Psalm 69 - Sour Wine and Unmerited Forgiveness
Hello, and welcome back to Tabernacle Talk. Hope that it's been a good week for you.
Crazy to think that we are already at the end of the week, and I got, let me think, yeah, about one more week left in September, and a week and a couple of days. We are, after this episode, we've only got three episodes left in Book Two of Psalms.
So we've got Psalm 70, 71, and 72 is all that's left. And so I am excited for us to complete another portion of scripture. Sorry, I don't want to say I'm excited for us to be done with Book Two of Psalms.
No, but I am excited that we've completed another portion of scripture, and I hope that it's been an encouragement to you.
This is not necessarily one of those passages of scripture that everyone's like, hey, like, what's your favorite book of the Bible? Oh, Book Two of Psalms. That's just where it's at.
And certainly, we've looked at some psalms that are very meaningful to people, Psalm 46, Psalm 51, among others.
But in all of it, I hope that you have realized again and again who God is, how he views the world, how he views sin, how he views those that repent and turn to him and call to him in faith, how he views his children, how he views those going through
trials, all of that. So we are in Psalm 69 today. The inscription for this psalm reads, for the choir director, according to the lilies, a song of David. Save me, God, for the water has risen to my neck.
I have sunk in deep mud and there is no footing. I've come into deep water and a flood sweeps over me. I'm weary from my crying.
My throat is parched. My eyes fail looking for God. Those who hate me without cause are more numerous than the hairs of my head.
My deceitful enemies who would destroy me are powerful. Though I did not steal, I must repay. God, you know my foolishness and my guilty acts are not hidden from you.
Do not let those who put their hope in you be disgraced because of me, Yahweh God of heaven's armies. Do not let those who seek you be humiliated because of me, God of Israel. For I have endured insults because of you, and shame has covered my face.
I have become a stranger to my brothers and a foreigner to my mother's sons, because zeal for your house has consumed me, and the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me. I mourned and fasted, but it brought me insults.
I wore sackcloth as my clothing, and I was a joke to them. Those who sit at the city gate talk about me, and drunkards make up songs about me. But as for me, Yahweh, my prayer to you is for a time of favor.
In your abundant, faithful love, God, answer me with your sure salvation. Rescue me from the miry mud. Don't let me sink.
Let me be rescued from those who hate me and from the deep water. Don't let the flood waters sweep over me or the deep swallow me up. Don't let the pit close its mouth over me.
Answer me, Yahweh, for your faithful love is good. In keeping with your abundant compassion, turn to me. Don't hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress.
Answer me quickly. Come near to me and redeem me. Ransom me because of my enemies.
You know the insults I endure. My shame and disgrace. You are aware of all my adversaries.
Insults have broken my heart and I am in despair. I waited for sympathy, but there was none. For comforters, but found no one.
Instead, they gave me gall for my food. And for my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink. Let their table set before them be a snare.
Let it be a trap for their allies. Let their eyes grow too dim to see, and let their hips continually quake. Pour out your rage on them, and let your burning anger overtake them.
Make their fortification desolate. May no one live in their tents, for they persecute the one you struck. And talk about the pain of those you wounded.
Charge them with crime on top of crime. Do not let them share in your righteousness. Let them be erased from the Book of Life, and not be recorded with the righteous.
But as for me, poor and in pain, let your salvation protect me, God. I will praise God's name with song, and exalt him with thanksgiving. That will please Yahweh more than an ox, more than a bull with horns and hooves.
The humble will see it and rejoice. You who seek God, take heart. For Yahweh listens to the needy, and does not despise his own who are prisoners.
Let heaven and earth praise him, the seas and everything that moves in them. For God will save Zion and build up the cities of Judah. They will live there and possess it.
The descendants of his servants will inherit it, and those who love his name will live in it. Man, what a great song.
I don't know if you guys know, as you're listening to this, maybe if you're someone that's been around church for a while, you're going to recognize a couple of these sentences from within this psalm, probably not even from Psalm 69, but from the
Gospel accounts. And I can't wait to dive into some of that with you. Okay, here we go.
