Dennis Tuuri

Continue or continuing a series of talks on the first statement of the covenant side of the confession and covenant statement of Reformation Covenant Church. We’ve been dealing with this portion of scripture from Ephesians 4. “I therefore the prisoner of the Lord beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation wherewith you are called with all lowliness and meekness with longsuffering forbearing one another in love endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

There is one body and one spirit even as ye are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all.”

And so we come this morning after having spent some time considering the foundation of our unity and the one Lord and one faith, one baptism and then beginning a series of talks through the ethics of our unity being verse two primarily with all lowliness and meekness with longsuffering forbearing one another in love.

And last week we spoke about lowliness or humility. We said that it had to be founded in a correct apprehension of our position before God, that we bring nothing to our relationship with God in terms of the covenant but what Jesus has given to us. And so that’s very important as we seek to serve one another in the body of Christ to humble ourselves first and foremost before God and then also as the scriptures has told us in this portion we studied last week to count one another in the church is more important than ourselves and to count the people that we minister under unto rather is more important than ourselves and so to demonstrate our humility toward them horizontally rather that we have with God vertically.

Today we come to the next portion of this passage with all lowliness and meekness. And we’ll be spending some time today considering the quality of meekness or who are the meek. Last week, a friend chided me a little bit afterwards for not having spent more time in the Old Testament in terms of the foundation for talking about humility. And he mentioned quite accurately that many people see these fruits of the spirit as being New Testament fruits of the spirit.

It’d be good to show some correlation to the Old Testament. Well, I mentioned to him, I was listening to Howard L. state this last week and it’s sort of like with wine you know, you’re condemned if you do and you’re condemned if you don’t. And with the Old Testament, New Testament verses as well, we’ve had people who have chided us for not using more New Testament verses and being too much of an Old Testament church.

And so it’s kind of a grateful relief and a balance to hear that I use too many New Testament verses. That was last week. So we decided to go back to the Old Testament this week. I think it is important because as I said there is a false dichotomy that we bring to the scriptures of New Testament, Old Testament, fruits of the spirit versus all those fruits of works being bad fruits in the Old Testament.

And yet the Psalm we have before us, Psalm 37, that we’ll be dealing with was the source for our Lord when he quoted from the Beatitudes: “the blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” The qualities that Jesus describe in the Beatitudes are not new qualities. They’re not as it were new covenant things as opposed to the old covenant. We find a direct quotation from Psalm 37 as I said in that third Beatitude: “the blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”

And so it’s very important to understand whatever commentary God gives us on the meek. And I think Psalm 37 goes a long way to do toward that end. If you look up the word meek in your dictionary today, you get a very incorrect apprehension of what it means. Of course, most of us are aware of that. The first in my dictionary at home has two definitions. The first is patient and mild. And mild is just kind of another one of those words we don’t know a lot about.

It has connotations, at least with me, of being kind of lukewarm. And we know that can’t be quite right because our Lord said if we were lukewarm or mild water as it were, that he’d spit us out of his mouth. So he certainly can’t say he’s going to spit us out of his mouth to inherit the land. The second definition that I went to in Webster’s dictionary is even worse. It says meekness is being too submissive, easily imposed upon, spiritless, spineless.

And you know, there’s a lot of people in the Christian church who think that’s what Christians should be, spineless. I think that when our Lord tells us to be meek and inherit the world, that means we’re supposed to get, we talked about last week, doormat humility, doormat meekness, to be spineless before people. But surely this is not what the scriptures tell us. We don’t want to take our own preconceptions to the word of God.

We want to let it tell us what meekness is. And so we’re going to look today at Psalm 37 to try to get a better definition.

Now some two years ago or maybe more, we listened to a series of messages by Reverend Rushdoony going through the Beatitudes, Matthew 5, Sermon on the Mount. They were very instructive for me at that time. Chris W. and I were teaching the kids downstairs while the tape was playing—or it wasn’t downstairs but at the dance academy. There’s another room. We were teaching the kids while the tape was playing for the rest of the congregation and we were trying to teach them what Rushdoony was teaching the adults at their level. And this is one lesson I never forgot because it was so easy.

The definition that he gave was that meekness was being broken to harness—that a meek horse is one who’s broken to harness. And he based that on the etymology of the word itself, the origins of where the Greek word came from. Now we taught that to our children and now most of those children who are in that class probably remember, for instance Emily remembers that definition—being broken to harness.

It’s an easy definition and it’s an important one to keep in our minds. There is internal evidence in the scriptures that this is the proper definition. If you’ll turn to Matthew 11:28-30, read a portion of scripture there.

