“Track 29: The Lord of Glory & Strength (Psalm 29)", Will DuVal | 7/27/25
Psalm 29 | 7/27/25 | Will DuVal
When you hear the word “powerful”, what comes to mind? Maybe the world’s most powerful weapon ever created - the “Big Ivan (Hydrogen) Bomb”, capable of producing about 1.4% of the power output of the sun! Or the world’s most powerful animal - the rhinoceros beetle, capable of lifting 850 times its own body weight. Or the world’s most powerful supercomputer - “El Capitan”, capable of performing 2.746 quintillion calculations per second! (A “quintillion” is a billion TIMES a BILLION, btw!)
The most relevant comparison for THIS MORNING might be the most powerful STORM in American history: the infamous “Tri-State Tornado” of 1925 that ripped through Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee - 219 miles total! - at wind speeds exceeding 300 miles per hour, causing 695 fatalities and roughly $3 billion worth of property damage. That’s a powerful storm!
But according to God’s word, ALL of these pale in comparison to the power of the LORD. And it is God’s power and glory upon which King David meditates this morning in Psalm 29. And David invites US to join in WITH him, in awe and worship of God’s greatness and strength.
Commentator James Boice notes (254): “This psalm is unlike any we have seen before… It consists entirely of praise to God… Almost all (of the psalms) mix praise with… with appeals to God for help or applications from the greatness of God to how we should live now. But this psalm has NO other elements. It is PURE PRAISE. It does not call upon us to DO anything, because the psalm is ITSELF doing the only thing it is concerned about: it is PRAISING GOD.”
So let’s join IN the praise now, as we READ the psalm aloud TOGETHER. I invite you to STAND with me as you’re able… and if I MAY, let me make a request of you: this psalm really is all about how POWERFUL God is, especially his WORD; v4 will say: “The voice of the Lord is powerful”. But let’s not forget that every time we READ the Bible, God’s WORD, we are HEARING his VOICE. So here’s my request: you don’t necessarily have to try and BOOM like THUNDER in your best “GOD voice”, but let’s at least try and put a LITTLE extra GUSTO into it this morning, okay?. You can’t read this psalm dispassionately, or PUNILY, in your little FIEVEL voice; no ALVIN and the CHIPMUNKS allowed. We’re gonna read God’s word like we MEAN it, like HE meant it, when he divinely INSPIRED it, all those millennia ago. This IS the powerful “voice of the Lord”; read it with me:
(SCRIPTURE:)
“Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings,
ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
2 Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name;
worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness.
3 The voice of the Lord is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the Lord, over many waters.
4 The voice of the Lord is powerful;
the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
5 The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;
the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
6 He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf,
and Sirion like a young wild ox.
7 The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.
8 The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
9 The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth
and strips the forests bare,
and in his temple all cry, “Glory!”
10 The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;
the Lord sits enthroned as king forever.
11 May the Lord give strength to his people!
May the Lord bless his people with peace!”
This is the word of God… Seated…
-
Commentator John Collins summarizes Psalm 29 this way (ESV Commentary, 172): “This is a hymn of praise to God for his awesome power, one in which a thunderstorm serves as a visible emblem of God’s majestic voice.”
This psalm is all about praising God for his GLORY and his STRENGTH. And IN the psalm, God’s glory & strength are DISPLAYED in 4 ways; WHERE do we see God’s glory & strength manifested? Really all OVER, but especially in these 4 domains:
#1- In His PRAISES. (vv1-2) We see God’s glory & strength on display in His PRAISE. Even the way in which God is WORSHIPED bears WITNESS to the AWESOMENESS of his power and majesty.
Let’s take these first couple lines a word at a time:
“ASCRIBE”: it means “to credit or assign; to attribute or think of as belonging to”; some translations say “GIVE” - “GIVE to the Lord glory and strength”. The PROBLEM is that you and I do NOT “give” God His glory; he’s already GOT it. God doesn’t need us to “GIVE” him ANYTHING; all WE can do is choose to RECOGNIZE God’s glory and strength, WORSHIP him for it. That’s the idea behind “Ascribing” to the Lord “the glory that is DUE his NAME”.
