Psalm 101

Psalm 101 is the kind of text that can be either profoundly dangerous or profoundly liberating, depending on what you do with it. I don’t know if you remember these, but when I was a kid there was a toy called a View-Master [photo]. There was a picture that you’d slide into place, and you’d look through the viewfinder, and you’d look at a picture through two different lenses. If you closed one eye, you’d get the picture from one angle; if you looked at it with the other eye, you’d see the same picture, taken from a slightly different angle. But if you opened both eyes and looked through both lenses at the same time, you’d get a picture that was in 3D.

Psalm 101 is the kind of text that can be either profoundly dangerous or profoundly liberating, depending on what you do with it. I don’t know if you remember these, but when I was a kid there was a toy called a View-Master [photo]. There was a picture that you’d slide into place, and you’d look through the viewfinder, and you’d look at a picture through two different lenses. If you closed one eye, you’d get the picture from one angle; if you looked at it with the other eye, you’d see the same picture, taken from a slightly different angle. But if you opened both eyes and looked through both lenses at the same time, you’d get a picture that was in 3D.

Welcome to Eglise Connexion. We are in the second week of our summer series, Jesus in the Psalms, during which we’re examining to 105. So today we’re in . This is the kind of text that can be either profoundly dangerous or profoundly liberating, depending on what you do with it. I don’t know if you remember these, but when I was a kid there was a toy called a View-Master [photo]. There was a picture that you’d slide into place, and you’d look through the viewfinder, and you’d look at a picture through two different lenses. If you closed one eye, you’d get the picture from one angle; if you looked at it with the other eye, you’d see the same picture, taken from a slightly different angle. But if you opened both eyes and looked through both lenses at the same time, you’d get a picture that was in 3D.

I say this Psalm is potentially dangerous because you can look at it through two lenses. If you look at it through the first lens, you’ll have a picture of what we’re called to do—but you’ll only get half the picture. If you look at it through the second lens, you’ll have a picture of what has been done—but again, you’ll only get half the picture. It’s only when you put the two lenses together that you get the whole picture.

So I’d like to do something kind of strange today. I want to go through this text twice: first through one lens, which we’ll call the “ideal lens,” then through the other, which we’ll call the “fulfilled lens”. And hopefully at the end, we’ll put the two together to have a full, 3D picture of what God is trying to tell us in this song.

1) The Ideal Lens

As you see on the heading of this Psalm, this song was written by King David, who ruled over the people of Israel from approximately 1010 to 970 B.C. David was a good king—under his rule the people of Israel prospered; the Bible called him “a man after God’s own heart” (). So what David does in this psalm is that he lays forth the ideal for the king of God’s people: this is how the king should behave, this is how he should rule over the people. And the king was the representative and model for the people—the king showed the people how they should behave. So what is the ideal that David sets forth here?

v. 1: I will sing of steadfast love and justice; to you, O Lord, I will make music.

So remember what we saw last week—to God’s covenant people, God shows eternal, steadfast love, and as God he upholds perfect justice for his people. And so the king, who sees this and is aware of it, should be so overwhelmed with gratitude and joy over God’s steadfast love and mercy that he sings and makes music.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that when someone is really happy, singing comes pretty naturally.

Have you ever seen a guy walking down the road with a smile on his face and humming to himself? Or a little kid alone in his room playing with her toys singing nonsense songs to herself?

When you’re happy, making music is the most natural thing in the world. And so because God is so good to his people, and because they are happy in him, they sing. They make music. David’s instrument of choice was the harp; he was known to be almost magical in his musical talent; he was known to celebrate God’s goodness to the point of embarrassment.

The king should celebrate God’s goodness, and the people should celebrate along with him.

Next he says that the king should walk with perfect integrity.

2 I will ponder the way that is blameless. Oh when will you come to me? I will walk with integrity of heart within my house; 3 I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless. I hate the work of those who fall away; it shall not cling to me. 4 A perverse heart shall be far from me; I will know nothing of evil.

Now, this is a bold statement coming from David. Because although David was a good king, he was far from perfect. And even that is a pretty big understatement—I can almost guarantee that David did worse things than anyone in this room.

Most of us know what he did with Bathsheba: he saw this gorgeous woman bathing on a balcony, and wanted her so badly that he slept with her, got her pregnant, then had her husband killed so he could marry her.

Anyone here ever do something like that? (Please say no.)

