20th February 2005

Willie Hunter

All Bible references in this sermon transcript are taken from the English Standard Version. This can be found at www.biblegateway.com

Did you know that Psalm 69 is one of the most extensively quoted in the NT (along with Ps. 22, which is the great Passion psalm)? Does that surprise you, as it did me? No fewer than five of its verses are quoted whole or in part in five different places, and there are echoes of a sixth verse.* Jesus, Paul, Peter, the disciples, and probably Matthew and John in their accounts of the crucifixion, all make reference to this psalm, applying its words variously to Jesus himself, to unbelieving Jews and believing Christians, and to Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus. Why is this psalm, written by David and appropriate to his day and situation, so significant and so resonant that people are picking up its words almost 1000 years after it was written as being appropriate then and applying them to people like us as well 2000 years in their future?

Let’s begin with David as the writer of the psalm. Did you know that he was a prophet? We think of him (on his good side) as the shepherd lad who became a great warrior and the supreme king of Israel, and as the “sweet singer of Israel” (2 Sam. 23:1, AV). We may also remember that he was called the man after God’s own heart (1 Sam. 13:14; Acts 13:22). But in addition, and uniquely of any OT king, when he was anointed by Samuel he received a special and (it seems) permanent endowment of the Spirit of the Lord (1 Sam. 16:13), so that when he comes near the end of his life he could say, in his final recorded song: “The Spirit of the Lord speaks by me; his word is on my tongue” (2 Sam. 23:2). This doesn’t mean that every single thing David said as king or poet was inspired, any more than the fact that he was a man after God’s own heart meant that everything he did was right! But it does mean that he had special prophetic as well as poetic gifts, a fact that is repeatedly endorsed in the NT,** and his poetic gift was used by God as a medium for the expression of his prophetic gifts.

Through his prophetic gift he was given special insight into the spiritual significance of what was happening to him; and again through prophetic inspiration he was given language of peculiar aptness that fitted specific aspects of the life and death of the future Messiah. As one small example, the words of v. 21 of our psalm (through the Greek translation, the Septuagint, that was used by most people in Jesus’s day and that provides the text of almost all OT quotations in the NT) are alluded to by Matthew and John when they refer to the gall and sour wine that were offered to Jesus on the cross (Matt. 27:34; John 19:28). But much more important than such incidental details is the broader prophetic insight in the psalm. How can the same psalm speak with full appropriateness of David in his experience, of us in ours as believers, of Jesus, and of Judas? What we see in David’s unique experience highlights fundamental spiritual realities that manifest themselves again and again, and that reach their fullest and most extreme manifestation in the life and death of Jesus. Psalm 69 deals in fact with the ultimate hostility between good and evil, between God and the devil, whose battleground is the lives of men and women, and which reached its maximum intensity in the life and death of Jesus.

And there is no doubt that the psalm teaches us about the Messiah. The disciples identified Jesus with Psalm 69 (v. 9a) when they witnessed him, whip in hand, driving the people selling animals out of the Temple in Jerusalem and scattering the coins of the moneychangers because he was so offended at the misuse of the premises for commercial ends – his Father’s house, the house of prayer, where God chose to meet with his faithful ones and they could approach him. “His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me’” (John 2:17). And Jesus applied to himself the words in v. 4, “They hated me without a cause” (John 15:25, in a passage that we shall return to later). And it is important to note that these NT quotations, like all the others from this psalm, are not just picking out scattered words that happen to fit; they are words whose significance depends on the full context of the whole psalm. We have to get into the psalm really to appreciate what it is telling us about Jesus, and what we find is quite disturbing. As we read of what David went through and think of what provoked it, remember what Jesus went through at the hands of hostile men and what provoked that, and the devil-inspired treachery of Judas. As we look at the character of David, consider how Jesus matches and surpasses him in his devotion to his Father and his passion for what is right. And as we read of what David feels – his distress, his sense of drowning, of the pit closing over him, his sense of abandonment – recall the isolation of Jesus so often during his life and the cry of dereliction from the cross. Can you bear to read David’s words as giving us a glimpse into the very thoughts and experience of Christ? We are on holy ground.

