Latest / Reformed Thinking / Today, If You Hear His Voice (Psalm 95) | Charles Spurgeon

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Today, If You Hear His Voice (Psalm 95) | Charles Spurgeon · Reformed Thinking

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Reformed thinking, welcome back to the table.
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Today we are doing something a little different for a deep
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dive. Usually we take a specific
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doctrine like justification or maybe sanctification, and we
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chase it through a dozen different verses across the Old
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New Testament. But today we are going to park
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the bus. We are staying in one single
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chapter of the Bible. We are, and it is a chapter that
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if you grew up in a liturgical tradition, Anglican, Lutheran,
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or even some Presbyterian circles, you probably know by
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heart, or at least you think you know it.
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You were talking about the Venite.
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The Venite Psalm 95-O Come, let us sing unto the Lord.
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It is the classic call to worship.
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It functions as the opening bell of the service.
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Right, it is the happy part of the service.
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You stand up, the organ swells, everyone feels good.
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But here is the problem. And This is why we wanted to do
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a deep dive on this specific text.
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Most of us stop reading halfway through.
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We get to the part about the sheep and we check out.
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We do. We love the invitation, We love
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the joyful noise. But Charles Spurgeon, who is
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going to be our main guide today through his massive work, The
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Treasury of David, he describes the Psalm in a way that gave me
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pause. He says this text rings like
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church bells. It starts with a lively, joyful
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peel, almost like a wedding March.
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And then without warning, it drops into a funeral.
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Now it goes from sing to the Lord to harden not your hearts.
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It is a massive shift from a wedding to a warning.
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That is the tension we want to unpack today.
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Why does this Psalm have a split personality?
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How do you get from shouting for joy to God, swearing in His
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wrath that you will never enter His rest?
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We have a lot of source material to help us answer that.
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Along with Spurgeon, we are pulling from John Calvin, EW
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Hengstenberg, and several other Puritan commentators.
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And to understand it, we have to look at it through a Reformed
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lens. We have to talk about God's
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absolute sovereignty. We have to talk about the
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authority of Scripture. And we have to talk about the
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uncomfortable reality that you can be in the church singing the
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songs and still have a heart of stone.
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So let us get the housekeeping out of a way first.
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I'm looking at my Bible, Psalm 95.
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There is No title. It does not say a Psalm of
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David. It is totally anonymous.
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In the Hebrew Masoretic Text, you are absolutely correct.
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It is an orphan Psalm. But we are attributing it to
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David. We are and this is a classic
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case of scripture interpreting scripture.
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We do not need to guess because the New Testament solves the
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mystery for us. If you flip over to Hebrews
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chapter 4 verse 7, the author of Hebrews quotes the specific text
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and explicitly introduces it with the phrase saying in David.
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Saying in David, that is kind of an odd phrase, isn't it it?
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Is a bit unusual and you'll find scholars who NIT pick that they
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will argue well in David just means in the book of Psalms
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because David is the headline name for the whole book.
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Like saying I read it in Shakespeare, even if it is a
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sonnet he might not have written himself.
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Precisely. But Spurgeon pushes back on that
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idea. He argues that the internal
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evidence screams David, the tone, the shift from high praise
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to heavy pastoral teaching. It is very characteristic of the
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shepherd king. It speaks to the Jewish people
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with strict authority. Yet the Holy Spirit uses it in
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Hebrews to speak to Gentile believers.
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It bridges the Testaments beautifully.
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OK, so we have David as the author structurally.
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You mentioned this wedding to funeral shift.
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Yeah. Where's the actual break in the
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text? It is almost perfectly down the
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middle. Verses one through 7 are the
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invitation. It is the come let us.
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It is entirely vertical looking up at God.
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Then right in the middle of verse 7 the camera snaps to a
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horizontal view. Verses 8 through 11 are the
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warning. It connects the come let us of
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worship to the Today if you will hear of strict obedience.
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You cannot have one without the other.
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You can try, but that is called hypocrisy.
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The Psalm argues that true worship must lead to a soft
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heart. If you have the singing without
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the obedience, you are just making noise.
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Well, Speaking of noise, let us look at verse 10.
