Sermon notes

Text: Psalm 11

If you had to rate our world – its problems and tragedies and on the other hand its
beauty, wealth and opportunities – unbelievably bad to wonderful and beautifully good –
say from one to seven, what score would you give it? (Take a show of hands: ‘Now you have
to choose one number!’)

Of course, many or perhaps most of us would like to say it’s both bad and good. It’s a
world of violence and terror and poverty but also human beings on average have never been
better off. (Take a journey around the world with the recent news).

 · University dropout with a couple of ideas can build a corporation – Microsoft – with
an annual income greater than the world’s tenth largest economy

 · But there is mass starvation, killings, abductions, rapes and forced slavery in
Southern Sudan

 · The killings in West and Southwest Africa – with guns supplied from Britain and
other Western nations. AIDS – eastern African countries, Cambodia etc. Indonesia:
‘Christians’ and Muslims and the army are involved in killing each other – Ambon and East
Timor. Slavery on the Indian subcontinent.

 · Refugees. For example, Diego Garcia: do you know what did the U.S. and Britain did
with the Ilois people, who were relocated to Mauritius and are rotting in slums there? And
how they covered it up? (See John Pilger’s Hidden Agendas, pp. 20-22).

 · Serious persecution of Christians happens in about 40 countries. Which country is
worst? Saudi Arabia

 · Russia – an economy that is imploding; people shooting their neighbours for stealing
backyard potatoes; Russian mafia raking in millions

 ·  We have the level of unemployment we want. Greed/the bottom line is driving
everything

 · TV – children between 5 and 14 will have watched 13,000 deaths by violence. Internet
– children can see anything you can imagine (a friend saw boys swapping pornography on
disks on the train).

 · Marriages – one in two in the West likely to end in divorce

Philosophy: Postmodernism and deconstructionism – truth is relative.

Don’t know what to believe anymore. No longer a ‘common morality’. Our society is
moving from religious consensus to one whose foundations are laid by secular humanism.

One of America’s states is about to be the first to legalize homosexual ‘marriages’.

‘God’s plan made a hopeful beginning

But man spoiled his chances by sinning;

We trust that the story will end to God’s glory

But at present the other side’s winning’.

What can we do? As a church? As a family? As individuals?

SO (this Psalm asks) IF THE FOUNDATIONS ARE DESTROYED, WHAT CAN THE RIGHTEOUS DO?’ It’s
the metaphor of a building. Society rests upon the foundational principles of the rule of
law, social justice – caring for one another – and order.

What can we do? The Psalmist’s answer: it all depends, he says, on the kind of God you
believe in.

[1] THE LORD IS TRUSTWORTHY – so we can go on believing in him! (Psalm 11:1-3). This
statement of faith is reiterated throughout the Psalms (see eg. Psalms 7, 16, 31, 57, 71
etc.)

God is our refuge in a troubled world. God is the same, yesterday, today and forever.
If you look around, sure, things look hopeless: but we need to widen our horizons and look
up! Fear reacts to immediate perils.

Faith takes in ultimate realities. The things around us will pass – they are
transitory. But there are eternal realities which are the ‘most real’.

Jacques Ellul in his book Prayer and Modern Man says the most radical thing we can do
in the face of horrendous social problems is – to pray!

‘Everything will flow from that. This act in society which is also an action on
society, gets very much further than concrete involvement, which it still does not shirk.’

There was a priceless printer’s error that appeared in a program of Handel’s Messiah.
It listed the Hallelujah Chorus as follows, ‘The Lord God Omnipotent resigneth’. Was this
really an error, or was the printer a cynic, figuring that in a world like this the Lord
God must have resigned, and give us up as a hopeless case?

No. God is still on the throne. But that doesn’t mean we can opt our as escapists and
do nothing. We have two options: work for change, trusting in God, or flee away to the
mountains (the emotional mountains of neutrality, inactivity, resignation,
self-righteousness or disgust.) We can be monastics, and believe only in prayer; or
sectarians and practise separation; or let Jesus set us an example of both prayer and
engagement with the world.

Faith and works.

As Augustine put it in his classic ‘Concerning the City of God’ we live in two worlds.
We live in a physical world where the foundations are being destroyed, but also in God’s
world where the foundations cannot be shaken (see also Hebrews 11:10).

So when the going’s tough, think about God. As the medieval mystic put it, if you have
God and everything else, you have no more than having God only; but if you have everything
else and not God you have nothing. Nothing is bigger or stronger than God. And ‘God is
working his purpose out, as year succeeds to year… And the earth shall be filled with
the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.’

[2] THE LORD IS HOLY – so we, too, must take a stand against lawlessness (11:4-6). God
is watching everything. This is God’s world. God cares about what happens here. God’s
holiness is expressed in anger at the sinning which is destroying us. ‘Thou God seest me’
my mother used to quote to me when I’d done wrong. God commands certain things because
they are right, and because otherwise they will destroy us. 

