Today we conclude our series of messages on the "Songs of Ascent," Psalms 120 – 134. These are traveling songs, sung by the people of ancient Israel on their journeys up to Jerusalem, as they made their way to the capitol city for the three annual feasts. Taken together, these Psalms form a kind of catalog of the life of faith; they deal with issues that God’s people have been struggling with for thousands of years; issues like hope, and joy, and perseverance, and humility. And that’s why we’re studying them; because they are so timelessly relevant. Even today, they can aid us in our spiritual "ascent"; they can guide us in our lifelong journey of discipleship to Jesus Christ.
This morning’s selection is number 124, a Psalm of thanksgiving for God’s deliverance:
If the LORD had not been on our side--let Israel say--if the LORD had not been on our side when men attacked us, when their anger flared against us, they would have swallowed us alive; the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters would have swept us away.
Praise be to the LORD, who has not let us be torn by their teeth. We have escaped like a bird out of the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.
Now, we don’t know which event in Israel’s history the author is referring to. Certainly there were many times when God intervened to rescue his people from calamity, many times when he saved them from certain destruction at the hands of foreign kings and armies. If you watch "The Ten Commandments" on television this week, you’ll see Cecil B. DeMille’s version of one such deliverance, the Exodus. In that story, taken from the Old Testament, we see the Israelites suffering under cruel slavery in Egypt. Through Moses, God demands that his people be set free, but Pharaoh refuses. And so God brings Egypt to its knees by a series of increasingly destructive plagues – frogs, gnats, boils, hailstones, locusts, and finally, the death of every family’s first-born son. At last, Pharaoh is forced to allow Israel to leave. But almost as soon as they’ve gone, he changes his mind. He orders his army to pursue them. As the Israelites are camping by the Red Sea, they hear the sound of a great army approaching; they look up, and as if in a nightmare, they see horses, and chariots, and armed warriors, bearing down on them with terrifying speed and murderous rage. Fear grips their hearts! They have no weapons. They’re trapped, with no possibility of escape: the swords and spears of the Egyptian army are before them; the shores of the Red Sea are behind them. They are completely defenseless. A bloody massacre seems certain. The people panic! They cry out to Moses, "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?"
And then, just when it seems that all is lost, God shows up. He sends a great wind to divide the sea. His people walk through on dry land, but when the Egyptians try to follow, the water rushes back over their heads, and every one of them drown; soldiers, horsemen, and horses. Pharaoh’s army is destroyed! The Israelites are saved! They rejoice, and sing, and dance! Certainly they would have agreed wholeheartedly with the words of Psalm 124. They knew that if God had not been with them when they were attacked, they would have been annihilated. They would have been cut to pieces. They were trapped, defenseless, their situation completely hopeless. But then God intervened, and suddenly, unbelievably, everything changed. They were free, like a bird escaping from a snare. They were saved! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
The interesting thing, you realize as you read through the Bible, is that this is not an isolated incident. Unexpected deliverance is a recurring theme, in both the Old and New Testaments. Repeatedly, we see God intervening in apparently hopeless situations, turning defeat into victory, loss into gain, failure into success, death into life. Over and over again, when disaster seems the only possible outcome, suddenly God shows up. And that changes everything.
For instance, we see Abraham and his wife Sarah, both of them old, advanced in years, well past any possibility of child-bearing, and yet God allows Sarah to bear a son, Isaac.
Or Daniel, thrown into a den of lions because he prayed to God, and disobeyed the king’s edict. Death seems certain. But God sends an angel to shut the lions’ mouths, and his life is spared.
Or Peter, thrown into jail, bound with chains, guarded by soldiers. Escape is out of the question. And yet, he does escape. God sends an angel, and Peter simply walks out of the prison.
My point is not that God can perform miracles, or that angels are real. My point is that often we find God acting in people’s lives just when things look bleakest, when nothing short of his power can save the day. Those are the times when people say, "Unless God does something, unless God shows up, we’re lost." And often, that is just when He acts -- when our only remaining hope is in Him, not in ourselves, not in other people, not in wealth or power, but in him alone.
