PSALM 74 - "But You PROMISED!"

Introduction

If you have ever had little kids (or if you have ever been a little kid), you know the power of a promise. Parents learn early on to be very careful saying “I promise” to their kids unless they are sure that they can follow through. Because it doesn’t matter how unavoidable your change of plans are, kids do not like to cut you any slack when you can’t deliver on your promise. Say you’ve planned a trip to Presque Isle and then find out they’ve shut the beach down again because of e. coli—something utterly and completely out of your control—they’re still going to hit you with the “but you promised!” card.

It is no fun having to break a promise—whether to your kids, your spouse, your family, co-worker, friend, whatever. And truth be told, it doesn’t matter how old you are; having someone break a promise they made to you always hurts. It’s not just little kids who are hurt by broken promises; everyone in this room has been hurt—and all too often, hurt deeply—by a broken promise.

But we live in a cursed and fallen world, and there are some things that happen in this life that we simply don’t have the ability or authority or power to overcome. Some of our promises just get broken, and we can’t help it.

But the same is not true of God, is it? God is never at the mercy of this world’s brokenness; His plans are never thwarted or changed:

Psalm 115:3 (ESV)

3 Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.

Psalm 135:6 (ESV)

6 Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.

Daniel 4:35 (ESV)

35 ...he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?”

God is the One Who “works all things together according to the counsel of His will”—He never has to be concerned that He will make a promise He can’t keep, does He? This is a great comfort for His children, to know that when He says, “I promise”, that He will see to it that His promises are all kept.

But, as this psalm demonstrates, this can also be a source of great bewilderment for God’s children, can’t it? What about those times (and they are more common than our pious self-assessment would like to admit), when it seems that God really has forgotten us? When we are the child sitting in the back seat of the car saying, “But you promised!!”

If you want an image to help you understand Psalm 74, this is it: A child who has always believed that his Father can be trusted to keep His promises, crying out in bewilderment, “But you promised!” The psalmist is walking through the devastation of Jerusalem after Nebuchadnezzar and his armies destroyed the city and carried off its inhabitants. (It is attributed to “Asaph” not because it was written by the original Asaph appointed by King David, but probably because it was written in his classic style: Blunt, forceful and passionate.) He is bewildered and confused over the destruction of the city that God had promised to protect; the desolation of a people that God had promised to preserve:

Psalm 74:1–3 (ESV)

1 O God, why do you cast us off forever? Why does your anger smoke against the sheep of your pasture? 2 Remember your congregation, which you have purchased of old, which you have redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage! Remember Mount Zion, where you have dwelt. 3 Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins; the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary!

The psalmist was lamenting the desolation of his city and his nation, crying out to God, Who seemed to have abandoned them. And here we are on this Independence Day weekend 2023, wondering much the same thing—we see the desolation and ruin of so many of the institutions of our nation, how far we have fallen from the faithful Christianity of our founders and how much destruction has been wrought by the enemies of God who scoff and revile Him.

And so how do we pray when God seems to have forgotten His faithfulness? Whether it is praying for a nation that He seems to have abandoned, or praying for the tragedies and difficulties of our lives when it seems as though He has somehow gone back on His promise “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb 13:5)? Everyone in this room has (or someday will) find themselves in the same kind of crisis of faith that this psalmist did, where we are crying out in frustration and bewildered pain, “But God, You promised!”

And at those times, this is a psalm that you can come back to over and over again to learn how to pray the way this psalmist did. When you are bewildered and broken over the sense that God has abandoned you, pray the way this psalmist does. Because this psalm shows us that

God delights for His CHILDREN to REMIND Him of His PROMISES

As this psalmist stands in the smoking ruins of his beloved city, he cries out unashamedly to God, “But You promised!” And as we go through this psalm we see several ways that he reminds God of what He has promised—and in doing so, reminds himself of God’s faithfulness.

Look with me at the first three verses of the psalm—calling on God to

I. Remember the PURCHASE of His PEOPLE (Psalm 74:1-3)

Psalm 74:1–3 (ESV)

1 O God, why do you cast us off forever? Why does your anger smoke against the sheep of your pasture? 2 Remember your congregation, which you have purchased of old, which you have redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage! Remember Mount Zion, where you have dwelt. 3 Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins; the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary!

The psalmist “reminds” God that these are not just any people—these are His people! God had purchased His people, delivering them out of Egypt, bringing them safely through the wilderness, and giving them this land and this mountain (Zion) for their possession:

Exodus 15:13 (ESV)

13 “You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed; you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.

