Psalm 135

Good morning once again. It’s so great to be here with you and be able to celebrate all of the incredible things that God has done and is doing among us. Today please turn in your Bibles or on your devices to the book of Psalms 135.

This will be our final morning in our Summer in the Psalms. Next week I’m going to launch into a short series of messages covering some of the questions in our culture and the lies that are associated with them. We are going to start next Sunday with “Is there Absolute Truth?” I hope you will join us for the whole series.

Now, Psalm 135. This is a psalm that is not only for the priests or levites but is a call to the entire community of followers of God to praise the Lord. There are strong exhortations made and reasons given for this praise of the Lord God.

‌

Every verse in this Psalm either echoes or quotes or is quoted by some other part of scripture. This very truth is a reminder that Scripture itself is perfectly capable of supply us with all the material, truth, theology, that we need to sing back to God in praise, to express our thanksgiving, to come before Him and bless His holy name.

The author is giving the Israelites reasons why they should praise the Lord in the first part and then makes a rather intense declaration about the lack of value found in idols. He then leaves them with a closing exhortation to praise the Lord. I invite you to follow along as I read:

Read Psalm 135

Psalm 135 ESV

Praise the Lord! Praise the name of the Lord, give praise, O servants of the Lord, who stand in the house of the Lord, in the courts of the house of our God! Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good; sing to his name, for it is pleasant! For the Lord has chosen Jacob for himself, Israel as his own possession. For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord is above all gods. Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth, who makes lightnings for the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses. He it was who struck down the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and of beast; who in your midst, O Egypt, sent signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants; who struck down many nations and killed mighty kings, Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan, and all the kingdoms of Canaan, and gave their land as a heritage, a heritage to his people Israel. Your name, O Lord, endures forever, your renown, O Lord, throughout all ages. For the Lord will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants. The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths. Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them. O house of Israel, bless the Lord! O house of Aaron, bless the Lord! O house of Levi, bless the Lord! You who fear the Lord, bless the Lord! Blessed be the Lord from Zion, he who dwells in Jerusalem! Praise the Lord!

This is the Word of the Lord

Pray

Why is it that time and time again in scripture, God has to command His people to praise Him? After all we can see that He has done for them, why would they be lacking in this area?

I. Reasons to Praise the Lord (v. )

Praise has many enemies but one of the main detractors from praise is ingratitude.

‌

Ultimately, this psalmist gives us four connected reasons for praising God. The first area that he focuses on is the goodness of God.

1. The Goodness of God (v. 3)

- Elsewhere in the Psalms we are told that praising the Lord is good or that the name of the Lord is good but here in 135 we find out that you should praise God because He is good in and of himself. And God isn’t just good but He is goodness itself.

- The first temptation was to plant a doubt in humanity about the goodness of God.

- Genesis 3:1-5

Genesis 3:1–5 ESV

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

‌- Do you believe the Lord is good? Truly good? Right now, in this moment in your life?

- In any circumstance, even hard ones?

- The psalmist is telling them and us to praise the Lord because He is good. In order to do that, you have to actually believe that He is good. You need to feel it deep down into your bones that He is good. If you don’t really trust and believe that God is good you’re not going to be able to positively respond to what we read here. And the enemy goes directly after your belief that God is good. We need to give ourselves over to learning more about God’s goodness. We should marinade in it, in our study of the Word and the goodness of God.

2. The Choice of God (v. 4)

‌If you have believed the gospel and surrendered your life to Jesus then God has chosen you. If you are a true Christian, you can know that you have been chosen by God.

