SPEAKER_01: Turn in your Bibles with me to Psalm chapter 24 as we continue our summer series through the Psalms.
SPEAKER_01: We're kind of getting to an end to it.
SPEAKER_01: The goal is over time that we would have worked through all of the Psalms as a church over a span of a few years, and we're narrowing it down.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm chapter 24, it's uh twin, it has a twin psalm, and uh you can guess which twin psalm it has.
SPEAKER_01: It's Psalm 15 that Pastor Henry read before the prayer of confession.
SPEAKER_01: These two go hand in hand, almost like Pastor Henry and I planned that out for you.
SPEAKER_01: And I will tell you this morning, um Pastor Henry did not write this message.
SPEAKER_01: I know that I'm not the pastor of alliteration, um, but as I started working through this text, it just started happening.
SPEAKER_01: And once you have so many peas together, um you're like, well, the rest of them have to be peas.
SPEAKER_01: Am I right?
SPEAKER_01: And it just like the pen just makes it happen.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so this morning, usually when I work through Psalms, we have the I've been working through the historical horizon, um, how it looked to the original audience, the Christological horizon, how it connects to Christ, and then the congregational horizon, what it means for us as a church today.
SPEAKER_01: All of that is still in the text this morning.
SPEAKER_01: But as I was preparing this, I found that interweaving those together as we walk through this text together laid itself out better for me to preach this morning.
SPEAKER_01: And I have to tell you, one thing I love about being a pastor, besides getting to tend to the souls of such wonderful, fine people here, is that whenever I get to preach, I get to sit in a text for a while.
SPEAKER_01: And I have I have enjoyed thoroughly sitting in Psalm 24.
SPEAKER_01: I will tell you, Tuesday evening, I took uh my youngest two to soccer practice, and I was just gonna sit there in the heat while they practice soccer for an hour.
SPEAKER_01: So I was there, I was gonna do some sermon prep.
SPEAKER_01: So here I was sitting out in my little folding chair out on the soccer fields of Colonial Hills soccer grounds, and I'm reading Psalm 24, and I'm studying Psalm 24, and guys, I started tearing up.
SPEAKER_01: Just this, I was overwhelmed by the imagery here.
SPEAKER_01: And I've never been more grateful to the Lord as I was in that moment for sunglasses.
SPEAKER_01: And that I wasn't this, who's that weird guy sitting by himself crying at soccer practice?
SPEAKER_01: It was covered up because this psalm is overwhelming, and I want you to pick up on it as we read through it.
SPEAKER_01: This psalm was written for a procession.
SPEAKER_01: When David brought brought the Ark of the Covenant up into Jerusalem, it's recorded in 2 Samuel 6 and 1 Chronicles 15.
SPEAKER_01: Israel sang, and Psalm 24 has the marks, and Psalm 15 have the marks of the liturgy, a hymn to the creator of the universe that we see in verses 1 and 2, a question and an answer to the entrance in verses 3 to 6, a call at the gates in verses 7 through 10.
SPEAKER_01: And it in Psalm 15 ask the very same question.
SPEAKER_01: Now, through the Psalm, I want you to notice something.
SPEAKER_01: The Psalm itself climbs, it begins in creation, it moves to a question that no Israelite could finally answer, and it ends with a king entering uh gates that were too small for him.
SPEAKER_01: And as we follow it, follow it, we're going to ask what Israel heard when they sang it.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to ask, where does this psalm land with Christ?
SPEAKER_01: And also what does it mean for us today as a people of God?
SPEAKER_01: And the burden of the entire psalm is this the earth belongs to God.
SPEAKER_01: No sinner can climb up to him.
SPEAKER_01: Only one has, and he has taken his people, the church, up with him to God.
SPEAKER_01: So I want you to follow along with me as we read Psalm 24.
SPEAKER_01: And what I want to tell you, I don't want to surprise you.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to tell you the whole sermon right here so you can pick up on it as we're reading through.
SPEAKER_01: Be humbled by this imagery of the King of Kings returning to heaven after the ascension.
SPEAKER_01: So this Psalm symbolizes Christ returning to heaven.
