Faithfulness Himself

Image by Людмила Аненко

​You know what made the holidays so special as a kid? The fact that everything was taken care of by someone else! You could sit back and enjoy watching dad cut down the tree (or struggle to figure out which branches went in which order on the artificial tree), you could smell the food your mother was cooking, and best of all looking under the tree on Christmas morning to see the presents that were bought for you! Those memories are wonderful, but some can look at those days as joys long gone by. Oh, those were the days when someone else took care of you, but now that responsibility is all on you and with it the nagging fear that perhaps you won’t be able to pull it off, that disaster is just around the corner. Now the eggnog makes sense. But perhaps that wasn’t your experience of the holidays. Perhaps what makes them painful to remember was the fact that there weren’t people caring for you when there should have been. The responsibilities of life were thrust on you very early, and now life is viewed through the lens of “I got myself this far, so I think I’ll make it the rest of the way.” This sense of self-sufficiency if it isn’t bravado, is simply the lack of realizing how delicate life can be. 

Psalm 146 has something to say to the both of us. Quite simply the Psalmist is telling us not to trust in people but to trust in God. What made the holidays so carefree when we were children is that we trusted the powerful people in our lives, and when those people were no longer in power, that simple trust has vanished. And in my short time in ministry, I’ve met a few self-sufficient people who suddenly were reminded how delicate they really are and thus lost that confidence. 

This Psalm, I trust, will help you regain that sense of childlike joy of this season, not because you are trusting in a new person (even if that person is yourself) but because you’ve got your eyes on Jesus. 

v 1 The Psalmist is emphasizing the theme of this Psalm which is obviously praise. He uses the covenant name of God, Yahweh showing that this praise is being offered up from the perspective of deep, abiding relationship.

We can rejoice when a player we don't even know crosses the touchdown line. We go absolutely crazy! But now let's imagine that it is our own son or daughter making the game-winning play. We go absolutely insane! The action of praising is the same in kind, but it is vastly different in quality. 
This might be what is wrong with our praise today. We praise "God" like we would say, "Long live the King," but it is very different when the king also happens to be a great father. Do you praise God from the heart that knows, is assured, of God's favor to you? Do you worship Him as someone that you have a covenant with? The Psalmist does. You can as well. 

v 2 This relationship that we have with God is a love between essentially different beings. The Psalmist, while still praising God, looks to himself and declares that he will praise God for as long as he lives. This idea is repeated, emphasizing the finiteness of the Psalmist. The declaration isn't, like it is in marriage, "as long as we both shall live," because God isn't going to die. The Psalmist will, and so will everyone else that the Psalmist knows. Yet, there is a positive dimension to this as well. Ross points out that the Psalmist is going to praise God his whole life which means this commitment to praise goes beyond just happy emotions in the present (923). 

v 3-4 Here, the Psalmist points out that trusting in any other being is foolish. There is no salvation in a man. Even if that man is a powerful person, a prince, he can't provide salvation. 

I think this is something that we need reminding about now more than ever. In the Psalmist's day, powerful men had armies and access to food. That's not nothing, but compared to what is the case today, we have singular men that control nearly all aspects of our lives as we know them today. In our own country, we've seen the power of the executive order, one man making a decision that impacts literally hundreds of millions of people. Up in Canada, protestors found themselves without access to their banks. Speaking of banks, this power extends to the private sector, too. Do you know the names Ryan McInerney and Michael Miebach? They are the CEOs of Visa and Mastercard respectively. Their companies handle about 80% of all transactions of credit and debit cards. How about Tim Cook and Satya Nadella? They are the CEOs of Apple and Microsoft, basically the two major computer companies that control the software that runs 90% of the world's computers. My point here isn't to take a position on whether that's good or not, but the world that we live in depends on the networks that are built and maintained by a few. It is easier than ever to give praise and fear to tech geniuses like Musk or Jobs, because we see how their world impacts our lives. Mark Zuckerburg is making it possible for you to see me right now if you are watching on Facebook. If you are listening to me via podcast, you can thank Steve Jobs, because I am recording on my iPhone that he envisioned. 

Yet. Yet, when their breath departs, they all will return to the earth, and on that very day their plans will perish. Companies will go in different directions or implode entirely, new figures will be elected into office if that office is still there to occupy, pastors and preachers will die, and with them their plans. Apple is very different without Jobs at the helm. America can feel very different from president to president. 

So don't put your trust in them. We can be grateful for the good these people do, criticize the evil that the do, talk about safeguards to not let them run their sinful hearts wild with power, but please, don't put your trust in them. What does that look like? Well, don't let what they do change how you sleep at night. Don't let them rule your conversation, your thought life, your podcast listening, or your news watching. They won't last. 

vs 5-6 Who will? God will last. The God who was the hope of Jacob thousands of years ago is your hope today. That is you if you are trusting in the Lord you are blessed. Who is the Lord? Oh, He is the one who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever. You know, the one Who made all this possible. Every bit of technology is just rearranging the creation that God gave us. Computer chips don't just come out of thin air. In most basic terms, they come from the dust of the ground. God is so powerful, He can create something that grows crops and also can calculate space rocket trajectories when combined with other elements of God's creation. He is still in charge of those things! God holds together the blood cells of all of those powerful men I just mentioned. He actively maintains their heart beats, and will one day cause them to stop just like He will mine someday. We don’t need to fear or trust in them for salvation, for as Ross asks, “How could a man save anyone if he could die at any moment…” (923).