Verses one through four is kind of this first paragraph where David, through using really poetic language, describes his desperation before God of the water rising to his neck, him sinking in mud, there's no footing, he's coming into deep water,
floods coming over him, he's weary from crying and his throat is parched, his eyes are failing like he's not being able to see as he is looking for God. I don't know about you, there's been times in my life where I felt that, and I have felt just
completely overburdened by what life brought. And in those moments, the most meaningful thing that we can do is to call out to God because he hears and he sees us. Then David talks about why he's feeling that way.
He says, Those who hate me without cause are more numerous than the hairs of my head. My deceitful enemies who destroy me are powerful. Though I did not steal, I must repay.
This world, even when we don't do anything wrong, and many times we do things wrong. But even when we don't do anything wrong, there will still be people that dislike us, people that betray us, people that speak poorly about us.
And our response shouldn't be like, Oh man, I'm going to get even with this person. We ought to go to the Lord to say, God, will you deal with this? Will you rescue me?
Will you save me from what these people are trying to do? Then, verses 5 through 12, I won't read over all of it again for sake of time.
He's saying, in essence, like, God, you know where I have failed, and you know that right now in this instance, this isn't as a result of my sins and my failures.
Like, these are people that have no reason to be angry with me or to dislike me, but they're continuing to do it. And he says, God, don't let people be dissuaded from following you because of how other people are treating me.
And that's where he comes to verses 8 and 9, which is the verse that in John chapter 2, John says the disciples remembered this verse when Jesus was cleansing the temple and throwing out all of those that were charging exorbitant interests and taking
advantage of those that were coming to worship God, that they had taken the court of the Gentiles, that was supposed to be a place where people from all nations could come and worship God in his temple, and they had turned that portion of the temple
into a marketplace where people could buy and sell things. And so Jesus cast them out and his disciples remembered this verse. He says, I've become a stranger to my brothers and a foreigner to my mother's sons because zeal for your house has consumed
me, and the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me. That Jesus was alienated from his countrymen, from those that were Jews, just like he was in the first century because he actually cared about people.
He cared about the worship of God being pure. He cared about God's house being a house of prayer, not a house, not a marketplace, not a place where people would go to make a buck from others.
And because of this zeal for the house of God consuming him, it prompted him to action and not everyone loved it. And frankly, today in the church, there will be people that because of a healthy zeal for the house of God.
And by that, I do not mean a physical building. Though certainly we would want right things to take place within the house of God. That doesn't mean that you can't laugh in a sanctuary.
It doesn't mean that kids can't run around and be kids. It does mean that there's not gossip or slander in the house of God. It does mean that there would not be evil or perversion of God's actions of marriage and any of that stuff.
In God's house should be taught and modeled holiness because our God is holy. I think of 1 Peter chapter 1 where it says, Be ye holy, for I am holy. That is our goal.
And not everyone in our world is going to appreciate when God's people want God's house to be holy. When we say, Hey, there cannot be this or this that takes place. This group cannot meet here.
This doctrine cannot be taught here. Why? Is it just because we hate people and we're jerks and we don't want this or that?
No, no, no, it's because God's house is holy and we ought to have a zeal for him that consumes us. But can I tell you today, even more so than in a physical church building, you, according to 1 Corinthians chapter 6, you are the tabernacle.
You are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, that God lives in you, that you are the house of God.
And maybe you might get upset about other people for what they do in an actual physical church building, but do you care about what filth you are putting in your life, into your heart, that the Holy Spirit lives inside of you?
Are you looking at things that you should not look at? Are you saying things to others or typing things to others that you should not be? Are you gossip?
Are you a gossip? Do you slander others? Do you use your body to spread the gospel?
Or do you use your body to just satisfy you? And you don't care about what God wants for you. You are the temple of God.
You are the house of God. That gives you incredible value, by the way.
It means that no matter if you wish that you were 30 pounds lighter or 30 pounds heavier, or that you had some dental work done and you had the money for that, or maybe you wish that you were 30 years younger or 10 years older, can I tell you who you
are is valuable to God, because you are his dwelling place. You are his house. So that gives you value.
It also gives other people value, other people that have the Holy Spirit of God living inside of them, that we would talk about them in a right way, in a good way, a way that honors the image of God that they are made in and honors the fact that they
are the Tabernacle, the dwelling place, the home of the living God. Sorry, I get excited about that. That's a truth that God impresses on my heart. Like, hey, I live in you.
And that's not just like a platitude. It is fact. It is truth.