Matthew 11:28-30. Our Lord tells us, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Well, this is the portion of scripture that tells us that definition of being broken to harness, being yoked as it were under Jesus Christ’s yoke is correct. Jesus Christ tells us to take his yoke upon us and to learn from him. And what’s his example? That he’s meek. He’s broken to harness. He’s come to do the will of the father. And he exhorts us to that same meekness in terms of being yoked under God’s yoke.

So it’s important to recognize there that immediately tells us that he’s not talking about spinelessness. He’s using the illustration of an ox. Oxen were yoked. An ox did heavy work. They weren’t, you know, spineless or spiritless animals. They were under control of the yoke, however. And that’s the essential meaning of the term meek.

Now, we went to the state fair last Monday. Various people from the church went other days. And that’s one thing talking about meekness. There’s lots of illustrations that you can see in the world around you about some of these things we’ve been talking about—humility and meekness and patience. Just this morning for instance, Elijah has a little ear ache and somewhat infectious today. He’s out of antibiotics so we didn’t bring him to church and he wanted very badly to come to church.

Now my wife also wanted very badly to come to church and she really misses it when she’s not here. She delights in coming and seeing you all and hearing the word of God. But Chris was meek in that she didn’t scream and yell when she couldn’t come. Elijah was not so meek. And when I brought him back in from the car, he was anything but meek.

But at the fair, Oregon State Fair last Monday, we saw various meek entities. They had a little family circus down there with some trained ponies. And I thought as I was watching, “Well, there’s meekness. There’s a good illustration, a good example of meekness.” Because these ponies are broken to harness. They’re under the direction of the circus master and they do what he tells them to do. They’re meek. They’re not spiritless, though. These ponies are very active. And of course, you wouldn’t want to see a circus full of spiritless animals just kind of trudging around doing what they’re supposed to do.

Now, these horses were spirited, but they were under control and they were meek. Well, we also later on that day, Elijah and I took a walk. I was trying to tire him out so that my wife could rest for a while. I’d walk him around the whole fair. We went over to the stadium portion, that big covered thing they have there just as some of the work horses were coming out. They had a pulling contest that day. They had these huge horses yoked together, two of them together, that were being led out after they’d done their work.

And these horses, they’re not spiritless either, and they’re certainly not weak or spineless, but they’re meek. They were under this harness, and they had to pull this heavy load. And it’s important for us as we remember what meekness means, to recognize that we’re not to be weak, as it were, but we’re to be under control and under God’s yoke. Remember those work horses. Remember the oxen that Christ gives us the example of in terms of meekness.

I believe that Derek Kidner in his description or exegesis of Psalm 37 correctly calls Psalm 37 an exposition on the third Beatitude. And so it’s important that we spend some time in it this morning to consider in a little more detail this meekness that we’ve been talking about generally up to now. So if you could turn to Psalm 37, we’ll be spending some time in it.

Now, the responsive reading we read is not a translation any translation I’m aware of. I have a book called The Psalms as Liturgy and the writer of the book, this is his translation of the Psalm. And the only reason I used it this morning is because it maintains the acrostic nature of Psalm 37. Psalm 37, every other verse in the Hebrew begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And there’s lots of things we could talk about why that is. But certainly one reason for that is as a memory device.

I think it also tends to show us that all language, all characters of the language are God-given and have their proper use in the scriptures. But in any event, that’s why we use this particular rendering of the Psalm this morning because you see that the verses—in verse one in the translation that we read starts with the letter A and verse three with B and verse five with C, and so on throughout the Psalm.

Now as we go through this Psalm, there are three main themes that I want to center on as we go through this Psalm and as we understand what meekness is. And I think we need to see the threefold aspect of what meekness is. Now meekness, you notice, and I say this at the very beginning, meekness is not a passive quality. It’s not the opposite of being meek as being pushy and aggressive and then being meek means sitting back and not doing anything. It’s not inactivity.

And it’s not that we have no faith in God’s word. It’s not that God tells us to do something and then we sit back and we don’t do it and then we don’t give us help or instruction in the way to properly fulfill that responsibility we have before him.

Some of you were here 3 or 4 years ago and several of us went to visit or went to hear Jay Adams speak. A church in Portland had brought him up and he was very good. Really enjoyed his talk and one illustration he gave or a comment he made on the modern church was that the modern church tends to have plaques, you know, and by that he meant that we have all these plaques hanging in our rooms and our kitchens and our walls with various scripture verses taken out of context.

