Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Psalm 17
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Begin by reading Psalm 17. Hear the right, O Lord, attend unto my cry. Give ear unto my prayer that goeth not out of feigned lips. Let my sentence come forth from thy presence. Let thine eyes behold the things that are equal. Thou hast proved mine heart. Thou hast visited me in the night. Thou hast tried me and shalt find nothing. I am purposed that my mouth shall not transgress. Concerning the works of men, by the word of thy lips, I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer.

Hold up my goings in thy paths that my footsteps slip not. I have called upon thee, for thou wilt hear me, oh God. Incline thine ear unto me and hear my speech. Show thy marvelous loving kindness, oh thou that saveest by thy right hand, them which put their trust in thee, from those that rise up against them. Keep me as the apple of the eye. Hide me under the shadow of thy wings. From the wicked that oppress me from my deadly enemies who compass me about.

They are enclosed in their own fat. With their mouth they speak proudly. They have now compassed us in our steps. They have set their eyes bowing down to the earth. Like as a lion that is greedy of his prey, when as it were a young lion lurking in secret place, faces. Arise, O Lord, disappoint him, cast him down, deliver my soul from the wicked, which is thy sword. From men which are thy hand, O Lord, from men of the world, which have their portion in this life, and whose belly thou fillest with thy hid treasure, they are full of children, and leave the rest of their substance to their babes.

As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness. I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy likeness. Let’s pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your scriptures. We take them from you gratefully and thankfully, Lord God, understanding that they’re words of life to us. We thank you for the regeneration that you’ve given us on the basis of Christ’s doings and dyings and his resurrection. We thank you for regenerating us to life in Jesus Christ, for forgiving us our sins, that we might hear this word and act in obedience to it.

Help us, Lord God, to be faithful to your word this day and during these next half hour as well. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

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This psalm speaks—obviously it’s subtitled “the prayer of David.” The subject of this psalm is prayer. And we wanted to say a few words today concerning prayer. You know, when I thought about this I thought well, now here’s a nice, neutral topic. I guess we probably shouldn’t get in too much trouble with this one.

Most of the people who profess Christianity or profess some faith in God pray. And somebody said that all Christians pray as if they were Calvinists because they expect God to hear the prayer and answer the prayer, and so they really believe in God’s sovereignty when they pray. So I thought we shouldn’t really get too much different from that. But yet I think—well, let’s see. There was an incident that happened to me this week and I’ll just share it briefly because I don’t want to tell any details that would let you know who this person is. But it’s somebody that I have an acquaintance with, and this particular girl is in trouble.

She has been dating and in a relationship with a person who professes some faith in some god, but is not a Christian and does not profess faith in Jesus Christ. And therefore, the scriptures tell us he’s pagan. And this man—this girl has become pregnant now as a result of this relationship. And this man now may be in the process of marrying another person. And this girl obviously is in a lot of distress. She has a lot of affection for this other man and has been praying very hard about her situation. She attends a very popular church on the west side here that literally thousands of people attend, and she’s praying very hard to God about her situation.

I’ve known this girl for about a year now, and I’ve tried to counsel her from the word of God about her relationship with a pagan and the dangers of that. And she hasn’t really heeded the word of God in that situation. And so now she finds herself reaping some of the fruits of that relationship. And you know, far be it for me to look down upon her and say that we haven’t done the same things in our minds or whatever else. We all have sinned. That’s not the point of what I’m trying to say.

What I’m saying about this girl, though, is that she’s prayed zealously about her situation. But she hasn’t consulted the word of God initially in the relationship and continues to reject the message of the word of God in terms of her relationship to this man. She would marry this man in an instant if he would but propose, even though she recognizes the word of God teaches you shouldn’t be yoked with an unbeliever. There are differences—is what I’m getting at—in the way that she approaches prayer and how her understanding of her basis or appeal for prayer to God and what the scriptures teach.

And we’re going to talk about just two basic differences and two basic appeals or basis for our appeal to God during these next few minutes.

I suppose an outline of Psalm 17 would be that verses 1-5 talk about obedience to the king’s commands as the basis for our appeal to God in prayer. Verses 6-9 talk about our relationship to God, our relationship to the king, our relationship to the Savior and to our Lord, as a basis for our appeal in prayer. Those two things are the basis for David’s appeal here in his prayer for deliverance out of the situation he found himself in.

Additionally, verses 10-12 speak of a description of the ungodly. And it’s interesting that he begins a description of the ungodly with—let’s see, verse 10—with “their mouth they speak proudly.” David, earlier on in the verses, makes great pains to say that I’m not going to use my mouth to transgress your scriptures. And he describes the ungodly in his description in verses 10-12 as those whose mouths sin, whose mouths speak proudly.

