The Righteous King and Just Judge

Intro

Well good morning everyone. While my face might not be new to many of you now, this is my first time up here leading in any capacity so I just want to take a moment to reintroduce myself. My name is Ben Hein and I am one of the two new pastors hired here at Redeemer. My wife Neva and I, together with our two boys Felix and Kaius, moved here in June to come on board as the church planting resident. What that means is we have come to partner with Redeemer and join you all in what we believe God is doing here in Indianapolis, which includes calling us into the work of church planting together. And While I’m not up here to talk about that this morning, I do want to take a moment just to say thank you to everyone who has helped make this big transition so warm and welcoming for our family. You all have been so kind to us in these last two months, and we feel so incredibly privileged to be here. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you.

Before we jump into our text, please join me in a word of prayer.

Gracious God, please fill us with your Spirit and give us the humility we need to sit under and receive your Word to us this morning. Remove any pride in us that makes us think we can sit over your Word and judge it for ourselves. This we ask for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Who is God to you? How do you see God this morning? Maybe you’re still new to even considering a question like that and you’re just trying to figure all of that out. Maybe you’ve faced some really dark and difficult experiences in Churches that have left you hurt and confused. Maybe you’re a lifelong Christian who realizes the older you get, the less you really know about God. Wherever you might be in your spiritual journey this morning, I hope we can all recognize this almost inescapable tendency to reduce God to his parts, to emphasize certain ideas about God to the neglect of others, to forget all of who God says he really is.

I believe this Psalm has a helpful and hopeful Word for each of us this morning. In David’s praise and prayer in Psalm 9, we see God presented to us as a Righteous King and Just Judge who draws near to save. That’s our outline for this morning so let me say it again. God is a Righteous King and Just Judge who draws near to save.

God is King and Judge (vv. 1-12)

Let’s look a verses 1 through 12 together, and I want to begin by highlighting verses 1 and 11 together. Here we see David singing a song of praise to God for his righteousness and justice. I want to pause long enough to tease this out, because I think this is so important not only for a right understanding of this Psalm, but also for a right understanding of what our response ought to be to God’s righteousness and justice. Far from being something to fear, or to make an apology for, or to try and make relevant through cultural appropriation, God’s righteousness and justice gave David something to sing about.

In verse 1 David said he is praising God with his whole heart; his entire person is taken up in the praise and worship of his God. A couple of weeks ago my family took a vacation up to the Illinois and Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan. One of the beaches we visited had this amazing playground immediately behind the beach front. Our oldest son, who absolutely loves beaches, was overwhelmed at the sight of a big beach and this incredible pirate-ship-themed playground. On one of the several times that I took him over to the playground, he was leaping and jumping with excitement and he said to me, “I have so much energy in my heart!”

That’s David in this Psalm. He has a lot of energy in his heart from beholding God’s righteousness and justice. It gives him something to sing about.

I know the language of this Psalm might be off-putting for our modern or Western sensibilities; the thought of God as judge might seem harsh and offensive to many of us. But as Charles alluded to last week, if that is our response to who God is, that doesn’t really come from any moral high ground in us, but really our lack of familiarity with true oppression and affliction.

When someone experiences deep injustice, their heart yearns for someone to take action and make things right. That is who God is in this Psalm. The oppressed peoples of Afghanistan do not find the message of God as judge offensive; it is good news. Those familiar with cycles and systems of abuse do not hear these words of God’s total justice and cringe; they rejoice.

Now look at verse 11. David’s own heart is filled with praise and it overflows in a summons for the people of Israel to join him in song. And beyond that, Israel is too narrow of a space to contain God’s praise - he wants to extend this praise to all the nations! How different would the Christian witness on matters of justice be if we first and foremost saw God’s justice not as something to theorize or argue about, but to sing about?

Now, I am quite aware that there are dark and difficult times in our lives where songs of praise seem far from our lips. In fact, if you have a Bible open take a look at how Psalm 10 opens. Psalm 10 was likely originally joined to Psalm 9, and at some point was separated into two, which is fine, but that might be a helpful note to remember in terms of context. Psalm 10 begins with a deep lament, as David cries out to the Lord and asks, “Why do you hide yourself from me?”

It is in these times of lament where we need others to sing over us and for us. This is one of the beautiful aspects of corporate worship as a church; when our hearts are too broken to praise, we can be buoyed by the praises of our brothers and sisters. There have been at least two times I can remember where I needed the congregation to sing for me. The first was when we miscarried our first child in 2017; the second was my first Sunday here at Redeemer in June. As I was grieving the loss of my father who had died only 8 days prior, I needed you all to sing God’s praises for me - because I couldn’t. And my heart was strengthened when you did.

Now, everything in between verses 1 and 11 describe God as righteous King and just judge. Let’s take a look at what David says in verses 7 through 9.

Observe how David intertwined language about God as King and God as judge; about his just and righteous judgment. God is not King if he is not also judge.

Now these words justice and righteousness often appear side by side in the Old Testament, but what exactly do they mean? When we talk about justice, whether God’s or our own, the emphasis is on action. To execute justice is to give people what they are due. In some cases, justice takes the form of punishing the wrongdoer. This is often what we think about. But true justice is bigger than that; it is putting things right, it is restoring what has been taking, giving honor to those who nobody else is honoring. It is caring for the neglected. It is putting things in the right.

If justice is putting things in the right, we might think of righteousness as being in the right. Righteousness is necessarily relational in nature and therefore has vast social implications. To say that God is righteous, or judges with righteousness, is to say that God is always in the right. He is always on the right side. He never gets it wrong. He never sins against us. He never makes it better for some at the expense of making it worse for others.