v 7-9 That kind of power centralized in one person would normally scare us and did scare people who believed in a pagan system with many gods subject to the same flaws that we have, but God doesn't have those flaws! God executes justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, sets prisoners free, opens the eyes of the blind, and lifts up those who are bowed down. Do we not see this visually in Jesus' ministry, when God walked on the earth among and as one of us? When He cleared the temple, driving out the animals, He was clearing the way for the Gentiles, the sojourners to be able to worship. He fed the 5,000, freed the woman caught in adultery from stoning, opened the eyes of the blind, and raised the widow's son. He didn't just do these things physically, but does these things spiritually as well. 

And He does it still today, even though He doesn’t have to. God isn’t gracious because He can’t help Himself, but because He has in the past and promises to do so again, we can trust Him (Ross, 925). For example, in the late sixties, there was a proposal in a book called The Population Bomb to put sterilization drugs in the water to prevent populations from outpacing the food growth rate! Right about that time, we had an agricultural revolution that allowed for food to be grown to the point that now we are facing a crisis of people having TOO MUCH food. We live today in an era of God providing for us in way that would have been difficult for even my grandfather to imagine. 

And as far as bringing the wicked to ruin, God has been at work there, too. This is true of evil empires. The Assyrians once were carting off Israel and many other nations into its fold. Where are they now? How about the Babylonians? The Persians? The Romans? The Ottomans? The Nazis? The Soviets? All these wicked men who tried to burn the world down are now themselves on fire. "But why did it take so long?" you may ask. It’s a question that needs answering, because it deals with the reality that God doesn’t always present grace in the way that we want Him to, which usually means no suffering on our part and other wicked people quickly being stopped. So let’s give two answers to that: 1) God doesn't owe you a solution at all much less a quick one and 2) if God were to strike down evil people quickly, I would be dead before I finished this sermon. God gave even Hitler time to repent. God is more gracious than you or I am. If I were the almighty creator of the universe with my petty personality, it wouldn't have made it past the flood. But God keeps His promise to be gracious, and usually chooses to be gracious through us, His servants (Ross, 925).  

v 10 And that God, that God is the one who will reign forever. The Hebrew here could be translated in the present tense, meaning that God reigns now and forever into the future (Ross, 926-7). The best days of our experience with God's administration are ahead of us! They will be for our children and our grandchildren. I often hear this from my parents and from many of you who say something similar to, "Well, I'm old, so I won't see the decline of the world, but I worry about my children and grandchildren." Allow me to remind you of Who is the God of your children and grand children! Look at verse 10 again, "The Lord will reign forever, YOUR God, to ALL generations." The same God who has watched and reigned over your life will reign in your children's and grandchildren's lives. So don't despair! The God of Mrs. Clyde brought her through the Great Depression, World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, The Cold War, September 11th, the 2008 financial crisis, her widowhood, and most recently, the 2020 Pandemic, and He's still in charge to be Augie's God, too in all that he will face (and it has already been a lot, hasn't it?)!  

I could point to so many of you who have walked through personal crises that would crush people without the grace of God. So many of you who have lost spouses and children. Yet even those lost to us and not lost to God, which means they aren't even lost to us permanently. God is a God of the living (Matt. 22:32), the One who kills also makes alive, and the one who wounds, heals (Deuteronomy 32:39)! For those who are in Christ, even death cannot separate them from God's love and rule (Rom. 8:38-39)! God can make it so that the worst thing that we could ever imagine is just the thin doorway to eternity with God! 

So what should be our response? Praise. Worship in the midst of hardship, because the God Who keeps covenants is watching over you. Hardships will come, but they are temporary. And the day is coming when they will be no more. 

So what do we do now? In light of all that we have just said, is there any reason to fear how an election will turn out? No. Now, do elections have consequences, even consequences that can bring a lot of pain? Yes, of course, I'm not minimizing that, but I am wanting you to maximize your view of God's control over those. We act responsibly as citizens because that is one of our God-given duties to the world. We do our duty and then sleep well at night. God controls governments, and your own health. So trust in Him. Feel the sweetness of a child-like trust in their good father. Do you remember the days when your folks did all the worry and care? Or if you didn't, did you long for that? Well, you both can have it, either again or for the first time. 
And then, be that person for someone else. To borrow one last time from Ross, “The righteous…should demonstrate their love for [God] by emulating his faithfulness to the covenant, championing justice, feeding the hungry, bringing relief to those in bondage, and taking care of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. It remains true in the New Testament that God most often meets these needs through the ministry of his servants.” (927)
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God has done a lot to make that happen. In fact, that is what we are about to display in the Lord’s Supper here. That supper shows, as Ross put it, that “God is able and willing to meet all our needs.” (927). Willing! Even at the cost of His own Son. Have you put your trust in that God? 

And if you do, maybe you will see why the Psalmist is so eager to Praise the Lord.