And I think he was talking at the time on “be not anxious”—it’s a sin to be anxious. But if all you do is have something up there out of the scriptures saying “be not anxious” and don’t have the surrounding context, you’re in a lot of trouble.

Well, the same thing can be said to be true of meekness. To just tell somebody, “You’re not being meek.” And for me to explain, tell my son, “You’re not being meek. We’re going to spank you because of it. You better be meek next time.” Really is not serving him the way that God would have us serve him by giving him the whole of the scripture to understand what that meekness is.

And so we don’t want to take verse 11 out of this and suffer from plaques by saying, “The meek shall inherit the earth” and then fill in our own meaning of what the meek is or just see it as a command of God. “If we don’t do it, then we’re in disobedience.” There are things that God has told us in the rest of the verses that helps describe what meekness is and how to attain it.

Adams said that if he had a different time schedule, he might actually start a business selling context plaques. So you could have a plaque with the context of the verse that’s up on your wall with all the other verses that are around it, you know. And a context plaque for Psalm 37:1 would be Psalm 37:1-10. You stick it up over the rest, the plaque and then you’d be cured of plaques.

Well, Psalm 37 has a lot of injunctions to us. Verse three, we’re told to trust in the Lord. Verse three, we’re also told to do good. In verse four, delight thyself in the Lord. And those are the three things we’re going to center on as we talk about meekness and the characteristics of a meek person: to trust in God, to do the works that God has told us to do, and actually delight in the will of the Lord.

Now, there are others. These are repeated. For instance, trust is repeated in verse 40. The admonition to do good works is repeated in verses 27 and 34. To delight is repeated in verse 23. Additionally, in verse 5, for instance, we have “commit thy way unto the Lord.” In verse 7, “rest in the Lord.” Also in verse 7, “to wait patiently.” Commit, rest, and wait patiently. I’m going to put under the general heading of trust. So that’s kind of how we’re going to look at these characteristics.

Now trusting, doing, and delighting. And then finally, at the end of that, we’ll look at the blessings because meekness, we’ll find out as we go through this as everything else, is a covenant fact. And therefore, there are blessings and cursings assigned in Psalm 37 to that reality.

That specifically, of course, is found in verse 11 in inheriting the land. But that really begins in verse three: “Trust in the Lord, do good, and so shalt thou dwell in the land. And verily thou shalt be fed.” So to dwell in the land and to inherit the land begins in verse three and then is repeated in verses 9, 11, 18, 22, 27, 29 and 34 throughout this Psalm. In other words, we have admonitions to do certain things to abstain from other things and we have a continual reminder of the blessings and cursings that God puts upon people as they choose one way or the other way.

Well, okay. So let’s talk about trust. First of all, trust in the Lord. It’s very important as I was thinking through this, I thought it’s very important not to see meekness and humility and patience as character qualities. We talk about them that way a lot. But we have to remember when we use those terms that they’re not isolated apart from everything else. They’re not isolated characteristics that is good in terms of people.

What am I trying to say with that? What I’m trying to say, it’s a complicated way I suppose, is that it is important that we put an object to the whole thing. What do you trust? It’s not good just to trust something. It’s what you trust in that is what God has commanded us to do—to trust in the Lord.

I used to, sometimes I’ve asked—we’ll be studying through specifically in the context of justification by faith. Several groups have studied through that and I always ask the question: what’s the basis of our salvation? Is it our faith or is it a life lived in perfect obedience to God’s will, God’s law? And almost everybody will say, “Well, it’s our faith that saves us,” you know, but it isn’t our faith that saves us. Our faith has an object to it.

That object is Jesus Christ who came as the covenant keeper to walk in perfect obedience to all the requirements of the law. It’s his life of perfect obedience to the law that is the foundation for our justification, the imputation of his righteousness to us through faith. But it’s the object of the faith that actually saves us, okay?

So the scriptures say that we’re saved by faith. Implicit in that, because of the rest of the teachings of scripture, is that faith is in the risen Savior Jesus Christ as our covenant keeper and who took upon himself our covenant wrath due to us for our covenant disobedience.

Well, so it is with trust. It’s important then to recognize that we must trust but not just have a simple blind trust in everything or everybody. That’s not biblical meekness. Biblical meekness is to trust in the Lord, okay? The object of the trust—this is important.

I thought of another illustration. The State Fair is full of illustrations. At that same family circus, there was a juggler, the Ricochet, I think is what they call them. And he had this thing he was spinning on the end of a stick of pan and he put it way up high, you know, and he balanced the stick on the end of his finger. And we used to—when Chris and I went to a Baptist church—we used that as an illustration. We take in a long stick and have various kids come up and try to balance it on the end of their hands before everybody, end of their finger.

