Psalm 147 • The God Who Heals
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
"Though Satan should buffet and trials should come, by our faith in Christ it is still well with our soul."
That is really the subject of the Psalm that we will consider this day, Psalm 147.
It's toward the end of the Psalter, the Hebrew hymnal, what we call the book of Psalms. The last three Psalms the people are celebrating, but as we will soon see, it is difficult for them to do.
Psalm 147.
Let's stand as we honor God's Word. I'll read now verses 1 through 5, and we'll cover the rest of the Psalm as I speak to you. Psalm 147.
"For it is good to sing praises to our God, for it is pleasant and a song of praise is fitting."
The Lord builds up Jerusalem.
He gathers the outcast of Israel.
He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.
He determines the number of the stars. He gives to all of them their names.
Great is our Lord and abundant in power.
His understanding is beyond measure. Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, your understanding not only beyond measure, beyond our understanding,
when we face the storms that make us question, when we face the inexplicable and ask why,
our hurts sometimes turn away from you.
But this Psalm urges us to turn to you with insight into who you are and what you have done.
Help us to understand.
If not what happens, the God who is ours and takes us through and gives us rest. Bring peace to our souls by your word, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Please be seated.
I thrived on the urgency of the emergency room, the chaos, the opportunities, the ability to reach people and help them in their direst moments.
So writes an emergency room nurse, Katherine Butler, but she also wrote this, "After work, I would drive for hours.
One dawn I parked at a bridge that spanned the Connecticut River. Mountains flanked the bridge and the October sunrise set the horizon a fire in jewel tones. I tipped my face against the wind, breathed and felt nothing.
I parted my lips to pray, but no words came.
I felt cut off from God.
I thought the Lord, if He existed, had abandoned me."
Why the emptiness?
Because the excitement of the emergency room could not compensate for the trauma of the emergency room.
That night before the dawn when she could not pray, Katherine had cared for a 22-year-old bludgeoned with a baseball bat in his sleep. The attack had killed his wife. He was struggling for his life and their four-year-old had witnessed it all.
While they were treating him, paramedics rushed in with a 15-year-old boy dying from a gunshot wound.
And while they were treating him, another 15-year-old came in. This time, another gunshot wound, but his mother accompanying him. And when she saw her son, she shrieked and fainted.
Each of my patients, wrote the nurse, Katherine, suffered because someone saw them as of no worth.
But God saw them, and here they were, where they of no worth to Him.
She wrote, "The emergency room was adrenaline, but what I prayed for and dreamed about was numbness.
I just did not want to feel."
Thus later she wrote, "My husband lost his job.
He sought the church and for the first time understood the Word of God and accepted Jesus as His Savior. He invited me to come to church to worship with Him. I finally attended to appease my husband."
At the sanctuary, the singing, the sermon seemed awkward and foreign and unreal.
My husband would bow his head in prayer.
I would stare ahead, my gaze defiant.
We may not like the words, but we do understand.
At least we should understand, for it's precisely what this psalm is about. This is from the fifth book of the psalms, the very last collection in the Hebrew hymnal, the time when the people of God are now coming back from exile. Their nation has been destroyed. Their families have been decimated. By the time Jerusalem was finally conquered by the Babylonians, the cruelty that had been exerted over the people was beyond the expression that we can politely give in our Sunday school classes.
They know what they should be doing.
It's verse 1. "It is good to sing praises to our God. It's pleasant and the song of praise is fitting."
They even know what they ought to pray for. Verse 2, "The Lord builds up Jerusalem. He gathers the outcast of Israel." They have been dispersed across the nations if they have not actually been enslaved by Babylon.
The families that remain are now back in Jerusalem trying to rebuild the walls and the temple, but it is just a shadow of the former glory. They are building on ruins.
And now to praise God to say this will be something that is fitting and good and pleasant and will make us feel it, it just seems like a facade.
To worship is good. It's right. But how do you worship after trauma? It's precisely the same thing that Catherine Brouthard was feeling, right? I know I ought to praise. I know I ought to worship. I know the words. I know it's supposed to happen in church. But when you've experienced this kind of trauma, whether the nurse or the family experiencing the trauma itself or the person going through the trial, how do you worship after trauma?
