Dan: [0:00] Hi everyone and welcome to Training for Life Redeemed. I’m Dan, I’m here as always with my father, Dr. David Jackson.

We are finishing off today, Dad. We’re going to finish the second book of Psalms.

We’re going to be looking at Psalm 72.

Now, Dad, we’ve been going through Psalms for quite a while.

Just about a year.

 So, as we come to the end of Book 2, why is Book 2 significant? What’s the kind of ebb and flow i guess of book two uh and then once you do that we’ll then get into the reading of, the psalm

David: yeah some book two started if you remember psalm 42 43 44 um with a believing fellow sitting down going I’m in a mess I’m in exile you know I’m out here with all the people who did the wrong thing I’m basically been put in jail with bad guys and I’m innocent and God isn’t answering my prayers, he’s not talking to me, he’s silent. [0:58] Where are you? Help

And then from there you go to a little block of Psalms where the king summons the world pretty much with a warning, so all you Babylonians if we’re in exile you’ve been tormenting us because you think you’re greater than Yahweh greater than God, so here’s your warning, he’s going to bring judgment down on you, even if it doesn’t look like that.

And then you get this contrast between a right response to God and a bad response to God.

So we issue the warning, we issue the invitation, and then you have the example of David repenting, and then you have the example of Doeg who didn’t, and all the horrors that are going to come down on him.

And then we follow in the next set of Psalms pretty much the life of David, with all the people that abused him and chased him and tried to kill him, and all those dramas that happened through his life, which mirror Jesus’ earthly ministry, mirror the history of the church. [2:01] Mirror the life of God’s people on mission in a world that’s against us, Satan’s kingdom.

And then finally we get to the end of the book and we’re starting to look at where we’re going to end up.

And of course the great promise to David was that he would have a son who would rule and resolve all of these issues.

And so if this is a collection of songs from the past that have been put together by people who are, we think, in exile in Babylon, what’s your great hope?

If God was to answer all your prayers, fulfill all his promises, bring us to the place where everything is put right, what would that look like?

And they go back and they dig out this song of Solomon, for Solomon.

Yeah. And we look at this song and we go, there’s the hope. There’s the promises.

There’s where we want to end up. Take us back to the promised land. Give us back a Davidic king. Let’s make it work.

Historically, the only way this song was fulfilled is Jesus. Yes.

And new creation. But it just encapsulates the whole gospel picture of how to resolve this world.

Dan: All right. Well, Dad, let’s hear you reading it, and then we’ll dive into it.

[3:24] Psalm 72

⁰ Of Solomon

¹ God, give your judgements to the king.

and your righteousness to the son of the king.

² He will judge your people with righteousness.

and your afflicted with judgement.

³ The mountains will lift up peace for people,

As do the hills with righteousness.

⁴ He will judge the afflicted of the people.

He will bring salvation to the sons of the poor,

And he will crush oppressors.

⁵ They will fear you with the sun,

and before the moon, for a generation of generations.

⁶ He goes down like rain on mown grass;

Like heavy rain on a land dripping wet.

⁷ The righteous one buds in his day,

and there will be abundance of peace until the wearing out of the moon.

⁸ Let him rule from sea to sea,

And from the river as far as land extends.

⁹ Desert dwellers will bow down before him,

and his enemies kick up dust.

¹⁰ Kings of Tarshish and the distant shores will bring back tribute.

Kings of Sheba and Seba will present a gift.

¹¹ All the kings will bow down to him.

All the nations will serve him,

¹² Because he will deliver the poor who are crying for help,

And the afflicted, for whom there is no helper.

¹³ He will pity the weak and the poor,

And he will save the lives of the poor.

¹⁴ You will redeem their life from injury and violence.

Their blood is precious in his eyes.

¹⁵ May he live and give to him from the gold of Sheba,

And may he pray on behalf of him constantly.

 May he bless him every day.

¹⁶ May there be plenty of grain in the land.

At the head of the mountains his fruit will abound like Lebanon

They will produce buds in greater numbers than a city,

like a herb of the land.

¹⁷ Let his name be forever.

Before the sun may his name grow shoots.

All the nations bless themselves in him.

Let them make him happy.

¹⁸ Blessed be Yahweh God, God of Israel, alone doing wonders.

¹⁹ And blessed be his glorious name forever.

And let his glory fill the whole earth.

Amen and Amen.

²⁰ The prayers of David, son of Jesse, are finished.

