Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Psalm 40:6-8
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Well, Psalm 40, which we just read responsively, is the sermon text. I want to focus particularly on verses 6 to 8. So, I’ll reread that portion. And the topic today is listening. So, please stand and listen.

“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire. My ears you have opened. Burnt offering and sin offering you did not require. Then I said, ‘Behold, I come in the scroll of the book. It is written of me. I delight to do your will, oh my God, and your law is within my heart.’”

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you that you are a God who hears. From the beginning to the end of the scriptures, men cry out to you and you hear. Lord God, we thank you for hearing our prayers. We thank you that your thoughts are ever toward us and your ear is always inclined to us. Bless us, Lord God, as your image bearers in this world that we may be so inclined. Make us hearers first and foremost of your will, Lord God, that we might do it.

And then help us to work out that relationship with you in the context of our relationships in this world by understanding this text. Open our ears, Lord God. Prepare us by your Spirit so that we may do your will. The Word being found in the center of our being in Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

God listens. Praise God for that. Something we take for granted. But we shouldn’t. God declares himself to be a God who has ears and hears. Unlike the psalm we just sang that describes the idols who have ears and hear not, mouths that do not speak. God is there. God is not silent. He has revealed himself in his word, in his speech, which he expects us to hear, to listen to. And in that word, he reveals that he is a hearing God. He has ears. He hears us. Do we hear him?

This is the last sermon in this section on the second word of the ten commandments. The topic today is listening. I wanted to kind of generally make the case today that Christians should be—based on the verses we just read and many others—a people who hear, who listen.

When the second commandment warns us against visual representations as mediating points of worship, when it points us back to the true image—the engraved image on the ten commandments—that same word used for the tablets on which God wrote the ten words as for the engraven image. He points us back to his word.

Now, images are good, pictures are good, art’s good. We’ve seen that God actually required some art be in the context of the temple and the tabernacle. But ultimately, God prioritizes the spoken word and I think that’s true in our lives as well.

I want to talk today about the spoken word, listening, hearing, and this is an implication of the second commandment. The second commandment prioritizes hearing, prioritizes speech and word, and as a result, deprioritizes the visual image—at least in the context of worship. And that’s where everything flows out.

Yeah, good to have pictures, but God wants us to never focus on them as points of mediation, but rather to hear his word.

The picture on the cover of worship today—well, we have two covers of worship, which allows me to use two pictures. Most of you receive this one with music in it. Some people have requested text-only liturgies. And this picture is kind of ambiguous, isn’t it? Is he doing a good thing? Is he doing a bad thing?

Now, what does it say to us about hearing? And it’s kind of odd that I used a picture to talk about hearing. I suppose I actually suggested maybe that we should just put “listen” in big bold words on the cover on the order of worship this time instead of a picture. That is the coloring picture for the children. And that’s why—because listen is the point of the whole text here, I think, in the sermon—that we’re to listen to God and do his will.

But I thought that this picture might be good. You know, we live in a world of iPods and…you know, it’s interesting to consider the history of mankind and how revolutionary—probably, I don’t know—but how much our world is changing through headphones. Let me read some stuff from Bugomu Yarmuac. He wrote an article for a Festschrift, a book in celebration of James B. Jordan’s works that I’ve mentioned before.

This second commandment—he talks about a man named Nik Dulkimoff who wrote a book on icons who believes that the visual image is—as Eastern Orthodox theologians teach—a point of contact with God. And so this is the idolatrous portion that’s forbidden in the second commandment, and they recognize it’s forbidden in the second commandment. They just say that since Jesus came things have changed—kind of dispensationalist that way.

Well, Bubu interacts with Nik Dulkimoff through the writing of a guy named Jacques Ellul. Ellul published a book in 1985 called The Humiliation of the Word, and it’s very philosophical. It slices and dices in all kinds of ways and it’s not an easy read. Or at least for me not an easy listening to as I listen to it on my Kindle. But he does have some significant things to say that I think Boo has very helpfully pointed out in his article that’ll be published in this book.

Let me just read a couple of things from what Boooo says. He says that Jacques Ellul deals with the role of images in modern society. “Images force out words and their popularity is a sign of the laziness in the pursuance of spiritual maturity. Listening is hard. Seeing is easy. Listening and understanding requires maturity and submission.”

If you’re really going to listen correctly and speak correctly, the easy thing to do is to just look at something. I can read a book—takes hours. I can watch a movie—takes two hours. Much easier. So it’s kind of a laziness to the image. Images seem to be driving out words in the context of our world. And so the seeing, the sight is becoming more preeminent in terms of the ear.

This in turn, he says, produces problems with communication and a problem of perspective too. “We prefer sight to hearing because it enables us to catch the space around us and make it our own. It puts us in the center of the world. My sight constructs a universe for me.” That’s a direct quotation from Ellul. “It establishes spatial relationships.”

So seeing, you know, a supervisor is somebody who sees over something—an overseer. Sight. There’s a kind of a control of things in our sight and visual imagery. Wherever we’re at, our sight determines what’s around us, right?