David is in a desperate state and cries to God as he waits for him to intervene 1–3: “Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary with my crying out; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.” What is causing his intense distress? Enemies, in great number, but it is not military defeat or physical attack that have brought him so low: 4: “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause; mighty are those who would destroy me, those who attack me with lies. What I did not steal must I now restore?” But why this virulent misrepresentation on the part of people whom he has given no reason to hate him? What explains the intensity of this antagonism? He knows he is not perfect 5: “O God, you know my folly; the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you”, but the real cause is not in fact in David himself but in a deep hostility against God that is being directed with savage malevolence against someone who is identified with God because he is faithful to him. 7, 9b: “For it is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that dishonor has covered my face”; “the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.”

So is it just the humiliation and disgrace, to the point where he is being ostracised by his own closest family (v. 8), and a sense of unfairness that he is the kicking boy for people who can’t take it out on God that have brought the Psalmist so low? We say “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me”. Reproach – verbal abuse and taunting – seems a slight and inadequate cause for the almost pathological distress that the Psalmist is expressing. Doesn’t v.4 seem like paranoia? And look at 19–20: “You know my reproach, and my shame and my dishonor; my foes are all known to you. Reproaches have broken my heart, so that I am in despair. I looked for pity, but there was none.” Surely the man is just over-reacting and has worked himself into a state of depression.

There are two things to say about that. First, the sociology. Middle Eastern societies at that time, and it is still true of Mediterranean lands generally, are “honour and shame” societies. Individuals, families, nations feel deeply any slight to their honour. Reputation matters. A person disgraced or treated with scorn will kill another or even kill himself because he cannot live with the shame. Look at what we have just read about how the Psalmist is affected. The OT is in fact full of language such as mocking, taunting, showing contempt; becoming an object of derision, a byword, a proverb. These things are of huge personal and national significance, and the heightened importance (from our point of view) invested in these social values is the base-line when we try to grasp what the Psalmist is going through. The second, and more important, thing to say about the Psalmist’s state is that although he is bearing the brunt of the reproaches aimed at God, the reason the Psalmist is so distressed is the intensity of his zeal for God’s cause 9a: “For zeal for your house has consumed me.” His jealous passion for God’s honour is like a consuming fire within him. In David’s day the Temple had still not been built, but they had the Tent of Meeting which in a similar way represented God’s presence and the respect and worship that are his due. And notice in v. 6 it is because he cares so deeply about God’s reputation in people’s eyes and the respect that he should be shown, that he wants God to rescue him, because if he is not delivered, he says to God, think of the effect on other members of the believing community 6: “Let not those who hope in you be put to shame through me, O Lord GOD of hosts; let not those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me, O God of Israel” (note the “national” names for God in 6b and 6d in comparison with v.3). If he is not delivered, other believers will be put through the same kind of ordeal, as people taunt them, saying, “Where is your God in all this? Look at that miserable creature David! How can you believe in a God who lets his people get into such a state? Your God is rubbish!”

Yet even though God seems so remote and his troubles loom so large, we find an unshakeable faithfulness to God at the heart of the Psalmist’s prayer, and a profound and constant trust in him because he knows the character of the One who means so much to him 13: “But as for me, my prayer is to you, O LORD. At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of your steadfast love answer me in your saving faithfulness.” 16–18: “Answer me, O LORD, for your steadfast love is good;
according to your abundant mercy, turn to me. Hide not your face from your servant; for I am in distress; make haste to answer me. Draw near to my soul, redeem me; ransom me because of my enemies!” And there is yet more to David’s character as we see it in the psalm. Did you notice 10 and 11? “When I wept and humbled my soul with fasting, it became my reproach. When I made sackcloth my clothing, I became a byword to them.” Now it may be that we should link David’s penitence with the sin he acknowledges in v. 5; but if the verses are to be taken with those that they follow (which seems the natural implication), then the Psalmist’s shame and repentance are over the treatment of God by the God-despisers: he is taking their sin on himself, humbling himself on their behalf, and in doing so foreshadowing the infinitely greater act of identification in which Jesus actually pays for our sin by dying the death that we owed. Doesn’t that say volumes about the character of the man? And volumes about how great must be the trial he is going through for such a man to be brought into such bleak darkness.