Dan: [5:35] All right, Dad, so you did say already that this is a psalm of Solomon, but what of actually means, whether it’s a song for Solomon written by David possibly or whether it’s a song written by anyone really about Solomon or whether it’s a song written by Solomon at any various point in his life.

But let’s jump into the actual content of the psalm.

So we’re starting off at the beginning. We have a prayer for a king. We’re talking about the judgments of a king here, I know that other translations have different words for the word judgment that’s there. So it says, God, give your judgments to the king, which would fit for Solomon when we’re talking about his whole wisdom and how he leads the people and making correct judgments and having wisdom in executing justice in that kind of a sense.

And then there’s also further down, he will judge your people with righteousness. There’s plenty of judgment stuff in here to start us off.

David: If you live in an unjust world, which we do, if you want to complain about the decisions of the courts, you know, they let the paedophiles out and they punish the victims and all that sort of stuff.

[6:42] When you look at the injustices of the ability of sinful people to deliver justice to sinful people, you know that’s never going to work. Yeah.

Our confidence is not in the courts. But here is the king, God’s anointed king, coming to his throne. And what does he say? I need wisdom to deliver judgments. I don’t know how to judge.

[7:05] It’s not just give me justice, but give me the ability to rule, to deliver judgment.

[7:14] There are lots of people who lack judgment. You can’t afford to be the king under God’s rule and lack judgment.

So Solomon asked that prayer, and this song, which is, I think written by Solomon but here is that expression of his heart, because in a world gone mad we want justice we want to put it right how do you do that and this whole beginning of the song focuses on now what do I do.

Dan: [7:50] Yeah yeah, So it moves on then from judgment, like it talks about the afflicted people of the world being, you know, those who are oppressed and all that kind of stuff, receiving that kind of judgment.

But then the next section talks about peace and prosperity, but it talks a lot about the sun, the moon, peace, and stuff like peace until the wearing out of the moon. Yeah. Wearing out of the moon, I always think of wearing out of the sun.

But, and then that sort of flip into letting rule by the sea, from sea to sea. And that’s very creation-motif type language.

David: We’re going straight back to the creation mandate. So we’re going back to Eden. So in verse 8, let him rule from sea to sea. That is the word that is used in Genesis 1:28. [8:39] “Be fruitful, not apply, subdue the earth and have dominion. This is the have dominion word.”

So here is the king, God’s anointed king, the one that is promised, the son of David, asking for the wisdom and the power to fulfill that cultural mandate from sea to sea.

[9:02] And he mentions here from the river as far as the land extends. Well, the river in Hebrew is the Euphrates. So when God gave Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the promised land, It went from the river, the Euphrates, all the way down to Egypt.

So he’s saying, give me that land that you promised. He’s got that narrow focus on Israel. But it’s going to expand when we get up to the son of David, Jesus, who actually fulfills all of these requests.

Dan: Yeah, and I think, too, the idea people miss the fact that the promised land is from essentially where Babylon is on the Euphrates River all the way across to the Mediterranean Sea. Yeah. That would encapsulate Lebanon, et cetera, and it works its way the whole way down.

When it says sea to sea, would you say like from the Mediterranean Sea to, I don’t know what the sea is, down the bottom with the makes two little bunny ears and a map?

David: The Red Sea. I don’t know where one is. I think, well, these people, we tend to think of these people as primitive people.

[10:08] Later on, he’s going to talk about Sheba, Seba, and Tarshish.

Okay. Okay, so Tarshish is the Phoenicians. They traded right across the Mediterranean Sea. We know that from Jonah and Paul’s trip to Spain and all that stuff. But down at the end of the Red Sea is, on one side is Ethiopia, Seba. On the other side is Saudi Arabia, Yemen. That’s Sheba. The queen of Sheba’s capital is actually in Yemen. Yep.

[10:43] But if you were living in those two kingdoms, you’re trading with India. So your ships are going around Saudi Arabia and across the Gulf to the west coast of India. These people knew all of that.

So we’re talking about from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, at least. Yeah.

There’s some indication the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa, but that’s another story.

Dan: But then this is very much going to link into Solomon. If you think of Solomon’s lifetime and the Queen of Sheba coming and giving him gifts, she wants to come and see his wisdom, his judgments that are talked about at the beginning of this psalm.

This is definitely talking about a king that’s set up, that’s ruling well, that’s got great judgments, that’s righteous, essentially, in what he’s doing.

David: And every other ruler is looking at this going, your kingdom’s working, mine’s a disaster, can I come and visit? Can I learn how to bring judgment and wisdom and prosperity to my people?

