Psalm 11; Honest with God: A Psalm for the Unsettled

Jason Sterling July 12, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL 

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Transcript

Psalm 11 Read Aloud

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If you have a copy of God's word, if you could turn with me this morning to the book of Psalms. So go open up to the center of your Bible. We're going to look at Psalm 11 this morning. This is God's word. And the Lord I take refuge. How can you say to my soul, flee like a bird to your mountain? For behold, the wicked bend the bow, they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart. If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? The Lord is in his holy temple. The Lord's throne is in heaven. His eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked, and the one who loves violence. Let him rain coals on the wicked. Fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. For the Lord is righteous. He loves righteous deeds. The upright shall behold his face. This is God's word. Let's ask God to come and meet with us this morning through the preaching of the word. Bow with me. Father, I pray that you through your spirit would fall fresh on us this morning. Bring revival to our hearts.

Prayer For Revival And Clarity

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Holy Spirit work, reveal, encourage, convict. And I pray that more than anything, you would give all of us a powerful encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ this morning through your spirit and through the word. Please do that in a way that leaves us just worshiping and giving gratitude and thankfulness for what you have done for us in Christ. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. In 2005, my wife Susie and I moved back to Birmingham. We're both Sanford graduates, but we moved back to Birmingham where I was starting as an RUF campus minister at Sanford. So we were going back home in a way. And when we moved back, uh we lived in West Homewood in a home that was

A House With Foundation Cracks

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built in the 1940s. And as homes that age, it had some foundation issues that we were not crazy about. And if you know anything about foundation issues, they don't a foundation doesn't crumble or fall or fail all at once. Most of the time it's slow. It starts with a crack along a grout line or a seam, starts with a little settling here or there, but nothing that's too dramatic. You patch it, you watch it, you manage it, and you get on with your life. But ever so often a foundation cracks not along a seam, but in a different way, straight through the middle of a cinder block in your foundation or a brick. And when you have that kind of crack in your foundation, it's much more serious, and it is something that you need to give attention to pretty quickly. In Psalm 11, King David, his foundation is giving way. And the crack is not running along the grout line or the seam, it is splitting and running right through the middle of a kingdom and a nation. The very structures that were supposed to hold a nation together, the foundations of a nation, were starting to come apart all at once. Most of us don't have a kingdom, but we know that feeling, don't we? When the foundations start to feel shaky in our lives, when something was structural and load-bearing and permanent, so we thought, and it turns out not to be stable at all. And when that happens, when the foundations start to crack in our lives and start to shake and start to come out from underneath us, our instinct in that moment is to run for solid ground, to go somewhere where we can stand, to go somewhere where something stable is underneath us. David refuses to flee and he refuses to run in Psalm 11. Not because the danger isn't real, it certainly is. He refuses because he has found something in God that the cracks in his foundation cannot touch. A God of justice who sees everything that happens in the dark and whose throne is never shaking, even though everything else around it is. This morning we're going to look at three things in Psalm eleven, three headings this morning. Number one, the crisis. Number two, the concentration or the gaze.

