Summary 

Psalm 76 is an ancient war psalm that declares God's absolute control over the rise and fall of nations. Christians can and should be patriotic, expressing genuine gratitude to God for the blessings and freedoms their country provides. At the same time, gratitude does not mean ignoring injustice. It means holding both thankfulness and honest historical perspective together. God is not a distant observer of human events. He actively intervenes in history on the side of the humble and holds the powerful accountable. Every loyalty we have, to self, family, community, and country, must ultimately be subordinate to our loyalty to God. The practical response to God's rule over history is to align ourselves with the poor and overlooked, because that is where God stands.

Transcript

Oh, Lord God, your name is great throughout all the earth. You are good to all those things that you have made. We praise you for your fatherly care. We praise you that you have embraced the church as your bride. We ask now that you would open our hearts and our minds to hear your word.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Four score and seven months ago, and another four years, because that's only about seven years, our pastor brought forth in this church building a new sermon schedule conceived in liberty because nobody made him do it, and dedicated to the proposition that we would study the Bible in its various parts in more or less equal intervals. That is, when Peter took this job initially, he started doing these quarterly teaching series and began doing psalms in the summers and today in God's goodness and with God's sense of humor, which we've already heard a little bit about. Today we are going to study Psalm 76, eight days after we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of independence in 1776. When we're done here, if you're feeling especially patriotic, you can jump on Interstate 76 and drive down to Philadelphia and take a picture in front of the Liberty Bell.
And it's an interesting thing that we're studying 76 so close to the celebration of 76. I'll just tell you, this is not something that Peter had planned 11 years ago. We didn't know as a church about a month ago that this coincidence was occurring, and we all sort of giggled about, was just accidentally the next thing on the schedule. Once Peter had got done with his series on the Ten Commandments last week, which, by the way, I thought was excellent. And I think we should think about this coincidence a little bit.
Because if you believe in an omnipotent God, you believe that his plan and his providence extends to all things. And so when you get a coincidence or a small providence like this one, you have to think about how to think about it, right? The poet Robert Frost has this great line where he asks, quote, if design govern in a thing so small, does design govern in a little thing like this? Right. What's the point of seeing, claiming that you see providence at work if you can't see that there's any sort of providential point in the action?
Well, it's my contention, excuse me, it's the manner in which I conducted my study of this particular psalm, that when we see one of These small providences, something that we know theologically to be part of God's plan, even if we can't understand the purpose of it, even if it seems like a small thing. Well, that should drive us to prayer. That should drive us to receptivity toward God. Maybe he's teaching us something. Maybe he's strengthening our faith, maybe showing he loves us.
Maybe he just wants us to be on our toes, spiritually speaking. So in the spirit of prayer and receptivity and being on our toes, I want to talk about 76 and 76 today. I want to talk about America as a historical phenomenon, which I think we can all agree to be part of God's providence one way or another. Then I want to talk about history as such in really big picture terms. And because I'm taking a wide angle on the text today, I'm not going to talk about a number of things that I would like to.
I have a list of these things. It's written here, the things that I'm not going to be able to get to. Feel free to come and ask me after the service if your unanswered question is on my list. So after that big picture stuff, I want to zero in on a psalm and ask what it has to say about history and providence and us as a congregation. If you want points, if you want to write down alliterative points, I have got them for you.
My points today are going to be history, humility and hierarchy. History, humility, hierarchy. So let's get into the first point. History 76 and 76. So I think it's a good and spiritually mature thing to be interested in the customs and the traditions of your country.
And I think it's undeniably a mark of holiness to be grateful to God for the good gifts that he gives through all the different facets of our lives. If you think about the blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 28, for example, which go on for a long time, one of the more chilling parts of this whole litany of curses, it says all the cursings come, it says, because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart because of his great gifts. Being ungrateful to God is a mark of great sin.
It is spiritual foolishness not to give thanks to God for His blessings. And this poem is helpful for us in remembering that. So Matthew Henry, who was not an American, when he writes about this poem, he says, quote, it is a psalm proper to a Thanksgiving Day that is for all people, for whatever particular gifts they have received from God. And I think he's right. So in our context, I'm pleased that our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, at the last general assembly had no less than three overtures recommending that we as a group solemnly thank God for our country.
The one that passed, one did pass was from the Philadelphia presbytery. And it introduced itself in these words, whereas. Hold on. Whereas God's word calls his church. Oh, give thanks unto the Lord, for his mercy endures forever in whatsoever comes to pass according to Jesus Christ, sovereign rule and reign over all men and nations.