It is all down to his enemies who are the despisers of God. They are acting with total consistency in the verses we have just read in despising everything to do with true religion. And we see their fundamental scorn expressed in heartless tormenting of the distressed and their enjoyment of the unhappy state of those whom God is disciplining for his own good ends 20b–21: “I looked for pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none. They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.” 26: “For they persecute him whom you have struck down, and they recount the pain of those you have wounded.” There is a line of demarcation that could not be clearer. These people have put themselves decisively in the opposite camp from the Psalmist: his zeal for God even in the midst of desolating loneliness and abandonment is the categorical antithesis of their zeal for wickedness, callousness and hatred, and their scorn of God. They have given themselves over to godlessness, apparently irredeemably. For them there is no way back. And that is why the Psalmist in 22–28 (which we have no time to consider in detail) is calling upon God to bring his judgement on them. This is not mere vindictiveness, asking God to hit them hard so that he can get satisfaction. He is asking for no more than what God himself in other places in the OT threatens as punishments and actually brings about. He is asking for God’s right order to be upheld and God’s justice to be accomplished (see vv. 24, 27 and 28 in particular). The judgement on the God-despisers is simply the reverse side of God’s redemption and salvation for those who are faithful to him (see vv. 18 and 28).

There is something left to add, however, to the picture of hostility in this psalm, something that the Psalmist was not privileged to know, living when he did, but which we do know because we have the fuller revelation of the whole Bible. Why is the hostility of the psalmist’s enemies so intense and ruthless? There is one verse in the judgement section that leads us to the answer. In Acts 1 Peter says this: “Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas [the betrayer of Jesus]. ... For it is written in the Book of Psalms, ‘May his camp [i.e., his nomad encampment] become desolate, and let there be no one to dwell in it’.” That is verse 25 of our psalm. Peter goes on to quote from Psalm 109, which is a companion-piece to our psalm and fills out significant details that you might look at in your own time. Now Judas’s act of treachery is attributed in the gospels (Luke 22:3; John 13:27) to the specific and direct influence of Satan, who is thereby completing (as he would see it) the campaign of hatred and attempted destruction against God’s Christ that he had waged all through Jesus’s earthly life; indeed the betrayal by Judas is intended by Satan as the climax of the conflict against God and all who trust themselves to him and serve him, that he has masterminded and inflamed since the first sin of Adam and Eve. It is his malignancy and malevolence that lie behind the human enemies of the people of faith (and that includes Jesus himself), whether they know it or not. The psalm depicts just a corner of the universal battlefield where the larger conflict is being played out, but where the same laws apply.

We know, of course, that the final victory over sin, Satan and death itself has already been won; it was never in doubt, but time has to pass. God had so much that he wanted us to see and learn about wickedness and its effects and consequences, and about his own holiness, love, patience and power to save, even in this damaged world and with damaged people, that it took time up until Jesus came and enacted what was a reality in God’s heart and mind from the beginning; and for the same reasons the outworking will take the rest of time – that is what time is for. But still, in the midst of all that, we are on the victory side. The Psalmist saw it coming as well, in his own terms, in the final part of our psalm. And if we like him are faithful people we can’t escape the skirmishing. It may be low-level annoyances from people you might know whom you would not perhaps identify as having an attitude of open antagonism to God; they may well themselves not recognise that God comes into the equation. But they take offence at what smacks of holiness, of the life pleasing to God – your honesty, truthfulness, concern for others; your dislike of what is cruel, hurtful, indecent; your “religiousness”. It gets up their nose, and they want to take it out on you. The skirmishing may become more like open hostilities with full-blown malevolence. Many, many passages in the NT deal with the troubles and persecutions that Christians can expect and provide reasons and motives to help us cope and rise above them. Let me finish with a passage that applies the example of Jesus and ends with a quotation from our psalm. John 15:18–25 (p.1087). The more we identify with Jesus, the more likely we are to face opposition. But identification with Jesus in the way of the cross is the way of victory and the way to glory. That is the message of Easter.

* Verse 4 in John 15:25; 9a in John 2:17; 9b in Romans 15:3; 21 echoed in Matt. 27:34 and John 19:28; 22–23 in Romans 11:9–10; 25 in Acts 1:20.

** In the NT he is indeed called a prophet (by Matthew in 13:35 and Peter in Acts 2:30). We are told in Acts (chaps 1, 2 and 4, and compare Heb. 3:7ff.) that the Holy Spirit spoke by the mouth of David, and in Hebrews (chap.1) the words “God says” introduce words that David wrote. And the psalms are quoted on numerous occasions in the NT as God’s Scripture, and particularly as pointing to Jesus. All in all a pretty fair endorsement of David’s credentials. So there should be no difficulty in accepting that as David composed his psalm he was guided by God himself in his reflections and also in the way he expressed himself so that his words do indeed have prophetic value.