Let us turn to our Bibles to Psalm 62. You know that I go through a psalm once a month, so I just stopped Hosea and skipped over to Psalm 62. So it’s been 62 sermons so far.
Excuse me. A couple of psalms I think I broke up. Psalm 62.
Let’s listen attentively to the word of God. Psalm 62. Truly, my soul silently waits for God.
From Him comes my salvation. He only is my rock and my salvation. He is my defense.
I shall not be greatly moved. How long will you attack a man? He shall be slain, all of you, like a leaning wall on a tottering fence. They only consult to cast him down from his high position.
They delight in lies. They bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly. My soul waits silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him.
He only is my rock and my salvation. He is my defense. I shall not be moved.
In God is my salvation and my glory. The rock of my strength and my refuge is in God. Trust in Him at all times, you people.
Pour out your heart before Him. God is a refuge for us. Surely, men of low degree are a vapor.
Men of high degree are a lie. If they are weighed on the scales, they are altogether lighter than vapor. Do not trust in oppression, nor vainly hope in robbery.
If riches increase, do not set your heart on them. God has spoken once, twice I have heard this, that power belongs to God. Also to you, O Lord, belongs mercy, for you render to each one according to his work.
Let us pray. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, glorious God above, creator of heaven and earth, we come this evening, God Almighty, reading this psalm. We pray that it would sink into our hearts, that it would be a psalm of encouragement for us, as, yes, we have heard this morning in the sermon that we are called to exercise, as we are able, Lord, common sense measures and practical things in our life, as we deal with things before us and around us, God, to sanctify all things through word and prayer.
But, Lord, we know, it seems more often than we like, there are times in which we can do nothing. We’ve tried all the resources, all that we can, and we are left with nothing but to wait. Our God and Savior, may this psalm be the psalm for us, if we find ourselves in such a situation, that we must wait and wait silently, God, without complaint, for the salvation and deliverance you may give us here and now, in your time and your way, but certainly always, for all things, Lord, when Christ Jesus returns, we will have full deliverance and salvation of our body and of our soul.
Come quickly, Lord Jesus, we pray, as we wait and continue to wait the remainder of our days. Amen. What do you do when the bus is late? That’s supposed to pick you up for work.
What do you do when the school is still locked when it’s time to start, or your job? Well, you wait. You wait until the thing changes. There’s not much you can do with the bus, and you don’t have the keys.
What do you do when unjustly fired from work, but still have not heard back from the new job opportunity? What do you do when your neighbor still hasn’t fixed your damaged fence in the yard he messed with, when he said he would, and the HOA is still doing nothing? Sometimes you just simply have to wait. What do you do when trouble rises above your eyes, when you have no leverage or power to change things that need to be changed in your life? And again, often the answer is very little. You’ve just got to wait.
It can be very frustrating. But we will wait, we must wait, by God’s grace upon us. We will wait upon God’s timing, or we will grow impatient and anxious.
Will we have angry shouts and worry hearts? This is a problem all of us face, at least once in our life. David faced it as well, and even failed at times, as we read in the Psalms and in Samuel. In this Psalm in particular, we see the Lord’s grace was strong with David, and so he writes how he persevered by God’s mercy upon him.
And how he persevered, of course, was by looking to the Lord, focusing upon Him, praying to Him, while he realized all the things around him forced him to wait. So let’s see what this looks like, and how it may encourage us, I pray, in this regard. Wait for God’s salvation, verses 1-4.
Wait for God’s Salvation
Wait, I say, on the Lord. Silently waiting, that is, not simply that his lips were quiet, I think it’s more along the lines of his soul was not troubled. It’s shorthand that he was not complaining before God.
Because surely when we complain, our hearts are not silent, but they’re agitated and moving around. We are agitated and moving around. Our soul, as it says here, is silent instead.
That is, calm and waiting for God’s deliverance. And he knew God would do it in His own time. The context of David writing a Psalm about waiting for deliverance is easy for us to miss that, because we often read these Psalms, and properly so, in the application sense of, well, deliverance of my situation, deliverance, of course, ultimately of my soul, from hell.
