Words are powerful, aren't they? Words can tear down or build up (James 3:8-10, Eph. 4:29). Someone says to you, "you did a good job cleaning today," "I really got a lot out of the lesson this morning," "thanks for running that errand for me." Tender words heal wounds and facilitate love in the body of Christ. But what about when words aren't so tender? What happens when words don't heal wounds but instead they make wounds? You come home one day to your white carpet to find a rainbow in it. You knew from the book of Genesis that God gave us the rainbow to tell us He would no longer send a flood to destroy the earth, but you also knew that rainbow wasn't supposed to show up on your living room floor. Fruity pebbles. You ask your daughter (culprit) to vacuum the floor, but your words along with the pebbles are swept under the rug. Later you ask if it was done and you're given a firm "yes." Lies hurt. Deception hurts. But even "hurt" doesn't describe when these sins come from those you love. What happens when your best friend gossips behind your back to help them get a position at work that you've been praying for as long as you've worked there? What happens when you come home from church encouraged by the sermon and you have an unsaved family member who's words threaten to take an axe to your joy in the Lord? Now, with your child there will be discipline involved and the dynamic is somewhat different there, but you get the point, right? Sin is evil. That includes verbal sin.
SUBJECT QUESTION:
But the question I wanna ask you today is... how do you respond when that evil comes YOUR way?
Turn with me to Psalm 52. Psalm 52. King David experienced this evil and the prayer and attitude of his heart is recorded for us here in this Psalm. It's called a "maskil" of David. A maskil means "instructive." This Psalm is meant to teach us something. It's going to teach us that (BIG IDEA) Words of evil against us should bring a trust in the love of God for us. When evil is spoken against you and I, our response should reflect our trust in God.
READ Psalm 52.
We're told this Psalm was written during a specific time in David's life. Can I get someone to read 1 Samuel 21:1-9 (slowly and loud enough for everyone to hear)? And then someone else to read 1 Samuel 22:6-23.
After 1 Samuel 21:1-9...
David is on the run. His day to day life is consumed with trying to stay alive as a man he greatly loved (King Saul) seeks his life. The time comes when David is out of food so he travels to an unsuspecting uninformed priest for groceries. And this man Doeg heard the whole conversation.
After 1 Samuel 22:6-23...
Doeg does his duty and reports his information to the king. As a result the priest Ahimelech and many other innocent people die. *******Keep this story in your mind as we look at our text tonight.
READ V.1-4 show us first The Nature of the sin against us.
As we read these verses we're forced to ask who this is talking about. Who is this "mighty man?" The majority opinion is that David here is speaking of Doeg. I disagree. A lot of people try to connect these words to Doeg, but we're only told this was written during the time of this incident, not necessarily or entirely written because of the incident. This man Doeg only plays a small part in the greater story of David and Saul. In fact, after these two chapters he's never mentioned again in Scripture. Call me crazy, but I believe the man David has in mind here is King Saul. I can't share all of these observations, but we know Saul was a "mighty man" because he "stood a head above the rest" (1 Samuel 9:1-2). This was part of the reason he was chosen as king. Further this is someone who's "tongue plots destruction." Very often we see Saul plotting to kill David, don't we? (1 Sam 18:9-11, 18:21-22, 18:25, later 23:10). This is also someone who is deceptive (1 Sam 18:21). This is also someone who lies (1 Sam 18:17, 19:6). From the account in 1 Samuel, we have no reason to believe that Doeg did any of these things. We can't tell he was lying (in fact he gave an accurate report to Saul), being deceptive, or plotting anything.
But v.1 asks a kind of thesis-like question, Why practice evil when it's the love of God that actually endures? Maybe you've asked the same question. You find yourself wronged. Someone has spoken evil against you and you ask the question we all ask, "Lord, why are they doing this to me? Why are they saying these things about me? Why act that way when no good is going to come from it? Why do they even open their mouth? Why can't people just consider and act with the 'love of God'?" The simple answer to this question is original sin. People naturally gravitate toward what's wrong. If you don't believe that read psalm 51 and let David tell you about it. But it's one thing to state doctrine and theology and quite another to apply it to our moments of pain isn't it? Well I don't think our Psalm was written to teach us why people do the things they do. I think that's instructive for us. That tells us something. I'll come back to that in a minute. There are three major sins mentioned here: plotting, deception, and lying. These sins usually work in unity. They make decisions together. Where you find one you'll often find the other two in some form.