Hearing, on the other hand—and we can close our eyes, we can look here or there. Hearing, yeah, there’s some of that goes on. We can go like this or we can point an ear, but generally sounds come to us outside of the thing that we’re grasping and making us the center of, right? Sounds tend to kind of come in from the side. Some little child started babbling over here and there’s a little rustling over here. You’re trying to listen to me, but you can’t. You can focus on me visually. But ears are open and all kinds of sounds. The cough I just heard, right? We’re listening and the listening is more, you know, it’s less selfish. We could say, okay, we have less of an ability to control what we listen to. And I would say that maybe biblically speaking, we should say that listening then is more of an activity of submission than seeing is.

To listen to speak—this is quite different from seeing.

Ellul says, “It’s not the same with hearing. Noises come to us even if we are not looking for them. They are much more independent from us than images. We can close our eyes and stop seeing. But it’s much harder to close our ears and stop hearing. Images form a panorama, but noises do not. They make us feel uneasy.”

There is a special kind of noise, namely human words. According to Ellul, here comes the main difference between seeing and hearing: “Humans are just one of many kinds of things that we can see, but spoken words come only from other humans.”

Okay? So I can look around the world and I can see human beings, but I see all kinds of other things. But a spoken word can only come from a human being or some reproduction of a human being by a computer, whatever it is. So the spoken word is quite interesting in the context of thinking about it in terms of what we see, what we listen to.

The spoken word is very significant and the spoken word produces relationship, right? I can see you this morning and I sort of, you know, I went by Freddy back from Australia—Brendan Freddy—and you know, for me, the visual image is not as acute as it is for you. He seems also cutting his hair shorter. Maybe he’s lost some weight. I don’t know. But I didn’t know notice who he was as he went by and said hello.

But, you know, as I went past him, the voice clued me off. “Oh, I think that might be Freddy.” And sure enough, it was. I was with another person at the time who didn’t hear any of it, didn’t see it. But at any rate, the human voice creates relationship. You can see somebody and you don’t know a darn thing. Well, you know a few things about them. What color hair they might have or maybe not. You can know a little bit. But to talk to somebody produces a relationship with them.

Seeing, there is no relationship between you and the thing being seen, right? You’re more in control of that image. And it’s a depersonalized image. It’s a depersonalized activity. Whereas speech and communication produces relationship, right? And these are observations by Ellul on reality. And I know they’re a little philosophical and “what the heck you doing, Dennis? Where’s the scriptures?” We’re getting to it. We’re coming to Psalm 40.

But I want you to understand, I think, why the second commandment in the Bible stresses so much word, hearing, listening, and speaking as opposed to sight.

What did we just sing from that psalm we just sang—about how you know they have these idols and they have ears that don’t hear and everybody that worships those guys, they become like them. How? They become deaf. They can’t hear and they become dumb. They can’t speak. Communication ceases in idolatry. And communication is at the heart of relationship.

So Ellul talks about this. He says, “It’s only by listening to a person that we can get to know him or her better. If we only look at a person and do not want to listen to him or her, we tell ourselves our story of the person. We interpret it ourselves.”

The same is with God. This is why liturgy has to be based on the revealed word of God and not on our ideas about God. And that’s what the second commandment is all about.

In listening, seeing is easy. I can watch a movie or look at the world. It’s easy. But listening takes time. It takes attention. It’s hard work. It doesn’t come naturally, so to speak. It’s hard work. Attention is required to hear a story. While images establish spatial relationships, words establish personal relationships.

In this context, Bumu says—it’s notable, says Ellul, that God’s main means of communication with man is speech. Ellul reminds us that also that the Bible strongly opposes seeing and hearing. Quoting Bible passages such as Exodus 33 and Judges 13: God cannot be seen but he can be heard. So in the view of Ellul, you have this opposition between seeing and hearing. And we’re going to look at some scriptures about that.

And I know seeing is okay. Seeing is not bad and evil and hearing good. You hear the wrong things, you can see good things. But in the Bible, in the verses that we just read, there is this opposition. God can’t be seen, but he can be heard.

And so God is not visual, but God is language. Language or wordness is an attribute of God indeed. So much so that the second person of the Godhead is referred to as the Word of God, not the picture of God, the Word of God.

This is why the revelation and worship of God is verbal, not visual. And why adoring things made by human hands is forbidden in the second commandment.

So hearing, seeing—the second commandment privileges hearing. And throughout the scriptures, this is based because God himself is not revealed by sight. He’s not visible. He’s declared to be invisible and yet he communicates. He is there and he is not silent. He communicates by means of speech.

So the second commandment. Now we’re going to bring this now into Psalm 40. And first a few comments about Psalm 40.

Psalm 40 is quoted in Hebrews 10, which we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes. But first some general comments about Psalm 40. It is described in modern commentators as a liturgical psalm used in a liturgy of intercession or supplication by the king. And so the king would have this liturgical service of supplication to God. And this seems to mark that. And there’s beginning to be analyses of various portions of the Psalter in terms of their use in liturgy. And that’s what this seems to be.

“I waited patiently for the Lord, and he listened to me and heard my cry. See, that’s immediately what’s the first thing we’re told. Communication requires patience, but God listens to our cry. You know, he inclined to me and heard my cry.”

