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Now, I'm not going to make you stand back up since I just told you to sit. And if I was going to make you stand to hear the scripture read, then you'd have to stand a lot during most of my sermons, in fact, I hope. But this particular one, we're going to look at a lot of scripture because the scripture kind of explains itself as an introduction to this topic.

We're going to talk about the omnipresence of God. So, for some people, when we get into what we'll call theology proper, the doctrine of God, it starts to be, we'll say, a little over their head, they think. They want a sermon where, when they leave today, they know something they can do. And so we call that practical sermons or practical theology. And there's a lot of churches that are, in fact, designed around, hey, we're just going to give the people stuff to do.

And they still will claim to be Protestant and saved by grace, but they really are loading laws on people most of the time, I think, when people do that. But what I want to get on your mind, and I'm not saying I think anybody in our audience has a problem with this fundamentally, but just a general statement, maybe even for kids, that theology proper, the doctrine of God is utterly practical. Now, you may not always see the direct practicality of it, but there's nothing more practical than knowing about God, knowing who he is.

And what becomes practical sometimes is learning how to apply that to your life. So, knowing that God is, for example, we can take from the confession without body, parts, passions, that he's immutable, that he's just, that he's good. Knowing things about God may not be immediately evident to you what practicality those things have. So that's a little bit, there's a little more of a jump you have to make than if I just got up here and said, hey, feed homeless people.

I can tell you that. I can say, let's go stand in the gap for babies. alright so Roe v. Wade was overturned and that's a good thing we have no reason to believe Roe v. Wade should have ever happened and so the fact that it was overturned is a good thing and yet people I know that go to abortion clinics to protest or stand in the gap or preach the gospel or whatever the word some people like to use I've seen some of them say I've never seen a clinic so busy that it was supposedly shut down so abortion is still alive and well in our culture and Roe v.

Wade being overturned has not changed the fact that a half a billion tax dollars from federal monies is going to people like Planned Parenthood and it hasn't changed the fact that abortion is still occurring and so there's still a lot of work to be done although I will agree that Roe v. Wade being overturned is a good thing, it was a right thing to have happen And I'm not sure it was strategically the best focus, but that's not what the sermon is about. And so we're going to just, we'll talk about abortion all you want in the fellowship time, and we can do more sermons about it.

Or Thursday we're going to Planned Parenthood, because as far as I know, they're still going to have people showing up there who want to do something evil. And we're going to be there to preach the gospel to those people. But the practicality point I'm trying to make is that if you learn about God, it may take a couple steps but it will give you information about how to live your life but even if some of the steps aren't immediately obvious to you isn't learning about God simply worth it because he's worth it? because he's so vast and incomprehensible and wonderful that just learning more about him would prompt you to praise him more or to praise him more in truth if Jesus said God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth doesn't it seem necessary that you actually learn as much truth about God as you can so that you might worship him truthfully there's Christians out there that we think are real Christians I heard you guys talking before the the sermon a little even your shirts are it's getting me here because they're both Ralph Lauren right yeah I just noticed that so they got the guy on the horse.

There's people out there who disagree with us on a number of Christian issues that we believe from the scripture. And we still believe they're Christian. Our confession even says every church has a mixture of truth and error. And so you all can think of that person in your life who you think they're a Christian, but you don't know why they just can't get certain things.

There's things that they're just not kind of understanding, and they're grasping to some teaching that they've heard, that maybe you even once believed, and you think you've been enlightened. And there's a part of you that realizes that, wow, when they worship God according to this thing that they think is true, that you think is not true, that they're actually falsely worshiping at the time. and false worship is actually sin and you don't want to persist in sin I mean think about it for a moment just take the easy one Presbyterian with baby baptism and us with credo baptism whichever one of us is wrong which of course we think we're right that's why we're here whichever one of us is wrong we're actively sinning when we're disbelieving the other position so a Presbyterian that sprinkles a baby and they're worshipping God while they do it and they're thinking we're doing this by faith in what we think God's commanded, they're either actively sinning against God and violating worship principles at that time or when we don do it and we think they wrong for doing it we actually violating God So it a serious thing Now you may not go to hell because you sprinkle a baby We might not go to hell because we don't sprinkle them. There's issues in the church that are damnable heresies and there's issues that just mean, hey, we go to church here and you go to church down the road.