But David’s talking about swords and spears, and getting stabbed and skewered. And he’s called to wait, and he kind of tells himself to wait, and we too must wait at times. Salvation here, or deliverance, it can be translated rescuing, and similar such words.
Often David’s case was especially rescue and deliverance from what? The Philistines, from even Saul himself, and his own son. Absalom. Physical danger that would put your hair on end.
I know young boys, I used to be one of them, you love to be the cowboy and Indian, or the knights in shining armor, and you play around with guns and arrows. When it gets down to it, when you’re 20, you start realizing, this is real stuff. It can be kind of scary.
It can be kind of terrible. I don’t want to go to war. David was, and in that situation, where he’s surrounded by the enemies of God, we know the stories in 1 and 2 Samuel, where he’s hiding in the caves.
What can he do? He can do nothing. He’s got to wait. He simply has to do nothing but look upon God for deliverance.
And so God’s power sustained him, and he waited. And he was delivered by God’s providence. My soul silently waits for God.
From Him comes my deliverance. He only is my rock and my salvation. He is my defense.
I shall not be greatly moved. He is therefore immovable. My defense, I shall not be greatly moved.
That is, moved by internal passions and angst and worry, or external fears and concerns as well. Wherever the source of agitation is from, he shall not be moved in that moral sense. In particular, the cases of fighting the enemies, of course.
David did all he could. He fought. When he could fight no more, he fled.
And with the skills God gave him, and all the everyday training he had, it still was not enough. As we heard this morning, Psalm 38, I think it was, where I quoted that, where he said, God trained my right arm with strength and power and might, but also God sometimes holds that arm back, and there’s nothing you can do with it. And it can be very, very frustrating.
And so he waits. For the Lord God, in particular, the reason why I shall not be greatly moved is because God is my rock, which means what? That which will not move. I’m on a solid foundation that will not shake, like the earthquakes of California and elsewhere in this world.
For God is immovable, therefore I shall be immovable to the extent that I trust and depend upon the immovable himself. That’s the picture David is painting for us, and for himself as well. When he writes these psalms, yes, by God’s divine inspiration, the power of the Spirit of God in him and through him, it’s written for us today, but it was also for him as well.
It helps to write things out sometimes, basically, is what I’m saying. And it may help calm your mind as well. The problem, he complains about the attacks, and he unpacks some of these problems here.
Verses 3 and 4. How long will you attack a man? They only consult to cast him down. They delight in lies, and they curse inwardly. We read a little bit about that in the, or we sing about it in the psalm, where half that psalm there was describing wickedness.
The problems that David deals with, the problems that we deal with as well, their plans are only ever going after David. They only consult to cast him down from his high position. We want to take this man down.
David is a king, he’s a ruler, he’s a man established by God, appointed by Samuel, becomes public eventually. Initially, as you recall, it was private anointing by God. And it gets around, and they want to take him down.
He’s the number one target. They have nothing else on their mind but him, and him only. And they trade in lies, they delight in lies, they bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly.
A common theme we read about in prior psalms where my closest enemy we read as my friend, but he backstabbed me is the word we would use today in a prior psalm. And what we see then, typically, in the descriptions Paul gives is a cluster or a collection of sins. You ever notice that? It’s never just one, I can’t say never often, it’s not just one sin.
It’s two or three different sins going together. And in this particular case, it’s greater and lesser sins. The greater sins, it seems, is like a whale for the ocean, and it captures and grabs everything.
The waves get wider and broader, and when it hits the net, it starts collecting more and more things. It opens its mouth of sin, and it grabs smaller and smaller sins, and it just gets bigger and bigger. And these men want to kill him.
They want to take him out to consult, to take him down from his high position. How do they do it? They bless with their mouth, but inwardly they curse. They’re hypocrites, they’re liars, they’re deceivers, they’re pretending to care or want to be helpful, or whatever the case is.