The psalmist answers.
He reminds us that this God that people are trying to worship is one who makes provision by keeping track of outcasts.
Verse 3, "He heals the brokenhearted." He binds up their wounds, those outcasts of Israel.
It's first just describing the situation they knew. When they are identified as outcasts, they are being reminded of the atrocities that came upon Israel. We think only in a modern context, and we forget that ancient hand-to-hand conflict and the terror that would be inflicted on a town or a people, first to conquer them and then to keep them enslaved was horrible beyond description and inflicted upon tens of thousands of people.
And now they are being told that God is going to gather them back up and He will heal the brokenhearted. And we may think, well, that's just an ancient word for an ancient people that doesn't apply to believers today.
But some of you are like me, and you may keep track of such things by organizations and publications such as Open Doors, who keeps track of persecutions of Christians in our present world. And just to show you the map, you can't see the country, but you can see the colors. The colors only indicate different degrees of persecution.
And as you perceive it, you will perceive that Christians in the majority of the world in which we live are experiencing persecution from the God who says, "I will heal the brokenhearted. I will gather up the outcasts."
How hard that must be to hear when you're a young woman who has visited your husband in a North Korean prison and writes, "When I saw the man before my eyes, I could not believe it was my husband, so disfigured from the torture.
And as I continued to visit my husband, I myself was arrested."
And despite it all, continued to lead worship and prayer in the outhouse for the women of the concentration camp.
Not our reality, not our existence, maybe.
In less than 18 hours, I will be traveling to a nation where if you are a Muslim who conversed to Christianity a few years ago, you would have been caned, some to death.
But that made too much world news. So what will happen now if you are a Muslim who becomes a Christian is that you will be placed under house arrest, denied the ability to leave, to make a living, to pay for your water, to pay for your electricity, to pay for your food, to take care of your children until you recant.
Those few who may come to the meetings that I conduct with others will be in hiding if they are former Muslims. They will hide in the shadows or the chairs or even the curtains in the back and will be warned if any government officials come in. The world in which others live and we may taste every now and then, it may also be the taste of our future.
I read the words of Rod Dreher, the author of The Benedict Option, which I'm not endorsing because some of you may know it sounds like isolation and retreat from me, but he says honest words. Today's Christians who hold to the biblical teaching about sex and marriage in the United States of America have the same status in our culture and increasingly in law as racists.
The culture war that began with the sexual revolution in the 1960s has now ended basically in the defeat of Christians who believe in a scriptural standard for gender, sex, and marriage. The American mainstream has no intention of living at peace with a biblical worldview.
It's pressing forward with a harsh, relentless occupation that is being ignored by most Christians who are clueless about what is happening.
I don't know if you believe that or not, accept it or not.
I would guess you recognize that you cannot be a Christian in a school, in the workplace,
or in broad families without at times people wondering if you're crazy and ought to be allowed to have the privileges that you currently have.
The world in which we live. And yet here is God in His Word writing, "He heals the brokenhearted, he binds up the wounds, he gathers the outcasts of Israel. He takes care of his people." What kind of care is that?
How are we to understand it in light of a God who says, "I'm in charge, I'm in control, and we are suffering or facing suffering, or our brothers and sisters in Christ are facing suffering?" And by the way, it's always been that way.
How do we deal with that?
The psalmist curiously lifts his eyes to the stars. Verse 4, "Speaking of God, He determines the number of the stars, He gives to all of them their names." Great is the Lord.
Wait, I'm struggling here, and you're telling me God names the stars. How does that help?
Because if I'm feeling like an outcast from my culture, if I'm feeling like an outcast from my family, I recognize there was a moment in which God cast the stars into existence
and still names them as though He keeps track of the stars. If He can keep track of the stars, He can keep track of His people. How many stars are there after all?
The October issue of Science Magazine, David Kornreich, who's the founder of the Ask an Astronomer website at Cornell. I've not been there, but some of you may have. Says that because of the deep field pictures taken by the Hubble Telescope, we now estimate that there are two trillion galaxies, each one having on average a hundred billion stars.
