Please remain standing now for the reading of
God's Word. We're going to be looking at
Psalm 6 this morning. Again, Psalm 6. Please
listen to the reading of God's Word.
To the choirmaster
with string instruments
according to the sheminith,
a psalm of David.
O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger,
nor discipline me in your wrath.
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I
am languishing.
Heal me, O Lord, for my bones are
troubled.
My soul also is greatly troubled.
But you, O Lord, how long?
Turn, O Lord.
Deliver my life.
Save me for the sake of your steadfast
love. For in death there is no remembrance
of you.
In sha'ol, who will give you praise?
I am weary with my moaning.
Every night I flood my bed with tears.
I drench my couch with my weeping. My
eye wastes away because of grief. It grows
weak because of all my foes.
Depart from me, all you workers of evil,
for the Lord has heard the sound of
my weeping.
The Lord has heard my plea.
The Lord accepts my prayer.
All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly
troubled.
They shall turn back and be put to
shame
in a moment.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God. Please be seated.
In June
of 15 20,
Spanish control over the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan
was quickly
unraveling.
A few weeks earlier, the tension in Tenochitlan
had reached a boiling point
and full rebellion against the Spanish had broken
out after Spanish conquistador
Hernan Cortes left the city and traveled back
to Veracruz
to defeat the troops that the Spanish governor
in Havana
had deployed to arrest Cortes
for insubordination.
In Cortes' absence, the man he had left
in charge,
Pedro de Alvarado,
had ordered a massacre
of the Aztec nobles and priests who were
participating in a pagan ceremony
at the great temple in Tenochtitlan.
The attack
was brutal
resulting in many deaths and sparking a fierce
uprising.
After Cortes defeated the Spanish troops from Havana,
he returned to Tenochtitlan
to find that the fragile peace with the
Aztecs
had been shattered.
And he immediately understood the great peril of
his circumstances.
With the Spanish troops besieged
from within the city walls,
Cortes decided that a hasty retreat
was their only hope.
So, exactly 504
years ago today,
on the fateful night of June 30th,
15 20,
Hernan Cortes led his troops,
under the cover of darkness in a daring
escape out of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.
2 things conspired against him and turned that
attempted escape
into a catastrophe.
1st,
the greed of his troops significantly
slowed down their movement
since not only were they traveling
under heavy armor, but they were also weighed
down
by the gold they had stolen from the
Aztec treasury.
2nd,
on the night of June 30th 15 20,
there was a full moon.
So their greed deprived them of agility
and the bright moonlight
deprived them of stealth.
And they moved as they moved along the
causeway
that connected the inland city the island city
to the mainland.
Having become aware of their movements, the Aztec
warriors launched a fierce attack.
Chaos erupted as the Spaniards fought desperately to
survive.
Many fell under the barrage of Aztec spears
and arrows,
and many more drowned
in the Lake Texcoco's dark waters,
submerged under the unbearable burden of their stolen
gold.
Though the Aztecs have removed part of the
causeway that connected the Nocitlan to the mainland,
as the bodies of men and horses piled
up along the shallow waters of the lake,
their lifeless bodies
formed a morbid bridge
that ironically permitted Cortes and others to reach
the mainland
and preserve their lives.
Exhausted and defeated,
Cortes and those who escaped regrouped near a
large cypress tree with a trunk over 10
feet in diameter and about a 150 feet
tall.
The few remaining hours of the night became
a nightmare
that Cortez would never forget.
The Aztecs had managed to capture scores of
Spanish soldiers. And for the rest of the
night, the Aztecs devoted themselves
to ritualistically
sacrifice
every single one of them.
So under the massive cypress tree and the
unrelenting witness of the full moon,
the air became thick with the weeping and
wailing of the sacrificial victims.
And Cortes, overwhelmed by the agony of his
men, succumbed in despair
and whipped bitterly.
That tree came to be known as el
arbol de la noche triste or the tree
of the night of sorrows.
