The Joy of Yahweh

Introduction

In Star Trek, there is a race of aliens called the Vulcans who are known for being logical and unemotional in all their decision making. This is sometimes seen as a good thing, since the vulcans are incredibly advanced in their science and technology. But it is sometimes seen as a bad thing, particularly when making decisions about the wellbeing of the Crew of the USS Enterprise. We learn that sometimes emotions are actually very useful for making decisions.

But we all seem to hate our emotions, don’t we? We hate being angry or sad, we don’t trust ourselves to make decisions when we get excited or eager. We like to believe that our lives would be easier if, just like the vulcans, we could make decisions based on logic alone. After all, logic is by definition predictable, but emotions are unpredictable and sometimes hard to control.

Yet one emotion in particular is seen as the backbone for Christian worship: Joy. We’re going to read a psalm today and talk about how the Bible understands Joy. We’re going to see, I believe, that Christian Joy doesn’t make sense to the outside world, because it requires seeing God moving in some of the darkest situations.

What the Scripture Says

Psalm 30 NIV

A psalm. A song. For the dedication of the temple. Of David. I will exalt you, Lord, for you lifted me out of the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me. Lord my God, I called to you for help, and you healed me. You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead; you spared me from going down to the pit. Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people; praise his holy name. For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. When I felt secure, I said, “I will never be shaken.” Lord, when you favored me, you made my royal mountain stand firm; but when you hid your face, I was dismayed. To you, Lord, I called; to the Lord I cried for mercy: “What is gained if I am silenced, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me; Lord, be my help.” You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord my God, I will praise you forever.

The Psalms are poetry. They paint pictures with words that communicate emotions and feelings in ways that other scriptures do not. Preaching, by contrast, is expositional and explanatory. So if I’m going to preach on the psalms, it’s only ever going to be reductive. The psalmist here says in 250 words what an essayist could only say in a few thousand.

So listen, preaching from the psalms is always going to feel like dissecting a bouquet of flowers to find out what makes them beautiful. 20% of the message of a particular psalm is the theological truth being expressed, but the other 80% is the theological emotion being communicated by the author that they want you to feel. To understand what this psalmist is trying to tell his audience, we have to feel the emotions he felt as he wrote these words. If we want the full picture painted by this passage of Scripture, we have to get both the truth and the emotion behind the words.

So what sort of emotions do you sense in this passage? Because for me, it’s a rollercoaster. Verses 1 through 3 are filled with nostalgic remembrance of what God has done. He is stating his intent and desire to worship God because of how God has proven himself in the past. Yet I also sense that the author is trying to remind himself of what God has done. There is a slight desperation to his tone here - he knows that God saved him from the pit and yet these words feel dry.

Verses 4 and 5 feel like a traditional call to worship. It feels out of place from the flow of the psalm, almost like it’s coming from an outsider in the author’s life. Perhaps it’s a call to worship resounding from the temple, or maybe it’s the author commenting from the future calling the audience to worship God. Either way, the reminder now is not “what has God done that I should remind myself of” its “look who God is, that he is truly worthy of praise.”

Maybe this is what breaks up the separation felt in verses 1 through 3. This call to worship moves away from what God has done in the authors life and instead focuses simply on who God is. We get the sense that it is this character of God alone that makes him worthy of our praise.

Verse 6 and 7 continue this rollercoaster. Verse 6 is full of pride and false assurance. He’s describing that feeling we get when our lives are going well. Suffering is a distant memory and life is going well, we are convinced that we are immortal. Then verse 7 comes to say “but look, God shows us favor and we have that false sense of security, but he could just as easily hide his face and our lives would fall apart.”

So we’ve followed this psalmist through what feels like a long journey so far. We start in this place of praising God for what he’s done, but feeling a bit numb. Then we praise him for who he is, but that reminder is coming from the outside, not from our own hearts. Then he realizes the problem - he’s been standing on his royal mountain sure of all the greatness in his life. He’s trying to do the right thing and worship God with his mouth but his pride has continually gotten in the way of genuine worship.

He realizes in verse 7 that, in spite of standing on his high mountain with everything seemingly going perfect, the absence of God makes everything empty. That’s why his words of praise feel empty and his reminders of God’s goodness don’t seem to hit home as strongly as before.

In verse 8 we get the psalmist’s response. He calls to the Lord for mercy and safety. Verse 3 mentions “going down into the pit” then verse 8 here asks the question “What is gained if I am silenced and go down to the pit?” This “pit” is death. The author has been saved from death, he recognizes, by a God powerful enough to do so.

