Psalm 18

If you were to look back over the course of your life and write a page or two of reflection, what would that look like? What would people come to understand about you and about how you view God? What about the main themes that show up in your story?  

David wrote Psalm 18 in the later years of his life and we catch a glimpse as to how he understood himself and his relationship with the LORD.  When we take time to remember that everything we are comes from our Creator who loves us and cares for us, it changes the way we see the world. 

Transcript

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If you were to look back over the course of your life and then write a page or two of reflection, what would that look like? What would people come to understand about who you are, about your view of God, about the main themes that continue to pop up over the course of your story? Welcome to Meet Me in the Word. I am genuinely glad that you've joined us today. We're looking at Psalm 18, written by David in the latter years of his life, and he kind of does the thing that we just talked about. We're going to go ahead and work our way through this beautiful moving Psalm. But before we do that, let's go ahead and pray. So open up your copy of the scripture to Psalm 18 and then we'll jump into this together. Jesus, thank you for this wonderful day that you've given us. God, thank you that you know us through and through, and that as we reflect on our own lives, we see evidence of you all over. God, we're here to meet with you. Would you please meet with us? All right, we're going to take our time and work through this section by section rather than having me kind of read all 50 verses and then come back and make observations later. I think it'll be more helpful for us. And then just so you know, at certain points, I'm going to leave sections of it out mostly for the sake of time, but just also to kind of help us keep moving through. But I invite you to read all of Psalm 18 in its entirety and just let it soak in for you. We're going to start with verses one through five, and then we'll keep moving on together. Let's read. For the director of music of David, the servant of the Lord, he sang to the Lord the words of this song when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. He said, I love you, Lord my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer. My God is my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. I called to the Lord who is worthy of praise, and I have been saved from my enemies. The cords of death entangled me, the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me, the cords of the grave coiled around me, the snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called to the Lord. And I feel like David here is saying, like, when you think about my life, I want you to think about the Lord. He has been, for David, everything that he's needed. And we see that really come out in those first three verses. God has been his strength, his refuge, his salvation, his foundation. All of that has been true time and again. And then we recognize that that the evidence of God's presence in his life, the thing that he starts off with, he begins with this very beautiful and emphatic worship of the Lord. But it's not just like uh a philosophy of life. It's a life that's been tested and he's experienced adversity. Verse 4 and 5, right? The cords of death entangled me, the cords of the grave. I jumped over there, but in verse 5, they coiled around me, the snares of death confronted me. He's again not just being poetic. He is being poetic, but he's remembering, I think, right, times in his life when he was fleeing or fighting so that he could survive. Verse 6 says this, and we're just going to handle verse 6 and then we're going to skip a bunch, but it it kind of moves it into the next bit. It says, I cried to my God for help. From his temple he heard my voice. My cry came before him into his ears. And I love that phrase into his ears. The NASB renders it that way. I think the ESV says it is just slightly different, but it's this sense that that uh David's request, it reached God, but it didn't just reach him. It was received by him, right? Uh David cries out and the Lord, uh, the Lord hears it and responds. He absorbs that request and and then begins to respond. And in the next like 14 verses, so this is the biggest chunk that I'm not going to read for us uh today, but in those next 14 verses, it is this like beautiful, dark, foreboding beauty. That's the best way that I can describe it. God's response to evil isn't disinterested or casual. It's this emphatic, thorough, and powerful response. And you read words where like the Lord comes and he's like he's on a cloud of a dark cloud and he's moving in and he's addressing the evil that that David is speaking of. And so we need to understand, I think, that that God is is love, absolutely, that God is compassionate, that he cares for everybody, that he desires that all would respond to his extension of life. But when there is evil, God doesn't just like sit by and go like, eh, whatever. No, he responds with force and with power and and he addresses uh that. And and that those verses really again, beautifully, I keep saying that word, but they they they just uh give us that picture of a God who is strong and will take matters into his hands to deal with uh with the evil that is present in our in our world. So we're learning, right? As we're going through this, can you see this? What's happening? We're learning about David, we're learning about how he viewed God, and we're learning about the things that have happened along the way and the nature of God himself. We're gonna pick it up in verse 20 and go through 24, which is kind of the next little movement that happens here. Listen how it shifts. So it's been all about God's response, and then and then yeah, you'll you'll feel this right away. The Lord has dealt with me according to my righteousness. According to the cleanness of my hands, he has rewarded me, for I have kept the ways of the Lord. I am not guilty of turning from my God. All his laws are before me. I have not turned away from his decrees. I have been blameless before him and have kept myself from sin. The Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight. Now