Sermon Tone Analysis
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Who’s in the pit?
David is experiencing a time in his life when he feels just left out in the cold.
It’s fascinating to me that this psalm was written for the dedication of the temple.
The house of God is where comfort is.
Warmth.
Togetherness.
But when we get into the meat of this psalm, we see that David feels separated from God.
He uses the word terrified to describe his condition.
This Psalm is a prayer that we need today.
1-3 Praise for what God has done:
General thoughts on the Psalms
A little comment on the structure of this Psalm for you nerds in the room,
Psalm 30 is a Psalm of Thanksgiving, one of 8.
These Psalms are a joyful expression of praise and thanks towards God, typically in response to a request made that God has answered.
A Psalm of thanksgiving is a Psalm that gives very intentional thought towards something that God has done, and less like “count your blessings” and more like “try and quantify how good God is.”
Psalm 30 is a Chiasm.
49 of the Psalms are.
“A chiasm is a literary device in which a sequence of ideas is presented and then repeated in reverse order.”
Thought A, Thought B, Thought B, Thought A
ABBA? Maybe think Dancing Queen to remember how this works.
Of course there can be more than 2 thoughts that are being taught and then retaught in reverse order.
Chiasm’s are all over Scripture
Luckily for us, this Psalm to me appears to only have two thoughts being used...
Praise, Salvation, Salvation, Praise
Let’s start with the first section: Praise
David starts this psalm by praising God
What can we infer from this immediately?
David was down!
And here we go into application.
David was in a spot where he was having to cry out to God.
We’ll talk in a moment about some of the circumstances in David’s life where he would have been down and depressed.
But for now, just consider your own circumstances.
This imagery of the pit that David is employing :
I identify closely with the words David uses in this Psalm.
The pit.
David uses this word frequently, and he often links it with the idea of sheol.
which is the old testament Hebrew understanding of the land of the dead.
SLIDE PHOTO
Sheol was a physical place that one only reached through death.
It’s important to know that David viewed Sheol as a physical place, and he viewed himself as a physical being that could really go there.
That might seem like an odd distinction to draw out, but...
Talk about differences between Hebrew vs Western/Greek understanding of the person.
Soul vs Flesh
David spoke of Sheol more than once, and we see through his prayers to God that through faith, David believed God would rescue and redeem Him from such a place.
So this language of pit and sheol is used together by David to describe a condition of utter helplessness, abandonment, loneliness, and even death.
For example
This same word for pit and sheol is used in Job, as Job pushes against his friends and uses this imagery of the pit as he asks, is my only hope death??
Unsurprisingly, we see Jonah using the same exact language as he’s writing poetry inside a giant fish.
Have you ever felt like you’re in the pit?
PAUSE
I sure have.
This Psalm has been one that I return to regularly in times of feeling that I have strayed from God, or when I feel helpless, or when my friends are feeling helpless.
There’s a certain togetherness that we all have to acknowledge here.
We all were in the pit spiritually.
Ephesians.
Grace is what draws us out of the pit.
But picture in your mind here what God is doing.
This pit is like a slippery well.
Have you ever been truly stuck?
When I was a kid I had another kid sit on my shoulders and hold me underwater in a pool.
This imagery makes me think of the Woman at the well irony.
Water doesn’t draw itself up.
You can’t get out of it on your own.
God’s not pulling you up out of the well while he swears under his breath about how stupid you are.
And He’s not pulling you out the pit and saying, “try harder next time” or “I’ll give you something to cry about.”
No.
In fact,
He cries with us.
When Jesus is actively in the process of drawing one of his best friends out of the pit, a friend who had DIED, he’s weeping.
Jesus weeps with you in the pit.
“Jesus’s tears also suggest something about our need to “fix it.”
There are a lot of people who are coming to New York to fix things.
We are glad for them.
They will try to fix the buildings.
We need that.
And eventually they will leave.
But when Jesus weeps, we see that he doesn’t believe that the ministry of truth (telling people how they should believe and turn to God) or the ministry of fixing things is enough, does he?
He also is a proponent of the ministry of tears.
The ministry of truth and power without tears isn’t Jesus.”
-Tim Keller
You have to have tears.
But he doesn’t stay there with you, or leave you there, he raises you up with him and seats you with him in the heavenly places.
But he’s with you in the pain...
David acknowledges this now as he turns his attention to the congregation.
for people singing this Psalm, the leader would shout out in a loud voice,
“Sing to Yahweh, you his faithful ones.”
this could fall under the category of what Rod was talking about last week when he said that our job is to “irritate each other”.
We have a duty to remind each other of the wonderful works that God has done for us, and to encourage each other to praise God.
Why do we remind each other?
Because it’s hard to remember when we’re in the pit.
4-5 A plea for salvation:
This is reminiscent of the covenant curse and covenant blessing that we see promised in the 10 commandments.
Love greatly outpaces punishment.
David knows this.
He would have grown up hearing his teachers call out the decalogue, or the 10 commandments
“Shema Yisrael.”
Hear O Israel the decrees and laws I set before you today.
I AM YHWH your Elohim who brought you out of the land of Egypt.
David’s reasons for sorrow:
Intense sorrow is the lot of a son of Adam.
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