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Come, let us sing into the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise to
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the rock of our salvation. I want to stop on the phrase
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joyful noise because in modern English noise is usually a bad
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thing. We say stop making that noise or
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we complain about background noise.
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Right, it is distinct from music.
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Music is ordered, whereas noise is chaotic.
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Yeah, it sounds like my kids banging pots and pans in the
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kitchen, but that is not what the Hebrew is getting at here.
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Not at all. The Hebrew word is Rua and it is
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a very visceral word. It literally means a shout.
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A literal shout. A shout.
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Think of a loud trumpet blast, or better yet, think of a
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victorious army coming home. It is that roar of a crowd when
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the home team scores the winning point.
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It is not a polite mumbled melody.
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It is a massive projection of energy.
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So when we stand in church and mumble quietly through the hymns
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looking bored. We are technically violating the
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spirit of Psalm 95. Spurgeon was actually very
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convicted about this. He noticed.
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And keep in mind this is Victorian England, so everyone
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is very stiff and proper. He noticed that people equated
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being religious with looking miserable.
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The frozen chosen, as they say, right?
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He pointed out that we often think solemnity means gloom.
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But Spurgeon argues that true Reformed worship, true biblical
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worship, includes Rua. It includes visible, audible
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joy. If you are shouting to the rock
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of your salvation, you should not look like you were attending
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a funeral. Now you mentioned the rock, the
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rock of our salvation. That is not just a poetic nature
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metaphor, is it? No, it is a history lesson.
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It is a hyperlink back to the Exodus.
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Remember, the Israelites are in the desert.
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They are dying of thirst. God commands Moses to strike a
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rock. And water gushes out.
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Life from a stone and 1st Corinthians 10.4 tells us
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explicitly that rock was Christ so when the psalmist says sing
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to the rock, he is reminding them of God's impossible
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provision. He is saying look at the rock
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that saved you, which is crucial because, spoiler alert, the
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second-half of the Psalm is going to yell at them for
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complaining about that very same rock.
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It sets the stage perfectly. You cannot understand the
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complaint until you understand the provision.
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Spot on. I want to dig into a source here
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that I found fascinating. From the stack you brought, you
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included a sermon from 1659 by a Puritan named Charles Hurl.
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He preached this before the House of Lords.
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Yes, the sermon he called the Discordant conquered.
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Yeah, I love that phrase. It sounds like a contradiction.
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A discordant conquered. What was he getting out of the
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House of Lords? Pearl was an absolute master of
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breaking down the text. He looks at verse one and sees
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these pairs of words that seem like they shouldn't go together,
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but they actually create a perfect harmony.
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Give me an example of one of these pairs.
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OK, take the first two phrases. Come and let us.
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The word come implies A multitude.
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It paints a picture of a massive crowd gathering from all over
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the place. But the phrase let us implies
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unity acting as one single body. So you have a massive multitude
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acting as a single unified entity that is the first
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conquered. OK, that makes sense.
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What's the next one? He points out.
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Then he pairs sing with heartily rejoice.
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Singing is the voice, meaning it is entirely external.
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Rejoicing is the heart, meaning it is internal.
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Hurl is arguing that you cannot just have the external sound,
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you must have the internal reality matching it.
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That is the conquered of voice and heart.
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And the last one you mentioned, there were three.
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The last pair is rock and salvation.
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Think about those two concepts. Rock implies might, stability,
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hardness, strict strength. Salvation in the biblical sense
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implies mercy, rescue, tenderness, grace.
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So in one single verse you have the conquered of might and
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mercy, voice and heart, multitude in unity.
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That is incredibly dense. It is not just hey, let us sing
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a song together. It is a massive theological
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statement about who we are and who God is.
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And that theology dictates our posture.
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Look at verse 2. Let us come before His presence
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with Thanksgiving. Now the source notes point out
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the come before is a bit of a weird translation.
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This is an archaic use of English.
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The King James Version says prevent his face.
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Prevent his face. That sounds like we were trying
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to stop him from doing something.
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In 1611 English, prevent meant prevent literally to come before
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to to arrive first. The idea is anticipation.
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You are rushing to meet him. You aren't dragging your feet
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into the sanctuary on Sunday morning.