And SPEAKING of his name - YAHWEH; any time you see that word “LORD” in ALL CAPS in the Old Testament, that’s actually a placeholder for God’s NAME, the name He first REVEALED to MOSES in the burning bush: “YAHWEH” - and it’s REPEATED here FOUR TIMES in these opening 2 verses; EIGHTEEN times in the short 11 verse psalm. So there is NO DOUBT, no CONFUSION, about who is OWED, who is “DUE” all of this glory and worship and PRAISE: it is YAHWEH, the covenant God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob… of ISRAEL, but not JUST Israel; Yahweh is God over EVERY nation, over all the EARTH, as we’ll see.
All the other nations in David’s day imagined a whole PANTHEON of gods, where each nation got their own tribal deity - the Philistines had Dagan, the Moabites had Chemosh - and even WITHIN each nation, there were a VARIETY of gods to rule over all variety of natural ELEMENTS. So, for instance, the CANAANITES worshiped YAM as the god of the SEA, but they ALSO worshiped BA’AL as god of the STORMS. But here in just a moment, David’s gonna say, “Nope - YAHWEH (not Yam) is Lord “over many waters”… and yet Yahweh is ALSO the Lord of the STORM, “breaking cedars” and shaking mountains. Yahweh is Lord over ALL!
We must “ASCRIBE to him,” then, “the GLORY that is DUE his NAME”.
Now, I say “we must”, but who is David actually APPEALING to here in vv1 and 2?
“O HEAVENLY BEINGS”. Who’s that? It’s the ANGELS. The Hebrew here is “bene elohim” which literally translates to “sons of God”, but it’s the same phrase used in Job ch1, where “the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord [YAHWEH], and Satan[b] also came with them…” - Satan, of course, is that fallen-angel-turned-DEMON who was CAST out of heaven because he REFUSED to “ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name”. Now David’s calling on the REST of them NOT to follow Satan’s example, but to instead “WORSHIP the Lord in the SPLENDOR of HOLINESS.”
And that key phrase - the HOW of God’s rightful worship: “in the SPLENDOR of HOLINESS” - it tips us off to what David is doing here, by appealing to the ANGELS to sing God’s praises. James Boice explains (256): “This seem[s] strange to us… for of course, praising God is what the angels of God are employed in doing constantly. Strictly speaking, it is human beings, not angels, who need to be urged to praise God… Why does David call on the angels, then? …It is because he feels that HIS praise and that of other mere human beings is not adequate. David is OVERWHELMED with the MAJESTY of God… he feels that he needs HELP to praise God properly.”
See, there’s a REASON why oftentimes when an angel shows up in the Bible, peoples’ immediate RESPONSE is to start WORSHIPING it (see Rev 22:8); because ANGELS are GLORIOUS! They are HOLY! (Lk 9:26) But here’s the point: only GOD is “Holy, HOLY, holy!”
Angels are POWERFUL: in 2 Kings 19, God sends just ONE angel against the entire Assyrian army, and the angel wipes out 185 THOUSAND troops in a single night (v35)!
And yet even THEY - the ANGELS - fall PROSTRATE on their FACES in the presence of GOD, because only HE is “powerful, POWERFUL, powerful”; SUPREMELY powerful, possessing ALL power, omnipotence.
That is why David appeals to the ANGELS here to praise, because if even THEIR worship falls SHORT of assigning the FULL “glory that is due [God’s] name”, how much MORE so does OUR worship fall short. ONE day we TOO will worship God “in the splendor of holiness”, when we are made LIKE them, LIKE the angels (Mk 12:25). But until then, we are nevertheless still invited to join in their chorus. We TOO are invited to “ascribe to the Lord GLORY”; the Hebrew word for “glory” (kavod) means ‘to be HEAVY’ or ‘IMPORTANT’. God is OBJECTIVELY the most “IMPORTANT” being in the UNIVERSE; ascribing Him GLORY is when He becomes that important TO US… PERSONALLY.
