ALL SERMONS IN SERIES

Summary

Psalm 122 is a Psalm of Ascents. It’s part of a group of Psalms comprising Psalms 120 – 134. Each year, as they traveled up the hill the temple was built on, the people of Israel would sing these Psalms to remind themselves of God’s grace and love for them. So, these Psalms were used to gather the people’s hearts together in preparation for worship. Israel was gathered as God’s inheritance. Jesus has broadened that gathering and this Psalm directs us to him.

Transcript

Thank you, Lord, that you have gathered us together here this morning to worship you. Thank you for the ministry of the music team and for Jess and for the way they have brought us into your presence. We thank you for your word, which is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword. We pray now that your word will speak to us. Holy Spirit, work through your word and exalt Christ among us. Have your way in our hearts for your glory. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

 Psalm 122 is one of the 15 Psalms of Ascent. Peter said, "Preach any psalm you want."

 I picked this one and then afterwards it's like, "Why did I pick this one?" But it's very good. I tell you why I picked it. I picked it because of the first verse.

"I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord."

 That is so wonderful. I feel that existentially. Shelley and I feel that. I stepped down from being pastor at Shore Harvest in Eastern Maryland in 2016. Since that time, it's been something of a wilderness experience where we've gone to different churches. We go to church every week, but we didn't really have a church home. There was no other PCA church within close driving distance at all to us there in Eastern. We didn't know where to move. The Lord led us to Hummelstown and the Lord led us here to Second City. It is so wonderful to be in a body of believers that love the Lord, love each other, care for each other. It is such a glad thing to come together to the house of the Lord and worship with his people. If we think about the psalm of ascents, we know that the people of Israel were a pilgrim people. We think of them from the days of their father. Abraham didn't have a home. He didn't have any land except for the grave site that he bought. Other than that, he was wandering about in a tent. Isaac and Jacob after him. Even as they settled into the land, they were a people on pilgrimage. They knew that things were not secure in their home all the time. They would come up on pilgrimage. They were supposed to come up three times a year. Everyone come on pilgrimage to worship the Lord together. They have that history throughout their generations. In Jesus' day, they were coming up. Jesus came up with people. His hometown was in Galilee. He would come with people from Galilee. They would sing the songs of ascent on the way. While this is a psalm of David, it is also a psalm of Jesus Christ. It is a psalm Jesus sang. I have been thinking about it for a month. I just told someone, "That is one of the problems I have in that long. I have changed my outline three times." If I had another week, I would change my outline again because there are so many different things. One of the things that I have been focusing on is that Jesus was not a critic of the psalm. We tend to be critics of things. We tend to think, "Why did David write this this way?" Even of the Word of God, sometimes we think, "Why does he talk about smashing things?" Things that offend us a little bit. Do you think Jesus criticized the way David wrote? Jesus inspired the Holy Spirit of God that inspired this. Jesus was singing it in a way that you and I can't even imagine as an author of it, if you will. It was coming from him, from his heart. Today, I want to look at this psalm in a twofold manner from David's perspective and from Jesus' perspective.

 In David's day, they were coming out of a period in which the Philistines had ruled over them.

 You remember all the battles. King Saul had gone out of the battle, and David had gone into battle, and after the Philistines killed Saul on the battlefield and his sons, David became king. He became king in Hebron for a number of years. Then there was civil war. Abner didn't want David to be king over all Israel. Abner thought that Ishbus' should be king. So, they went into a period of civil war. We tend to think David, Jerusalem, peace, Solomon, peace. That's not their history. Think about the civil war in the United States and the hard feelings from that that linger to this day, especially among our brothers and sisters in the South, I think a little more than in the North. These are hard things, and this was fresh for the people. David is writing this song about peace be within you, peace in the tribes. The tribes weren't at peace very recently. Yesterday, they weren't at peace. Peace be within.