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You want to be early. And we aren't just meeting him
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anywhere, it says his presence. That refers to the Shekinah, the
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special localized presence of God in the Tabernacle.
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We are entering the throne room of the universe.
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So if I am walking into the Oval Office or the absolute throne
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room of the universe, I shouldn't just be whistling a
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casual tune? No, you bring a gift and the
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ticket for entry, according to verse 2, is Thanksgiving.
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There's a logical point here that John Calvin touches on.
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We are honor bound to bring Thanksgiving.
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Think about it logically. If we do not bless the Lord for
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what we have already received in the past, on what logical ground
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can we ask Him for anything in the future?
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That hits home. If I haven't thanked you for the
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lunch you bought me yesterday, I probably shouldn't ask you to
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buy me dinner today. Precisely, gratitude opens the
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door to petition, but the worship and the thanks have to
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come first. OK, so we have the what, singing
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and shouting. We have the how with
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Thanksgiving in unity. Now verse 3 gives us the why,
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for the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods.
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Here we go into the theology proper.
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I have to play devil's advocate here.
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King above all gods. That sounds like he is admitting
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other gods exist. Like Jehovah is just the CEO of
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a board of directors of other deities, Is this teaching
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polytheism? It is a very common question
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when people read the Psalms, and the answer is a hard no.
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We have to be crystal clear on the monotheistic stance of
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scripture, especially from a reformed perspective.
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The psalmist is not admitting the existence of rival deities
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in the sense that they are real divine beings with actual
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authority. But he literally calls them gods
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right there in the text. He does, but look at the context
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of the ancient Near East. Every nation had a local God.
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The Moabites had Chamosh, the Philistines, said Dagon.
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The psalmist, is totally repudiating them when he speaks
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of gods here. It can mean a few specific
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things. First, it refers to idols, which
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the Bible elsewhere says are nothing, just wood and stone.
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Or, more disturbingly, they are demons.
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So king over demons? Right or king over blocks of
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wood. Second, it can refer to angels
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who are created powers and entirely subordinate.
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But there's a third option. If you look at Psalm 82, the
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Hebrew word Elohim gods is sometimes applied to earthly
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judges or magistrates because they hold the power of life and
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death over people. So the point isn't my God is
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stronger than your God. The point is, my God is the
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absolute sovereign, and your gods, whether they are statues,
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shoes, demons or earthly kings, are completely subordinate.
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Absolutely. Jehovah is not a tribal deity
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fighting for territory. He is the great King, and verses
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four and five prove why he is the great King.
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It points directly to creation, and this is where the text gets
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fascinatingly specific. Verse 4 says in his hand are the
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deep places of the earth. The Deep Places.
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Now I want to bring in that excerpt from the Edinburgh
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Review that you flagged in the source stack.
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Yeah, I was really surprised to see a 19th century geological
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journal in the theological study.
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It was talking about coal mines of all things.
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It is a brilliant illustration of Providence in the physical
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world. The writer argues that the deep
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places are arranged by God's design, specifically for human
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benefit. Think about coal.
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OK, think about coal. Coal seams are deposited in
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strata over long periods. If those seams were left flat at
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the normal geological depth where they were originally
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formed, they would be miles and miles underground, completely
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out of human reach. We could never mind them.
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But what if they were right on the surface?
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Then the wind and rain would have eroded them away millions
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of years ago, or they would have been used up immediately by
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early civilizations. The source argues that God in
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his Providence used massive geological disturbances,
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earthquakes, shifting tectonic plates to break up the seams and
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push them up at sharp angles, dip and strike, as geologists
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call it. So the chaos of the Earth
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actually brought the resources within reach.
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Within reach, but not too easy reach.
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It requires hard labor to extract, but it is physically
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possible. The argument is that even the
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geology of the deep places, the literal cracks and faults in the
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earth, shows a deliberate design for human benefit.
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It is not just that God made a hole in the ground, it is that
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God designed the depths with intention.
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That puts a whole new spin on the phrase.
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In his hand are the deep places. It makes it credibly intimate.
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It really does, and then the psalmist looks up the strength
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of the hills is his also the. Source mentions the Adamantina
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geese. The needles of the Alps.