Actually, since that came out in Science Magazine back in October, many astronomers say He under estimated the number of stars by half.
Actually 200 billion stars per galaxy times a trillion galaxies. That is a gazillion, gazillion, million billion.
I have no idea what it is.
It's one with 24 zeros after it.
And God knows them by name.
And that is only if you accept the fact that this is the only universe there is and don't believe what the theoretical physicists say. There might be multiple universes where God has a bazillion stars and knows them all by name.
And the psalmist is saying, as God has cast the stars across the heavens, so when His people are feeling outcast, dispersed, abandoned, God is saying, "I haven't lost track."
If I know the stars, then I have a purpose for you. I know your name.
And we're being told in the Psalm, God doesn't just keep track of the outcast. He keeps track of His justice for those who are worried about what's going on. Verse 6, very simple, He simply lifts the humble and casts down the wicked. The reminder in this vast universe with all its physical expanse is nonetheless a moral universe.
And God is making a promise about His own manner and dealing with things. And He is saying, "I will execute justice my way, my time. It's not something you have to worry about. I know we just know the words, but we don't often think of their impact. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
I will balance the scales, maybe not in your timing, maybe not in your lifetime." But God is saying, "It is the moral universe in which His purposes will be accomplished." And when we can know that, He's not lost track of us, He's not lost track of His justice. It's supposed to bring a certain peace to our hearts. I won't tell you it's not a struggle.
A lot of you will be aware that in a previous profession, I was the president of a national seminary and the consequence of being a president there for a long time when people don't like the way the church, the denomination is going, you're the chief target.
And the consequence of that was there was a period of years when I was the president of that seminary that there was a man, a pastor of a small church, wouldn't seem to have much influence, but he had inherited great wealth.
And the consequence was he had lots of time and lots of money to spend on getting after me.
Created a national newspaper, created a website, did everything he could to destroy me. I will tell you, he would do things that I would say in the name of Christ, you would say and do such things. It created in me, as he tried to destroy me and my family, it created in me such angst. I couldn't sleep at times. I couldn't eat. I lost weight. I worried. I couldn't be right to my family. At some point I recognized the very thing he was trying to do to me, I was doing to myself.
God says, I will execute justice on the earth.
Give this to me. Leave this with me.
Because I am telling you that I will lift up the humble and I will ultimately cast down the proud. It is this moral universe. For me, this was somebody who was in a profession at some distance. I know for some of you, it's not a person, it's somebody right in your own home. It's in your house, it's in your business, it's somebody in your classroom. And to be able to say, my God says he hasn't lost track of me and he will execute justice in the moral universe that he has done. It may not be in the way that I perceive or know, but God is saying he will accomplish his plan. Why should I trust that?
Because God only keeps track of his justice, he's keeping track of his creation.
He is showing us his hand, he is showing us his ability and what he says he is doing. Verses 7 through 9, "Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving. Make melody to our God on the lyre." He covers the heavens with clouds. He prepares rain for the earth. He makes grass grow on the hills. He gives to the beasts their food and to the young ravens that cry. Great and small, powerful and helpless. God is saying he gives to the earth the creation. What's it to do? What keeps it turning? What keeps it functioning?
And that's supposed to help us. Now, I recognize I can say the words and at times have trouble myself kind of receiving. Why is it supposed to help me? When I'm suffering right here and right now in this small place that God is in charge of great and big things that the creation still is taken care of, that the earth still turns, the stars are still in place.
How does that help?
Catherine Butler, the nurse from the emergency room, answers by describing her own experience.
As she struggled to worship, she began to see something beyond the angst of the emergency room. As she sat in her car after those long drives watching the sunrise, seeing the colors of the leaves, God began to heal her soul to bind up the brokenhearted in ways that she could never have anticipated.
She wrote, "The Lord took my despair and fashioned a blank canvas for his perfect work. Just as Christ raised Lazarus so that others might believe, so God redeems suffering, the gunshot wounds, the grieving, the lost jobs. He is redeeming for His glory. He pours blessings on us every day, the sunrises, the jewel tones in autumn, also the hard nights.