And it happens in our life as well, unfortunately. It happens in the church. I remind us again, and I’ll say it now, this evening, that yes, some of the enemies of David were outside the church, the Philistines.
They clearly were not members of the Old Testament church. But he also had enemies within the Old Testament church. Saul himself, the king, their leader, was trying to kill him.
It gets to be like Trump or Biden trying to come after you. You’re an American, he’s an American. What’s going on here? A fellow Jew, his own son, tried to slay him.
It wasn’t just his son. He was also a church member. Saul wasn’t just the king.
He was also a church member. Every member of Israel was also a church member. We forget that sometimes.
And so the parallel is, yes, it’s there politically, and since you can make some social applications, and I do that, but also ecclesiastically with respect to the church. We have enemies and liars in the church who put on a smiley face, who act really nice and kind, but are full of dead men’s bones and are inwardly cursing you and hating you and wishing to take your church, you, and your family down. In the church.
We see some of that, of course, in the book of Acts, and they’re exposed by God’s miraculous power for the apostles. We don’t have that, so we have to use common sense measures. I’m alluding to my first sermon again this morning.
Common sense measures to weed them out if possible. Verses 5 through 8, My soul waits silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him. He only is my rock and my salvation.
He is my defense, I shall not be moved. Almost word for word from verses 1 and 2, isn’t it? Very close. There, you can see the parallel there.
So when it says, for example, My soul waits silently from God alone. He says that earlier, although he didn’t say alone. He says from God, clearly by alone.
For my expectation is from Him. The second stanza there in verse 1 is, From Him comes my salvation. So the parallel clearly is, My expectation is from Him for my salvation.
Because he didn’t tell you what the expectation is. He says my expectation is from Him. My expectation is for what? What a car is? What my wife should be? No, clearly, not only the context, but the, what? Synonymous parallelism that Hebrew poetry trades in.
That’s its currency. Lots of parallel ideas. Clearly, he’s saying, My expectation of deliverance is from Him.
And he continues on, My rock and my salvation. He’s my defense. I shall not be moved.
Or I shall not be greatly moved, as he says in verse 2. The expectation of salvation and deliverance. That should he be hemmed in by God’s providence and His will, as we can be hemmed in at God’s providence and will as well. That God is there with us.
The expectations, more broadly, is the will of God. That God’s law tells us some expectations are wrong. Some expectations, in that broad sense, coming from God, comes from His will.
He tells us this is the right way of thinking, this is the wrong way of thinking, or wrong expectations in life. And, of course, from providence, that God directs all of life to show that some expectations of your life are misguided. You’re just hitting a brick wall.
Providentially speaking, you can’t get anywhere with this person. You can’t get anywhere with this job. You can’t get anywhere with this job, perhaps.
And that’s God saying, Well, you’re not getting anywhere with it. Maybe you should try something else. Or, if you’re hemmed in on all four sides, you’ve just got to wait.
You can’t change the job sometimes. You can’t change your neighbor often. And you’ve just got to deal with it.
You’ve just got to wait. Wait on the Lord, I say. And wait patiently.
At any rate, what he’s doing here is repeating, for emphasis, obviously, My soul waits silently for God. He’s my deliverer. He’s my salvation.
He will save, of course, ultimately my soul. David believes this with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. God Almighty, through the power of Jesus Christ, in his life and death and resurrection for us, is saving our souls.
That’s our deliverance. That’s our ultimate expectation. We should not lose sight of that, certainly as I apply it here, and you apply it in your life, to your particular situation.
But behind it all is always, not only the physical and material concerns, but ultimately the spiritual concerns of your soul. That when you’re struggling with temptation, and you’re struggling with sin, both within and without, flee to God and wait upon Him, for He will deliver you in His own time. The repetition here I want to emphasize, repetitively, is that David, it seems to me, basically reminding himself, Okay, listen, David, you need to wait.