That's okay, that happens. we may not go to hell over these things but if you care about god and you care about your relationship with god wanting to worship him in spirit and truth is how you should want to do it and so understanding how god is who he is will say what he is understanding these things about god is important so while i prepare to belabor i think a point here and when i say that i don't mean today. I mean, this may be, we may not get past verse 3 until August, as far as I know right now, in Jonah 1. So as I do this, I just want you to remember, as excited as you are to find out about the fish and the plant and whether the Ninevites just got saved from destruction or whether they actually got saved as Christians, it might be a while in the omnipresence of God in the beginning portion here. so Jonah 1 1-3 now the word of Yahweh came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying arise go to Nineveh the great city and call out against it for their evil has come up before me yet Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh so he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish and paid its fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh.

Just briefly look at verse 10. After the storm then the men became greatly fearful. Okay, well the storm after the storm began I mean. Then the men became greatly fearful and they said to him, What is this you have done? For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of Yahweh because he had told them. The jumping off point to discussing what's called the omnipresence of God is this concept of Jonah, the prophet of God, to whom the word of Yahweh came, somehow thinking he was going to escape God's presence.

Now, without trying to make light of our scripture, our holy book that God has given us, I think that we have to acknowledge that this is frankly comical. That the idea of anyone, to us today, hopefully some of you don't even need this sermon. All it took was the reading of Psalm 139 at the beginning to realize God is there. He's everywhere. You're not going to escape Him.

I think natural theology gets us to that point frankly I don't think you need a bible to recognize that God must be omnipresent he must be able to fill all things but I think we have to be able to acknowledge this is comical the idea that Jonah who knew who God was the God that made the heavens and the earth the sea and all that is in them the idea that Jonah was escaping his presence and believed he could somehow escape his presence is funny I don't want to make light of it but I imagine people who would have read this back in the day would have thought what a fool they would have thought to themselves and so we have to realize that sin can make us do pretty stupid things not wanting to obey God will eventually make you do some things that are counterintuitive, things that are illogical, irrational, and ultimately you'll add sin upon sin when you decide to disobey God. Second thing I want you to consider for a moment, though, give a little defense of Jonah. So Jonah might be my favorite character in the Bible, so omitting Jesus, who should be everyone's favorite, I get that.

I really think Jonah is just a neat guy to read about. Let's give Jonah a little bit of a break. Jonah was one of the earlier prophets. So I don't have a chart in front of me, and I don't have a map for you this week where Tarshish and Joppa and all these things are. But Jonah was one of the earlier prophets. And it's not that Jonah didn't have enough revelation to know that God was omnipresent.

He had Psalm 139, the litany of other scriptures in the Old Testament that would have made that clear for him. But keep in mind that prior to the giving of the New Testament, prior to really Pentecost, when the gospel started to spread outside of Jerusalem and outside of the people of Israel, the national theocracy that God had created to preserve a line so that his son could be born in the fullness of time in order to pay for the sins of others and then die and rise again. Prior to that, salvation and actually God's presence in one way was relegated to the nation of Israel.

In fact, the Israelites, to some extent, may have recognized, well, God's not with us except in the tent. And then when they picked up the tent and moved it, they had to do everything just the right way because that where they met with God And so when we see that Jonah tries to flee the presence of the Lord he's heading to a Gentile place. He's getting away from where kind of the center of Christian, or we'll say Jewish, religion is going on right now.

And so it's not entirely crazy that he's trying to get away in that sense. All right. If Emmanuel means God with us and that's what we're looking forward to. There is a sense that we have that God is also in some way. So don't get me wrong here. He's omnipresent.

But in some way, God isn't as active everywhere at the same time from our ability to perceive it. So although he's always active and he's holding all things together by the power of his will. there is a special sense that God visits us on Sunday when we meet together, right? Jesus said, wherever two or three of you are gathered, there I am with you in the Matthew 18 discipline passage, which we see that not as, oh, okay, Jesus wasn't there five minutes before, but now he's there because a few believers are there.

