Psalm 123

Transcript from podcast (so sorry for the spelling mistakes)

Wildfire podcast is an extension of Wildfire, which has a focus of igniting men and women of God into a deeper discipleship with Christ, instilling people with a passion to radically and relentlessly pursue Christ wherever that leads.

That God's truth will spread like a wildfire.

So, as you may have realized, our Psalm tonight is only four verses long.

So, half an hour each verse, you'll be home by nine o'clock.

Sound good.

So, I love reading the Psalms together as a church, but because it is only four verses, we'll go back and just read it again.

So, if you have it in your Bibles, it's Psalm 123.

To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens, behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid servant to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till he has mercy upon us.

Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us.

For we have had more than enough of contempt.

Our soul has had more than enough of the scorn of those who are at ease, of the contempt, of the pride.

So, essentially what's going on in this passage is the psalmist is lifting his eyes towards the throne of God in heaven, and using the illustration of a master and a servant, is asking for mercy.

So, the psalm doesn't actually tell us who the author is, but I'd like to put the case before you that the author is Hezekiah.

Hezekiah was one of the kings of Judah.

So you have the first king of Israel was Saul, then you have David, then David has a son, Solomon, then because Solomon's heart was divided before the Lord, the Lord splits the kingdom in two after Solomon's reign.

You have Israel in the north, and Judah in the south, and then Judah was ruled by kings and both fell into idolatry at different periods of time.

Israel was worse in this idolatry.

So then God sent the Assyrians from the east, and they came and took Israel away in the north.

So Hezekiah was king of Judah when this happened.

He saw Israel to the north, their other tribes get taken away, separately by the Assyrians.

And he was the king of the throne.

Then King Sennacherib of Assyria sends his army down and they besieged Jerusalem.

So they're camped all around Jerusalem, besieging it.

And I believe that's when Hezekiah wrote this psalm.

And you'll see, you'll probably see why later on.

So that's the context.

It's by Hezekiah.

First of all, we need to work out what the theme is in this psalm.

So the way we do that, when we're looking at Hebrew poetry, is we see what's repeated.

So the first word that's repeated, maybe you've noticed it already, four verses.

There's four uses of the word eyes, as you can see in the screen.

Eyes repeated four times and three verses, or four verses.

The other word that's repeated a lot is mercy.

So you can see that in this psalm, the psalmist wants to get the idea of eyes and mercy.

There's some connection there.

And we're going to try and work it out.

The next thing with Hebrew poetry that you need to know is that it's not the rhyming of sounds like we have in English.

It's not how, now, brand, cow, because in French or German, that doesn't really work.

But the genius of Hebrew poetry and the beauty of it is that God wrote these Psalms through the psalmists in a language that could be understood in any language because these ideas rhyme.

They work in any language.

It's the same with a lot of the proverbs as well.

So if we go to the next slide, you'll see how this works.

So this is the first two verses.

The psalm can be split into verses one and two, and three and four.

So verses one and two, if we take them, a song of a sense, we'll read all verses A and verses B.

So you'll notice there's a rhyming of ideas through all A, and a rhyming of ideas through all B.

So we take A, to you I lift up my eyes, behold as the eyes of servants, as the eyes of a maid servant, so the eyes look to our Lord our God.

All of that is to do with eyes.

So they're rhyming the idea of eyes.

And if we take B, O you who are enthroned in the heavens, look to the hand of the master, to the hand of the mistress, till he is mercy upon us.

Lines B are all about God, either something he's petitioned to do or something he is doing.

Is he enthroned?

Are they petitioning him to use his hand?

Are they petitioning him for his mercy?

So that's how we can divide up this Psalm, verses one and two, three and four.

And this helps us understand the themes.

So we'll break this down into three sections.

First of all, we'll look at why eyes are important.

Then we'll look at the throne of God, and then we're gonna look at finally mercy, which most of our songs at the start were about.

The first thing I want you to notice is, to you I lift up my eyes.

This idea of lifting up, it occurs quite often in the Bible, especially in the book of Daniel was where I noticed it first, was Daniel chapter 10.