I know there’s guys around the corner, around that boulder over there, with a bunch of skewers trying to kill you, and you want to jump them, but you can’t. You’ve just got to wait. Now’s not the time.
Now’s not the perfect tactical situation. You can’t do it. Your hands are tied.
You must wait. It’s like he’s talking to himself, and we do that sometimes as well. We need to remind ourselves, even repeating these truths, that I just simply have to hold back and do nothing sometimes, although we want to do something.
The rock of strength, again, parallel to verse two there, He is my rock and my salvation. Verse six, He only is my rock and my salvation, my defense, and I shall not be moved. He’s reiterating the fact that God is worth it, and the Lord’s plans are what? Never changing.
Wait in God’s Refuge
I can rest or rely upon Him that it will work out the way it’s supposed to work out. Refuge, verse seven through eight. And God is my salvation and my glory, the rock of my strength, and my refuge is in God.
And so he moves a little bit of subtlety here. Rock is also an idea of refuge, perhaps, or refuge from the enemies, that is protection and relief, but it mostly emphasizes being immovable and protected that way. Refuge is the idea of being encased around and protected, perhaps, by four walls even, like a high tower, as he says, elsewhere in the Psalms.
And so the metaphor then goes from stability and not being moved, to a rock of strength and protection, a place of preservation by the Holy Spirit. Strength as in a strong defensive position in His military situation or in your spiritual situation, where God is giving you the power of the Holy Spirit and the means of grace, prayer being one of them, don’t forget. Prayer is used by the Spirit of God to give you and equip you to deal with the situations in your life against practical matters and difficulties, again, within and without.
First by way of spiritual prayer, praise and preaching, and later by providential means that He has given us in our life. So on Sunday, as it were, we’re gassing up our car and our engine of life and get what we need to refocus the whole week and center it on God again, psychologically speaking. And throughout the rest of the week, we carry on providentially, using what God has given us in everyday affairs and common sense and the like, so that we can do what we are called to do, even if it means waiting, and even waiting six or seven or ten days or several years, in some cases, you pray for the salvation of those you love, for example.
Such refuge extends beyond our emotions and fears to practical effects. Our soul calms down when we realize that He is in charge. We read this Psalm when our hearts palpitate too much and too quickly.
Our mind slows down when we accept our limitations and realize, why am I spending so much energy in my brain when this is the end? There’s nothing more I can do. I simply have to slow down and wait. And our will will stay quiet, waiting upon God as we fully trust in Him.
Those are some of the more practical ways in which God is our refuge. Refuge from the bad effects of unbelief in our own lives. Trust.
Trust in Him at all times, ye people. Pour out your heart before Him. God is a refuge for us.
One of the more popular parts of this Psalm. Trust in Him. Trust in Him at all times.
A beautiful verse for all of us to remember, brothers and sisters. No matter how bleak things look, no matter how bad your life gets, you should pour out your heart before God and your Savior and all your soul. For He will hear and He will deliver.
Yes, in His time. And yes, in His way. And yes, it may seem like more often than not, it’s not the way you’d like to have it done.
But it will happen. That’s where Romans 8 comes in very practical there at the end of chapter. Romans 8, where all things work together for good of those who love Him.
All things. The Old Testament Church had to trust in God for the Messiah to come. The Messiah in the future.
The New Testament Church has to trust in God who has already come. The Messiah who has been here 2,000 years ago and now reigns in heaven among all the nations. But it’s trust nevertheless.
The Old Testament saints were not saved any different than we are, brothers and sisters. One of the verses that reminds us of this fact. He too had to believe.
He should not have depended upon His circumcision nor upon the priest, nor upon the temple, nor upon the holy days. Although those were all used by God and His Holy Spirit to sanctify them in their growth, but they never replaced the ultimate center of our regeneration, which is the power of God within us, conjoined with faith. That is, God has gifted Him, the saints of old and ourselves, with the gift of belief, trust, and reliance in God above.
So we can read the Psalms and say, David is like me. David too believed in the Messiah. David also had struggles, and I have struggles.
