Sermon for MHBC (18 July 2021). You can listen on Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, or our website. Live at 11:00am on Sundays. Also available as a podcast here or by searching “Monument Heights Baptist Church” in your favorite podcast app.
This psalm is typically understood and called an evening psalm.[1] The rationale for this is in the final verse where, the psalmist, who is identified as David, says he will lie down and sleep. In many ways, it is a companion psalm to Psalm 3, which we looked at last week. It covers many of the same themes.
If we think of this as an evening psalm, then we can think in terms of the last verse and work backwards from there. Again, the last verse says: In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety. Note the connection between the two halves of the verse. In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for (because) you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety. So let’s ask a question: How can we say with David, the psalmist, that we will lie down and sleep in peace? Put another way: How can we rest secure?
Do we really even need to identify the problem here? We don’t always feel secure. Life is hard. Thousands of things can go wrong. Some of us are anxious. Others of us are hurting. But this psalm points out a pathway to peace. It shows us how we can rest in the Lord.
AN APPEAL TO GOD
Let’s look at v. 1. Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness! You have given me relief when I was in distress. Be gracious to me and hear my prayer! Here is the petition, the appeal to God. Answer me when I call. This assumes a difficult situation. Then pay attention to how David characterizes God. God of my righteousness. In this context, David means, “You are the God will vindicate me before my enemies.” “You are the God who makes me stand in the right.”[2] But when we consider the collective voice of Scripture, there’s more that can be said. And this is the first part of the pathway to peace, to finding rest in the Lord. Our righteousness is secure in Christ.
Charles Spurgeon famously said of preaching that you take up a text and then make a beeline for the cross. I’m doing something of that here, so let me state the gospel. Gospel means good news. And in order to have good news, we need to start with the bad news. The bad news is that we are not righteous before a holy God. And there’s really no way we can make ourselves righteous. We can do lots of good things. We can make promises to be better people, but the simple fact is that we lack the capacity to be truly righteous. But Christ, who is God in the flesh, is perfectly righteous, and through his suffering and his resurrection, we can have perfect peace before God.
That means our righteousness is secure because it isn’t rooted in us. It’s not based in our action. Listen to how the NT puts it, in Rom 5:1: Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. The word justify is the verb form of righteous. We don’t have a verb righteousfy*. Look what Paul says. We have been justified. There is an action that has taken place upon us. Someone has made us righteous. And how? By faith. That is, by trust, not through good works, not through doing good deeds, not by keeping commands, by trust. And what is the result? We have peace with God. Now who did this? Christ. Through his work. Look at the end of the verse. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.
So the first thing that we can say is that by trusting in Christ our righteousness is secure and it can never be taken away from us because it doesn’t depend on us.
Life is difficult and uncertain. We don’t ever know the future. But what we do know, what we can be certain of, is that God will keep us. Let’s go back to v. 1. David asks God to answer him when he calls. We may not receive the temporal answers we desire in every case, but our security in Christ is finalized. And for that reason we can have the exact same assurance of David in the rest of the verse: You have given me relief when I was in distress. Be gracious to me and hear my prayer! Our biggest problem, the problem of sin and death, has been answered by Christ. We can be certain that the Lord will be gracious to us. That’s what David asks for, but in Christ, we receive grace upon grace.
This message is repeated throughout the NT. For example, we see it in Phil 4:6–7 when Paul writes: do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And here is the promised result: And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Peter says the same in 1 Peter 5. He tells us to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God and one of the ways we do that is by casting all our anxieties upon him (1 Pet 5:7). All of this is rooted in what Christ has done. The reason we can be certain of God’s grace is because Christ makes us righteous. The reason we can rejoice and bring our cares before God is because Christ makes us righteous. Truly, we can say with David, O God of my righteousness.
AN ADDRESS TO THE ENEMIES
Then David turns his attention to his enemies. And he gives them some instruction. Look at v. 2. O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame? How long will you love vain words and seek after lies? Selah. The pathway to peace is to trust what God has done in Christ. David’s enemies are doing the same thing we saw the wicked doing in Psalm 2. They are plotting in emptiness. They are making their own plans. But look what David says next in v. 3. But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself; the Lord hears when I call to him.
This is the second pathway to peace, to resting in the Lord. The Lord has set his people apart for himself. They are his people. And he is their God. What a comfort! David can look at those enemies who would surround him and say, “You may have me surrounded now, but you need to know that I belong to the Lord.” Now by godly, I don’t think David is banking on his own righteousness. The pattern we’ve seen in the preceding psalms and the pattern in all of Scripture is that the godly are those who trust in the Lord. What does it mean to trust in the Lord? It means to believe that he has acted in Christ. It means to trust that Christ can make you righteous. If you trust in yourself or your good behavior, you’re not trusting in Christ. If you trust in a priest or a pastor or a church or a ritual, you aren’t trusting in Christ. Let nothing hinder your total surrender in faith to what Christ has done. Throw yourself entirely on what he has done.