Dan: Yeah. One thing that doesn’t quite fit for me, though, when it comes to Solomon is this element throughout of the afflicted and stuff being relieved.

When I think of Solomon and his life, I always think of his son.

[11:55] Rehoboam. Rehoboam. And then there’s Jeroboam who takes the other half, right?

But Rehoboam, the complaint that people have about Solomon is that we were harshly afflicted in the sense of we had to work our butts off.

David: So, yeah, Solomon, in the beginning of Solomon’s reign, you see a poor woman and another poor woman arguing over a baby and they’re prostitutes, they’re in poverty and all these terrible things are happening.

[12:26] And he delivers judgment for an afflicted class of people represented by the lowest of the low.

Okay. And of course, when you come to Jesus and he walks through wherever he goes, he doesn’t bring the kingdom of God in by converting the rulers. He goes in and he deals with the rejects of society, something that churches today need to learn.

You come in at the poverty level. You don’t come in at the political level.

So he goes, yeah, here’s Solomon starting out doing that, and the whole world is going, oh, wow. And 20 years into his reign, when he’s married 500 foreign women.

Dan: [13:04] Broken a few of the rules for how kings are meant to live. Broken a couple of rules. Should not amass horses, should not marry foreign women.

David: And the kings and the traders of the world are bringing him money.

He’s got so much gold he can’t spend it. So he builds a whole palace and lines the walls with shields of gold because he doesn’t know what else to do with it.

In that kind of a world, he then taxes the people the way Egypt did with corvée labour, conscription labour, and everybody has to work for the king for one, two, three months a year to just keep up whatever he wants to do.

And he’s lost the plot and that’s where he went wrong.

So the blessings of God turned into a corrupting thing for him, not a thanksgiving thing.

But if we’re looking at Psalm 72, we’re looking forward to somebody who can get it right.

Yes. Solomon started well and failed. The only answer to this psalm is Jesus.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. He’s definitely going to be, he’s the promised son One that was promised to David in 2 Samuel 7 anyway.

[14:16] And then, yes, he’s the one that’s going to particularly go and relieve the poor. All of his ministry. He hasn’t go to all the rich people.

David: When Mary sings her song, when Jesus is born, Mary composes this song.

She picks it up from Hannah’s song when Samuel was born. And the whole song is about he is going to turn everything upside down. He’s going to bring the rich down. He’s going to bring the poor up. He’s going to bring justice, he’s going to drag the afflicted out of the dust. All those pictures, and they’re in this song. Mind you, and he gets the gold of Sheba.

And you go, well, when Jesus is born, what do they bring? Here come…

Dan: Gold, frankincense, myrrh. Yeah.

David: Here are the gifts you give a king coming from a foreign kingdom, and it’s a foretaste of Jesus’ rule over the world.

Dan: Yeah. So Solomon’s definitely the peak of Israel as a country. Soon after him, it’s not really going to be the same country anyway. It’s going to split in half, kind of.

[15:21] But one of the things that’s clear in the psalm, Dad, is that these nations are coming to be blessed by God’s king. And so there is an element where that definitely is happening with Solomon. People are coming to him. That’s why they’re bringing tribute because he is ruling and he’s ruling well, generally speaking, definitely to start with. God has said that he will bless him with all the gold because he’s said that he’s asked for wisdom and all that kind of stuff.

So all the nations are coming to be blessed, and this is a fulfilling of Abraham’s promise that was God’s promise to Abraham, sorry, Abraham’s promise. But we have this being fulfilled to an extent with Solomon and his rule. Obviously, when it comes to the greater fulfillment of this, we see this coming out in Acts particularly. It doesn’t really happen so much in Jesus.

We have a lot of the nations coming to Jesus. I mean, it does, but not to the extent where we then have the church spreading out and going, you will all be blessed now because of what Jesus has done in bringing the Gentiles in.

David: Yeah, I think one of the lessons I draw out of this psalm and out of the early days of Solomon and even out of the book of Acts and the mission, we tend to think of evangelism as in drag, not outreach. So we want the people to come to our churches where they will hear the gospel. [16:49] Where you know you’ve hired two or three ministers and they’re theyre going to do the job and the rest of the lady our job’s just to bring them in so that the professionals can do the job. Not the picture that you have here.

So one of the things that impresses me about this whole model of kingship and rule and bringing the kingdom of God, is that the world is as dysfunctional and damaged and that lovely line when people say, oh, I don’t believe in God, he’s a cosmic bully, all these terrible things they say. [17:27] And then you sort of leave that conversation. You come back a week later, and they’re telling you how miserable their life is and how life is pointless. And you go, look, you’ve got a set of beliefs. Big question. How’s that working? How does that work for you? Does it work?