Church: THAT’s what “worship” IS. And I’m convinced that MUCH of what PASSES for “worship” in the Church today isn’t really worship at ALL. It may be “positive and encouraging”; it may be “feel good” and “family-friendly”; it may even be deeply moving and inspiring. But just because it’s EMOTIONAL doesn’t make it WORSHIP-ful. It’s not WORSHIP if we’re not ascribing to the LORD the glory due his name.
Boice points out (256): “The praise of God [here in vv1 & 2] consists of two things: ASCRIBING glory to him, that is, acknowledging his supreme worth with our minds, and WORSHIPING or bowing down to God (the Hebrew word means ‘to bow down’), which means a subordination of our wills… to [God’s].”
In other words, worship reorients our ATTENTION and our AFFECTION. It shifts the focus off of US and onto GOD, while simultaneously aligning our HEART and our DESIRES with HIS.
So can we just make this really PRACTICAL. I don’t want to in ANY way diminish the importance of what we gather here on Sundays to do together: it’s WORSHIP. Corporate WORSHIP - we assign God WORTH, we ascribe Him GLORY in our SONGS, in our PRAYERS, in the subordination of OUR wills under HIS, as we humble ourselves under His WORD, and we LISTEN for His “powerful voice” during this SERMON - all MASSIVELY important. Sundays ought to be the HEART and HUB of our weekly work of reorienting our attention and affection towards the LORD.
But I think the question we need to ASK ourselves is: “Does it STOP there?” Because if it DOES - listen: “worship” that stops on Sundays isn’t really worship AT ALL.
REAL worship is “ascribing GLORY” to God, “acknowledging HIS supreme worth” on Monday morning when the boss awards you with that big project you’ve been vying for; who gets the GLORY? You or GOD? OR after you get publicly REPRIMANDED at the staff meeting - will you still be praising God, because HIS supreme worth remains UNCHANGED, regardless of OUR circumstances or feelings?
REAL worship means “bowing” to God, subordinating my will to His on Sunday AFTERNOON, when you get home and all you wanna do is take a NAP - cuz you’re TIRED and it’s almost 100 out there with the HEAT index - but WORSHIP means sucking it up and mowing the LAWN INSTEAD because you promised your WIFE that you WOULD this weekend, and even though it’s not that important to YOU and it could honestly probably WAIT a few days til it cools OFF a bit, you know it’s important to HER - SHE’S the one at home that’s gotta LOOK at it all day long, the KIDS are the ones who PLAY in it, but MOST importantly, GOD is the one who commands us to “look not only to [our] own interests, but to the interests of others”, to “in humility count others more significant than yourselves” (Phil 2:3-4). So WORSHIP - "bowing” to GOD, subordinating MY will to HIS - means mowing the yard.
Do we GET that? Do you SEE the connection?
Do we DO it? Do we MAKE the connection, from our Sunday morning SONGS, to our Sunday afternoon SERVICE of others?
Worship isn’t JUST head and heart; it is HANDS.
It isn’t JUST reoriented attention and affection; it is reoriented ACTION.
Worship is going BACK to visit the refugee family you met last week during Serve Week because you know they STILL need love and hospitality even when the church isn’t helping organize it.
They still need JESUS! Worship is taking them not just the food and cleaning supplies that Oasis put together, but the Bible translated into Dari that you bought on your OWN dime, so they have a copy of God’s word in their own language in their own home, and you just never know which of their 8 children might decide to pick it UP one day and check it OUT, and how God might USE that.
That is worship of GOD because GOD said, “I want you to take my gospel - the good news of Jesus - to EVERY ethnic group (“panta ta ethne”), and yet there are a few THOUSAND Afghani refugees right here in ST LOUIS, right in our own BACKYARD, almost NONE of whom have ever been told what Jesus did for them, to RESCUE them from sin and death and HELL. And I don’t even have to get on a PLANE to tell them; I can get in my car and drive 22 MINUTES and CHANGE that.
Church: this is WORSHIP; ascribing God the GLORY due his name. It’s more than a SONG; the Bible says, “this is love for God: that we keep his commandments.” We “assign God WORTH”, we SHOW him how much he REALLY means to us, when we OBEY; when we live LIVES of HOLINESS; that’s the “SPLENDOR of holiness”, IN which the Lord DESERVES to be WORSHIPED.