So God is positively inclining, you know, toward you with his ear to hear our cry. And that’s what Psalm 40 begins with.

“He also brought me up out of a miry pit, out of the miry clay, a horrible pit that is, and set my feet upon a rock and established my steps. He’s put a new song in my mouth.”

So now he’s using his mouth—the words—to praise God, praise to our God. So he begins the liturgy sort of like we do. He has no basis for himself of relationship with God, but God hears his cry. God delivers him. And as a result of that, he talks about singing songs to God.

“Blessed is that man who makes the Lord his trust and does not respect the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies. Now, there’s another reference to hearing. We don’t turn aside to lies. You have to be careful who you listen to.”

“Many, oh Lord, my God, are your wonderful works which you have done. So, there’s praise.”

Now, after this confession that only God can deliver him, he enters into a verse here—a long verse of praise—that he declare and speak of these things are more than can be numbered.

“And then he says sacrifice and offering you do not desire.”

And this is misunderstood frequently. You know it’s not as if he’s saying—relative between if we look at sacrifice and offering and opening of ears—it’s clear that God wants the latter. You can’t get to sacrifices and offerings without having open ears to hear the word of God, right? But he’s not saying sacrifices and offerings are bad. God commanded them. He’s saying relatively speaking.

And in fact the kings would do this. They would sacrifice animals. They would have priests there and sacrifice animals in a liturgy, a worship service of supplication before God. So, he’s not saying they’re irrelevant, but he’s saying that in relationship to what he’s going to say next, they’re almost like completely pointless.

“And what he says next is, ‘My ears you have opened.’”

We’ll get back to this in a couple of minutes. We’ll focus into the next section on that.

“Burnt offering and sin offering you did not require. Then I said, ‘Behold, I am come, it is written, I come in the scroll of the book, it is written of me. I delight to do your will, oh my God. Your laws in my heart.’”

There’s a parallelism there between the offerings and the sacrificial burnt offering that’s described there. And so the ears being opened is parallel then in that in these couplets to the one who is written in the book who comes to do the will of Yahweh. Okay.

So hearing is the way we do the will. Having our ears open by God is equated with service to God. Okay.

Now, what is this all about? Well, we’re not sure. But perhaps what’s going on here is what’s written in the scroll. That’s another thing that’s interesting. Not that is seen in visual imagery, but the revelation of this matter that he’s speaking of here is related to a scroll with written words. Right? “I come in the scroll of the book. It is written of me. What book?” We don’t know.

Some people think in its first application, right, so the Bible—this obviously speaks of Christ. Hebrews 10 makes that clear. Christ is being preached here. But there were real kings who did these real services of supplication. And in Deuteronomy 17, in the scroll of the law, in Deuteronomy 17, the king was required to make out a copy of the word of God and to speak it forth to the people. And that could be what’s being referred to here.

He’ll talk in a few minutes about praising God in the great congregation. And again, ultimately the great congregation is the great congregation in heaven and earth combined and Christ praising the Father. But here in the first application of this, you know, we may well see a Davidic king being exhorted here to praise God in the congregation of the people that assemble.

He’s confessed that he’s unworthy, that only God can bring him out of the miry pit. He’s praised God. He goes to the word of God then and says in that word it’s required of me to hear your will to serve you and you alone and to tell the people of that will and so Psalm 40 could be probably is related to that kind of a thing and then he says,

“I have proclaimed the good news of righteousness so you get to the proclamation portion of this liturgy that’s that’s going through. He’s proclaimed the good news of righteousness in the great assembly indeed I do not restrain my lips, oh Lord, you yourself know, I have not hidden your righteousness within my heart. I have declared your faithfulness and your salvation.”

And he goes on then to then engage in a series of prayers about his enemies. And the righteousness of God here is keyed to the faithfulness of God and his salvation. And so the righteousness of God that he’s praising—yes, there is a holiness to God, a perfect righteousness to him—but it seems here as well that particularly it’s the faithfulness of God and his saving us out of difficult times, his deliverance of us. That’s the focal point of the declaration of the righteousness of God as it is with ours, right?

The righteousness of God is revealed in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s been faithful to bring the covenant to culmination to establish the new world through the coming of the greater king, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will say, “It’s written of him. He came to do the Father’s will and he then can be called upon by us to deliver us from enemies, to redeem us, and that is the faithfulness of the Father to put the world to rights, to deal with the enemies that we have and he reveals who he is at that point in time.”

So overall what we have here is a liturgical psalm that has kind of the same sort of movement as our worship service in many ways and it’s in the context of that we find these three verses about the opening of the ear.

So let’s talk about that specifically now—the opening of the ear, verses 6 to 8.

“My ears you have dug” is the literal translation of this. “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire. My ears you have opened.”

And it’s not the normal word for “open.” It’s a word literally in the Hebrew that means “dug.” You dug out my ears. My ears were stopped up they were clogged—there was wax—and you took something and dug out my ears. Okay? And so that’s what he’s talking about—the opening of the ear.

Now, clearly it’s related to hearing the will of the one whom we obey. But that’s what he says. He says, “You’ve dug open my ear to hear your word.” So it means to dig.

