Psalm 4
Date: January 28th, 2023
Speaker: Samuel Crites
Scripture: Psalm 4
Exegetical Outline
MIT: David pleas with his enemies to find peace in their lives by finding peace with God.
4:1 – David pleas to God for help based on God’s previous faithfulness.
4:2 – David asks his adversaries how long they will they shame God with lies.
4:3-5 – David attempts to guide his enemies to repentance and righteousness.
4:6 – David’s opponents are skeptical of David’s advice, and David cries to the Lord for help like he offered Aaron.
4:7-8 – David recounts what God has done in the past and resolves to trust God and lay his head down in peace.
Homiletical Outline
MIS: Peace in life is dependent on making peace with God.
Peace is looking forward to God’s future help based on His past faithfulness. (4:1; 4:7-8)
Peace is impossible for those still clinging to their sin. (4:2-3; 4:6)
Peace in life depends on repentance. (4:4-5)
Introduction:
What is the value of a repeated lesson? How many of us learn all we are supposed to remember the first time someone teaches it to us? The most fundamental way that we learn is by repeating a task or information over and over again until it gets down into our very soul, until performing the task or recalling the information is muscle memory.
Think about how you learned to hit a baseball or, for many of the older generation, how you can dial your old home phone number when those were still a thing? You don’t have to recall your birthday or think about the timing of when to hit the brake pedal to slow your car. There are certain, fundamental lesson that have become so engrained in your being that they are part of who you are.
This is how the Psalm attempts to instruct us. We will see the same repeated themes and lessons over and over again. We will see God’s steadfast lovingkindness for his people as the foundation of their faith in him. We will see the promise that though it might seem that the wicked prosper, in the end, the righteous will prevail. We will see the hope of the future Davidic king that rescues his people from their sin. The Psalms is attempting to imprint these lessons on your spirit. To so infuse your mind and prayers with the truth of God’s word that it becomes more than a body of knowledge but something that is central to your very identity. When people meet you, there should be something noticeably different about you. That is the value of a repeated lesson, especially one that reveals the knowledge of the one true God.
Our sermon text this week is Psalm 4. In Psalm 4, we see many themes we have already seen in our short study of the Psalms. The many wicked against the one righteous, the peace offered by God to his people regardless of their circumstances, and the call to turn away from unrighteousness and come back to God. Let’s read Psalm 4 and consider how this Psalm fits into what we have already seen in the Psalter.
Psalm 4
4 To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. A Psalm of David.
1 Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness!
You have given me relief when I was in distress.
Be gracious to me and hear my prayer!
2 O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame?
How long will you love vain words and seek after lies? Selah
3 But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself;
the Lord hears when I call to him.
4 Be angry, and do not sin;
ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent. Selah
5 Offer right sacrifices,
and put your trust in the Lord.
6 There are many who say, “Who will show us some good?
Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord!”
7 You have put more joy in my heart
than they have when their grain and wine abound.
8 In peace I will both lie down and sleep;
for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
I don’t know what is going on in everyone’s life this week or over the last couple months, but perhaps we all need to be reminded of the peace that is offered by God to his people. We have seen this multiple times over the last couple of weeks. In Psalm 1 we saw that the way of the righteous as they follow the blessed man will not perish. In Psalm 2, we saw the futility of all that oppose the Son of God and the blessing it is to take refuge in him. In Psalm 3, we saw that in the midst of his enemies, God sustained David. He shielded David and protected him to the point that David was able to lay his head down to rest. He slept in peace in the presence of his enemies. The repeated lesson that some of us might be missing is that God offers us peace. Over and over the Psalms have been teaching us to seek the peace that is promised us by God. This week, in Psalm 4, we are going to see that same lesson again. The main idea of our sermon is this: peace in life is dependent on making peace with God.
Now, the points of our sermon are dependent on the structure of the Psalm. So we will have three points, but they are not linear, meaning, they do not go in order through the verses of the psalm. Hebrew poetry tends to couple phrases and ideas together. In Psalm 4, these pairings dictate the structure of the Psalm.