May WE display God’s GLORY and STRENGTH in the GENUINENESS and the SUBSTANTIVE-ness of our WORSHIP and praise.
#2- God’s glory & strength are displayed in His POWER. (vv3-9)
God’s IMPORTANCE and his DOMINION are demonstrated, they are manifested, put on display for us, SEEN, in His sheer POWER.
That’s the main THRUST of vv3 through 9 now, the BULK of the psalm. And specifically, WHAT feature of God is so powerful?
V4: “The voice of the Lord is powerful”. The “voice of the Lord” is highlighted SEVEN times here, in these 7 verses:
“The voice of the Lord is over the waters”
“the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.”
“The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars”
It “flashes forth flames of fire… shakes the wilderness… makes the deer give birth” - BOOMING thunder and AWESOME lightning; mountains SKIPPING and forests STRIPPING - ALL of this is the result of a mere WORD from the mouth of God.
And while you and I should be in AWE, we shouldn’t be SURPRISED, because after ALL, Hebrews 1:3 tells us that “[God] upholds the universe by the word of his power.” It is God’s powerful WORD, his VOICE, that holds our entire UNIVERSE together.
And how’d that universe come into EXISTENCE in the FIRST place? “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1); HOW?
“God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” – He SPOKE. The voice of the Lord is POWERFUL.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence, by the way, that David mentions the “voice of the Lord” SEVEN times here, and in Genesis 1 and 2, we read “And God SAID…”, we HEAR God’s VOICE, how many times? SEVEN, once for every day of Creation.
And SPEAKING of Genesis ONE and CREATION, I think David has it in MIND here in v3 when he describes the “voice of the Lord” as being “over the waters”; remember just BEFORE the first day of Creation, what God was DOING? “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” (Gen 1:2)
Now skip down to v6 with me - we’re not gonna dissect every single line and phrase of vv3-9; you get the overarching PICTURE here: God’s glory is displayed in his POWER over all of CREATION - but I DO want to point out at least THREE interesting observations here in the text. And the FIRST is David’s allusion not ONLY to CREATION in v3, but look at vSIX: “[The LORD] makes Lebanon to skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox.” What does THAT mean?
Well, Lebanon and Sirion (aka Mt. HERMON) are the two largest MOUNTAINS in northern ISRAEL. But according to DAVID, the voice of the LORD sends them “skipping”.
Did you know that when CHRIST RETURNS, to usher in “the END of the world as we KNOW it”, the CULMINATION of all of history, he’s gonna OPEN the 7th seal and there are gonna be “peals of thunder… flashes of lightning, and an earthquake… and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, [will be] thrown into the sea” (Rev 8:8).
Now, I don’t think DAVID knew about ANY of that. JOHN wouldn’t receive that vision, that “REVELATION” concerning the eschaton, until 1100 years LATER. But do you think it’s possible that under the inspiration of the HOLY SPIRIT, that David is offering us at least a veiled ALLUSION here, a prophetic FORETASTE, of the things to COME, in the end times?
I believe that when GOD inspired David to write this - about God’s voice speaking powerfully over the waters… and God’s voice shaking the MOUNTAINS - He is subtly making the NOT-so-subtle but SIGNIFICANT point that “it is the WORD of God that CREATES… it is the WORD of God that SUSTAINS (“he upholds the universe with the WORD of his power”)... and guess what: it’s gonna be the WORD of God that LAYS WASTE to the PRESENT heavens and earth in order to RE-create the NEW heavens and the NEW earth, at Christ’s second coming. 2 Peter 3 declares, “the heavens… and the earth were formed… by the word of God, and… by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire… on the coming of the day of the LORD, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved… But according to God’s promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness will dwell.” (vv5-13)
And friends: ALL of it that WAS… and IS… and IS TO COME is ACCOMPLISHED by the all-powerful WORD of the LORD!
God’s WORD is SOVEREIGN over every SECOND of the STORY: from Creation to RE-Creation, the LORD is divinely dictating, narrating, orchestrating it ALL.
