[00:00:00] Dan: Hi everyone, and welcome to Training for Life Redeemed. I’m Dan. I’m here with my father David Jackson. As always, sitting down to chat to you about the Bible. We’re continuing to look through the book of Psalms. Today, Dad, we’re looking at Psalm 59. Can’t wait to dive into this. We’re just going to listen to Dad read it for a bit, and then we’ll start chatting.

[00:00:21] David: Psalm 59

⁰ For the Director.

Don’t destroy.

A miktam of David.

When Saul sent men and they watched the house to kill him.

¹ Deliver me from my enemies, my God.

You set me on high away from the ones who rise up.

² Deliver me from workers of crime,

and save me from bloodthirsty men.

³ For look, they lie in wait for my life.

They stir up powerful ones against me.

It is not my rebellion, and not my sin, Yahweh.

⁴ I am without guilt.

They run and they get set.

Rouse yourself to meet me and see.

⁵ You, Yahweh, God of armies, God of Israel,

Wake to deal with all the nations.

Don’t extend grace to all those who are deceitful in crime. Selah

⁶ They return in the evening.

They howl like a dog and prowl around the city.

⁷ Look, they blather with their mouth.

Their lips are swords because “Who will hear?”

⁸ You, Yahweh, laugh at them.

You mock all the nations.

⁹ His strength is directed at you.

I look for God, my high place.

¹⁰ God with his faithfulness,

God meets me.

He shows me those who are watching.

¹¹ Don’t kill them lest my people forget.

Shake them in your power.

Bring them down,

My lord, our shield,

¹² By a sin of their mouths,

By a word of their lips.

Let them be caught in their arrogance,

and by an oath and the weak story they tell.

¹³ Finish them off in rage.

Finish them, so that they are no more,

So that they will know that God rules in Jacob,

to the end of the earth. Selah

¹⁴ They return in the evening.

They howl like a dog and prowl around the city.

¹⁵ They wander around looking for something to eat.

If they aren’t filled they find a place to sleep for the night.

¹⁶ But I sing of your strength,

and sing out in the morning regarding your faithfulness,

because you are a high place for me,

and a refuge in the day when he is hostile to me.

¹⁷ You are my strength.

I make music for God, my high place,

God of my faithfulness.

[00:02:38] Dan: Right, Dad. So for those of us who aren’t overly familiar with the context, I mean, I’ve got a pretty good grasp on it, but when did Saul send his men to a house where David was? Yeah.

[00:02:51] David: Yeah, so it’s a bit sad, David’s having all these victories at the beginning, he’s defeated Goliath, he’s defeated the Philistines, Saul is jealous because all the, the girls in town are going, yay, David’s the big hero, and Saul’s getting no attention at all.

[00:03:11] David: So, the guy that was originally Israel’s ideal king, tall, handsome, rich, cute. He’s now sort of shoved aside for this little runt of the litter, who’s the great war hero. And Saul is jealous. So he starts to think, how can I kill this guy off? So he throws a tantrum and chucks a spear at him. That didn’t work.

[00:03:34] David: Then he decides that the best way to do it is to send him out to battle and get him killed. So he offers him his daughter. If you’ll go and kill, bring him a hundred Philistine for skins. one assumes you have to kill a hundred Philistines to get their for skins . So you know, you can have my daughter if you can go and bring me a hundred Philistine foreskins.

[00:03:56] David: So David turns up with 200 Philistine foreskins. So, you know, Saul’s plan to get rid of David didn’t quite work. So now Saul is his father-in-law. Oh, is this better or worse? And the solution to that is to send some assassins in while he’s asleep in bed and kill him. And of course the daughter, here’s what’s going on.

[00:04:20] David: She’s madly in love with David, and she rescues him. And you have this comical scene of David being lowered out the window. and, The household gods being put in the bed instead of David, and you go, what household, what’s going on here? Mmm And so Saul is throwing more tantrums, but David is very much in a position where God, you anointed me to be king.

[00:04:48] David: I’m doing what you wanted me to do and everybody’s trying to kill me And he writes this song

[00:04:55] Dan: Yeah, and the song is very much. Yeah a cry for rescue from his People who are attacking him, particularly Saul at the moment, and, you know, relying on God to deliver him and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. very, very familiar pattern, I guess, to the psalm.

[00:05:12] Dan: Yep. In that sense. But then if we think about people today, looking at this psalm. Yes. I don’t really think I’m ever going to have… A king sent his assassins to come and kill me while I’m sleeping and need my wife to rescue me. I sure hope not. Yeah. so what modern examples are there for Christians, because I know a lot of people will talk straight away about like spiritual stuff and spiritual warfare and that kind of stuff.