Now, this verse—as we think about and meditate upon the fact that it is a digging with an instrument—then it kind of brings up other associations that we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes. But first, the citation of it in Hebrews—in Hebrews chapter 10—is—well, actually first let’s mention the circumcision of the ear.

So in Acts 7:51, just before Stephen is stoned to death, he says to those who are about to stone him, “You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. You always resist the Holy Spirit as your fathers did.”

So the Bible here, and in other places, but here very explicitly, we’re told that in the Old Testament, the people of Christ’s day and age—the Jews who were unfaithful—had uncircumcised hearts and uncircumcised ears.

So, you know, remember what we said last week with the centrality of circumcision in the account of Abraham and Sarah, and then its relationship to the hall of faith, and faith comes by the word. Faith is in the word, not the sight. And at the middle of that covenant making with Abraham was the sign of circumcision, which is the sign of humility and submission to God.

So first of all there’s a physical action of digging out of the ear, and that connects it up to the physical action of circumcision. But related to that then is this idea of taking our ears and making them submissive to Yahweh—opening them up to his command, hearing the word of the master with the view of obeying it.

Uncircumcised ears is what Steven says. By implication, we should have circumcised ears. Ears that have been open, dug out, to do the will of the Father.

Now, when this is quoted in Hebrews, a change occurs.

Turn to Hebrews chapter 10. You should see this. You probably know it, a lot of you already, but in Hebrews chapter 10, it’s kind of culminating the great priestly work of the Lord Jesus Christ. But in verse five, he quotes this psalm, but he quotes it differently. Verse 5 of Hebrews 10.

“Therefore, when he came into the world, he said, ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you had prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin, you had no pleasure. That I said, behold, I have come in the volume of the book, it is written of me to do your will, oh God.’”

Okay, this is very significant because this tells us exactly that this psalm is—and its proper application—to a real king. But ultimately, it’s typological of Jesus Christ, the greater king, the greater David, the greater Solomon, the great king.

So, first of all, there’s an assertion of kingship here as well. If we understand the kingly origins of Psalm 40 and its Davidic authorship, etc. But more than that, it strikes us as odd that a portion of this is misquoted.

Everything seems to be right except that second line. Instead of “my ears you have dug open, my ears you have opened,” it says “a body you have prepared for me.”

Now, what they’re doing here is quoting the Septuagint. You know, a couple hundred years before Christ comes, there’s a Greek translation of the Old Testament instead of Hebrew. And these guys—these Jewish scholars—assemble at Alexandria and they create a Septuagint. Septus—70. 70 of them got together and did this. And when they wrote the Greek translation of this Hebrew, “you have dug open my ears,” instead of saying that, they said, “a body you have prepared for me.”

Now, maybe they were wrong, but the fact that the New Testament quotes it means God approves of that translation, right? I mean, don’t get hung up with the 70 guys. The Bible doesn’t quote everything they say and a lot of things they got wrong. But the point is this one—God is saying, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s a good translation for opening or digging open ears.”

Why? Why is that a good translation? Because it’s a synecdoche—a big word, a fancy word—synecdoche. But what that synecdoche means—a part for the whole. So the tithe is a synecdoche for the use of your money properly for God in everything you do. Coming to church for a couple of hours is a synecdoche for the rest of your life when you’re praising God and what you do during your labors—a part for the whole. A little representation of something by something else—a smaller part.

And what they said, and what it seems like God tells us now through the inspired translation found in Hebrews 10, is that if we want to think about our bodies being prepared for service to God—the one part of our body God uses to describe that willing, servant-like body that God has given us to be used for the purposes of King Jesus and the body of Jesus Christ—the one thing is open ears. Ears that have been circumcised. Ears that have been dug open and hear the will of the Father.

Our Savior says, “If you’re a Christian, you’re united to Jesus Christ because you believe in him. You want to be like him. You want to agree—not in the ultimate sense as he can say that, you know, he’s come to do the will of the Father by ushering in salvation. That’s the point of the text here in Hebrews—his sacrificial work. But surely this is what we want to say in our lives as Christians, little c, and he’s Jesus Christ, big C. Is we want to say we’ve come to do the will of God the Father. That’s what we want to do, right? That’s what you’re going to do this week. That’s what you’re doing right now. You want to do the will of the Father.”

And Jesus says—God says—that to do the will of the Father, he requires your body. And specifically, it requires circumcised ears. It requires the ability to listen. To listen. To listen.

So Psalm 40 is a good indication to us of who we are in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Isaiah 35, and describing the new Zion, says pretty much the same thing. We read in Isaiah 35:6, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. The lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the dumb sing. Water shall burst forth in the wilderness.”

The description of salvation includes this description that the ones who are deaf will have their ears open to hear the word of God.

Now, let’s get the picture on this. The other order of worship, you got that guy with the headphones on. What’s he doing? Maybe he’s trying to control the sound and be an autonomous, sovereign individual. He’s got his iPod on so that God won’t disturb him by the sounds of the world, right? Maybe that’s what he’s doing. Maybe he’s actually listening to the scriptures. Maybe he’s doing it so he can listen intently and attentively to the scriptures or to a friend’s message or the music that the Spirit uses to motivate him toward obedience. Maybe he’s doing that. We don’t know what he’s doing. It’s somewhat ambiguous.