 They had a feeling of being scattered, being broken down, being oppressed by the Philistines recently, being oppressed by others. In Jesus' day, the Romans ruled over the people of Israel, and millions and millions of Jews did not live in Israel. They were still in Babylon. Not everybody returned from Babylon. They were still in Alexandria. There were so many Jews in Alexandria. I looked it up and I didn't write it down, but it was 600,000 or so, something like that, a lot, probably a million Jews in Egypt, and of course in Rome. There were Jews scattered everywhere, and Jews from all over the place would come to Jerusalem. That's what David had in mind when he captured Jerusalem. David said, "This is what I was made for," as my first point. David said, "This is what I was made for, to build this city, to have this place where people can come and worship the Lord." Because David was a worshipper of the Lord. David loved the Lord. He loved the Lord with all his heart. That's why God blessed David so much. He said David was a man after his own heart. Think of David as a shepherd. When Samuel went out to find a son of Jesse that he was supposed to anoint to be king, it wasn't the tall and the strong and the one that looked brave and handsome and all that. It was the shepherd boy. God said it's because of his heart. He's the one. You look on the outside, I look at the heart, I look at the heart, and his heart was a heart of worship. Think of him out there with a sheep writing psalms. "The heavens declare the glory of God." He's out there at night with the sheep and all the wild animals that want to get the sheep and looking at the stars. The heavens declaring the glory of God. Day to day, pours out speech. Night to night reveals knowledge. "The Lord is my light. The Lord is my salvation." He sees the sun coming up and that sun's not my salvation. It might be chasing some of these wild animals back into their lair. "But the Lord is my light and the Lord is my salvation. Who will I fear? Of whom will I be afraid?" Of course, the 23rd Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." David, who became the great shepherd of Israel as it were, being the king of Israel, the first great king of Israel, he recognized he never forgot he was a sheep. He was a sheep. His primary relationship wasn't as God's king, it was as God's sheep. Because he had a heart that recognized that he needed God and he worshiped God in that way. So this David, who was the king, says, "I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of the Lord." So obviously, the "me" is David the king. Who is the "they"? Who would say something like this? To the king. Well, who would say something like this to you and me? Let's go to the house of the Lord. Hopefully, a Christian friend, a Christian spouse, maybe our children. Sometimes our children want to come together to worship more than we do sometimes. It's like, "Oh, let's sleep in today." But our kids say, "No, I want to go to church."

 Maybe it's your parents, "Let's go to church. Oh, can I stay and play something?"

 Whoever it is, David says, "I was glad." And then later in the Psalms, it says, "For the sake of my companions and friends." His friends, his companions, his brothers, "They said to him, "Let's go to the house of the Lord." And David, who was the leader of God's people, became the follower. Sometimes we think that, "Oh, Peter's the leader. Oh, Dan's the leader. Oh, whatever. Whoever the leader is." But it's like, each one of us can be the leader. Children, you can be the leader. When you say, "Let's go to church. You're the leader." And the Lord can use each one of us to lead others to worship him. And praise God, he's willing to do that. And he does that. It's sweet to come and worship the Lord. It's sweet to worship the Lord alone, which David did, but it's even more sweet. It's another level when people who have been worshiping the Lord individually alone, who wake up early in the morning and pray, who stay up at night and pray and read the word and study the word, get together and worship the Lord together.

 As a corporate pilot, I've been in a lot of strange places. Strange to me, I have been a stranger in a lot of places, I should say. But one advantage of that is that you get to worship with a lot of different people. I kind of wish that I would have done that. I was a regional airline pilot before and I didn't go that many places and you never had time to hang out anywhere that we went. But I kind of wish that I had been a corporate pilot before I became a pastor. It really gives you appreciation of how different people worship in different places. And praise God for the diversity and the body of Christ and how so many people in so many different places are exalting Jesus Christ in their worship. And they're doing what the Holy Spirit is leading them to do to worship Jesus Christ and to exalt Him and to build up His kingdom and to reach people who need Jesus. People who are struggling in their lives and know that they need something, but they don't know what it is and don't know who it is. And they need Jesus. David said, "I have worked for this. I built this city." You know, he's talking about going up to Jerusalem. Well, this is the city that he built. It wasn't very long ago, one of the commentators said just yesterday it was Jebus. It was the home of the Jebusites. And some of you know the story how David, after he was king in Hebron for seven years, things were very divided because this Boseth was king somewhere else and he was king in Hebron. And it's like, now am I going to make everyone? It's like, no. And the Lord led him to go and continue the conquest of the land, really, which had not really been complete ever since the day of Joshua. Jerusalem was still occupied by the Jebusites and it was a stronghold. It's a city with ancient roots and ancient history way back in Abraham's day. We know of a certain priest, Melchizedek. Shelly's been going to a Bible study where we're talking about Melchizedek. And Melchizedek was priest of Salem. Right. And Salem, the commentators, historians tell us, was ancient Jerusalem. It was a settlement without walls and Salem means peace. So Melchizedek was prince of peace and he was king of peace and the king of Salem and a foreshadowing, a type of Christ, as Hebrews goes into detail telling us. In any event, the Jebusites

 ran over that peaceful village and they built a Jebus, their city, and put walls around it. And by the time of David, they were firmly a-scouched in their walls and they said, nobody is ever going to get in here. Jerusalem is a city fit firmly together and you're not getting in here, David. The blind and the lame will keep you from coming in here. But David's nephew, Joab, figured out how to go up through the water system and opened the gates, which made it a lot easier. But in any event, David risked his life to capture this city. He went in and they captured it and it became the city of David. He built it up stronger. Solomon built it up stronger.