God is not like a genie: remember those strange supernatural creatures in the stories
of the Arabian nights? Someone would rub a magic bottle, and a genie would come out – a
powerful magic creature that could do great things. Some think God is like that: God comes
when we ask, and goes away when we lapse into forgetfulness. But the God revealed in the
prophets and Jesus and the Scriptures does not go away. God is with us as encourager and
judge, scrutinizing every action, every thought, every word, every motive. 

God is the judge of the living and the dead, as the creed tells us. God ‘loves sinners
but hates their sin’. Such love labours to make us lovable (C.S. Lewis)…

An ungodly farmer wrote to a Christian. ‘I stole the seed. I stole the fertilizer. I
ploughed, sowed and reaped on Sunday while you were in church – and I have more bushels to
the acre this October than any of the Christians around here…’ The Christian wrote
back, a brief courteous response: ‘God does not always settle his accounts in October.’

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The way to become wise is to honour
the Lord (Psalm 111:10). Like the biblical prophets we are called upon to voice God’s
judgment against the evils in our society. 

[3] THE LORD IS RIGHTEOUS – so we must go on doing good (11:7)

God expects us to live right. Ours is a belief that behaves. There are two great
commandments – to love God and to love others. To love God only is to develop an
irrelevant piety; to love others only may result in a godless humanism. But to love God
and others in our society is to work for change. All that’s required for evil to triumph
is for good people to do nothing.

After the Second World War, Elton Trueblood wrote a short but significant book about
the Ten Commandments called ‘Foundations for Reconstruction.’ At that time the nations’
leaders were trying to reconstruct our shattered world and seeking foundations on which to
build. Trueblood pointed out that they did not have to look far, because God gave those
foundations to the human race thirty centuries ago: ‘You shall have no other gods before
me; honour your father and your mother; you shall not steal; you shall not kill; you shall
not covet.’ Wrote Trueblood: ‘Let us rebuild our post-war world on the firm God-given
foundation of the Ten Commandments, and it will be a world where people can live together
securely, and happily.

‘Righteousness makes a nation great;’ says one of the Bible’s proverbs.

‘Sin is a disgrace to any nation’ (Proverbs 14:34).

A feeble old man arrived late at the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, and found all the
seats occupied. He passed the seats of the Athenians and they laughed at him. He passed on
to the seats of the Spartans and as one they rose and offered him a seat. The Athenians
gave a loud cheer. ‘Ah,’ said the aged, white-haired stranger, ‘the Athenians admire that
which is good but the Spartans practise it.’

So aim for goodness: goodness is better than affluence; to be better off is not
necessarily to be better.

What good can I do? Start right here in this church: there are the lonely who need
encouragement; newcomers who need to be welcomed; the sick who need healing prayer; the
emotionally deprived who need friendship. Pure religion and undefiled is to visit one
another…

But on a larger scale, what can one person do? When Mother Teresa was asked about the
huge needs of people in India she suggested we start by helping one person at a time. (In
Romania I heard first-hand the story of a Baptist pastor who one day a week for 14 years
visited the local official to get permission to extend his church building. Finally it was
agreed due to the letters from Christians in Germany and Holland).

Martin Luther: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God.’

Solzhenitsyn: chose prison or exile to obeying the Politburo.

How can you glorify God in your profession? Sir Howard Walter Florey (1898-1968) was
the Australian scientist who isolated penicillin from the antibacterial mould discovered
by Sir Alexander Fleming. In doing so, this pair have probably saved more lives than
anybody else in the history of the world.

‘How far one little candle throws its beams: so shines a good deed in a selfish world.’

People who are kind and good may not get into the headlines in our mass media. It
concentrates on bad news – but you’re in heaven’s headlines!

So Psalm 11 is a song of confidence in God. Spurgeon called it ‘The Song of the
Stedfast’. It’s the answer of faith to the advice of fear. ‘The foundation that God has
laid cannot be shaken’ (2 Timothy 2:19). In spite of the seeming hopelessness of his
situation, the Psalmist says wickedness can’t triumph in the long run. In the language of
the New Testament, where sin abounds, grace abounds even more. The power of goodness to
conquer evil is greater than the power of evil over goodness. Look only at the evil, and
you’ll despair; look at God, and there’s hope.

You see, ‘the Lord has told us what is good. What God requires of us is this: to do
what is just, to show constant love, and to live in humble fellowship with our God’ (Micah
6:8).

The Psalm ends by affirming that those who do good will live in God’s presence. Those
who love God will never meet for the last time. As Jesus said, ‘The pure in heart shall
see God’. 

So what can good people do when everything’s falling apart? The 11th Psalm tells us
they can resolve to believe in a trustworthy God, a God who reigns, and who is the judge
of the living and the dead, a God who is righteous and asks us to be righteous too.
Well…???

Rowland Croucher

August 1999.