This next picture isn’t quite as ambiguous, but it reminds us of the need to listen and to understand that hearing is an important part of—it’s a way of submitting to things.

And what I was saying about the iPod earlier—I don’t think I finished the thought—is that we’ve got a whole new world now where sounds are no longer a reminder of our need to submit to the created order in a way that our sight isn’t a reminder of that. Now, through earbuds, we can control the world of our hearing. That is momentous, I believe, in the history of the world. And it is a powerful device. It can be a powerful device for good, but it can be a horrific powerful device for evil as well, because hearing reminds us of our submission to the things around us. The papers rustling again. Whatever it is—seeing isn’t that way. We gaze. We apprehend. We rule.

So, be careful with your iPods. That’s all I’m saying. Be careful. Be careful.

Well, this next picture is a little ambiguous also. I asked Angie to find me a picture of the servant at the door of the house of his master that he loves and wants to serve forever. And She came up with this. What this is—it’s this picture. In case those of you who don’t have it—and this picture is a guy indeed with his ear being pierced. Another guy is going to hammer a nail into the earlobe or some place close to his ear.

But if you look closely, he’s not a willing slave. He’s in the pillory. He’s being pilloried here. He’s in the stocks. And I guess in colonial times—I don’t know if this is—I think this might be European, I don’t know—but in that period of time, when men were put in stocks, they were beaten, of course, sometimes with things, but apparently also they did this. They would pierce the person’s ear. Probably, you know, I don’t know why, but that’s something they would do.

Now, now, let’s look at the picture. My wife sometimes, when she taught the twos, the fours, and five-year-olds, would have the kids draw just what the Bible says. And I’m going to do that in some of my Isaiah Sunday school lessons as well. So now I’m kind of going back again. I’m using visual imagery to talk about the written word. But what the purpose of drawing a particular text of scripture very carefully is to note the details of the written word that we might otherwise not notice. Okay?

Here’s the case law involving the piercing of the ear. Now, these are the judgments—and by the way, this is Exodus 21:1. So, do you know what that means, right? This is the beginning of the case laws. The ten commandments have been said. The kind of the idea of a short form of God’s law about worship has happened at the end of chapter 20. And now 21, we have the beginning of case laws. And the very first case law is what we have here.

Here’s what it says. Listen now.

“These are the judgments which you shall set before them. If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years. In the seventh, he shall go out free and pay nothing. If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself. If he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If the master has given him a wife, she has borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself. But if the servant plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife and my children. I will not go out free,’ then his master shall bring him to the judges. He shall also bring him to the door or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.”

Okay, there’s another account of this in Deuteronomy. Listen again. Try to get the picture of what’s happening here. Deuteronomy 15:12-18.

“If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and serves you six years, then in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you. And when you send him away free from you, you shall not let him go away empty-handed. Oh, new information. You shall supply him liberally from your flock, from your threshing floor, from your wine press, from what the Lord has blessed you with. You shall give to him. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you. Therefore, I command you this thing today.”

“And if it happens that he says to you, ‘I will not go away from you because he loves you and your house since he prospers with you,’ then you shall take an awl, thrust it through his ear to the door, and he shall be your servant forever. Also to your female servant, you shall likewise. I shall not—it shall not seem hard to you when you send him away free from you, for he has been worth a double hired servant in serving you six years. Then the Lord your God will bless you in all that you do.”

Now, if you make a little drawing of that, right there’s something that people normally put in this story that we just sort of fill in information that’s not there. You know what it is? Who knows what it is? What do we put in that story with the guy getting his hole drilled through at the door of the house with the female servant?

What do we put into the story typically? Anybody know what? That’s right. We put an earring into the story. Exactly. So, and all of a sudden, now we’re talking about earrings. And what are these symbols? There’s no earring mentioned, folks. That’s not part of the liturgy or the ritual here. He is simply getting his ear bored.

What does it represent? It’s rather obvious, isn’t it? He’s getting his ear unstopped. He’s developed—he has an ear that is circumcised—and splitting uncircumcised. He loves his master. In the Deuteronomy text, it’s not linked to whether he’s got a wife from his master. Forget all those details. They’re not in the Deuteronomy portion of it, right? He’s just a single guy or a single gal now. And he wants—he loves his master. He’s being prospered. He’s doing well there. He wants to serve there the rest of his life.

Is that a bad thing? Is it a bad thing for a person to work for a corporation all of his life? I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think most people are supposed to work for other people typically. So even in the in the work imagery, this is not a bad thing.

But he just has told them, remember that you are redeemed out of Egypt. How did that happen? Blood on the doorpost of the home. What happens here? The ears pierced through at the doorpost of the home.

What’s happening? It’s an imagery of the Father who owns the house—us who are slaves. First compelled to serve him because we live in his house, in his world. And we get to the place of saying, “Yes, Lord God, your goodness has brought me to repentance. I want to serve you forever,” and he unplugs our ears. He unstops them so that we can hear his word better and respond in faith. That’s the imagery. Is so we have the specific text in Acts. We have the visual imagery of this being our Savior as well—an ear that has been dug out.