And even every breath, we would not see the dawn if we had not known the night."
Now, I'm going to say some things I just recognize right now.
I recognize my reach will exceed my grasp, but those of you who have been through the worst of trauma will understand.
There have been times in which all I know about my faith, all I know about the Scriptures, seems almost to have been wiped clean by tragedy.
So much hurt, so much suffering, so much trauma, it's just hard to have these things impact and hold to you anymore as though there's a blank slate where faith wanted to be.
And then suddenly, the things that never touched you before, you see the sunrise with new eyes and you recognize the earth is still turning, and you hear your heartbeat, and you feel your lungs expand.
And the things that never touched you suddenly are saying to you with volume, "My God is real, and He is working, and He's here, and He's still operating, and He's still taking care of me. I'm still here. I still breathe. My heart still functions.
I still have a God."
And it's that creation existence that's imploding into our despair that's riding on the blank canvas of our trauma. My God is still here, and He is still real. And it's God saying to His people this very thing, "I yield a broken hearted eye. I bind up their wounds. Look at the stars. Look at the baby birds in their nests. You see, I'm still working. I'm still here. And by the way, I'm still for you."
And when all of that comes together, and it doesn't necessarily come together, we're able to take the next step, to do the next right thing, to move into tomorrow with renewed faith, not because the trauma is suddenly passed, but because we actually see the writing of the Word of God on nature before us as it's expressed from the Word of God before us as well. And we understand that taking that next step forward is made possible only as we understand what God's priorities are.
And God tells us by telling us what He delights in. It's not in our strength and resources. We sometimes chuckle at verse 10 in our modern languages. Speaking of God, verse 10, "His delight is not in the strength of a horse, nor is pleasure in the legs of a man."
Hey, God is not overly impressed with your resources or your strength.
The God who made the bazillion million stars and continues to keep the universe in order isn't going, "My, you're really a pretty capable person.
You know what? You've made a lot of wealth. You're really smart. You're really strong. Nothing's going to bother you. I can tell that." You know, it's kind of like Bill Gates is not overly impressed with the corner lemon age stans prophets.
God is not looking at us and saying, "Wow, you're pretty amazing, your resources. Wow, you're really strong."
That is not what delights God. What does delight? God verse 11, "But the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him, in those who hope in His steadfast love." God is taking pleasure in those who trust Him despite the trauma, despite their resources. They're not looking to their abilities, to their strength, to their resources. They are saying, "I trust God."
Not always easy because we are always self-idolators trusting ourselves.
Soon, some of you are going to be going off to college, or if not you, maybe your kids or grandkids. And when I went off to college, I will tell you, I had a pretty good high school career.
And because I had a pretty good high school career, I thought I would do great in college. I anticipated it, expected it, wanted it. You know, I made good grades, got lots of acclimation. I just knew I'd do well.
Well when I graduated from high school, my mother, as some of you will do to your children or grandchildren, my mother gave me a Bible.
And a mother who may have known her son's heart a little better than he did, wrote right in the cover words from Jeremiah, Jeremiah 9 verses 23 and 24.
"Thus saith the Lord, let not the wise man glory in his wisdom.
Neither let the mighty man glory in his might.
But not the rich man glory in his riches.
But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understands and knows me.
That I am the Lord which exercises loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight," says the Lord.
What God delights in is not somebody that trusts in their strength and their resources. Even their ability to cope with the trauma. What God delights in is one who says, "I trust God." I know we struggle with the wording of verse 11 a bit. The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him. In our English language that word fear only seems to be parallel at times with terror somehow or fright.
But it's not the meaning that the psalmist has. We've done this before when we've studied the Psalms. Remember that Hebrew poetry does not rhyme, it reflects.
If you want to know what a particular line means, read the one that's reflecting it. They will say the same thing in different ways. Verse 11, the first line, "The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him." What does that mean?
"In those who hope in His steadfast love."