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The untrod and freezing peaks. We look at a mountain and we
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just see a pretty postcard. The psalmist looks at a mountain
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and sees a massive water tower. These peaks are God's treasure
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houses for snow and rain. They are the strict reservoirs
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that feed the valleys below so humanity can survive.
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And then the sea, verse 5 says the sea is his and he made it.
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To the ancient mind, the sea is the ultimate chaos.
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It is the monster in the dark. You cannot fence it in.
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You cannot tame it. You cannot own it.
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A human king can own land. He can put up a border wall or a
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fence, but no earthly king truly owns the ocean.
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But God does. The sea is his.
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Why? Because he made it.
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Stephen Charnock, the great Puritan theologian, has this
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beautiful line. He says God holds the mimic
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globe of the earth in his hand. A mimic globe like a toy.
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Exactly like a small model. If God holds the raging ocean
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like a tiny water droplet in the palm of his hand, what does that
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say about our daily circumstances?
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It really what's our minor problems in perspective.
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It establishes the entire reason for our worship.
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We do not just bow because it is a nice tradition.
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We bow because He holds the title deed to the very atoms of
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the universe. And that realization forces us
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to our knees in verse 6. So let us talk about that
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physical shift. We have been shouting.
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We have been contemplating deep geology in the vast ocean.
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Now verse 6 says, oh, come, let us worship and bow down.
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Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
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It is a total change in physical posture.
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I will be honest, my knees hurt just thinking about kneeling on
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a hard floor. But there is a logic to this
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progression. You cannot just keep shouting
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forever. No, and you shouldn't.
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The Hebrew here is very specific.
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The word for worship is closely related to complete prostration.
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It means hands and legs stretched out completely flat on
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the ground, face in the dirt. Yet is intense.
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Yeah, we do not see that much in modern Western churches.
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We really don't. But it was the standard expected
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posture of the ancient world when approaching an absolute
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monarch. And here we are approaching the
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Lord our Maker. Now, Maker usually means Creator
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in our modern vocabulary, like he knitted me together in my
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mother's womb. That is true biologically, but
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in the context of Psalm 95 it means much more than that.
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Remember, this is a covenant song.
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When it says Maker, it refers to the making of a distinct people.
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Like nation building? Exactly.
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He took a family of wandering nomads, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
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and sanity. He built them into a massive
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nation. He constructed Israel out of
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nothing in the New Testament sense.
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He constructs the church. We are his workmanship, as the
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Apostle Paul says. So when we kneel, we are
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acknowledging that we are a manufactured people.
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We did not create ourselves. And that leads directly into the
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pastoral imagery of verse 7. For He is our God, and we are
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the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.
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This is where the text gets incredibly tender, but I want
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you to notice something that Agustin pointed out.
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It is a bit of a mismatch in the phrasing.
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A mismatch? How so?
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Read it again closely. People of his pasture, sheep of
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his hand. Usually you expect it to say
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sheep of his pasture and people of his hand.
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Right, because sheep eat grass in a pasture.
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Yeah, and God's hand forms people.
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Why did the psalmist swap them? It is highly intentional.
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Think about what it means to be the people of His pasture.
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It means that even though we are human beings with high intellect
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and free will, we are just as dependent on God for our daily
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sustenance as a dumb sheep is on grass.
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We are not self-sufficient in any way.
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And sheep of his hand. That is the most intimate part
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of the whole Psalm. If a sheep is in a pasture, it
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is eating off the ground, kind of doing its own thing.
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But if a sheep is eating directly from your hand, where
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is it? It is right next to you.
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It trusts you completely not to hurt it.
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It is totally vulnerable and it implies that the shepherd is not
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distant. He is not watching the flock
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from a hill a mile away with binoculars.
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He's hand feeding the flock. He's hand leading them step by
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step. Augustine had a great quote in
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the notes about the nature of ownership here.
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Yes, he said. Essentially that you can acquire
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sheep in many different ways. You can buy them with money.
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You can inherit them from your father, you can even steal them
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from a neighbor, but you cannot make them.
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Only God can make his sheep. Right.
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If you buy a sheep, you own it legally.