The totality of his person doing the will of the Father is expressed by having a circumcised ear. The rebels are described as being uncircumcised in the ear. The servant who loves his master and wants to serve—that’s what Paul says. We’re servants now, not abject slaves anymore as we were to sin. But this taskmaster, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Master, we love him and we want to serve him. And his what he does for us then is to open our ears so that we can listen. See, the imagery is listening, hearing his word.

It’s interesting in Zechariah 4 and 5. In Zechariah 4, there’s this imagery of two olive trees—like two big candlesticks from the temple imagery. You know, you got the candlesticks, but these things are huge olive trees. And there’s bowls of oil next to them, and the oil is fueling the light at the top of the olive tree. And so, it’s a picture of the Spirit of God empowering the overseers of the world that these trees represent—the Spirit-filled people that we are.

And then in chapter 5, something interesting happens. He turns and he raises his eyes and he sees a flying scroll. And he said to me, “What do you see?” So I said, “I see a flying scroll. Its length is 20 cubits and its width 10 cubits. Big scroll.”

Then he said to me, “This is the curse that goes out over the face of the whole earth. Every thief that shall be—every thief that shall be expelled according to the side of the script, and every perjurer shall be expelled according to that side of it. I will send out the curse, says the Lord of hosts. It shall enter the house of the thief and the house of the one who swears falsely in my name. It shall remain in the midst of his house and consume it with its timber and its stone.”

So he has this vision. What is it? It’s a scroll. Scroll has writing on it, right? That’s what a scroll is. It’s a book. The book is being sent forth to effectually purge the kingdom of liars, perjurers, thieves. The curses of the law will clean up the community of the world, right? It is efficacious in going over the world. It does its work. The word of God doesn’t return void. It expels the ungodly and maintains that and establishes the godly. And it’s a scroll. It’s interesting. It’s 10 cubits by 20 cubits.

When we get around to Solomon’s temple, he has these huge angels that, uh, you know, the ark of the covenant had an angel on either side whose wings touched. And the spread of these things and the height correspond to this 10 by 20. And it seems like what’s being pictured here is after the exile—when the temple has been sacked and the ark’s not coming back. Instead, what happens is with the coming of Jesus Christ, the greater exile occurs. The temple’s done away with. And instead of now the ark of the covenant—the special presence of God—dimensions. A flying scroll goes out after the spirit empowerment given to us at the end of chapter 4.

The spirit of God empowers the people of God with the word of God. And it’s an effectual word.

Now, what’s interesting is what happens next as well. The next thing that happens, continuing in Zechariah 5:

“Then the angel who talked with me came out and said to me, ‘Lift your eyes now and see what this is that goes forth.’ So I said, ‘What is it?’ And he said, ‘It’s a basket that’s going forth.’ He also said, ‘This is their resemblance throughout the earth. That’s important. This is their resemblance. This is their eyes throughout the earth.’”

The basket is a visual imagery, in other words, of people that worship or focus on resemblances, pictures, and images.

“Here is a lead disc lifted up, and this is a woman sitting inside the basket. Then he said, ‘This is wickedness.’ And he thrust her down into the basket, threw the lead cover over its mouth. Then I raised my eyes and looked, and there were two women coming with the wind in their wings, for they had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between earth and heaven. So I said to the angel who talked with me, ‘Where are they carrying the basket?’ And he said to me, ‘To build a house for it in the land of Shinar, Babylon, when it is ready, the basket will be set there on its base.’”

What is that? That’s a false ark. You remember the ark has the two angels on it, right? So this ark—instead of a gold cover, which is what the ark of the covenant has—it’s got a lead cover cuz it’s wickedness. Instead of God’s word and presence being represented by objects in the ark of the covenant, we have wickedness represented by a woman.

I didn’t choose the word of God. I don’t know. Wickedness is represented by a woman, probably because it’s talking about imagery—probably. So right, because women are beautiful. So the visual resemblance of these things. And this thing is then—these two other women come and fly it around. The way the angels on the cherubim on the ark of the covenant represent the ability of God to move it and stuff, and they fly it out to Babylon, and they’re going to establish a house there.

Now, it seems to me—and I know it’s probably stretchy for you—but it seems to me that the imagery here is that the Spirit-filled church of Jesus Christ—after the greater exile, the coming of Jesus Christ—remain people of the Word, a word that is efficacious in cleansing the land, the scroll, and that the opponents of the church. And we’ll see this—the same imagery is picked up in the book of Revelation—the woman, the great woman, is the one whose resemblance is in it, imagery, whose eyes are the whole thing. There’s a relationship.

The scroll is a speaking, hearing thing. The resemblance is an eye thing with this ark—this false ark, this false temple, this false representation of God, this wickedness—in the land of Babylon.

Once more, the scriptures put in opposition seeing and hearing—not in its ultimate sense, but in terms of priority and in terms of the way the word of God goes forth into the world. So God gives us these wonderful images through words that tell us of the preeminence of listening and its importance.

Let’s ask some questions as we conclude. Let’s do an ear check. Let me ask you some questions.

Do you listen twice as much as you speak? At least twice as much. And many have said that, you know, you’re given two ears and one tongue. The idea is you’re supposed to listen twice as much as you speak. Ask yourself that seriously. Do you listen at least twice as much as you speak?