And yet, if you remember the story, when he was confronted with his sin, he realized that he had been blinded by his lust, he fell to his knees, and he confessed his sin before God. He suffered the consequences of his sin (which were severe), but he fought his sin. He turned to God for help, and he fought his sin.

So in this Psalm, David is setting up an ideal that even he had not met—he’s not saying, “This is what I’ve always done,” but rather, “This is what I want to do; this is what I’m aiming for.”

I will ponder the way that is blameless. I will think about what it would look like to walk in perfect obedience to God.

I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless. I won’t even look at anything that wouldn’t please God.

I will know nothing of evil. I will take whatever measures I have to in order to make sure that there is nothing evil in my heart. I will fight tooth and toenail to eradicate sin from my life. And he’s not just saying he’ll do the right thing, but that he’ll want to do the right thing; that he will love holiness and that he will hate sin.

I hate the work of those who fall away; it shall not cling to me. The king must desire what is right and hate what is evil; and the people should do the same.

Next, he says that the king should exercise judgment against the wicked.

5 Whoever slanders his neighbor secretly I will destroy. Whoever has a haughty look and an arrogant heart I will not endure… 7 No one who practices deceit shall dwell in my house; no one who utters lies shall continue before my eyes. 8 Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land, cutting off all the evildoers from the city of the Lord.

We need a bit of explanation here. The context in which he was writing was a context in which people were extremely impressionable. If you spent time with people who worshiped other gods, or who had practices that weren’t in keeping with God’s standard for holiness, eventually you’d start doing those same things—you’d end up worshiping their gods, practicing the same wickedness.

(Thankfully we’re no longer that impressionable today, ha ha.)

So God’s concern here was not for material gain or mere material protection; he’s not talking about war for war’s sake. God was concerned for the holiness of his people.

This was God’s people; they were representing him on the earth. And so he would not let any kind of wicked influence tarnish his holy name. God would take every measure necessary to protect his people’s holiness—his priority was to watch over and care for his chosen people and to make sure they remained a holy people.

And so this was the king’s priority too. David says that because Israel is God’s chosen people, he would do whatever it took to protect the integrity of the people; he would not tolerate sinfulness, he would not tolerate anything that is not in line with the nature and character of God. And so the people should be just as concerned with their integrity and holiness.

Lastly, David says that the king will surround himself with faithful men and women who will help him do this.

6 I will look with favor on the faithful in the land, that they may dwell with me; he who walks in the way that is blameless shall minister to me.

The king will love the people of God; he will make them his priority, he will surround himself with them, he will serve them and let himself be served by them. And so the people should also walk in humility and love for one another; they should love being with other people who are faithful to God and who will help train them to live for God.

This is the ideal. Celebrate the goodness of the Lord… Walk with perfect integrity… Do whatever it takes to protect your holiness and purity… Love the people of God and surround yourself with them. In short, the ideal is absolute moral perfection.

2) The Fulfilled Lens

But this ideal is too good. We can not do this. None of us can. Even those who seem to be outwardly perfect are inwardly eaten up by sin no one else can see but God. No one can meet this perfect ideal.

So through the pen of David, through this song, he gives us an ideal that can only be met by God himself. The only person who could ever live like this would be God himself, who is absolutely perfect and just.

And God knows it.

No human king could be this perfect. So God himself sends a perfect king—his Son Jesus Christ. God becomes a man, and lives a perfect life.

Let’s look through the other lens, and see how Christ has fulfilled this psalm.

v. 1: I will sing of steadfast love and justice; to you, O Lord, I will make music.

First of all, Jesus was happy in God. We don’t have any texts that actually show him singing, but we have lots of texts that proclaim Jesus’s joy in his Father.

: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Jesus was the most joyful man who ever lived. Remember , the psalm I quote probably more than any other: In your presence there is fullness of joy, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

In , Peter says that this psalm is saying what Jesus would say. Jesus loved his Father; in the Father’s presence there is fullness of joy for him. Because Christ was always totally united to his Father, he was always perfectly joyful.

And if you think about the way Jesus behaved, it makes sense—a sad person would not act the way Jesus did. He wouldn’t welcome hoards of rowdy kids to come to him. He wouldn’t use his first miracle to make a party an even better party. He wouldn’t invite himself over to people’s houses for dinner. He wouldn’t spend his time with a bunch of ignorant men, teaching them and loving them.

Everything Jesus did was a celebration of his joy in who God was, whom he knew his Father to be.

Secondly, Jesus walked in perfect integrity.