 But it was always situated as a stronghold. So that in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, when the Lord's judgment came upon his people, you'll remember Nebuchadnezzar couldn't just march into that place, could he? No, he laid siege to it. The siege was a 30-month siege. Those of you who can do quick mental math know that's close to three years. And the reason why he was able to get in was because they were starving to death. I mean, it wasn't that this city was easy to get into. So David tells us, "In Jerusalem, a city built firmly together. I worked for it. I risked my life for it to come after it and to take it." And why did he do this? Why did he take Jerusalem? Well, like I said, a capital for himself. But more than that, he had in mind a central place of worship because the house of God had been in a tent ever since the time of Moses. Moving around from one place to another, the tabernacle was moved in the the Ark of the Covenant was within the Holy of Holies inside a tent. And David wanted to move it to Jerusalem and he wanted to build a temple. And God said, "David, I appreciate that, but you are not going to build a temple because you have shed too much blood." He was a man of war. And sometimes we forget David was a man of war because he was fighting the Lord's battles. The Lord led him. The Lord leads each one of us in different ways. And sometimes we're critical of each of each other more than we should be. I know. And we think, "Why is this person so argumentative for whatever?" It's like, "Well, maybe the Lord is leading that person to argue for this or that point in different churches." The church that the Lord led me to in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. So I was based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. So I went there more than any other church, but it was an Advent church. Not a Seventh-day Adventist, but an Advent church, which is an old denomination that focuses on Jesus' second coming. But the pastor there was always saying things almost every week, saying things critical to the Catholic Church and talking about the founding of our country and the founding fathers being Christian and things like that. And it's like, "Why does he say this every week?" But praise God, he brought us to Jesus. And many people were coming to Christ and people were coming out of churches that weren't preaching the gospel and coming to his church. And it's like, that's what the Lord was leading him to say. And praise God for what Lord is leading Peter to say. That's largely why we're here because of the preaching that Peter brings and the music and the worship and everything, but different people the Lord leads in different ways.

 At this point, you're saying, "What in the world are you talking about? Why are you babbling about all these different things?" Well, the Lord leads... I have got to thank the Lord for Shelly and the Christian wife. I mentioned before how sometimes it's the Christian spouse, Christian family that brings you to the Lord. Shelly has been reading Mystery of Providence by the great Puritan minister, John Flavell of Dartmouth. He says, "What Providence introduces is of special regard and consideration and by no means to be neglected by us. Lord, help us to see what you are about and help us to be quick to join into it." So what Providence brings to you is something that we should embrace. Shelly and I often pray in the morning, "What are you doing today, Lord? What are you about? Help us to see what you're about." Flavell continues, "There are leading providences which, however slight and trivial they may seem in themselves, yet in respect justly challenge the first rank of providential favors to us because they usher in a multitude of other mercies and draw a blessed train of happy consequences. Such a providence was it that of Jesse's sending with provisions of his brethren to lay encamped in the army. And thus, every Christian may furnish himself out of his own stock of experience if he will but reflect and consider the place where he is, the relation that he has, and the way by which he is led into them. One providence leads to another." Some of you are good at Puritans and I'm not great at even reading Puritans, reading it out loud. But the point here is one little thing that the Lord leads you to do, say yes. Don't say no if the Lord is leading you to do it because you don't know what the next thing would be. David was told by his dad, "Take this cheese and this bread and these skins, take them up to your brothers who were camped out against the Philistines." And he obeyed and he did it. And what did he end up doing? He ended up killing the giant Goliath who had been threatening the army of the Lord. There are little things every day that you and I have opportunity, with which we have opportunity. Think of Arnan and his four sons. They're threshing wheat, they're threshing flour. Imagine you were one of his sons. They were tired. "Oh, dad, do I have to go out and thresh again today? Aren't we almost done? Who knows how many days they've been doing it or whatever?" But they went out. They were doing what the Lord called them to do and they saw the angel of the Lord. You know, one little obedience, you don't know what one little obedience is going to lead to. I've worked for this and David also said, "I'm imagining better future than this." He was imagining the 12 tribes of Israel in peace. He was fighting the civil war and he was imagining the 12 tribes in peace. What's their peace focused on? Their peace isn't focused on, "Okay, now Dan and now Benjamin are going to get along with Judah and Simeon." No, it wasn't based on that. The peace was based on the Lord, that they were going to worship the Lord together, the tribes in peace. 