A tree whose trunk still stands,
a silent witness to the deep sorrow that
can befall
the human soul.
I pray none of us ever find ourselves
in the shadow of that kind of tree.
But King David, the primary human author of
the Hebrew Psalter,
not only experienced nights like the one Cortez
experienced exactly 505104
years ago under the tree of the night
of sorrows,
but thankfully,
he also recorded his raw sentiments
in the Psalter,
providing the church in God's providence and under
his guidance
with a compass
to guide us out of a state of
deep sorrow and into the light of God's
love.
Psalm 6 is precisely
that kind of godly compass.
Now many consider Psalm 6 to be the
first of 7 penitential Psalms in the Psalter.
In such Psalms, the psalmist expresses
sorrow for sin
and he pleads with God for mercy and
deliverance.
Think for a moment how extraordinary this is.
Many people today suggest that the Christian God
is either despotic or uncaring,
and that Christians are self righteous and hypocritical.
However,
penitential Psalms, like Psalm 6,
demonstrate
that far from being or far from being
called by the scriptures
to be self righteous,
or or in far from being encouraged by
the scriptures to be hypocritical,
the scriptures call us and encourage us to
confess our sin and to express sorrow for
it.
And far from God being despotic and uncaring,
the scriptures teach us that He has compassion
for His people
and that his saving work is an act
of mercy and a demonstration
of his love
for them.
This is why Psalm 6 presents a message
of hope for you this morning.
Since it reminds you that because God is
who He is,
you can come to Him as you are,
in the depths of sorrow,
in the shame of your sin,
in the agony of persecution.
And not only will He not turn you
away,
but because of the love that is yours,
by virtue of your union with Christ,
He will have mercy on you and He
will deliver you from the attacks of the
wicked
and from the fear of uncertainty,
and even from the seemingly
unbearable weight of deep despair.
And that's not all.
God will also work in you even painfully
if necessary
to purify you,
to cause you to repent
from your sin,
to teach you to hate your sin, and
to turn away from it, and to turn
in hope to Christ
that you might become more and more like
Him.
You see, the Psalms are not only a
window
into our hearts.
They are they are the uncensored voice
of the Christian soul
confessing to God our remorse,
our fear,
our shame,
and our sorrow, and doing so with the
expectation
that our good heavenly Father hears our prayers
and acts for our benefit.
If I could distill the message of Psalm
6 into a singular proposition,
it would be this,
In your distress
do not despair,
but turn to God for deliverance.
Again, in your distress do not despair,
but turn to God for deliverance.
So the message of Psalm 6 is a
message that we all need to hear this
morning,
for it offers us many practical lessons that
will enable us to draw near to God
in our time of need.
Consider first the title or superscript of the
Psalm.
We read,
to the choirmaster
with string instruments
according to the sheminith,
a Psalm
of David.
The first thing I want to point out
to you is that like like Psalms 45
before it, Psalm 6 is addressed to the
choir master.
Furthermore,
the title intimates that the psalm is to
be recited or sung with stringed instruments
according to the sheminith.
The sheminith means the 8th.
So it probably
refers to an 8 stringed instrument
or to a musical beat.
You might ask, why should we care about
these kinds of details?
The reason is that we ought to worship
God in the way that He commands,
neither taking away from His ordinances
nor adding rituals according to our own preferences
or to the traditions of men as Moses
instructs in Deuteronomy
12
and Jesus confirms in Matthew 15.
This is known as the regulative principle
of worship,
which asserts that the worship of God should
be based solely on what is explicitly commanded
in scripture.
This is why our worship services
are not a concert,
nor a political rally,
nor a platform for a self improvement TED
talk,
nor your weekly cappuccino with Jesus check-in.
Instead,
we strive to worship God in spirit and
in truth as Jesus commands us to do
so in John 4:24,
and to do so decently and in order
as Paul instructs in 1st Corinthians 14:40.