2 I will ponder the way that is blameless. Oh when will you come to me? I will walk with integrity of heart within my house; 3 I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless. I hate the work of those who fall away; it shall not cling to me. 4 A perverse heart shall be far from me; I will know nothing of evil.

We know this to be true of Jesus. Jesus lived like this.

says, 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Jesus walked in perfect integrity; he never set his eyes on anything that is worthless. Jesus hated sin and never let it touch him.

Again, in , the author quotes , saying the psalmist is talking about Jesus:

8 But of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. 9 You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.” (So again, we see his joy.)

Those first two were easy; the third is a little more complex. Jesus exercised judgment against the wicked.

This is hard, because Jesus said while he was here ():

I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.

People read this and say, “You see? Jesus never judged anyone! Jesus would never want anyone to be punished for the things they did right or wrong!”

And that sounds good, except that in the very next verse, Jesus affirms that judgment against sin will happen through him:

48 The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day.

So Jesus not giving a blanket statement against the judgment of God, but rather he’s giving us his primary motivation. His main reason for coming into the world was not to judge but to save.

It’s not that there is no judgment, but that’s not what his heart burns for: his main motivation is saving his people. And the proof of that is the cross! If his main reason for coming into the world was to judge the world, he never would have gone to the cross.

Put yourself in his shoes: imagine a guy steals one of your credit cards and racks up hundreds of thousands of euros of debt. You’re angry, you’re wounded, and you want to see them punished!

What would you do? You’d call the police, right? You’d cancel your card, call the police and say, “This guy stole from me!”

What you wouldn’t do is pay your friend’s debts for him. If someone steals your credit card, racks up tons of debt…and you decide to pay that debt for the one who stole, it could only be because you love your friend, despite what he did to you.

Jesus’s reason for coming into this world was because he loved us and wanted to save us.

In , Paul says:

21 For our sake [God] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Jesus was perfectly holy; he walked in perfect integrity. And God put our sin on him to such an extent that in God’s eyes he was the perfect embodiment of everything that was wicked. And then he poured out all of his wrath—the wrath that you and I deserved—on his Son, in our place.

You see, it’s not that Jesus did away with judgment, but rather that he suffered judgment in the place of all those who turn to him in faith, all those who receive his words. Jesus was the vehicle of God’s perfect judgment—every sin, without exception, is and will be judged by God, either in his judging those who refuse to turn to him, or in his judging Christ in our place.

And lastly, Jesus loved the people of God.

6 I will look with favor on the faithful in the land, that they may dwell with me…

Jesus loves his people.

: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.

If we have faith in Christ and trust him to be the perfect sacrifice for us, Jesus loves us—he loved us to the point of being brutally murdered on a cross in order for us to be with him. If you ever doubted God’s love for you, you only have to look to the cross.

: 13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

set before us an ideal of how we are to live. And none of us have ever been able to do it—not even the man who wrote the psalm could do it. The only person who was able to fulfill this perfect ideal was Jesus Christ. He was the perfect king who lived the perfect life on behalf of his people. What we couldn’t do on our own, God provided for us.

Application

So we have the lens of the ideal—this is what we must do in order to be accepted by God, but we can’t do it.

And we have the lens of the fulfilled—what we can’t do on our own, God himself did for us: he sent his Son to meet this ideal and apply it to us, in order for us to be accepted by God based on what he did.

Now let’s put those two lenses together.

Let’s just say you did manage to mostly live by this ideal. You set this ideal before your eyes, you made every effort to obey it, and by the sheer force of your will, you managed to live a pretty good life.

What would this do to you? If you said to yourself, “I CAN DO THIS. I can live like this,” and you managed to live your life in such a way that others would look at you and go, “Yeah, he’s a pretty good person.”

What kind of a person would you really be?

Well, outwardly you’d be good, but inwardly, you’d almost definitely be proud, wouldn’t you? Look at what I was able to do!

And even if you’d never say it out loud, you’d probably look down on others who haven’t lived as well as you have.

You’d become, in short, a religious person, in the negative sense of the word, someone only motivated by the outward workings of religion but has no real love for God.

If we only look through the first lens, the lens of the ideal, we will turn ourselves into outwardly moral people who are inwardly proud and haughty, and who despise anyone who’s not as good as we are.

So we need the second lens.

But if you look only through the second lens, your vision will be just as skewed, because you’ll say, “Look at what Jesus did for me! I’m free! I no longer have to obey the law because Christ obeyed it for me!” And you’ll permit all kinds of things in your life that aren’t at all in line with the nature and character of God.