But SECOND (I told you I wanna make THREE observations under this section #2 on God’s POWER…) - not only do we see God’s power over all of redemptive HISTORY; we see His power over all of the EARTH. David may have subtly taken us on a historical journey all the way from Genesis to Revelation, but he is ALSO taking us on a more obvious GEOGRAPHICAL journey spanning all of CREATION - the “waters”, the FORESTS, the MOUNTAINS, the desert “WILDERNESS”... all CULMINATING, v9, “in [God’s] TEMPLE”. And David’s POINT is, once AGAIN: over ALL of it, the LORD reigns SUPREME. The pagan NATIONS have got it all WRONG: it’s not as if YAM reigns over the WATERS, but then you travel INLAND to the FORESTS, and that’s ASHERAH’s territory, but then go to the DESERT and that’s… NO!! It is Yahweh, Yahweh, YAHWEH… he “sits enthroned as king” over ALL of it, every square INCH!
And David depicts this for us beautifully and poetically, using the vivid imagery here of a THUNDERSTORM. By the way, apparently according to the commentaries, early Christians used to read this psalm to their children or even publicly to the entire CHURCH any time there was a THUNDERSTORM (Boice). So when we were driving back from the Ozarks yesterday, picking Ellery up from camp, and we drove through a STORM, I had Polly pull it up and read Psalm 29 for us, the “God of glory THUNDERS”, he “FLASHES forth flames of fire” and lightning… pretty cool.
Warren Wiersbe notes (909): “This is a dramatic description of a thunderstorm that started somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea (“the waters” in v3) and moved eastward to the Lebanon mountain range in the northern part of Israel (v5). The storm continued moving eastward overland to Mount Hermon (in v6; “Sirion”), where it turned south and traveled about two hundred miles down to Kadesh in the wilderness (v8).”
In OTHER words, David is painting a PICTURE here of God “thundering” over the ENTIRE the land of Israel, because God’s power and glory are to be recognized and WORSHIPED by ALL of his people - “In his temple, ALL cry, “Glory!””
But not just all of ISRAEL; once again, I think there’s a SUBTLE implication here that God’s power extends over all the EARTH, and that’s in David’s reference of “the cedars of Lebanon” in v5. The cedars of Lebanon were well-known throughout the ancient Mediterranean world as a symbol of STRENGTH. But in the BIBLE, in the Old TESTAMENT, they are also frequently used as a symbol for human KINGDOMS, God-opposing NATIONS.
Like ASSYRIA, in Ezekiel 31:3; and BABYLON in Isaiah 14:8; and ALL the “lofty and proud” kingdoms of this world in Isaiah 2:13.
What’s the point? That “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars… of Lebanon”! God over-RULES and over-THROWS EVERY kingdom of this world that (temporarily) stands in FOOLISH opposition to Him. “All the nations are as nothing before him” (Isa 40:17).
Revelation 11:18 “The nations raged, but your wrath came, and the time for… destroying the destroyers of the earth.” – Friends: the time is COMING when God will destroy EVERY nation that “rages” against Him.
And that leads me to a THIRD and final observation concerning God’s POWER that we WITNESS here in vv3-9: it is almost exclusively his power to DISTURB, to UNNERVE, to TERRORIZE! God is “breaking cedars” (v5), moving mountains (v6), shaking the wilderness (v8), setting stuff on FIRE (v7)... even the one description that SOUNDS more like CREATION than DESTRUCTION, the “deer giving birth” in v9, is probably a bad translation; some of your study Bibles may note that the same Hebrew CONSONANTS - there were no VOWELS in ancient written Hebrew; you had to SUPPLY the vowels when you were READING it, based on CONTEXT. So the same four consonants vocalized ONE way COULD mean “deer” but, but with different VOWELS, it could mean “OAKS”; two totally different words, written the same way; basically, HOMOGRAPHS, Like “bat” and “bat”. Did you hit the ball with a “wooden club”, or with a “flying RAT”?