We don't think of it that way. We recognize that there's a special gifting of grace when you're exercising discipline in the way that the Bible has told you to do. It's not so much that Jesus happens to be there with you in some physical way. It's that you know that his spirit is actually guiding the group, and that's what we trust. So Jonah, I think, is doing something comical.

And I think it's okay for us to just kind of almost laugh about it. So now I want to talk about the omnipresence of God. But first, a quote from Spurgeon. I don't want this to sound too scattered, but along with the omnipresence of God, we do want to get to the point where we talk about what it means that Jonah is a prophet of Yahweh. the book starts with now the word of Yahweh came to Jonah this quote I think speaks to what we do as believers giving the word out Spurgeon said some preachers evidently do not believe that the Lord is with their gospel because in order to attract and save sinners their gospel is insufficient and they have to add to it inventions of men Jonah gets the word of Yahweh His job is to dispense the word of Yahweh.

Jonah failed in a different way than men fail today, where we add to it and make up other inventions. A couple of verses to show you that God sees all and knows all. Psalm 119, number 168. Verse 168, I should say. So what I want to do is give you a few verses from around the scripture to get this on your mind. And then I want to look in particular at Psalm 139.

In verse 168, I think it's David writes, I keep your precepts and your testimonies, for all my ways are before you. This is an acknowledgement by David in the Psalms that everything he does is before God. it has the idea that he's before the face of God God sees all of it if you look at Psalm 40 verse 5 David says many oh Yahweh my God are the wondrous deeds you have done he says and your thoughts towards us he reminds us of Psalm 139 there is none to compare to you there is none to compare with you He says, I would declare and speak of them, but they are too numerous to recount. It's the idea that God has infinite knowledge.

And his infinite knowledge extends even to the areas of life that you may think are dark recesses. A couple of New Testament verses to drive the point home. 1 John 3.20. make no apology for having you jump through the Bible at all or page through your Bible unless you come to me after and say oh it was just too scattered and disorganized well if that's the case then I apologize I think the thing that's hard about teaching scripture a lot is there's actually so many places you can go to support the same topics that eventually you come across when you're going verse by verse through a book.

1 John 3 20, in whatever our heart condemns us, well let's go back a verse because the whole sentence, and by this we will know that we are of the truth and will assure our heart before him in whatever our heart condemns us. He says, for God is greater than our hearts and knows all things. This is a declaration from John that when you feel separated from God because of your sin, God knows all things.

And He saved you in spite of the fact that He knew you were going to sin. And He saved you and your justification is complete in Christ, not in you continuing to somehow keep the law after He saved you. But just to prove the point, God knows all things, is the verse. Hebrews 4.13 another New Testament passage. We do a lot in the Old Testament here, and it's because we have one scripture.

It's undivided. I almost hesitate to call it Old and New Testament It one scripture and it teaching one thing It teaching many things but it really always teaching the same truth over and over Sometimes we can prove things out of the Old Testament just as easy as the New. And we don't need the New to necessarily interpret that God sees all things. But Hebrews 4.13, I believe referring to Jesus Christ, and there is no creature hidden from his sight, but all things are uncovered and laid bare to the eyes of him to whom we have an account to give I like the King James I think with whom we have to do that's the King James version of that so you can turn to Psalm 139 now and we'll camp out there for a while just to wet your whistle that God sees all things there is a distinction between God's omniscience that God knows all things and sees all things and his omnipresence.

There's technical distinctions there, but I also believe they go hand in hand. I think when we talk about God being omnipresent, we have to be careful we don't make a couple mistakes. One of those is, is we have to acknowledge that God is not omnipresent in any sense of the fact that he has a body. God is without a body so when we say God's omnipresent we're not saying well he's sitting right here with us we may use that type of analogy in our minds to think about God being in the room but in reality God is omnipresent he fills all in all and he doesn't have a physical body like men and in fact Jesus Christ who has a physical body is not omnipresent in his body.