And so these Psalms become very timeless indeed. Trust or faith in God and Christ is the cornerstone of Christian sanctification, of growing in dependence upon Him, of fleeing to Him as our refuge, waiting and especially waiting all the more for His deliverance in His own time. Wait for God’s power, verses 9 through 12.
Wait for God’s Power
Surely men of low degree are a vapor, men of high degree are a lie. What’s he talking about here? He shifts gear a little bit here and emphasizes, yes, I’m supposed to trust in Him at all times and pour out my heart before Him. On the flip side, don’t trust in men, don’t trust in oppression, verse 10, or the hope of robbery, or trust in riches.
The things in this world are what? Creation. As I mentioned this morning, everything outside of God, everything He created, has its use in our life to one degree or another, some way or somehow probably. But none of it should be such that we rely upon it as though they are our Savior and deliverer.
But they are merely tools that God has given us that we may continue on in our lives. Don’t trust in men, verses 9 in particular. They are of low degree, whether of high degree, high, low, and in between, it doesn’t matter.
You can’t put all your reliance upon them. Men of all kind will fail you. They are as vapors melting away from the sun.
Or men of high degree are also unreliable. And if all of them together are weightier than scales, they are altogether lighter than vapor. Vanity of vanity, all is vanity.
Another translation for the word vanity is empty. Lightweight, there’s nothing behind it. And these men are vanity as well when it comes to the end of the day of the greatness of deliverance of our soul especially.
They can do nothing, and doubly so. Now he says here, Surely men of low degree are a vapor, and men of high degree are a lie. I don’t think he’s saying there that men of great degree, of pedigree, or power and influence are always a bunch of liars, but rather trusting in them is a lie itself.
It’s a lie to rely upon them too much, is the idea there. You can, of course, and need to depend upon others. You’ve got to eat, therefore you depend on the farmer.
There’s no way around it. But you shouldn’t worship and honor the farmer. You shouldn’t pray to the farmer.
You shouldn’t say, Oh no, it’s the end of the world. My farmer died. Rather, always go to God with these serious concerns of ours.
They will fail you. Your friends will fail you. Your best friend will fail you at some time or other in your life.
But God will not. He is a refuge. He will never fail you if you but trust in Him day by day.
Don’t trust in money or power is the next one he talks about. Don’t trust in the power of oppression or the power of robbery. And of course, the wealth and riches there in the second part of verse 10, don’t set your heart on them.
There’s the emphasis. Don’t set your heart on them. Yes, you can use them and you ought to use them.
And we should pray for prosperity or as the proverb says, Lord, not so much that I forget you and love my riches, I’m paraphrasing, or so little that I forget you and steal and be angry, but rather just enough that you know I can live with and survive with. Don’t trust in oppression nor vainly hope in robbery. Clearly, that seems, it seems to me anyways, what you would think about the wicked unbelievers.
Well, yeah, you know, a terrible politician or whoever you can think of out there wanting to oppress people. They want a bunch of thieves out there trusting and relying upon robbery to survive. Maybe it’s the idea here, it seems as he is a king.
He has power. He has the sword. The temptation, of course, is tyranny.
Right? Using the sword to steal what he wants and get what he wants when he wants as a would-be king in the case as he’s becoming king in his own life there. But whatever the case is, don’t trust in this kind of power, earthly power in particular, whether for good or evil in that sense. And, of course, riches, increasing in riches.
And here we have especially something that is ever-present temptation in the American scene. Prosperity. So much wealth.
Even when it’s not real wealth, as unfortunately the middle class, you see the numbers, is imploding, and a lot of the middle class, more and more anyways, their wealth is actually on paper, as it were. There’s a lot of debt. It’s still wealthy, relatively speaking.
It’s still something that, unfortunately, people depend upon too much. They set their heart upon it, is the idea here. Not use it in a proper sense, but too much use.
Too much attachment to the things of this world. To the things of the flesh. By flesh, again, I mean the things of this world that make us comfortable, food, clothing, housing.