And additionally, they don’t have compassion for anybody. They’re devoid of compassion. And the two basis for David’s appeal to God are one, obedience to his scriptures, and two, a relationship to God and compassion in his heart. As a result of that, he describes the ungodly in just the reverse situation. They transgress God’s law and they have no compassion in their hearts for their fellow man or, of course, for God either.

So verses 10-12 is a description of the ungodly. And then verses 13-15 talk about the appeal again to God to save David, ending in verse 15 with a confident delighting in the fact that God will accomplish his salvation and that David will delight himself in God.

Now we want to speak primarily to verses 1-5 and verses 6-9. The basis of our appeal to God being obedience to the commandments and our relationship to God. But first, I wanted to go just through a couple of other small verses here and hit a couple of little points early on in the scriptures that would be good for us to consider.

First, notice that in verse 1, he says, “My prayer goes not out of feigned lips.” And hopefully we who have relationship with God and who are walking in obedience to his commandments recognize that when we go to God in prayer, particularly when we go to God in prayer, there’s no way we’re going to fool God about our situation. We shouldn’t have feigned lips when we approach God in prayer. We often have feigned lips within one another. We shouldn’t do that either, of course, but it’s particularly abominable to go to God in prayer and somehow pervert the situation in our talk or our speech with him and try to fool him into blessing us as a result of that. It sounds stupid, but I’m sure we all do it from time to time.

David’s prayer and our prayer as well should come out of unfeigned lips.

Second, notice in verse 3 that David says, in his description of—or in the middle of his basis for appeal—is keeping of the commandments of God. David says, “I am purposed that my mouth shall not transgress.” David said resolutely to himself that his mouth would not transgress God’s word. Now, we know that James tells us that he who can bridle the tongue is a perfect man. David recognized he couldn’t be sinless in this area, but he set a watch upon his tongue. He purposed.

And we should have that kind of purpose as we have sins that beset us, and particularly sins of the tongue. We shouldn’t just say, “Well, I shouldn’t do this,” and we’ll go about it, and if it happens today, well, I’m sorry and ask God’s forgiveness. We should purpose not to sin with our tongue. We should set ourselves resolutely in that matter the same way that David did.

David also in verse 2 says, “Let my sentence come forth from thy presence.” Now, when David—and this is probably written when David is fleeing from King Saul. When David and King Saul began to have their troubles, David said the Lord decide between me and you. David’s appeal would normally be to the judicial system that God had in place, including eventually an appeal to the king himself—the king himself, Saul, had denied the rightness of David’s appeal. And yet David knew it was correct.

The higher court of appeal, as we’ve said before, is always in session, and that is God himself.

I’m a purchasing agent by vocation. And when I have problems expediting an order—in other words, I’ve ordered something and it hasn’t come in—and I talk to somebody at the company from which it’s supposed to be shipped to us, and they say, “Well, we don’t know. It might be another couple of months, or we don’t know when it’s going to ship,” one of the things that I learned early on in purchasing is to appeal to a higher authority. You ask for that person’s manager. You ask whoever they report to. You do it nicely, but you ask for whoever they report to. You want to talk to that person. And many times, eight times out of ten, that person is a much more responsible person. That’s why they’re in a management position, and they’ll be able to understand your problems with your need of that particular item. And they’ll do much more to help you than the person on the order desk.

Well, the same thing’s going on here. David is appealing to a higher authority. He’s saying that I want you to judge this case between me and these people that are coming against me. It’s important for us to recognize that we always have a higher appeal to God himself in prayer.

And then verse 4: “By the word of thy lips, I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer, concerning the works of men.” By the word of thy lips, I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer. David not only purposed, or resolutely set himself, not to sin with his mouth in verse 3, he went on in verse 4 to understand God’s word. And as a result of the word of God—the word of God’s lips—he will keep himself from the paths of a destroyer.

Remember the scriptures, this book of Psalms, and we started in Psalm 1. You’ve got two paths shown there: the righteous and the unrighteous. Covenant keepers and covenant breakers. The path of life and the path that leads to destruction, the destroyer, Apollyon, the one who destroys. And this is no different. We’re to keep to the path of life. And we’re to keep to the path of life by resolutely setting ourselves to do that, and also by understanding the word of God and its application to our lives so that it would restrain us from evil.

