Reverend Peter Marshall's Commentary Archive

". . .Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Luke 12:56)

         Perhaps many of you were expecting this week's commentary to consist of my predictions of what kinds of things will occur in America and around the world in 2009. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about writing on the new religion of environmentalism (with the latest surprising truths about global warming). Well, I will write on that very soon, and also on Barack Obama and his fast-approaching Presidency. But that is not what is on my heart to write about this week.

First, a word of warning: As the last hours of 2008 ebbed away it was a foregone conclusion that the health and prosperity preachers would weigh in with their usual end-of-the-year prophecies that the coming  year would be one of great prosperity for the righteous, and that God would bestow much financial blessing on those who trust Him by faith. I have learned not to listen to these self-serving false prophets. The way the spiel goes is that you're supposed to exhibit the faith required of you by immediately sowing financial seeds of faith into their ministries, and then wait expectantly for great financial blessings from the Lord to show up for you. And if the financial blessings don't appear, "why then, you simply didn't have large enough expectations, brother! Your faith wasn't strong enough," because Jesus said ‘according to your faith be it unto you,' remember?" But, by those words the Lord didn't intend for us to understand that He was saying that however much faith we can muster up will produce a similar-sized blessing from God. God simply will not be manipulated "by faith" in the same way that the prosperity preachers manipulate the Christian public.

Some of you might remember, as I do, how a few of these preachers (who will go unnamed) prophesied that 2008 would be the year when the transfer of wealth from the unrighteous to the righteous of the Lord would begin to take place. Yeah, right! The only transfer of wealth that took place in 2008 was that the value of people's 401Ks and their houses and their investments transferred into the ether, in the worst destruction of American wealth since the Great Depression! And that affected the righteous every bit as much as the unrighteous.

Please, please, do not get sucked in to listening to false prophecies. Stand on the Word of God, and feed only on Biblically sound teaching, so that you will learn to discern between wool and flax, clean and unclean - or between what God is saying and the subtle corruption of these preacher's opinions. (The above references come from Deuteronomy 22, where we read various warnings from God against bad mixtures: women wearing men's clothes [and vice-versa], plowing with an ox [clean] and a donkey [unclean] together, and wearing garments made of both wool and linen [in Rev. 19:8 linen signifies the righteousness of the saints] together). The issue here is not whether we Christians are bound by these exact same laws (we're not) but that God is warning us against mixing clean and unclean, good and evil, and requiring that we learn to discern the difference.

As we enter 2009, fear is abroad in the land - fear of financial distress and failure, fear of an Obama Presidency and his encouragement of the evils of abortion and homosexual marriage which threaten the fabric of our society, fear of a more leftist than ever Congress intruding in our lives through increasing Federal taxes and regulations, fear of the burgeoning threat of Islam to Western civilization in general and America in particular, and on and on.

What then can we stand on as we enter the New Year?

Like many of you, I begin my day with a time when I read devotional literature and my Bible - actually, before I even get out of bed. I have done this for decades, and the only times I miss it are days when I have to get up at dawn or before to catch a flight. My daily pattern is to first read a Psalm, and then a chapter each from the Old Testament and the New Testament. It so happens that today's Psalm is Psalm 34, and as I was prayerfully reading it I came to believe that God had ordained it for today, because it speaks powerfully to  apprehensive and fearful believers. In an anxious time, this psalm contains a number of directives that can help us enter 2009 in the right attitudes of heart and mind.

Psalm 34 is one of the prayers of David - this one prayed, if we can trust the superscription at its beginning, when he was fleeing for his life from King Saul (1 Samuel 21). He had just come from a tearful farewell with Jonathan, who was dearer than a brother to him, and had fled to the land of the Philistines, Israel's archenemy. (This is precisely where Israel is doing battle right now, by the way - the land of the Philistines!).

He had sought refuge with Achish, the king of Gath, but quickly became afraid that the king would have him killed. To lull the Philistines into leaving him alone he had pretended to be insane, drooling and scribbling on doors, thereby buying himself a few hours time to flee again - this time to the cave of Adullam. His brothers and all the men of his father's house came to join him. And, as the Amplified Version of the Bible puts it, "every one in distress, or in debt, or discontented gathered to him there; and he became a commander over them." About 400 men joined him in his desolate and lonely exile.

From his rocky retreat he could see the valley below, where he had experienced the most heroic and exhilarating moment of his life - the impossible victory over the giant Goliath. And now he found himself at one of the darkest and most despondent times he would ever face - hunted by the king whom he had faithfully served.

By the way, this psalm is an acrostic, which means that the first letters of each of the verses form (in order) the Hebrew alphabet. That accounts for the slightly disjointed flow of thought in the psalm.

The opening verse is these words: "I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth." David is telling us that in times of danger and fear (or any other time, for that matter!), our focus is to be one of blessing the Lord and praising Him. A verse that comes to mind is: "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee." Not only are we to focus our attention on the Lord, but to actively bless and praise Him. So, the first attitude we must take into the New Year is to bless the Lord and praise Him continually.