He's delivered a vision from heaven.

He lifts up his eyes, lifting up the eyes towards heaven.

There's something important there that we need to realize.

And the reason eyes are important is because right now I've just lost about the attention of half the people in the room because I'm not looking at you.

Eyes are very important, and where we look determines a lot of things.

So let's look at this through the lens of the Bible.

Where is the first time eyes are mentioned in the Bible?

Maybe you can have a way to think and you might know the answer.

It's in Genesis 3, the fall.

The serpent mentions to Eve that she needs to open her eyes and that her eyes will give her her desire.

And Eve noticed that the fruit is good for her eyes.

This is the first notice of eyes in the Bible.

And this tells us it's important, because it's the law of first mention.

When something is mentioned first in the Bible, you know that the author is drawing our attention to it.

So now that we know eyes are mentioned first in the Bible, we know that they are important.

And eyes, in this case, with Eve, it's showing us that where she's looking is directing her thinking.

Whenever she saw the fruit, what did she do next?

She took it.

The two-year-old was synonymous.

By looking, she wanted to take.

So that's what can happen here.

That's why it's important that we use our eyes appropriately.

So I used to be a sprinter back whenever I was in school.

100 meters, I wasn't fit enough to do anything any longer than that.

The important point about the start is you can win or lose a race on the start.

And when you're down in the starting blocks, your eyes are facing down.

But if they're facing too far down, then it doesn't happen very often, because most people have worked this out pretty quickly, because once it doesn't happen again, you just fall on your face.

That's what happens if you look at your feet.

The other alternative is to look straight up like this.

You'll see, like I'm doing a bit of coaching now in schools, and you see tons of the kids are starting like this, looking up, and they're always the ones that come last.

Because when you look up, you just pop up straight away, and everyone else overtakes you.

So what has to happen is your eyes have to look just and literally, and just come up as you run.

Your eyes guide where you go.

If you look down, you fall down.

If you look up, you come up.

That's why our eyes are important, because it's gonna guide where we go.

There's something called the myth of neutrality.

I don't know if you've heard of that before, but it's the idea, it's not whether we do something, it's which thing we do.

So to explain it a bit more, you hear quite often when Christians engage in politics, oh, you need to forget your bias, because you're just being biased towards the Bible.

But whenever we apply the myth of neutrality, it says that everyone has a bias.

There's no such thing as someone with no bias.

Yes, we are biased towards the Bible, we have to admit that, but they have their own bias.

So the way we can apply it to this, Sam, is that everyone has to look somewhere.

It's not whether or not you look, it's what you look at.

There are no blind people spiritually in this context.

You have to look somewhere.

So where is the Psalmist telling us to look?

To the throne of God.

Oh, you who are enthroned in the heavens.

That's where we have to lift up our eyes to.

So what does this mean in Israel's context?

Well, the Psalmist has already said that God is enthroned in the heavens.

Well, what else did they have?

They had the Ark of the Covenant, and this was God's dwelling place on earth.

They had...

We talked about the Psalms of Ascent.

Johnnie mentioned last week what the whole purpose of the Psalms of Ascent was.

It was songs that the Israelites could sing as they went towards the temple and towards Jerusalem.

Within Jerusalem, the center of worship was the temple, and within the temple, God dwelt in the Holy of Holies.

But what was the one artifact or the one object in the Holy of Holies?

The Ark of the Covenant.

It was God's throne on earth.

That's where God came down to dwell with his people.

And in case you haven't seen the Ark of the Covenant before, it's a box made of wood, coated in gold, and on top of it are two cherubim, two angels.

And God said in Exodus 25 that he will sit above the cherubim.

And Hezekiah as well in 2 Kings actually talks about God sitting above the cherubim.

That's one reason why I believe it's Hezekiah.

God sits above the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant.

And you might know as well, the top of the Ark of the Covenant is called the Mercy Seat, which will be important later.

So that was Israel's context.

That's how they saw the throne of God applied to their lives.