David’s Crisis And A Shaking Nation

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And number three, the cup. The crisis, the concentration, the cup. Let's look at our first heading, the crisis. Look at verse one. David begins, In the Lord I take refuge. How can you say to my soul, flee like a bird to your mountain? We don't know exactly who's speaking here. Most people think it's an advisor of David's of some sort, maybe even David's own fear talking. So he's talking to himself, but whoever it is, they mean well. And what I want you to notice here is the contrast before the danger is even described. Look at the contrast in verse one: refuge in the Lord or refuge in the mountains. The mountains here are a false refuge. Not because mountains are bad, but because of what they replace. In other words, it is take refuge in the mountains or take refuge in the Lord. David isn't being told where to go. He's being told what to trust in. Why is he being tempted to run in the first place? Well, look at verse 2. Because people are after him. There's an ambush. Someone has got a bow and arrow, and they have it loaded, ready to attack. And so notice the ambush language. This is not open conflict. This is in secret. Notice the danger is immediate, and they shoot in the dark. And so concealment and hiding is the entire strategy. This is not a fair fight. It's targeted, a hidden strike against people who are upright in heart. Verse three. Notice it broadens out here some. If the foundations are destroyed. The idea here, and I mentioned this in the introduction, is that the very foundations of a nation or society, the moral and the social and the spiritual underpinnings of a nation and society are starting to give way. And notice the movement. It starts with David is in danger. Well, David's not in danger anymore. It's not just him. It is, notice verse 3, there's no stable ground left anywhere. There's no place for him to go. And I think when we read, I do this with the Bible. I think we all do, particularly with the Psalms, even you read a passage like this, and you're like, what? What does this have to do with me? This is written thousands of years ago. I can't relate to this at all. Not so fast. We all have our versions of Psalm 11, don't we? Haven't we all experienced our foundations in our lives starting to give away right underneath us? It's part of living in a broken and fallen world. A marriage of 30 years all of a sudden starts cracking and starts to feel like it's coming apart. The job you had that you thought you would have forever starts to collapse. Your health that you've never even thought about suddenly starts to go away. Someone you love more than anything in this world dies, and the world just doesn't seem to make sense in the same way again. You feel the foundations? Or what about a child who walks away from the faith that you raised them in? Or what about graduating high school seniors that are heading off to college? You're leaving for college, and the world and the structures that you've known for 18 years like that are going to shift and feel like they're gone from underneath you. Maybe your last child is leaving, and so now you're an empty nester, and for years and years, your whole life and your whole marriage and your home has been built around your children, and now suddenly they're gone, and the foundations feel like they're shaking because you're trying to figure out what is life like now. Or the midlife crisis, when you realize this thing you've been chasing that has consumed your life for decades wasn't as solid as you thought it was. You see, when those things happen, when our foundations start to shake and the ground starts to crack beneath us, every one of us will be tempted to flee, to flee to the mountains. And even if you don't have a literal place in the mountains or a beach house or somewhere at the lake, a literal place. And we do that, don't we? We just like, I need a break. I gotta check out, I gotta get away. And we have a literal place that we can go to. Even if that is not your story, we have this strong pull inside of us mentally and emotionally to check out and to avoid hard things. And for

Our Fight Or Flight Reflex

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you, it might look like distraction and busyness. If I can just stay busy enough, I don't have to think about and feel the crack in the foundation of my life. Or maybe it is anxious control. You start trying to manage everyone around you in things that were never yours to manage. It might look like pulling back or shutting down from people, from community, from risk, because the world just feels too unsafe. But I think the opposite instinct is worth naming too. And that is if we don't have this temptation to flee and to run, maybe your instinct is to fight. And that's when we try to dominate everyone around us. We strike first before we can be hurt, like we were hurt before, or we refuse to let anything be uncertain. And so we refuse, even if it means running over everyone around us in order to get there. Sometimes it looks like reaching for voices that feed the panic instead of calming it. You know this, but isn't there something almost addicting about being agitated and stewing on something? That's especially new especially true with social media and the news, where the algorithm is built on exactly that. You know this. The news and social media is built on keeping you, keeping us in the fear loop, keeping you in this panic, because that's what keeps you coming back. That's what keeps us watching the news and scrolling social media for hours. And here's the truth underneath both of those instincts, whether it's fighting or fleeing, is the same fear. And here's the fear. I'm all alone. There is no one watching out for me. And because there's no one watching out for me, I have got to handle this all by myself. I'm all alone. Where is your mountain? Where do you run? Where are you tempted to run instead of stand? David does neither. He runs to an entirely different place. And that's what we see in our second point. Our second heading, the concentration. Look at how verse 3 ends with the question What can the righteous do? Notice David's answer here. It's not, I've got, I need to get a better strategy or a plan. He doesn't argue that the danger's not real. The bow is still pulled back. The foundations are still cracking.