And if it is truth, then it ought to motivate us to action. Okay, verses 13 through 18, he's saying, God, like, save me. Don't let the deep waters get me.
Don't let the flood waters sweep over me. The deep swallow me up or the pit close its mouth over me.
I'm thankful that as believers in Jesus Christ, that Jesus made open the way to heaven so that when we pass, there's no question of God is just the grave going to swallow me up forever.
No, we know that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. And that as we are with him, we are with him forever. So shall we always be with the Lord, as first Thessalonians would say.
That there is great security for the child of God in knowing where our eternal destination is. And it is with the Lord. Verses 19 through 21.
And here I just want you to like think about Jesus on the cross, because this is, you know, what happened to Jesus. This was a part of David like kind of being a prophet.
And I'm going to note something then from verses 22 to 28, after I go through these verses. So think about Jesus on the cross. You know the insults I endure, my shame and disgrace.
You are aware of all my adversaries. Insults have broken my heart and I am in despair. I waited for sympathy, but there was none for comforters, but found no one.
That Jesus, all of his disciples abandoned him. None of his brothers were there. And they all fled away.
And instead, Jesus got, hey, if you're really the son of God, then tell us which one of us hit you. He had the crown of thorns put on his head and the purple robe placed on his back and then ripped off, re-exposing the wounds from the whips.
And was told, Hail, the King of Israel. He was spit on and hit and mocked. Those insults came against him and there was no comfort.
There was no sympathy, but he was brutalized for our sins, for our transgressions. Verse number 21, instead, they gave me gall for my food and for my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink.
And when Jesus said, I thirst on the cross, the fount of living water, the one who made the stream open from the rock in the Old Testament, the one that made bitter waters sweet, that made poisonous waters able to be drunk from, the one that in his
life calmed the wind and the storms, the one that commanded all of nature, he thirsted. And in that moment, no one even had the decency to give him water.
They gave him sour wine, vinegar, that even in his thirst, it would actually make him more parched. It would actually harm him to drink it. And that's what he went through for you.
But then I think in verses 22 through 28, as David here is writing, and he's saying in his humanness, God exact vengeance on these people for their evil that they're doing against me, of their table being a snare and a trap for their allies, God's
rage being poured out on them, persecuting that there would be persecution and striking and woundedness, God charging them with crime, not letting them share in his righteousness, erasing them from the book of life. That is, David's saying that from
a human perspective, Jesus on the cross, after receiving the gall for food and the vinegar, the sour wine for his thirst, his proclamation was not the same as David. He said, Father, forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing.
I think about us, that where we deserved for Jesus to say, let, let Bryon's table be a snare, let it be a trap for his allies, let his eyes grow too dim to see, let his hips continually quake, that is, to have uncertainty, basically to have hip
problems, pour out your rage on Bryon, let your burning anger overtake him, make his fortification desolate, may no one live in his house, for he persecuted the one you struck. He talked about the pain of the one that you wounded.
Charge Bryon with crime on top of crime. Do not let Bryon share in your righteousness. Let Bryon be erased from the Book of Life and not be recorded with the righteous.
That's what I deserved. But Jesus said, Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
What a wonderful Savior, that the one who became sin for us, the one who knew no sin, made it so that we might have this share of God's righteousness, that we would be written in the Book of Life, that we would be recorded with the righteous.
And then as David goes on and says, like, let your salvation protect me, God, I'll praise him, this will please him more than sacrifices. The humble will see it and rejoice.
There's gladness for all of those following the Lord, that we experience all of that because of Christ. So then the psalm ends with 34 through 36, Let heaven and earth praise him, the seas and everything that moves in them.
For God will save Zion and build up the cities of Judah. They will live there and possess it. The descendants of his servants will inherit it.
And those who love his name will live in it. Today, you've got an eternal home headed for you with the Lord forever. If you love his name, you will live with him forever.
Today, do you need to call out to God? Do you need to have a reverence for the house of God? And that includes you and who you are, and includes your brothers and sisters in Christ?
Do you need to remember what Jesus went through for you? Do you need to rejoice in the hope of heaven? And do you need to just praise the Lord again and again for everything that he has done?
Whatever God wants you to do today, I encourage you, take that action. Looking forward to being back with you on Monday for Psalm 70, a short little Psalm of just about five verses. See you then.