Plotting is something that happens in the mind. It's something that involves an active premeditation to harm someone. When Saul tried to kill David with the spear (1 Sam 18:9-11) he had to (1) Consider if it was possible to throw a spear that far "Can I hit him?" (2) Look at the spear and pick it up, weighing the balance and taking aim "Let's try it" (3) Throw the spear "Please hit him, please hit him." But the plotting here mentioned isn't merely mental and neither was all of Saul's plotting (18:22). Our text says, "your tongue plots destruction." The level of evil and bitterness must be great for someone to vocalize their plotting. God does say "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." Deception is something that happens secretly by it's very nature. Saul deceived David by trying to give his daughter in marriage as a distraction and so that the Philistines would take advantage of this. You can't feel the blade of deception until the damage is done. It's like a disease that eats at your immune system and until you get the results, you had no idea how long it had been there. Lies are evil. Saul says he won't kill David on multiple occasions and yet he keeps going after him. We know after Saul's death that David greatly mourns this loss. He loved Saul, but this man he loved was doing everything in his power to kill him. Have you felt something similar when those you love sin against you? Husband? Wife? Mom? Dad? A good friend? David points out that Saul lied, but what about David's lie? Scripture is honest about the faults of God's people. David told Ahimelech the priest that the consecrated bread was for the men, but it was really for him. Yet this David is the one God says is a man after His own heart. Righteous people sin too don't they? We're not immune to verbal evil. So before you're tempted to lift yourself up and tear the other person down you need to remember that you could fall into the same thing, whether it be on a large or even a small scale. So I said this psalm doesn't dwell on answering the "why" question. Our psalm focuses instead on the "now what?" question (as we'll see). We know "why" in Saul's case. If you remember from 1 Samuel 18, Saul wanted to keep his kingdom and fight what God was doing in replacing him with David. BUT this Psalm still asks the question why yet it doesn't seek any more of an answer to that question. This may not be the best example of this point, but this is very common throughout the Lament psalms. I think that's important, because the answer isn't important. So often we dwell on and speculate about why something is happening to us or we try to make assumptions and use our imagination about someone's motives, but assumptions are SO dangerous. I think an indirect lesson here is that our focus needs to be on the now and not on the why just as the psalmist' focus was.
So we see The Nature of the sin against us. It's primarily verbal and it's evil, but we aren't immune to it and we don't need to ask why it happened.
Secondly, in v.5-7 God shows us the The Judgment of the sin against us.
V.5 begins with two words of comfort, "but God." The intervention of God in our moments of pain ALWAYS means hope and spiritual growth. David here expresses the certainty of God's judgment. Samuel said Saul's kingdom would be torn from him. Here David predicts Saul's removal from the kingdom and his death. A tent is a temporary dwelling place. Saul's stay in the palace was now temporary. Beyond this he would no longer be firmly planted, but he would be uprooted from the land of the living. He would die (1 Sam. 31:4). He would also be subject to humiliation. Why? Because He wouldn't take refuge in God, but did instead look to his own riches and his own evil. The riches here are I believe pointing us to the riches of Saul's kingdom. Saul wanted to maintain his own wealth and trusted that it would remain steady, that his kingdom would survive. There's considerable difference in translation about the second half of v.7.
ESV, "and sought refuge in his own destruction!"
NIV, "and grew strong by destroying others!"
NASB, "And was strong in his evil desire."
Amplified Bible, "seeking refuge and security for himself through his wickedness."
*I think the idea is expressed best in that Saul "sought refuge in his work of evil or his work of wickedness." Saul put his trust in the evil He was doing and not in God. When people sin against us they aren't trusting in God or they wouldn't resort to lies, deception, and scheming. These things are attempts at solving our problems or getting what we want without considering God. It's important to note here too that we don't know if Doeg was torn from his dwelling place or if he died as a result of God's judgment. We also have no concrete evidence that he was trusting in riches or in his works of evil. To what end would he be trusting in such things?
