God: Our Warrior, Protector & Provider

David leads the people of God in praise of God – their warrior, protector, provider and sustainer. Rejoice with hope and confidence that God your warrior protector provider and sustainer will defeat all your enemies and reign in peace forever.

Father in heaven, we see only in part, you see everything. Thank you that you speak. Please help us hear and learn. Please help us to walk in the good works you prepare for your people. Amen.

Michael Burry was a hedge fund manager: that is, he’s a very clever man who understands how to make money and he invests other peoples’ money for them so that they can make money. He was a hedge fund manager in 2005 when he made an unusual decision to bet against the housing market. That is, he put his clients’ money at risk because he saw there was going to be a huge market crash in the next few years, which there was in 2008. But for three years his clients watched the value of their investments go down and down and down, and Michael kept telling them “wait wait wait”. And in 2008 when the markets crashed, Michael’s clients made huge profits. At least, that’s what I understood from the film The Big Short.

It’s a well-known story that J. K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, was rejected by 12 publishers before The Philosopher’s Stone was accepted by Bloomsbury. Apparently, it was accepted because the chairman’s eight year old daughter liked the first chapter and wanted to read more. It’s hard to hold your nerve and wait when you’re in danger of losing or being let down. It’s hard to know when you should take a risk on something when you can’t afford to lose. That’s what life following Jesus is like. Ultimately, we are asked to give Jesus our whole life. We can’t keep any insurances or securities. We can’t spread the risk and maintain a respectable agnosticism. Either we trust him, and let him rule our lives as our King, and let him protect us as our saviour or, we reject him and live by and for something else.

Sometimes trusting Jesus will mean that we feel exposed and in danger and we’ll want to step back to protect ourselves. And we need to hear “I will come for you! Wait!” And sometimes trusting Jesus will mean being led into danger, and we’ll want to stay back to protect ourselves, and we need to hear “I will be with you – Go!” Psalm 68 speaks to us in that way: it sings and celebrates (Psalm 68.1):

God shall arise, his enemies shall be scattered; and those who hate him shall flee before him!

Psalm 68.19:

Blessed be the Lord who daily bears us up; God is our salvation.

Psalm 68.35:

Awesome is God from his sanctuary; the God of Israel – he is the one who gives us power and strength to his people.

It’s a massive Psalm of praise! And I think when you get to the end of it, you’re supposed to think to yourself “Boy I’m glad God is my God, and I am one of his people.”

I’ve been watching The West Wing recently and utterly loving, though barely understanding, the fast paced dialogue between the characters. Anyway, Director Aaron Sorkin penned these words for his Character Josiah Bartlet:

Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music. And music has the ability to find us, and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can’t.[The West Wing, Season 3 Episode 5, War Crimes]

So here’s the thing with Psalms, it is possible to summarise a Psalm in a way that gets the information across but fails to do what the Psalm does to us. So I can tell you – Psalm 68 praises God who is our warrior, protector, provider and sustainer – and that is true so far as it goes, but the Psalms weren’t meant to be summarised, they were meant to be sung! So our approach this evening will be to listen to and enjoy the Psalm as it leads us in praising God, and my hope is that all of us will go away and read Psalm 68 at some point during this week out loud, and let God’s Word find you, move you and lift you up in ways that me simply telling your doctrines and how they apply to your life can’t. Psalm 68:

1. Praises God as our warrior.

We’re told this is a Psalm of David, who was King of Israel. David himself was a military leader and he knew what it was like to be surrounded, be besieged, and surrounded by enemies. And he gives this Psalm to his people to sing to remember that when their lives are in danger (when they are under siege), God will arise and come to their aid as their warrior defender. Nobody liked sieges. Defenders didn’t like sieges because it meant being trapped and on rations – combined with the threat of invasion. But attackers didn’t like sieges either, because they cost money to feed your army, and all the while you were abroad with your army you were vulnerable to attack from other people. So attackers would try to shorten sieges by making deals with defenders saying “If you let us in we’ll go easy on you, but if you resist, when we eventually do get in we’ll make an example of you so that other cities will never even think to resist us.” So imagine you’re being besieged by an enemy, and they’re making all kinds of terrible threats to force you to roll over and submit to them. And that might be the situation you’re in now: being under all sorts of pressure to abandon your convictions and work against your conscience. God is spoken about in these verses as a mighty warrior who routes the enemy. Psalm 68.1-3:

God shall arise, his enemies shall be scattered; and those who hate him shall flee before him!As smoke is driven away, so you shall drive them away;As wax melts before fire,So shall the wicked shall perish before God!But the righteous shall be glad;They shall exult before God;They shall be jubilant with joy!