SOMEONE decided to translate “makes the deer give BIRTH” here instead of “makes the OAKS to SHAKE”; but it seems pretty clear to ME, from the CONTEXT - look at the very next LINE: “[he] STRIPS the FORESTS BARE”; I’m going with “OAKS SHAKING”.
ALL of the imagery here is intentionally INTIMIDATING so as to inspire within us… WHAT?
FEAR!! The “fear of the Lord”; “reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Heb 12:28-29).
Our God is a BOOMING thunderstorm. I don’t care HOW big and tough you think you are; if a lightning bolt hit our STEEPLE right now, there wouldn’t be a DRY pair of PANTS in this SANCTUARY; do you have any idea how LOUD that thunder clap would be?
David wanted to inspire in us a holy FEAR. And storms STILL do, 3,000 years LATER, don’t they? You wanna talk about POWER? “Scientists calculate that an average thunderstorm (not even a BIG one, that shakes the MOUNTAINS; just an AVERAGE one) releases around 10,000,000 kilowatt-hours of energy – the equivalent of a 20-kiloton nuclear warhead.” (Guzik, “Enduring Word: Psalm 29”) That’s more POWER than the nuke we dropped on Hiroshima that killed 140,000 people. That’s a lot of POWER.
When David CONTEMPLATES that kind of power, when ANY of us attempts to; when you think about the kind of force, the PERSON who must be BEHIND a storm like that, CAUSING it, SHAKING those mountains, STRIPPING those forests bare… not to mention the kind of POWER it takes to cause something like the BIG BANG! - “Who pulled the TRIGGER, and MADE it bang?” - friends, you don’t have to try for very long to conceptualize of the kind of POWER it must take, the kind of GOD that Yahweh must BE, before you FIND yourself, just like the “heavenly beings”, once again, in v9, in God’s temple ALL crying “GLORY!!” I mean, that is the ONLY appropriate RESPONSE: “GLORY!!!”
But speaking of the FEAR of the Lord, that’s a good segue way now to our THIRD demonstration of God’s glory and strength:
(#3-) we see them displayed in His PUNISHMENTS. (v10)
Yes, in His PRAISE; Absolutely, in His POWER. But friends: God’s GLORY is made manifest every BIT as much in His PUNISHMENTS, as well.
Commentator James Johnston writes (Psalms, 297, 305): “Frankly, this picture of God’s power [in Psalm 29] is disturbing. Why would David compare the voice of God to a violent and DESTRUCTIVE storm? The fact is, the God we serve is not a tame God, a god we can lead around on a leash… Rather, “the God of glory THUNDERS” [and]... Every violent storm reminds us that a final storm of judgment is coming.”
But it’s not just that FINAL storm we are warned of here; look with me at v10: “YHWH sits enthroned over…” - WHAT??
“the flood”
Now ancient Hebrew had quite a FEW words for “flood”. But the one used here is used only one other place in the Bible: in Genesis 6-11, to describe the SINGLE GREATEST… most DESTRUCTIVE… most POTENT and PERTURBING picture of God’s PUNISHING POWER in all of human HISTORY: NOAH’S Flood. The one that wiped out EVERY LIVING CREATURE save for 8 people and two of every animal. THAT Flood; “THE” Flood; there are “floods”, and then there’s THE Flood. David specifically uses the definite article “the” here: YHWH sits over THE Flood. And actually, the VERB is in the PAST tense in Hebrew: “The Lord SAT enthroned” over that great and terrible Flood of the past.
What’s the point? Two points:
First of all, there’s not a pantheon full of some good and benevolent gods, but other destructive and capricious gods; no, there’s just ONE God - YAHWEH - and HE sits enthroned as King over it ALL - he is God over CREATION and God over its DESTRUCTION; God over BIRTH and God over DEATH; God over health and wealth and the SUNNY days AND God over sickness and poverty and the FLOODY days… over ALL of it, Yahweh is KING. Isaiah 45:7 - “I am the Lord, and there is NO other.
I form light and create darkness;
I make well-being and create calamity;
I am the Lord, who does all these things.”
