We are fast approaching the end of our series in the life of David. When I was seventeen years old and a new believer, the pastor preached through the life of David and I have been intrigued ever since. I trust that you have been not only informed, but especially challenged and edified through this series. As we near the end of the series, I will reveal my teaching strategy to you. But first, let me ask you a question. If you really ant to learn about a person, take C.S. Lewis for example, is it better to read a detailed biography about his life or would you learn more by reading all of the books he has written? I think the correct answer is that you need both. You can learn a lot about Lewis by reading The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, but if you also know that he married late in life and that he watched his young bride succumb to cancer, his books about suffering will take on new meaning .Moreover, when you combine the two, you have a better understanding of the man, Lewis. Similarly, you can learn about Lewis’ beliefs by reading the famous apologetic, Mere Christianity, but that book acquires new significance when you know that between the ages of 15 and 30, Lewis was a committed atheist who dabbled in the occult.

We have learned about David by reading his biography if you will, the inspired, inerrant history of his life as recorded in the pages of Scripture. But we have also been learning about him by reading his writings. Recall that David wrote almost half of the book of Psalms—seventy three to be exact. My teaching strategy has been to sprinkle several Psalms throughout this series in 1 and 2 Samuel. We looked at Psalm 16, the Psalm of resurrection, on Easter Sunday. We studied Psalm 23 together and three weeks ago, the great hymn of repentance, Psalm 51. This morning we will look at Psalm 18, but we will be studying in the context of 2 Samuel 22. Please turn to that chapter. This is interesting, because all of Psalm 18 has been reproduced in 2 Samuel 22. This means that the author of the Samuel history thought that out of all of David’s psalms, what we call Psalm 18 should be placed in the brief history of David’s life. Do you see how significant this is? It would be like someone writing an infallible biography of C.S. Lewis and including one of the chapters from one of his books in the biography. Suddenly that one chapter would take on additional meaning. Such is Psalm 18. I am not suggesting that this Psalm is the most important Psalm out of the 73 that David wrote, but I think it is a fitting summary of David’s relationship with the Lord.

A cursory reading of this psalm (and by the way, I will probably keep referring to it as a Psalm, even though we are technically in 2 Samuel. It is a psalm, no matter where you place it, or study it from the Bible.) shows great similarity to many other psalms. Let me give you a few keys patterns.

· Praise and thanksgiving

· Trouble and peril from enemies

· Rescue and deliverance from the Lord (Defeat of enemies)

· Praise and thanksgiving

This is a rough outline of this psalm, but it would also suffice as a rough outline of many, many psalms. These same themes are repeated again and again. And this pattern is one of the reasons why we don’t appreciate the Psalms. Occasionally I hear a believer say, “I really love the Psalms,” and I have no reason to question their sincerity. But I do not think it is a stretch to say that the average Christian, perhaps even most Christians, do not love the Psalms. Sometimes we even think the Psalms are boring—or even worse—irrelevant. I don’t think anyone would actually say, “I strongly believe that the Psalms are boring and irrelevant,” but if we routinely ignore the psalms, then are we not saying that they are boring and irrelevant by our actions?

I am not sure that I can ignite a passion for the Psalms in everyone’s heart in the next twenty minutes, but I am going to try. I will start with several reasons why we might think the psalms are boring or irrelevant.

1. The poetic words of the psalms are foreign to most people. Take vv. two and three for example. “The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation.” First of all, no one talks like that in real life. Have you ever come home after along day of work, walked into the house and declared, “The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge.” To our modern ears which are not accustomed to hearing lines of poetry, such words sound a bit foreign, and a little bit of what we might call “hyperspiritual.” It reminds us of people who go around always saying, “Praise the Lord.” “It’s raining outside today. Well, praise the Lord!” My car just got repossessed. Well, praise the Lord.” Some people say this sincerely while others just say it out of habit. In this way, the psalms can be a stumblingblock to us.

Here is my answer to this excuse: so what. So, no one talks like this, but why can’t we pray like this. Why can’t we allow the psalms to transform the way we pray, even our public prayers? I know that we are “low church” evangelicals, which means that we are not used to liturgy and responsive readings. We might even think that it is rather unspiritual to read someone else’s prayers, because they do not arise from our experience or from our words. That may be somewhat true, but I would rather hear prayers from the psalms than most of what passes for prayers that are spoken by our mouths.