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But if you make the sheep, if you designed its wool, its legs,
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its lungs, its breath, you own it absolutely.
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It belongs to you in a way nothing else ever can.
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That sense of total ownership and total care is really
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comforting. I mean, who wouldn't want to be
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a sheep of his hand? It sounds incredibly safe.
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That is the trap. The trap.
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What do you mean? We get too comfortable, we hear
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the sheep language and we think, oh how nice, God loves me, I'm
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safe in the fold and we drift into a dangerous spiritual
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sleep. And that is exactly why the next
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sentence hits like a physical slap in the face.
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Verse 7B today if you will hear his voice.
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Is a violent pivot, Yeah. One minute we are happily eating
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from his hand, the next minute he is strictly demanding our
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absolute attention. Hankenberg called calls this the
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beating heart of the song. Why the sudden urgency?
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Why the word today? Because the Holy Ghost knows
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human nature perfectly, we love to procrastinate spiritual
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things. We think I will repent tomorrow.
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I will get serious about my faith when I am older and have
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less distractions. I will deal with that secret sin
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next week. And the Psalm says no today.
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Not tomorrow. The sources had a chilling quote
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from Thomas Fuller on this exact point.
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He said you cannot repent too soon because you do not know how
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soon it may be too late. That is terrifying to think.
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About And W Mason added to that, he said if we put off repentance
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another day, we have a day more to repent of and a day less to
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repent in. The math is totally against you.
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Every single day you wait, the syndec gets bigger and the time
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window gets shorter. But let us talk about the
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mechanism here, if you will hear his voice.
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Hearing seems so passive. I hear the traffic outside the
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studio right now and I'm not trying to hear it.
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It just happens. But are you listening to it?
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That is the core difference. The Hebrew idea of hearing
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involves active obedience. Shima Israel, hear, O Israel.
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It implies taking the information in, processing it
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and acting on it immediately. Bernardo Clairvaux noted that
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the problem isn't the volume of God's voice.
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Right. It isn't that God is whispering
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too quietly for us to catch it. It is that we stop our ears.
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We actively block the frequency because we do not want to hear
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what He has to say. And from a Reformed perspective,
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this touches heavily on the doctrine of the call.
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The external versus the internal call.
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The external tall is the preaching on Sunday.
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It is the reading of the Scripture.
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Everyone's sitting in the room hears the physical sound waves
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hitting their eardrums. But the internal call, the
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effectual call, is when the Holy Spirit takes that sound wave and
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drives it past the defenses and into the heart.
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The strict warning here is do not resist that pressure.
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Because if you do resist it, something happens to your heart.
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Verse 8 says harden, not your heart.
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This is the real danger. We tend to think of a hard heart
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as someone who is cartoonishly evil.
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You know, villain twisting his mustache, plotting crimes.
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But biblically hardening is a slow process.
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It is a callus. Like getting a callus on your
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hands. Exactly.
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If you go out and work with a shovel, the first day your hands
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blister, it hurts terribly. But if you keep doing it day
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after day, the skin gets thick. Eventually you can grip that
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shovel and you can't feel the handle anymore.
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So the first time you sin, or the first time you actively
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ignore God, you're conscience pricks you?
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It stings, but if you ignore it today and then you ignore it
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tomorrow, the spiritual callous builds up.
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You lose sensitivity. William Gouge, the Puritan
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commentator, breaks this down into 3 distinct parts.
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The mind, the will and the affections.
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How does that breakdown work? 1st the mind becomes blind.
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You literally stop seeing the truth of the gospel.
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Then the will become stubborn. You refuse to bend your knee and
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finally the affections become, and I love this old phrase he
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uses. They become stupid.
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Stupidity of affections. That is quite a phrase.
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It means you start loving the wrong things.
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You love the dirt instead of the diamonds.
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You love your specific sin instead of your Savior.
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That is the definition of a hard heart.
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And the song gives us a very specific historical example of
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this process. It says as in the provocation
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and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness.
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Masa El Miraba. These are real geographical.
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Places they are, and we need to go back there mentally to feel
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the actual weight of this warning.
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We are talking about the events in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20.
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The Israelites are in the desert.