Friends: that’s a HARD truth, but it’s a TRUTH. And it is a VITALLY IMPORTANT truth; it is SO much better than the alternative, a “god” who I guess stops BEING god every time something BAD happens down here, “Whoops; wish I had the power to stop THAT from happening…” - No, our God has ALL power. And he doesn’t just “ALLOW” bad stuff to happen; he ORDAINS it: “I CREATE darkness… and calamity.” It’s not like SATAN sent the Flood, and God just “allowed” it; you won’t find Satan ANYWHERE in that story. No, GOD sends floods, AND He sends RAINBOWS… WHY?
For the same unifying purpose: For HIS GLORY!! That’s why God does ANYTHING… EVERYTHING: for His GLORY! And God gets GLORY from lavishing GRACE on sinners who don’t DESERVE it, but He ALSO gets glory from PUNISHING sinners who DO deserve it.
And that’s the SECOND key thing for us to recognize here with God’s “punishments”: that we DESERVE them. “The wages of (our) SIN is DEATH” - because of our SIN, you and I deserve the WORST punishment of ALL: DEATH; we deserve the FLOOD, “flashing flames of FIRE”... WE deserve fire and BRIMSTONE, HELL! Not to MENTION every “STORM” we encounter on THIS side of eternity. We deserve it ALL… and WORSE.
That’s the BAD news: what we DESERVE. But now let’s END with the GOOD news: what we actually GET. Instead of eternal punishment; God displays his GLORY and his STRENGTH in…
#4- His PROTECTION over us. (v11)
How does this great, terrifying, “fear of the Lord”-inspiring psalm END?!
With a hope-filled PRAYER: “May the Lord bless his people with peace!”
You say, “PEACE?! Are you reading the same psalm that I am here? There’s thundering waters, shaking mountains, splintering cedars…” - where’s the PEACE?!”
Friends: where do we find PEACE in the midst of the STORMS of life? We find peace in knowing the God who sits enthroned OVER the storms. The God OF the storms, who sovereignly sends them, and sovereignly STOPS them, both for OUR good and for HIS glory.
You can have PEACE through the storms of life, when you know, when you TRUST that God is PROTECTING you through them all: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” (Ps 46:1)
He doesn’t promise to spare us FROM the storms, but to bring us THROUGH them… out the other side, the STRONGER for it! That is David’s OTHER prayer here: “May the Lord give strength to his people!”; “God, I don’t just need to SEE your strength on display; I need to FEEL it INSIDE me right now, strengthening ME, sustaining me, protecting and preserving me.”
God gives us the strength to make it THROUGH the storm, and the PEACE to trust Him no matter WHAT, come what MAY.
HOW!? How can we have THAT kind of peace? Because we KNOW that the very WORST that can happen to us here - even if we SUCCUMB to the storms of THIS life: disease, divorce, debt… DEATH! - like that wonderful line from one of my favorite hymns we sing here reminds us: “Be still and remember the worst that can come / But shortens our journey and hastens us home”.
Friends: Jesus Christ laid down his LIFE to protect us from the only storm of ETERNAL consequence: the tempest of God’s righteous WRATH against our SIN. Jesus went to the CROSS, bearing ALL our sin and shame, to die the death that WE deserved, so that he might BLESS us with PEACE. No more WRATH; we now enjoy PEACE with God our heavenly Father, because ALL our sins have been FORGIVEN in Christ.
He is our PROTECTION; 1 Peter 3 actually depicts Jesus as the ARK that we climb INTO to be SPARED of the FLOOD of God’s wrath against sin.
So let me END by ASKING you: “Have YOU entered IN?” Have YOU, by faith, personally entered into a SAVING, “protecting”, peace-providing relationship with Jesus Christ?
If not, I URGE you to turn from your sin, and trust in Jesus today, and be SAVED!
“The voice of the Lord is POWERFUL”, as He THUNDERS in his all HOLINESS against SIN. But the word of God became FLESH, and dwelt AMONG us, to reveal God’s powerTO us - “we have seen his glory”! - but more than that, to manifest his GRACE to us - “[Jesus was] full of GRACE and TRUTH… and from his fullness we have received grace upon grace.” Have YOU received it?