Most of us are lazy pray-ers. I don’t necessarily mean that we are lazy in the sense that we don’t pray very much, although this may be true as well, but I mean that we are lazy with our words. Jesus chastised the Pharisees for vain repetition in their prayers. We think that people who pray the Lord’s prayers are guilty of the same vain repetition. Perhaps some of them are, but are we any less guilty of a different type of vain repetition with our tired, old prayers? I am including myself in this category, because my prayers need transformation just as much as anyone. Our basic prayers include thanksgiving, prayers for the sick, prayers for blessing and prosperity, and on a good day we might throw in thankfulness for our salvation. We pray the same way over and over again, using the same, worn out words we have always used. But the Psalms can transform the way we pray. I encourage you to begin to pray through the psalms. Start with Psalm one and pray devotionally through the words of the psalm. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the LORD.” This one verse can lead to a wide variety of prayers.

· “Lord, thank you for giving me a family who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.”

· “Father, right now I don’t especially feel like your word is a delight to me. Show me why this is so.”

· “Lord, there are so many people at my workplace who are walking in the counsel of the wicked—they do not know you and worship you. Help me to be a faithful witness for you today.”

You don’t have to spend a long time on each verse or pray through every verse. These are just some examples of how to pray through a psalm. You can do this on your own or do it as part of your family or couples devotions. If you do it for a while, you will see your prayers begin to be transformed.

2. We can’t relate to the continual onslaught of our enemies. In vv. 5-6 David wrote, “The waves of death swirled about me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me. The cords of the grave coiled around me; the snares of death confronted me.” Maybe my life is too easy, but I have never once felt like this. I have had bad days. I have been very sick. I have had deaths in the family, but I cannot say that I have ever felt the way David felt here. I know that there is still plenty of pain and suffering in the world. Every day, tens of thousands of people die of malnutrition and starvation. Nevertheless, especially in the western world, our prosperity and our technology have helped to insulate us from pain and suffering. In effect, prosperity and technology have lessened the full force of the original curse. The sweat of our brow has largely been helped by tractors and combines. The “increased pain in childbirth,” if we wish, can be alleviated through epidurals and other pharmaceutical wonders. Genuine prayers for “our daily bread” have been replaced by freezers full of food. “God as our provider” has been pushed away because of our retirement funds and social security. The Government’s retirement and all investments are officially called “securities.” Are they? Are they secure?

There is nothing wrong with tractors and medicine and freezers full of food and pension plans. These are not sinful by themselves, but together they serve to insulate us from a great deal of the pain and suffering of life. In other words, they make us more self-sufficient and less desperate for God. And David was desperate for God. And you would be desperate too if death swirled about you and the cords of the grave coiled around you. And what was this swirling death and cords of the grave? Verse one tells us it was Saul. “David sang to the LORD the words of this song when the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul.” If thousands of troops from your own country relentlessly chased you across the mountains and valleys, you would be desperate too.

But this is where there is so often a disconnect between the psalms of David and our own life. First of all, we don’t have thousands of troops chasing over the countryside seeking to chop off our head. We will never face a nine foot, hardened warrior like the Philistine Goliath. As I said before, we are insulated from so many things and so many people that sought to harm David, and we are insulated from so much of life’s other hardships.

Since we do not need deliverance from insane dictators, we seek a different type of deliverance. What we end up doing is redefining the enemy. Our enemy is not Saul or Absalom or Goliath. Instead, our enemy becomes something or someone far less sinister. On this past Monday there was a midget league game between two undefeated teams: the Eagles and Aligned for Health Chiropractic. This match-up became an epic battle among these 6, 7 and 8 year olds, but the real battle was not among the kids. As the game progressed and the score remained close, the two coaches began to trash talk one another. “Out! Whaddya’ mean he was out? He was safe!” That kind of thing. One coach tried to talk to the other, but he turned his back and wouldn’t even speak to him. These two continued to bicker against one another and bad mouth each other, and all of it was done in plain sight of about twenty five little midget leaguers and their families. You see, what was happening is that these two coaches were brothers and their sibling rivalry was affecting the game. Luckily, their parents were in the stands and put an end to the tirade before it turned into the Cain and Abel of the midget league world. Do you see? When we don’t have real “enemies,” we busy ourselves with creating our own.

