40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Psalm 3 (Episode 379)

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Chad and Daniel discuss Psalm 3. Have a listen! Show Notes: 1517 Podcast Survey Support 1517 1517 Podcasts The 1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts 1517 on Youtube What's New from 1517: Faith and Reason Exchange @ 1517.org 2023 HWSS Conference Livestream Signup Join the 1517 Academy Faith in the Face of Tyranny More from the hosts: Daniel Emery Price Chad Bird

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament, the psalm companion to 40 minutes in the Old Testament. This week we are in Psalm number 3. It's so weird. I always feel like when people say, turn to Psalm chapter 7 or something like that, and you're like, I don't know, it's just like, it's not really like a chapter, man. It's just like Psalm 7. So this is Psalm number 3 in the, you know, the Old Testament hymnal. We're going to hymn number 3. Gonna talk about some foes, man. There's a lot of them, many of them. Yeah, yeah, many, many, many. The first two verses has a threefold use of many. I say a word about the title here. As you know, some of these psalms have titles, some don't. And some of these titles have nothing more than

probably what was the tune or some kind of musical reference. Some of them are directed to what's called the choir director. Some of them have the author. But there's a few that have a historical circumstance they're connected with them and this is the first of them so begins with a psalm of david when he fled from absalom his son so that takes you all the way back to well we talked about that a bunch right we spent several episodes on absalom and david yeah in uh in the podcast i really like that it includes the the his son at the end because you could just say when he fled from absalom uh absalom at this point is his foe uh but oh yeah but it does let you it does let you know that this is we are talking about david fleeing from his own son here

this is an absalom the stranger or absalom the philistine or whoever it might be not just absalom the enemy right not absalom the foe it is absalom the foe but it's more complicated than that because this is absalom david's son yeah it's it's way complicated and If, if y'all listen to our episodes on, on Samuel, we, we, we dive into a lot of complications between these, these two guys. But anyway, that's the historical circumstance. So you can go all the way back to second Samuel 15, beginning there and read all about that complicated kind of messy, messy history between father and son.

Pretty short. It's only about, I'll say eight verses long. So let's read through it quick and then we'll talk about a few things. oh lord how many are my foes many are rising against me many are saying of my soul there is no salvation for him and god but you oh lord are a shield about me my glory and the lifter of my head i cried aloud to the lord and he answered me from his holy hill i lay down and slept i woke again for the lord sustained me i will not be afraid of many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around. I rise, O Lord, save me, O my God. For you strike all my enemies

on the cheek. You break the teeth of the wicked. Salvation belongs to the Lord. Your blessing be on your people. I'll tell you what, this psalm hits different when, just if you know the context. I mean, the first thing you have to, you have in this that I see, Chad, is that in verses one and two so you have this oh lord how many of my foot like david's losing everything here like he's he's really messed up it looks bad like he is gonna be bad he is gonna be overthrown the capital yeah he flees he is on the run and uh and many are saying of his soul like so there's a lot of people saying there is no salvation for him in god what does this mean this means that the people think he's done like god is not going to save him from this

yeah it's not just like oh that dude he's uh he's done for this i mean it is that but there's more they're saying he's done for because god's not going to save him yeah yeah in other words god has either turned his back on him or god's now on absalom's side or whatever it might be you you find this kind of language actually pretty frequently in in the book of psalms where many will say this or that and a lot of what they say is you know god's not with him or god's not going to save him or whatever whatever it might be and this is their this is their determination based upon the evidence that they see yeah and you can see i mean you could if you know that history yeah you can see people saying hey david's david was was great for a while but

he's not god's man anymore absalom is not god's man there's no there's not many any rescue coming from from god for david he's he's had to flee the city absalom's taken over absalom's pitched a tent on the roof of the palace he's taken all the king's concubines in there and had sex with him i mean he's made it unmissably obvious that he is the guy now that and that is the i mean you have to remember i mean you're only talking about the second king i mean so people are like well seems like uh what david did to saul absalom's about to do to david and that's how this is going to go down yeah violent every time you switch to new king it's gonna be violence and a lot of uh a lot of danger so david begins in just by kind of by describing this okay got a lot of foes a lot

of people against me a lot of people are saying that you've turned against me so he doesn't hesitate to it's one of the interesting things about the psalm sometimes they will quote to god what others have said either about God or about them in a relationship to God. It's kind of like when, remember the situation we covered in Kings where Hezekiah took that letter from the Assyrians and he unrolls it before God in the temple. Yeah, I need you to look at this for a second. Yeah, God, can you read this right quick?

I want you to hear what people are actually saying, the threats. Well, the way that this psalm is set up too, I think that it's like, hey, here's all these reasons to lose faith. In fact, everybody has lost faith, and the rest of the psalm is, but not me. So David's saying, everyone says there is no salvation for him in God, and the rest of this is David saying, I don't believe that. And that's that nice switch. We have many, many, many.