Now, of course, whenever God acts on behalf of his people, it’s cause for thanksgiving and rejoicing. We don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. But in the back of our minds, there’s this nagging question. If God can come to the aid of people in desperate situations, then why doesn’t he just prevent the desperate situations in the first place? If God was able to drown the entire Egyptian army, and give Sarah a son at ninety, and muzzle Daniel’s lions, and spring Peter from jail – then couldn’t he have prevented the crisis altogether? Couldn’t he have stopped Pharaoh from sending out his army? Couldn’t He could have given Sarah a son in her 20’s? Couldn’t He have stopped the king from issuing that decree against prayer that got Daniel in trouble? Couldn’t God have kept Peter from being arrested? Of course. But he didn’t. Instead, he allowed all these people – His people, remember – to get into terrible difficulties, apparently just so he could show up in the nick of time and rescue them.
But why? If God knows beforehand that he intends to help his people, then why does he place them in situations that provoke fear, and doubt, and worry? Why put them through such mental and spiritual anguish? Friends, this is not an idle question. It matters. It matters because we are prone to misinterpret what God is doing in our lives, especially when we’re suffering. When our backs are against the wall, when all the exits are blocked, when we see no way of escape – at those times especially, we are likely to misread God’s intentions.
For instance, we may conclude that things are going badly because of something we did wrong; either that we have sinned, offending God, or that we have somehow missed his will for our lives. Parents dealing with an angry, rebellious teenager may blame their imperfect parenting. A Christian businessman facing bankruptcy may wonder if he has missed His calling – perhaps this is God’s way of telling him that he should have gone to seminary instead of business school. A laid-off steelworker who can’t get work may imagine that God is punishing him for his drinking. A wife whose husband refuses to attend church may wonder if she married the wrong man. When our circumstances seem dark and hopeless, we’re tempted to think that somewhere along the line we must have made a mistake, or else we wouldn’t be here. We must have taken a wrong turn. We must have failed to listen to God’s voice. But that’s not true. Moses and the people of Israel did exactly what God called them to do. And yet there they were, with the armies of Pharaoh barreling toward them. Suffering and setbacks are no evidence that we are out of God’s will. In fact, sometimes crises come because we are following Christ. But even if our difficulties are of our own making, it doesn’t matter. Because God is sovereign over all things, even our bad decisions. His plan for us, his good, and wise, and perfect plan, incorporates even our sins and mistakes. We can’t thwart his purposes for our lives. So no matter what brought us here, ultimately we are here because a loving God willed it.
This affects our decision-making. If being in a hopeless situation means that we’ve missed God’s will, then we need to make some kind of change. We need to alter course, turn back, abandon ship. Which is just what the people of Israel wanted to do. When they reached Canaan, the land God had promised to give them, Moses sent twelve spies in to see what it was like, to see what kind of people lived there, what kind of resistance they should expect. After forty days, the spies returned:
"They gave Moses this account: "We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. . . We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are." And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, "The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. . . We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."
That night all the people of the community raised their voices and wept aloud. All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, "If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this desert! Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?" And they said to each other, "We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt." – Exodus 13:26-14:4
The Israelites misinterpreted their circumstances. They saw how terrible their enemies were. They feared for their lives, and for the lives of their children. They saw no way of entering in and taking possession of the land. And so they concluded that someone had made a horrible mistake. Perhaps their leaders, Moses and Aaron, were to blame for taking them all on this wild goose chase. At any rate, what they needed to do (they thought) was to turn right around and go back. Tell Pharaoh that they were very sorry for the inconvenience, and ask him very nicely to take them back. Now, were they correct in judging their situation to be virtually hopeless? Yes, they were. The people of the land were indeed fierce, and strong, and numerous. But were they correct in thinking therefore, that they had made a mistake? No. How did God respond to their lack of faith? He was not pleased.
"The Lord said to Moses, "How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the miraculous signs I have performed among them? I will strike them down with a plague and destroy them, but I will make you into a nation greater and stronger than they." – Exodus 14:12-13
Thankfully, Moses interceded for the people and God relented. They did eventually enter the Promised Land, after forty years of God-imposed exile spent wandering in the desert. But the point I want to make is that they misinterpreted the seeming hopelessness of their situation as a sign that they should turn back; when in fact what God wanted was for them to persevere, to forge ahead in courage and faith. Now, I’m not saying that you should never turn back, or never change course. I’m just saying that you can’t judge by appearances. God’s ways are not always evident to us.
Sometimes people react to setbacks and difficulties in another way, by concluding that God has abandoned them, that He no longer loves them. But that wasn’t true for the Israelites, and it’s not true of us, either. God has promised never to leave us or forsake us. His love never falters or fails.