We don’t have enemies like Saul and Goliath, so far lesser enemies begin to cast a sinister shadow in our lives. We create enemies in the political world. We pray, “Lord, deliver me from the opposing candidate. I think he is going to destroy our country and ruin my life.” In such cases, God does want to deliver us—not from the opposing candidate, but from our foolish trust in government’s ability to save us. We create enemies in our marriage. We pray, “Lord, deliver me from this rotten marriage before I lose my mind.” God is trying to tell you that he does want to deliver you—not from your rotten marriage though. He wants to deliver you from your extreme selfishness that has contributed to your rotten marriage.

Not only do we redefine the enemies that taunt us, we go the extra step of feeling let down when God does not deliver us. We read David’s psalms and see that God routinely delivered him from  the Sauls and Goliaths of the world, but we become disappointed with God because it seems that God does not always deliver us from our enemies. Why would God let us down in this way? If the Lord is truly the Deliverer, then why doesn’t he deliver us from our enemies?

Let’s say you had liver cancer in one of the lobes of your liver. At that point in your life, your liver cancer is a type of enemy, is it not? In essence, the goal of the liver cancer is to kill you. You naturally want to defeat the enemy of cancer, so you enlist a deliverer in the form of a surgeon who can cut out your cancer. You have the surgery and as you are waking from your anesthesia, the surgeon stands beside your bed and says, “Good news. When we opened you up, we didn’t detect any cancer. But just to be on the safe side, we removed your right kidney.” Do you have a right to be mad at that point? You better believe you do. The surgeon, who was supposed to deliver you from your cancer enemy, was not able to deliver you because he identified the wrong enemy. This is what happens to us in our relationship with the Lord, only we are the ones who wrongly identify the enemy. The Bible plainly tells us that God is our Deliverer. He delivered David and he will deliver us, right? But when we identify our enemy as things like strained relationships, financial struggles, sickness and disease, death of a loved one, political candidates and high gas prices, God doesn’t always deliver us from these things. If God is our Deliverer but then he doesn’t deliver us from the enemy, then we have made God out to be a liar. This leads to disappointment with God and even anger at God. Worst of all, we believe that we have a right to be angry at God and disappointed with God because he broke his promise. He promised to deliver us and he didn’t do it.

This happens because we have identified the wrong enemy, we are fighting the wrong enemy and we have asked God to deliver us from the wrong enemy? One of the reasons I know this is found in vv. 41 and 43. “You armed me with strength for battle; you made my adversaries bow at my feet. You made my enemies turn their backs in flight, and I destroyed my foes. I beat them as fine as the dust of the earth; I pounded and trampled them like mud in the streets.” Let me ask you a question. If you have identified your spouse as your enemy, do you really want God to pound and trample them like mud in the streets? If you have identified a co-worker, a difficult neighbor or your son or daughter as your enemy, do you really want God to beat them as fine as dust of the earth?

Don’t you see? We have identified the wrong enemies. I don’t deny that David was often locked in battle with real enemies who were throwing real spears at him. But in this psalm of praise, David was not praying that God would pound Saul into the mud. David twice spared Saul’s life, so he could not be wishing for that. David was not praying that God would smash the Philistines into the dust. David was not seeking to take vengeance on his enemies, but he was rejoicing that God had defeated his own enemies. And what or who is God’s chief enemy? It wasn’t Saul or even the Philistines. God’s chief enemy is sin and Satan, and God’s chief enemy, by definition, must also be our chief enemy.

Rightly understood, then, this psalm of praise is a poem of salvation. We are not waiting for God to deliver us because God has already delivered us. He has delivered us from the punishment of our sin. Before we were saved, the waves of death really did swirl about us; the torrents of destruction did overwhelm us; the cords of the grave really were coiled around us. Verse eight and following is a picture of Christ coming to earth to destroy sin. “The earth trembled and quaked, the foundations of the heavens shook; they trembled because he was angry.” God was angry at sin and he sent his Son to destroy it. The earth really did shake and tremble at the cross, did it not? As David wrote in verse 17, God reached down from on high and took hold of us, he drew us out of deep waters; he rescued us from our powerful enemy, from foes that were too strong for us. In verse three, David wrote, “[the Lord] is my savior.” The word for savior is Yeshua. In an old covenant context, David was saying, The Lord is my Yeshua—the Lord is my Jesus.

This psalm is a poem of praise for salvation, but it is also a poem of tactical prayers against our ongoing enemy of sin. We have been delivered from the punishment of sin, but sin and Satan still seek to destroy us.

Wrong enemy…

From now, when you read the Psalms…

Rich Maurer

July 6, 2008