Verse 3 says, but you, O Lord, are a shield about me. uh he'll say something similar and i think it's psalm 118 you know many nations are surrounding me or many peoples are surrounding me they surround me like bees but in the name of the lord i will surely cut them off so it's the idea okay i got all these people who are against me but i've got you and so i'm i'm okay because if i'm with you i'm in the majority i'm on the victorious side if you know if god is for you who can be against you as paul will say in romans 8 so you oh lord you're you're my shield you're my glory and the lifter of my head i love that image it's the idea of you know we've all seen people they're been beat down and they kind of their

heads hanging right yeah their heads hanging down and then the god comes along and he as it were puts his hand under their chin and lifts up their heads says hey hey look up chin up look up everything's gonna be all right you're the lifter of my head so david says i cried aloud to the lord to answer me from his holy, from his holy hill. Which again, if you know the history here, it's pretty cool because David had to flee from the holy hill. The holy hill is Jerusalem. That's where the tabernacle is set up. That's where everything is. And so David has to run away from there, but he, as it were, turns and faces back to the holy hill and offers his prayer and God's going to answer him. Well, this is why this is like the contrast of like the people who have

lost faith, and David's saying that the rest of this is a prayer of faith, because he states something that hasn't happened yet, right? So he says, I cried aloud to the Lord, and He answered me from His holy hill. But he hasn't saved him or answered him yet. So he's saying, I did this, and I know that you're going to, because I believe that that's who you are. Yeah, yeah. There's something kind of helpful here that happens in the Hebrew a lot of times, not just in the psalms but in the prophets as well so things will be stated in what's called the uh the perfect aspect in hebrew which is usually translated past tense because it's talking about something that is a like a perfected action a completed action okay but very often

what's being talked about is a prophecy of something that's going to happen in the future so this is often referred to as a prophetic perfect meaning that the prophet or the psalmist who says this like david here is so certain of what is going to happen in the future they speak of it in terms of a completed perfected action in the past yeah so that's what's that's what he's doing here so he answered me from his holy hill i lay down and slept i woke again for the lord sustains me see i like this i like that his his reason for faith is as simple as like so everybody I got, like, all kinds of people trying to kill me. I went to sleep, and I woke up, so I know that you're with me.

Yeah. That's all I needed. I just needed to wake up in the morning, like, no one killed me last night? Well, I know that God's with me then. I love to read this psalm, not just about David's life, too, but if you take it and you transpose it into the life of Jesus, how perfect it is, the son of David. because jesus is like i'm gonna lay down in that tomb there and i'm gonna sleep for a couple days

and then i'm gonna wake up and you know why because the lord is the one who sustains me yeah it's such a perfect crucifixion burial and resurrection confession too it is it's also like it's also like such a simple thing to have bolster your faith that you could be on the run you're probably exhausted i mean you're fleeing the capital stuff and you're like gotta get some sleep are you laying down the woods i don't know where you are but like wherever you are you decide that you're gonna get some sleep it's hard i don't know how hard it would be to go to sleep if you knew that like thousands of people were trying to kill you i assume it's difficult uh and there's this real there's this real simple act of faith of i'm gonna go to sleep and if i wake up this

only tells me that god is that there is salvation for me and god yeah yeah so taking going to bed and going to sleep is a confession yeah yeah i mean many of us have trouble going to sleep at night when we don't have anybody trying to kill us yeah imagine if you had if you're on the run you got all these guys out for blood i'm taking a nap so he's not gonna be afraid of the thousands many myriads of people who have set themselves against me all around and then he has this straight up petition that actually is a perfect echo of the way the psalm begins so it begins by saying many are rising against me and the hebrew verb used there is kuma now he's going to use that same verb when he reaches out to god and says arise oh lord so many are rising against me

so oh lord i want you to arise to and save me this so they're saying the many who are rising against me say there's no salvation for him in god so arise oh lord save me oh my god it's the perfect contrast to what he the way he begins and then he has a very military graphic image for you strike all my enemies on the cheek you break the teeth of the wicked which is a pretty common poetic description of the conquest of the enemy you break the arm of the wicked you you break the the arm of the evildoer you shatter their teeth in their mouth you hit them on the cheek you take them out yeah this is about like uh you know think of like a wild beast or something that like has been defanged right so like this enemy cannot bite at you uh with all its teeth

shattered out uh striking enemies on the cheek is uh not just a a hey defeat them but this is a humiliating act i mean like if you get slapped across the face uh maybe it doesn't hurt as bad as being punched but like it's insulting yeah i'd rather be punched and slapped than yeah yeah blacken my eye before you just slap me yeah so there it seems that there's this kind of petition like it like uh where you're uh disgrace my enemies and and make it to where they cannot devour me is kind of what's going on yeah then it wraps up here verse 8 uh with our salvation language again salvation belongs to the lord and the implication of that that's not stated is uh if salvation belongs to the lord he's going to give his salvation yeah it's not just his like

to hoard or something he's going to give it and he's going to give in this case to me and then it wraps up by saying your blessing be on your people which i think is important because what happens to david isn't just happening to an individual this is going to affect the entire people to God. So he wants a blessing to extend to all the people. Well, this is great, because some of the people who are the people of the Lord have turned against him, and he actually—there's an element here, one, like, salvation belonging to the Lord is always a good thing. Like, this prayer is one of the best prayers, and you see this all over Scripture, because it's the confession that salvation doesn't belong to you, it's not contained within yourself, you do not have the

ability to save yourself. David does not believe he can save himself, that salvation belongs solely to God. You could stick the word alone in here if you wanted. Salvation belongs to the Lord alone, right? Nobody else saves. And then he does this thing where he prays, basically, a blessing upon if that is going to be true, where God is going to deliver me and save me. I don't want retribution on all who have not believed that you would save me, all those who say that there is no salvation for me. Instead, I want a blessing for all of your people, including those who are not on my side. Yeah. Yeah. Which is an act of regal compassion on David's part in the way that it should be. Much like our politicians are today. This is exactly

the way that they operate. Exactly. Exactly. The Psalm 3 political motivation. Yes. so anyway that's uh that's our psalm for for the week uh psalm three uh we're moving along good stuff great that's a good one all right man i'll see you next week see you then