In order to see the whole, 3D truth of the gospel, you have to look through both lenses.

Think of a guy who works as a carpenter. At the beginning he loved his job, but pretty quickly ran into some pretty severe financial problems. There’s not a lot of call for carpentry these days, so he’s not making a lot of money; he can’t do nice things for his kids, he can’t ever take his wife out on a date; he can barely scrape together enough money to put food on the table.

So this job that he once enjoyed is now stressful for him—he keeps thinking, “I’ve got to work enough to provide for my family!”

So he takes any old job that comes his way, no matter how insignificant, and he’s constantly counting pennies while wondering, Will this be enough? He no longer finds any joy in his job because of the weight of his financial burdens. And he feels guilty, because no matter how hard he works, it’s never enough.

Now let’s say this guy gets a letter in the mail that says, “You have an aunt who has just died and left you everything she has—an estate which amounts to several million dollars.”

Suddenly he knows that he’ll never lack for anything again. He can provide for his family. He’ll never have to worry again about not being able to put food on the table.

Do you see how his relationship with his work will change? Suddenly it’s no longer a burden to go to work, but a pleasure. He can once again enjoy the feel of the wood beneath his hands, the smell of the sawdust, the joy of the finished product.

Free from financial pressures, he can finally take pleasure in what he does.

This is exactly the state of affairs for us today. We were under the weight of condemnation for this ideal that we weren’t able to meet; we try and we try and try as we might, we can never meet the perfect ideal of God. We can never achieve the moral perfection necessary to be united with God.

And so God sent his Son to achieve this perfection for us, to meet the perfect ideal for us.

So suddenly, we know we don’t have to be perfect to be united to God—we’re reconciled to him on the basis of Christ’s perfection.

Some Christians are tempted to drop anchor here and imagine that now they can do whatever they want—since Christ was perfect for me, God doesn’t expect any change of me at all.

But if you look at any of the teachings of Jesus, you’ll see that’s not true. God isn’t interested in grace for the sake of grace, but rather, he shows us grace to make us like him, and to allow us finally to ENJOY it.

He shows us grace to change our desires, to make us want to do what we were created to do…and then frees us to do exactly that.

In essence, in the first lens he shows us the ideal he calls us to; in the second lens he shows us how Christ fulfilled that ideal; and then he brings the two together.

He doesn’t do away with the ideal, but rather completes it for us, and enables us to pursue it. Because of what Christ did for us, we’re now free to pursue this ideal, knowing that our acceptance by God does not depend on our ability to accomplish it, and that he has promised to bring us progressively closer to it.

You see, what Christian sanctification looks like is not perfection, but the pursuit of perfection. Christians are not perfect, but living from a borrowed perfection. And thanks to that borrowed perfection, we can finally grow toward it.

And we can do this, because Christ has fulfilled perfection for us. We’re free to be imperfect, we’re free to stumble, and we can get back up again because we know that that stumble is not the end: God still loves us, still delights in us, is still for us.

Now we can look at this ideal and not feel ashamed—we can look at this ideal and not be crushed under the weight of it, but rather see the potential for joy that this ideal holds for us.

As we progress toward this ideal, progressively freed from sin and anything that will rob us of our joy, progressively growing in the holiness that God designed us to walk in, we will grow in our happiness—and so singing and making music and celebrating the greatness of God will be the most natural thing in the world for us.

So as we close today I think God would call us to examine ourselves. Am I religious? Am I trying to gain God’s approval or love by the things I do? Do I have a tendency to look down on those who don’t do as well as I do?

If we’re religious, we need to repent of our religion.

And on the other hand: Am I so enamored with the idea of grace that there’s no real change in my life? Do I allow myself to do things that clearly aren’t pleasing to God because I know he’ll forgive me? because I know Christ died for that?

If so, we need to repent of our abuse of God’s grace.

God has called us to receive his grace, yes—but in so doing he has freed us to pursue holiness. He has accomplished it for us, which means I can pursue it—I can become holy as he is holy. And I can pursue that holiness knowing that even if I fail, my failing won’t cancel out his grace for me, because Christ was holy for me.

Brothers and sisters, we can do this, because Christ has done this for us. Let’s pray that God would help us to believe this, to pursue holiness, and to love God so much that we can’t help but follow him faithfully and celebrate his glory, and joyfully make music in his praise.