They knew that the Ark of the Covenant, they didn't see it very often because it was in the tabernacle or in the temple, but they knew that's where God dwelt with them in the middle of their camp.

But for our context, we don't have the Ark of the Covenant anymore.

We have Christ, and Peter tells us about this in his sermon in Acts chapter two.

Peter talks about Christ because this is after Christ has lived in the earth for three years with his disciples, 33 years, and three years in his ministry with his disciples.

He's been crucified, he's been resurrected, and he's ascended.

So this is Peter's sermon just after Christ has ascended.

Peter tells us where Christ is.

He says that God would raise Jesus up to sit on the throne of David.

So he's sitting on the throne of David, and where is this?

It's at the right hand of God.

That's not a physical position, that's a position of authority.

That's what that means.

If someone's at your right hand, then they're someone important to you.

So to God, at his right hand is the throne, and on that throne is Christ.

And Peter references a verse in another psalm, Psalm 110, the Lord said unto my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.

That's Christ on the throne.

So whenever we're told by the psalmist to look to the throne, who's on the throne?

Jesus.

Where is the throne?

In heaven.

And where is it?

It's at the right hand of the father.

This is a position of power.

It's not a throne that means nothing.

So to apply to our context, we don't have many monarchs left in the world.

We have Queen Elizabeth, but she doesn't actually decree much in the land anymore.

That's the job of politicians and those in West Minister.

She doesn't really do that much.

And you can like the Queen, you can not like the Queen.

But the point is, when the Israelites are writing this, thrones actually, that was the position where everything was ruled from.

That meant something to them.

And in our context, we don't understand that.

But this throne is in heaven.

He is above all, and he that is above all is above all.

He's in charge of everything.

There is nothing that he is not the ruler of.

That's why we have to look up to him.

The myth of neutrality that we talked about earlier can also be applied here.

It's not whether there's a throne.

It's which throne you have.

So we're designed by God to have a throne.

We're designed to worship, and we're designed to want to follow someone, to have someone in that position over us.

A lot of people don't like to think about that today, but that's the way it is.

There's always that throne in your life.

So it's not whether you have the throne.

It's which day that you have on the throne.

So just to give you an example, that might be yourself.

You might be the god of your own life.

Whatever you want to do, you do.

You don't care about anyone else.

You don't care about the laws in the Bible, the laws of the land sometimes.

You are your own god.

Or the state.

You have people going around.

Whatever the state is, it defines morality.

Whether abortion is legal or illegal, that makes it right or wrong.

Based on what the state says.

Or you can have money.

People do all their lives to make as much money as possible.

That's what they worship.

That's what's on the throne of their lives.

That commands them.

Then you have sex.

Some people go around, and they just have sex with as many people as they want.

That's what rules their lives.

And then you have power.

Some people are willing to trick anyone, do anything, pull any trick, to be in charge of everyone else.

They want to be on the throne, when actually they're already following a throne.

They just don't realize it.

So it's not whether you have a throne, it's which God is on the throne.

And the irony is, God's already on the throne.

Whether you realize it or not, he's on the throne.

And you don't get a say in that.

You can't, there's no way you can change that.

He's already on the throne.

To illustrate this, you might remember back to the Bible, David and Goliath, Goliath was a Philistine.

Just before that, whenever David was still a young boy, the Israelites went out to battle against the Philistines.

They went out to war against them, and they got beat quite badly, which didn't happen very often.

God usually blessed them.

But because of the way they were worshipping, they weren't worshipping God correctly, so God allowed them to get defeated by the Philistines.

So then they came back, had a wee brainstorming session, and thought, how can we beat these boys?

So they thought they'd pull a wee secret trick on them, and they brought the Ark of the Covenant from earlier.

God's thrown on earth.

They brought that out to battle with them, and they thought this would be their secret weapon.

So if you've seen Indiana Jones, that's what Hitler wanted to do when he was trying to find the Ark.

We side note there.

He was copying this story in the Bible.

So they thought this was an appropriate weapon.

They were going to bring the Ark of the Covenant out, so we'll have God out with us.