SPEAKER_01: He's already been crucified, he's been resurrected, he's been with his people for 40 days, and now he's ascended up.
SPEAKER_01: So where the disciples are seeing him ascend, this is what it looks like on the other side.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: That's the picture that we have.
SPEAKER_01: He's defeated death, he's conquered Satan for his people, he's a victorious warrior king that is returning from battle and a decisive victory where he crushed the head of the serpent.
SPEAKER_01: That's the imagery that Psalm 24 leads us to.
SPEAKER_01: You can see how this gets overwhelming very quickly.
SPEAKER_01: So follow along in your copy of God's word.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 24.
SPEAKER_01: The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.
SPEAKER_01: Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand in his holy place?
SPEAKER_01: He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully.
SPEAKER_01: He will receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation.
SPEAKER_01: Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.
SPEAKER_01: Lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.
SPEAKER_01: Who is this King of Glow?
SPEAKER_01: The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.
SPEAKER_01: Lift up your heads, O gates, and lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.
SPEAKER_01: Who is this King of Glow?
SPEAKER_01: The Lord of hosts, he is the King of Gory.
SPEAKER_01: You can see how this gets overwhelming rather quickly.
SPEAKER_01: So, firstly, this morning, as we work walk through these verses, we see in verses one and two, the possession and the power.
SPEAKER_01: The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.
SPEAKER_01: This is not a small claim.
SPEAKER_01: In the time span covered by the Old Testament, normally the gods of the nations were local gods, and we still see remnants of that even today.
SPEAKER_01: Kemosh ruled Moab, Dagon ruled the Philistine plain, each deity had its patch of land, and his authority would stop at the borders of that nation, of that country, but Israel saying something else that the nations would have found intolerable and insulting.
SPEAKER_01: Their God did not own just Canaan, their God owned the earth.
SPEAKER_01: He owned the fullness of it, its harvest, its silver, its cattle, its kings.
SPEAKER_01: He owned all of those that dwelled therein, which is to say, he owned his own people, and he owned all those who were not his people, meaning that he owned the Philistines, and he owned all of Israel's enemies too.
SPEAKER_01: And verse 2 tells us why.
SPEAKER_01: Because he made it.
SPEAKER_01: And here is Scripture saying that the God of Israel built dry land upon the deep, as though the deep, uh chaotic seas were simply a bedrock for him.
SPEAKER_01: The creator has the title, deed, ownership relies and rests on his making.
SPEAKER_01: There is no chaos with God.
SPEAKER_01: Whether we see calm or whether we see chaos, God has complete control.
SPEAKER_01: Now, when I was a kid, my family would, when we would go somewhere in the car, either with my brothers or with friends, the first one to say dibs on front seat.
SPEAKER_01: Remember, I got dibs on the front seat.
SPEAKER_01: First person to say that got to ride in the front seat.
SPEAKER_01: Now, to a teenager in the 90s, calling dibs was very powerful.
SPEAKER_01: Almost as if it were universally recognized as a sacred bond uniting all humanity.
SPEAKER_01: The word dibs carried a lot of weight.
SPEAKER_01: It carried an ownership that was respected by all.
SPEAKER_01: And here you and I sit and we watch the world around us as it seems to get crazier and crazier.
SPEAKER_01: And people do not fear the Lord, nor do they acknowledge him.
SPEAKER_01: But this is a reminder.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 24, 1 and 2 is a reminder this morning that God does not have to cry out from heaven, remember, I've got dibs.
SPEAKER_01: God owns all of the earth and all who dwell within it today, just as much as he did on the day that he created it.
SPEAKER_01: Now, where does this land on Christ?
SPEAKER_01: Now the Apostle Paul tells us that by the Son all things were created in heaven and on the earth.
SPEAKER_01: John tells us in his gospel that all of the world was created by Christ, visible and invisible, all things created through him and for him.
SPEAKER_01: And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
SPEAKER_01: So when Israel sang, the earth is the Lord's, they were singing, though they could not yet see it, of the one who would one day walk the very earth in sandals.
SPEAKER_01: And what does this mean for us?
SPEAKER_01: What does this mean for the world?