And what the world does is if they can see the kingdom of God works, works if they see godly people living godly lives that actually function so the whole purpose of our training for life redeemed model is that we are as disciples of Jesus we’re learning to live in God’s world God’s way the way he designed life to work and if you do that life does work and even if people hate you and chuck rocks at you and you suffer injustice everybody notices the difference and when they see the difference they start asking questions and that’s what’s happening here you see Solomon’s kingdom this little nothing bit of dirt you know that’s no bigger than you know Newcastle to Wollongong and Katoomba to the coast that tiny little bit of dirt how much has happened in that bit of dirt uh and God put that there to be a model to attract track the nations to what would it look like if you actually obeyed Yahweh and committed your life to him and set up life the way he designed it to work. It transforms everything.

[18:55] So if we go into the community, we follow God’s instructions, we have the power of the Holy Spirit with us, we learn the wisdom, the skill of godly living, we do life God’s way, the redeemed life, the nations will come and so you look at

There’s a wonderful line where at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry.

[19:22] One of the disciples goes and grabs his brother and says, I’ve seen the Messiah. Come and see. And Greeks came to him and they said, we want to see Jesus. We’ve heard about this guy. And the crowds are coming in. Foreigners are coming in. Roman centurions are coming in because they can see what it would look like. And it’s beyond imagination.

We do movies about dystopian universes. you know all these horrible worlds that we can imagine um because we can’t imagine a world of justice and judgment and righteousness and a world that functions properly. It would upset

Dan: yeah it’s funny we recently re-watched The Matrix and there’s actually a point in the matrix where you know the machine police guy is talking to neo about the matrix and how it was originally built or whatever, and he was saying that we originally built it with you guys all living peacefully and happily and all the rest of it, but it just never worked.

Everyone just crashed and woke up like it wasn’t real. They worked out that it wasn’t real too quickly because it was too good. But that is the reality that we’re looking forward to is for it to be like that.

[20:38] As this psalm comes to a close, it does get to the point where it talks about the glory of God filling the whole earth. Yes. And for that to happen…

That can’t really be something that’s going to happen through Solomon, right? No, no. Two small fish.

David: Yeah. So you’re looking back. If you go through the whole of Book 2 of Psalms, let alone the rest of the Psalms, you’re looking at the emotional responses of people who are encountering, who are looking to the Lord, looking for the promises and the hope and everything else that he’s done, experiencing his grace in the midst of a world that’s all out of order. And looking for these promises.

And along the way, I love this line, “blessed be Yahweh God, God of Israel, alone doing wonders.” And they’ve seen the wonders. It’s not, you know, this is not a philosophy. This is not a fantasy.

You know, it’s not myth. We saw him do these things, and that gives us assurance that he’ll do the whole package.

“And blessed be his glorious name forever. let the glory fill the whole earth.”

That’s a way of saying bring it on. Bring in the kingdom. Some people say, you know, come Lord Jesus.

[21:58] My prayer is a little bit different to that. Please wait till my family gets saved. I’ve got grandchildren who don’t know you yet. Please wait till we get them all in. Let there be none missing. I’ve got friends who need to come to Jesus big time.

[22:18] So, and he does, he prolongs the suffering of a world gone mad to buy time for those people to get saved.

And if you want to say, why is God allowing all this suffering?

It’s so that you, you great muggins…Well, get on your knees and admit you’ve got life wrong and come to Christ.

Who knows? You might be the last one.

And if you’re the last one, you’re the one delaying this from happening.

That’s a powerful image that God in his long-suffering grace is longing for people to come and be saved. And for that to happen, the world has to keep going the way it is. And he embeds his people out there to show here is the kingdom and there is the alternative.

Don’t you want to come here? So I just love the way this finishes.

The prayers of David, son of Jesse are finished.

[23:14] Solomon is the end of David’s life. You get to the end of David’s life. We’ve been through the songs of his retirement. And you go, you know, whatever else is wrong with life, here comes God’s king.

Dan: Well dad that brings us to the end of this episode the end of our time for now in psalms if you would like to grab the study notes to go with this episode head over to training for life redeemed.com/134 and if you haven’t hit subscribe yet make sure you hit the subscribe button uh you can come and join us again i don’t know next week or the week after whenever we’re looking at whatever’s next i have no idea but there’ll be more podcast episodes coming very very soon

David: well we’re going to come back when i get it done we’re going to look at Titus Dan: there we go Titus, Titus.