In those who so regard the one who has the power of the universe and care for the outcast
that they continue to hope. It's not hope against hope. It's that faithful confidence of God's working in the future. I have faithful confidence that God will be working. And so I have this hope in His steadfast love. I'm confident that when my world is falling apart to my eyes that God is being steadfast. That His love is still at work, that He's still accomplishing what He said He would accomplish. And it's that that carries you through the trauma so that you ultimately can worship if you're willing to grow in the understanding that God intends for you.
Walter Brueggemann is an Old Testament theologian who says the typical Christian goes through three stages of faith.
The first stage he calls the focus on security.
We count on God to provide for us emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It's the consequence of how many of us, at least as adults, come to salvation. I've mentioned a pastor friend of mine who says every adult convert that he's ever known has told the same story.
Well, you know, I was just kind of walking through life and everything was going well. And then suddenly this big rock came and fell on me.
And I knew that my resources were not enough.
And so we turned to God, and rightly so, for rescue and relief emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Often God's supplying just precisely what we need. He's the rescuer who spares us the most wicked and difficult aspects of life crisis. He supplies what we need in the early steps of our faith.
That's just stage one.
Some people never grow out of stage one.
But there is something meant to grow you out of stage one, stage two.
It is the focus on tragedy.
God is supposed to fix this or maybe to prevent it ever from happening. This isn't what I got in for.
But then comes stage three, the focus on glory. After the focus on security, the focus on tragedy, I can't see anything but the tragedy.
Then finally the focus on glory.
This faith in God seems to be shattered. It begins to build and satisfy again, often in quite surprising ways, because our faith is no longer in our fulfillment or our success or our ease, but faith in having the resources
to fulfill the eternal purposes of God.
I believe profoundly that God will give me the resources to bring Him glory, that I even in the valley of the shadow of death will fear no evil, for you are with me. And I don't just say that to myself, I say it to others. I live for the glory of God. I recognize He is providing everything that I need according to His riches in glory to accomplish His purposes in my life and the life of my loved ones, that I'm here not just for me, I am here for the purposes of God who lives on the eternal plane who is accomplishing spiritual as well as physically, emotional, material goals.
And because God is doing that, I begin to live that theology of the cross. I begin to believe that even my suffering is for the glory of God. And I can live in such a way that the very thing that the world would eschew would say, "This is no good, this is garbage." I can believe is actually the canvas on which God is painting the glory of His purposes in my life.
I recognize at this point, my reach exceeds my grasp again.
It's hard for me to say it in such a way that I think I can be clear about it, but I know you all experience it, particularly if you're in that third stage. I marvel at believers, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers in this church who are enduring suffering in their bodies, but are radiant in trust for medical personnel, for children, for grandchildren, are living the faith of not self-fulfillment, but of glory fulfillment.
I simply respect those among us, young people, who are accepting financial and emotional burdens for the sake of children to adopt them, to foster care them, to take on the brother-sister care of those who are emotionally or physically in terrible situations. And they do it not for themselves at all. They are living for the glory of others, that God's eternal purposes would be fulfilled in yet another generation. And they perceive themselves as part of that eternal plan, not just living for self anymore. And it brings them joy.
It's what makes sense of those who are in the persecuted countries who sing hymns to their torturers. It's not craziness. It's the sense of, "I'm not living for me. God, as the apostles would have said, has counted us worthy of suffering for the glory of Christ.
And I now live out my faith beyond what people see and what they expect. It's not just to make me wealthy. It's not just to make me healthy. It's not to give me a life of ease.
I rejoice for those who are making sacrifices of time and resources for your church, for Christian organizations, for mission organizations. And somehow you've caught the vision.
I'm living for the glory of God.
I'm not just self-fulfilled. I'm God-fulfilling for the Savior who gave Himself for me. And the reason I'm able to do that is I hope in God's steadfast love.
And so when the Wollongfangs and the Ringenbergs minister to us through baby Jane, there's a part of us that says, "I can't receive that. I can't accept that. I just want the God who fixes it like that." But this is this broken, fallen world that we live in where God has said, "It is not heaven yet." And so people need steadfast hope in a world that's broken. And we become part of that ministry and mission in the church of Jesus Christ as we minister to and for one another because we are living for the glory of God to be known and His eternal purposes. What are those? He tells us. He tells us what those purposes are as He tells us about the provision of His Word and its purposes. He is sustaining His kingdom and His creation and His covenant.
