2nd Sunday after Pentecost [c] June 23, 2019
Psalm 3
1 O LORD, how many are my foes!
Many are rising against me;
2 many are saying of my soul,
there is no salvation for him in God.
3 But you, O LORD, are a shield about me,
my glory, and the lifter of my head.
4 I cried aloud to the LORD,
and he answered me from his holy hill.
5 I lay down and slept;
I woke again, for the LORD sustained me.
6 I will not be afraid of many thousands of people
who have set themselves against me all around.
7 Arise, O LORD! Save me, O my God!
For you strike all my enemies on the cheek;
you break the teeth of the wicked.
8 Salvation belongs to the LORD;
your blessing be on your people!
In the name of Jesus.
David writes, “O Lord, how many are my foes! Many rise up against me.” [Psalm 3] Then David appeals to the Lord to be delivered from his foes.
When did David write this Psalm, when was he surrounded by so many foes that he even asked the Lord to break their teeth?
David wrote this Psalm when Absalom, his own son, was chasing him down to kill him.
We remember the account. We learned it in Sunday School. We remember the gruesome end. David is king over Israel. Absalom is one of his sons. Absalom wants the throne. So Absalom conspires, turns the people against his father, David, constructs his own army, and chases his own father across the countryside in order to kill him make the throne his own.
How does the story end? We can probably all remember the grisly scene on the front of those Sunday School lessons, that painting of young Absalom with his long hair caught in the branches of a tree, with his mule continuing on without him, leaving Absalom helplessly dangling from the tree limbs, until one of David’s soldiers speared him through his heart.
But before Absalom got his hair tangled in the tree and died, while David was still running scared from Absalom and his army, David wrote Psalm 3.
7 Arise, O LORD! Save me, O my God!
For you strike all my enemies on the cheek;
you break the teeth of the wicked.
8 Salvation belongs to the LORD; your blessing be on your people!
[Psalm 3:6]
David wrote the Psalm in the context of him being surrounded by Absalom’s forces. But the Psalm is much more. For this is not some private writing of David’s, hidden under his bed in a diary. This is Holy Scripture. It is the words given by the Holy Spirit because Holy Spirit wants them spoken by the whole congregation when he gathers his people to his service. Which is why you and I these words today—the Lord had these words included in Holy Scripture so that we can hear and speak them, as we did today in the Introit.
So when the Lord gives you and me and our families to pray:
6 I will not be afraid of many thousands of people
who have set themselves against me all around.
7 Arise, O LORD! Save me, O my God!
For you strike all my enemies on the cheek;
you break the teeth of the wicked.
what deliverance is he actually giving us to pray for? It’s not for deliverance from Absalom. That problem belonged to David, not us.
But we may think a moment about Absalom, this son chasing down his own father to overthrow him. What was David’s actual enemy? It’s more than Absalom. David’s enemy was also David. For Absalom was a deadly enemy because of what David had done. David had committed adultery and had had sons with more than one wife, so that these sons were now set against each other to see who could sit on the throne. Because of that adultery, David had killed Uriah, one of his best generals, an officer who could’ve now helped protect him from Absalom.
So David’s first enemy is not his son Absalom, it is his own sinful flesh. And that is our first enemy, too. When the Lord gives us to say, Arise, save me from my enemies, break their teeth, we are praying to the Lord that he put to death our sinful flesh in daily repentance.
And David’s enemies included not just his own flesh, but also the devil and his demons. They tempted him with arrogance, with lust, with greed for power, with being concerned about himself, not his neighbor. And they, these demons are our enemies, too. When the Lord gives us to say, Arise, save me from my enemies, break their teeth, we are praying to the Lord that he delivers us from the temptations and accusations of the evil ones.
And we may remember that about the demons. They not only tempt us. They certainly do that. But they tempt us in order to make us guilty under the holy Law. They tempt us in order to bring us into shame. They tempt us so that when we see ourselves in the mirror of God’s holy Law, we will tremble in fear. They tempt us so that as we stand before God, we will try to justify ourselves by our own righteousness, claiming that we are improving.
They tempt us, in other words, in order to rob us of the sureness and certainty of faith in the righteousness in which the Lord has clothed us in our Baptism.
When the demons have struck our consciences with the accusation of God’s Law, when they have driven us to despair, when they have us rushing around trying to act like we are cleaning up our lives and progressing every day, they have won their victory.
For the ultimate victory of the demons is to rob us of faith in the forgiveness of sins given by Jesus, and, instead, to enslave us under the Law. So the Lord gives us to sing and to pray:
Arise, O LORD! Save me, O my God!
For you strike all my enemies on the cheek;
you break the teeth of the wicked.
[Psalm 3:7]
It is a song and prayer for the daily defeat of our sinful flesh, of the devil and his unclean angels, and of the sin and death of our world.
The Large Catechism speaks of the evil of the devil:
Since the devil is not only a liar,
says the Large Catechism,
but also a murderer, he constantly seeks our life. He wreaks his vengeance whenever he can afflict our bodies with misfortune and harm. There, it happens that he often breaks men’s necks or drives them to insanity, drowns some, and moves many to commit suicide and to many other terrible disasters. So there is nothing for us to do upon Earth but to pray against this archenemy without stopping. For unless God preserved us, we would not be safe from this enemy even for an hour.
When Jesus was casting the demons out of the man in the country of the Gerasenes, he was not just showing some great miracle of power. He cast the demons out as the Savior who loved the man and wanted him freed from all fear. He cast the demons out as the Redeemer on his way to the cross to strike Satan’s head.
The cross is the defeat of the devil and the demons because on the cross Jesus bore our sin in order to put it all to death in his own flesh, in order to forgive you and me and justify us before the heavenly throne.
When Jesus forgives our sins, the devil has no more accusation of the Law to speak against us at the heavenly throne or to hold against us in our conscience. If the accusation of the Law is removed from our consciences, then you and I have nothing to fear, as we stand before God clean and pure.
And when we stand before God clean and pure according to the Word of Jesus, when we stand justified at the heavenly throne, then the words of the Psalm have come into their fulness:
Arise, O LORD! Save me, O my God!
For you strike all my enemies on the cheek;
you break the teeth of the wicked.
8 Salvation belongs to the LORD;
your blessing be on your people!
[Psalm 3:8]
We are no longer under the lie and the terror of the devil. The devil wants us to hear only the accusation of the Law in our consciences, wants us enslaved to the Law. Jesus has redeemed us from all that. He speaks a different Word for us to hear in our consciences, an opposite Word, the Gospel.
The devil will always be there to whisper in our consciences, Just a little more Law would be good for you. Use it to improve yourself, to justify yourself.
But Jesus frees us from slavery to the Law. He gives us a different Word, an opposite Word, a word not showing us how to improve from our sin, but actually forgiving our sin. A word to cleanse the conscience. A Word making us children of the Father living in freedom and life. Galatians 4:7:
God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. 6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.
In the Name of Jesus.