SPEAKER_01: Because the world belongs to God, the question of verse three, who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand in his holy place is not optional for anybody.
SPEAKER_01: You must answer that question.
SPEAKER_01: All who ever exists must answer that question.
SPEAKER_01: You live on his property, you breathe his air, you walk on his ground, and you will, every single one of you, meet the owner.
SPEAKER_01: Abraham Kuyper said it in a single sentence at the founding of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880, when he said, There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry mine.
SPEAKER_01: That's verse one.
SPEAKER_01: Now the digital age has advanced us more rapidly than we can even keep up with.
SPEAKER_01: We are literally at a crossroads where technology is evolving faster than we can keep up with.
SPEAKER_01: And one would think that advancing technology would bring with it more a closeness to truth.
SPEAKER_01: You would kind of think that that would be a natural result.
SPEAKER_01: What I mean by this is that it seems that we would have easier access to things that are true, therefore we would learn them better, and humanity would have more truth in our minds than the generations before us simply because we have better and easier access to knowledge.
SPEAKER_01: But we live in a fallen world.
SPEAKER_01: In the advancement of the digital age, interestingly enough, it seems that the complete opposite is true.
SPEAKER_01: The more access we have to information, the more false information that we are being bombarded with.
SPEAKER_01: So we have advancement in technology, but it is creating a lack of knowledge of what is true.
SPEAKER_01: And that can be overwhelming for us, can't it?
SPEAKER_01: As a people sitting here watching this unfold.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it can make us feel hopeless.
SPEAKER_01: In comparison to the intelligence of humanity, say in the Enlightenment period, in the Industrial Revolution, we see humanity accomplish some great things just with the power of their mind.
SPEAKER_01: And now we look and it really seems like we are just getting dumber.
SPEAKER_01: And the world around us is getting more hopeless.
SPEAKER_01: And then we read Psalm 24, 1 and 2.
SPEAKER_01: This all belongs to God.
SPEAKER_01: And so one immediate application from this text for us is remember to whom all of this belongs, and take hope, comfort, and rest in that the seas of culture around us look rough, but there is an eternal calmness in the sovereign hands of the Creator God.
SPEAKER_01: He owns everything.
SPEAKER_01: And if he owns everything, another question arises to whom does he owe an audience to?
SPEAKER_01: Who gets into his presence?
SPEAKER_01: It brings us to number two, the problem.
SPEAKER_01: The question posed in verse three who shall ascend to the will of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place?
SPEAKER_01: The question I told you that you all have to answer.
SPEAKER_01: We all have to answer.
SPEAKER_01: Everyone that's ever lived has to answer.
SPEAKER_01: Now picture this scene: the procession taking place at the foot of Zion, the Ark of the Covenant, the visible throne of an invisible God is carried in the midst, and someone, likely a priest, calls out the question.
SPEAKER_01: It is a question that would have been asked at the gate of the sanctuary generation after generation, and it has two parts.
SPEAKER_01: Who shall ascend, that is, who has access, and then who shall stand.
SPEAKER_01: That's who has who has acceptance.
SPEAKER_01: Who has access and who has acceptance?
SPEAKER_01: It's one thing to get up the hill of Zion, it's another thing to remain there and not be thrown down.
SPEAKER_01: Who can stand?
SPEAKER_01: And Israel knew at the time that this was not just some rhetorical flourish that they're going through.
SPEAKER_01: This is not just some established liturgy that they're doing with the Ark of the Covenant.
SPEAKER_01: It was not wrote to them.
SPEAKER_01: On this very procession, when the ark was first brought toward Jerusalem, a man named Uzzah reached out to steady it when it had stumbled on with the oxen.
SPEAKER_01: When he reached out and he touched the ark as he was not supposed to, God struck him down immediately because of his error, and he died there beside the ark.
SPEAKER_01: David was so shaken that he left the ark in the house of Obad Edom for three months before he dared to try moving it again.
SPEAKER_01: The holiness of God is not a figure of speech.
SPEAKER_01: It killed a man who meant well.
SPEAKER_01: And so the psalmist question still hangs over us today.
SPEAKER_01: Who can ascend to the hill of the Lord and who can stand before him in his holy place?