In other words, it is right always and at all times to give thanks and praise to the Lord. Right. But of course, there's more to it just than that. So the overture writers and I think that this country has been the instrument through which God has provided immense blessings to many people. Consider we have a very large degree of religious liberty here.
I read a book once where the author, who was a missionary, was talking to a guy after a service, and he was lamenting that American Christians were so lukewarm in their faith. And the guy that he was talking to, who was a Christian from the Middle east and was visiting here, he said, this morning I saw a public baptism conducted openly and without fear. I saw hundreds of people worshiping God openly without fear of governmental retribution. This is the type of miracle we've been praying about for years. How about that?
Many people around the world right now cannot worship God the way they feel is right. There are many people connected with our own congregation who have had to get away from religious persecution in their country of origin. Right. We ought to give thanks to God that we can worship freely here. Additionally, peaceful living has been historically possible here for a large percent of families, such that many of us have been able to live quietly and mind our own affairs.
As Paul says in First Timothy, this country and its stability has been a huge common grace, kindness from God to this people. And I think we should thank the Lord for his gifts. All of this is not to say that this country doesn't still have very large problems and doesn't have huge historical sins in its past that we're still working through as a country and as a church. But if we're thinking historically, I think we need to think as people with a historical sense, not just as impatient moral idealists. Here's an example of what I mean.
I think it is scandalous that women did not have the right to vote in this country until 1920. I think that was a flawed judgment on the part of our forefathers. I think that's all true.
It is a bad lack of judgment. But we should consider what's happening in the rest of the world at that same time, right? None of the other large democracies allowed women to vote. In 1920, America beat England to granting women's suffrage by eight years. It beat France by 25 years.
Really, surprisingly, can. In Bolshevik Russia, women did have the right to vote, but just like men, they did not have a legal right to free speech. They did not have the right to form an independent political party. So they were allowed to vote, but only for the person the state chose to be voted for. Right?
And soon that was going to be a guy named Joseph Stalin, who famously said, it's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes. So there's that.
Then of course, there's the issue of racial slavery and following the Civil War, racial discrimination, which is an enduring and awful evil. But again, we should consider how the US was able, in some sense, to deal with some of its unjust laws. The historian John Meacham says, quote, in our living memory, Christianity has been deployed as a means of liberation and progress. In that issue, he's Talking about the 1960 civil rights movement, of course, which was primarily the work of the black church asking the white church to get the memo and the white church finally listening up and voting accordingly. And think about how the nonviolent protest movement was able to get things done here in this country.
So Martin Lloyd, Martin Luther King Jr. Famously said, quote, we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. Do to us what you will and we will continue to love you. He said that in 1957, which was the same year that Eisenhower needed to deploy the National Guard to protect black students as they walked to school. And here's the remarkable thing about all of this. King's non violent Christian approach worked, right?
Appealing to the consciences of our people eventually, gradually, grudgingly worked. And I think we should thank God for this. Again, consider the alternative, right? He tried that with Stalin. He would say, you're going to wear me down by your capacity to suffer, so you try, right?
Here's a quote from Russell Moore. And I think this gets the balance that we should have just right. Quote, our patriotism is the kind that needs our country to be our country, not our Messiah. We have another King for that. We love our country best when we don't expect it to be our final city on a hill.
So that was the intro to my history points. Anyway, I want to go back to Psalm 76, I want to go back to 1776. In 1776, the Continental army was really destroyed. On several different occasions they were outmanned by the British, who had the largest, most well funded and most professional army in the world, supported by the strongest navy in the world. In fact, the American Revolution came so close to being snuffed out almost immediately that the people at the time and smart people since have talked about God's special providence favoring the Americans.
Here's a quote from a Massachusetts newspaper in that year. We have thought that God was for us and had given many and signal instances of his power and mercy in our favor, and had greatly frowned upon and disappointed our enemies. And verily it has been so. The author goes on to say that the people needed to give God the glory for his work and pray for his continuing favor. Even the cautious historian David McCulloch says that the outcome of the war, quote, seemed little short of a miracle, especially for those who knew what a close call it was in the beginning.
So when we think about the Revolution of 1776, we're thinking about a bunch of smart guys who started a war they did not have a great chance of winning, but which they did win, partially by accident. That's the haughty defiance of 76 that Walt Whitman, our great poet of democracy, talks about, which I quoted in your bulletin. But I want to turn back to our actual sermon text this morning. Psalm 76 is a war song, but in a very strange sense, isn't it? Look with me at the text.
What does it say? What does it say? In essence, what's the main point of says this? God is in control. The strong, the well armed, the warlords, they can't stand before God.
God breaks the flashing arrows. That's verse three. He sinks the stout hearted into sleep. The men of war are paralyzed. That's verse five.
