Psalm 131
Who is the most admired man in the world? Who is the most envied man in the world? For most people, is the most admired and the most envied man the same person?
Why do people admire Billy Graham the evangelist and Mother Teresa who cared for the poor in Calcutta but envy Donald Trump a real estate tycoon, Ted Turner head of a media company including CNN and Hugh Heffner head of Playboy magazine – a pornographic magazine? As an adolescent with raging hormones, I used to envy Hugh Heffner with his Playboy mansion filled with beautiful girls. But would I want to trade my soul for the soul of Hugh Heffner?
To think of all the money and power Donald Trump, Bill Gates or Ted Turner have is mind boggling. Vacation anywhere you want to, no limits. With their wealth, you could spend a fortune every day and not run out of money. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be free of the worry and constraint of not having enough money? But would it be worth it to you if in addition to their money you had to take their conscience, their memory and their soul?
My father started his ink business in 1962. My father is a very creative person, a wonderful man who I hope you will one day meet. But he was not talented in the areas of marketing and selling. He would rather create a new product than devise a way of selling an existing product. So for twenty years, his business did not grow. And in those years, my mother used to tell him, “Why can’t you be more like Jack Lyons?”
Jack Lyons was a neighbor who had several businesses. He would buy a company, strip it of its assets and buy another. He made a lot of money, but in the end? In the end, he got in trouble, owed the American tax authorities a lot of money and fled the US to Switzerland to evade a warrant put out for his arrest. He took with him one mistress and had another mistress take things out of his home to send to him. He left his wife and five sons (who were all working with one of his companies) to face the legal action taken by the IRS and other injured parties.
Jack Lyons is now in his 70s living in Switzerland, estranged from his family: his wife, his sons, his grandchildren. Would anyone in this congregation like to take his place?
This is the question this psalm puts before us. We all have choices to make. The world calls to us, telling us to go for it. And so we sacrifice ourselves and our families to work as hard as we can to get as far as we can go. We strain to get that promotion, we scheme to get that job, we do whatever it takes to get ahead and then, at the end of life, when we look at what we have accomplished, we ask if this has been such a good deal after all.
We may get what we wanted, but at what cost?
In the heat of passion, people can be excited by the power they accrue, by the men or women they acquire, or by the money they accumulate. But at the end of life there is a price to be paid. The emptiness and foolishness of life choices becomes terribly visible toward the end of life.
Today’s psalm presents a picture of one who made good choices and in the description of those choices, the foolish life choices people make is revealed.
1 My heart is not proud, O LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
2 But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
3 O Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore.
The heart of the psalm is in verse 2 where the psalmist paints the picture of a person at peace with God and with himself.
2 But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
A nursing child greedily sucks at the breast for milk. A nursing child is demanding. A nursing child worries, straining for the breast, crying when it does not get the milk it craves. But the picture here is of a weaned child at rest in its mother’s arms. The child no longer demands milk, it has learned to find its own food. The child is not grasping, demanding, struggling. The child is at rest in the arms of the one who protects and nurtures. The child is content.
Likewise, the soul of the psalmist is not struggling and striving. The soul of the psalmist is not consumed with worry and anxiety. The soul of the psalmist is not trying to be the adult, in charge and in control of all around him. The soul of the psalmist does not worry if God accepts him and loves him. The soul of the psalmist knows he is loved and safe in the arms of his Lord.
3 O Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore.
The psalmist has learned to put his hope in the Lord and is a peace.
There is a longing in us to be in that state. There are times when we want to stop being adults with all the responsibilities we carry on our shoulders. We want to be able to sleep at night without tossing and turning, thinking through all the options for problems we have or problems friends and family around us have.
To lean back in the sovereign arms of our Lord and to rest in contentment, that is our longing.
What prevents us from getting to this state?
Verse 1 of this psalm presents to us a picture of unruly ambition, what Eugene Peterson calls getting too big for our breeches.
1 My heart is not proud, O LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
Christians in the world do not all face the same temptations. Because cultures have different values, some cultures clash in a way with the Gospel that others do not. One example of this is found in the Western world, particularly in the United States. This temptation is ambition.