And to do it in a way that
God himself prescribes
in the entirety
of his word.
And we learned in Psalms and we learned
in Psalms, like Psalm 6,
that music and singing has always been an
important
and God honoring element
of worship.
Even in our simple worship services,
we worship God by singing hymns
accompanied with a stringed instrument. In this case,
the piano, which even though it has a
keyboard,
is,
its sound production relies on strings being struck
by hammers.
Our first lesson, therefore,
is that we sing in our worship services
not primarily because we enjoy it, though we
do,
nor because singing together brings us closer together,
though it does,
but because singing
to God in worship is prescribed
in his word.
Now, the title also teaches us that this
Psalm is composed by David.
However, unlike Psalm 3, for example, which tells
us the what the Psalm is about,
Psalm 6 does not give us the historical
background
for its composition.
We do know,
that Psalm 6 is a prayer that David
offers in terribly difficult circumstances,
perhaps under his own tree of sorrows.
So, in the midst of his agony,
let us first of all consider David's posture.
In verse 2, we read that David is
languishing
and that his bones are troubled.
And in verse 3, we read that his
soul is greatly troubled.
The word languishing has the sense of withering,
of drying out,
of dwindling away.
It's as if his very life is dissipating,
like it is vanishing into thin air.
His bones, which are the frame of his
body or the scaffolding, one might think, of
of his very existence
are troubled,
or better yet
distressed,
and his soul
is greatly troubled.
The word languishing,
like I said, has this this sense of
of of withering. And and David is,
feels like his whole existence is withering, like
he is falling apart.
His body cannot withstand the burden
that is that he is carrying and his
soul is in abject terror.
He is utterly dismayed, one might say.
That's the sense
conveyed by David's poetic language in this Psalm.
In verses 6 and 7, we learn more
about David's ruinous condition.
His pain has provoked an intense moaning
that has debilitated him.
And at night, tears pour out from his
eyes without ceasing,
so that his couch is drenched
by his unconsolable
weeping.
So profound is his grief is his grief
that his eyes are wasting away from so
much crying. And he feels that the constant
torment
from his foes might cause him to lose
his eyesight altogether
as his eye grows weaker
and weaker.
Darkness
is encompassing David and he is about to
black out as the world, his world is
spinning out of control.
Worst of all,
verse 1 shows that David is concerned that
God has set his anger and his wrath
against him.
You see that
in his words in verse 1.
In other words, David's despair
is deepened
by his concern
that God has forsaken him.
So in Psalm 6,
David's posture is that of a man who
is forlorn,
physically frail,
spiritually faint,
emotionally
fading.
He feels forsaken
and forgotten by God.
Have you ever felt this way?
Perhaps not all at once, but can you
identify
with that sense
of sorrow that is conveyed in the first
seven verses of Psalm 6?
Problems in your marriage, for example,
can lead you down very very dark paths.
Especially because conflict with your spouse
can make it seem as if you had
made an adversary
out of the very person whom God has
provided to encourage
and support you in your adversity.
And if you're not careful,
that can cause you to lose trust in
your spouse,
and to lose trust even in God's promises.
And that can very quickly and effectively be
used by Satan
to cause you to
feel physically alone,
and emotionally abused,
and spiritually abandoned.
Relational conflicts with family or with friends can
cause you to experience a deep sense of
betrayal.
When one of your children, or grandchildren,
or when one of your parents is not
walking with the Lord,
that can provoke a profound
sense of sorrow.
The loss of employment
and the uncertainty that comes with it
can lead to unbearably high levels of stress
and anxiety
as you consider the potential repercussions
on your family,
not to mention the unwarranted
guilt and shame that often accompany
the loss of a job.
And speaking of guilt and shame,
hidden,
indwelling sin
over time
can not only stunt your spiritual maturity
and your growth in godliness as well,
But Satan can use it to cause you
to doubt your salvation,
leading you to spiritual despair.