Yes, they have their place. It’s okay to have relaxation. We’ve talked about this before.
It’s clearly there in the Bible, but you can have too much. You can have too much prosperity in which you end up forgetting about God and relying upon the house and your jobs, which can get consumed in the fires as they did in California. We had fires out here the last few years.
In fact, my house had a fire. Remember that? Near my house, maybe half a mile away, up on the ridge there. You can see it off of 285, off of Hampton Highway.
You can see two bird trees there. If they didn’t get to those trees, that hospital, that helicopter didn’t make it to the lake by our house. It scooped up that water.
Remember that, Renee? And fly over there and dump it out. It would have gone all the way down the hill, up another hill, and hit our house. And then I’ll find out, does the pastor really believe and trust in God, or will he freak out like his hair is on fire, as we say, and worry and fret, and be like, what’s wrong with the pastor? That’s when you know, when the rubber hits the road.
I praise God. I don’t have to be in David’s situation. In a combat situation, which you’re sitting there calmly, waiting upon God, and in this case, I would argue, waiting upon God means not a miracle.
I don’t think David and Jonathan ran around saying, when’s the next miracle? They just did what was practical and made sense militarily. And if God gave a miracle, double blessing. But they could still win without a miracle.
Lots of stories of them winning without miracles. And you’re waiting and waiting in a combat situation. And he did.
And he did it faithfully before God. And we lose a house? I don’t think there’s a comparison there. I mean, we’ve got kind of insurance, we’ve got friends, I’ve got a church.
But David could lose his life. But he’s still what? Waiting upon the Lord. He’s a grand example for us.
I know he fell, and he had a feet of clay. But here, God used him mightily to show us what it means to wait for him. Power belongs to God, verse 11.
And this is one reason why God has spoken once, twice I’ve heard this, that power belongs to God. All power, of course, is what he’s saying. Not just some power.
But also to you, Lord, belongs mercy. Both power and, by implication, justice. Because good justice requires power to execute it.
And here on the flip side, verse 12, mercy. And of course, he thinks the mercy, and he’s right for himself. And his enemies, if they would but repent, as we read in another psalm, he prayed for the repentance.
For you render each one according to his work, which is an indirect way of saying, God will judge these people who hate me for without cause. But the power of God here that he emphasizes, the power that doesn’t come from violence or robbery, as he said in verse 10, nor from wealth and prosperity, not from men of high status or low degree, the Lord and Master and most powerful of all, why would you not trust in him? Partly because it becomes abstract to us. The concrete examples they had, of course, in the temple system about the Messiah and the person of the priests, it’s helpful in that way.
We don’t have that anymore. We’re supposed to be more mature than that. But we do have a weakness insofar as we don’t have an example they had, and they also had during the time of the apostles, we forget.
They had Caesars. They had kings. And by kings, I don’t mean the kind of king we have in England now.
I mean ancient Near East kings who what we would call today would be called tyrants. They had that kind of power. And he’s saying, my God is greater than these kings.
Why shouldn’t I go to him for refuge and protection? And this is why what is nicknamed Calvinism makes much more sense and comfort in the Christian life when you realize, why would I go to anybody else but the King of Kings and Lord of Lords who sustains all things, that these kings and these Caesars and these presidents would have no power if God had not given it to them. And so in our deepest, darkest difficulties, we must go to the source of all power and justice and mercy, verse 12, of our God and Savior and Lord Jesus Christ himself. We too may and have been stuck waiting for mercy and for justice.
Having those who hate us or at least do us wrong surrounding us, you have a resolution you must resolve yourself to where God has put you, to wait upon him and wait upon the Lord and wait silently for he is worth the wait. Let us pray. Spirit of truth and life, may this lesson sink into our hearts if we have much angst and worry, that we do what we can and stop and rest and know that you are in charge.
Help us, Lord, we pray. Give us the aid that we need day by day to learn this lesson or relearn it again. We pray these things for your glorious namesake.
Amen.