The first point of our sermon defines what is peace and it comes from verses 1 and 7-8. Peace is being confident in God’s future help based on his past faithfulness. In the Psalm, David cries to God for help on the basis that God been faithful to relieve his distress in the past, and we see that mirrored in verses 7 and 8. In verse 7, God has given David joy in the past, so, in verse 8, he will lay his head down and sleep peacefully in the safety that the Lord will provide. David’s peace is a confidence that Gods past performance is indicative of what he will do in the future. This is the peace that defines David’s life.
But the congregation of Israel is not this way. The second point of our sermon is that peace is impossible for those still clinging to their sin. David addresses the congregation of Israel in verse 2-3 and verse 6. In verse 2-3, David asks an accusatory questions of the men of Israel. How long will they bring shame upon God with their vain words and lies? God does not hear them, because they are not righteous. In verse 6, these vain liars are skeptical of David’s plea for repentance in verses 4-5, so David invokes the Aaronic blessing on the people. David cannot make the people see, so he asks God to lift up the light of his face upon them, a clear allusion to Numbers 6:24-26, the famous blessing that God gave Aaron to speak over the people of Israel. The people do not share in the peace that David enjoys because they still cling to the blindness of their sin, so he asks God to shine the light of his glory on their darkness.
Finally, in verses 4-5, we will see that peace in life depends on repenting from your sin. The Lord has caused a separation between the righteous and the wicked. The righteous enjoy his peace because he hears them when they pray to him for help, as we saw in verse 1. No such help comes to the wicked. David warns the congregation to not be angry about being shown their sin, but to quietly meditate on what he says. As they lay on their beds, they are to consider his words and be convicted. He calls them to respond, not in anger, but by offering right sacrifices to God and putting their trust in him. The peace that God offers is dependent on abandoning your sin.
Everyone is looking for peace in their life. The lesson being constantly put forward by the Psalms is that only God’s people can lay their head on their pillows at night knowing that their future is secure. Rest is a gift from God to his people. In our sermon today, we will see that having peace in life is dependent on making peace with God.
Peace is looking forward to God’s future help with confidence based on His past faithfulness.
What is peace? Simple questions such as this are the most difficult to answer. How do you define a thing like peace? Is it an external reality, meaning, is it merely an end to war? Can such a profound concept as peace simply be reduced to a matter of who carries the biggest stick? Is peace an internal reality? What are you at peace with? Yourself? What does that say about the human condition? Why aren’t we naturally at peace with ourselves?
My goal with our first point is to take our definition of peace from David in Psalm 4. What God has given to David and what David is offering to the congregation of Israel is a kind of peace that the world does not understand. According to David in Psalm 4, peace is looking forward to God’s future help with confidence based on His past faithfulness.
We see this clearly at the beginning and end of the Psalm. In verse 1, David says,
Psalm 4:1
1 Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness!
You have given me relief when I was in distress.
Be gracious to me and hear my prayer!
David begins the Psalm by crying out to God for help. He wants God to hear his prayer. But look at the why. He expresses to God why he is confident that God will hear his prayer. He says, you have given me relief when I was in distress. Have given, past tense. Meaning, there is a moment that David has in his mind when did deliver him and that deliverance in the past is the basis for his request for deliverance in the present.
This is how the Bible teaches us the concept of faith. Faith is never a blind leap into the dark. God does not require blind faith, rather, he has demonstrated his trustworthiness to us in his Word and he calls us to put our trust in his real promises and real actions. He has demonstrated himself to be a rescuer of his people so frequently that is reasonable to trust that he will be a rescuer in the future.
In fancy, theological terms, we would call this God’s immutability. God never changes. If he was a rescuer in the past, a savior to his people, you can bank on the fact that he will be a savior in the future. If God has heard your prayers, you can be confident that he will continue to hear your prayers. David is confident that God will hear his prayers because God does not change. He is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.
But David’s confidence is not merely that God will hear his prayers, but that God will act on his behalf. Look at verses 7-8.
Acts 4:7-8
7 You have put more joy in my heart
than they have when their grain and wine abound.
8 In peace I will both lie down and sleep;
for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
God has done two things for David: he has put joy into his heart and makes him dwell in safety. This is the foundation of David’s peace. God has satisfied David’s deepest inner desires, and he has protected him from external harm. He has brought peace to David’s soul and to David’s life. David can rest with confidence because the God who does not change has proven that he is able to do these things. If God has done those things then he will continue to do those things in the future.