The word of God is a great restraint against evil. In the New Testament, we read that in 1 Timothy, it says, “Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient.” And he goes on to describe a whole group of people. One of the implications of that is that God gave us the law because we are unrighteous, and the law, therefore, is a restraint against our sinfulness. If we—David said, you know, “I hide the word in my heart that I might not sin against thee.” We’re to memorize God’s word or understand God’s word, and as a result of that, it will have a restraining influence on us. That’s one of the purposes of God’s law.

We bought a record for our kids for Christmas, and it’s just a bunch of little snippets of scripture verses that they memorize because they’re singing them along with it. And there’s one real catchy little tune, “Keep thy tongue from evil.” You know, it’s kind of set to a real syncopated beat, and it just says, “Keep thy tongue from evil,” and then gives the reference Psalm 34:13. Well, the children, after, you know, a couple of hearings of that record, memorize that verse. They know that verse. And when their tongue begins to speak evil, that verse will come back—the spirit of God will use that to keep them from the path of the destroyer, to keep their mouths from evil. And so that’s very important to do. And that’s what David did. He said, “By the word of thy lips I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer.”

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Now we want to leave that behind—the little snippets there—and go to some broad brush strokes that David draws in the next—in the first nine verses of this psalm. We’ll deal first with the basis for our appeal being obedience to the king’s commands, verses 1-5.

By the way, recognize here also what David doesn’t pray. That’s significant too. In our day and age, a lot of people pray a lot of things that the answer to those prayers are found in the word of God. We know, for instance, it’s not a good thing to go into a ten-year debt to buy some big fancy car, right? The word of God tells us to restrain ourselves from debt. Well, then what good does it do us to go to God in prayer and say, “Well, should I buy this or shouldn’t I buy this?” But yet, that’s precisely what occurs throughout the Christian community in America.

The things that God clearly addresses in the scriptures are ignored either through slothfulness or from just plain disobedience. And yet those same people turn around and pray. This friend of mine, this acquaintance of mine that I mentioned earlier, there’s no doubt about what God says about that relationship. It’s wrong. What good does it do to go to God in prayer when he’s already clearly directed us from his scriptures?

It’d be as if we told our children a set of rules for the house and they come to us one day and make supplication to us and they say, “Well, I’m wondering if it’s the right thing to do today, whether or not I should make my bed.” Now, you’ve told them to make their bed, and yet they’re coming to you saying, “Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure I feel like it today. I’m not sure, you know, if it’s the right thing to do. Maybe I should do something else.” What are you going to tell them? You’re not going to hear that prayer in the sense of hearing it and attending to an answer. You’re going to say, “Obey. After you’ve made your bed, then come to me and we’ll talk about, you know, the things you’re supposed to do.”

David does not ask in Psalm 17 for that which God has already given him in terms of direction and understanding about the unrighteous. He doesn’t say, “These guys are being kind of mean to me and they seem to be breaking your word. Now, if they’re breaking your word, should I just forgive them or should I call them ungodly?” He addresses them as ungodly. In the psalm, he knows their position before God because he knows the scriptures and he knows King Saul has rejected the counsel of God and therefore stands in violation of God’s word.

And so, he can ask for deliverance from him clearly without having to go to God and seek—try to figure out what should I ask for here. He asked for deliverance. He asked for God’s wrath against the ungodly. And we have that same clear teaching of God’s word today, and yet we ignore it time after time and time again.

But what David does pray is he says that I’ve purposed my tongue to keep it from evil. I’ve tried to attend to the word of thy lips that I might keep myself from the path of the destroyer. He says you’ve tested me. You’ve tried me. My heart is correct in this matter. My heart is trying to act in obedience to your word, to your scriptures. He pleads from the basis of his obedience to God’s law.

Okay. Now, I collected several scriptures here, and I want to just go through them to give us some light on why he would make this basis for his appeal.

First of all, though, I’m going to address some scriptures—I’ll go through them quickly—that have specific application to non-covenanters, to non-believers, okay? To those people outside the visible community of God. Here’s some things it tells us in Psalm 18. We’ll talk about Psalm 18 next week, but one of the things he says there is that those people that have come up against David, okay—it was Gibeah who have come up against David with the idea of oppressing him. He says, “Now when you give me strength and I step upon their neck, they cry, but there’s none to save them. They cry even unto the Lord”—and the name used there is for Yahweh, Jehovah, the covenant God of Israel. “They cry even to Jehovah, but he answered them not.”

