After the Sermon: Psalm 36

7/13/26 | Will DuVal | Psalms: The Soundtrack of Faith

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Welcome to the After the Sermon podcast where Pastor Will answers follow-up questions and we share your personal applications from the sermon for the benefit of the church. I'm Brian, I'm here with Pastor Will. Hey everyone. We want to remind you with this podcast that sermons are not just a Sunday thing. So if we could start off with a reminder recap of the sermon yesterday.

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Yes. Psalm 36, a beautiful Psalm of David. And we looked at the title of the sermon was With You, Oh Lord is the Fountain of Life. I kind of use that as the driving theme of the Psalm. That's a line straight out of, I think it's verse nine of the 12 verses that we have there in Psalm 36. And the Psalm breaks down into kind of three sections with the verse four verses David giving us a portrait of the wicked and of sinners, evildoers. And I kind of again use the through line of how do we live life to the fullest?

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We all want to live better, live more, live life to the max and how do we do that? And sinners look to sin to maximize personal happiness in life and to follow their hearts and all of that. And so David gives sort of a picture of that, of looking to inequity to fulfill your heart's desires and how it kind of comes up short and empty. And then he immediately goes in verses five through nine to just rejoicing in the Lord and gives us just a picture in stark contrast to the picture of the wicked is the picture of the Lord and who he is. And as best David or any of us can in human language, just really celebrating, praising God's faithfulness, his love, his kindness, his justice, his patience, his goodness, his provision and protection and just on and on these virtues of God that David is rejoicing in and finding David's own joy and fulfillment in and inviting us to do the same again with you oh Lord is the fountain of life.

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By your light we see light. We live all of life here and we have wisdom and we have light and purpose and meaning and joy because you give it to us. You're the source of all that goodness for us. It flows from your goodness. And then in the final three verses, David is praying and really praying for God's justice because I think David sees the wicked prospering in this life. He sees those who rejoice in the Lord not always getting ahead in this life in this fallen world of ours and yet he knows that's unfair. And so David ends by saying like, please continue to be loving and merciful toward those of us who love you God, but please bring to justice those who delight in sin instead of delighting in you. Don't let them, even if they go to their grave, delighting in sin over you.

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God, I'm trusting you to bring them to justice in the life to come. And so yeah, that's the Psalm in a nutshell and we ended with the gospel and how really we, like Paul tells us that we all are wicked and we all better fit the description of the first four verses certainly than we do the description of God and of true love and faithfulness and kindness the way that God loves us. And so we need his mercy and if we're going to pray like David for justice, we're going to need to find a justifier who can declare us righteous and make us right in God's eyes and that's Jesus.

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That's good. Well, jumping into our questions. The first one is from Emily who wrote during the sermon you talked about how the specific word used in verse one for fear of God is better understood in the terror sense rather than reverence. Later you also mentioned other passages like the end of Ecclesiastes in Proverbs 9:10 that talk about the fear of the Lord and seem to imply that the interpretation fear referring to terror rather than reverence was the same case there. Is that the case or did I misunderstand something? I'm just curious as I usually think of the fear of the Lord as being in awe and reverent towards him rather than being afraid of him, especially in passages like Proverbs nine verse 10.

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That's a really good, insightful question. Thank you Emily for listening closely to that. And I think she's onto something and she's right. And I could definitely be a bit guilty of conflating those two because I did specifically mention and point out how Christopher Ashe, I think was the commentator who points out that this, well, a lot of the commentators do, that the Hebrew word for fear used in Psalm 36: one is a different word than the typical word in Hebrew that's used when we find that phrase, the fear of the Lord. So in places like Ecclesiastes 12:13 where Solomon says, "The end of the matter, all has been heard, fear God and keep his commands." This is the whole duty of man. Or Proverbs 9:10, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." I need to go back and double check, but I believe that in both those passages and in many others where we read about the fear of the Lord, Moses feared the Lord and was considered a holy man or whatever, is usually a word that connotes more of that awe and reverence and dutiful respect or something like that as opposed to Psalm 36: one where David says the problem, one of the core problems with the wicked is that there is no fear of God before their eyes.