At your rebuke, O God of Jacob, both rider and horse lay stunned. Verse 6. God smashes up the tanks. We might say God confounds the helicopters. Right?
Here's an interesting thing. The word arrows in Hebrew is actually the word thunderbolts. That's why it says flashing arrows. So the bad guys are guys who think that they have godlike power, which seems a lot like most of the governments today, Right? By the way, did you know that the initial tests for the atom bomb that were conducted in New Mexico were called the Trinity tests?
That's kind of strange, isn't it? But God shrugs off all human weaponry. Think about what's being said in this poem. Here's our poet. He lives in a very tumultuous time.
Think about the records in Kings and Chronicles. They make you exhausted. He says that it doesn't matter how big the enemy armies are. Why? Because God is bigger.
We could call this the haughty Defiance of Psalm 76 against all the materialists, against all the people who think they can play God if they just get together a big enough army. This psalm is shouting, nope. God is in control. He will decide the battles that decide the fates of nations. God will be glorified.
His name is great in Israel. God's faithful people will continue to praise him, and they can know without hesitation that he is the boss, even in the face of political or military opposition. So that's my first point, or half of it. So God is in control of actual history, the stuff that actually happens in the world. God is intensely concerned with what happens here, and he is at work to bring salvation to his people and glory to Himself.
Think about what we say every week in the Apostles Creed. Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate. That's a particular person. God did not snap his fingers outside of time in physical reality. No, he entered into history.
And psalms like this one say that he has been involved in history since the beginning. This is the doctrine of Providence. The Philadelphia presbytery, when they made their overture to the General assembly this year, referenced a guy named John Witherspoon, who was a minister as well as a signer of the Declaration of Independence from a sermon which he preached on Psalm 76 in the year 1776. So I'm going to quote his main point from that sermon. He says, all the disorderly passions of men, whether exposing the innocent to private injury or whether they are the arrows of divine judgment and public calamity, shall in the end be, to the praise of God, the ambition of mistaken princes, the cunning and cruelty of oppressive and corrupt ministers, even the inhumanity of brutal soldiers, however dreadful, however, shall finally promote the glory of God.
That is, God is in control even in the evil of history. He restrains that evil to show mercy, and he allows that evil in order to bring about his plans and to let the evildoers store up wrath for the Day of Judgment. And we see this supremely, of course, in the judicial murder of Christ. He was killed by the ambition of mistaken princes, the cunning and cruelty of oppressive and corrupt ministers, and even the inhumanity of brutal soldiers. All of these things were instruments that God used in the human life and death of Jesus to bring about his great redemption.
God is at work in history, even though it's messy. So I want to come back to that. But first, here's the other half of this first point. God is not just the God of actual history, he's the God of all history. Think about what it means that we're reading this text here in 2026.
Right? Many scholars think that this psalm was written in celebration of the destruction of the armies of the Assyrian warlord Sennacherib. This is a pretty famous thing. You can find accounts of this in Isaiah, for instance. The English poet Lord Byron wrote a poem about this incident.
The last two lines are, and the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord. It's a pretty good line poem. Is generally considered to be a part of a classic romantic literature. Right. Well, here's the thing.
Byron was born in 1788, which is the year before George Washington became president. Byron writes glowingly about Washington. As you know, news. We think of Byron as old, right? The English language as we speak it is maybe 500 years old, depending on how you want to measure early modern English.
Right? The Assyrian attack on Jerusalem, which is being celebrated in this poem was in 701 BC that is at the time of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. This poem was already older than our language is. Consider just in terms of antiquity. This poem is to Shakespeare, as I am to my daughter Bella, who turns 3 today.
Wish her a happy birthday. She's in the nursery. This poem is at least 10 times older than the United States of America. Generations have trod, have trod, have trod. Civilizations have risen and fallen.
But this poem celebrating the acts of God in history is still here. It has weathered all of history from then till now. All flesh is as grass, and the glory of man is the flower of grass. But the grass withers, the flower falls. But the word of the Lord endures forever.
Friend. This word is a rock. It has been a light to all generations. If you want something that will last, if you want something bigger than yourself, you've got it in your hands. Treasure this word.
Treasure the God who gave us this word so that we can know him. Us and our children and our children's children. That was all. Point 1. God is the God of history.
He controls it. He always has. He's the ancient of days. He has determined the periods and the boundaries of the dwelling places of nations. As we read about in Acts, let's move to point two, which is much simpler.
So what do we do as people living in history, knowing that God rules all of history? Make it practical. Fill in the blank for me here, right? Think about the psalm that we've read. God rules all history, therefore I should.