Okay. Then did I beat them small as the dust before the wind. When the ungodly in the midst of their destruction of other people cry out to God for deliverance—when the battle is turned—he will not hear them. Now, he hears them. He hears their voice, of course, but then when we talk about whether or not God hears the prayer of the unrighteous, we’re talking about whether or not God attends to that prayer, hears it with the idea of answering it in a positive way, attending to the prayer with that kind of a concern.

We said the last couple of weeks—we talked about whether or not God hears the prayer of the Jew. That was a big controversy a couple years back when some evangelists said God doesn’t hear the prayers of Jews. And maybe when we get through all this, we’ll be able to answer that question as well as several others. But we know that God does not hear the prayer of those who are oppressing his people. We know that from Psalm 18.

Job 27 is kind of a parallel chapter to Psalm 17. He starts—he says, with David—he says that while my breath is in me and the spirit of God is in my mouth, my lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit. Job does the same thing as David did. He purposes his mouth not to sin against God. And so in chapter 27, and then he goes on to talk about—later on he describes the ungodly much the same way that David describes them. He says about the ungodly, “If his children be multiplied for the sword, his offspring shall not be satisfied with bread. Those that remain of him shall be buried in death, in death, and his widow shall not weep.”

And we use this occasion. We have cursings and blessings relating to childbearing. This is a cursing of childbearing for those people who would disobey God. But in any event, in the middle of Job 27, he says this: “What is the hope of the hypocrite? Though he hath gained, when God taketh away his soul, will God hear his cry? When trouble cometh upon him, will he delight himself in the Almighty? Will he always call upon God?”

And what he’s saying, of course, is that when the wicked—when those people who are wicked and oppressing God’s people—when they turn and cry to God, God won’t hear them. Will God hear them? Well, of course not. God’s not going to hear them. They’ve purposed themselves against God’s people.

In Proverbs 1, the first chapter, we read that those people who have rejected wisdom—and in chapter 1, wisdom, of course, is typified in Jesus Christ. It’s a description of the coming of Jesus Christ—because I have called, ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded. But ye have set at nought all my counsel and would none of my reproof. I also will laugh at your calamity. I will mock when your fear cometh. When your fear cometh is desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind. When distress and anguish cometh upon thee, then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer. They shall seek me early, but they shall not find me.

Those people who reject God’s counsel, who reject the word of God, will not get answered in the day of their distress. That’s what the scriptures clearly teach us throughout all these verses.

Proverbs 15—the Lord is far from the wicked, but he heareth the prayer of the righteous. He heareth the prayer of the righteous for the purpose of answering it. The wicked—he’s far from the wicked. He will not hear their prayer. These are clear teachings from the word of God.

John 9, the blind man that Jesus healed is being questioned by the Pharisees, and he says, “Now we know that God heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshiper of God and doeth his will, him he heareth.” And he’s right. This is all he’s doing—is repeating all these Old Testament verses we’ve talked about and saying, “We know that God does not hear the prayer of sinners. But if a man worships God and doeth his will, him he heareth.” The basis for our appeal to God in our prayers has to be worshiping God and doing his will. Not just profession, but living a life on the basis of that profession. That’s the basis for our appeal in prayer.

First Peter 3: “For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers, but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil.”

So all these verses clearly tell us that the pagan, the unrighteous, the god-hater is clearly not being heard by God in the sense of being answered in prayer. That’s fine and good, but we really would like to know a little more than that. David here is not an unrighteous person. He’s not, you know, outside the covenant community of God. He’s within the community of God. He’s a covenant person, a covenant man. How does God regard covenant men?

Well, in Psalm 66, David says—I believe this is David. I’m not sure. I shouldn’t say that. Whoever wrote Psalm—let me look it up quickly. It doesn’t identify it. It probably is David, however. I’m sorry. Yes, it is probably David. In any event, whoever wrote the psalm says, “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. If I hold on to my sin, if I regard—if I think upon evil, if I keep iniquity in my heart, if I don’t turn my back on evil, God won’t hear me when I pray to him.”

Covenant man, and yet God will not hear him if he regards iniquity in his heart.

1 Samuel 8. And this is an interesting one. It’s when the people of God want a king over them, and instead of judges the way that God had set up their system of government. They say, “We want a king like these other nations have kings.” That’s their sin. It is a sin in terms of the civil government based upon what the other nations are doing—natural law, I guess you could call it. And he says God says, “You know, this king is not going to treat you well if you have a king. He’s going to take a tenth of your sheep and tenth of your sons and all this stuff.” He says, “You’ll cry out in that day because of your king which he shall have chosen you, and the Lord will not hear you in that day.”