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It is boiling hot, it is dusty, and they completely run out of
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water. Now, to be fair to them, dying
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of thirst in a desert is a legitimate crisis.
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It is a massive crisis. It is terrifying.
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Your children are crying, your livestock is dying.
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Your throat is parched. But look at what they actually
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did. Did they fall on their knees and
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say, Oh God, you saved us from Pharaoh, please give us water to
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drink? No, they attacked Moses.
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They almost stoned him to death and they put God on trial.
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They literally said, is the Lord among us or not?
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That is the provocation. They questioned his very
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presence just because of their physical discomfort.
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And that leads to the theological definition of
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tempting God. The text says when your father's
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tempted me, what does it actually mean to tempt the
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Almighty? You can't trick him into doing
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something. Henry Melville had a great
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definition in the notes he provided.
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He said tempting God is demanding that He change his
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will to suit our comfort. It is pure arrogance.
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It is looking up and saying God, if you are real, you will do
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what I want exactly when I want it.
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It is treating the sovereign creator like a cosmic vending
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machine. If the candy bar does not drop
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when you push the button, you kick the machine.
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And the irony of it looking at verse 9 is just crushing.
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When your father's tempted me, proved me, and saw my work.
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Saw my work stop and imagine the scene.
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They are standing there in the dirt, complaining loudly that
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God has totally abandoned them and what is visible in the sky
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right above their heads at that exact moment.
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The pillar of cloud. The miraculous supernatural fire
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cloud that has been leading them every single day.
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They are eating manna, literal bread from heaven that appeared
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on the ground that very morning. They saw the Red Sea part in
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half. And yet they act like atheists
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because they are thirsty. It really shows that miracles do
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not create genuine. Faith they do not.
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If your heart is hard, you can see a dead man rise from the
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grave and you will just ask how he did the magic trick.
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They saw the work for 40 continuous years and yet they
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still tempted him daily. And God's reaction is extremely
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visceral. Verse 10 says 40 years long was
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I grieved with this generation. Grieved.
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The Hebrew word used there is quet, and it is much, much
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stronger than just being sad or disappointed.
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What does it imply? Nausea, loathing.
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Utter disgust. It is the feeling you get when
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you eat something totally rotten and your body desperately wants
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to reject it. That is a scary thing to hear
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about God. We always talk about God being
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love, but here God is physically disgusted.
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He is disgusted because of the nature of the relationship.
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Peron notes that this is the reaction of a devoted parent or
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a spouse who has given everything love, protection,
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constant provision and receives only bitter scorn in return.
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And it wasn't just a bad weekend.
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It was 40 years. An entire lifetime of rebellion.
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The whole generation of nagging, complaining and deep unbelief.
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It exhausted the divine patience and.
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He gives the spiritual diagnosis in verse 10.
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It is a people that do air in their heart and they have not
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known my ways. Notice the specific location of
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the air. It is not in the head, it is in
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the heart. Explain the difference for us.
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Musculus the reformer points this out beautifully.
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The Israelites were not ignorant people.
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They knew the statutes. They heard Moses preach the law
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every week. They knew the theology inside
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and out. The error was in the affections.
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They simply didn't want God's ways.
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They wanted God's stuff, but not his ways.
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Correct. They wanted the water from the
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rock, but not the obedience to the rock.
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They wanted the physical safety, but not the divine sovereignty.
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And that is the exact state of the natural man.
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That is the doctrine of total depravity on full display.
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Left to our ourselves, we will always choose the air because we
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naturally love the air. And because of that hard air, we
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get the hammer drop in verse 11. Unto whom I swear in my wrath,
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that they should not enter into my rest, God swearing an oath
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against his own people. Robert SA, classic English
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preacher, said that an oath from a mortal man is serious.
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If I swear to do something for you, I might break it due to
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weakness. But an oath from God?
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He calls it truth with a vengeance.
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It is totally be irrevocable. Once God swears in his wrath,
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the door is shut and locked. There is no higher appeal court
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you can go to. And the physical punishment was
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that they were barred from entering Canaan.
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They were. Think about the massive tragedy
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of that. They crossed the Red Sea.
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They survived all the plagues in Egypt.