Of course, chronic illness,
deteriorating health,
an unfavorable diagnosis,
and the prospect of death, either yours or
that of a loved one,
can lead you to a very dark valley
indeed,
causing you to drench your pillow with tears
night
after night
after night.
My father was diagnosed with a very aggressive
form of cancer in September of 2011.
And he passed away 2 months later at
the age of 59.
I love my father deeply and those couple
of months were a nightmare to me. It
It was a nightmare to my sisters. It
was most of all a nightmare to my
mother.
I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to
spend the last 10 days of my dad's
life with him, although the remembrance of those
days can still be disquieting for me.
In particular,
the night before he died was especially ghastly.
I remember it was about 3 in the
morning and I couldn't sleep. So I went
to the living room and, there was a
window in our living room that,
faced the front of the street.
And I opened that window and noticed that
there was no breeze.
It was eerily
quiet and still outside,
as if death itself had moved into the
neighborhood.
The only sound I could hear was that
of my father's labored breathing
as he gasped for air with greater and
greater difficulty.
I thought to myself,
what a nightmare this is.
I was in my last year of seminary
and I remember praying that God would have
mercy on my father.
Since he was a believer, I prayed that
if God was not going to heal him,
that he would take my father to enjoy
his presence.
I also prayed that God would use my
profound sense of pain to teach me how
to minister to his sheep
whenever their hearts were hurting
like mine was.
In that night of sorrow, instead of questioning
the goodness of God, I was thankful that
the Lord permitted me to seek comfort in
him through prayer.
And you see that is the pattern that
David lays out for us in Psalm 6.
While the circumstances of his life have given
him a posture of sorrow,
David doesn't protest against God.
Instead he prays to him,
pleading with him before
God's throne of grace.
And that is what we must do
when we find ourselves under the tree of
sorrow.
We are not to run away from God.
We are to take comfort
under the shadow of His wings.
So having looked at David's posture, let us
now consider David's plea.
Notice first of all that David addresses his
plea to God
using his covenantal name, Yahweh,
translated Lord in the ESV.
In the 10 verses of Psalm 6, David
uses God's covenantal name 8 times.
So when sadness sets in,
when anguish
agitates you,
when doubt depresses you,
when conflict confounds you,
when fear makes you faint,
when iniquity
isolates you.
Beloved Christian, do not believe even for a
moment
that your privilege
of calling upon your heavenly Father for help
has been revoked.
On the contrary,
that is when Christ's work for you
is most beneficial.
And when he most clearly demonstrates
his unfailing love for you.
Remember that your standing before God has never
been grounded
on your goodness
or steadfastness,
nor on your happiness or confidence,
nor even on the strength and extent of
your faith.
No, the reason
why you can turn to God in prayer
even and especially
in your night of sorrow
is because of Christ's perfect and finished work
for you.
The circumstances in your life may change.
The vibrancy of your walk with the Lord
may vary.
The fortitude of your faith may fade
or may flourish.
But what never changes,
but is always
steadfast
and is always sufficient
is the merit and efficacy
of Christ's work for you.
Saying snares,
the fallen world's lies,
and your own sinfulness will constantly remind you
of your inadequacy
to stand before God.
Ah, but in so doing,
your adversaries are doing you a great favor.
For you see, a great a greater apprehension
of your personal inadequacy
should result in a correspondingly
greater appreciation
for Christ's work.
Remember Jesus' rebuke of Simon the Pharisee in
Luke 7
when Jesus asked him, If a lender cancels
a man's debt of 50 denarii
and another man's debt of 500 denarii,
which man will love him more?
And Simon answered, I suppose the one who
had the larger debt.
So Jesus replied, You suppose correctly.
He who has forgiven much
loves much.
Far from invalidating your appeal before God's grace,
it is precisely
through confessing your necessity and poverty
and your personal unworthiness
before God
that the chambers of the king shall be
open wide to you.