[00:05:40] Dan: I don’t want to neglect that completely, but. There are times when Christians are physically persecuted even in the Western world where we’re free and all those kinds of things.

[00:05:53] David: This brings up an issue. When I was reading the commentaries on the Psalms, one of the things I noticed is that we’re very comfortable.

[00:06:02] David: We live in our suburban homes or urban apartments or whatever. And we don’t, evangelicals, white evangelicals tend to feel very safe. most of the time, but the reality in our, when we get down to the ground is that that is not, not true at all. we are living in a world where violence is incredibly common.

[00:06:31] David: you think of the United States where everybody’s getting shot, they kill more people, more of their own people with guns and they kill foreign nations that they invade. but even here in Sydney where we feel relatively comfortable and safe, you know, we’ve had murders a block away from where I live.

[00:06:53] David: Where does it affect Christians? We tend to think, oh, yeah, it’s non Christians out there killing each other because they’re all bad people. but the truth of the matter is we have women in our church whose husbands have been incredibly violent, and we live in a volatile society. I, So I tell, you know, there’s a couple of incidents that stick in my mind.

[00:07:15] David: I broke up a fight at school, at the front gate. There were some vendetta over a girl and, some fellow had come in to punch out one of our students. so I broke that fight up. and just as I’d finished doing that, a woman came up to me and said, Can I help you? And I thought, you know, I’m not a big bloke and she was a smaller woman, and I’m thinking, but you know, I’ve got the problem’s over, the fight’s over, it’s all solved, now I’m right.

[00:07:48] David: And I sort of gave her a quizzical look and she opened her purse and she’s got a badge. And she was a very senior police officer, but it was a big scene. I talked to your mother. Who was the assistant principal at the time. And she said, Oh, you didn’t get her name, did you? And I said, no. She said, good, because she was the senior police officer on one of the most notorious murders Australia has ever seen.

[00:08:15] David: And she’s actually in witness protection. So I’ve got a mother at school and her children who are under constant threat, by the people who did this by serial killers effectively. Who would have taken her out for getting a conviction? we had another lad at school who in year 10 became a believer.

[00:08:40] David: He was converted out of a, his family are Lebanese, but his uncle was a member of Hamas. and he had threatened the family that if any of them converted from Islam, he would find them and kill them. and that boy’s father was absolutely terrified. He’d been to the home, he’d been shown the weapons in the garage, and he knew there were people here in Sydney who were connected and they would do that.

[00:09:08] David: I’ve broken up domestic violence incidents and the police will tell you that, you know, if they turn up to a domestic violence, 94 percent of the husbands in this case. will never offend again once they’ve seen the boys in blue and been marched out to the paddy wagon. But there’s another 6 percent of psychopaths who will never quit.

[00:09:30] David: And we have people in our churches for whom this is reality. So this is their song. and it’s a very real song, in a world that there are times in our life when we can be terrified. so I think, you know, while we go to church and we sing all the happy clappies. these are the songs where our, that really resonate with the heart at a depth, and we need to recover, our awareness at least that there are folk in our church for whom this is our song.

[00:10:06] Dan: Yeah. We do definitely have a very clear selection process when it comes to picking the songs that we choose to sing at church, and that may or may not be appropriate, depending on what’s going on really. But, yeah, I think it’s important for us when we have people in front of us who are hurting and who are in these contexts, to be able to provide them with a, this is, this is your prayer.

[00:10:29] Dan: This is how God feels. Take this kind of psalm and sit down with it and… And see the words that David uses, inspired by the Spirit speaking to God on your behalf type stuff, you know, the Spirit will still speak for you on your behalf with the groans and all that kind of stuff that you don’t, to put things into words that you don’t have, because I remember I was leading a growth group at one stage, and there was a woman in the growth group who got beat up by the neighbours, and I remember the next time we were with it together as a growth group and they were like, you know, what do we do?

[00:11:03] Dan: Because our insides, all we want to do is like, we want justice. You know, the husband was like, I just want to go over there and beat someone up.

[00:11:11] David: I know that feeling

[00:11:14] Dan: and rightly so, we should have that feeling, and it was good to be able to give him Psalms like this where he could actually go to God and pray for.

[00:11:24] Dan: justice, and ask God to take God’s vengeance, you know, not to do it yourself, but to pray and ask God to actually execute the justice that he says comes.

[00:11:38] David: There was a night when, you know, the drug guys next door were threatening your sister and her children, and the police couldn’t come. They were on other things.