Refuge In The Lord Not Mountains

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What he does instead to push back against his fear and his panic is he looks somewhere else entirely. He stops looking down here at the cracks in the foundation. And notice verse 4. Where do his eyes go? They go straight up to the throne room. Verse 4. The Lord is in his temple. The Lord's throne is in heaven. Notice here, verses 4 through 7. This is worth pointing out. I love pointing out things like this as we read our Bibles, but what do you notice is repeated in the second half of this Psalm over and over and over again? The Lord or a reference to him? Question. When your foundations are crumbling, the panic is loud, and you want to flee or fight. Who becomes the main character in your life? Your fear or the Lord's? Notice the Lord just completely consumes the second half of this psalm. Your foundations are giving way, but David looks to a sturdier foundation, not the mountains, to the throne that is unshakable and that was never shaky to begin with. And the throne here that David is looking at, it's not a backup plan, it is in a different category of stability altogether. And notice the word holy. I think it's easy to miss, but it's doing some big work in this passage. Holy in this context means that God's seeing isn't neutral. In the throne room, God is not just observing things, he's also judging things. And that sets up the next phrase. Nothing done in the dark is hidden from a holy God who is holy, who is awake, who never sleeps or slumbers, and who is watching everything. And notice who's in view here. Look at verse 4 again. God sees, his eyes see everyone, the children of man, meaning there's no exceptions. This is universal seeing and scrutiny. Some of you know we have a cat, a rather large cat, I might add. And if you've ever owned a cat, you've seen this. The cat will go out in your backyard and will lay down in the grass, and the cat will appear to be half asleep, completely unbothered, until something in the yard moves. And then in that moment, suddenly the cat is utterly still, not asleep still, not stillness as in their board. I'm talking about every muscle locked, eyes wide open and fixed and focused, and ears up so that they can hear everything. There is nothing in this stillness with this cat that communicates that they are uninterested. It is the complete opposite. It is complete and total concentration, full focus on one thing. That's a picture of verse four. One commentator says, God's stillness here is not inertia, but concentration. God's throne isn't unmoved, as if he is detached from what is happening with David and what is happening in our lives. It's unmoved because his eyes are fixed, because he is concentrating, because nothing gets past his gaze. We could say it this way, because he is watching his yard, so to speak. Everything in his view, looking and gazing and concentrating very carefully. And the archers in verse two, they're counting on one thing that no one's watching closely enough to catch them. We live a quieter version of that same bet often, don't we? I can do fill in the blake, whatever that is for you. And it will stay hidden. And it will stay hidden because it's done in secret.

God’s Unblinking Gaze In Darkness

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And this passage says that that bet has always been wrong. The bet has always been wrong because nothing, God sees. Nothing happens in the dark. But also notice the gaze doesn't stop with what you've done. God also sees what's been done. To you. God sees your suffering. He sees your situation. Nothing is unseen by God. And remember, underneath the fight or flight is the same fear that no one is watching out for me. Verse 4 says, that has never been true. That God always has his eyes on you. He's always watching, that he always sees that you're never alone. And once we actually believe that, we can respond or we respond the way David does here in what the Bible calls the fear of the Lord. That's what that's how David's responding, if you wanted to sum it up. Not because we can respond this way by looking to the throne and the fear of the Lord, not because uh we're fearful that the arrows might hit us or we're going to get ambushed. It's talking about something different. It's talking about your vision of God being so real, the holiness of God being so present, filling up your vision so that God becomes the thing that matters most, so that he starts to fill up your mind and heart in such a way that it impacts your entire life. How you talk and what you say and what you do. And to say it another way, I could say the fear of the Lord, it means that God becomes the main character in your life instead of your fear and panic. And this sounds strange, but it actually is freedom. Because the bigger God gets in your vision, the smaller everything else becomes. The smaller your fear and your anxiety get in comparison. Again, not because the danger's not still there, not because things aren't hard and the foundation's not cracking, but because those things are no longer the biggest thing in your life and in your view. What would it look like this week if the Lord, not your circumstances, were the main character in your life? What would that look like for you in your situation this week? Lastly, the cup. Things take a turn. David, he could have taken, think about who David was and what is happening to him. This is a real active threat. And it would have been real easy for David to take revenge himself. But instead, he takes