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  And that word fear there is really more about terror and dread. And so I think Emily's right that I did a bit of kind of conflating those two Hebrew words. Interestingly, some of the others that I mentioned though, like I mentioned where Jesus himself says, "Don't fear those who can kill your body.Fear the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell." In other words, fear God. Well, now that's the gospel of Matthew, that's New Testament. And so it's phobos, it's Greek, it's a whole different language and word. And so it's hard to tell. I'm not sure if in the Greek there's multiple words for fear. I'd have to again remind myself, do some homework. Obviously in English, I mean, we can use synonyms like terror, dread, or respect and all. But in our English Bibles, you're translating mostly that same word fear in both cases.

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  So all of it to say Emily's got a fair point, but I do think there's overlap. There's overlap and I mean, there's a reason why we are using the same word fear in both those cases. And I do think that even the believers fear of the Lord. Well, and if I go to Jesus's statement about fear the one who can destroy both body and soul and hell, I mean, even the context of what he's saying there really seems like it's less about have this healthy sort of awe and wonder and respect and reverence. That's less of that than it is like you have terror and dread towards someone who can send you to hell.

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  And so even there where Jesus is talking and then even we had to look at the context of who Jesus is talking to there. Is it his disciples? Is it the Pharisees? Is it enemies of God or friends of... Who is it that Jesus is encouraging to be terrified of like Jonathan Edwards' sermon title Sinners in Hands of an Angry God comes to mind. So that kind of terror and dread. But all of it to say, I think there are plenty of other passages. I think of the depiction in Hebrews. Is it Hebrews chapter 12 where it's talking about a healthy fear of the Lord because God is a consuming fire and elsewhere in Hebrews where it talks about, man, if this is what happened to that rebellious generation of Israelites and the wilderness who didn't fear the Lord, who hardened their hearts and their sin and who rebelled against him, how much more so should we be afraid of rejecting, of not obeying God's Son?

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  God has given us his ultimate gift in Jesus and salvation and woe to us if we reject so great a salvation. And so again, in all these senses I think you have examples and pages you have even in the New Testament, you have examples of even of believers who are in the church, in the community of faith, in Christ. And yet we're being exhorted, encouraged, reminded that God is a consuming fire. He is a really incredibly holy, holy, holy God. And that's both a wonderful, beautiful thing worthy of our awe and reverence. It's also again, in light of our sin and our sinful tendencies to still do things our own way or drift or not obey, that it ought to really cause us to be alarmed or on guard, on watch against our own sinfulness because of who God is. And so anyway, when she says, "I'm curious," because I usually think of the fear of the Lord as being on reverence rather than being afraid.

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  I think it's a little bit of both. And I think that there's a healthy fear of the Lord in both senses of awe and reverence. And also if nothing else, you could say that the believer still has that terror fear of the Lord in the sense of understanding that, I mean, gosh, you read the book of Revelation, you look at where things are headed and just lots and lots of blood and God's justice. And so if nothing else, again, we can be comforted. I don't think that we're meant to live in this existential eternal angst of like, "Am I truly saved? And I'm living in dread all the time and that sort of thing. If nothing else though, the believer can, like Jesus says, fear the one who has the power to destroy both body and soul in hell and fear him in that sense on behalf of others.

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  So our fear of God's justice and his power to do that in the lives of others ought to drive us to both an even more personal and powerful sense of gratitude and praise that we have been saved, that we no longer have to fear being sent to hell by God because of Christ. And we have that eternal security in him, but also an even greater sense of urgency and fervor and passion to reach those whose souls have not been saved by Christ. They don't have the right kind of terror and dread of God and of hell that they should have. And so we have it on their behalf and we let it drive us to an even greater passion to reach them and to save the loss. So thank you, Emily.

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  That's good. Next one is from Cody who wrote, "How should we distinguish the effect of persistent sin on the conscience of an unbeliever versus a believer? If an unbeliever's conscience can become seared one Timothy four: two, in what ways can a believer's conscience be affected? And what role does God's preserving grace play in bringing them to repentance?" And also said, "Really good sermon. Thanks for the

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  Work." Thanks Cody. It's a really good question. So we believe at West Hills in the perseverance of the saints that if you've truly been saved, born again, had your heart brought from death to life by the Holy Spirit, sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, that you can't be unsaved, unsealed. Jesus says that my sheep hear my voice, they come to me, they know me and I call them. I keep them. I haven't lost any that the Father gives to me. They're safe in my hands. No one snatches them away from me. Anyways, we believe that a true Christian cannot have their heart so hardened, their conscience so seared that they would lose their salvation, lose the Holy Spirit or anything like that. The issue, the problem is that there are those, millions, I don't know, of examples of people who would have told you that they were Christians and who seemed to have a very sincere profession of faith and testimony and all of that, just like many of us who, to use the words of one John, where John says, "They were with us, but then they left and they proved that they were never truly of us.