SPEAKER_01: We're scared to death to even walk beside the ark should it fall on us and stumble and strike us down.
SPEAKER_01: But if the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, and he is the creator and the owner of all things that are in existence, and if he is a good God, if all these things are true, then logic brings us to one deduction.
SPEAKER_01: I want to be with this God.
SPEAKER_01: I want to ascend the hill.
SPEAKER_01: I want to stand before him.
SPEAKER_01: I want to have access to him.
SPEAKER_01: I want to be accepted by him.
SPEAKER_00: I want to be with him for all eternity.
SPEAKER_01: But we see from this psalm that doing that is not as simple as walking into the doors at Walmart.
SPEAKER_01: It's not going to slide open and we just casually stroll in.
SPEAKER_01: You don't strut into the Holy of Holies of the universe.
SPEAKER_01: We, of our own accord, are not allowed to.
SPEAKER_01: Like Uzzah touching the ark, we would be struck down.
SPEAKER_01: But thankfully, the Psalm does not leave the question hanging.
SPEAKER_01: It gives us the standard of what it means to ascend the hill and stand before God.
SPEAKER_01: And we see this in verse 4 with the pronouncement.
SPEAKER_01: He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.
SPEAKER_01: There you go.
SPEAKER_01: There's your standard.
SPEAKER_01: Who can ascend the hill?
SPEAKER_01: Who has access to the hill?
SPEAKER_01: Who can stand before God?
SPEAKER_01: Who has acceptance before God?
SPEAKER_01: This guy.
SPEAKER_01: Four marks, clean hands.
SPEAKER_01: That is the outward conduct.
SPEAKER_01: What have you done?
SPEAKER_01: A pure heart.
SPEAKER_01: That's the inward disposition.
SPEAKER_01: What have you wanted?
SPEAKER_01: What are your desires?
SPEAKER_01: He does not lift up his soul to what is false, that is worship.
SPEAKER_01: Where does your allegiance go?
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 25 begins to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
SPEAKER_01: The description here is of a man that has never lifted his soul anywhere else.
SPEAKER_01: And he does not swear deceitfully, that is speech, whether his words can be trusted.
SPEAKER_01: Notice the sweep of it: hands, heart, worship, and words.
SPEAKER_01: This is describing the whole man.
SPEAKER_01: Now, what is this not?
SPEAKER_01: This is not a ritual checklist.
SPEAKER_01: This is not the Levitical law.
SPEAKER_01: We would have thought, knowing the Old Testament, that who can ascend the hill, who can be accepted before God?
SPEAKER_01: Well, here's all the laws that we already gave you in Leviticus.
SPEAKER_01: Just go read them again and do them.
SPEAKER_01: This is the point of the law of the Old Testament, that you cannot keep it.
SPEAKER_01: This is who belongs to God: the one with clean hands, a pure heart, pure worship, and pure speech.
SPEAKER_01: The Levitical law had washings and sacrifices for the entrance to the sanctuary, and none of them are mentioned here.
SPEAKER_01: This is not ritual.
SPEAKER_01: This is moral.
SPEAKER_01: It's total.
SPEAKER_01: And it is the standard for standing in the presence of God.
SPEAKER_01: You don't meet this standard, you're not allowed to stand in his presence.
SPEAKER_01: Now, Israel's own honest verdict on this verse is recorded in the Psalms itself.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 130.
SPEAKER_01: We just sang about it.
SPEAKER_01: By the way, we've already sang the sermon this morning.
SPEAKER_01: All I mean, we could have just printed out all the words to the sermon.
SPEAKER_01: We sang this.
SPEAKER_01: If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 143, enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you.
SPEAKER_00: So the very people that sang verse 4 also knew that verse 4 condemned them.
SPEAKER_00: The entrance liturgy indicted by the singer, indicted the singer.
SPEAKER_01: So the singers are singing the very words that indict them.
SPEAKER_01: They're singing their own pronouncement upon themselves as they're going with the procession.
SPEAKER_01: But that doesn't make it less true.
SPEAKER_01: So the question of verse 3 is never fully answered in Israel.
SPEAKER_01: It hung over every procession.