And one group we tell to watch their finger, you know, and the other group we tell to watch the top of the stick. And of course, if you watch your finger, you can’t keep that stick upright. It’ll fall over every time. But if you watch the top of the stick, your finger tends to move with it fairly naturally and keeping that stick balanced.

Well, it’s the same thing here. We’re to trust in God. One of the ways that God tells us to avoid fretting and worrying about the prosperity of evildoers is to focus on him, to focus on God. That’s the point of looking at the top of the stick. That’s—and we’re talking about God up there. We’re to focus our attention upon God and his purposes, not upon ourselves and our present situation, our finger.

And so the object is very important and the object of our trust should be our Lord.

We said that verse 5, “commit unto the Lord” helps us to understand what trust is. Also, commit in the Hebrew word there has the implication of rolling something onto and it says to roll your burdens onto God, okay? And that’s trusting in the Lord to commit ourselves and all our problems that we might have unto God into his hands. He cares for us. He cares for us so much that he sent his son to die for our sins.

And certainly we should be able to commit ourselves unto him and to roll our burdens onto him. But we couldn’t do that, could we? To trust in God, if we didn’t understand and believe in his sovereignty over all creation. To believe that there are areas of life out there, and perhaps large areas of life, that are somehow removed from the sovereignty of God and from his decree—how could you trust God in those areas? You know, you might hope that he gets there on time because the thing’s out of control, but we know in this church, and we stated in our confessional statement, that God’s decree is what brings everything to pass.

His providence is the working out of his decree, and it’s eternal, and it’s fixed. And so we can trust in that decree. And we can trust that whatever comes to pass in our life is part of that decree from God.

And my wife this morning accepted that. She knew that God and his decree and through his promise had made it so that she couldn’t be here this morning, although she wanted to be. My son Elijah has yet to learn that. His lack of knowledge of God’s decree may not be the problem. However, he may simply want to go on willfully sitting even though he knows that it’s God’s decree that he not be here. He certainly knew it was his parents’ decree that he not be here this morning and yet he still rebelled against it.

But it’s important to recognize that trusting then has this twofold nature to it. First of all, an understanding of the providence of God in creation—that God has ordered everything that comes to pass. And secondly, a bending of the knee, as it were, to that will or to that decree.

To trust in God then means to not be envious, to not be angered, to not be wrathful. Those things indicate a displeasure—ultimately in the wrong sense of the word—if you use those things a displeasure with God’s decree itself.

Another illustration. On the way back from the fair, and I shared this with some people Wednesday night—we were there from 10:30 in the morning to, I think, 9 or 9:30 at night. We got home at 10:30. Well, the kids did real good, but when we got in the car at 8:30 or 9, whatever it was Monday night, and started driving back home, Benjamin, our little 5-month-old now, began to cry and screamed and be very upset.

And we stopped. This happened immediately. We stopped right away at the first gas station, got some gas. My wife fed him. Thought that would take care of it, put him back in his car seat, started driving down the road. Didn’t take care of it. He was very upset. He cried. And when I say cry, I mean screamed, okay? I don’t mean whimpered. I mean he was screaming and his hands were going like this. You know, they really get upset sometimes.

He cried from Salem. I think he took about a 30 or 45 second rest just this side of Woodburn. And then he—this I’m serious, this is not exaggeration. And he continued to cry until about five, let’s see, about halfway between tired and Champoeg, he finally quit, went to sleep.

Well, now that was good probably 30 minutes or more of this child screaming in our ears. My wife had actually put her finger in her ear because it was so loud it was hurting her ear crying. I just wanted to jump out the window, you know. Well, now it’s very easy. It’s very easy for those of us who have had children, small children know it’s very easy to get very angered at our children and to get very wrathful against them and against the situation that God has placed us in here.

God in his providence and decree put me in this car next to the screaming child. I can’t spank him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing yet in terms of volitional actions. I don’t think he does. Another couple of months we’ll see. But you know, I really couldn’t do anything about the situation. And if I did quite well, my wife said I was very patient.

And I trusted that God had placed me in that situation. And she said, “Well, I hope at least you can use this for a sermon illustration,” which I could. But it was important that I trust that God had placed me in that situation and accept his decree. That didn’t come to pass because Benjamin was a bad baby. Ultimately, it came to pass because God had placed me in that situation and I couldn’t do anything about it.