This is one of the arguments against the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Jesus Christ cannot be truly, the bread cannot be truly turned into Jesus Christ's body literally, because then Jesus Christ's body would be in many places at one time and he has a body. And that body is not omnipresent. And so the confession says this doctrine is repugnant to our senses and is the source of many gross idolatries.

And I think we've seen that happen. But so in Psalm 139, I want to just, I'm going to re-read it to you. I'm going to stop for commentary. but I want you to just see how clear from just this one chapter of the Bible that Jonah thinking he's going to flee God's presence how clear it is that that's just a silly notion. O Yahweh, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down and are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, behold, O Yahweh, you know it all. Take that, open theists, right? You have enclosed me behind and before, and you have put your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is too high. I cannot attain to it. Obvious question that comes up here. I just told you God doesn't have a body, right? So if that was shocking to you, now you just read verse 5.

You have put your hand upon me. Well, how can I tell you God doesn't have a body and then two minutes later I read the scripture that says his hand is on you. This is the kind of work we do when we do what's called the doctrine of God or people call it theology proper. It's a doctrine of God I think it's a subset of. We have to be able to reconcile verses that describe God in a creaturely term that we can understand with the verses that tell us things about God that cannot literally both be true.

So if God is a spirit, and he doesn't have a body like men, but God's hand is upon David, you have to be able to think that through. So let me ask you this, is Jesus a vine? Because if you're going to take the literal approach to Scripture in such a way that it says, you have put your hand upon me, means God must have a hand, then Jesus is a vine and he's a door.

I think we all understand metaphor. I think little kids learn metaphor and they should be learning it. We have to be able to recognize that sometimes God describes himself in human creaturely terms and the terminology is representative of a different meaning than what it reads literally. Before I came to church, I jumped in the shower. I will assure you, I was standing still.

I wasn't jumping where I could slip and hurt myself. We use phrases all the time, as well as the Bible, that express a truth that does not necessarily need to be understood literally. When it says, you've put your hand upon me, this is an explanation of God's act of love towards David. Of God's act of being close to David. in creaturely terms. What you need to realize is we don't have terminology that can describe God truly.

Everything we do when we talk about God is creaturely language that's been created. so we can creaturely communicate with one another. And God has given us analogies to what He really is to help us understand and approximate, we'll say. But God's incomprehensible, and He's not a creature like we are. And so the language we use to describe God as having His hand on someone is not to be taken as, well, I guess God must have a hand, just like we do. it's to be taken in an understanding of what it means when we put a hand on someone.

What is that like? When it talks about God's strong right arm in the scripture it doesn't mean God has a right arm suddenly. It means it's talking about his power, his ability to affect all that he wills. And so don't be, I don't mean to be rude, but don't be dense about this. this type of literal reading of scripture is a cause of a lot of wacky theology right now it's the cause of believing that frankly a pervert most of the time in the Roman Catholic Church can transubstantiate bread into the body of Christ read the scripture and believe it and do the work to understand what it means and do enough work to notice when there are these things that we could call an apparent contradiction.

There's no contradiction in Scripture, truly. But from a creaturely standpoint, there's going to be things that are hard to understand. Not all things in Scripture are alike understandable. So now, David, I'll say, changes gears a little bit. He says, where can I go from your spirit? He asked the question, effectively, how can I escape God?

How can I flee the presence of God? He's literally asking the question that Jonah is trying to answer, right? Because the answer, if you're Jonah, is, well, I can just go down to Joppa, and if I get on a ship and I go across the Mediterranean to Tarshish, instead of going east to Nineveh, I can flee the presence of God. Now, did Jonah really believe he was going to flee the presence?

I really don't know. Jonah had Psalm 139. I'd bet he had it memorized. That's what makes it so comical that Jonah would even try such a thing. He says, where can I go from your spirits? Or where can I flee from your presence?

And now he answers the question with a number of clear answers. These are arguments from the greater to the lesser where he's going to go to the extreme. If I did all these really extreme things you're going to see. I wouldn't be able to get away from your presence, Lord. And so then it follows logically, well, if I go to the farthest away place, I can't escape God.

There's no way I'm ever going to escape Him because I can't even get to those places. So he says, if I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there. Sheol in the Old Testament, that's the word for the place of the dead, basically. Even if I die, you're going to be there. If I go in the belly of the earth, you're going to be there.