When I check my email via AOL, there are little news items and invitations to different sites on AOL. And over and over there are items about becoming a millionaire or talking with millionaires or talking with people who are on their way to becoming millionaires. Ambition runs unchecked in the United States. People are obsessed with becoming rich. It is not enough to have a decent job and bring home a pay check each week. If you are not climbing and clawing your way to the top, there is something wrong, something inadequate about you. Being number 2 is never good enough and if you do not have the drive to become number 1, there is something deficient in your character.
Particularly in the Western world, we spend much of our time and energy trying to achieve and accumulate what we think will bring us what we want, but contentment is not to be found in what we achieve and accumulate.
Verse 1 describes unruly ambition in the form of the sin of pride and the sin of presumption.
The sin of pride.
My heart is not proud, O LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
Proverbs 30
13 (There are) those whose eyes are ever so haughty,
whose glances are so disdainful;
When I was in business, I would go to trade shows at least once each year. These were big events, one always held in Chicago and then another that would meet in some other interesting part of the United States. Companies would rent space at these shows to display their products and entice customers to begin doing business with them. Egos were on display at this show, pride reigned. I would see people strut down the isles of the show whose eyes were ever so haughty and whose glances were ever so disdainful. These were people who would do whatever they needed to be successful. They were your friend if you were useful to them, but as soon as a better deal came along or you got in the way of a deal, the friendship disappeared.
This picture of pride describes someone who undervalues people unless they seem worth cultivating for future use. Everything revolves around me in the sin of pride.
A good picture of this in our Bible is the story of King Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel. King Nebuchadnezzar set up an image of gold to be worshiped. As with everything else for King Nebuchadnezzar, this statue was impressive. This stature of gold was 90′ high and 9′ wide. Assuming it was also 9′ deep with half of that space empty because of the sculpting, the value of that gold today would be 20 billion US dollars.
Nebuchadnezzar did everything on a grand scale. His Ishtar gates, on display in what used to be East Berlin in Germany at the Pergamon Museum, are impressive even by today’s standards. Beautiful blue tile mosaics with golden lions. A long passage with these golden lions in a field of blue and then the huge impressive gates themselves.
Nebuchadnezzar thought a lot of himself. When he discovered that Daniel and his friends would not bow down and worship the gold statue he had made, he had them cast into a fiery furnace. When they were not burned, he saw the power of God but his pride still reigned.
At some later point he was warned in a dream that if he did not acknowledge the sovereignty of God, he would suffer the consequences of his pride and end up out of his mind, living in the fields and eating grass like the cattle.
We pick up the story in Daniel 4.
29 Twelve months later, as the king was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, 30 he said, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?”
The warning comes true and for seven years, Nebuchadnezzar is out of his mind and living in the fields. But then, he comes to his senses, his pride has been broken and he acknowledges God.
37 Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven, because everything he does is right and all his ways are just. And those who walk in pride he is able to humble.
Psalm 131 paints a picture of a person who has learned the lesson of King Nebuchadnezzar. God is the one to be exalted, not ourselves. Even when we have been blessed with success, we cannot take too much credit for our success.
The sin of pride deludes us into thinking that what we have is the result of our efforts and our talent. Psalm 131 paints the picture of a man who has experienced the truth of this verse from James 1
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.
We see in verse 1 the sin of pride and also the sin of presumption.
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
Do you remember the story of Job? Job was a wealthy man with many servants, vast possessions and in a conflict between God and Satan, he was put to the test. All his possessions were taken from him, his children killed and his body broke out in terrible, painful sores.
The book of Job is a 4,000 year old story of the struggle to understand the presence of suffering in the world. For 35 chapters there is a series of discourses on suffering by Job and his three friends. The discussion goes on and on and on. And then in Chapters 38-41, it is God’s turn to speak.
Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said:
2 “Who is this that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
17 Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death?
18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.
19 “Do you give the horse his strength
or clothe his neck with a flowing mane?