Now I must confess before you that a couple of nights earlier, the same thing happened Sunday night on the way back from the Woods’s house. And I did get very angry. Well, it’s not that—that’s not what we want to do. We don’t want to get angry over these situations. We want to trust God in his providence and yield ourselves unto his decree.

We want to trust God and these scriptures tell us that in spite of prosperous autonomous men—okay? “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.”

We’re going to see in the world around us, in the providence and decree of God, wicked people prospering. And we’re going to have a tendency to get angry over that. We’re going to have a tendency to be envious, to want it ourselves, and to want to have God’s judgment against them. Not because they’ve broken his law, but because they have something that we don’t have and we can’t have it, okay?

That motivation will begin to build in us as we’re sinners. We have these sin natures and we’ll have that in us to want to envy these people and to destroy them because of it. God says, “Don’t do that. Don’t fret. Don’t be anxious. Don’t be envious of these people.”

Throughout this Psalm, you hear that same refrain. Rather, trust God. Trust that God is active in history, that it’s his decree that has brought this thing to pass. Plus, he tells us that he is sovereign in terms of history. And his decree, as surely as it brings up people in rebellion against him, will bring those people down and will cast them down again. Justice and judgment will be evidenced in the earth.

So we’re to trust God in spite of prosperous autonomous men. We’re to trust God in spite of ravening wolves who might come against us. The Psalm tells us as well that some of these wicked people seek to eat up the righteous and destroy them and we can get quite anxious about that and quite fretted as it were and quite heated up. The Hebrew word for fret means to be heated up.

We can get all worked up about that. We can get worked up about people in our church we don’t think are doing quite enough, you know, and are hurting us and trying to hurt us and our possessions. But God says, “Trust me. I’ll bring these things to fruition.”

We’re to trust God and his providence. We should recognize that as we’re walking down that furrow as it were, an oxen with the yoke of Jesus Christ on us, that if we see other pastures that look greener, that greenness will be cut down in a day by God and his righteousness in history. And we should trust God as we’re plowing that furrow with Christ’s yoke upon us—that it’s his hand that’s upon us.

And though evildoers may seem to come very close to us and seem to want to gobble us up and take over us, our Lord’s hand is upon us. And he’ll protect us from those who would seek to do us harm. And we should also trust God in spite of the occasional whipping that we’ll get from him.

After all, God’s chastisement that comes upon us comes upon us when we’re disobedient. At that circus I was mentioning down in Salem, those little horses that were meek and been trained by that guy to run in the circle and stand up, do various tricks—he had a little whip there with him and he would use that whip to speed them up or to make them do various things.

And God does that same thing with us, doesn’t he? We don’t act in perfect righteousness. We have the righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed, but our actions are still flawed, as it were, and we’ll continue to sin, and God’s hand of judgment will come upon us in terms of disciplining us.

And we’re to trust God in spite of those occasional chastisements that he’s given us. As a matter of fact, we’re to actually ask for those chastisements. David in one of the Psalms says, “Wash me and I’ll be whiter than snow.” David, the word there for wash that David used was the Hebrew word for beat me.

And he wanted God’s discipline, beating upon him because he knew he had sinned. And he knew that if God still loved him, that if he was elect of God and called to righteousness in Jesus Christ and the covenant keeper, that he knew that if he was beloved of God, he would be disciplined by God. And he knew that if he continued in his sin and suffered no chastisement from God, that he was forsaken by God.

And so he asked for God’s discipline upon him after his sin, recognizing that God disciplines those whom he loves. He asks for it as a sign of God’s love. We should be the same way, right? Not only should we not chafe at that discipline, we should seek it out, as it were. We should hope that God will discipline us as his beloved sons.

We’re to rest. These scriptures also tell us in that trusting attitude, waiting patiently for God.

Now, key to this idea of trusting in God is the whole area of submission. And while Webster’s definition tells us that humility or meekness rather is being too submissive, and that’s a perversion, of course, yet there is a valid submission that we should have on the basis of our meekness.

Turn to 1 Peter 2, please. We’ll read a couple of verses there. 1 Peter 2:23. That’s talking about Jesus Christ. Start in verse 21, I guess.

“For even hereunto were ye called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow in his steps, who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth, who when he was reviled, reviled not again. When he suffered, he threatened not, but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously, who his own self bear our sins in his body on the tree that we being dead in sins, that dead to sins, should live unto righteousness, by whose stripes you were healed.

For ye were as sheep going astray, but are now returned under the shepherd and bishop of your souls. And then he says likewise be humble, the wives being submission to their own husbands.”