Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

When God Plays Hard Ball

Psalm 50, Hebrews 12:7-13

by Dave Wilkinson

September 19, 1999

"Baseball umpires are carved from granite and stuffed with microchips" writes George Will in Men at Work. They are professional dispensers of pure justice. Once when umpire Babe Pinelli called Babe Ruth out on strikes, Ruth made a populist argument. Ruth reasoned fallaciously from raw numbers to moral weight: 'There's 40,000 people here who know that last one was a ball, tomato head.'

"Pinelli replied with the measured stateliness of Chief Justice John Marshall: 'Maybe so, but mine is the only opinion that counts.'"

Sometimes we feel pressured by the weight of numbers against the law of God. "Everyone else lets their kids do --whatever." Our congress often seems to make decisions not according to firm beliefs but according to the latest public opinion polls.

But Christians know that in the end, only one opinion really counts. That opinion is God's. In fact, if you are on the side of God -- even if everyone else in the world disagrees -- you are still with the majority.

During the agonized debate over slavery before the Civil War, poet James Russell Lowell expressed a great truth in his hymn, "Once to Every Man and Nation."

"Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone in strong;

Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong.

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow keeping watch above his own."

That is true of those who gave there lives for freedom before the Civil War. It is also true of those who were killed for their faith just this last week in Fort Worth, Texas. God knows. God sees. God acts.

James Russell Lowell’s hymn echoes the Psalms. In Psalm 50 we see our God portrayed as a righteous judge. The Psalm warns the world and the church: "don't underestimate God. That can have serious consequences."

This is not a tender psalm like the Twenty Third Psalm. It’s hard. I struggle with it. It's a hard truth about the God who plays hard ball. This is not a message that tickles our ears. But it is a message we need, or our understanding and worship of God will be very limited.

Three names describe God's majesty at the beginning of the Psalm. He is "The Mighty One, God, the Lord." He speaks. He shines forth from Zion.

Just as the sun exerts awesome heat, so does the "rising" of God. Before Him there is a devouring fire and a mighty tempest." Everything that is false and evil is consumed. We see in this Psalm the all-righteous judgement of the creator God who cannot be mocked.

In verse 4 this awesome judge summons the peoples of the earth as well as the angels, the host of heaven, into His law court. And there before the citizens of earth and heaven stands the one accused.

Don't miss the irony here. Who stands on trial? Who is in the defendants seat? It is Israel -- the chosen people of God.

The people of Israel expected to judge the world. They never expected to be judged before the world. But that is the condition in which, in this Psalm, they suddenly find themselves.

God reads the indictment. His purpose is not to pass sentence but to bring truth to light. He says, "I am God. I am your God." That is good news. "I am your God. But I am not 'yours' in the sense that I am like you. You can't squeeze Me into your mold."

In the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver tell the children about the great lion Aslan -- the figure or image of Jesus Christ in the Chronicles.

"Is -- is he a man?" asked Lucy.

"Aslan a man!" said Mr. Beaver sternly. "Certainly not. I tell you he is the king of the wood and the son of the Great-Emperor-Beyond- The-Sea. Don't you know who is the king of beasts? Aslan is a lion - -the Lion, the Great Lion."

"Ooh!" said Susan, "I'd thought he was a man. Is he -- quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."

"That you will, dearie, and no mistake," said Mrs. Beaver, "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking together, they're either braver than most or just silly."

"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.

"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver. "Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king, I tell you."

This Palm tells us that we can never bring God down to our level. We can never make him safe. But God says that the people of Israel -- His chosen people -- have tried to lock him into a box. They have tried to turn the Lion of Judah into their house cat. This is even shown in their worship. The people assume that all God wants from them is a few bulls and sheep.

"You are certainly dutiful in your religious rituals" God says. "You offer me burnt offerings daily. But I won't take any more of these beasts from you. All the beasts and the birds of the forest are Mine already! Do you think I need to be fed by you? Do you really think I drink goats' blood?"

What God looks for is a sacrifice of thanksgiving. "It is by your heartfelt repentance and sincere love that you will show how you glorify me." Verse 14 tells us that God expects us to keep our word to Him. We are to pay our vows to the Lord.

God is good to the godly. But he expects us to keep our promises. God wants us to reflect His nature and glory -- to show the perfection of His beauty and righteousness in our lives.

Do you know what God is up to in you? Do you know what God's ultimate purpose is in your life? The Bible says that God is up to nothing less than making you like His Son Jesus Christ. He will carve and shape you and remove anything in you that doesn't look like Jesus. In Hebrews 12:7-13 we read: "It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which you have all become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, And we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of Spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but His discipline is for our good that we may share His holiness."

