40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 2 Samuel 22:1-36 (Episode 286)

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Chad and Daniel discuss a song of salvation by David. God is a dragon riding on an angel to save His beloved. Someone is righteous, is it David or his son… or both? Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network Regional Event in Las Vegas 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes of the Old Testament. 40 Minutes of the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast and check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. while you're over there. Make sure you go to the events page if you haven't done so already. If you live in the Las Vegas area, in the Nevada area, in Southern California, in New Mexico, any of those places, make sure you register for the Here We Still Stand conference in Las Vegas, October 15th and 16th. By the time this releases, it'll be like two weeks away. We would love to hang out with you. It's only $65 to come hang out with us for two days. It

includes your lunch on Saturday. It's going to be a good time. Chad will be there. I'll be there. It's going to be a lot of fun. You still have time. So go ahead and grab those tickets and we'll see you there. Chad, we're continuing through 2 Samuel. We're in 2 Samuel 22 today. And we're continuing on this sort of look back, as it were. So we're still going kind of back in time uh in second samuel this is this is the etc portion and today we have another thing where we're going to revisit the life of david and this time and not like a story but in in song or poetry yeah we're gonna do a little poetry today we haven't had a ton of chances to do that in this podcast i know we will we'll have a bunch of chances to do that uh in uh in the coming

months and years as we get to more poetry. But, you know, we've looked at some sections and there's some poetry in Exodus. There's some poetry in Deuteronomy. There's poetry kind of scattered here and there. And, you know, when we first started the books of Samuel, we had the Song of Hannah, which is very much kind of like what I think of it as the Old Testament version of the Magnificat of Mary's song, because there's a lot of parallels between not just the songs, but also the women themselves so we have yeah we've we've dipped our toe into poetry but we haven't done it a bunch so here's our chance to shift from a narrative and talk about guys with you know six fingers and six toes and killing giants and all that fun stuff to uh some very elevated

uh graphic colorful imagery that david just david uses to describe his not just his victories but the way that god is behind his his victories there's some real uh kind of literally earth earth shattering earth shaking imagery that that david uses here you know one of the things that's kind of nice about this uh this sort of look back is you know as we've gone through the life of david we've said a couple times like david doesn't sort of get better and better and better but it gets worse and worse and worse as david goes along and so it's kind of nice that at the end of the book here, you have this sort of song that makes you remember who David was and where he came from. Because this is a song that takes you all the way back to his days of running from

Saul and being persecuted by Saul. And it is a little bit of a, just kind of a reminder about the heart of David. It takes you back and you get to sort of remove like all of the, all the Bathsheba all the all the kids stuff all of the all the bad decisions and remember that this is the same guy yeah yeah that's a good point I mean so if you've been following along with us up to this point then yeah you've seen David kind of falling apart he's he's come unraveled beginning with his his ogling on the rooftop of Bathsheba and from that point on we've just seen David piece by piece fall apart come unraveled get worse and worse and yeah this is a chance for us to to go back and to kind of recapture that earlier vision we had of david and to to see how this

and this is the part i guess that fascinates me the most about chapters like second samuel to hear how there's a there's a retelling of the story but a very different sort of retelling i I mean, not just in the genre, this is poetry instead of prose, but it's very much of a kind of a poetic, very intensely theological retelling of the story that we don't always have in the prose. You know, so for instance, when you read about David's conquering of Goliath, or you read about him successfully averting the hunt of Saul, whatever it might be, there's not a ton of theologizing that goes on in those narratives i mean there is some you know there is some of course it's scattered here and there but a lot of times you'll just kind of have this bare bones account of this battle happened or this persecution was happening and david got free and whatnot and there's no you know 5 10 verse section which interprets what was happening

theologically and we get to second sam in 22 and that's exactly what you have i mean this whole thing is basically a musical theologizing of what was happening in all those earlier years of David's life. And so it's interesting in that respect, and also the fact that in the Bible, and this happens frequently in the Bible, it is through the poetry that we have this theology taking place. And of course, this is done preeminently in the book of Psalms, which is in many ways, the most theological book in the Old Testament, but it presents the theology. Well, it's the most quoted book in the New Testament. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, it's not only literally in the heart of the Bible,