I'll be honest with you, as I read through this part, I was like, huh, that's so interesting to me. Because it is at the end of his life, and I remembered and read and was thinking about the fact that David's life was not flawless. So how should we understand David's quote unquote clean hands? He certainly did sin. And just to be clear, like probably the most famous one of the things that he did that were definitely wrong, he took another man's wife, and then he killed that same man when his cover-up strategy didn't work, right? So there's there's adultery, there's deceit and lying, there's murder, right? Like all of that stuff happens, and he just kind of keeps carrying on until he's called out on it. Now, when when David is called out on it by Nathan the prophet, he he does take ownership. And David, by the way, freely talks about this process in his life, his own sin, his confession of sin, his his desire to be clean again. The the more famous uh one of these two is is Psalm 51, and that even has the little note there after David's sin with Bathsheba. Uh that's what he he wrote out. But also Psalm 32 is a beautiful expression of I felt the guilt and the weight of my sin, and then I confessed it to the Lord, and he forgave me. And uh, so those two places we see David himself acknowledges sin, and yet here he is like, I have kept the ways of the Lord, verse 21. I am not guilty of turning from my God. Uh verse 23, he says, I've kept myself from sin. So how do we process this? How do we understand it? It's possible, number one, that David was thinking about this in a narrower way than the full context of his life. That's a possibility. But I actually think it might be different than that. When we consider David and his clean hands, it's not about perfection, it's about forgiveness and repentance. And if you missed uh last week on Monday, we had uh Psalm 17, and we kind of talked quite a bit about this exact thing, that it isn't about living to perfection. Nobody's capable of that, but it is about that for that uh excuse me, that confession, when we become aware of our sin, that we do deal with it, and in that way we can have clean hands again. It's not as though they've never been dirty, it's just simply that God has made them clean. This is a hopeful thought for for me. And when I think about this idea that David was received by God in that way, based off of confession and forgiveness. And and David lived when he lived before the the events of Jesus and the cross and the resurrection, all of those things. Now we have that opportunity, the same opportunity that David had, but like times a thousand or whatever big number you want to throw after that, all because of Jesus. And so when we come across things in our own hearts and in our own lives where we're like, man, we were absolutely wrong, we we come and we bring all of that stuff to the Lord, we bring that to him, and we're like, God, give me clean hands again, give me a pure heart. And and and then he does, and and then we can rightly say, as David did say, that we have kept ourselves from sin and from its effects. All right, enough of that. We'll move on because David continues to go. We're gonna go to verse 30 and read through to verse 36. Again, the attention shifts and its focus he moves here into this description of who God is. As for God, his way is perfect. The Lord's word is flawless, he shields all who take refuge in him. For who is God besides the Lord, and who is the rock except our God? It is God who arms me with strength and keeps my way secure. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he causes me to stand on the heights. He trains my hands for battle, my arms can bend a bow of bronze. You make your saving help my shield, and your right hand sustains me. Your help has made me great, you provide a broad path for my feet so that my ankles do not give way. And it's as if David is saying, Every good quality, every good skill, every success that I have comes from the Lord. All those things that people admired about David, he attributed to God, right? His hands ready for battle, his strength, his swiftness of feet, all of those different things, his secure path along the way. People admired David. They they sang David's praises, right? And that's even recorded in scripture. Saul killed his thousands, David his ten thousands. They they celebrated his his military success, and David takes it back and he says, you know, you know who made me strong, you know who made me wise, you know who made me swift and and accurate, and all of those things. You know, the one who made me with the ability to lead like I do, it's it's all it's all because of God. You know, I've noticed this about good leaders in the church. They may be wildly talented, smart, skilled, educated. All of those things may be true of them. And the good ones, it's not that they like despise their own gifts or try to like pretend that they're not there or that they don't matter. It's just that they regularly point everything back to the Lord instead of seeking glory for themselves. And that, I think, is true humility when they behave in that way. And then finally, verses forty six through fifty. The Lord lives, praise be to my rock, exalted be my God, my Savior. He is the God who avenges me, who subdues nations under me, who saves me from my enemies, you exalted me above my foes. From a violent man, which was probably Saul, you rescued me, therefore I will praise you, Lord among the nations, I will sing the praises of your name. He gives his king great victories, he shows unfailing love to his anointed, to David, and to his descendants forever. Finally, David returns to praise and celebration of the Lord for being his strength and his victory. All right, I'll leave it with you. Which section of Psalm eighteen spoke most to you? Whatever that was, I'm going to encourage you to spend just a few more minutes there, bring it before the Lord, and just ask him to do that good work in you. Let's pray. Jesus, thank you for this wonderful day that you've given. God, would you be our strength and our refuge just like you were for David? But God, more than that, would you continue to give us clean hands and pure hearts? Help us to move forward in faith. We ask this in your name. Amen.