they will not prevail, even though they plow deeply the furrows upon our backs. We know that the Lord, despite their harmful intentions, he intends it for our good. And all that our Savior suffered on our behalf assures us of that truth. Let's pray.