We're going to win this battle, because God's not going to let us get beat whenever he's out there with us.

But God kind of saw that one coming, surprisingly.

And he let them get beat.

He let them get beat again, and there was many of them killed, because they tried to take him for granted.

What happened next was the Philistines captured the Ark and took it to their own temple.

They put it in the temple of their god, in Ashdod, their capital city.

They set the temple, or the Ark of the Covenant, in their temple, beside their favorite god, Dagon.

And I probably should have put a picture up with Dagon, but he was basically a merman, so like a mermaid but a dude.

And he had like a big Sumerian beard, a wee pointy hat, that kind of thing.

He looked like someone you'd see in Babylon.

And he, that was kind of their statue of Dagon.

So they set Dagon beside the Ark of the Covenant.

And they thought, they probably offered incense to Dagon, or whatever they usually did to pay homage to him.

Left, and then when they came back the next day, Dagon had fallen on his face before the Ark.

So they thought, all right, maybe there's a bit of wind in here or something, and then lifted him back up.

Left it one more day.

When they came back, Dagon had fallen on his face again, but this time his head was off, and so were his arms.

He was completely broken.

Their God had fallen on his face and was destroyed before the Ark of the Covenant, before God's throne on earth where God dwelled.

Because God's a jealous God, and there's only one throne, and he sits on it.

No one else can have that throne.

It's his, and whether you can try your best to have whatever you want to be the God of your life, but God won't allow it.

He is on the throne.

And the Philistines saw that pretty quickly.

They had to get the ark back to Israel.

Even though they just defeated them in battle, they took the ark out and gave it back to them, essentially, with all this gold and stuff as well, to try and make the whole arrangement go a bit smoother.

But God is a jealous God, and he will not allow anyone to take his position on that throne in your life.

Because every knee will bow.

If you don't give him homage now, that's just a temporary thing.

So, when it comes to the end, every knee will bow.

That's what the Bible tells us.

God doesn't tolerate other gods.

They will fall on their faces before him.

All those things you worship, yourself, the state, money, sex, power, they're worthless.

They don't matter, because they're weak, they're useless.

God can destroy them like that, and he will someday, because every knee will buy before him.

So what actually happens when we look to the throne?

So if we do what the psalmist is telling us to, and we lift our eyes towards the throne of God and the throne in heaven, to Christ and that throne, what will happen?

Well, just after Peter gives his sermon in Acts 2, it goes to Stephen, the first martyr.

And whenever he's giving his testimony before the Pharisees, it says his face is shining like an angel.

And what happens after that?

When they're about to stone him, he says, I see the Son of God, the Son of Man, sitting at the right hand of the Father.

He sees Jesus, he's standing this time, he's up off his seat, but he's at the right hand of the Father.

Stephen sees this, and his face shines like an angel.

Is that how people see us?

We don't have that literal vision.

The Bible tells us about it, and we can have that time with God, but is that how people see us?

Do they see us as someone who reflects the glory of God in our lives to them?

So, we've talked about the eyes, we've talked about God being on the throne.

Now let's address the other word that appeared throughout, which is mercy.

So, mercy can be positive and negative.

So, the most common way you'll hear mercy talked about is in the negative sense.

So, God can judge you, but he sent his son, and therefore, he's being merciful to you, and he's going to spare you that judgment.

So, that's the negative sense.

It's something he's not going to do, which is punish you.

But the way we don't think about mercy as much is in the positive sense.

So, when God does a force that we don't deserve, many people call this grace, but there is a slight distinction.

The best way to illustrate it is in the story of the Good Samaritan.

This man was beat up on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.

A high priest, a Levite, both walked past him on the other side of the road, left him to die.

But a Good Samaritan came along, lifted him up on his donkey, took him to the next town, and paid for all his medical needs, paid for everything that he needed.

And the person who asked Jesus about this story said that his neighbor was the one who was merciful, and Jesus said, you have spoken correctly.

The Good Samaritan showed mercy.

So mercy is something you can do for someone, as well as something you can spare someone.