 David had an imagination that was sanctified. Obviously not perfect. Obviously he imagined many things he shouldn't imagine and got himself in deep trouble imagining things he shouldn't imagine. And you and I are not perfect. Praise God for Jesus Christ who is perfect. But pray for the Lord to give us sanctified imaginations that will imagine better things. Better things than what sometimes we just keep thinking of things that are not good. Keep thinking of things that don't have good endings. Keep thinking of things that are depressing and don't have to do with Jesus Christ being exalted in our lives, being effective in helping others. Praise God by his grace, the Holy Spirit can help us to imagine better things. David was imagining the temple actually being there. He's talking about going up. He says, "For the sake of your temple." The temple wasn't there yet. David wanted to build the temple, but it wasn't there yet. He wasn't allowed to build the temple. He was collecting for the temple. In our Old Testament reading, we read about how the angel of the Lord met them on the threshing floor of Ornan, the Jebusite, and said, "Build an altar here." It's like, "Okay, this is where the temple will be." History tells us it was on Mount Moriah, which is where Abraham was told to go. A couple of days' journeys, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, and sacrifice him to me." He went the whole way to, I believe, and it's not exactly clear it was Ornan's threshing floor, but it was sometime before that. It was on Mount Moriah that he was led to sacrifice Isaac, and the Lord provided a substitute for him.

 David had a view for the temple being there, and the Lord promised that his son would be able to build it, and Solomon did. It was a temple that brought people from all over the world, not just Jews from all over the world. You don't remember the queen of Shebra came to see this. People from all over the world came to see it was a wonder of the ancient world, and people came to believe in God because of that. David was a prophet, and many of his psalms are direct prophecies of Jesus coming. I don't think that David had an understanding that Jesus was going to be the real temple, but he had an understanding that God had a bigger plan for salvation than what he was about.

 Peter quoted on the day of Pentecost, "I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken. Therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced. My flesh also will dwell in hope, for you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your holy ones see corruption. You have made known to me the paths of life, and you will make me full of gladness with your presence." Peter went on to say, "Obviously, David died, and his tomb is still here." David wasn't talking about himself. Peter says David was a prophet. He foresaw the sufferings of Jesus Christ, whom the people that he was talking to had killed by handing him over to godless men and crucifying him. David didn't ascend under the heavens, but he said, "The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies my footstool." And then Peter went on, "Let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified." And many turned to the Lord. Thousands of them came to faith in Christ as they heard this, and they were convicted that, "Yes, we have rejected the Christ." "No, we don't want to direct the Christ."

 "We need to turn to the Lord." You know, I graduated from a seminary 20 years ago this year, and one of the things that I will never get over from my seminary experience, and that has struck me the most in my seminary training, was how the apostles in the early church came to apply the Jehovah title, the title of the Lord. What we read in our Bibles as "Lord," L-O-R-D in capital letters, the apostles applied these texts to Jesus. And it's like when we go through, some of us think, "Oh, when we read, we Lord," we think, "Oh, that's Jehovah. Yes, oh, here's Jehovah. Yes, it's Jehovah when we see Lord in capital letters." It's just as good to think, and I think better, to think, "Lord, capital letters, that means Jesus. That means Jesus." Every time you read, and sometimes we think, "Oh, there are Old Testament's so boring. I'd rather read about Jesus." It is about Jesus, and whenever you read, "Lord," think Jesus, and it will revitalize your reading as you read through His word. David said, "I was made for this." Jesus said, "I came to earth for this." Jesus is the reality. David was a type of Christ. The types are always lesser than what they are the type of. Jesus is the real thing. David was the king of his people, but he was foreshadowing Jesus Christ, who is the eternal king. David died, and he was in his grave in Saul corruption, as Peter pointed out. Jesus Christ is the king forever of his people forever. He is the king of heaven, as we sang this morning. He's the real king. He's the real priest. He's the real Melchizedek. He's not a Levite, but he's the real priest. He's the real thing. He's what we need. The person who can reconcile us to God, and he did it not by the blood of animals or anything, but his own blood.