SPEAKER_01: Every priest who climbed the hill, every priest that went into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement.
SPEAKER_01: They asked that question as a sinner with blood on their hands from an animal that ultimately could not take away sin.
SPEAKER_01: And here's the Christological connection.
SPEAKER_01: Only one man has ever walked up to that gate and passed the test that it is written.
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at verse 4 and this time read it as a portrait of Christ as told throughout the rest of Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: Clean hands.
SPEAKER_01: Peter writes of Christ, he committed no sin.
SPEAKER_01: The writer to the Hebrews says he was holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners.
SPEAKER_01: A pure heart.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus said, I'll always do the things that are pleasing to him.
SPEAKER_01: Talking about his father.
SPEAKER_01: In worship.
SPEAKER_01: And he did not swear deceitfully.
SPEAKER_01: Isaiah foretold it.
SPEAKER_01: There was no deceit in his mouth.
SPEAKER_01: Peter repeated it.
SPEAKER_01: Neither was deceit found in his mouth.
SPEAKER_01: Do you get it?
SPEAKER_01: What Psalm's telling you here?
SPEAKER_01: Now that we see this fulfilled in Christ, verse 4 clean hands, pure heart, pure worship, does not lift up his soul to what is false, does not swear deceitfully.
SPEAKER_01: This is not a task list or a ladder that you must climb to get to God.
SPEAKER_01: This is a description of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Martin Luther spent years terrified of this kind of verse.
SPEAKER_01: He tells us in the preface to his Latin writings, written in 1545, near the end of his life, that for so long he hated the phrase, the righteousness of God, because he understood it as a standard by which God punishes sinners.
SPEAKER_01: At one time, Luther hated Paul's writings.
SPEAKER_01: He says, until he saw that the righteousness of God in Romans 1 is not the demand that crushes, but it's the gift that saves.
SPEAKER_01: A righteousness of God gives to the ungodly through faith.
SPEAKER_01: And then he says, I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.
SPEAKER_01: So verse 4, read one way is the gate that shuts.
SPEAKER_01: So we immediately read that and think that's not me.
SPEAKER_01: But read through Christ, verse 4 is the gate that opens.
SPEAKER_01: And there's two ways to read this verse wrongly.
SPEAKER_01: One way is the presumption that says, I basically have clean hands.
SPEAKER_01: I'm basically a decent person.
SPEAKER_01: I'm here, aren't I?
SPEAKER_01: I'm at church, but most people aren't.
SPEAKER_01: I think I've got verse four down.
SPEAKER_01: The second wrong way to read it is the person that is in despair that says, I never will be that.
SPEAKER_01: And the gospel answer to both of those is Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: He has hands that we do not have.
SPEAKER_01: He has the heart that we cannot produce.
SPEAKER_01: But when he ascends and receives a gift, is it only for him?
SPEAKER_01: So what we see in verse five and six is the promise.
SPEAKER_01: He will receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation, such as the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.
SPEAKER_01: So we see the one who ascends will receive righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: Not merely possess it, receive it.
SPEAKER_01: Even in Israel's liturgy, the man who stands on the hill is the man to whom righteousness is given by the God of his salvation.
SPEAKER_01: And then in verse 6, we see something strange happen.
SPEAKER_01: The singular becomes plural.
SPEAKER_01: One ascender, and then such is the generation of those who seek him.
SPEAKER_01: Just like we've seen in so many Psalms, we see a widening to a people.
SPEAKER_01: The blessing of the one becomes the blessings of an entire group of people.
SPEAKER_01: So where does this land on Christ?
SPEAKER_01: So he ascended and he received, he was received, and Paul says he was declared to be the Son of God in power by his resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: He was vindicated by the Spirit, taken up in glory, and therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.
SPEAKER_01: The ascender, Christ, received blessing and righteousness and the crown.
SPEAKER_01: But here is the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Such is the generation of those who seek him.
SPEAKER_01: The blessing of verse 5 is not his alone.
SPEAKER_01: For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
SPEAKER_01: Those who received the free gift of righteousness, Paul says, reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: The standard of verse 4 only met by Christ, and then the blessing of verse 5 is shared with his people.