So when the cards are stacked against us, when the likelihood of success seems small; when the obstacles facing us seem insurmountable; when fear and discouragement threaten to overwhelm our hearts – if all that doesn’t mean that we’ve made a mistake, or that God has abandoned us, or that we should give up and go home, then what does it mean? It may mean that God is preparing to do something great and mighty, to demonstrate through us to the world what kind of a powerful God we serve. And in fact, that’s what was going on with Moses and Pharaoh.
"Then the LORD said to Moses, "Get up early in the morning, confront Pharaoh and say to him, ’This is what the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me, or this time I will send the full force of my plagues against you and against your officials and your people, so you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth. For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague that would have wiped you off the earth. But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth." – Exodus 9:13-16
And again, at the Red Sea,
"Then the Lord said to Moses, "Tell the Israelites to turn back and encamp near Pi Hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea. . . Pharaoh will think, ’The Israelites are wandering around the land in confusion, hemmed in by the desert.’ And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them. But I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord ." So the Israelites did this. " – Exodus 14:1-4
In other words, the whole thing was a setup, a trap for the Egyptian army. God purposely put his people in that terrifying situation, with no way out, with death a seeming certainty, because he wanted to display his power. He wanted to glorify himself, by annihilating his enemies in a way that no one would ever forget. You see, God’s primary goal is to obtain glory for himself. To be exalted, and praised, and worshiped for who He is and what He has done. In you or I, this attitude would constitute monstrous pride and arrogance, but in God it’s not. Why? Because He alone is worthy of all glory and honor, all praise and worship. His purpose is to receive those things, because it is right and good for him to do so.
God puts us in difficult situations, and then delivers us out of them, because that displays his power and glory. The more furious the opposition, the more formidable the foe, the more hopeless the situation, the more his power is displayed when God intervenes at last to accomplish his purposes. It’s like the NFL. No one is too impressed if you beat the Carolina Panthers, who lost almost every game last season. But if you played the Rams or the Patriots, both of whom were in the Super Bowl, and blew them away fifty to zero, then that would be a display of power.
It’s also a fact of life that we rejoice in our deliverance all the more when it comes after a close call. Success is sweeter when it is snatched from the jaws of defeat. The more we fear that our cause is lost, the more we rejoice when instead it succeeds. And so I assume that those who narrowly escaped death in the collapse of the World Trade Center were far more thankful, and praised God much more fervently, on September 11th than they did on all the other days of the year, all the other days when they returned home safe and sound. In truth, it was always God’s sovereign power that protected them, every day of their lives. Yet on that day, their narrow escape from death intensified their appreciation for his grace and mercy. Likewise, when God allows us to be put at risk, and then intervenes in our lives in a powerful way, it heightens our appreciation for his love and mercy.
Which points to another reason for God placing us in difficult situations. It’s for our benefit, to test our faith. When we can’t see any way out, and yet we continue to trust and obey God, it both reveals and strengthens our faith, like heat tempering steel.
Does God always deliver his people? No. If he did, there would be no need for faith. God doesn’t always grant temporal deliverance; he doesn’t always deliver us from the evil and sickness and failure of this sin-corrupted world. As we read through the chronicles of faith in Hebrews 11, we find this:
"Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated– the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect."
-- Hebrews 11:36-40
These people had faith, and yet they did not receive what had been promised. Did God abandon them? Did God fail them? No. They will be delivered from sin and death. They will be honored and rewarded. They will be victorious. But their victory will come at the resurrection. And that points us to the last reason for God’s seemingly strange behavior. God delights in delivering us from hopeless, impossible situations, to show us that when the time comes, he will save us from the ultimate hopeless situation, death. Jesus Christ was crucified and died, but he rose again. And all who put their trust in him will likewise be raised to eternal life. As Paul writes:
"By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also." -- 1 Corinthians 6:14
I’d like to close by taking a few moments for application. Some of you may be facing difficult situations. Fractured personal relationships. Medical problems. Family issues. Job-related trials. Your situation seems hopeless. You’re tempted to yield to despair. What I want to say to you is that your situation is not hopeless. From a human perspective, perhaps. But from God’s perspective, never. Perhaps God wants to do something mighty and powerful in your life, something unexpected, and all you need to do is hold on a while longer. So don’t give up. Pray. Trust in God. Wait on the Lord. Keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. Remind yourself of all the times that God has helped you in the past. Ask Him for grace and wisdom, and keep walking by faith, rather than by sight.
(For an .rtf file of this and other sermons, see www.journeychurchonline.org/messages.htm)