Now before I explain this second point more, I want to pick up vv. 4–5. In these verses, David gives some instruction to his enemies. Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent. Selah. Offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord. See there is the crucial factor again: trust or faith. But he also gives the instruction of being angry and not sinning. (And there is some debate how to translate the word be angry.) The idea could be closer to fear or trembling. So the whole thrust of v. 4 would be the idea of repentance. And then offer right sacrifices. Right is just the word righteous that we’ve already seen in earlier in the psalm. So notice how all of this is culminating in the idea of trusting in the LORD, resigning oneself to the LORD. That’s David’s instruction.
Now v. 4 is quoted in the letter to the Ephesians in the NT and I think that is instructive for us. Ephesians 1 and 2 are some of the most breathtaking chapters in all of Scripture. In ch. 1 Paul has a 202-word sentence that extols the stunning work of the Trinity in redeeming God’s people. For example, he writes that in Christ, the Father chose us before the foundation of the world, so that we should be holy and blameless before him (1:4). Remember what David said in this psalm. The LORD has set apart the godly for himself. The NT clarifies how that’s possible. In Christ, we are made righteous, so that we might be holy before God. Ephesians 2 explains more of this, saying, we were dead in sin, but God raised us in Christ, by grace we are saved, not through works.
Then on the basis of that identity and on the basis of what God has done in Christ, Paul describes the practical implications in Ephesians 4–6. He says in ch. 4 that we are to live new lives in Christ, putting off the old person, and being renewed in our new identity in Christ, “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (4:24). Then, he gets specific and one of the specific things he says is an exact quote from Psalm 4. He says, “Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph 4:26).
Here’s how all of this connects and the reason I think Paul quotes from this psalm. If you are in Christ, you have been set apart by God for himself. You have been given a new identity and are called to live in a different manner. You are called to reflect the unique calling as one of God’s own people. That calling looks very much like what David describes in Psalm 4:4–5.
The pathway to peace, to resting in the Lord, is grasping the breadth of what the Lord has done for you in Christ, and then living life in light of and empowered by that reality.
AN EVERLASTING POSSESSION
Let’s look at the final three verses, picking up in v. 6: There are many who say, “Who will show us some good? Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord!” You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound. In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety. Look at what David says concerning the LORD. You have put more joy in my heart than anything this world can offer. Psalm 63:3 says, “Your steadfast love is better than life.” Somewhere John Piper has drawn the correct inference. If the Lord’s steadfast love is better than life, it is better than all that life has to offer. And here is our third point on the pathway to peace, to finding rest in the Lord. The Lord is an everlasting possession that can never be taken away. In a famous verse in the middle of a discussion on suffering, Paul writes, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are calling according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28). He goes on to say that what we have in Christ can never be taken away from us. This is why Jesus instructs us to store up treasures that cannot be destroyed (Matt 6:20). Or consider 1 Pet 1:3–5:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
What we have in Christ can never be taken away. We rejoice in the security of our salvation—the fact that we will forever be with the Lord. All of this culminates in the grand vision of Revelation 21 when God comes to dwell with his people forever and ever. We will be his people and he will be our God. He is our possession that can never be taken from us.
I have to confess to you that I find this to be a real challenge in our world. I don’t know about you, but I tend to so fixate on this world and the joys of this world, that I forget, and even reject, the idea that one day I will look upon Christ and behold the living God and every desire in me will be satisfied in a way that nothing in this world could possibly match.
It is essential, then, that we cultivate what we might call a heavenly-mindedness. Lately, I’ve been convicted by this. Our Christian forebears have urged us to meditate upon beholding the glory of God. We do that “by faith now and by sight in heaven.”[3]
Augustine put it this way: “[I]f anyone accepts the present life in such a spirit that he uses it with the end in view of that other life on which he has set his heart with all his ardour and for which he hopes with all his confidence, such a man may without absurdity be called happy even now, though rather by future hope than in present reality.”[4]
Look, nothing in this life will satisfy you. Everything is fallen and it is uncertain and unstable. But in Christ, we have a better hope, because in Christ we have perfect peace with the living God. In Christ, we have been set apart by God for himself. We are his possession. And he is ours. I close with the words from a hymn by Wade Robinson:
O this full and precious peace
from his presence all divine;
in a love that cannot cease,
I am his and he is mine.
[1] E.g. Motyer, Longman.
[2] See Calvin in his commentary on the verse.
[3] McDonald, “Beholding the Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ: John Owen and the ‘Reforming’ of the Beatific Vision,” in the Ashgate Research Companion to John Owen, 142.
[4] City of God, trans. Bettenson (Penguin), 19.21 (p. 881).
[5] “I Am His, and He Is Mine.” Equally appropriate is Fanny Crosby, “Blessed Assurance” and Mary Byrne (translator), “Be Thou My Vision.”