Look on to Psalm 68.11-14:

The Lord gives the word;The women who announce the news are a great host:“The kings of the armies – they flee, they flee!”The women at home divide the spoil – though you men lie among the sheep foldsThe wings of a dove covered with silver, its pinions with shimmering gold.When the Almighty scatters kings there…”

Enemies routed like smoke – like you or I would waft smoke from a BBQ away from our eyes. There’s a scene in the Lord of the Rings film when the good guys are besieged in a castle and their surrounded by enemies and it all looks hopeless. Then, they remember that Gandalf had said he’d return at dawn on the fifth day, and it’s the fifth day and they look up an on the hill; there’s Gandalf and he’s gathered a bunch of exiled warriors and come to their rescue. And they charge down the hill and their horses don’t even break their stride; they just sweep the enemy away. God’s victory is complete so suddenly…before the men have gathered themselves from the sheepfolds the women are announcing victory and dividing spoil. God single handedly defeats his enemies for his people. Psalm 68 praises God as a warrior, and:

2. Protector of his People.

Psalm 68.4:

Sing to God, sing praises to his name;Lift up a song to him who rides through the deserts;his name is the Lord;exult before him

Just imagine a warrior riding through the deserts with his banner in the sun on his way to rescue his people (Psalm 68.5-6):

Father of the fatherless and protector of widowsIs God in his holy habitation.God settles the solitary in a homeHe leads out the prisoners to prosperityBut the rebellious dwell in a parched land.

This guy is like Robin Hood, Zorro and The A-Team all rolled into one. Now look at Psalm 68.15 -17 and see who the people need protecting from:

O mountain of God, mountain of Bashan;O many-peaked mountain, mountain of Bashan!Why do you look with hatred, O many peaked mountain, at the mount that God desired for his abode,Yes, where the Lord will dwell forecver?The chariots of God are twice ten thousand,Thousands upon thousands;The Lord is among them;Sinai is now in the sanctuary.

Bashan is about 80 miles north east of Jerusalem. It’s the place where a King led an army out against the people of Israel after they had escaped from Egypt. (Numbers 21 and Deuteronomy 3). And you can think of the mountains as two fortresses; on the one hand you’ve got the fortress of Bashan and it’s garrisoned with enemies, and they look with hatred on the mountain that God has chosen for his abode. The mountain that God has chosen for his abode is where his temple is on Mount Jerusalem. Only when David wrote this Psalm it wasn’t a temple, it was a tent. And when The King of Bashan attacked Israel, the tent was being carried around in the wilderness by a wandering people. So mighty mount Bashan looks down with contempt on this wandering people, the Israelites whom God had chosen to dwell amongst. And they looked very weak and Bashan looked very strong, but God defended Israel and defeated Bashan because he had decided to tie his name and his honour to this weak and unimpressive people. God is Warrior, Protector:

3. Provider.

Look at Psalm 68.7-10:

O God, when you went out before your people,When you marched through the wilderness,The earth quaked, the heavens poured down rainBefore God, the One of Sinai,Before God, the God of Israel.Rain in abundance, O God, you shed abroadYou restored your inheritance as it languishedYour flock found a dwelling in itIn your goodness, O God you provided for the needy.