One of my favorite living preachers is a guy named Ligon Duncan. When he was preaching on this passage he said this,

“It is a staggering thing, my friends, to think that the Lord has chosen you and chosen you for His own possession and His own heritage. On the basis of Scripture, in both the Old and New Testament, I can tell you, were you to draw near to the Lord in heaven tonight and were you to say to Him, “Lord, why is it, why is it that You did all this? What did You get out of this? What did You want out of the sending of Your Son into the world? What did You want out of His perfect life and His experience of the curse of sin and the pouring out of Your wrath on Him and His death and burial and resurrection? What was it that You wanted out of this plan which has stretched across all of human history from Adam to the very end of Your redemption? What is it that You wanted out of it?” The Scriptures, and this passage here, says that the Lord will look you in the eye and say, “What I wanted was you. I chose you and I chose you to be Mine, to belong to Me. You’re the inheritance that I want. You’re the heritage I want. You’re the possession I want. I'm going to give you everything in Christ, My Son, but what I want is you.”

We should praise God because we love Him, yes, but ultimately, we praise God because He loved us first. When we were not worthy, when we were still sinners, when we were at war with God, we were enemies with God, He chose us. He had someone set before us the glorious truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Someone told us that Jesus died in our place, for our sin, as a substitutionary sacrifice on our behalf. They told us he died for our sin and was raised from the dead by the power of God and will return for His church someday. God chose us to hear and respond to this message and because He loved you before you ever knew Him, you sit here today. How incredible! We praise God because according to scripture, He has chosen us. Dwell on that and it will bring you humbly to praise of the one who loved you first.

### find Spurgeon quote

3. The Sovereignty of God (v. 6 )

‌Duncan had a family in his church that had three of the five members of the family with cancer. Duncan said that Henri, one of the family members said this, ““Our verse is Romans 8:28 — God works all things together for good for those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose.” Duncan adds, “This is an Old Testament declaration of that truth that God does what He pleases, but the psalmist knows that what God pleases is always for the good of His people. And so he calls on us to praise the Lord because He's sovereign.”

4. The Redemption of God (v. 8-14)

‌

- In Israel's history

‌

- In Jesus

‌

‌So in contrast to the active and saving work of God that he has just recounted, you have the non-activity of inanimate idols. The psalmist wants his audience to reject the worship of false idols.

II. Reject the worship of false idols. (V. 15-18)

‌

- You become like what you worship.

- They are deaf

- They are lifeless

- No life

- Idols are created by another creation

- They have no senses and no ability to do anything

- No life - key

- No ability to create or provide life

‌

III. So, praise the Lord. (V. 19-21 )

‌The psalm ends with yet another exhortation to praise the Lord.

Conclusion:

A.W. Tozer has a very well known quote that says,

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” - A.W. Tozer

Our worship will hinge on what we think about God. What we think about God will reveal much about us.

??? We are not what we say or do at any given time but we are what we conceive of God to be, that is the most important thing about us. ???

Will we worship the true God that saves? Or will we worship a God we have created in our own minds?

The god you create in your mind is an idol that will lead you to nothingness even though you think it will lead you into more. Idolatry is deceptive like that.

To worship the true God, you need to know the true God. So make your life be about the business of knowing God. The way you do this is you have to be in the Bible because the Word of God is where He tells us who He is. You learn about what God is like in His Word. He reveals Himself to us by the Word of God. Learning who He is and what He is like on a continual basis will help us worship Him and not some idol that we dreamed up on our own.

‌Questions to ask:

- What are the idols in our lives?

- How do we worship them?

- How do we make them?

- What does it mean that they are deaf, dumb, and mute?

- Why would we chase after and worship such absurd idols when we have incomparable power and goodness of God in the gospel?

- How do we reason this out in our brains and make sense of or justify this?

The reasons we are to praise the Lord - Exhort them to praise the Lord.

So to get back to a question I asked at the beginning of this message: Why does scripture again and again remind us and exhort us to praise the Lord?

Because of the depth of our fallen nature. We are what Plummer calls “criminally indisposed” to this activity. He wrote the sad commentary that angels in heaven don’t need this kind of exhortation to worship the One who created them. We’re sinful and our attention is turned back in on ourselves.

We tend to make a god that looks like us and worship that. We worship ourselves when that worship is due someone else.

We should encourage one another to praise the Lord with these reasons in the same way that the author exhorts us. We should.

And even when things are hard we should still praise Him for He is good, He is sovereign, He has chosen us, and He redeems us for Himself. Praise the Lord.