David’s only response is to lay his head on his pillow at night and go to sleep. Have you ever wondered why we sleep? John Piper has a fascinating theology of sleep. Listen to an excerpt from an article he wrote in 1982.
John Piper, A Brief Theology of Sleep
Sleep is a parable that God is God and we are mere men. God handles the world quite nicely while a hemisphere sleeps. Sleep is like a broken record that comes around with the same message every day: Man is not sovereign. Man is not sovereign. Man is not sovereign. Don’t let the lesson be lost on you. God wants to be trusted as the great worker who never tires and never sleeps. He is not nearly so impressed with our late nights and early mornings as he is with the peaceful trust that casts all anxieties on him and sleeps.
What a perfectly appropriate living metaphor for peace in life. To lay one’s head on your pillow at night and surrender to the exhaustion of the day in helpless slumber. To recognize that the peace you enjoy is because your God does not slumber and does not rest and is vigilantly taking care of all that you are not able to.
How well do you sleep at night? I know that there are many nights when sleep evades me and I lie in bed worrying over what I cannot control. Almost every time I cannot sleep it is because I cannot get my mind to stop pestering something that I cannot change. I have even prayed that God would take my worries. I promise that I will leave it in his capable hands and five minutes later I pick it back up.
We must learn from David. When we lay our fears and concerns in God’s hands, we must remind ourselves of his faithfulness in the past, so we can be confident to rest in him now. One way to do that is to make a worries list. A worries list is a physical reminder that you have rolled those concerns off of your shoulders and on to Gods. You simply write down your fears and concerns on a piece of paper as you give them over to God, that way, if you are tempted to feel anxious about a particular item, you can remind yourself that you left that with God.
Another excellent exercise is to make a faithfulness board. Molly and I did this right after we had Nora Kate. Times were tight and we were living paycheck to paycheck. We didn’t let anyone know we were struggling, but one day, I went out to get the mail and there were 4 or 5 boxes of diapers on our front porch. It was such an unexpected and random act of kindness. We called our parents and siblings and no one took responsibility for them, so we only had God to thank.
To remember that moment, we framed a piece of butcher paper and began writing our thanksgivings and praises on them. Sometimes they were in code, but most of the time we just wrote what actually happened. It was a constant reminder to us and an opportunity to share God’s faithfulness with guests that came to our home.
So consider that for a second. What if you had a private list of all the anxieties that you had given to God and you had a public reminder of God’s faithfulness? How would that affect your anxiety? Do you think you would be more at peace? Of course you would because you would be constantly reminded that God is trustworthy. He has shown up in the past and he will continue to provide for you because he does not change. Peace is being able to look back at what God has done and be confident that he will continue to do that in the future.
Peace is impossible for those still clinging to their sin.
Which brings us to our second point. Peace is impossible for those still clinging to their sin. If present peace is dependent on God’s past faithfulness, then what if you do not know God? What if you have not experienced his loving-kindness? The world is looking for peace in anything and everything that is not God. If you are still looking for peace in the worldly comfort of sin, you will never know lasting peace.
Read with me Psalm 4 verse 2-3 and verse 6:
Psalm 4:2-3; 6
2 O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame?
How long will you love vain words and seek after lies? Selah
3 But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself;
the Lord hears when I call to him.
6 There are many who say, “Who will show us some good?
Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord!”
In verses 2-3, David turns from pleading with God to pleading with the congregation of Israel. He wonders how long they will continue in their vain lies, bringing shame and dishonor to God. Since Psalm 4 immediately follows Psalm 3, I think it is appropriate to interpret the honor in verse 2 not as David’s honor but as God’s honor, because we saw in Psalm 3 that David’s glory is God. Look back up at Psalm 3:3 briefly:
Psalm 3:3
3 But you, O Lord, are a shield about me,
my glory, and the lifter of my head.
David’s glory is God, therefore David’s honor is God.
This also makes sense as we continue to read in Psalm 4. Verse 3 speaks of the Lord, not of David. David is concerned that the congregation of Israel has turned away from God by devoting themselves to falsehood and their sin is preventing their prayers from being heard by God. Which is so important because if God is not answering your prayers, you will have no peace.