SPEAKER_01: This is what our spiritual forefathers meant when they wrote in the 1689 Baptist Confession on justification that God justifies believers not by imputing faith itself or any other evangelical obedience to them as their righteousness, but by imputing Christ's active obedience unto the whole law and passive obedience in his death for their whole soul and soul righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: His clean hands credited to you, his pure heart is now reckoned yours.
SPEAKER_01: And who are they?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: It's only those who are with Christ.
SPEAKER_01: It says those who seek him.
SPEAKER_01: Notice it does not say the ladder climbers.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't say the earnest.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't say those who are more moral.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't say the ones who have climbed the farthest.
SPEAKER_01: It's referring to the ones who have stopped looking at their own hands and now look to the face of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Seeking in this psalm is not a labor of merit.
SPEAKER_01: We just sang that too in another psalm.
SPEAKER_01: It is a posture of faith.
SPEAKER_01: Seeking Christ is a posture of faith.
SPEAKER_01: And his face, Paul says, is now the face of Jesus Christ, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And so what do we do?
SPEAKER_01: We seek him where he has promised to be found.
SPEAKER_01: In his word, and his word being preached rightly, in prayer, and the gathering of his people, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also, and the table, participating in the Lord's Supper.
SPEAKER_00: All these things that we do, they aren't ladders to climb.
SPEAKER_00: They don't get us closer to salvation.
SPEAKER_01: These are the places where the church together seeks his face.
SPEAKER_01: Then we get to verses seven and ten, and the procession is reaching the gates of heaven.
SPEAKER_01: Lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in.
SPEAKER_01: Who is this King of Globe?
SPEAKER_01: The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.
SPEAKER_01: Lift up your heads, O gates, and lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in.
SPEAKER_01: Who is this King of Glory?
SPEAKER_01: The Lord of hosts, he is the King of Glory.
SPEAKER_01: If we hear it first, as Israel heard it, the ark coming to the city gates, a voice outside Christ, the gates themselves, lift up your heads.
SPEAKER_01: A voice from within challenges, who is this?
SPEAKER_01: The answer comes back, the Lord, strong and mighty.
SPEAKER_01: And then if the gatekeepers had not heard, the whole exchange is sung again, and then the ark enters, God takes his throne in Zion.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 132 sings the same event: Arise, O Lord, and go to your resting place, you and the ark of your might.
SPEAKER_01: And notice the strange command: lift up your heads, O gates.
SPEAKER_01: The gates are too low for the king.
SPEAKER_01: The doors are ancient and they must be raised.
SPEAKER_01: Which, side note, in the Ark of the Covenant days, the doors to Jerusalem would not have been ancient.
SPEAKER_01: Which tells us this is talking about something greater.
SPEAKER_01: The ancient doors of the gates of heaven.
SPEAKER_01: The doors are ancient and they must be raised.
SPEAKER_01: The city is enlarged by the God who enters it, and notice who he is: the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of heaven, mighty in battle, the warrior king who has just come from a fight.
SPEAKER_01: Now, the church has read these verses for 2,000 years.
SPEAKER_01: As long as there's been a church, we have read these verses in light of the ascension of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: This is not a new uh um uh uh um commentary on Psalm 24.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, in the second century, Justin Martyr, reasoning with the Jew Trifo, pointed to this psalm and said, The rulers in heaven asked, Who is this king of glory?
SPEAKER_01: Because they saw Christ ascending in a form that they did not recognize.
SPEAKER_01: And the Holy Spirit answered them, It's the Lord of hosts.
SPEAKER_01: Iranius said the same thing.
SPEAKER_01: And for most of Christian history, this is a psalm of ascension day.
SPEAKER_01: The gates are the gates of heaven, the voices are the voices of the angel, and the one entering is the Son of God returning from a battle that he has won.
SPEAKER_01: And I found this to be the crux of the psalm, and this is where I get overwhelmed with emotion in my spirit.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ, eternally God, eternally uh the Son of God, begotten, not created.
SPEAKER_01: All things were created through him.
SPEAKER_01: He has always been with God, he has always been God.