Through the abundantly merciful ministrations of Jesus
who is never ashamed of you, but who
will gladly anoint your head with oil and
prepare a table for you in the presence
of your enemies.
When the devil reminds you of your inadequacy
and need,
discern
that you have been forgiven much.
So love much.
So in your distress do not despair,
but turn to God for deliverance.
For a sound travels faster through water than
it does through air,
so also
your tears
expedite your appeal for mercy before the very
heart of the God of consolation.
The second thing I want you to notice
about David's plea
is that in verse 1, David doesn't ask
that God not rebuke him nor discipline him,
but that God does not do these things
in anger
or in wrath.
There are 2 things I want you to
take away from this. 1st,
you may find that the rebuke and discipline
of the Lord is painful,
but you can be assured that it is
always good.
If we rebuke and discipline our own children
because we want to help them grow in
maturity,
steering them away
from a direction that will lead them to
trouble,
and helping them to experience instead a life
of blessing and joy and peace,
how much more
should we benefit
from the rebuke and discipline
of our loving
heavenly Father.
So don't despise the Lord's rebuke and discipline
when they come, but learn from them
and grow through them.
2nd,
notice that David prays that God restrain his
anger and his wrath.
Now can God restrain his anger and wrath
from us
even when our sinful actions merit it?
Would this not violate God's justice?
No, it would not.
The Christian can indeed pray that God withhold
his anger and wrath from us without putting
God's justice in jeopardy.
The reason for this, of course, is that
God has already fully satisfied
his anger and wrath for our sins
when Jesus was judged on the cross of
Calvary.
Thus David prayed relying on the future fulfillment
of God's promise.
But you can pray remembering
God's past demonstration
of his faithfulness. The
third thing I want you to notice about
David's plea
is that he reminds God of his covenantal
promises for to his people.
In verses 2 and 4, David asked for
grace,
healing,
deliverance,
and salvation.
Not because he deserves them,
not because it would be just for him
to receive these blessings,
but for the sake of God's steadfast love.
What David is doing here is reminding God
of the promises
that God made to his people.
In Exodus 3:8,
when God appears before Moses in the burning
bush, he tells him, I have come down
to deliver
my people out of the land out of
the hand of the Egyptians
and to bring them out of that land
to a good and broad land, a lamb
flowing with milk and honey.
In Exodus 52,
after God delivers Israel from bondage in Egypt,
Moses and the people of Israel praise God
by singing a song saying,
The Lord is my strength and my song,
and He has become
my salvation.
In Exodus 1526,
as Israel begins its journey through the wilderness,
God made this promise.
If you will diligently listen to the voice
of the Lord your God,
and do that which is right in his
eyes, and give ear to his commandments, and
keep all his statutes,
I will put none of the diseases on
you that I put on the Egyptians,
for I am the Lord,
your healer.
And on Mount Sinai, in Exodus 34:6,
as God hands Moses the tablets of the
10 commandments,
that are going to go inside the ark
of the covenant, God identifies himself in this
way.
The Lord
the Lord, a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love
and faithfulness.
So you see the lessons the lesson for
us
is that it is always good for us
to pray God's words back to Him,
especially
reminding him of his promises to his people
and claiming them because of his steadfast love.
This underscores the practical importance of reading the
Bible.
For it is only by reading the Bible
that we will be able to learn and
claim God's promises
for us and for our loved ones as
they are contained
in the Bible.
The last thing I want to highlight about
David's plea this morning is the purpose that
he attaches to it. Look at verses 45
with me.
Turn, O Lord,
deliver my life.
Save me for the sake of your steadfast
love.
For in death
there is no remembrance of you. In Sheol,
who will give you praise?
David says that the reason why God should
be gracious to him, and heal him, and
deliver him, and save him
is so
that David can remember God's faithfulness
and give him praise.