That sin prevents God from listening to prayer is the common teaching in Scripture. Look at Isaiah 59:1-3 with me, it says:
Isaiah 59:1-3
59 Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save,
or his ear dull, that it cannot hear;
2 but your iniquities have made a separation
between you and your God,
and your sins have hidden his face from you
so that he does not hear.
3 For your hands are defiled with blood
and your fingers with iniquity;
your lips have spoken lies;
your tongue mutters wickedness.
Sinner, your sin has made a separation between you and the God that made you, not because sin is more powerful than God, but because it has changed you. Sin has blinded your eyes and deafened your ears. He refuses to hear your prayers because you do not actually want his help. You are more interested in all that the world can offer you and you do not want the peace that God offers.
Sinners prayers are ineffective because their nature is to reject God. This is clear in Psalm 4. Look at verse 6, the congregation of Israel says:
Psalm 4:6
6 There are many who say, “Who will show us some good?
David is telling them, God will! God will show you good. I know this because he has been good to me, but they don’t want to hear that. He told them what to do in verses 4-5, but they refuse to see the truth of what he has seen to be true in his own life. They do not want to turn away from their sin, so they will not receive the good that God offers.
Imagine David’s frustration. If he could only get these stubborn and obstinate people to listen they would find the peace that he has found. But they will not hear and they will not see. So at the end of verse 6 David invokes the blessing that God gave to Aaron to say over the people in Numbers 6:22-27. Now David only alludes to it in the Psalm 4, but compare the end of verse 6 with what we read in Numbers 6. Listen:
Numbers 6:22-27
22 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 23 “Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them,
24 The Lord bless you and keep you;
25 the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
26 the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
27 “So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.”
What David is doing is significant. This is not some generic request. He alludes to the blessing that God gave to Aaron, the first high priest, to say over his people in order to mark them as set apart. It was by this benediction that the Lord said he would bless his people. David, the priest-king, intercedes with God on behalf of Israel so that the light of the glory of God would wash away their blindness. David cannot make the people see. They don’t believe him. But he knows that God can. He can make the people see and understand their need for repentance. So David leaves it with God to deal with his people according to the promise he has already made to bless them with light that will break through their darkness.
Two natural points of application come out of this point. For the Christians in the room, pray is an essential component to evangelism. God saves and he alone can overcome the blindness of those that are lost. So, like David, you should be constantly praying for the lost people in your life that the light of God’s glory would shine into their lives and reveal the Gospel to them.
If you are not a follower of Jesus Christ and you feel the same skepticism that the congregation of Israel feels, ask yourself this question: do you have peace in your life? Be honest with yourself. You have spent your whole life being in charge and doing exactly what you have wanted to do. Would you say that you have a peaceful life? Psalm 4 offers you a joy and a peace that the rest of the world cannot offer. There is a kind of happiness that you do not know that will let you lay down your head at night and truly rest. You can find peace you have not been able to find anywhere else if you will just trust in a God that has demonstrated his trustworthiness.
I am not asking you to make a blind leap of faith. I am asking you to believe this. There is a God and he is perfect and holy and good. You have rebelled against that God and have tried to be the king of your own life. As a rebel, you have chosen to be God’s enemy. It is an injustice for you to attempt to dethrone the one true king. His holiness and goodness requires him to seek justice. Which means, you will have to pay the penalty for your rebellion. If you do, you will spend an eternity separated from him in a place devoid of goodness, happiness, and light. Your offense against an infinite God must be met by an infinite punishment. But God loved you so much that he was willing to let someone else stand in your place. He sent his only Son, Jesus Christ, to live the life that you could not, to pay the penalty you deserved by dying on a cross, and to make a way of salvation by returning from the grave conquering death and sin. He has proven his faithfulness by standing in your place, offering you salvation and paying the penalty himself. I am not asking you to make a blind leap into the dark, I am asking you to trust a God who has proven that he is faithful. Faithful to save sinners, even when they were his enemies.
That is how you can find peace. Turn from your sin that cannot satisfy to the God who loves you and will give you a joy that all the abundance in this life can never offer. Our church invites you to find peace with God, so you can have peace in your life.
Peace in life depends on repentance.
Which is the perfect transition to our third and final point. Peace in life is dependent on repentance from sin. You might have notice that I am working through this Psalm in an odd order. Like a sandwich, we are working from the outside to the middle. The top and the bottom of the sandwich were the first point. David cries for help and finds the peace that he expects because God has shown himself to be faithful in the past.