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  They were here. They were here every Sunday hanging out. They talked the talk. They seemed to even walk the walk. And then they walked away and they walked away from the church and the faith and seemingly from Christ. And I think John's conclusion to that is in his words is they proved that they were never really truly one of us. And we know, I mean, even Jesus says there's going to be wheats and weeds growing side by side until the farmer comes back for the harvest. And Jesus said, just let it be. Don't try and be the testimony police and run fake Christians out of the church and get too caught up on which testimony of faith is a genuine one or not. Let the crops and the weeds grow together and let him sort it out when he comes back. And our job is to just be faithful and preach the gospel and love people and try and minister to them and let him sort out the rest.

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  And so all that to say, to Cody's question, if an unbeliever's conscience can become seared in this way that they become hardened. I used the example of Esau from Hebrews 12, I think it was, where he says Esau sought he wanted the grace of God, but he had become so hardened in his sin that he couldn't even find the chance, the opportunity to repent. And even though he sought it with tears, I mean, that's a really hard verse by the way.

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  But I think Cody is asking, can that happen to a believer, to someone who is truly a Christian? And I think Cody's assuming, implying that no, it can't. Unbelievers can so kind of sear and mar their conscience by persistent unrepentant sin in that way that they can no longer find repentance and find their way back to the Lord. But what about believers? Because like he says here, what role does God's preserving grace play in bringing us to repentance? And again, I think it's just another occasion to celebrate and rejoice and praise God for his grace that not only brings us to saving faith, but that keeps us and sustains us and preserves us. I think of that song that we sing sometimes, He Will Hold Me Fast. And just some of the great kind of lyrics there when the temperature would prevail and Satan tries to convince me I'm not truly a Christian or when my sin tries to tempt me all over again and when I screw up and et cetera, I'm paraphrasing.

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  I just keep reminding myself that God is going to be the one to hold me fast for my savior loves me. So it's not because I'm this great Christian that stays faithful to him, but he is faithful to me. I think two Timothy 2:13. When we are faithless, he remains faithful.

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  But believers can do a real number on our consciences too. No matter how saved you are, if you do not take really seriously this call, this exhortation, like I read the one from Hebrews three about beware of the temptations of sin and avoid it. Don't harden your hearts. You need to exhort one another every day. Beware the deceitfulness of sin and it's a slippery slope. And so we're always called to swim upstream. Downstream is always going to be toward sin because of sinful nature, living in a sinful fallen world, got an enemy, all these things. So it's always going to be swimming upstream to live like Christ in this world. Hopefully the current gets a little more manageable over time as you become more sanctified as your spirit nature takes over more and more of your heart and your sin nature gets more and more put to death.

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  Hopefully that battle isn't maybe quite as...

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  Yeah, the claws of sin aren't quite as strong in your heart as you grow and mature in faith. But again, believers can do a number when we just drift and when we don't fight that battle, when we drift long enough and when we make allowances for sin and when we minimize our sin and all the things we talked about in the sermon yesterday, excusing it, it's not that big a deal. And God probably doesn't even notice he's got bigger fish to fry. He doesn't care. God forgives me anyway. I'll just do it and ask for forgiveness the next day. All the things that our wicked hearts do to justify, rationalize, excuse our sin. And you do that enough and you really can get to a point where you're just in pretty blatant and even serious potentially public whatever egregious kind of sin and not even recognizing it as a problem.

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  And again, there's just enough examples of that, that ought to really scare us frankly into even if it doesn't cost us our salvation, like I said yesterday, if nothing else, it's going to cost you that intimacy with the Lord, closeness with the Lord. It's certainly going to cost you eternal reward when you think about not every Christian is going to hear a well done good and faithful servant. I'm convinced of that.