but it really is the heart of the Bible. And it's the heart theologically, Christologically, as well as just the way it's expressed poetically. I hope he said this about hymns and songs, you know, the songs that we sing. You know, Chad, you've written hymns, I've written hymns, and one of the reasons why I'm picky about hymns is because they are memorable. You don't remember every word, you know, of a sermon that you heard, but you can sing the hymns that we sing without the words even being, you know, in a book or on a screen. Someone could just start singing it, and you can know all the words. And so there are these little mini sermons that you remember, that you have memorized. Kids can memorize them and all

this kind of stuff. And I think that one of the reasons you see the Psalms quoted in the New Testament and passages like this, quote, you know, because they're ingrained in the heads and hearts of people. They're the things that they remember. It's the poetry that they memorize, the songs that they sing. And so it's important that they be deeply theological and that they be theologically accurate. You don't want to just skip over those type of things in the scriptures. Yeah. The theology of teachers and preachers throughout the ages has always been expressed poetically. That's one of the things that you see. Old Testament, New Testament, early church as well. When you were talking, I was reminded of the fact that one of the early church heretics,

Arius, the one who said there was a time when the Son of God did not exist, that he was basically a creation of the father Arius himself composed hymns in order that his teaching that is to say his false teaching could be spread uh more pervasively because you know if you take any doctrine and you translate it into verse and put it in the mouths of people like you said it's going to be more easily remembered so this has been done not only by orthodox but also by heretical teachers throughout the centuries. That's why, in other words, the psalms are so important, the hymns are so important, the psalms

are so important. They're not there for entertainment purposes, but they're there for proclamatory, for proclamation purposes. So, as that as a kind of a preamble to this, let's see what David has to say. We have an introduction, that's verse

one. David spoke to the Lord the words of this song on the day when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. So that, of course, that reference back to Saul is what we were referring to earlier. This has taken us back earlier in David's life, but it is really kind of a panoramic view of everything that happened to David. So this isn't concerned just with the persecutions by Saul, but it's by all of his enemies, both those who were kind of the cohorts of Saul, as well as others who, in one way or another, threatened David's life, as well as

David's reign. And this opening introduction, this opening verse, really sets the theme for what we're going to see, because it says David spoke these words on the day when the Lord delivered him. So this is all about the deliverance, the salvation, the redemption, which God works for David. So David, of course, was a very smart warrior. He was a very accomplished soldier but ultimately his deliverance was not based upon his own experience or skill but it was based upon god's actions on his behalf so we start out in these first couple of verses verses two through four with a heaping up of various images for god we have uh the lord is my rock my fortress my deliverer these come in pair a lot of these come in pairs of three so rock

fortress deliverer. My God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield, the horn of my salvation. So rock, fortress, deliverer, and then again, rock or rock of refuge. He's a shield. He's the horn of my salvation. Then we have three more. He's my stronghold. He's my refuge. He's my savior. And this kind of heaping of images is not unusual in the rest of biblical poetry. we're starting out here with all of these various some more abstract but many of them very concrete images for how god as the deliverer actually brings us about so he's pictured as a as a fortress i mean i can't hear that without thinking of a mighty fortress yeah martin luther you know which isn't based on this is based on psalm 45 but it's still kind of i mean psalm 46 but it's

kind of the same idea that God is this castle or fortress in which we find refuge. And then we have these very militaristic images of like a shield, so he's there to protect us. Horn, the horn of my salvation, we actually heard that way back in the Song of Hannah, beginning of 1 Samuel, this picture of a horn. Horn, not meaning like a trumpet here, but the horn of salvation, like an animal would use its horn to defend itself or to attack kind of as a bodily weapon, if you will. So God is our saving horn as well as our stronghold and refuge. Also, interestingly, a gathering together words that all have as their root salvation. So he's the horn of my salvation. It goes on to say he's my savior. You save me from violence. At the end of verse four, I am saved from my enemies.