Verse seven gives us a powerful promise: "The Angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him - who revere and worship Him with awe; and each of them He delivers" (Amplified). Angel is capitalized because this seems to refer to the Holy Son of God. It was the Angel of the Lord that stopped Abraham from slaying Isaac; it was the Angel of the Lord that spoke directly to Jacob; and it was the Angel of the Lord who stood with sword in hand in front of the commander of Israel's armies. Holed up in their mountain cave, surrounded by the Philistines and with the murderous Saul hunting him down, David and his band of outlaws were encompassed by the presence of the Lord Christ - He encamped around them! Wonderful word, that word "encamps" - it means that the Lord comes to stay with us; He abides and dwells with us. He doesn't just check in once in a while.

Notice that it is "those who fear Him" that He encamps around. And this is the key to one of the most important attitudes of heart that we need to adopt going into 2009: the fear of the Lord. You don't hear much preaching any more on the fear of the Lord, which reveals how spiritually destitute the churches of Christ are in America. The fear of the Lord doesn't mean the fawning, cringing, "I'm afraid to get too close to Him" kind of fear that people have who are laboring under the guilt of sin. Rather, it means the fear of offending or upsetting the Lord - the fear of displeasing Him. As the Amplified makes clear, it means revering and worshipping Him with awe. It is the negative or flip side of "blessing the Lord at all times" in verse one.

The Lord Jesus is truly able to encamp around people who worship Him this way. We may be headed into 2009 isolated and pressed about with all kinds of worries and troubles, but we are not alone. Like Jacob by himself at the Brook Jabbok - very afraid to face his brother Esau on the next day for fear that Esau would avenge himself on Jacob by putting his wives and children and herds to the sword - we are not actually alone, we are in the company of the Angel of the Lord.

In verse 9 we are admonished to "fear the Lord, you His saints - revere and worship Him! For there is no want to those who truly revere and worship Him with godly fear." The next verse goes on to say: "The young lions lack food and suffer hunger, but they who seek (inquire of and require) the Lord [by right of their need and on authority of His Word] none of them shall lack any beneficial thing." On the authority of the Word of God we have His promise that we shall not lack any beneficial thing. But, it is clear that we have to 1) revere and worship Him, and 2) seek after Him and require His help and provision.

And He delivers us. Four times in this psalm we are assured of deliverance by the Lord - verses 4, 7, 17, and 19. In the seventh verse the Hebrew word for "deliver" means that we are equipped, strengthened and invigorated for the fight. So, we are not removed by the Lord Jesus from the conflict, any more than David was removed from the conflict with Saul. But, if we revere and worship the Lord He will strengthen us and equip us for whatever we have to face in 2009.

In the other three instances in which the word "deliver" is used in Psalm 34, the Hebrew word is natsal, which means to snatch, to take away, to snatch out of danger. In verse four, David says that he "sought (inquired of) for the Lord, and required Him [of necessity, and on the authority of His Word], and He heard me, and delivered me from all my fears." The meaning here is that the Lord snatched David right out of the midst of the fears, in the same way that He delivered (natsal is also used there) the people of Israel out of the hands of the Egyptians in the Red Sea crossing.

Clearly, the meaning of natsal is a dramatic rescue. In Psalm 34:17 we read: "When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears, and delivers them out of all their distress and troubles." Here again, the implication is that the Lord plucks us up out of the distresses and troubles. And lastly, in verse 19 David asserts that "many evils confront the (consistently) righteous; but the Lord delivers him out of them all." He will not keep us from experiencing the evils, or the distresses and the troubles, but He will deliver us from them and rescue us out of them.

These are powerful promises, but note that their coming to fulfillment depends upon our maintaining righteousness in the Lord. We're told what that means in verses 13 and 14: "Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Depart from evil and do good; see, inquire for and crave peace, and pursue - go after - it!" The next verse (15) says: "The eyes of the Lord are toward the [uncompromisingly] righteous, and His ears are open to their cry." So, clearly, verse 15 implies that righteousness consists of speaking in the Spirit of the Lord, departing from evil (negatively) and doing good (positively), and craving and pursuing peace whenever and wherever we can. If, by the grace of God, we live in this kind of righteousness, we can expect the Lord to snatch us out of the jaws of both evils and troubles.

I'll let Alexander Maclaren, that wonderful nineteenth century Scottish "Prince of the Expositors," have the last word:

"So, like the hunted fugitive in Adullam we may lift up our confident voices even when the stress of strife and sorrow is upon us; and though Gath be in sight and Saul just over the hills, and we have no better refuge than a cave in the hillside; yet in prophecy built upon our consciousness that the Angel of the Covenant is with us now, we may antedate the deliverance that shall be, and think of it as even now accomplished."

From a human point of view, 2009 looks as if it will be a very tough year. But, if you and I will take Psalm 34 to heart, and commit to living it out as best we can with the Lord's assistance and grace, then we can trust that it will turn out to be a

Happy New Year!

Copyright, 2008, Peter J. Marshall. All rights reserved.

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