Some commentators think that God was punishing David for being arrogant in his security in verse 6. He became sick and needed to call to God for mercy. That’s certainly what this language seems to describe: someone sitting firmly on his prideful mountaintop being suddenly humbled. Disease has a way of doing that, but so does spiritual disease. I hear the longing absence in verses 1 through 3 and wonder if maybe the psalmist was simply crying to God for his presence in the midst of worship that was feeling empty.

Whatever this humbling experience was. the rhetorical questions in verse 9 reflect the author feeling very seriously humbled. He asks “what is gained if I am silenced, will the dust praise you and tell the world of your faithfulness?” This is the way an arrogant person reacts when they are humbled by God. They try to bargain with God. “Listen God, you don’t want to get rid of me. I’ll serve you faithfully and make sure people know about you!”

As if God needs us. Elsewhere in the psalms, David will say that the rocks will cry out in praise if we are silent. God does not need anyone to praise him. He doesn’t actually need us for anything. Whatever bargaining the psalmist is doing here is some last, futile effort to seek the presence of God.

But God answers! The psalmist goes all-in with zero chips left in play, and God still answers his prayer. That’s what verse 11 says “You tuned my mourning into dancing, you removed my funeral clothes and clothed me with joy.”

The thing the Psalmist was missing this whole time was joy. He had the right words, the right theology, and was on a mountaintop moment in his life. But he didn’t have joy in his worship. Through this humbling time of trial, God gave him joy. Why? Verse 12 says “That my heart may sing your praises and not be silent.” Notice what’s singing the praises, not his mouth but his heart.

God stepped into the situation and restored the psalmist, but he also clothed him with joy and made him able to sing praises with his heart again. The result is a man who says “Lord, I will praise you forever.”

What this Means

I think the theological question of this psalm is “Why do we praise God?” but the more practical question here is “Why is is sometimes difficult to joyfully praise God?” Because if we are talking about Joy during Christmastime, we are talking about this Joy of the Lord - the Joy of Yahweh, Israel’s faithful and true God.

We talked about this in Bible study this past Wednesday - anytime you see the word “Lord” written in all capital letters like it is here in the NIV or the King James, it is the Hebrew word “Yahweh.” This is the name of God given to Moses at the burning bush. It’s the name that God uses in reference to himself and that Old Testament writers use when they want to talk about the God of the Covenants - the God who always keeps his promises.

That’s important here because I think the psalmist answers the first question of “Why do we praise God” with the answer “Because of who he is.” See, the author recognizes specific instances where God has been good to him in verses 1 through 3 and he praises God for that. But the call to worship in verse 4 and 5 doesn’t care what he’s done for you personally. It’s a call to worship as a body of faithful believers based on the testimony of God we all share - that God’s character is good and trustworthy.

His anger is short, his grace is eternal. We praise God simply because God is good and worthy of praise. He is perfectly good, perfectly righteous, perfectly gracious, and perfectly just. The call to worship is based solely on the object of that worship. Weeping may last for the night, but joy comes in the morning. That phrase is so beautifully poetic. No matter how dark a night is, the sun will always come up. No matter how chaotic life is, the world keeps spinning. Just like the sun is faithful to shed its light on a dark morning, God is faithful to His character to bring order in chaos and joy in pain.

We’ve talked before about how the plan of God is about this sort restoration and revival - bringing life out of death. In fact, when God speaks into chaotic nothingness to organize all of creation in Genesis, he’s showing His fundamental nature as the God who creates order from chaos. So it makes sense that, because of who God is, joy would alway come in the morning. It also makes sense, though, that joy would come from mourning, and that dancing would come from wailing.

See, that’s the strange thing about serving a God on a mission of redemption - we often find the joy of God in the most unexpected places. The joy of an eternal reunion experienced at a funeral, or the hope of healing experienced at a hospital bedside are evidence to this strange joy. But perhaps the manger is the place we see this joy of God is bizarre places, seeing God’s plan arise out of the chaos of a human world.

Think about the joy of that mother in the stable compared to the chaos that was happening around them. Israel was a political hotbed during the days of the Roman Empire. The census and tax enacted by caesar was a show of force by an oppressive government trying to keep a tight reign on its Jewish servants. The Inn was full because people had to return to their hometowns to be counted in the census.

So Mary must have been in a panic. She knew the baby was coming, and knew it was about to happen in a stable. Yet she delivered a baby boy and had the faith to name him Jesus, a name that means “God’s Deliverance.” What was she delivered from in that moment? What about God’s deliverance was worth celebrating in that moment? What joy could she have possibly felt giving birth in a stable?