Exodus 15:17 (ESV)

17 You will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain, the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode, the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established.

And so the psalmist is confident that he can call God to remember the purchase of His people, because

He will surely PROTECT His own POSSESSION

If God has done so much for His people; if He has brought them through so many “dangers, toils and snares”, why would he abandon them now? And so the psalmist appeals to God on that basis— “God, You have redeemed and kept and protected and guided us for so long, don’t stop now! You are still our guide and protector and hope; we can’t understand why it seems you have abandoned us, but surely you will keep your promises to the people you have purchased!”

God delights for His children to remind Him of His promises—the psalmist calls Him to remember the purchase of His people, and in verses 4-11 he calls on God to

II. Remember the PROVOCATIONS of His ENEMIES (Psalm 74:4-11)

In verse 3, the psalmist is talking to God as if He is personally touring the destruction of the city:

Psalm 74:3 (ESV)

3 Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins; the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary!

He goes on in the following verses:

Psalm 74:4–8 (ESV)

4 Your foes have roared in the midst of your meeting place; they set up their own signs for signs. 5 They were like those who swing axes in a forest of trees. 6 And all its carved wood they broke down with hatchets and hammers. 7 They set your sanctuary on fire; they profaned the dwelling place of your name, bringing it down to the ground. 8 They said to themselves, “We will utterly subdue them”; they burned all the meeting places of God in the land.

Imagine how devastating it would be to stand in the middle of what used to be a beautiful sanctuary dedicated to the glory of God and see it smashed and burned and desecrated. Imagine walking into our sanctuary and seeing that someone had taken a chainsaw to these beautiful hand-carved pews, and had smashed out the baptistry and the plaster work with sledge hammers and ripped apart the Bible on the table and hacked apart this pulpit with an axe and set it on fire in the middle of the room and spray painted obscenities and blasphemies all over the mural and shot out the stained glass windows with a shotgun? And you stand there and look up to Heaven and say, “God, look at what they did to YOUR house!”

Because, as devastating as it would be to see our beloved sanctuary destroyed this way such destruction would not ultimately be an attack on us, would it? We love this place because this is where we come to worship the God that we love. It is precious to us because this is where we gather to praise and delight in Him. And so an attack on the sanctuary isn’t ultimately an attack upon us:

It is an ATTACK on God HIMSELF (v. 7; cp. Daniel 9:19; Isa. 48:11)

As hard as it was for the psalmist to see the Temple destroyed, it wasn’t his personal loss that made him cry out to God:

Psalm 74:7 (ESV)

7 They set your sanctuary on fire; they profaned the dwelling place of your name, bringing it down to the ground.

It’s not because the Chaldeans had provoked the psalmist that he cries out to God—he is calling on God to see that the Chaldeans were ultimately attacking God! The psalmist makes this connection even more explicit in verses 10-11:

Psalm 74:10–11 (ESV)

10 How long, O God, is the foe to scoff? Is the enemy to revile your name forever? 11 Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand? Take it from the fold of your garment and destroy them!

God has promised that He will always vindicate His Name—He will not allow His Name to be defiled. Decades after this psalm was written, one of the young men who were carried off in the sack of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans—Daniel—would go on to call on God to act for the sake of His Name:

Daniel 9:19 (ESV)

19 O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.”

And the prophet Isaiah wrote regarding God’s rescue of His people:

Isaiah 48:11 (ESV)

11 For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.

God loves for His people to remind Him of His promise to act for the sake of His Name—He delights for His children to remind Him of His promise to glorify Himself. His enemies were provoking Him by their blasphemies and their scoffing, and so the psalmist cries out “You promised to defend Your Name! Don’t wait any longer—

Defend Your NAME by defending your PEOPLE!

God delights to hear His children say “But you promised!” The psalmist reminds God that He has purchased His people, he calls God to remember the provocations of His enemies. And as we move through the next several verses, the author calls on God to

III. Remember the POWER of His WORKS (Psalm 74:12-17)

Starting in verse 12, the psalmist turns his gaze away from the destruction of God’s sanctuary and considers the record of God’s mighty acts throughout history:

Psalm 74:12 (ESV)

12 Yet God my King is from of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.

He says, “God, You are my God, and my God is a God who works wonders for the sake of His people!” He says in verses 13-14,

My God is able to RESCUE His CHILDREN (vv. 13-14)

Psalm 74:13–14 (ESV)

13 You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the sea monsters on the waters. 14 You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.