all those in Hebrew are from the verb yasha, which is the typical word. It's the word from which we get the Hebrew name of Jesus, Joshua, and it's the word that we see all over the Old Testament for how God saves his people. It's also, to me, interesting to point out that, you know, if you ask a Christian today, are you saved? Of course, they're going to think a very specific thing. They're going to think of spiritual salvation, salvation in Jesus. But if you look at the broad perspective of the biblical story very often to be saved is interpreted and meant quite literally so like if you are saved from an accident or you're saved from an attack or you're saved from whatever physical condition you find yourself whatever physical dangerous condition you find

yourself in you are yashad so that is part of the kind of the background here of what we think of as salvation in the New Testament. It's a spiritual deliverance, to be sure, but it also has this physical component to it. So Christ doesn't come just to save our souls, but he comes to save us in our entirety of who we are, and that is based upon this deep rootedness of physical deliverance, physical salvation that we find throughout the Old Testament. Yeah, I mean, David is saying that he was quite literally saved from the hand of Saul. Yes. But this is not a spiritual salvation.

This is quite literally— His life was in danger. Yes, yes. And I think this might sound weird, but I think we overly spiritualize most things because we're Gnostics at heart. It's true. When we say saved, we're thinking about some kind of spiritual thing, and we're like saved from the devil or something like this. But even in a Christian context, when you say that I'm saved, well, what I'm saved from is death. Yeah, literally.

Literally. And so I am literally saved. because of what God has done in Christ, I'm going to physically, not spiritually, but physically live forever. So this is an actual saving of my life. I think it was Eugene Peterson who said we're always trying to be more spiritual than God. Yeah. That is so true. We're always hyper-spiritualizing everything. But yeah, the more you sink yourself into psalms like this, and the stories that we've been covering and just the ministry of Jesus.

I mean, what is he doing? Is he going around just saving people's souls? No, he's actually healing people. He's raising the dead. He's rescuing his disciples who are caught in the midst of a storm. He's feeding people who are hungry. So he's always helping people out,

not just according to their souls, but physically. So that physicality of the salvation of Jesus is very often kind of eclipsed by this focus on the super spiritual or the soul focus that we so often lean into. Yeah, you see that with Lazarus. When Jesus comes up and he says that, hey, I'm going to raise him up, and they're like, yeah, yeah, we know there's going to be

like a spiritual kind of resurrection or whatever. And Jesus says, no, how about right now, like physically? And this is absolutely what Jesus does. I mean, when God shows up on the scene, it's not just like some spiritual warfare going on, But when God shows up on the scene, people are being fed, diseases are being healed, dead are being raised. I mean, it's all it's all quite physical. Yeah. Yeah. It's all the kind of the Isaiah 35 that Jesus himself refers to in the gospel of Matthew.

You know, go back and tell John what you see in here. Well, the blind see the death here, the lame walk, all these very physical kind of new creations are happening, just like Isaiah said they would when the Messiah came. okay so that's the introduction so he shifts from that to talk of uh well how's that how to describe it's he's using images kind of two different images two different metaphors we might say one is a watery image or oceanic we might say image and the other is of ropes or cords so five and six use kind of are pulling these these two things together so first of all talks about these waves of death that encompassed him and or breakers that sometimes translated but

literally it's talking about waves like waves of the ocean if you've ever been uh in a in the the gulf of mexico or the ocean where you have strong waves and strong wind those breakers coming on that's the the idea these are like our breakers or waves of death that are that are uh coming over david and then he uses the the language of torrents of destruction or more literally rivers of destruction so both of these of course are water images and then he describes and he shifts and he talks about the the ropes or the cords of sheol entangling him so first of all has these water coming over him and if that's not bad enough now he's got ropes wrapped around him and he describes the snares of death that are confronting him.