What right. There's a lot of good answers to this question. Of course, if this was a test and my students were raising their hands and making that look on their face, I would say I'll take a lot of answers. There's a lot of ways to get full credit, but you need to explain yourself. The reference to the test.
Here's what I think we should take practically from this. God rules all history, therefore I should be thoughtfully nice.
That's how I would fill in the blanks. Let me show you how I got this. Look again at the poem. Go to. Verse 7 says, but you, you are to be feared.
Who can stand before you when once your anger is aroused from the heavens you utter judgment? The earth feared and was still when God arose to establish judgment to save all the humble of the earth. Selah. You'll remember that selah is kind of a mysterious term. That's why it's left untranslated.
That's the English version of the Hebrew word. Our best guess is it's some kind of musical term meaning pause, stop, breathe. Think about that a second. That's what we should do here. God is in control of all things.
No one can stand against Him. And he is a judging God. And he is going to judge in anger in order to what, save the humble of the earth. My point too today is humility. The God of history is on the side of the humble.
What does this mean? Well, it means for our own good, we need to be on the side of the humble. We have this phrase in our society that's kind of this moral prod. We say we want to be on the right side of history, right? People say that when they want you to vote for them.
And I think what they're saying is right, but they're not saying it with the meaning that this text has. People today seem to mean that if you get things wrong today, in 50 years, some teacher with a book in his hand is going to be shaking his head and saying, well, those guys were wrong and we will feel shame in our grave or in our old folks home or something like that. It's a pretty wimpy judgment, really. This text says something very different. It says that God intervenes in history and when he does, he is on the side of the humble.
The word translated humble here means what you think it means in the context of history, in different places, it's translated meek, poor, lowly, oppressed. When Jesus says that the meek will inherit the earth, he's probably thinking of verses like this, Matthew Henry says, though the meek of the earth are by their meekness exposed to injury, yet God will sooner or later appear for their salvation. And so when we read this text, knowing that we are those who are favored by history generally, we need to put ourselves on the side of the poor and the humble. Don't be an oppressor. Be kind in a thoughtful way.
Be on the right side of the history and for the right reason. I think there is messiness, there is injustice, there is enormous pain in history. But God is not complacent. God sees the ugliness of history and it makes him angry. The oppressors of history aren't just going to get away with it.
God is on the side of the poor and the meek and the humble. And we want to think about who those people are and make sure we are nice to them. So that was point two. My last point is hierarchy, and it's related to both previous points. Let's look at the last few verses of this poem quickly for my last point here.
Verse 11. Make your vows to the Lord your God, and perform them. Let all around him bring gifts to him who is to be feared, who cuts off the spirit of princes, who is to be feared by the kings of the earth. Who should we fear, according to these verses? Who should we serve?
Well, it's God, obviously, right? But then look at verse 12. Who else should fear God, princes and kings, right? The people who, in a traditional society, everybody else is supposed to fear and serve, right? So there's a sense, of course, in which we're all equal before God. God chose no favoritism or partiality.
As Peter says in Acts, a beggar woman can be the spiritual peer of the disciples, as Jesus shows. But there's still a sense, and a very obvious sense, in which a beggar woman and a king are different, right? One has money and power, one doesn't. This poem is saying that everybody on the earthly totem pole, everybody in every part of the social ladder, will answer to God. And the ones at the top are going to answer the most.
They need to fear him.
Let's put all this together, and here's what I'm suggesting. I think we need to train ourselves to have concentric loyalties or layered loyalties, right?
Broadly right. We should be loyal to ourselves. That's part of being a creature. But our loyalty to ourselves need to be bounded very tightly to our loyalty to those around us. And there's family loyalty, there's social loyalty, there's loyalty to one's country.
And I think that's a good and healthy thing. Loyalty to this state is good, right when it's correctly possible. And then of course, there's loyalty to God, who expresses himself most fully in Christ. And that's the hierarchy that should most concern us. God is at the top and everything else.
Every other loyalty, no matter how real, needs to be subordinate to that. I think we need to be a thoughtful people. We should thank God for his grace, I think, in giving us this country. We should thank God for His grace in giving us this Word. I think we can praise God freely in this country and we should praise God for that.
And further, we can praise this country under God, because God is over this country just as he's over everything else in all of history.
Pray, O Lord God, your might is evident throughout all the world. You come in weakness when you come in the person of Jesus. We praise you that you are on the side not of the warlords, of the poor, the humble. And each of us, Lord, in our sin is poor and humble. Come to each of us, Lord, bind our wounds.
Help us to look to you in gladness, knowing that you are good, that your mercy endures, that you will be God to us. Help us, Lord, to love you and do your work. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.

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