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They walked for decades through the blistering heat, and they
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died in the sand. Their bones were left bleaching
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in the wilderness. They never tasted a single drop
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of the milk and honey. But the Psalm calls it my rest,
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and the writer of Hebrews picks up on this specific phrasing.
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It wasn't just about Middle Eastern real estate.
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No, Canaan was a type, A shadow of things to come.
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The rest is much bigger than a plot of land.
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Unpack the theology of that rest for us.
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Hebrews 3 and 4 make the theological connection.
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There is the creation, rest the Sabbath day.
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There is the land rest, the physical nation of Canaan, but
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the true rest is salvation in Jesus Christ.
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It is ceasing from your own exhausting works to try and save
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yourself and in the end it is the eternal state heaven.
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So the strict warning for us for what Spurgeon calls the Gentile
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believers sitting the pews today is that we could be just like
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the Israelites. We can be in the visible church
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in the wilderness. We can take the sacraments.
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We can hear the Word preach. We can be the people of his
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pasture in a visible, outward sense.
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But if the heart is hard, if we persist in hidden unbelief, we
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will not enter the true rest. Outward membership does not
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guarantee inward reality. That is the core Reformed
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distinction between the visible church, which is everyone
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sitting in the pews on Sunday, and the invisible church, which
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is the actual elect. Is a very sobering thought
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regarding the doctrine of perseverance.
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We often assume once saved, always saved.
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So I can live however I want during the week.
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But the actual proof of salvation is perseverance.
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If you fall away, if you harden your heart over time and die in
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the wilderness of your own sin, it proves you never truly
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partook of the rock to begin with.
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As Hebrews says, we must fear lest we seem to come short of
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it. Unbelief firmly bars the gate to
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heaven. And that brings us to the
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closing logic of the Psalm. It just abruptly ends there.
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That they should not enter into my rest.
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Boom into the Psalm. Nothing else.
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It is shockingly abrupt, it does not resolve gracefully.
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There is no happy ending verse where they all repent, cry and
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everything is fine. Why leave it hanging like that?
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I think it is a brilliant rhetorical device by the Holy
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Spirit. It forces the listener to go
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right back to the beginning. You are left staring at the
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threat. They didn't enter.
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So the natural panicked question in your mind is how do I make
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sure I enter? And the answer is back in verse
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one. Exactly.
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To avoid the terrifying wrath of verse 11, you must embrace the
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come. Let us sing of verse one.
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You must embrace the urgent. Today of verse 7.
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You have to bow down physically and spiritually.
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You have to soften the heart. The sheer terror of the warning
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drives you back to the joy of the worship.
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So the structure itself is a loop.
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The fear of the warning drives you to the joy of the rock.
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And the joy of the rock keeps you from the hardness of the
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heart. It is a perfect theological
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circle. Let us summarize this because we
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have covered a massive amount of ground today.
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We started with the height of praise, the loud shouting joy to
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the rock of salvation. We move to the depth of
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reverence, kneeling flat on the ground before our maker who owns
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the raging sea and the deep coal mines.
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Then we hit the absolute urgency of the called the Today, the
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demand for immediate internal hearing and obedience.
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And finally, we face the terror of the alternative, the hard
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calloused heart, the provocation in the desert, the generation
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that literally disgusted God, and the oath that barred them
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from eternal rest. It really is a complete theology
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of the believer's walk in 11 short verses.
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The shepherd leads, He feeds, He holds us safely by the hand.
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But the sheep have a strict responsibility.
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We must not harden our hearts against the rod and the staff.
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We must trust His daily Providence, even when the water
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seems scarce and we are thirsty, because we know He is the rock.
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Here's a final provocative thought to leave you with,
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derived from the notes we study today.
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The entire Psalm hinges on that one word today.
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Today, if you will hear His voice, if you were sitting there
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waiting for a better time to get right with God, or to deal with
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a secret sin, or to really engage in worship instead of
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just mumbling, you are operating on a very dangerous assumption.
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You are assuming you have rights to it tomorrow.
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You nailed it. As the source said, he that hath
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promised pardon on our repentance have not promised to
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preserve our lives till we repent.
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You have today, that is all you actually possess.
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Use it well. This has been reformed thinking.
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Thanks for taking this deep dive with us.