Hey, here God tells those people who decided to run their civil government on the basis of something other than his revealed will to them—on the basis of what the other nations are doing—God says when that civil government oppresses you, I won’t hear you when you cry out. Okay, that should have application to us today in terms of our understanding of the civil magistrate.

If we, as Greg Bahnsen preached in that wonderful sermon, have no king but Caesar—have no king but those who would rule over the rest of the world based upon some kind of natural law principle or strength or something else—if that’s the god, the king that we would have rule over us, God won’t hear our prayers, and that same king oppresses us. Application, for instance, to the tax resistant movement. You know, I recognize that we’re in a transition period now, but the point is that we brought this evil upon ourselves in this country. We’re the ones who have brought ungodly taxation upon ourselves by voting in people who support these things, by calling for the programs that support the taxes that support.

And so when we cry out that we don’t have enough money to pay our tithe, God’s not going to, you know, he’ll give us no quarter in that day when we cry out to him for that reason. And he says, “Tough. You always knew you had to pay my tithe to me. And if you don’t like paying the taxes too, well then do something about it. Select another government to rule over you according to my principles.”

Micah 3, verse 4: “Then shall they cry unto the Lord, but he will not hear them. He will even hide his face from them at that time, as they have behaved themselves ill in their doings.” And he goes on to describe what he’s talking about here in verse 11: “The heads thereof judge for reward, the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets therefore divine for money. Yet will they lean upon the Lord and say, ‘Is not the Lord among us? None evil can come upon us.’”

He’s saying here that within the covenant community, if you’ve got leaders, preachers, whoever, who are doing what they’re doing for the sake of wealth, when that person cries to God, he’ll not hear their prayer. Covenant person here, at least in the visible covenant community, and God will not hear their prayer.

I heard a TV evangelist the day that we didn’t have church here, on TV, and he was a New Testament Christian, of course. He was trying to decide whether or not tithing was New Testament. And that was interesting because he went through a whole bunch of scriptures about how God owns the cattle on a thousand hills and Jesus now has been given all that stuff by his father. He inherited all of it for us. And then at the end of the thing he says, “Well, is tithing New Testament though?” And he goes back to the book of Leviticus, I think. Or he says, “The tithe is holy to God.” He says, “Well, if it was holy then, it’s holy now.” Close the book. Tithing is New Testament.

This is a major TV evangelist I’m talking about. Why does he do that? Why does he retain that portion of the law of God having to do with the tithe and reject everything else in the case law of the Old Testament? Well, he does it for monetary purposes. He does it because the tithe supports his ministry, and the people out there in TV land have to tithe to keep him going. Well, God says that if that’s the motivation of a TV evangelist, his prayer won’t be heard.

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Well, let’s go on. Isaiah 58. Isaiah 58 is the chapter where we frequently read—we used to read it every Sunday—about turning their foot away from doing our pleasure on the Sabbath, in doing God’s pleasure. Isaiah 58, that portion of Isaiah 58 that has to do with making the Sabbath holy—and from which we took the clause in our covenant statement about doing God’s pleasure on the Sabbath day—is prefaced with a description by God of what the correct Sabbath is.

And he says the Sabbath isn’t just sacrifice and, you know, praying and worshiping to me. He says the Sabbath—if you’re going to perform Sabbath duties—is to break the bonds of the oppressed, to help the poor, the widow, the orphan. Those are the things that identify whether or not you’re walking in obedience to God and his commands and are truly worshiping him in everything that you do.

So, this should be a warning to us as a covenant community. He’s saying that your liturgy is good, but if you have liturgy and don’t help the oppressed people that I say you should help according to the way that I tell you to help them in the scriptures, then what does he tell us in chapter 59?

Your iniquities have separated between you and your God. Your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear. If we don’t, as a church, address what he tells us is a true Sabbath in Isaiah 58, he won’t hear our prayers.

Okay. The same theme is sounded in Isaiah chapter 1, verse 15: “When you spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea, when you make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood.”

And he goes on to describe the ways in which their hands are full of blood and the sin of the nation of Israel at that time that he is talking about. He says, “Learn to do well. Seek judgment. Relieve the oppressed. Judge the fatherless. Plead for the widow.” These things are—bottom line—in terms of understanding whether or not walking in obedience to God’s commands. What’s the law of God? To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And God gives us specific instructions as to how that love is to be performed in relationship to those people in the covenant community who are strangers, who are orphans, and who are widows.