God’s justice and righteousness are perfect. Any attempt of ours to act justly or righteously, to advance justice in society, is but a tarnished sketch of the beautiful tapestry of God’s justice and righteousness. Any of the hundreds and thousands of books and blogs about justice, as good as they may be, are a shadow of God’s just and righteous character.

If God’s justice and righteous character are so beautiful, then why do so many of us shrink back at the thought? Why does the thought of God as judge strike us as being so offensive? I think we all know the answer, if we’re willing to be honest with ourselves. To acknowledge God as righteous King and just judge is to implicate ourselves in the evil and wickedness of the world. Worshipping God in this way would require that we confess the part we play in the sinfulness we see seemingly spiraling out of control all around us.

So rather than doing that, we try to forget who God is, and create our own responses and ideas about justice, often that implicate others while excusing ourselves. It is this behavior and attitude of the heart that the Bible says is the source of wickedness. Look at verse 17. Wickedness comes from those who forget God; those who try to supplant him as King and judge.

We could observe countless ways we all do this, but let’s just think about the way the very conversation about justice is playing out in the public square right now. This is obviously a big issue for our country and society right now, and its a conversation on everyone’s mind. I don’t know a single person who would say they do not care about justice. And yet, in trying to advance our own ideas about justice, we are perfectly happy to believe and say anything that lets ourselves off the hook and puts the blame on others. We are even perfectly happy to commit injustice against our neighbor by lying, cheating, or slandering them with false representations. In the name of justice, we readily commit injustice in order to strengthen our side and excuse ourselves.

We are all prone to forget God and turn from him. We all have a part to play in the evil and sin around us.

Yaa Gyasi’s bestselling book Homegoing is a masterfully heartbreaking tale about the ugliness of sin in which we all play a part. It begins in late 18th century Africa with parents sinning against child and siblings against one another. As sin and evil compounds itself, we find tribe turning against tribe, enslaving one another to sell to the British. We see nation against nation, as the British treat African souls like dirt and sell their bodies to countries around the globe. Soon, race will be turned against race, family against family, and entire communities against themselves. In the end, every character of the story is implicated in the sin and injustice of the story. Here is how one character sums it up toward the end of the book: “Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.”

You see, the Bible has a lot to say about “social justice”, about how we might act justly as a community and respond to the injustice around us. But it also has something to say that is inconvenient for each of us: we have to start in here, in our hearts, with us. We must acknowledge the part we play in the sin and evil of this world. We must recognize that any attempt to achieve justice and righteousness apart from God is likely only going to shift blame and perpetuate injustice elsewhere.

God alone is king and judge.

Who Draws Near to Save (vv 13-20)

David is so confident in God’s care, his nearness, that in his new and present troubles he cries out to God to once again deliver him.

Here is something incredible about God. When we think “King” and “judge” we often think of abused power; after all, this is what we most often observe all around us. We think of people who will do anything to increase their power, often by protecting the strong at the expense of the weak. Yet we find no such behavior in God. Instead, what we observe time and again is that God’s perfect justice and righteousness also gives him the softest heart and nearest intimacy to the weak, to those who cannot protect or defend themselves.

You see, one of the ways I think we all tend to forget God is by separating his attributes and character in such a way that we lose sight of who God really is. I think we are all prone either to emphasizing God’s holiness and power and justice, or to emphasize his love and mercy and forgiveness. As a result, we tend to either live in fear of him, or not to take him seriously enough.

But God’s perfect character makes no room for such separation. His holiness and love, justice and mercy, righteousness and tenderness, they are all core attributes of his being. Here is how Dr. King said it in one of his Strength to Love essays:

“The greatness of our God lies in the fact that he is both tough minded and tenderhearted. He has qualities both of austerity and gentleness. The Bible, always clear in stressing both attributes of God, expresses his tough mindedness in his justice and wrath and his tenderheartedness in his love and grace.

If God were only tough minded, he would be a cold, passionless, despot sitting in some far-off heaven, self-knowing but not other-loving. But if God were only tenderhearted, he would be too soft and sentimental to function when things go wrong and incapable of controlling what he has made. He is tough minded enough to transcend the world; he is tenderhearted enough to live in it. He does not leave us alone in our agonies and struggles. He seeks us in dark places and suffers with us and for us in our tragic prodigality.”

God is King and Judge who draws near to save.

“God is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble”, David said in verse 9. Again, in verse 12: he avenges the blood of the afflicted; verse 18 says that he does not forget the poor. In numerous other places, such as Deuteronomy 10, God is described as the one who defense the orphan and the widow, who loves the foreigner among us, who gives clothing and food to those in need.

As David meditates on God’s ability to save him in his affliction, he magnifies God for his love and power to save all those who are oppressed and downtrodden, all those who have their backs against the wall. David’s own heart moves from praise, to trust, to compassion on all those who suffer. Surely one of the clearest signs that we have forgotten God’s righteousness and justice is when we evidence no compassion for the poor and oppressed all around us.

Now, there is one more repeated theme in this Psalm we haven’t mentioned yet, and it is the one that will bring all of this together for us. Look at verses 10 and 16. David proclaims that those who know God’s name will trust in him; and then he declares that God has indeed made himself known. If we want to truly understand God’s righteousness and justice, to discern his nearness to the oppressed and afflicted, we must come to God in the way that he has made himself known.

And how has he done that? In Jesus. In the gospel of John, chapter 17, Jesus said this: And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (vv 3). If we want to encounter God it can only be through his Son. And what ought to astound us is what Jesus teaches us about God’s justice and tenderness.

You see, if God really is perfectly just and righteous, and if we really are all implicated in the sin and evil of this world, then try as hard as we may for just ends, we will always fall short. And as those who are responsible for sin, we have no right to expect God to draw near to us. But David knew something we often forget: that his right standing with God did not depend on his love for God, but on God’s love for him.

1 John 4:10