Hebrews says that God disciplines us as his children. This discipline is essential to our health and growth. In fact, Hebrews says that the fact that we are disciplined shows that we really are God's children. You don't discipline the neighbors kids -- even though we have all been tempted. God disciplines us because we are truly a part of His family.

Did your dad or mom ever say to you just before the boom fell: "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you!?!" Personally, I never believed it. But now I have learned that the pain of disciplining a loved child is worse than being on the receiving end. We want so much for our children. We so badly want to help them find the right road. We so badly want a relationship built on love. And it is hard to do something in love that you know is going to be initially interpreted as unloving.

God does not delight in discipline -- any more than loving earthly parents are happy about having to discipline their children. It hurts to discipline. But to fail to provide appropriate discipline is the greatest failure of love over the long haul.

What does God's discipline look like? Apparently it looks like whatever it takes to get our attention and do the job. Sometimes, it’s hard ball. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul warns that God's discipline has come upon the church because of terrible abuses of the Lord's Supper. In fact, Paul says that the illness and even the deaths of some of the Corinthians are a part of God's disciplining process. That bothers me, but that’s what it says. In the same way, I have seen a couple of instances where I have suspected that God put a person flat on his back in a hospital so he'll finally have to start looking up.

However, as Paul so clearly points out in 1 Corinthians, the purpose of this discipline is ultimately for our good. It's purpose is to pull us up short -- to keep us from running out into traffic -- so that we will not be condemned along with an unbelieving world. Paul writes: "but when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord in order that we may not be condemned along with the world." Discipline and damnation are two different things. In fact, the purpose of discipline is to prevent damnation.

That is also God's word to the first group of people in this Psalm. Discipline is how God pushes people who genuinely desire to serve him further along on the road of true discipleship.

But then, in verse 16 of our Psalm, God turns and addresses a very different group -- the wicked. These are people who call on the covenant of Israel and who mouth all the right words but who have no true desire to obey God. The only God they want to please is the God of their own selves.

In Psalm 50, verse 21 God says: "these things you have done and I kept silence. You thought that I was just like you. I'm not!" You thought I was a permissive God who would let you enjoy a permissive society. Wrong. I'm giving you one more chance. Don't make me have to come and deal with you. I want to save you. I'm the only one who can save you.

Does this Psalm have any meaning for us today as the church? I believe it does. For scripture teaches that God still brings his people in for cleansing, healing judgement before the eyes of heaven and earth.

In 1 Peter 4:17, Peter writes to Christians going through a time of testing: "it is time for judgement to begin with the household of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?"

Do you hear what Peter is saying? He carries the same message to the church as the first half of Psalm 50 carried to he godly in Israel. Yes, we are the people of God. But that does not mean that God expects less of us than he expects of non-believers. He expects more of us. He expects us to worthily represent him to a non-believing world. God demonstrates to the whole world that He is truly the righteous judge who will not ignore sin even in His own children. And the world, as it sees the righteousness God demonstrates as He deals with the sin is us, His people, is then called on to consider the degree of judgement that will be visited on those who are not saved.

God says at the end of our psalm:

"The one who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors me; and to the one who orders his or her way aright I shall show the salvation of God."

Salvation is a very interesting word. It is sometimes used in the Bible in the past tense -- because of the tremendous fact that through faith in Jesus Christ, we have already been saved from the ultimate penalty for sin -- that while God may and does give fatherly discipline, H does not condemn those who trust his work in Jesus Christ.

The word salvation is also used in the future tense. "We will be saved." this tense points us toward the glorious day when we will be saved not only from the penalty for sin but also from the very presence of sin -- when we live with God in His own house.

And salvation is also used in the present tense. The Bible also says that we "are being saved." This present tense salvation refers to the progressive freedom from the effects of sin in our lives that God wants us to enjoy as His children.

The message of Hebrews, Peter, and Psalms is that if we truly desire to follow God and experience the fulness of the abundant life he offers, we need to remove from our lives anything that gets in the way of following the Lord -- the bad stuff certainly and even the good thing that gets in the way -- no matter how good a thing it might appear when considered all by itself parat from its impact on our discipleship.

In other words, we need to be Walt Disneys of the Spirit.

Walt Disney was ruthless in cutting anything that got in the way of a story's pacing. Ward Kimball, one of the animators for "Snow White", recalls working 240 days on a 4-1/2-minute sequence in which the Dwarfs make soup for Snow White and almost destroy the kitchen in the process. Disney thought it was funny, but he decided the scene stopped the flow of the picture, so out it went. 240 days!

When the film of our lives is shown, will it be as great as it might be? A lot will depend on the multitude of "good" things we need to eliminate to make way for the great things God wants to do in and through us.

Recognize the authority of God. Be a willing participant in His shaping of your life. Then, when everything else is gone, you will have something left that is eternally worthwhile.