Beautiful picture of who took care of Jesus while he was in the grave. If I lift up the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there your hand will lead me, and your right hand will lay hold of me. if I say surely the darkness will bruise me and the light around me will be night even the darkness is not too dark for you and the night is as bright as the day darkness and light are alike to you one of the things that's very different about the creature and the creator is that we are subject to darkness if all the lights went off in here right now you would not be able to see. People in this room could do things that you couldn't witness.

If we go outside and somebody's inside, things could be done that you don't see. You're not aware of what's going on. One of the creator-creature distinctions is that that doesn't exist for God. in the most dark part of the universe that could ever exist. God knows exactly what's going on at all times. First of all, because He decreed it to come to pass.

So everything's really easy if you have a God that's powerful and decrees everything that comes to pass. But secondarily, He's still there. He sees it. His omnipresence is that He fills everywhere. It's not like if I go to heaven, you are there. Like you're running up to heaven, and there's no God, no God.

And then when you get there, oh, there he is, there he is again. It's not like, he's all the places all the time. He's not in that chair watching our service. He fills it all. In fact, he holds everything together by the power of his own will, too. I think the fact that your seat didn't just break under you is because he continually sustains it for you.

Now, he does that through the way he's designed creation, which is mind-blowing enough that he could design all these things. But he's not like a watchmaker who made a watch, and he made all the gears work together, and then he gave it to the other guy, and then the gears just work, and they follow the principles that he provided. And you can tell time hours after you're away from the watchmaker.

God is intricately involved all the time in making sure everything's always happening the exact way that He has designed them to happen. So now if we get to verse 13, it starts to get kind of neat, because these are our abortion ministry verses So we go here to prove that little babies in the womb are people that God created and thus are subject to the sixth commandment protection of life. And I'm not going to contradict that today.

But sometimes I think we just pull it out of its context, because it serves our purpose. Let's read it. He says, For you formed my inward parts. you wove me in my mother's womb I think we have a crocheter right now even in the room and knitter, right? but knitting is the idea, weaving and knitting is the idea here in the passage, that there was in a sense it wasn't just tossing things together there's a work involved in knitting things together just right, and we're supposed to actually have thoughts about the delicacy and the importance of things like knitting.

And we have this idea of weaving together in my mother's womb. And so the area of the body that we have no, we can't really see it very well. We have ultrasounds and things where we can get some idea of what goes on in there. God's there doing all the work to create human life. It's fantastic. And part of the point here is that the womb where a baby forms, from, I mean, we'll say virtually nothing, right?

I mean, think of any plant you have in your backyard right now, some of you gardeners and stuff. It started as a seed that looks nothing like what it looks like now, and you all did too, okay? There was a long time where we don't look like what we look like, and it's just amazing. But just like if you went to the bottom of the sea, or you went to the highest heaven, God's there.

He's also intricately involved in your life. He's integrally involved in your development. Your internal organs function right now because God makes them function. You understand that? Did anyone think about breathing the last half hour? Isn't that fantastic?

Can you imagine if you had to think about breathing? God just takes care of it for you. And it's even neater, as He created a part of your brain that does it, so that we can actually study some of those concepts and learn things about how amazing He is. He says, I will give thanks to you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. We are made in such a way that there is no way that a rational person can look at the human body and first of all come to the conclusion that it evolved from randomness.

Even when people say they're evolutionists, they're still proposing a design and a designer. Anyone that does any kind of decent medicine believes in these things. They'll deny God somehow, but they believe there's a design. The doctor that gives you a prescription believes that prescription is going to have a consistent effect on your body across a lot of other people's bodies because they believe there's something similar going on.

But we're fearfully made that it should strike fear in you to realize God's power. Wonderful are your works, and my soul knows it very well. David's aware of this. We should be aware of it. Jonah should have been aware of it. He says, My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

He compares God putting together the baby in the womb to being so far away as the depths of the earth. The idea is that it's so far from our ability, creaturely, to even observe it or assume we could do anything about it that God is the one with the power. I want you to think for a moment about the fact that God wove together Jesus Christ in Mary's womb.