I’m not saying it’s a law, but I’m saying that we should be—well, that’s the very next question. It says, “Do you listen twice as fast as you speak?” And I got biblical substantiation for that one, of course. James 1:19. “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and as a result, slow to wrath,” right?

What about you? Are you quicker to speak, or are you quicker to listen? God says it’s quite clear that he wants us to. Listening is supposed to occupy a lot of our time. Listening is supposed to be the normal thing. The thing we do quickly is to hear things, and speaking is done much slower.

Ear check. Do you normally choose to listen? Okay. Do you incline your ear? That’s what God does, right? He inclines his ear to hear our cry. We’re supposed to do that. In fact, in Jeremiah 35:15, the prophet is talking to rebels and he says, “You have not inclined your ear nor obeyed me.”

So, we’re supposed to incline our ear to hear God’s word. And I think by way of application, when people are speaking, we’re supposed to incline our ear. Now, you don’t have to lean forward necessarily, but do you do that? Do you choose to change what’s going on, including at times your bodily posture? Do you choose to listen when things are being said to you? It’s a choice you have to make. You can walk right through a crowded room. People can say things to you and you have no idea if they were even said.

You have to choose to listen. Someone once said that wisdom is the reward for a lifetime of listening when you’d preferred to talk.

Do you use discernment in listening? Right? We saw that earlier. Don’t listen to lies. Psalm 1—don’t walk in the counsel of the ungodly, meaning you’ve heard the counsel. What’s on your iPods? You have discernment in what you’re listening to. Good that you’re listening, but are you discerning what you’re listening to? Think about it. Judge yourself. Give yourself a grade. A, B, C, D, E, F? No E’s. A, B, C, D, F.

How much do you listen as opposed to speaking? How fast are you in wanting to speak as opposed to wanting to listen? Do you make a positive choice to listen? And then do you use discernment in listening?

Do you listen attentively? And it’s sort of like the other thing, but you know, we’re talking about people, and you’re talking to somebody. Are you listening to them attentively, or are you just sort of waiting until you get to speak again? Right? That’s what we always tend to do. Love desires to understand the other person. Listening is the way to do that. Romans 12:10 says, “Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love in honor, giving preference to the other in honor, in glory. Give glory to the other person by being attentive to what they say, listening correctly.”

Someone said, “You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.” Husbands, wives—we tend to do that with each other and it gets us in trouble more often than not. Listen attentively. Grade yourself.

Someone said, “The first duty of love is to listen.” If you love somebody, you listen to them. Jesus loves the Father. Loves him more than we could possibly imagine. And he describes the whole preparation of his body as having ears that are open, inclined to hear the Father. Jesus tells us the way of love. The way of love is listening.

Another person said that listening is an attitude of the heart. “A genuine desire to be with another which both attracts and heals. A genuine desire to be with the other.” You see, this is how relationships are formed. Going back to Ellul—listening, communication. Do we love God? We can’t say we love God if we don’t listen to him in his word. How does he speak? He speaks by means of his word. His Spirit uses that word to change our lives. “A desire for relationship that’s both attractive to us and healing to us.” And that’s the way we should be in our personal relationships as well.

Someone else said, “The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.” The purity of your attention. That’s wonderful. Be interesting in the conversations that go on this afternoon.

Do you listen humbly? Okay. So Jesus says he listens to them that he would do the will of the Father. He’s not just gathering abstract information. You see, he’s trying to listen in a way that will teach him to do things. He’s listening humbly. Are we listening just to rebut what’s being said, or are we listening humbly? Because the whole point of listening is this idea of submission—to something from outside of ourselves that we can’t control.

Do you listen humbly? Do you listen to God’s word? That’s a good one. Ask yourself A, B, C, D, F. Do you listen to God’s word?

I read it. I didn’t ask if you read it. I think about it. I didn’t ask if you think about it. I know it’s good. I’ve said this before. Don’t get mad at me today. But I’m saying that, you know, if the Bible says over and over and over again to hear the word of God, I think it means to hear the word of God. That Ethiopian eunuch hears the Gospel—the word of God—that he is reading because he’s reading it out loud. That’s why Stephen knows he’s there. Well, that’s not why he knows he’s there, but that’s why he knows what he’s reading.

See, read the Bible out loud. Listen to the Bible. Do you hear the word of God? Now, you know, I’m way down with reading your Bible—visually reading your Bible. Great. Good thing to do every day. But I’m also I think it’s very important that we put ourselves in the context of hearing God’s word.

Do you listen fully to a matter before you address it with counsel? And here you know the proverb I’m going to say. Proverbs 18:13. “He who answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame to him.”

So important. We want glory. We want to make good decisions. In order to do that, we have to be patient. We have to hear a matter through. We have to hear it through from various individuals. You hear a story, you go off, half cocked, and you’re wrong. You test the neighbor comes and tests the person and you get a different thing. Fully hearing a matter is absolutely essential precursor to deciding a matter.