So the water imagery is pretty common in the rest of the book of Psalms, too. This idea of being trapped in the waves, being caught in the seas, of sinking down. Jonah uses the same imagery in his prayer where the breakers are coming on top of you and then you have some sort of deadly ropes or snares sometimes that are wrapped around you. Of course, you get the image. this is poetic imagery for things not looking good completely overwhelmed he's describing uh how much he needs somebody outside of him to save him you go try to stop the ocean from from from beating you to death uh when it's in the midst of a storm i mean this is this is what

he's doing here as he's saying i'm getting i'm in i'm in a situation that i cannot do anything about like i can't i can't stop the waves uh these happen to be waves of death that's what he's getting at right is that uh i'm gonna need something external uh this is this is he's painting a picture of the situation that he found himself in and he's gonna need to call on somebody else david's a a dude that's pretty good at uh fighting and you know uh he's a he's a good warrior but he's describing here a situation that he is not going to be able to be able to overcome yeah yeah there's always always situations in which david realizes hey i have a lot of uh prowess a lot of military skill but there's no way i'm getting out of this the only way that this is

going to happen is by by divine assistance so what does he do verse 7 says in my distress i called upon the lord that's always a good thing to do anytime anytime you're in these situations Yeah, well, then reach out to the very one who can rescue you. In my distress, I called upon the Lord. To my God, I called. From his temple, he heard my voice and my cry came to his ears. There's a parallel there between divine ears and the temple, which is not accidental. I checked this morning to, I was thinking my memory was correct.

And it was, if you look in Solomon's prayer at the dedication of the temple in 2 Chronicles 6.40, he talks about the temple. This is all about the dedication of the temple. But he talks about how God's ears are attentive to his prayer at this place. So there is this idea of God's eyes and ears being in the temple. so if you're familiar with solomon's prayer at the dedication of the temple he talks about how when people are caught in famine or whether they're in prison or they're exiled or whatever their their bad situation might be to turn and pray toward the temple why because that's where god has promised to be that's where he that's where his ears are and eyes are so he hears from

the temple he sees from the temple so david is incorporating that imagery here from his temple he heard my voice and my cry came to his, to his ears. Now, as a, as a Christian, when I hear things like that, my, my mind immediately goes to John two and the actual temple with ears. Christ says, my body is the temple. So our temple actually does have ears and eyes that see, and that, that here. So when we cry out to Jesus, his ears are attentive to our cry. He sees because he is our incarnate temple so david cries out and and how does god respond now this this is in many ways actually my favorite part of the psalm because you you have this uh it's kind of apocalyptic language i don't know how else to describe it of of god opening up the heavens and coming down and

the images here are just unforgettable so david's trapped and these billows are coming over him these waves are encompassing him he's all tied up he can't do anything so he cries out to god And what does God do? God just breaks loose from heaven and comes down, and there's this cosmopolitan, because the whole world is involved here, and earth-shaking response on the part of God. So the earth reels and rocks. The foundations of the heaven tremble. They quake because God was angry. Why is He angry? Well, because His servant is being persecuted. so verse 9 makes me think of a dragon smoke went up out of his nostrils devouring fire from his mouth glowing coals flamed forth from him not the typical image we have of god but uh that's the way david is describing him here yeah it's interesting that david is in distress he calls out to god and god gets angry on his behalf yeah you know you don't think much to to ask god i'm gonna need you

to get angry for me here. I'm going through it, and I'm going to need you to come rescue me, and in this rescuing, God is upset. Yeah, yeah. They're messing with His beloved, and He's not going to simply kind of snap His fingers from heaven and make everything better. He's actually going to show up in person, and when He shows up, the whole world's going to know it. So we have this idea of fire and smoke coming out of God because He's angry, which is the the hebrew way of expressing anger is to talk about a heated nose so he was angry he was hot and here's how this anger was expressed when smoking and fire and glowing coals and then he bends or he bows the heavens and he descends he comes down and there's thick darkness that's under his feet

so i kind of picture him ripping heaven open he's coming down he's descending with all these thick clouds but then we shift the image he's not just coming down he has saddled a cherub and he's riding it he says he rode upon a cherub and he flew he was seen in the wings of the wind so god has mounted his stallion except in this case it's a cherub like that blows to pieces this idea of our precious moments cherubs you know those cute little pudgy things that uh that are fragile no cherubs are like divine warriors and this one is pictured as the mount of god he's flying in on this cherub to rescue his servant you got a you got a image of a dragon riding an angel here it's pretty yeah i get that in your mind wow we need a uh we totally need a uh a stained glass