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  And do you really want to just kind of get into heaven in spite of every way that you lived? I mean, I don't think that that's the calling and what certainly it's not the calling that Christ wants for us. I mean, we've died to our old way of life. The time for sinning has more than sufficed and behind us. We want to look forward, press on to the way that God's called us to live and holiness. And so yeah, I'll leave it there. I hope that I answered some of what Cody was asking about there. Both the believer and the unbeliever's consciences can be screwed up by their indulging of sin. But if you're truly a believer, but again, even there. I shared in a sermon, the last thing I'll say, I shared in a sermon once.

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  John Piper, I'll never forget in an Ask Pastor John podcast episode that he did after the kiss dating goodbye guy walked away from the church, the faith, pastored his marriage, all that. And basically said, "Yeah, I'm not a Christian. I don't know if I ever have been." And somebody asked John Piper about it and John Piper said, "But for the grace of God, I, John Piper, I've lived and walked and professed to be a Christian for 55 years now," or whatever it is. And he's like, "But for the grace of God, I would wake up tomorrow and I would do the exact same thing.

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  None of us is so... Security of faith is one thing, but none of us is so impervious to sin and temptation and whatever that we can ever just sort of coast and have some sort of sense of self-satisfied like, " Well, I could never do that. "It's like, no, you would absolutely do that tomorrow, but for the grace of God. The only reason that I'm still a Christian today or tomorrow or ever is because God's grace keeps me and preserves me. And basically he said like, " Yeah, I could fall away from the faith and prove that I was never in the faith, the first John thing. So you don't get to be so secure in your faith that you don't really take seriously all of scripture's warnings to be on your guard. Watch out. Your enemy walks around like a lion trying to devour you.

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  Your sin is always there in your heart trying to devour you. You need to be conscious of it and listen to your conscience and be sensitive to sin and put it to death. So thanks, Cody.

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  Then our next question is from an anonymous congregant who wrote, why do we use juice instead of wine? Even if symbolic, should we not use what Jesus commanded?

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  Multiple reasons. I'll just be quick because we've done this one before and periodically and it's not obviously specifically on the sermon. But honestly, the shortest answer is a couple reasons, but out of respect for and care for folks who struggle with addiction to alcohol and for whom that would be an issue. Now you could always say, well, you could have a separate little cups of juice for them if they wanted to do that. I would say out of also respect for folks who have a conscience issue with drinking alcohol. The Bible's kind of in some ways like wine glad's dark. Timothy, make sure you drink a little wine when you're sick. Paul says. And then at other places, wine is a mocker. Strong drink is a brawler. And watch out, don't drink too much. Careful. Wine is not for kings and important people because you never know when you don't want to be under the influence.

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  And so it's kind of both, don't get drunk. So there's kind of mixed reviews on alcohol and scripture. And so out of respect for folks who have a conscious thing against drinking alcohol, I think that's a part of it. I think you could, there's a practical thing about the cost of wine being more.

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  And just being able to keep it from week to week. And I don't know. I think the bigger thing, if you want to get with the theological and symbolic, we know that wine in the first century wasn't what it is today in terms of just the percentage of alcohol and how much it had been fermented and all of that. And so much weaker. So to think about, well, would we then have to water down our wine to make it more like their wine? So then you're just getting pretty legalistic about what communion is supposed to, the nature of what it is that we're supposed to be drinking. Honestly, I would say the bigger maybe I think question or issue than the wine would be the bread because we eat these little, they're not even crackers anymore. They're like these little melt in your mouth weird gross wafer things.

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  And I would say that one is even maybe more symbolic in terms of where Paul says in one Corinthians 10, "Don't we drink from the same cup?" So that's one thing because we all have these little individualized cups now and the way we do communion, which I don't love. And then he says, "And don't we share the same loaf, the same bread?" And we don't do that either. And especially with that symbolism that comes in the best way of doing communion would be again, one cup, one loaf, everybody comes forward. It would just take forever. So there's practical concerns there. But the one loaf and then everybody tears off or has the person serving it tear off a little piece of the bread to give to you the body of Christ and you receive it. But there's something really good and again, symbolic, biblical, beautiful about that sharing in the same bread, the same savior, the same body that we're a part of and all of that.

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  And so I feel like we really miss out on that with these little prepackaged cups things that we're doing. And the last thing I'll just say about it is that it's just the grape juice that we do have is just really gross and the wafer is gross. And so I actually just last week was texting with our lady who's been in charge of that for us and like, "Hey, we got to make a change. Even if it costs a little more, this is just so gross and we need a better solution for this. " And so that should be coming. So sounds like we got that coming down the pike. So thanks for the question though.