He says in verse 22 of that same chapter, “Thy silver has become dross. Thy wine mixed with water.” And Gary North has talked a lot about this verse and debasement of currency leading to inflation. I think it’s a good principle and a good analysis of these verses. God says if you reject just weights and measures in which he delights, then you’ve committed abomination in the land. You’ve done it for the purpose of oppressing people, and he’s not going to hear your prayer.

He goes on to speak in verse 23: “The princes are rebellious, companions of thieves. Everyone lovest gifts and followeth after rewards. They judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.”

Once again, the same thing as Isaiah 58. He says, “The widow, the orphans, these people you’ve got to take care of, or I’m not going to hear your prayer.” It’s a true test of our religion before God and whether or not we’re walking in obedience to his law word.

The churches in our land today that don’t take solid, strong positions against abortion, against any murder of any infant at any given point in that infant’s life—be it two months, three months, whatever—inside the mother’s womb. The church that doesn’t do that has not judged with equity. They’ve not protected that child that has been orphaned by his natural mother who wants to give him up—in terms of giving up to the abortionist.

That church, any church in this land that does not take that position against abortion and move—try to move against it—their prayers aren’t heard by God. If you believe this verse, he says, “You’ll spread forth your hands and I won’t hear your prayer.” So we can count those out.

This church—we’ve talked a lot about the last two or three years about the poor tithe, poor alone, gleaning, and how do we get these laws of God into place in our church. It’s good that we study this thing through. It’s good that we not act until we know what we’re doing, but it’s not good as a result of that to put action off and to not ever deal with the subject.

I’m very pleased now that there are several men in our church who are taking the time to go through some material where other churches are taking programs and putting them into effect in other churches. And I suppose I’ve dragged my feet on this thing. As I was studying through this, I thought, there’s no—the only thing that can come of delay is the wrath of God against us as a congregation.

So we will have a congregational meeting tentatively scheduled for the third week in February, third Friday night in February. And you can let me know if that’s not a good night for some of you. We can change the date, but I want to tentatively schedule it now. And we will, at that meeting, deal with the subject of initiating a program for the poor, for the widow, for the orphan in our communities.

Now, I will preach on that subject prior to that time so that we can come to it with some sort of understanding from the word of God as to how we’re to approach it. Prior to that time also, we’ll have some reading sheets for you, and we’ll hand that out as well.

I’m trying to say is that as I read through these verses and I saw certain things in here that indicated us as a church would suffer an absence of God hearing our prayers if we don’t move on these things, we should be motivated on the basis of that to get in obedience, to get in line with what God’s word teaches. Okay?

If you find yourself with some sin, with some violation of God’s word that God is bringing you to conviction for—and by that I mean you should be reading the scriptures, of course—and if in those scriptures you find a sin that you’re doing that you’ve not taken care of, these words this morning should be an admonition to you to get that right and to recognize that God is not going to hear your prayer. Do you regard iniquity in your heart? You want answered prayers? Well, we better get in line in terms of God’s commandments.

Zechariah 7, again, he talks about oppressing the widow, the fatherless, the stranger, and the poor. Verse 12: “Yeah, they made their hearts as an adamant stone. And we’re getting down to the crux of the issue here. They made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law and the words which the Lord of hosts has sent in his spirit by the former prophets. Therefore came a great wrath from the Lord of hosts. Therefore, it has come to pass—just as he cried and they would not hear, so they cried and I would not hear.”

He’s saying the prophets that I sent to you preached forth my law, and the people made their heart as stone and said we don’t want to hear the law of God. We don’t want to have it affect our lives. We don’t want to determine our civil government on the basis of your law. We don’t want to understand our relationship to the poor involvement on the basis of your law. We don’t want to hear your law. We don’t want to obey it. We’re not going to hear the prophet you sent to us.

And God said, “If you didn’t hear him, when calamity comes upon your head, as it surely will, I won’t hear you.”

Well, now we’re starting to weed out a lot of people in this country that profess to be part of the visible covenant community of God. Churches that refuse to hear God’s word, according to this scripture, if I’m reading it correctly, will not be heard by God when they cry out to him.

Proverbs 28: Very simple. “He that turneth away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer shall not be heard. No, shall be an abomination.” A disgusting, revolting thing to God. An abomination. If you turn your ear away from hearing the law of God, your prayer is an abomination.

Well, that means that there are all kinds of people, including this acquaintance of mine who refuses to hear God’s law, who refuses to study God’s law, who refuses to hear the mouth of the prophet of God, as it were, speaking through his scriptures. That girl’s prayer, praying as hard as she is, according to what these verses tell us, is an abomination. He doesn’t want to hear it. He wants her to go back and hear his law and attend to his word, and then he’ll hear her prayer.