somewhere where God pictured as a dragon riding on an angel. What an image. He's got darkness around him like a canopy or a tent, thick clouds, gathering of waters. Then we have more images of coals of fire and brightness. And then it shifts to kind of storm imagery, which is also very common in the Psalms with God thundering from the heavens, uttering his voice. He's sending out arrows. Arrows is paralleled here with lightning, which makes sense. This is actually a pretty common pairing in hebrew poetry where arrows are pictured as or lightning rather is described as an arrow that god shoots downward so he's got he's he's sending these arrows of lightning downward and then verse 16 reminds me of two things creation and then the exodus the crossing of the sea

because it says the channels of the sea were seen the foundations of the world were laid bare at the blast of the breath of God's nostrils. So just like in Genesis 1, God parted the waters from dry land. He made a separation. That's imagery here. And then the same thing, of course, happens in Exodus 14 when Israel crosses the Red Sea. God, from this wind or spirit that he sends, he makes a division in the waters.

So at the blast of the breath of God's nostrils, he makes a way for David. He makes this exodus sort of escape for him in the midst of his tribulation. Yeah, here you have sort of like the power of the Word of God, right? Because you have the channels of the sea we're seeing. In other words, you don't usually see those. They're usually covered up with water, but they're all split, and the foundations of the world are layered bare.

It says, at the rebuke of the Lord. So you have this God rebuking what is going on, And this causes all of these things to happen. So what God says happens. So you have David understanding that with a word, God can do whatever he wants. And this is, and keep in mind, this is David's poetic interpretation of how God delivered him from all of his distresses. So did David actually see God as a dragon riding on an angel? Did he see these coals blasted from the nostrils of God?

Did he see these channels of water? No, he didn't see that. But this is his poetic interpretation of what divine deliverance looks like. And so it tells you that when David was trapped, this is what God was doing. He was literally moving heaven and earth to rescue David. And then he kind of continues with some of the same stuff. He says, verse 17, he sent from on high. He took me, he literally in Hebrew, we might say he Moses to me out of the water.

So in, in the ESV, it says he drew me out of many waters. The Hebrew verb there is Masha. And if you think back to Exodus chapter two, when Moses was named by the daughter of Pharaoh, it says she named him Moshe, Moses, because she said, I Masha, I drew him out of the water. So the verb mashah, from which we get the name of Moses, means to draw out. So that's the same verb that David uses here. He Moses-ed me out of the waters. He drew me out of the waters.

So another Exodus allusion going on here. And then he sums this section up by saying, He rescued me from my enemy, from those who hated me, because they were too mighty for me. They confronted me in the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my support. He brought me out into a broad place. he rescued me because he delighted in me. So we have David threatened. He's got the waters. He's

got the ropes of shill wrapped around him. He calls out to God. God comes down with this apocalyptic kind of scene. He rescues him, brings him out of this calamity because he delights in him now versus 21 through 25 are a unit which needs a little bit of explanation so go ahead well i was gonna say yeah this this starts with uh with a phrase that you're like that can't be right and knowing what and knowing what we know uh that certainly can't be right there must be something else going on here yes yes so uh it's sort of a bookend here because it's going to begin in 21 we're talking about my righteousness and then it's going to end in verse 25 with my righteousness so let me just read quickly through this this is 21 through 25 the lord has

dealt with me according to my righteousness according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me for i have kept the ways of the lord and have not wickedly departed from my god for all his rules were before me and from his statutes i did not turn aside i was blameless before him and I kept myself from guilt. And the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanness in his sight. Now, this is one of the reasons that this is kind of nice that this is on the back end of this book,

because you know that in and of David's own person, that none of this is true. Yeah, if you know anything about David, you're like, righteousness? Excuse me? Cleanness in my hands? What? Yeah, I mean, you can't say, like, all his rules are before me and I did not turn aside ever.