He's sustaining His kingdom. That's verses 12 through 14, right? Praise the Lord. Praise Him, Jerusalem. Praise Him, Zion. Why? He strengthens the bars of your gates. He blesses your children with you. He's doing things to establish His kingdom purposes. And when the kingdom has been destroyed by the Babylonians people, "Did that work? Is it still happening?" He says, "Don't just look at the physical kingdom.
Look at my creation."
Verse 15, "He sends out His command to the earth. His word runs swiftly. He gives snow like wool, scatters frost like ashes. He hurls down His crystals of ice like crumbs. Who can stand before His cold? He sends out His word and melts them." I mean, even in Peoria in the summer, you can get the hail coming out of the summer thunderstorms. And we gather our kids to the window. They say, "Look at that. Look at the marble hail on the walk there."
What if you could say, "Parent, grandparent, you know what's going to melt that hail?
The Word of God."
Not just the temperature.
God continues to sustain all things by the Word of His power. And He's operating. He's working so that you will believe He's not just in charge of a kingdom.
He's showing you He is by His creation. But the ultimate purpose is that He is sustaining His covenant.
Verse 19, "He declares His word to Jacob, His statutes and rules to Israel." He's not dealt thus with any other nation. They do not know His rules. Praise the Lord. Now, we get caught up on the rules, but recognize what He's saying. "I established the nation through Jacob, lying, conniving, thief that he was.
I was establishing a people by my grace, not because of their abilities, not because of their morality, not because of their righteousness. I, the God of Israel, who gathers the brokenhearted, who pulls the outcast back together, even though they've been idolatrous. I'm the God of Jacob, who establishes a people who do not deserve to be a people. Why do I tell you that? So that you will rejoice that God is still at work establishing eternal purposes for His people and through His people."
Two weeks ago, Panama City, Florida.
Mom lost track of two little kids. I know that never happened here.
Lost track of two little kids that got too far out in the ocean, caught in the riptide.
Other family members went out to help them.
Almost before they knew it, nine family members caught in the riptide, all in danger of dying.
Until a couple of people on the shore stood in the shallows or on the sand and began to link arms.
Standing on something solid, they linked arm to arm to arm, until at one point some report said 30 people, you read some of them, said 80 people, lined up, lined up, arm to arm to arm to arm to rescue those who were dying.
Another thing has happened.
God has dealt with His people for 4,000 years from Abraham forward to say, "I have linked the arms of my people to show you my steadfast love. Through war and famine and trial and trauma, I have reached to you so that even when you are in trauma, you know I am the God of a kingdom and all creation and a covenant.
I'm still reaching."
And God reaches through you.
We have hope in His steadfast love and believe He has called us here for His glory as we, not for our fulfillment, but for the sake of those who need His love, link arm to arm standing on the faith that we know.
For the God that we love, He has shown us His heart through His Son. He gave Himself for us not living for His good but for our glory.
And now we live for His, even through the trauma.
I so love serving you.
I so love seeing your hearts beat for Christ.
They will do so ever more strongly when your steadfast hope is in His steadfast love.
Jesus make me not depend on the earthly, but show me the eternal that I may show another.
And the heaven we all desire is ours because of the work of Jesus that you have shed abroad in our hearts and allowed us to share.
Heavenly Father, teach us the truths of Your Word.
We struggled because we're human enough to want it all to be easy, but You are honest enough to tell us it is a broken and fallen world. And so You call people of faith to live through it and to help others to live through it, not living for the moment but living for eternity.
Remind us our purpose and teach us what it means to believe it's fitting to sing praises to You because we have turned to You and trusted You, even through the trauma, that we might worship You eternally with all those that have been touched by You through our lives and tens of thousands like us.
Grant the truth of Your Word to our hearts that we may be at peace in You, we pray, in Jesus' name. Amen.