God is the One who “divided the sea” so that His children could walk through and escape Pharaoh’s armies (who were broken and crushed by the waves). The psalmist says, “You delivered us before—You can do it again now! Don’t you remember, God, how you rescued us? What are you waiting for? You are the same God that parted the Red Sea—rescue Your people again!”

And then he goes in in verses 15-17 to add another of God’s mighty works to his plea, saying

My God is able to JUDGE His ENEMIES (vv. 15-17)

He uses language that alludes to the great Flood of Noah’s day—look at verses 15-17. In verse 15 the psalmist reminds God:

Psalm 74:15 (ESV)

15 You split open springs and brooks; you dried up ever-flowing streams....

An allusion to Genesis 7:11:

Genesis 7:11 (ESV)

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.

And you’ll remember that after the Flood waters receded, God declared that

Genesis 8:22 (ESV)

22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

The psalmist picks up that thread here in verses 16-17:

Psalm 74:16–17 (ESV)

16 Yours is the day, yours also the night; you have established the heavenly lights and the sun. 17 You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth; you have made summer and winter.

The psalmist is crying out to God to remember His mighty works that He has done to deliver His people and judge His enemies: “God, You are the God who splits open seas and crushes sea serpents in order to rescue Your people—do it again! You are the God Who brings judgment on wicked and destructive enemies who hate and revile You—do it again!”

God delights to be reminded of the power of His works; He is pleased when His children cry out to Him “But you promised!” When you are bewildered and anxious because He seems to have forgotten you, when it feels like He has left you in the dark, cry out to Him to remember the purchase of His people; when it seems He has allowed your foes to triumph over you, cry out to Him to remember their provocations against His Name; when it seems as though His ability to rescue you has fallen short, cry out to Him to remember the power of His works. God delights for His children to remind Him of His promises!

Throughout Psalm 74, the psalmist has piled up reason after reason that God should act for the sake of His people—they are helpless sheep that He has purchased, His enemies are reviling His Name, He is powerful and has always acted to rescue His people and judge His enemies. But as we come to the closing stanzas of this song, the psalmist plays his trump card—starting in verse 18, he calls on God to

IV. Remember the PROMISES of His COVENANT (Psalm 74:18-23)

In verse 18, the psalmist does something he hasn’t done to this point in this cry: He calls God by His covenant Name!

Psalm 74:18 (ESV)

18 Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs, and a foolish people reviles your name.

The psalmist appeals to the fact that God is YHWH—He is the One Who has sworn a covenant with His people, to show them His lovingkindness forever! And he presses his point in verse 19-21:

Psalm 74:19–21 (ESV)

19 Do not deliver the soul of your dove to the wild beasts; do not forget the life of your poor forever. 20 Have regard for the covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence. 21 Let not the downtrodden turn back in shame; let the poor and needy praise your name.

The phrase “have regard for the covenant” is literally translated “look to the covenant”—it’s the same Hebrew word that is used when God tells Abraham in Genesis 15:5, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them... so shall your offspring be.” In the same way, the psalmist is telling God, “LOOK to Your covenant; and

Look AFTER the RESCUE of your PEOPLE! (vv. 19-23)

The psalmist directs God to “look” to the dark corners of the land where violence and wickedness festers—as if he is pulling up a rock to show God the evil lurking underneath. And he says, “God, You promised that the poor and needy would never be forgotten, that you would defend the helpless and the innocent! Look at all the dark corners of this land where the light of your covenant is shut out, and the violence and evil that oppresses the innocent there!”

Can we not say the same today? We look at our land and see all the darkness, all the habitations of violence, the injustice and destruction being perpetrated in the name of “tolerance” and “love”, and we cry out to God to defend the helpless and needy from the wickedness that, if it cannot tear them apart in their mother’s womb will try to mutilate their bodies and minds with gender confusion and sexual sin, lust and sodomy and meth and heroin and violence. We live in the midst of the darkness of a people who are trying their hardest to scoff and hate their way out from under God’s righteous Law. And when we feel abandoned to that darkness, when it seems like the ground is giving way under our feet and we are going to be swallowed up by the calamities and tragedies of our lives, we can cry out to Him and say, “God —you promised!” God delights to have his children remind Him of His covenant, to lay before Him His own promises in prayer and call Him to honor them.

But there is something else going on here in this psalm—something that has gone unsaid by the psalmist the whole way through these verses. Because the destruction of Jerusalem was not ultimately because God had forgotten His promises to His people, was it? It was because His people had forgotten their promises to Him!