 He's the real temple. The people who were against Jesus in his day, the Jewish leaders, they wanted to kill him. They couldn't figure out how to kill him. They couldn't get any of the charges that they trumped up against him to stick. Finally, the charge that they came up with, that semi-stuck, was he said he would destroy the temple, or that if they destroyed the temple, he would raise it up in three days. Because he's the real temple. They did destroy the real temple. They killed his body. It was raised again by the Father and the Holy Spirit. It was raised by a power of an indestructible life. He came back to life on the third day. He's the real thing. He wanted to build the shadow. Solomon built the shadow, which was the glory of the ancient world. Jesus Christ is the glory of heaven. He's the glory of heaven. He's the glory of our lives. David wanted the twelve tribes to come in and come in with peace. Jesus is bringing the twelve tribes. He came for the twelve tribes, but he came for the world. He came so that people from every tribe and tongue and nation will come in to his kingdom, will come in and form the new Jerusalem, which is the bride of Jesus Christ. When we see in Revelation, it tells us that the new Jerusalem is built upon the foundation of the apostles and the twelve apostles.

This always gets me reading this. The twelve gates are the twelve tribes of Israel. It's like, "What in the world? The bride of Jesus Christ and the twelve gates are the names of the tribes of Israel." Because it's all one. We're not looking for a Jerusalem to be built back in the Dome of the Rock to be destroyed in Jerusalem. We're looking for the new Jerusalem to come down from heaven with the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles in everyone from every tongue and nation and language coming together to worship the Lord. It's what David was about. It's what Jesus Christ is about. It's what we're about. Praise God, we can be a small part of that here as we come together to worship the Lord. Jesus Christ says, "I've worked for this, living out obedience to the Father." You know, boys and girls, do we have any stories of Jesus when he was a boy?

 One.

 Yes! Yes! Yes! That was yours too. Well, I hope it was everyone's because it's the only one. We have a story of them taking him to Egypt when he was a baby, but when he was big enough to do something by himself and make his own decision, he went to the temple and he decided to stay there. He stayed behind. Exactly. His parents said, "Where is he? What's he doing?" It's like, "Didn't you know I'd be in my father's house?" David built that place and he built it for Jesus Christ so that Jesus Christ could come stay there and so that it would be a place that pointed to the future, to the real temple, to himself, and to the church. Jesus stayed there talking with the scribes and talking about the law and talking with the priests. Jesus was about his father's business and then it says that he went back with his... That wasn't the end of the story, was it? They found him and they went back to Nazareth. The last word of that section of the story, he went back with them to Nazareth and he was submissive to them. So it wasn't that he was trying to disobey them. He was obeying his father, but he wanted to obey his parents. Do you want to obey your parents? I appreciate the honesty. Sometimes it's easier than other times. It depends, but that's what Jesus did. He submitted to his father. When you think about Jesus keeping the law, it's not all him parsing out, "Oh, this point of this law and where..." It's that he was delighted to do the will of his father. He loved his father. He wanted to do the will of his father all the time. We're told in Scripture that that's how we should be too, that we should want to do the will of God and want to follow Jesus all the time. Children, we need to be wanting to obey our parents too. That's the first command with a promise. "Obey your parents."

 On the dark night that Jesus was betrayed by his friend in the garden of Gethsemane, he fell on his face. What did he say? "Father, let this cup pass from me, but nevertheless not my will but yours." His desire was to do the will of his father. He went to the cross, obeying his father. Jesus Christ said, he worked for this. He did the works of active obedience, the work of passive obedience in dying. And David said, "I imagine a better future than this." Jesus Christ said, "This is my future. This is my future. People coming into worship from all over. The glory isn't in the past. Jesus came in when he came up to Jerusalem. He wept over Jerusalem. Was he weeping over the temple being destroyed? I don't think he was weeping over the people that were going to perish. He said, "If only you had known what would make for your peace, but you don't know what's making for your peace." He didn't weep over the temple being destroyed because he's the temple. The real temple is him. The temple age has come and gone. The age of Jesus Christ is now, is the age of Jesus Christ. Brothers and sisters, I'm going to wrap this up here. You are the beloved of the Lord. He came to gather together a bride for himself. He came to gather us together, to gather us together, to worship him here. But more than that, the telos, the end, what we're going for is to be together forever, worshiping him together with all of his people from every nation and every tribe. He has invested in his future, and his future is with you. His future is with us. Peace be within Jerusalem. Peace be within the church. Peace be within you, because the Prince of Peace has come for you and given himself for your peace. I was so glad when they said to me, "Let's go to the house of the Lord." Let's pray. Blessed Lord, we thank you that you have come to draw us to yourself, to give us your peace. Like the people of Jerusalem, we don't always go for the things that make for peace. We pray, Holy Spirit, that you will work in our hearts more and more to embrace the things that work for peace, work for the glory of Christ, and build up your church here at Second City, here in this country, and all around the world, in Jesus' name and for his glory. Amen.

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