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Now, she’s not in any situation, and we’re not of us in this church in any situation we can’t get ourselves out of. One of the most often repeated verses in this country in the last ten years that I’ve heard is in 2 Chronicles 7, and it says, “If my people which are called by my name shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Is being too pregnant too big a thing for God? Oh no, of course not. Is living in a nation that murders infants in abundance too big a thing for God? No, of course not. These—none of these situations we find ourselves in are too big for God. You know, I heard this verse in one of the churches I used to attend. And in this church, by the way, there was a voice from God sent into that church—not myself, not somebody in this church present—who instructed the people in that church, who instructed the leadership of that church to attend to God’s law. A lot of the leadership rejected that counsel.

Well, if these verses we just read are correct, then that means God doesn’t hear their prayer.

It’s significant that in that church this verse was read one Sunday, and there was a Freudian slip—it’s not a Freudian slip. I don’t believe in that. Probably a deliberate omission. The phrase that was omitted, of course, was the phrase that says “to turn from their wicked ways.” And that’s what you hear in many pulpits today. Even if they read the whole verse, what they say time after time, if they’re rejecting God’s law, is that “of the people, whoever call my name shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face.” Then I’ll hear from heaven. But we know that’s not true. We know that clause in there—that they have to turn from their wicked ways—is based upon all these other verses we read that said if they reject God’s law, he’ll reject them.

Obedience to God’s commandments has to be part of that. Humbling ourselves in repentance before God, turning ourselves from evil ways, going to the right, then he’ll hear and heal our lands and in our lives as well.

So the commandments of God are a basis for our appeal to him in prayer, our obedience to them.

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Now, lest it be said—you know, one person in our church, and I just mentioned this because I agree with him—you know, I was talking about the need for body life, you know, in our church and fellowship and a warm attitude toward another. That’s true. I don’t bring that up to put it down. That is absolutely true. And that’s what David talks about.

In verses 6-9, after he makes his appeal in verses 1-5 on the basis of obedience to the commandments, he goes on to talk about his relationship to God as being a basis for his appeal also. He says, “I have called upon thee, for thou wilt hear me. Incline thine ear unto me and hear my speech. Show thy marvelous loving kindness, oh thou that saveest by thy right hand, them which put their trust in thee, from those that rise up against them. Show thy marvelous loving kindness—that there is—there’s—there’s a relationship going on here that David understands that God is going to demonstrate his marvelous loving kindness to David. His loving kindness that will cause people to wonder and awe after it. That’s the kind of love God has for his people.

And verse 8, it’s a beautiful verse: “Keep me as the apple of the eye. Hide me under the shadow of thy wings, from the wicked that oppressed me.” David’s appeal to God was based upon his obedience to God’s word, but it was also based upon his understanding of God’s love and concern and relationship with David. He knew that he was the apple of God’s eye.

By the way, the Hebrew word there for apple—kind of interesting. It really talks about the daughter or the hollow or the ball of one’s eye. And what it’s really talking about is the pupil. It’s not talking about looking at an apple. It’s kind of interesting. That’s the apple of the eye. Because if the pupil is damaged, of course, then you have real problems. The apple of the eye is most important part of our sight. And so it’s an extremely well-protected place. We have bones around our eye sockets. We have eyelids to cover up our eyes, eyelashes to keep things out of it. Very protected place, place of great concern for our eyesight.

Well, that’s what God says about us. We’re the pupil of his eye, the apple of his eye. And he hides us under the shadow of his wings. David understood that concern of God for him was a basis for his appeal to him as well.

And of course, we know that loving concern brought Jesus Christ to act in perfect obedience to those commandments we were talking about—which we can’t do—to be our righteousness before God, so that we can have access to God through Jesus Christ. God, out of his great love, in Jesus Christ, out of his great love, suffered death on the cross for us and a descent into hell, separation from the father that he knew and loved from all eternity, for our sake, for the forgiveness of our sins.

That’s love. That’s relationship. But it’s not the kind of relationship you hear a lot about these days either, as it turns out.

You know, it’s—I don’t think what’s going on here is what we would call a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” You hear a lot about that these days. What does that mean? It’s interesting that in the same period of time in which you have a shift from covenantal marriage into relationships with people, living with people in out of the wedlock, in that same time, Christians have gotten this idea that we have no longer a covenant relationship to God. We have a personal relationship, and we’re kind of living with God, you know, as it were. Not in marriage with him, not a covenantal thing, not a legal thing, but just kind of a relationship. And if I feel like it today, great. And if I don’t, well, maybe I’ll end up in the trouble that this friend of mine has.

