A Reason to Sing

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 your Word and receive it 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.

In 1974, Evangelical leaders Billy Graham and John Stott convened the First International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. They brought together over 2,400 church leaders from over 150 nations in order to better articulate a holistic, global Christian mission for the 20th century. Together they produced a document known as the Lausanne Covenant, a statement which articulated their position on various aspects of Christian mission.

One of the articles in this document pertained to the Christian responsibility on matters of justice. In this paragraph, while stating positively their view on justice, they also made space to confess their own neglect of justice issues. They wrote, quote, “We express penitence both for our neglect and for having sometimes regarded evangelism and social concern as mutually exclusive.”

Fast forward nearly 50 years, and matters of justice seem only to have become increasingly pressing and complex. Justice is not a word far from any of our hearts and minds. And for good reason! Not a day goes by where it doesn’t feel like injustice is thriving all around us. I have often felt myself resonating with the confession made by Graham and Stott nearly 5 decades ago; that I have neglected a concern for justice that reflects God’s own heart for the oppressed. Maybe you feel that some as well. In response, like many of you here, I have given myself to the study of issues of justice, study that I hope is growing outwardly into a more just life.

Now, I know there is not a person in this room who would say they do not care about justice. But as I’ve sat with Psalm 9 this last week, the Lord has impressed upon me that I have been missing something foundational, something crucial to the work of justice that if I can be honest has been far too absent from my study and labors: singing. Praises of his righteousness and his justice have been all but missing from my lips.

As a result, I’ve realized that too often the posture of my heart is to become far more concerned with defending myself, with defending my own ideas of justice, and arguing with those who disagree with me. When my heart turns away from God, I am so prone to turn against others with a defensive and critical spirit.

I share all of this with you up front because as we turn to God’s Word together, I want to invite you to sit under this text with me, and to find reason to sing God’s praises this morning. Maybe its simply recognizing that God’s justice is too often an idea rather than a personal quality that moves you to worship; maybe it will be recognizing this quick reaction to defensive debate rather than praise.

Wherever you might find yourself, I believe this Psalm has a helpful and hopeful Word for each of us this morning. Here in Psalm 9, we see that God’s righteousness and justice give us a reason to sing.

A Reason to Sing

I want to focus most of our time this morning on verses 1 through 11, and I want to begin by highlighting verses 1 and 11 together. David opens this Psalm with exuberant joy. His whole heart is overflowing in praise to God. God’s righteousness and justice are not mere ideas for David to be debated. They are core attributes of God that are deeply personal for David; personal because David has time and again experience for himself God’s faithfulness and deliverance. Far from being something to fear, or to make an apology for, God’s righteousness and justice gave David something to sing about.

A couple of weeks ago our 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 both beaches and playgrounds, 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. His heart overflows with energy from beholding and trust God’s righteousness and justice.

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 Pastor 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 it often is a result of our own unfamiliarity with oppression and affliction.

When we experience deep injustice, our heart yearns for someone to take action and make things right. I am sure many of you know this from first hand experience. And in this Psalm, God is praised for being the judge who does take action, the King who will make things right. I am confident 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.

Here is how Dr. King connected these attributes of God to his own understanding of justice. He said,

“I am thankful that we worship a God who is both tough minded and tender hearted. If God were only tender hearted he would be so soft and sentimental that he would be unable to function when things go wrong and incapable of controlling what he has made. He would be a lovable Being strongly desirous of making a good world, but who finds himself helpless before the surging powers of evil.

When day grows dark and nights grow dreary we can be thankful that our God is not a one-sided, incomplete God, but he combines in his nature a creative {synthesis} of love and justice which can lead us through life’s dark valleys into sun-lit pathways of hope and fulfillment.”

Dr. King found reason to sing in David’s God, and this song fueled his life’s work.

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! God’s people have always had a great commission. 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 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 joining this summons to sing with others in corporate worship; 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 and I found reason to sing again.

David had reason to sing with exuberant joy. Everything in between verses 1 and 11 tell us why. Let’s take a look at what David sings about in verses 7 through 9.

Notice 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 ideas of justice and righteousness often appear side by side in the Old Testament, but what exactly do they mean? When we talk about just judgment, 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 taken, giving honor to those who nobody else is honoring. It is caring for the neglected.

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 never gets it wrong. He never sins against us. He never privileges the strong at the expense of the weak. He never leaves us alone in our affliction.

God’s justice and righteousness are perfect. His tender care for the oppressed and the troubled is total and extends far beyond anything we could conceive of on our own. 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.

But if God’s justice and righteous character are so beautiful, then why does the thought of God as judge strike us as being so offensive? Why do we spend so much of our time debating about justice and pointing fingers rather than meditating on and singing praises to God for his justice? I think we might know the answer, if we’re willing to be honest. To truly 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 all around us.

So instead, we dismiss who God has revealed himself to be, and we create our own responses and ideas about justice, often that implicate others while excusing ourselves.

When His praise falls from our lips, when our hearts turn from him, in our sin we end up turning against one another. We end up becoming a part of the very injustices which we say we hate.

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 church and the public square right now. As I said before, I don’t know anyone who would say they do not care about justice. And yet, in trying to advance our own ideas about justice, we are so quick to believe and say anything that lets ourselves off the hook in the work of justice and puts the blame on others. We fantasize about how just we are while believing the worst about those who disagree with us. 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, our view, and excuse ourselves.

It’s not just me, right?

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 children 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 what we might call “social justice”, about how we might act justly as a community and respond to the injustice around us. It has a lot to say about God’s heart for those who are hard pressed with their backs against the wall. 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. We are not. As hard as that may be for us to admit, It is this very knowledge of who God is that gave David reason to sing.

If we want God’s praise to fill our lips, then we must know him.

And God delights to make himself known to us; not only his person, but also his works of justice. Verse 16 says “The Lord is known by his acts of justice.”

We cannot know God except through who he has revealed himself to be and his acts of justice. There is good news for us this morning because God has not left us alone to discover where - or in whom - these things are revealed.

In John 14, Jesus said something that was absolutely preposterous to his followers. He declared,

English Standard Version Chapter 14

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

In other words, Jesus is saying, if you’ve seen him, if you know him, then you’ve seen God and know God. He is God in the flesh, God made real and tangible before our eyes.

More than that, he is the way to God, to fellowship with him, to life before his eternal throne.

How could he say such a thing?

You see, all of the sin in our hearts, all of the wickedness and injustice that we play a part in - if we’re willing to be honest with ourselves and with God - leaves us in quite the predicament. Standing before a perfectly just and righteous God, he would be in the right to take action against us, to sentence us to an eternity apart from him.

But God, he has not left us to ourselves, but has made a way; and that way is Jesus. Jesus, who stood condemned in our place, took upon himself all of God’s just judgement so that we might receive what we do not deserve: his perfect righteousness. We are found to be in the right not because of what we’ve done, but because God saw us in our misery and need and did something about it. Thanks be to God that we can trust ourselves to him; that he hears our cries for mercy in our affliction; that he draws near in Jesus to forgive and to save.

Jesus resolves the tension for us: he receives the justice we deserve, so that being found in the right, we might join in the choir of his people and sing a new song of all that God has done. The more we meditate on this reality, the more we sing praises to this King Jesus, then the more our hearts and lives will be fashioned after his justice and his righteousness.

Oh friends, if David had reason to sing, then ours is even greater. Whatever conversations about justice we have together, and I hope they are many; whatever work we do together, and I hope there is much good and just work ahead; let us begin and end all our labors with God’s praises.