Yes, the Chaldeans swept through Jerusalem, pillaging and burning and destroying the sanctuary; but God’s own people had been profaning that sanctuary for decades! Yes, the Babylonians were setting up their own standards and their own false gods in the land, but God’s own people had been worshipping false gods there for centuries! For all the dark places of the land full of wickedness that the psalmist laments, the darkest of all was in the hearts of God’s own people.

On this Independence Day weekend we can lament all we want (for it is obviously so) that we are living in the dead and rotting remains of a once mighty Christian nation. But it was not some pagan Chaldean host that swept in and destroyed this Christian nation from the outside. It was destroyed by the faithlessness of God’s own people from the inside.

And so—follow me here—this means that if we are going to ask God to be faithful to His promises, we are asking Him to be faithful to all His promises. His promises to rescue His people, and His promises to destroy His enemies!

Psalm 74:22–23 (ESV)

22 Arise, O God, defend your cause; remember how the foolish scoff at you all the day! 23 Do not forget the clamor of your foes, the uproar of those who rise against you, which goes up continually!

And so the only way we can cry out, “God, remember your promises!” is if we also cry out for Him to

Look UPON the FULFILLMENT of your COVENANT in CHRIST!

You cannot, you must not call on God to keep His promise to avenge Himself on His wicked enemies apart from Christ, because apart from Christ you are His wicked enemy! You must never call on Him to arise and defend His cause against the foolish scoffers apart from resting in the fulfillment of the New Covenant promises by the blood of Jesus, because it is the blood of Jesus Christ that rescues you from the vengeance of God against your foolish scoffing!

The psalmist mourned over the destruction of the sanctuary of God in verse 7, but that destruction was only a foreshadowing of the destruction of the temple of Jesus’ body, crucified by foolish scoffers on the Cross and raised three days later:

John 2:19 (ESV)

19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

John 2:21–22 (ESV)

21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body. 22 When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

When you call on God to keep His promises to you, you are calling on Him to remember the price He paid for you!

1 Peter 1:18–19 (ESV)

18 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

When you call on God to hear and answer your cries to Him, you are asking to be heard on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice for you—you pray in Jesus’ Name as an appeal to God the Father that you belong to Him by faith, and the blood of His sacrifice that purchased you cannot go to waste!

God delights for His children to remind Him to keep His promises, to remember His covenant, to rise up and act on behalf of His people—because He does it for the sake of His glory revealed in Jesus Christ! When you are tempted to the unbelief that says God has abandoned you, that He has forgotten you or that He does not see or care about your predicament, turn here to Psalm 74 and cry out “Have regard for Your Covenant, O LORD! Your Son has accomplished all of your purposes through His death, burial and resurrection, and I belong to Him by faith! So rescue me as you would rescue—as you did rescue—your own Son!” He can no more abandon you in your distress than He could abandon His own Son to the grave:

Hebrews 5:7 (ESV)

7 In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.

Because Jesus was heard when He cried out with loud cries and tears, you will be heard! Because God kept all His promises in Christ, you delight Him, because when you cry out “You promised!”, you magnify the work of Christ for you.

And if you have come here today and you have no share in Christ; you have had no regard for the promises of God, that He will punish sin, that He will defend His cause against your foolish scoffing; but you have begun to see here in His Word today that your refusal to obey Him and your indifference to His holiness will someday be reckoned against you by Almighty God, and there will be no escape, then let me plead with you: God has made a way for all of your sins against Him to be cancelled out forever, because He has made a promise that can never be broken:

Romans 10:9–10 (ESV)

9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

You can know that you belong to this Covenant this morning; you can know that you belong to Jesus Christ by faith, and you can know that when you call on God to keep His promises to you that He will. Come and talk to me after the service, come and talk to one of the other elders, talk to someone who is a member here at Bethel so that we can show you how you can know that you are a member of the people of God purchased by the blood of the Keeper of the New Covenant, your Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION:

Romans 16:25–27 (ESV)

25 Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages 26 but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith— 27 to the only wise God be glory forevermore through Jesus Christ! Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

Why do parents have to be so careful in saying “I promise” to their children? What is the difference between God's ability to keep His promises and our own? How does this assure you in times of distress or anxiety?

Read Psalm 74:1-3 again? How does Peter apply this thought to believers in 1 Peter 1:18-19? What comfort does this give you in your times of trouble, reminding God that you have been bought by the blood of Christ?

Read Psalm 74:20 again. How has our culture’s rejection of God’s promise of salvation through Christ resulted in the darkness we see around us today?

Why must we never call on God to keep His promises without first coming in repentance and faith to Christ? Do you know without a doubt that you belong to Christ by faith?