And He did that miraculously. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes have seen my unshaped substance. So you know, you're one cell, two cells, four cells. You kind of start small. A person's a person no matter how small.

Dr. Seuss had it right. Good for him. He says, In your book, all of them were written. Well, what was written? The days that were formed for me.

When as yet there was not one of them. God has already planned all the days of your life. That could be a little scary. Today could be the last one for all of us. One of you. None of us. but there's no amount of crossfit that's going to make your life longer than what God planned it.

Now, God might use that as a means that you extend your life. You're also not to be careless. But God has planned it all. And you can't read these passages without thinking of some of the false teachers out there that propose otherwise. Well, I can't, at least. How precious are your thoughts to me, O God?

An echo of Psalm 40. How vast is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand. When I awake, I am still with you. The psalmist realizes, David, and I almost said Jesus, which isn't a slip, because Jesus is also speaking here, that God's thoughts towards him are precious. When he realizes that God has made all these things, the stars of the heaven the earth, the sea and all that is in them and he says earlier in Psalm 8 what is man that you are mindful of him or the son of man that you pay any attention when you realize how many thoughts God actually has toward you because he is infinite it is not like God is thinking about me so he is not thinking about you it is not how it works it is not like us some of us we can only think about one thing, right?

I couldn have the audio on in the car on the way here and hear my wife talk at the same time We are just incapable of handling it God is able to not only be everywhere at once He's able to think all the thoughts that He wants towards His people. And they're more than you can number. And so while you sometimes feel condemned because of your sin, remember His love toward you and the vast sum of His thoughts toward you. he says when I awake I am still with you if for a moment you start to feel powerful and you start to think you know I can do this myself just try to not sleep you see how long you can go without sleeping because what happens every single time you go to sleep is God continues to sustain everything that you have no power to sustain for that 7-8 hour period anyway.

Including your own life. But when you awake, He's still with you. He's still there. It's almost like you're in dreamland and there's no God and there's cheese and marshmallows and whatever weird stuff some of you guys have in your dreams. If you're like me, I get weird dreams once in a while. Very few of them are acknowledging the God of heaven and worshiping Him and trusting that He's taking care of me.

Like, my thoughts are all over weird land, okay? And I wake up and God has taken care of everything. My house is still standing. Other people's lives that I'm expected to help sustain at least, they're still alive. They slept too. So when you awake, God's still with you.

This is not only His presence is always with you, but His eyes are with you. What do we say? Coram Deo, right? Before the eyes of God. Everything you do is Coram Deo. When you wake up, you know God's there.

I'll give you a pass if you have dreams that aren't good, but are any of you grumpy in the morning? What's the old joke that, say, I woke up grumpy today, yesterday I let her sleep. some of you are grumpy at night. That's me, okay? I'm the morning person. When you wake up, God's with you. So when you wake up and your first thought is, leave me alone until I have some coffee, or whatever the things that we say are, remember, God's watching.

I'll give you a pass if you do something weird in your sleep, if you talk in your sleep. Alright, I'm not going to accuse you of sin. I might laugh about it, but it's a serious thing to be in the presence of God, though. You can't escape His presence. So now, Psalm 139 takes another turn, and commentators have actually said that maybe it was supposed to be two different psalms, because it's so different to them. and I think that could be kind of a lazy way to look at it because what is more natural after reviewing God's utter presence everywhere after reviewing the fact that God sees all things and all that you do what is more natural than the transition he makes to realize, wait a second if you're everywhere and you see all things why is Planned Parenthood still open? why is Joe Biden allowed to have breath? why is Kamala Harris one breath from being our president? or Kamala, excuse me there's just a couple examples why does wickedness persist? the logical question becomes, does God not see it?

Because we believe He cares, we believe He's righteous, we believe He has the power. You may wonder, does He not see? So David says, O that you would slay the wicked, O God. He says, O men of bloodshed, depart from me. speaking to God again for they speak against you wickedly and your enemies take your name in vain people have tried to excuse David and they've tried to say well no he didn't really mean that he was wishing God would slay the wicked he was actually saying something else and I don't even remember all the stuff they said because as I read it I thought how can you get there and I didn't see any good Hebrew exegesis to prove it I think David speaking on behalf of the Christ literally wants to see the wicked slew or slain.