That's what mercy is.

But why has the Psalmist only brought mercy up in the last few verses?

He spent an awful lot of time dwelling on the first thing.

The first two verses are a lot bigger than the second two.

Why has he done this?

It's because you have to establish God on the throne.

Christ has to be on the throne for mercy, to mean what it does.

So, for a second, just close your eyes.

So if I told you someone loved you, how would that make you feel?

Hopefully it would make you feel good.

Okay, you can open your eyes.

It was actually a 40-year-old weirdo on the internet.

The actual action doesn't mean anything unless you know where it's coming from.

So as Christians today, we love to talk about the love of God and the mercy of God, and that's great.

We need to actually do more of that.

But we need to talk about God being enthroned first, and a lot more than we do for it to mean what it does and what it should mean.

We need to talk about God being on the throne, and that's what the psalmist has done.

He has to establish that first, and he's talked about it through illustration and through images, so that the hearers get that for their mercy to mean something.

And we can receive this mercy from the throne of God.

That's where it's coming from.

And that's not to say mercy between two individuals means nothing, but in the grand scheme of things, that means something because God sits in the throne.

If there's no God, then why would that matter?

If evolution is all there is, then why would you be merciful for someone?

You're both basically two cocoa balls just fizzing beside each other.

You're the same as that.

You have no value if evolution is true.

So for even the small acts of mercy between two people to mean something, God has to be on the throne.

What did mercy mean for the people of this psalm?

Well, we talked about the start, Hezekiah.

They were in Jerusalem surrounded by the armies of Sennacherib, the Assyrians, probably about 200,000 men and warriors around them chanting at them.

They actually sent a Rebshikah or messenger from Sennacherib to Hezekiah and he read out this big letter for them and basically blasphemed God and called them all cowards and wimps and just blasted them and told them that they were useless and called God useless and blasphemed against God.

So mercy for them was not getting destroyed and they deserved it.

They had been in idolatry for hundreds of years.

Hezekiah was a good king, but he was about the only one.

The rest of them were just terrible.

They blasphemed God, they set up idols all over the place and the people were not in a good place.

And Israel in the north was worse and they had already been taken away.

They had seen their brothers in the north get taken away to captivity and they thought they were next.

They needed mercy.

That was the form it was going to take.

God was going to save them.

What did he do?

He said that God sent an angel into the camp that night after Hezekiah petitioned God and talked about him being seated above the cherubim on his throne.

God sent an angel into the camp of the Assyrians and the angel killed 185,000 of them and they all fled.

That's what God did to save his people, to give them mercy when they looked to the throne of God.

But what does mercy look like in our context?

It's a very practical thing.

Look at the example he uses.

Behold, as the eyes of servants looked to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maidservant looked to the hand of their mistress, that that master-servant relationship is a practical one.

The master provided for all the servants' needs whatever they wanted, he had to provide for them in terms of their needs.

And it's the same thing for us.

It's our practical thing.

God gives us mercy by providing for us day to day.

And sometimes it doesn't seem like it.

It talks about in verse 4, our soul has had enough of the scorn of those who are these, of the contempt of the proud.

We can look around us and think God's providing for them a lot more than he is for me.

I'm kind of getting it tough here.

But God will always provide for you.

He will always give you that mercy.

And do you want to know how we know?

Because we can look to Christ, look to the one enthroned.

He said, what did he do?

He gave us mercy by giving his life on the cross for our sins and rising again from the dead and ascending to heaven to rule the universe.

That was a merciful act because we can be spared from eternal judgment and we can go and worship him in eternity.

It's a very practical thing.

And it's not just spiritual either.

Maybe you've suffered bereavement, maybe you're having relationship issues, maybe you have mental health problems, maybe it's physical problems or an illness.

God can give you mercy.

And that doesn't mean you're moving it completely, but it means he can give you the strength to get through it.

He can be merciful to you.

Finally, Christ is still on the throne.

Lift up your eyes to him, that you may receive mercy.

Hebrews 4 says, let us with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help him in a time of need.

Let's pray.