Fully hearing a matter. Do you listen carefully and do you try to get all the knowledge you need from hearing before you make a snap decision? You know the little things train us for the big things. If we have discussions with others this afternoon and make decisions and evaluations and don’t really take the time—what are they really trying to say?—then when it comes to big matters we probably won’t slow down then either, you see.

So in the little matters try to hear thoroughly. You know, hearing is the reminder that we’re different from each other—different in the way we communicate. They don’t say things the next other person doesn’t say things quite the way you would, and you don’t say things quite the way they would. If you love the person, you’ll slow the process down. You will hear carefully, attentively, choosing to do it, leaning forward, as it were, blotting out distractions, hearing thoroughly from the other person what they’re trying to tell you, as opposed to just responding to every little thing that they say.

Do you draw others’ information out of them? Well, I would listen, but they just don’t talk. Well, there the Bible says, you know, that there is this stuff—this knowledge that people have—like deep waters, and the wise men will draw them out. If you’re going to listen, if you’re going to learn and improve your life, it means you’re going to have to bring information out of people who may not want to give it to you.

A guy said this once, “Every person I work with knows something better than me. My job is to listen long enough to find it and use it.” Everybody has some kind of knowledge, information to add to your knowledge that will lead you both making better decisions and having a better life. The question is: How do you get it out of them? Do you know how to?

“My wife never talks to me. My husband never talks to me.” Well, there’s techniques you can apply, right? You can ask what a person is thinking. Now, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but sometimes you don’t even think about it. Part of listening is drawing the other person’s explanation, their knowledge out of them because you want to hear it. You want to submit to the truth of it, and you need to hear it. And so, you need to ask what’s going on.

You can mirror back to them. Well, you know, it seems like you’re sort of maybe not comfortable talking about this subject. Is there something I could do to make it more comfortable? You mirror back to them their reticence in speech with a desire stated to bring out what they have to bring to you. You can try paraphrasing. Well, you said this little bit here. Is this what you mean? You paraphrase what they say, right?

Or if none of that works, and if they’re just silent, you can back the pump. Well, maybe it’s this. Is this what you’re trying to say? These are various techniques, lots of other ones, to draw people out. Part of listening is being unerring enough to make the other person feel comfortable enough with you to speak their truth.

Now, you can, you know, yell at somebody and then say, “They never told me anything.” Well, that’s because they’re afraid of you or they just didn’t like you. That’s why they didn’t tell you anything. So, giving people glory—you know, going back to that—we’re to in honor esteem one another better than ourselves. Part of the way we get people’s story to come out is by not making them defensive. The best we can do.

Now, sometimes you just can’t do much about it, but you can try real hard to get rid of the defensiveness. Maybe they’d be happy if somebody else was there. I’m always amazed when I hear stories of elders and they have a counseling thing and the other person wants to bring somebody else, and they say, “No.” I’m like, you know, what is that? You know, it’s really hard for people to talk to elders. Most people except the brazen ones, no? But it’s hard ’cause it’s authority, right? It’s hard. And so, you know, as elders, you have to always remind—you don’t feel any different, but you have to remind yourself that in addition to your own personality, which can be intimidating, the office itself is. You know what it’s like when a policeman shows up? It’s the foolish guy that talks a lot at that point.

So, you know, we’re Protestant. So, we have to learn to try to draw people’s knowledge out of them.

Do you look for signs of the loss of safety or glory on the part of the one that’s speaking to you? So, I mentioned that already.

Do you pray for God to make you a better listener? At the end of the day, you know, God’s the only one that can work through our sinful rebellion and our sinful tendencies and make changes in us. Isaiah said—Isaiah was told—”Go speak to them, and when you speak, they won’t hear. When you talk, they won’t listen. I’ve given them stupor.” That’s the way we are.

So the first part of listening is to recognize that we need to pray that the Lord our God would sovereignly grant us his blessings in making us have open ears. The Lord opened my ear, Jesus says, right? The Lord dug open my ear. Only God can do it. We need to pray that he would do that.

And then, of course, finally, we’ve done all the hard work. We’ve applied ourselves with diligence to what the Lord God wants us to do. We’ve prayed that he would help us to be a better listener. We’ve learned things. But if all we’re doing is learning them to be more interesting or more knowledgeable, forget it.

Samuel is the picture for us here. Samuel, in 1 Samuel 3:10, God calls to Samuel, and Samuel answers by saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Speak, Lord, for your servant hears.”

In other words, he’s like the Savior. He’s hearing to the end that he would obey the will of the Father.

May the Lord God grant us to be better listeners. May he grant us particularly to hear his word, his voice, which normally comes through other people as they bring implications of the word of God to us and help us to process through how that relates. May the Lord God grant that we would be those who have dug-out ears—quick to serve the Father in the same way that the Savior was. May God prepare our bodies now as we offer ourselves to him by opening our ears.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you that your word has instructed us. We’ve heard it. We’ve tried to open our ears today, Lord God. By the power of your Spirit, we’ve asked for your sovereign intervention to make us hearers and thus doers of your word. Bless us, Lord God. Now, as we offer ourselves to you, prepare our bodies by opening our ears so that we might be good listeners this week.

We thank you for the mighty and powerful work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for the good news that united to him in faith, we become those people whose ears are open and whose hands then serve him. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.