It’s the joy of who God is! It’s the joy that comes from experiencing the presence of God even in the most ridiculous places. It’s the joy that comes from holding Immanuel in your arms and knowing indeed that God is with us. It’s the joy that comes as Jesus hangs on a cross knowing that his resurrection will mark an end to the reign of sin and death. It’s joy that just doesn’t make sense until you consider the faithful character of God.

How We Live it Out

God has this fantastic way of doing what the Psalmist says in verse 11: turning wailing into dancing. Notice what isn’t happening: mourning isn’t just ending and being replaced with dancing. No, wailing is being transformed into something good. See, joy doesn’t come from being happy all the time even when things are going bad. It comes from an encounter with God’s redemptive power. Joy comes in the morning because the morning marks a transformation of the darkness of night into something more beautiful.

I used to go hunting with my dad during thanksgiving week. We had a deer stand out in the woods on a quiet bit of property surrounded by other hunting leases. We’d usually wake up early so that we could be sitting inside the stand with the heater on by the time the sun came up. I remember when I was younger, I hated this because those woods were scary in the dark. It was as quiet as could be, especially with a fresh layer of snow on everything.

But the sun would come up, warm everything, and wake the birds who would sing in the trees. As the sun rose, you could see out into the clearing several hundred yards and to the adjacent hilltop. It’s a beautiful place to be in the daytime, but at night it was scary and unsettling. Likewise, the joy that comes in the morning is the kind of joy that can only be experienced when we see God moving to bring daylight out of darkness. It’s the kind of joy that comes when we get a hug from a loved one at a funeral, or see someone after a long separation (covid has given us many of those).

It’s also the joy we will experience in the New Creation after a long life of suffering and pain when we finally see our savior face to face. See, the reality is that the Joy of Yahweh is not a joy that makes sense outside of his character, but it also doesn’t make sense outside of the darkness of this world.

See, praising God doesn’t come naturally to us. It’s much easier to dwell on the evil in this world and complain. Joy comes when we see God moving through our pain, but that unfortunately requires acknowledging and confronting our pain. God humbled the psalmist from his place of security and showed him how desperately he needed God’s presence. This humbling event was undoubtedly painful for the author, but he confronts it as he finds restoration through God, and is able to praise God joyfully.

So if we want to be joyful, we have to live through our pain, not just ignore it. The joy of God is not a joy that is naive and ignorant to the struggles of the world. But rather than asking “why is this happening” or “what have I done to deserve this,” a joyful heart will say “I am eager to see how God uses this great evil for good.”

So do you want to be joyful? I’m not going to tell you that the trick is to “just be happy anyway.” I think it requires a conscious acknowledgement of how terrible and painful our circumstances are. Joy requires a certain level of emotional maturity. That’s the first step to being joyful - is simply offering up those emotions to God and understanding that he is present in our suffering.

Secondly, we have to remind ourselves of God’s faithfulness in our lives. Remind ourselves of the blessings he’s already given us. Practice gratitude and make a list of all the good God has done, and thank him for every bit of it.

Third, we have to remind ourselves of who God is. He is faithful, merciful, holy, slow to anger and gracious. A God who possesses such character will not let suffering go uncorrected. He did exactly that on the cross, and the suffering of this world is slowly being unraveled until the day when Christ returns to set it all right again.

But lastly, I think we have to humbly submit to the suffering and anticipate God’s healing. God will always bring about good and sometimes when things go wrong, he just wants us to learn while he works to soften our hearts and bring about good even when the world seems broken. The author’s failure was believing he was secure in verse 6 and ignoring God on the mountaintop.

So whether we are on our mountaintop or deep in a valley of despair, our job is to serve God with joy. That joy is not natural joy, it’s supernatural. It’s joy that comes from watching God work in crazy ways through dark situations. It’s joy that comes from witnessing God work again and again to bring the sun up over a dark world. Like many things in this life, joy is a discipline. It’s an emotion that comes from proximity to God and meditation on his character and work in this world.

So my challenge to you all as we continue into this advent season is to encounter the joy of God in the most ridiculous places. Look for him in the places where only God could move: in the lives of the broken people around you, in your own sinful heart, in the most broken parts of our country and community. Because I believe God is moving in those places. Joy is the ability to see God moving in those dark places, even when it doesn’t look like he is.

One of the biggest ways we celebrate that joy is when God moves in our hearts for salvation, calling broken people to follow Jesus. If you sense that God is calling you to follow this morning, come see me after service. We would be filled with joy to experience just one more soul come to know its savior this morning.