SPEAKER_01: He descended through the gates of heaven to take on human form, lived a sinless life, was crucified, and then in his human body was resurrected, and he was still truly God and truly man.
SPEAKER_01: He said in John 16, 28, I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I'm leaving the world and going to the Father.
SPEAKER_01: This dives into what we call the hypostatic union.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ has two natures, truly God and truly man, the two natures undivided in one person, and yet they are not mixed together to form a new person.
SPEAKER_01: And so there's three statements about this hypostatic union of Jesus that are simultaneously true.
SPEAKER_01: Number one, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forevermore.
SPEAKER_01: Hebrews 13, 8.
SPEAKER_01: The Son is immutable according to his divine nature.
SPEAKER_01: And number two, Jesus grew.
SPEAKER_01: Number three, we don't say Jesus' human person ascended.
SPEAKER_01: There isn't a separate human person of Christ, but he ascended according to the human nature he had assumed.
SPEAKER_01: Everything is predicated of one person, the Son ascended.
SPEAKER_01: That's the doctrine of the hypostatic union.
SPEAKER_01: So we can say without contradiction, the one who entered heaven here in Psalm twenty four in the ascension had never left heaven according to his deity, yet had never before entered heaven according to his humanity.
SPEAKER_01: What this means, here's the beautiful implication.
SPEAKER_01: The incarnation of Jesus Christ was not temporary.
SPEAKER_01: The Son did not finish redemption, discard his humanity, and return to how things were before Bethlehem.
SPEAKER_01: There is now and forever will be a man upon the throne of heaven.
SPEAKER_01: A man with scars in his hands and side.
SPEAKER_01: Truly God, truly man, and he sits on the throne.
SPEAKER_01: The eternal son remains forever, truly God and truly man.
SPEAKER_01: That's why the ascension matters so much for us.
SPEAKER_01: That's why the angels ask this question: Who is this coming up?
SPEAKER_01: Because for the first time they're seeing the ascension of the King of Kings in human form through the gates of heaven.
SPEAKER_01: And the Lord answers them, it is the Lord of hosts returning home.
SPEAKER_00: In Hebrews 6:20, he's called our forerunner.
SPEAKER_01: Human flesh has no place in heaven because of the sin of our father Adam.
SPEAKER_00: Until we had another forerunner go ahead of us.
SPEAKER_01: So Psalm 24 can be heard as heaven's response to the completion of redemption.
SPEAKER_01: Lift up your heads, O gates.
SPEAKER_01: Who is coming?
SPEAKER_01: But the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: But look again, you angels.
SPEAKER_01: He bears scars.
SPEAKER_01: The eternal King of Glory has returned, wearing our humanity.
SPEAKER_01: And because our head has entered, his people will now follow.
SPEAKER_01: There's an extraordinarily rich connection between Psalm twenty-four, the incarnation of Christ, his immutability, his ascension, the union with Christ of the church, and then that leads to our future glorification.
SPEAKER_01: But I want you to see that these gates swing both ways.
SPEAKER_01: Paul in Ephesians 4, quoting the ascent language of Psalm 68, says that he ascended necessarily means that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth.
SPEAKER_01: The king of glory has come through these gates before.
SPEAKER_01: He came down.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord of hosts, he lay in a feeding trough in Bethlehem.
SPEAKER_01: And had anyone asked at the door, who is this king of glory?
SPEAKER_01: The answer would have been the same, and no one would have believed it.
SPEAKER_01: That this baby is a king of glory?
SPEAKER_01: He came in through the gates of our world in weakness.
SPEAKER_01: And then, having gone to the cross, having disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, having destroyed the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, he went up through the gates of heaven, leading a host of captives won his train.
SPEAKER_01: That's you and that's me.
SPEAKER_01: The king is entering back into heaven, and the church is with him.
SPEAKER_01: And he's coming back, having won a battle.
SPEAKER_01: Mighty in battle is this warrior king.
SPEAKER_01: The battle was Calvary, and the victory was the empty tomb.
SPEAKER_00: And where did he go?
SPEAKER_01: Not into the depths of Zion, not into a room that's hidden away with a heavy curtain.