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  If I could share briefly a really practical communion game changer that Callie Born shared with our theological triage class yesterday. Okay. You tear off the top, you get the bread and then you snap down, which I had never done. The tab, you push the tab down, you don't pull both up. I had never done that. So it snapped and it just opened right up. I've struggled with that every Sunday. The juice. Super helpful for the juice. Thanks Kelly.

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  Yeah.

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  There's been

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  Sundays when I could I almost didn't get the

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  Little

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  Juice tab open

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  In time. I finished playing for comedian and then I'm like, "I can't open this.

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  " Yeah. It's bad.

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  Next one is from Victoria who writes, "What does biblical rest look like?

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  " Well, that's a whole nother separate topic. I guess we did. I was curious about where her question came from because I guess I did talk about it though. No, I know I did. I sort of paraphrased Matthew 11:28 - 30 where Jesus says, "Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Rest for your weary souls." And I used it in the context of kind of mashing it up with what Jesus says to the woman in the well in John four where he says, "You can keep drinking this water, but you're just going to keep getting thirsty." And he's not of course just talking about the literal well, Jacob's well that they're at there. He's using that as again, a symbol to talk about where that woman, the Samaritan woman, was looking for her satisfaction and these men and these relationships and looking for love and all the proverbial wrong places of you've had how many different husbands and actually none of them are your husbands.

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  You just keep sleeping around and not even committing to any of these men, I guess. And Jesus is saying you're drinking from the wrong wells and they're not going to leave you quenched and satisfied. But if anyone drinks the water that I give him or her, the water's going to well up in you to eternal life and quench you forever and satisfy you forever. And so talking about that like the St. Augustine quote of our hearts were made for you, God, and they are restless until they find their rest in you. And so Jesus is saying there, come to me all you who are tired of trying these other wells and thirsty because their water just, it's like drinking soda and expecting it to quench your thirst. It just makes you more thirsty or salt water. Come to me. I got fresh water. I got the good stuff.

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  It's going to do the trick, do the job if you're tired and thirsty.

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  I'm just going to leave it honestly at that and say biblical rest means going to Jesus. I don't want to get on a whole thing about Sabbath and this and that. But I mean, we could. So Victoria, if you want a whole kind of separate, maybe ask the pastor's episode about biblical rest, that would be an episode worth doing and dealing with kind of the question of the Sabbath and whether or not Christians today should still be taking 24 hours of rest each week and what does it mean to Sabbath and rest on a sort of micro sort of daily basis in between there and those kinds of things.

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  We may haven't asked the pastors on that. I can't check

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  That now. We might. I can't remember. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm blocking on that too. But thanks Victoria. The short answer is it means finding our rest in Jesus. That much is clear on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on now on every basis, finding our joy, contentment, satisfaction, hope, peace, all of it, and rest as well in him.

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  And then she writes, "Pray for an application. Pray to be sensitive to my own sin." That's good.

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  That was certainly an emphasis from the sermon yesterday and something that we all... Yeah. I hope that again, always preaching to myself first, but hope that others can take away from that as well. Just really taking sin seriously in my own heart, in my own life and not giving myself passes. No, I want to be godly. I want to be Christ-like, which means I need to pay attention to where are the areas where I'm not.

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  And then lastly, a application from an anonymous congregant who wrote, "I always love the added stories, personal notes and real life stuff helps to apply the rest of the message content to life."

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  Well, hopefully it's not too much at the expense of my kids or usually I try and make it at my own expense and tell stories about where I kind of fell short and how I struggle in this or that area. Or even with my example of my kids kind of bringing it back to myself and how I'm like them and we're all like them. But I do appreciate that encouragement and God willing, we'll keep it coming. These are not just abstract kind of truths for us to think about once a week for an hour and then go about our lives. It's like, no, these are principles to live by and put in practice. And so we need to see where are examples of us failing to do that and needing to kind of be challenged in that and what are some practical specific ways we can do that better and that I've found success or others have found success and why don't you try this?

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  So anyway, appreciate that encouragement and thanks for listening both to the sermon and after the sermon.

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  Well, we hope that this has been edifying for you as you seek to be changed and to love God more as you apply God's word after the sermon. So go continue to make disciples and to apply the sermon. And Lord willing, we'll catch you right back here next week. I