And I think they think that way about God too. Can’t help but affect the way they think about God’s attitude toward them. It’s kind of a whimsical sort of thing.

Well, it’s interesting that these verses that talk about the apple of the eye—and by the way, there’s only six or seven verses in the whole New Testament that talk use that expression, “apple of the eye.” One of those verses is Proverbs 7:2, where we’re told to keep God’s commandments as the apple of our eye. Okay? Relates it to the verse—the first section—on obedience to God’s word being a basis for our appeal.

Well, in Deuteronomy 32:10-11, we read this interesting expression here in terms of the apple of the eye. Deuteronomy 32:10-11. Now what’s interesting about Deuteronomy 32:10-11—actually the whole chapter. This is the witness of Moses, and this is a covenant witness. Okay? This is what’s known as the song of witness. It was a tradition. It was widely used as a covenant form to ratify the covenant, to provide two copies. There’s a historic prologue. You can divide it right out in terms of the delineation of the verses in Deuteronomy 32 as a covenant witness, a song of covenant witness between two parties.

And it begins, you know, with an invocation: “Give ear, O heavens, and let me speak. Let the earth hear the words of my mouth.” Two witnesses, right? You have to have two witnesses. The earth and the heaven is going to witness to this covenant. And I won’t go through the whole thing, but it would be interesting to spend some time going through this covenant song of witness of the covenant. But what we want to look at particularly right now is verses 10 and 11.

Remembering that this is talking about God’s establishing of his covenant relationship with his covenant people. Verses 10 and 11 are found in the historical prologue to the song of witness. And they talk about the initiation by the covenant creator—which is God himself.

Begins with “Remember the days of old. Consider the years of all generations. Ask your father and he will inform you. Your elders and they will tell you.” And he talks about when the most high gave the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of man, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob is the allotment of his inheritance.

Now he’s talking here about the nation of Israel, the covenant partner, the other side of this covenant relationship between God and his covenant people. What does he say? “He found him, the covenant person, the covenant nation, a desert land. And in the howling waste of a wilderness, he encircled him. He cared for him. He guarded him as the pupil of his eye. Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that hovers over its young, he spread his wings and caught them. He carried them on his pinions.”

He says in the prologue, the story appropriate to the song of witness of the covenant, that when God found his covenant people, he regarded them as the apple of his eye, and he covered them with his wings. David isn’t ignorant of Deuteronomy, and he writes the same thing in Psalm 17. He’s using covenant language. He says that my relationship to God is not some sort of personal, emotional thing. It’s a covenant relationship which has compassion. It has love. It has emotion to it. But the basis for it is the covenant relationship between God’s people and himself.

David knew what Deuteronomy, the song of witness, said, and he was quoting out of that song of witness to describe his relationship to God as the basis for his appeal to God.

One other reference that might be just interesting to look at is in Ruth 2. Let’s see. Should have it here somewhere. I make these copies so that I don’t have to spend a lot of time turning pages, and then I can’t find the copies.

Well, I’ll just turn to Ruth 2. Actually, we’ll start in chapter 1, verse 16 of Ruth, where in the famous passage where Ruth says, “Entreat me not to leave thee, nor to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” The covenant God of Israel was now becoming the covenant God of Ruth as well. And she was counting herself as part of the covenant people. She was a proselyte, if you will, entering into the nation of Israel.

And in Ruth 2:11-12, Boaz is talking to Ruth here, and he says, “It hath fully been showed me all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law since the death of thine husband, and how thou hast left thy father and thy mother and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people which thou knowest not heretofore. The Lord recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the house of the Lord, God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.”

He described—he uses that same language of God’s wings covering the person who enters into covenant relationship with God. He says, “May blessings come upon you from the Lord, God of Israel, the covenant God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for cover.”

David’s relationship to God was a basis for his appeal to God in prayer. And that relationship was clearly established in the covenant. And the verses—the very verses that we use that would—some people would use to seem to indicate a personal relationship apart from covenant—in actuality are verses that are covenant-laden with meaning for the person who reads it and understands the Old Testament.

Our relationship to God then—our covenant relationship to God—and our obedience to God’s word are bases for our appeal to God in prayer.

But you know, it’s not as if these two things are really separate either, because in First John we see that these things are related. There’s a portion of 1 John 3 where it talks about our heart, and again—a lot of people use these verses out of context. They use them to talk about a personal relationship apart from God’s commandments or apart from covenant relationship. We understand though that throughout the book of First John we read things