It may seem strange to us that military images of marching segway into agricultural images of rain fall. I don’t think it would have seemed strange to them. Every age has a way of understanding the universe and the tendency of our age is to view it purely in terms of laws of cause and effect. So the story we tell ourselves is that rain comes from the constant cycle of evaporation and condensation and is determined by a million natural variables and if we know enough of the variables we can predict when it will fall. I’m not saying that story is wrong. Just that our age is prone to forget that behind the impersonal laws is a personal God who made the laws and upholds them. 3000 years ago the popular story was that the storm god brought about rain by defeating the chaos god and the sign of his victory was rain and fertility.
So, 3000 years ago we would have seen the worship of various storm gods like Baal. Baal is like the Gilderoy Lockhart of the Old Testament. Gilderoy Lockhart was that air-headed teacher in the Harry Potter series who took credit for other people’s accomplishments. Psalm 68 is challenging the common story of its age saying Baal isn’t the one who fights against the spiritual forces of chaos and death and showers life giving rain and fertility – God is!

We may not think that our good fortunes depend on Baal. But when you feel like your life is languishing, who or what do you look to to restore it? What’s your “if only…then I will be happy”? Psalm 68 causes me to remember that my life will be happy because God will restore my life, give me a hope and a future and will settle me somewhere where I can flourish. I may be languishing now, but God will arise. God is my provider.

4. Christ

There’s not time to look at every image. But how has God done this for us who don’t live in David’s time and who are not part of the nation of Israel? And how will he bring it to completion? The question to ask with every Psalm is how is this Jesus’ Psalm before it is my Psalm? David is the Psalm writer and the worship leader for his people in his day. Jesus is the worship leader for his people in his day, which is our day. Jesus, the Son of God, having taken on human flesh – leads us in worship saying: “Blessed be the Lord who daily bears us up. God is our salvation.” We get in on the benefits of this Psalm by coming to Jesus and being part of his people and allowing us to lead our worship. And Jesus is also the divine warrior, protector and provider for us his people. So the enemies Jesus goes into battle against on our behalf are the enemies of sin, Satan and death. And 2000 years ago, he arose to confront and defeat these enemies for us. He fought alone – as he alone bore the burden of his peoples’ sin and paid its penalty. He rose from the grave, defeating death, never to die again. He has ascended into heaven and from there rules all things and has the power to give new life to any and all who come to him. And he says to us in this Psalm: “Take courage and have hope – I will come soon and scatter my enemies, who are also your enemies.”

So, can I ask us to learn to sing this Psalm even when it feels like we’re losing?
Because for courage to be any use at all it must be with us when we are weak. And for hope to be real hope it must be able to sustain us in the face of overwhelming odds.

William Wilberforce is well known for his work in parliament to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and then slavery itself within British territories in 1833.
John Piper has written an excellent little book called The Roots of Endurance which not only looks at his life, but also what kept him going. Wilberforce spent 46 years of his life campaigning against the slave trade and was defeated 11 times in parliament. Apparently his opponents complained: “He grows more vigorous from blows” – every time they knocked him down, he’d get back up stronger! The stuff that kept Wilberforce going was his faith in God. He wrote about it in his journals. He wrote about it in the two books he published. His friends noticed it when they saw him at home and with his children. Can I encourage us tonight to come to Jesus and keep going, singing joyfully God shall arise, his enemies shall be scattered.

You may have been defeated eleven times already - what hope is there that there will be any difference the twelfth time, except that God shall arise and do what you cannot do with my own strength and resources. You may be surrounded by powerful enemies who are trying to get you to abandon your convictions and you conscience. Jesus says “Wait, stand firm. I will arise and scatter your enemies. In your weakness take courage and in your hopelessness have hope.” It is a wonderful thing to know that the power who created the universe is coming soon to scatter the forces of evil and chaos and to establish his people in safety and happiness forever.

If there are any here this evening who have not yet responded to Jesus’ offer of forgiveness and life, he once again calls you to do so – to come under his protection and receive his gift of new life. Let’s take a moment to consider what that means for us this week and then I’ll pray for us:

Father in heanen, tank you so much for giving us your Son, Jesus Christ, to fight our enemies, to protect and provide for us for ever. Help us take courage and have hope to stand firm against all those who hate us for his sake. Please make your Gospel known in all the land and may Jesus come again soon. Amen.