26 “Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom
and spread his wings toward the south?
27 Does the eagle soar at your command
and build his nest on high?
Job learned the lesson of the folly of questioning God on matters impossible for us to understand. The psalmist knows this and says:
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
Now the problem with this is that it can seem to be a call to mediocrity. If men and women through the ages had not concerned themselves with great matters, there would be no space travel, no airplanes, no medicine, no telephones or email.
But the answer is not to settle for mediocrity but to aspire for what God designed us. And God did design us to have curious and inquisitive minds that want to explore. We are to search and understand our world and universe. When we explore and ponder and discover, we are acting as he created us to act.
Steven Hawkings is one of four or five people in the world that are thinking at an incredibly deep level, contemplating the origin of the universe and time. They operate in an area of physics called string theory . Hawkings wrote a book titled, A Brief History of Time in which he says this,
“Where did the universe come from and where is it going? How real is time? Will it ever come to an end? Where does the difference between the past and the future come from? Why do we remember the past but not the future? If we find the answer to why it is, that we and the universe exist, it would be the ultimate triumph, for then we would know the mind of God.”
Some Christians become disturbed by these questions, but there are no questions we should not ask. The search for knowledge is God-given. But when we begin to use all of what we learn for our own benefit, to serve ourselves, we abandon noble aspiration and settle in on crass ambition.
I don’t know the spiritual state of Stephen Hawkings. But if he pursues this knowledge solely for the sake of acquiring knowledge, he will be left as empty as Jack Lyons and Ted Turner. On the other hand, if this knowledge draws him closer to God and an awareness of the awesome power and wonder of God, then he will have used his gifts as God intended them to be used.
When we take our aspiration to be what God means us to be and remove God from the picture, we end up with ugly arrogance, pure ambition. The desire to serve myself rather than God.
Replacing godly aspiration with crass ambition is well illustrated by the character of Faust.
The character of Faustus has been written about in literature by Marlow and Goethe. Johann Faust became impatient with the limitations placed on him in his study of law, medicine and theology. No matter how much he learned, he always found himself in the service of something greater than he was — justice, healing and God. He wanted to be in control, to break free from his limitations. He wanted to be the mother in this psalm, not the child. So he studied magic to defy the laws of physics, to break free from the restrictions of morality and his relationship with God. And he used the knowledge he gained for his own pleasures and purposes.
In order to do this though, he had to make a pact with the devil. For 24 years, he was permitted to live without limits, to be in control rather than be in relationship, to exercise power instead of practicing love. But at the end of 24 years was damnation.
There have always been Faustian characters on the scene. Read the history books and see person after person who traded life and peace with God for temporary wealth and power. Read the newspapers and you can still see people on the world scene who have traded eternal peace for worldly success. We pray almost every week at our prayer meeting for the dictators in this continent of Africa who plunder their countries for their own gain.
But let me tell you that what makes today so dangerous is that we live in a time, particularly the Western world, where the whole culture has become Faustian.
Listen to what Eugene Peterson has to say:
“It is difficult to recognize pride as a sin when it is held up on every side as a virtue, urged as profitable, and rewarded as an achievement. What is described in Scripture as the basic sin, the sin of grabbing what there is while you can get it, is now described as basic wisdom: improve yourself by whatever means you are able; get ahead regardless of the price, take care of me first. For a limited time it works. But at the end the devil has his due. There is damnation.”
It is more difficult for some of us than others, but we need to set aside our pride and realize God is the mother who holds her weaned child in love and safety, not us. We are the dependent child, not the mother who is in control. This can be painful for those of us who like being in control, who like taking charge.
I spend more time each week preparing to preach a sermon than I do anything else and there are times when I am frustrated because I don’t seem to find the words or ideas that are powerful enough to transform the lives of those who come to RPF on Sunday. But then I realize I am not the mother who is in charge and responsible to protect her child. I can become Faustian in my preaching as easily as I can in any other profession.
We are God’s children, not God. We do not presume to tell God how to do his business. We come to God as his child and lean back in his arms and trust in him.
O Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore.