[00:11:51] David: And I went through a very turbulent 10 minutes. I had my daughter on the phone screaming with absolute terror that they were at the front gate with knives and telling her that they were going to gut her children, because she’d called the police on these drug dealers. and I remember sitting there, and contemplating whether I would take what weaponry I could muster and go up there and.

[00:12:23] David: Deal with it. I certainly had the ability to do that and the resources to do it. But I sat by the telephone with a wrestling in my conscience. This is not the right thing to do. Put it in the… Do I exercise faith in the Lord to do this? Or do I take matters into my own hands? and I prayed and ten minutes later I got a phone call to say that…

[00:12:50] David: Her husband had gone out and resolved the matter with another friend who ran a tattoo parlour for the Gypsy Jokers. and these guys had backed off, but, it’s a terrifying moment. And the satisfaction is a few weeks later, the police raided the joint and took the whole lot of them to jail, with 57 charges.

[00:13:13] David: I don’t know that they’ve never come back, but, you look at that and you go. If it’s not the Lord fighting the battle for me, if I don’t put my trust in Him, if it’s all me, I’m going to make it worse, I’m not going to make it better. And that,

[00:13:33] Dan: just going off that story there, and the prayer that’s here in this psalm, does it then mean that If I’m in the situation and I rely on God and I pray and stuff, that I’m going to have a nice end to the story like that every time.

[00:13:48] Dan: Like, I don’t knwo

[00:13:54] David: There’s no promise here that they’re not going to kill you. That’s, that’s the deal. There’s no promise here. They’re not going to kill you. So this is David and you’ve got to imagine he’s a young man. He’s, you know, 18, 19, 20.

[00:14:09] David: newly married and his father in law is trying to kill him. there’s no, except for the fact that, you know, he’s the Lord’s anointed and God’s got a plan and he’s revealed it. He hasn’t revealed his plan for me. He hasn’t revealed his plan for my children. and he doesn’t have to tell me those things.

[00:14:30] David: So I don’t know plenty of God’s people get killed and murdered and it’s horrible. And this psalm is really telling us to take, bottle up all that fear and all that sense of injustice and present it to the Lord and then be content with, well not content I guess is the word, but be able to sit there and accept what he’s going to do and know that what he’s going to do is for his glory and It’s going to be why he created you.

[00:15:09] David: You’re here to glorify his name. And if part of that means that Stephen gets stoned to death, or, you know, Jesus’s brother gets thrown out a window and killed. If these things are what’s going to happen, well, we really only exist to serve him and advance his kingdom. We’re at his service. Yeah.

[00:15:36] Dan: And it still feels terrible and you still come to God with everything that you’ve got.

[00:15:40] Dan: And, you know, tell him exactly how you feel. Like, don’t, don’t think you’ve got to be happy in the circumstances. People try and say, you know, I’ve seen Christians kind of go, you know, even in every circumstance, you should be able to praise God. And you’re like, well, you can. Praise him in different ways.

[00:16:00] David: You’re praising and glorifying him when you, your emotions are in harmony with his. Yeah. So this is, we’ve got to picture Jesus singing this song on my behalf and then remember they killed him. Yeah. there is a, there’s a real sense in which as a man, Jesus felt this, we’re echoing. that experience.

[00:16:27] David: He’s not asking us to do anything he didn’t do himself.

[00:16:30] Dan: Yeah. And ultimately there’s, there is that satisfaction in knowing that regardless of what happens here on earth, there is definitely going to be proper justice and judgment, whether that’s Jesus taking it for them if they become Christians or if it’s them getting what they deserve

[00:16:50] David: Yeah. And us being able to glorify God for delivering that justice. And there’s a sense among evangelical believers that we, we cringe at the idea of saying, go get them Lord, you know, smash them. but that’s a genuine reflection of the justice of God and of how God feels about wickedness and sin. those beautiful passages in the Bible, he who touches you, touches the pupil of God’s eye.

[00:17:20] David: You, if you’re an idiot, if you get a stick your finger in a lion’s eye or a dog’s eye, you want to try God, we are precious in his sight. And so you want to mess around with us, man, you’re an idiot. And there’s us glorifying God for delivering justice. We need to, we need to be able to celebrate that.

[00:17:44] David: That’s an honest and genuine thing.

[00:17:48] Dan: Well, that’s going to bring us to the end of this episode. If you would like to come and grab the study notes that go along with this episode, please head over to trainingforliferedeemed. com slash 122, we’d love for you to hit the subscribe button as well. Come back and join us again next week.

[00:18:04] Dan: we’re going to look at Psalm 60 next week and yeah, I can’t wait to chat about that one.

[00:18:10] David: That’ll be good.