We know that's not true. I've kept myself from guilt. We know that's not true. David himself will say that he needs to be saved from blood guiltiness, right? And so I think the most important words in this section are the words, in his sight. Yes. yeah yeah yeah in his in his eyes literally is the way that that ends according to my cleanness in his eyes so this is the way in other words that god views david now why would god view david that

way why would he view him according to this righteousness and the cleanness of his hands and all the various ways that david describes him it's because he's viewing him not just as david but he's viewing him in light of the one in whom David himself trusted. He's viewing him in light of the very seed that was promised back in 2 Samuel 7. You know, we could say the same thing. I could say the Lord has dealt with me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanness in his eyes, because we can, as Paul sometimes will say,

we can make our boast in the righteousness of Christ, or we can make our boast in the grace of Christ. So this wasn't sort of David's own personally merited, personally acquired works righteousness that he's talking about here, but this is the way that God views him through his son. The thing that makes it awesome that David is saying this is because David is essentially saying that God is treating me according to the son of David. David is being treated as if he was his son, which of course he's not. It's interesting that on 30 Minutes of the New Testament, we're going through Mark, and you have this thing that Jesus does to sort of confuse the religious leaders, where he talks about whose son is David, and how is it that David calls his own son Lord?

Lord. In other words, how is the son of David called Lord by David? How does this all work? Well, it works because David understands that the son of David is the everlasting God. And so he knows in writing things like this and saying things like this, that he is being treated according to his Lord, who is also his son. Yeah. Yeah.

And another way just to kind of add to that, that it's helpful to kind of understand these verses, is in light of kind of the bigger picture of all Psalms like this. I think I mentioned this on the last podcast. I didn't mention it today, but 2 Samuel 22, this psalm that we're going over, is basically identical to Psalm 18. So it's a few spelling and grammatical differences, but it's basically replicated in Psalm 18. And as with Psalm 18, so with all the psalms, you'll frequently have this language like we just talked about, and you're thinking, how does that really fit with with david doesn't it fit more perfectly with the son of david we're like yeah that's kind of the that's the point of a lot of these psalms you'll have this hyperbolic language it's used about my righteousness and all these kind of things that we've been

describing that are hyperbole but in the mouth of jesus it makes perfect sense yeah i mean this entire psalm uh or this entire song could be uh come from the mouth of of jesus standing outside the tomb yes i mean absolutely and and what's what's great about this is that because of everything you know about david these these verses are 21 through 25 because you know david is a great kind of sinner and he can say this then you know that great kind of sinners like us can also say this. I mean, you have permission to say these things, that God is going to deliver you and treat you according to your righteousness. And it's interesting that he says, you know, that he does own it, where he says, it's my righteousness and that I'm blameless before him. It's not

simply sort of this sort of God putting on his Jesus glasses and choosing to view you as something you're not. I don't like it when people talk about that, you know, like that word, you know, sometimes you'll hear it. I understand it when they say, you know, when God looks at you, he sees Christ. Kind of. What he sees is the righteousness of Christ that was given to you, and now God counts as yours. So it's not simply God, like, doing, like, a parlor trick where God decides that he's going to—I'm going to see you as something you're not, but that he treats you according to what you've been given and what actually belongs to you, because God is not a God who takes away his gifts. And so if God has gifted you the actual righteousness of Christ,

the blamelessness of Christ, well, then that's what you are. So God isn't just treating you as according to something you don't possess. He's treating you according to something that he has given you and now belongs to you. Yeah, you don't have to pretend as if you have the righteousness of Christ. You're not an actor on a stage, but knowing who you are in real life. No, this is actually who you are this is actually who you are in christ okay let's move on so verse 26 uh has four different couplets four different pairings here where we have a person described then how god responds to that person so with the merciful you show yourself merciful with a blameless man you show yourself blameless with a purified you deal purely and with the crooked

you deal we would expect crookedly but that's not what that's not what we have here so with merciful you're merciful with a blameless you're blameless with a pure you're pure with a crooked you make yourself torturous that's one way to to translate this this is i think uh just fascinating to think about how one's perspective toward god how we stand in relation to god we might say affects god's standing toward us so at the beginning of uh i think it's the large martin luther's large catechism when he talks about the first commandment he talks about how you know everybody has their god uh whatever they whatever they believe in and the way that the kind of god that you believe in ends up being the kind of god you have yeah so if i believe that