SPEAKER_01: Christ has entered not into holy places made with hands, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.
SPEAKER_01: He is this is what scripture means when it says a great high priest who has passed through the heavens.
SPEAKER_01: Now, what does this mean for the church?
SPEAKER_01: The church is not standing roadside watching this procession go by.
SPEAKER_01: This is not a Christmas parade that we're watching.
SPEAKER_01: The church is in it.
SPEAKER_01: He went up as our head, and where the head has gone, the body follows.
SPEAKER_01: He did not ascend to heaven to get away from his people.
SPEAKER_01: He ascended to heaven to bring us there with him.
SPEAKER_01: John Calvin saw this with great clarity.
SPEAKER_01: He wrote that by his ascension Christ opened the way into the heavenly kingdom, which had been closed through Adam.
SPEAKER_01: And that since he entered heaven in our flesh, as if in our name, it follows, in a sense, we already sit with God in the heavenly places with him.
SPEAKER_01: That is why Christian worship is bold.
SPEAKER_01: We draw near with confidence to the throne of grace.
SPEAKER_01: That is why to the Christian, death is not dread.
SPEAKER_01: He holds the gates open for us from the inside.
SPEAKER_01: Christ is already there.
SPEAKER_01: Adam had the opportunity to do this, but he failed.
SPEAKER_01: And we are sons and daughters of Adam.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, this ascension in Adam is unavailable to us.
SPEAKER_01: But praise God that he sent a true and better Adam, Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And in Christ Jesus, and only in Christ Jesus, can we as the church ascend with our King into the Holy of Holies of the universe and watch our King sit in human form on his throne.
SPEAKER_01: And we don't simply watch as an audience, we belong to the procession, we belong with the king, we belong to the king.
SPEAKER_01: The church belongs with her king, her bridegroom, and he gladly welcomes her in.
SPEAKER_01: Lift up your heads, O gates of heaven, for the king has returned, and he brings his blood-bought bride with him.
SPEAKER_01: So as we conclude, let me bring you back to where we began.
SPEAKER_01: The question Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's not us on our own strength.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have the hands, we don't have the heart, we don't have the right worship, and we don't have the right speech.
SPEAKER_01: We have not kept verse 4 a single day of our life.
SPEAKER_01: But there is one who has.
SPEAKER_01: He has clean hands and a pure heart.
SPEAKER_01: He never lifted his soul to a lie, and no deceit was found in his mouth.
SPEAKER_01: And he is not ashamed to be counted with those who seek him.
SPEAKER_01: He does not stand on the top of the hill looking down on those who cannot climb.
SPEAKER_01: He came down the hill.
SPEAKER_01: He came through the gates of this world, and he went to the cross, and he rose, and he went up through the gates of heaven in your flesh, in your name.
SPEAKER_01: So the answer to who shall ascend is not climb harder.
SPEAKER_01: It's not wash your hands better.
SPEAKER_01: It is come in with the clean one.
SPEAKER_01: Seek his face.
SPEAKER_01: Look to Christ and be saved.
SPEAKER_01: Believe and you are of that generation, the generation of those who seek him, the generation that will stand in the holy place because he stands there for them.
SPEAKER_01: I would encourage you this morning, sinner, to look to Christ and be saved.
SPEAKER_01: Repent of your sins and proudly declare Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior over your life and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, and the scripture says, You will be saved, and you will enter the gates of heaven with the King of Glory.
SPEAKER_01: And who is this King of Glory?
SPEAKER_01: It's the Lord of hosts.
SPEAKER_01: He is the King of glory.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ is the true and better Adam.
SPEAKER_01: Where Adam fell in the garden, Jesus did not give in to temptation in the garden.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ is a true and better Isaac.
SPEAKER_01: He's a worthy sacrifice to cover the sins of his people.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus Christ is a true and better Moses.
SPEAKER_01: Moses parted the Red Seas to get his people to safety just on the other side of the water.
SPEAKER_01: But Christ tore the veil that separated his people from the Holy of Holies, that we now may enter in and be delivered to the eternal promised land.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ is the victorious King.
SPEAKER_01: Worship him today as we continue this procession to the gates of heaven.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray together.