I think the psalm is imprecatory at this point. And the idea that a believer in God whose paths are scrutinized, verse 3, whose ways God's intimately acquainted with, in verse 3, whose words on his tongue God knows before he speaks, in verse 4, who everywhere he goes he can't flee from God's presence, verse 7, I think he's a little bit angry with the wicked right now. And it's a natural progression from God is omniscient and omnipresent to wonder why the wicked persist in their bloodshed.

So he says oh that you would slay the wicked oh God Now here where you have to make a little bit of a distinction Because there is a distinction between recognizing that you are a sinner saved by grace also and being pretty glad that God didn't slay the wicked the day before he saved you. But also recognizing that as a new creature in Christ, and as a brother of the Lord Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ himself speaking through the psalmist for his people, is perfectly entitled to hate the wicked. And in one sense, we understand that.

Jonah's problem, Jonah was good at hating the wicked. Jonah's problem was he didn't even want God to be merciful toward them. So to learn the lesson of Jonah, and learn the lesson of Jesus, I think Jesus, who hates the wicked, in fact, Jesus will be the one that comes and slaughters them, and you'll be along with them. And we'll enjoy it. Okay? But keep in mind, Jesus is also the one that's reaching out to the wicked with the gospel and he's forgiving people their wickedness on a regular basis.

But he says, They speak against you wickedly. Verse 20, Your enemies take your name in vain. He says, Do I not hate those who hate you, O Yahweh? Do I not revile those who rise up against you? You read in the commentaries and these guys say, well, what he really means is I hate the things they do, I don't hate them. I don't believe it.

And when people say, hate the sin, not the... Well, people say God hates the sin, not the sinner. And Paul Washer's response is the best one. He says, God's not going to send sin to hell, he's going to send sinners to hell. Now, can you abuse the holy hatred that actually should be built into you if you actually love God? Can you abuse it?

Yes. Can Elijah and I go to Planned Parenthood on Thursday and treat people in a way that is inhumane and unfair and not the way God wants us to treat them because we're angry with the things they're really doing bad? Yes, we can. But at the same time, I don't think God wants you to sit there and just constantly have this heart of peace and love with people who are actively doing wickedness, particularly if it's against you.

Can you imagine going up to a woman who's actively being abused and saying, hey, just remember, you've got to love that person. You know what I mean? I get that you want to try to have that disposition in your heart. Somebody's hurting your children. I don't even want to describe the horrible atrocities that people could actually do that I think it's acceptable in those moments to hate that wickedness before God.

And I think that you identify with Christ not only when you forgive people their sins against you, but when you actually have a holy hatred for things that he hates. David says in verse 22, I hate them with the utmost hatred. They have become my enemies. Jesus Christ says that too. Listen to this. I think it's Matthew, Henry.

We have the more need to attend to this because the keen sense we have of what concerns our private interest, honor, and convenience makes us never hesitate, listen, to engage in contest when anyone injures ourselves. Very few of us are actually unconditionally loving when somebody offends us. He says, while we are abundantly timid and cowardly in defending the glory of God, Thus, as each of us studies his own interest and advantage, the only thing which incites us to contention, strife, and war is a desire to avenge our private wrongs.

None is affected when the majesty of God is outraged. So he says, do I not hate those who hate you, O Yahweh? And do I not revile those who rise up against you? Your enemies take your name in vain. the focus of this psalm is not that David has been personally offended and he has enemies the focus is God's enemies are the ones God's people oppose continuing the quote on the other hand it is a proof of our having a fervent zeal for God when we have the magnanimity to declare irreconcilable war with the wicked and them who hate God, rather than court their favor at the expense of alienating the divine layout.

That's a tough pill to swallow and it's tough for us to do it right. So you need to be with people. You need to have accountability. You need to question your own heart sometimes. and David will teach us a prayer for that in a moment but just briefly support that point for zeal for your house has consumed me Jesus says but he's quoting Psalm 69 9 and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me Psalm 119 158 I see the treacherous and loathe them those who do not keep your word listen to this for a moment he says do I not hate those who hate you O Yahweh, and do I not revile those who rise up against you?