Beloved Christian,
it is good for us to write down
our prayers, not only because it will help
us remember
who to pray for and what to pray
for,
but also
because it will help us remember God's faithfulness,
which will increase our gratitude and love for
Him,
and it will encourage and embolden us to
give Him praise, which will help others
trust in Him.
In verses 8 to 10, David's tone changes.
He writes,
depart from me all you workers of evil,
for the Lord has heard the sound of
my weeping.
The Lord has heard my plea. The Lord
accepts my prayer.
All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly
troubled.
They shall turn back and be put to
shame
in a moment.
It's as if David's sorrow has dissipated
and he is confident
that the Lord has heard his weeping,
has heard his plea, and most importantly
has accepted
his prayer.
So in this prayer
of Psalm 6,
we have seen that David's posture of sorrow
led him to plead God's promises
for the purpose of praising God.
Now we see David's prayer end with a
prophecy.
Instead of David being concerned
about God's anger and wrath, he warns his
enemies that God's anger and wrath will fall
upon them.
Altogether certain that in a moment,
they will be put to shame.
This shift in the Psalm is so abrupt
that it has left secular biblical scholars confounded
leading some of them even to posit that
these verses were a later edition written by
a different hand.
Christians, of course, have no excuse for indulging
such folly.
You see in verse 9, David tells us,
The Lord
accepts
my prayer.
And that
tells us everything we need to know about
the source of David's confidence and the reason
for his change in tone.
The reason the Lord accepts David's prayer
is the same reason why God's anger and
wrath are no longer set on David.
You see, as David prayed God's promises,
David himself remembered them.
And he understood that God himself would provide
and offer up
the lamb who would appease God's anger and
wrath.
So David trusted,
fully trusted,
in that promise.
You and I get to fully trust
in that fact.
Look at how the author of Hebrews puts
it in Hebrews 10.
He writes, and every priest stands daily at
his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices
which can never take away sins.
But when Christ
offered for all time a single sacrifice for
sins,
he sat down at the right hand of
God,
waiting for the time until his enemies should
be made a footstool for his feet.
For by a single offering,
he has perfected for all time
those
who are being sanctified.
Christ is both our Passover lamb which satisfies
God's anger and wrath and our high priest
who is at God's right hand,
interceding for us, guaranteeing
through His perfect merit
that God accepts our prayers
as they are sanctified and offered up by
Jesus Himself.
In a moment,
your enemies and His enemies
will be made a footstool
for His feet.
This liberates us to pray as Jesus commanded
us for our enemies
since vengeance belongs to him
and not to us.
You know, we live in a time
during which revisionist history
is everywhere.
And this movement has not spared even the
tree of the night of sorrow.
Early in 2020,
just before the 500th anniversary of Cortez's fateful
night,
the authorities in Mexico City renamed
the tree
from the tree of the night of sorrow
to the tree of the victorious night
commemorating the victory of the native Aztecs over
the European colonizers.
And although I'm no fan of revisionist history,
in this instance, I do find good precedence
for that revision.
You see, as Cortes wept bitterly under the
tree of sorrow,
he vowed to return one day to avenge
his men's death
and conquer
Tenochtitlan. Well, that reminds me of a different
vow under a different tree.
On the night of his arrest,
our savior was greatly troubled,
sweating drops of sorrow as he prayed beneath
an olive tree.
Yet he vowed to do his father's will
no matter what the cost.
The next day, under the shadow of another
tree on Calvary,
the drops of sorrow transformed into drops of
love.
As our Lord fulfilled his vow
not to avenge his men by killing his
enemies,
but to redeem his bride
by dying for her while she was yet
his enemy.
Thus, while it's true that our savior hung
on a tree of sorrow,
that tree became a tree of victory when
he was raised on the 3rd day.
That's why like David,
if you're in Christ, you can be sure
that God's anger and wrath are no longer
on you.
That's also why like David, if you are
in Christ, you can be sure that God
accepts your prayer.
So in your distress,
do not despair,
but turn to God
for deliverance.
Let's pray.