Great Expectations (Psalm 102:12-14)

Verses 1-11 describe a man who is in great distress. He has been in this state for some time. He is overwhelmed by it all and is in isolation, with no one to speak to apart from himself and God. What is the problem? Divine providence personally and divine providence nationally as far as Israel is concerned (the people were probably in exile in the Babylonian Empire). Things are not in a good way from his perspective. Is God indifferent now about his cause? Is he no longer interested in answering prayer? Have we ever felt like that with regard to divine providence?

Yet we should observe that he is thinking things through, speaking to himself about the matter and at the same time speaking to God. Have we ever done that, engaged in a mixture of self-assessment and prayer? It is as if he was saying to God, ‘Here I am, puzzled and battered spiritually, and there are you, the eternal God.’ And we must note that this psalm is included by the Holy Spirit in the Psalter as suitable as an item of praise.

The confession

The first matter to note is the confession that he makes in verse 12: ‘But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever; you are remembered throughout all generations.’ In contrast to himself, sitting on a ash heap, the Lord has very different surroundings. Here we have a reminder of the importance of thinking about God when things are out of sorts, even tough. What does this psalmist say about him?

First, God is a king, but a different kind of king in that he reigns forever. We don’t know who wrote the psalm, but he obviously wrote it during a bleak time in Israel’s history. The glory days of David and Solomon were in the past. Jerusalem is now in a mess. All that is left is stones. No point looking to the earthly palace now, but that cannot be said of the heavenly courts. Nothing changes there. It has the same King now as it had at the beginning of time. Countless generations have sung this psalm in countries that have lost their kings, but they have all sung consistently of the eternal King.

Second, God is a covenant king. We see that detail in the divine name that is used. It is very important to have the right name. I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s surgery this past week. There were about a dozen people in the room and when each was called they were called by name. Imagine if the nurse had come in and said, ‘Hey, you over there, follow me.’ None of us would have known what to do, and we would probably still be sitting there. The psalmist was going to God for help. How did he know that God would help him? Because he is a covenant God. There is nothing in any of us, not even our needs, that can compel God to help us. But there is something in him, and that is his covenant arrangements for his church. Yahweh is the great ‘I am’, the unchangeable God. That is why we can read this psalm and say that it applies to us as well as to the psalmist.

Third, God has worshippers in every generation. Obviously, when we read that line, we tend to look back the way. It is good for us to think of God’s people in previous generations. We crossed the Kessock Bridge to come here. I thought about that as I was preparing this sermon and I remembered how in the seventeenth century people flocked the other way in their thousands from the eastern Highlands to Inverness to listen to the exiled preacher, Robert Bruce. 

But the statement about all generations is not only about the past. It also includes the present. We don’t have to go anywhere to find out about the state of things in the present. All we have to do is ask Google. So I asked how many Christians there are in China. Different answers were given by various organisations but one hundred million is an average. We could ask the same question of every country in the world. The point is, our God is worshipped today all over the world.

The statement does only refer to the past and the present. All generations includes the future. Whatever else happens, and whatever else goes and disappears, there will always be a church, sinners saved by grace. There is nothing so special about the twenty-first century that means it is harder for the Lord to convert sinners than it was in previous generations. True, there is much ignorance today, but there are also exceptionally fast means of conveying information, which the Lord can use if he wishes. So the church will exist in the next century when we are gone. And everyone in it will be brought in by the same gospel that brought them in in the past and in the present.

Before we move on, there is something else we should say of our God because we are Christians. The God enthroned in heaven above is the triune God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We cannot estimate how much the psalmist knew about the Trinity because much of the information we have comes from the New Testament and the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. It is sufficient that we know, and that we worship the Holy Three, and take time to interact with each of the divine persons. That is what Christian worship is, responding with our hearts and minds to the triune God.

The confidence

In verse 13, the psalmist in his dire straits expresses his confidence in God: ‘You will arise and have pity on Zion; it is the time to favour her; the appointed time has come.’ How did he know that? He could have been a prophet to whom God revealed his mind, although I suspect he knew that restoration was coming because Jeremiah had predicted that the Jews would be in exile for seventy years, and that period was coming to an end. Maybe he had forgotten that God had promised to do this, but he had been reminded of it when he was meditating on the Lord.

What does he say that God will show when the restoration comes? He will have pity and show compassion to his people. The description here is like the beginning of Psalm 67 – ‘Lord, bless and pity us.’ The mercies of the Lord are undeserved, but they are abundant. There is a sense in which the Old Testament can be described as the account of a continuous list of times when God showed mercy to his rebellious people. They had to be chastised for their sins, but the chastisement was designed to bring them to long for divine mercy. There are many accounts of such divine restoration from the darkest of circumstances. Think about the frequent periods of mercy that are stated in the Book of Judges. Another example is the last chapter of Hosea, where the prophet outlines what divine restoration will be like.

We can see from this psalm that in an unexpected manner this restoration was to lead to the expansion of the church because of the ingathering of the Gentiles. God’s grace revealed in the recovery of his church from dark periods is astonishing and even our church history reveals that to us. It is good for our souls to read about periods when God revealed his pity through blessing the gospel to large numbers of sinners. One effect will be that we will pray to him to do such a work again. Another effect will be that we will look on God as the God of mercy.

The consideration

In verse 14, the psalmist mentions a shared experience about ruins: ‘For your servants hold her stones dear and have pity on her dust.’ The stones here are the stones scattered over the ground once occupied by the buildings of Jerusalem. These stones, we might say, are different from the stones that are the remains of other ancient cities.

Why did the people of God hold these stones dear? Because in the past there had been divine life there when the multitudes went to the city to worship the eternal God. Because in the future divine life would once again be there and multitudes would go there to worship God. The existence of ruins does not always mean the end; they could point to a new beginning of a period that would far excel what had been experienced in the past.

How could they have pity on those stones? Literally, they could not pity the stones, but symbolically they would pray for recovery. It would not be an expression of pity if all they did was read about the great promise of future deliverance given by God through his servant Jeremiah. That could be comforting, no doubt, in a sense. But pity is an action as well as an attitude. The way for them to show pity would be to pray about the matters that God has revealed.

After all, we believe in the God who redeems sinners, who regenerates sinners, who restores sinners, and who can recover his cause. We are to be like Nehemiah who prayed for recovery and decided to do what he could do when he saw the scattered stones of the city because he knew that his God had promised restoration and recovery for that city. His response is a challenge to us all.

At the same time, we should note the comment of Sir Richard Baker on this part of the psalm; ‘As long as Zion is afflicted, and her stones neglected, the heathen will never believe there is any other God besides their own idols.’ That is a reason to pray. The unconverted also need to see God’s cause thriving.