He says, I hate them with the utmost hatred. Jesus said, the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me. Planned Parenthood is still open by the decree of God. Okay? But you sit here today, a forgiven sinner, because you who hated God, the reproach that you deserved, the hatred that God had for you with the utmost hatred because you were his enemy, because God cast that all on Christ.

So yeah, it's strong language when we see that God hates the wicked. It's strong language. He says, I hate them with the utmost hatred. That's strong language. But what's even stronger language is the fact that He poured out that hatred on His only Son for you. And that should humble you.

And it should make you want to reach out to people, unlike Jonah, and tell them of the love of God that's available to sinners that repent. and it should make you want to trust God that he'll have his vengeance in his due time and it should make you want your affections to be molded to his so you want your affections molded to his David says search me oh God and know my heart well he already proclaimed that God knows his heart he's already acknowledged this read the beginning of the psalm God knows all his thoughts before they even come out of his mouth. God knows them before you know them. But he says, search me and know my heart.

Try me, test me, and know my anxious thoughts. God's going to put you in situations that test your anxious thoughts. You going to find out what really in your heart when God puts you in a situation that causes things to come out of your mouth that you didn even know was in your heart But David is coming to God saying, see if there's any hurtful way in me and lead me in the everlasting way.

So immediately following this imprecation, this proclamation of hating the wicked, of wanting the wicked slain, David says, hey, you know, check my heart. Help me to be the holy person that I'm called to be, so that my holy hatred towards the wicked doesn't turn itself upon me anyway. But a Christian who is... Okay, we've all known hateful Christians, right?

So there's like Westboro Baptist Church, for example, or Westboro Cult. We've all known these types of people who we think they've taken the judgment of God too far, and they've focused on it too much. But there's also people who have just taken God's love and grace, and they've focused on that too much at the expense of His judgment and justice. And so we want to be properly, I don't even want to say balanced, not for the sake of balance, but we want to properly be viewing these things.

So that we are neither too much proclaiming the judgment of God, but we also not too much just acting like God judgment isn that big a deal Hopefully it the fear of God judgment that would lead people to His grace I want you to remember that David and Jonah are types They are types of Jesus Christ. David is a king and a prophet. Jonah is a prophet. And so they both, in one sense, are shadows of Jesus.

And so when you read their writings, when you read how they acted, you're supposed to notice similarities between these men and Jesus. You're supposed to notice how they, through their actions and words, pointed you to what Jesus would eventually fulfill. You're also supposed to notice the contrast. You're supposed to see where Jesus succeeded, where they failed.

And so where Jonah failed to dispense the gospel, where Jonah failed to proclaim to people the truth that God gave him to proclaim to those people, Jesus came and he did it all perfectly. Jesus came and proclaimed freedom to the captives. He proclaimed judgment to those who wouldn't believe. And then by his actions, going to the cross, being the vicarious sacrifice for other sins, dying bodily, being buried, and then three days later, as the sign of Jonah rising again Jesus proclaimed his victory over death And that victory is something he offers today If you in my hearing So it is only for us to believe.

It is only for us to come to Christ and to say, look, forgive me. I'm one of the ones that deserves the hatred and I'm literally asking you, God, to take the reproaches that belong to me and and put them on your son. And forgive me, I can't come to you with any strength of my own. I don't have a powerful right hand. I used all the strength I have for the rest of my life to obey God's law.

The only thing that would happen at the end is I'd be laughed at as I was sent into hell for thinking for a moment that I could satisfy and please a holy God in my sinfulness. And the same is true of each and every one of you. Father, we thank you that Jesus Christ is the God of heaven, that he came into the world, became a man, and that he, as God, still fills all in all.

We know that we can always talk to him because he sees all things, he hears all things, he knows our thoughts. We can pray in our heads, we can pray out loud, and we can keep nothing secret from him. So we pray that these truths would motivate us. Aid us in our sanctification by the power of your Holy Spirit. Amen.