But we must ask how could David say such things? David did know by the prophecy of Samuel that Saul's time would come to an end and it would be a reflection of God's judgment on him, but on what principle could he stand on to be so certain ...He knew the character of God. God is just and "vengeance is the Lord's." He's the one who punishes the guilty. He's the one who deals with hearts. How does this help you and I? We may not have a Samuel today to tell us how our situations will turn out. We can't go to a witch of Chicago and conjure up the spirit of Samuel to prophesy over our situation. I hope you wouldn't try to do that. Very problematic. But when people sin against us with words that feel like swords we can rest in the character of God. I'm not talking about a Buddhist idea of Karma... what comes around goes around. I'm talking about a just God in heaven who knows exactly how and to what degree to rebuke the sins of mankind and especially the sins of His children. God disciplines those He loves. We need to believe that. We need to rest in that truth. We rest in it though, we don't glory in it. Proverbs 24:17-18 tells us, "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles; Or the Lord will see it and be displeased, And turn His anger away from him."
So we see The Nature of the sin against us, and The Judgment of the sin against us.
Finally we see The Response to the sin against us in READ v.8-9.
David says he is not like the tree that Saul would be... the one that's uprooted from life. David is like an olive tree. This tree grew for hundreds of years, yielding 6 gallons of oil on alternate years. This is a tree that stands and it stands in the presence of God. V.8 tells us David trusts in the steadfast love of God "forever and ever." We see a return here to the opposite of the evil in v.1. David's hope is found in his trust in the love of God. If you are a child of God tonight, do you believe God loves you? There's so much confusion and misuse of the love of God these days. We're so busy showing people the justice of God in our culture (and rightly so) that we sometimes minimize a biblical understanding and application of God's love. I want to tell you today that if David could trust in the enduring, steadfast love of God then we can do the same! Psalm 36:7 says, "How priceless is your unfailing love, O God! People take refuge in the shadow of your wings." Romans 8:39, "Nothing can separate us from the love of God." You see if we forget that God loves us we begin to think of a way to retaliate when others sin against us. We begin to do some plotting of our own. If not that, we get angry, we go into panic mode and freak out. We must remember that the love of God is upon us and we can trust that His love for us will help us endure... because that's what it does!
Not only does David TRUST in the love of God though... he also THANKS God. How often do we actually thank God because of His character and His justice? I gotta tell ya I'm thankful that God is just and that He's the one who takes care of all that. It saves me the time, pain, and heartache it would involve to worry about paying someone back. So I ask you... how often do you thank God because of who He is? How often do you (in the midst of being wronged) thank God that He is sovereign and still on His throne? Finally, David WAITS for God. We're so reactionary aren't we? When someone hurts us we want to kick and scream and DO something about it. It's so contrary to who we are to wait. A pastor once gave me some great advice. He said when something major happens or something that really hits your heart hard... that it's a good general rule that you wait 48 hours before acting on it. This is wise advice because no matter how mature we think we are... we can still be unstable. We don't like waiting. We're a culture in which the microwave doesn't beep fast enought. And the older I get the more I realize that the Christian life is really just a series of waiting seasons. We wait until God moves in this direction or that direction then we wait until a door opens or closes in another direction. Waiting is hard, isn't it? But when God moves and the waiting is over it's usually just followed by another kind of waiting. Getting what we want or God culminating our waiting period doesn't solve the problem. No... instead we need to learn how to wait. David was on the run for his life. He had no choice but to wait on God to bring justice in the situation. We may not have David's exact situation, but we need to learn from his example. You may have a similar situation... one that's just as sticky. Maybe the person who has sinned against you is your boss and they have a firey temper. In fact you fear for your job if you were to retaliate. They've slandered you behind your back and told your co-workers things that simply aren't true and what can you do now? They have the authority.
TRUST God
THANK God
WAIT on God
How do we do these things?
By grasping the truth that Words of evil against us should bring a trust in the love of God for us.
All this comes back to trusting God... trusting that He loves us and knows the situation, trusting that He is still sovereign and still just and He'll bring about the end that most glorifies Him.
"Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt us." This is true in the end not because it's a pithy saying, but because we have a God and Father who loves us and His love endures despite the evil of others... forever and ever.
Let's pray...
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