The Cup Of Judgment And Justice

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this and he opens his hands and he says, God, you take this. I am going to leave the judgment and the revenge to you. And how does God answer? With fire. Look at verse six. Let him rain coals on the wicked, fire and sulfur. So the King James Version, the old King James, that word there is brimstone, where we get our phrase, fire and brimstone, and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. Please notice here there's no testing like there was the children of man. For the wicked, there's just consequence. Judgment. And notice verse five. Hatred. His soul hates the wicked and those who love violence. Yes, we're talking about fire and brimstone this morning. And you know why we're talking about fire and brimstone? Because it's in the Bible. And if it's in the Bible, we talk about it. The language there, coals and fire and sulfur, it isn't random. Every commentator points this out. It is an echo of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. And if you know anything about Sodom and Gomorrah, it was edged in Israel's memory because it was a time when the judgment of God fell suddenly and completely and visibly on Israel and on the wicked. And understand here that this isn't an isolated image, because I think that we maybe have this view of, like, yeah, that's the Old Testament God. Well, did you know that Jesus points back to Sodom and Gomorrah in the Gospels when talking about a picture of final judgment? Peter does the exact same thing. And I say that because it's this thread, it's not a one-off. It's this thread running through the entire Bible. And that raises an obvious question that we need to deal with, particularly in these types of Psalms. So let's deal with it this morning. Is it right to pray this way? I mean, because think about the Psalms here. Over and over we read these kinds of things. Is it right to pray for God to rain down coals on the wicked? Proverbs 813 answers this directly. The fear of the Lord is the hatred of evil. Evil is the proper object of your hatred. But, and this is critical, the Lord alone, not you, not us, is the proper subject of its judgment. David isn't taking revenge here, he's refusing to. Said, God, I leave this to you. Go back to verse four. Listen closely. God eyes the children of man. Remember? No exceptions, universal scrutiny. Not just David's enemies, everyone. You see, we assume when we read passages like this, that it's only the archers until we realize that we are the ones in the dark, too. Which means that we can't read verse six as a psalm about those terrible, wicked, evil people out there. Because if nothing and no one is exempt from his gaze, then somewhere inside of me and inside of you is an archer. Is someone who has aimed at someone else in the dark. Someone who has counted on nobody watching while we have done harmful things in secret. You see, it's not only the enemies who deserve this judgment. We deserve God's wrath too. And here's the thing about the Sodom story. And I went back and read it, and it again, all the commentators point this out. It was never only a story about fire. If you read it, before the fire fell, an angel of the Lord went to Lot and his family in order to pull them out. Not because they had earned it. In Genesis 19, it says that God sends angels, and then it says, but Lot lingered. And then you read that the angels actually physically have to grab Lot and his family and take them outside the city. And if you read the fine print, it says,

Jesus Drinks The Cup For Us

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Why did those things happen? Because God was merciful to them. That's why they were pulled outside of the city. They walked out of a city under judgment into safety for no other reason except the mercy of God. Fire's real, but so was the rescue. And I tell you that because the fire wasn't the whole story at Sodom, and it is not, friends. Thank goodness. It is not the whole story here. In Psalm chapter 11, look at verse 6. David calls it the portion of their cup. And in the Psalms, a cup was something God hands someone to drink, and it goes in either two directions. It was a cup of blessing and joy, or it was a cup of wrath, depending on who was holding the cup. So we've got a problem, don't we? Well, because we know who's holding the cup. Who deserve the wrath of God? And so then the question is, what do we do? God in his mercy sent the Lord Jesus Christ centuries later. And Jesus would kneel in a garden before he went to the cross. And you remember he said, God, take this cup from me. What cup? Our cup. The cup that belonged to the wicked. And unlike Lot, nobody dragged Jesus by his hand to the cross. Jesus voluntarily went on his own accord. And he hung on a cross and he drank the cup all the way to the bottom so that he could be with you forever. More specifically, look at verse seven, so that you could see his face. And friends, that's an astounding promise. Because do you remember Moses? He only got God's back, never his face. And David says that you and me will get God's face. And the whole Bible runs towards this promise till we get to the very end of the Bible in Revelation chapter 22. And remember, it says, the people of God are worshiping God. And it says they will see him face to face. Not his back, not his glory from a distance, his face. And it's easy to miss. But it was never only about us getting to see him. His eyes were on us first. Remember, the Psalm says that. Beholding, in other words, always runs both ways. You will see his face, and he will get to look into your face. The face of his child, you, that he gave everything for, even his very life, so that he could have the joy of looking into your face. Isn't that what all of us want? Every one of us, you know what we're after? For someone to look at us and not look away. We want someone to look at us and their face light up. To look at us and be full of joy and delight. That is the look on God's face when he looks at you. I don't know where you are this morning. Maybe you're in Christ, but you're still running and fighting instead of standing and looking up. Or maybe this morning you're not a Christian and you're still holding your own cup. This passage is grace to you. It's not just a warning, it is God's mercy reaching out for you. And so this morning, whether you've been a Christian for 40 years, or whether you're not a Christian at all, will you come to Jesus, whether for the first time or the thousandth time? Let's come to Jesus and let's worship and let's give thanks for what he has done for his people. Let's pray. Father, thank you for holding us fast, for holding us when the foundations and everything around us seems like it's giving way. Forgive us for running and for fighting instead of standing and gazing at your throne. And Holy Spirit, help us to fix our eyes on God, whose eyes have never left us. In Christ's name I pray. Amen.