The fixing of the sandwich, the mustard, mayo, tomatoes, and lettuce was the second point. David pleads with the congregation of Israel to turn away from their sin so the Lord will hear their prayers, but the congregation rejects David’s plea. They respond with skepticism rather than contrite hearts. So David again pleas to God, this time for help in changing their minds.
The last point is the meat of the sandwich, the center of the Psalm. It is the point on which the rest of the Psalm turns, set in the center to give this crucial idea a pride of place so that you cannot miss what David is trying to teach us. In verses 4-5, David tells the people and by proxy he tells us how to find peace. Peace in life is dependent on repentance from sin. Look at verses 4-5 once more time.
Psalm 4:4-5
4 Be angry, and do not sin;
ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent. Selah
5 Offer right sacrifices,
and put your trust in the Lord.
When confronted with the sin of their lies and vain words, the congregation reacts with anger. The lost do not want to face their sin. They love their darkness and do not want the light to shine on their sin.
David recognizes their anger and says fine, be angry, just don’t sin. Rather, slow down. Instead of responding in the heat of the moment, take time to meditate on what has been said. Lay in your bed. Let the coolness of the night calm your passions and meditate, ponder in your own hearts the truthfulness of what has been said.
He is hoping that they will respond to his rebuke. If they do, they will follow his command. Offering right sacrifices and putting their trust in God. They will demonstrate their contrition by offering sacrifice and they will put their trust in God by turning from their sin in repentance back to the God that offers them peace.
Repentance, turning away from sin, is the heart of this Psalm. It is the means by which we make peace with God and when we have peace with God, God makes peace in our lives. He satisfies us with a happiness that is beyond this world’s ability to imitate and he gives us peace through his sovereign protection.
So how do we repent? I see at least four steps to repentance in these two verses. First, listen to the rebuke. The rebuke might come from a brother or a sister in Christ; it might come in your personal time of worship as you read God’s word; it might come from the Spirit’s conviction as you witness the consequences of sin in someone else’s life. David rebukes the people in verse 2 of their sin, but they do not hear him.
Second, do not respond immediately, but ponder for the purpose of conviction. Your immediate response to rebuke is going to be that’s not true. It might even make you angry, but prepare now to have the assumption that your sin might have blinded you to the truth. Maybe you can’t see what your brother or sister sees. Decide now that you will listen well and then take time to consider the truthfulness of what you have heard, praying that the Holy Spirit will convict you if it is true.
Third, once you are convicted, offer right sacrifices. For the Israelite, that meant going to the temple to literally offer sacrifices, but the purpose of the sacrifice was not merely the shedding of blood, it was about obedience. Listen to what Samuel said to Saul when he refused to obey the Lord regarding the Amalekites. Listen to 1 Samuel 15:22:
1 Samuel 15:22
22 And Samuel said,
“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,
as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
and to listen than the fat of rams.
Even in the Old Covenant, right sacrifices meant obedience. How much more in the New Covenant? Romans 12:1-2 says:
Romans 12:1-2
12 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Offer right sacrifices by devoting yourself to turning away from your sin and obeying God.
Finally, trust God to preserve you in the future. Do not rely on your own will power or cleverness to fight sin in the future. You did not save yourself, you cannot sanctify yourself. Trust the Father and the sacrifice of his Son and power of his Spirit in your life to keep you. You will make it to the end, not because of what you do, but because of what Christ has done.
Conclusion
As we finish, if you take nothing else from this sermon, take this: sin and peace are mutually exclusive. If you want peace, you must kill sin in your life. Which means, Christian, that you should be aggressively putting up safeguards in your life against sin. Perhaps you should not take that trip you are planning with your friends because it exposes you to temptations outside of the protection of you normal community. Perhaps you should not charge your phone on your nightstand so you are not tempted to scroll through social media endlessly, envying the fabricated lives people let you see on Instagram. Perhaps you need to schedule time on your calendar for your spouse so you do not neglect your duties to care for and meet their physical and spiritual needs.
The more we excise sin, the more we orient ourselves toward God. We are at peace with him and he makes peace in our lives.
Let’s pray.