God is vindictive toward me. If I believe that God is vindictive, it's not going to be any surprise if I think God is acting vindictively toward me, in other words. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you believe that God is merciful, then you have no trouble seeing the mercies of God. If you believe that God is blameless, you have no problem seeing how God is blameless in all His ways. But if you believe that God is out to get you, then you ascribe all bad things to him. Yeah, that becomes your perspective. We see this, this crossed my mind this morning when I was looking at this verse, we see this in the way that Jesus deals with Pharisees. Very often they come to him and they're trying to trick him, or they're trying to trap him in his words, or they're

trying to have some kind of legal argument with him, whatever it might be. And Jesus will respond in a in a way that's sort of similar oh yeah so they'll say it was so is it is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife and jesus will respond to the law question with a law with a law answer of his own well what does the law say if you want to if you want to if you want to define everything kind of legally well then then he will respond legally that's kind of a an example for the ministry of jesus yeah and there's i mean he doesn't what david doesn't say here is that With the crooked, you are torturous, but he says that with the crooked, you seem torturous. Yes, yeah, yeah.

So for the crooked man, God seems like something he's not. Yeah, so the way that we view God becomes the way we interpret all reality, especially divine reality, the way that God acts toward us. Okay, it goes on to say, verse 28, You save a humble people, but your eyes are on the haughty to bring them down. This is another common biblical theme of God, of course, exalting the lowly and bringing down the high. And then David begins to shift to the image of military victories. So God's his lamp.

He lightens his darkness. By God, I can run against a troop. I can leap over a wall. He's a shield to me, to all who take refuge in him. And then he continues this with verses 32 and following, where he picks up again the language of God being a rock and a refuge. But he describes how, like a deer, he can run on the heights. God trains his hands for war.

His arms can bend this bow of bronze. he talks about a shield and God preserving him no matter where he might be, whether it's a wide place or a high place, whatever the situation might be for David, God is the one who is going to, in the midst of what David is facing, in the midst of David's battles, God is be the one who provides him with the victory and the means whereby he can gain that victory. Yeah, what's interesting about these verses is that David, you know, we had just heard David say, I'm blameless, I'm righteous, all this stuff. But now he says that God is his strong refuge and has made my way blameless. So it's God who is responsible for this blamelessness, right? So he does it. So I am

blameless, but you're responsible for that blamelessness. And then I love this line where He says that you have given me the shield of your salvation, and your gentleness has made me great. That's not something that you would normally think of a God, that his gentleness has made you great. Yeah, I was reflecting on that this morning. The Hebrew there can go more than one way, but here's kind of the cool thing about this. So that can be translated, that particular root can be understood as the root of a very common adjective that we have to describe those who are lowly or meek or gentle. okay so in that in that hebrew is ani and that is the corresponding word in greek to what jesus uses when he says come to me all your weary heaven laden uh take my yoke upon you

for i am gentle and lowly in heart so the word here in hebrew for gentle the corresponding greek to that is what jesus uses to describe who he himself is yes it's it's it's interesting that david and it's encouraging that essentially what david is saying here is uh were you not a gentle god i could not be great my i'm going to i'm going to require a god who is gentle yes it's a startling image i mean you would think your power has made me great your authority your whatever big thing has made me big but that's not what he does yeah it'd be you could if david said your power has made me great. That's true, that it's not David's power, it's God's power. But it's interesting that when he talks about his greatness, the thing that he says that he is

required to have to be great is that he has a God who is gentle with him. Yeah, yeah. Reminds me of the—we'll probably have to end here for now—there's an old prayer that I can't cite it word for word, but it says God's power is made known chiefly in showing mercy. yes so that's kind of that same idea how how do you know the how do you really see the power of god well if people would ordinarily say well because he like made the world or he did these great things actually his his power is made known chiefly when he is gentle and shows mercy and heals and saves that's his that's the real demonstration of his power that's right yeah there's there's no weakness uh in being gentle and lowly no quite the opposite yeah and that's

We thought we'd finish it, but we didn't do it. We didn't do it. We tried. There's a lot baked into this type of passages. So we'll wrap it up next week, but we will have to stop for now. We'll see you then, Chad. All right, see you then. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh