Psalm 105 "Within Grace's Circle" Scott Hoezee

In a recent article Jeremy Rabkin incisively pointed out that sometimes the people who claim to be at the forefront of the so-called "culture war" are themselves vastly more entrenched in American culture than they know. As an example, Rabkin noted that some years ago televangelist Pat Robertson created his own cable TV network called "The Christian Broadcasting Network" or CBN. But aside from a nightly news and talk show which presented conservative commentary on politics and a smattering of Bible summaries, CBN mostly filled up its airtime with recycled Hollywood movies and old TV shows.

What's more, the sitcoms and dramas on CBN were not from the relatively innocent days of the 1950s but from the troubled decade of the 70s. As Rabkin noted, perhaps those shows are a bit cleaner than the current crop of shows on television, but they hardly represent an alternative Christian worldview. Indeed, last year Robertson sold his network to Fox, resulting in the Fox Family Channel. Curiously, however, there was virtually no change in programming as a result of this network's moving from Christian control to secular control.

Figuring out how to be a distinctive people in this world is not easy. That is perhaps even more true for folks like us Reformed Christians who refuse to flee the world but who instead seek to be salt and light within it--ours is a world-engaging kind of work and witness, not one which sets up shop in communes or Amish-style alternative communities. We are "in the world but not of it," and yet we are at least partly "of the world," too as we take in at least some of the same entertainment, eat at the same restaurants, shop at the same malls, buy the same kinds of cars and clothing as people who do not attend church regularly the way we do. Our calling is to be different, distinct, holy. Living out that calling is the stuff of daily challenge and great creativity.

Psalm 105, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, gives us access to this with a conclusion which the average reader does not see coming. In the Book of Psalms there are several long poems which are called "historical psalms" (78, 105, 106, 136). As you can see from Psalm 105, they are called this because these psalms present long summaries of Israel's story, tracing Israel's history from the call of Abraham, through the exodus from Egypt, and up to the reign of King David and Israel's establishment in the Promised Land.

Each of the historical psalms is slightly different, however, as the authors did not merely give a blow-by-blow account of Israel's history but instead edited and selected from the events of history in order to communicate a theme. In the case of Psalm 105 the theme is God's promise and God's sovereign faithfulness in keeping that promise. If you still have your Bible open, take a look at verses 8-11 which recall God's covenant with Abraham. The core of the covenant was the promise that God would create a nation which would one day inhabit a land of its own. That promise, and God's fulfillment of it, is what the whole rest of the psalm is about.

Notice, beginning in verse 14, how many of the verses begin with "He." Over and over again it is God's action that takes center stage. As a matter of fact, the sovereignty of grace can be seen in Psalm 105 by noticing how relatively passive Israel is in all this. All of the events which get recounted here are things that happened to Israel. Israel does nothing but instead we see that it is God who does it all for them.

From the outside looking in, Israel's securing of a homeland looks like no more than the result of typical historical events. It is fully possible to explain Israel's history with no reference to any God--and there are secular history books about the Middle East that do just that. In those books you might read a lot about what Moses did, what Joshua accomplished, and about the politics of King David, but in these secular tellings of the story it is only the human actors on the stage. Psalm 105 claims that this is not the real story. Psalm 105 pulls back the curtain of history to reveal the divine hand of Yahweh, who alone and by his sovereign initiative of grace is the One who made Israel what it was.

But after 44 verses of God's activities and of God's taking the lead role in it all, you come to the climax of the psalm in verse 45 where suddenly Israel becomes the active agent. Suddenly we learn the purpose and goal of all these events and, as it turns out, that goal is obedience. God had quite literally moved heaven and earth not just to fix Israel up all nice and pretty in a land where the people could kick back and lead a rich, fat life of milk, honey, wine, and cheese. No, God had orchestrated cosmic events with the goal of establishing a little colony of heaven. God did want his people to prosper, of course. He did want to give them a good life which dripped with blessings. But from the midst of that goodness and joy was supposed to emerge faithful, obedient lives.

The Torah or Law of God was to be the center of Israel's life together. All of the dramatic history that led up to the establishment of Israel in Palestine was just the beginning of the story. The history relayed to us in Psalm 105 is not a mere historical episode but was the beginning of a cosmic epic. Israel existed for God to form a beach head, a starting point from which to save the whole world. Israel needed to be a showcase display window, a living vignette which would show the world the reality of God's reign, rule, and ways. Israel had to make the reality of God visible in how they lived.

That is why, throughout the psalms, you can find so many references to the other nations of the earth. Again and again it is clear that what the Hebrew poets of the psalter want is for their songs to be "overheard" by the kings and princes and peoples of the surrounding nations. Israel was supposed to be a bright, shining, glorious example of God's holy ways through which foreign people would be attracted also to the God who had given out the laws, decrees, designs, and precepts which lay behind Israel's lifestyle.

The Church of Jesus Christ has the same vocation today, of course. We are likewise to be a colony of heaven as we view ourselves as citizens of God's kingdom. "The kingdom of God is at hand," Jesus said when he began his ministry. He then proceeded to form his own beach head in the persons of the original disciples. To these followers he preached the Sermon on the Mount, told the parables of the kingdom, and proclaimed the ways of grace all so that they could form a church which would be the one spot on the planet where the reality of Jesus as Lord could be visibly displayed.

As Dallas Willard has written, we sometimes don't know what to make of this concept called "the kingdom of God." If it's not a literal chunk of real estate, then just what is the kingdom of God (and "where" is the kingdom of God)? Willard's answer has to do with the extent of God's influence. In a way, Willard writes, every last one of us has a "kingdom" of some kind. We have a realm which is uniquely our own, that sphere where our choices determine what happens. Maybe this is within the circle of our family, maybe it extends to work, maybe it includes a staff or some friends. But a kingdom is the place where it is my influence, my presence, and the carrying out of my suggestions that make a difference.

So also for now with the kingdom of God: God's kingdom exists wherever God's will is done. And this is not just some invisible realm hidden deep in our hearts. It is not some personalistic "Me and Jesus" sense of inner peace and serenity which we generate through meditation techniques. No, the kingdom is visible whenever God's rule and Jesus' Lordship are seen in action in our lives. God's kingdom should be available for anyone to see--and the place for them to see it is in our own lives.

Psalm 105 sums up salvation history up to the reign of David. More than just a summing up, however, we also are told that what the entire project had been about all along was the establishment of a group of folks who could incarnate God's ways through their obedience to the creation blueprint, a copy of which God graciously printed up and handed to the people at Mount Sinai.

As a colleague in my Princeton seminar likes to say, there's a sense in which you can sum up the whole Bible by envisioning God as saying to us, "I love you. Now behave!" That may be a bit simplistic, but at least it has the order right (an order of events reflected also in Psalm 105). God's love is not conditional. God is not waiting for us to behave before he reaches out to us but he takes the initiative by loving us right up front, saving us by his grace, and then asking us to live for him as a result of his salvation and love.

It is indeed the same pattern you see in the Old Testament. God did not send Moses to Egypt with the Ten Commandments already in hand so as to say to Israel, "Hear, my people, these are the ways I want you to live. As soon as you've got this all down pat and have achieved a worthy level of moral goodness, then I will consider leading you out of Pharaoh's house of bondage." No, first God kept his promise to Abraham by creating a mighty nation which he then graciously led out of Egypt. And then, and only then, after the grace had already come, did God sketch out how to live as a result of that grace.

The perennial temptation of believers is to confuse fruit with root. Our true root is grace, with our obedience to God's ways coming as a fruit of the tree that grows out of grace's richly deep and verdant root. But too often in our minds we turn the whole thing upside-down, trying to stick our fruit-laden branches into the ground as the roots from which our salvation grows. But it doesn't work that way. Grace is prior. Grace is first. Grace leads the way. Everything else follows from that. But as Psalm 105 and the Bible generally make clear, the fruit of obedience does and must follow.

Because if it does not, people will have no chance to see God. The simple, albeit surprising, fact is that God has always chosen to take the low road of hiddenness. It all began when he launched global salvation not by writing the name "Yahweh" in the sky and not by thundering through the heavens with chariots of fire to wow the fallen creation back into believing. Instead God got the ball rolling by quietly sneaking down the back staircase of history to tell two childless senior citizens that they would soon have a baby after all. That's how God began and he's not really changed his M.O. since.

God is, for now anyway, not going to take the world by storm. It's not that he doesn't want to be known, loved, and worshiped by all people, he's just not going to force it. Instead, he plants his church like a mustard seed in the ground; he buries his people in history like a treasure hidden in the field; he mixes us into the world like yeast in dough or salt into meat. We may be a quiet, humble way for God to get things done, but once he plants us, he does expect us to grow; once he mixes us in, he does expect the dough to rise and the meat to be made more savory. In short, he does want his church to be that one place on the planet where the kingdom of God is made visible. "Jesus is Lord!" the church has been saying ever since Jesus first ascended into heaven nearly 2,000 years ago this Thursday. But we are the one place (and maybe the only place) where the truth of that Lordship will be seen. It's the church or nothing!

Unhappily and alas, there is a tension in all of this which we've thus far ignored this evening (and which, frankly, Psalm 105 ignores, too). The tension is the fact that like Israel of old, so also the church today is never a perfect incarnation of God's rule--sometimes we are profoundly imperfect. It is not only we believers who, when looking at God, see "through a glass darkly." Most of the time when the world tries to view God through the church, they, too, are forced to look through milk glass at best. If the church is a window on God, it is often a sheet of glass in need of some serious Windex!

As a matter of fact, if you were to read on into Psalm 106, you would find the sequel to Psalm 105 as well as what Paul Harvey would call "the rest of the story." For Psalm 106 rather unstintingly, and tragically, details the myriad of ways by which Israel did not behave. Only the grace of God which got the project of salvation rolling in the first place managed to keep that salvation alive through the multiple failures of God's people in history. That is at once a very unhappy fact but also one redolent of hope. Salvation is not up to us but God alone. Even God's sticking with us in love is not dependent on us, which all the honest among us cannot help but admit is a good thing--as in a profoundly good and moving thing given our abiding failures.

But I close with this for another reason. Because it is possible to take this call to obedience and turn it in the wrong direction. The good news of the gospel is that our disobedience and failures do not signal the evacuation of God's presence nor do they indicate the condemnation of the sinner in question. Too often, though, we turn the kingdom of God into a black-or-white, obey or you're out proposition. We turn the kingdom, and so for now the church, into a citadel of only moralism and not the realm established by grace (and maintained by that sovereign grace alone, too). Often the church becomes a place where those who struggle, straggle, and doubt (or who just don't fit into a certain mold) end up feeling unwelcome, shunned.

We are called to make visible the reign and rule of God. But the God whose presence and Lordship we make visible is first and last a God of grace. We cannot display this gracious God, however, if we are ever and only ungracious, unforgiving ourselves. We, too, live by a promise and it is the promise that God has forgiven us in Christ for all we have ever done wrong and for all that we will ever do wrong. What's more, we believe that the fulfillment of that promise got kicked off in our lives "while we were yet sinners." So why do we too often find it difficult to do what God did for us, which is to love sinners even while they too are yet sinners; to love strugglers not only after they've neatly tied off every loose end of their lives and subdued their every doubt but even while they are still doubting, seeking, and working to follow God?

To be a place of obedience, to be a showcase window displaying the reality and the beauty of God's loving desires for this creation is a high, holy calling. We are right to be serious about it. But in the prolix knottiness of God's gracious ways with sinful people, we carry out our holy vocation within grace's circle. We display the Lordship of the ascended Christ Jesus because if we don't, who will?

But the Jesus we show needs to be the whole Jesus, full of grace and truth; full of both the truth of why God's ways are the best and the grace needed to forgive without ceasing our failures to live up to that. Our lives are circumscribed by grace, founded on grace, bounded by grace. Grace is the oxygen of the kingdom air we breathe. If we are to, as Psalm 105:1 puts it, "make known among the nations what God has done," then those who come among us to discover this God must always know that they, too, are inhaling the sweet air of grace alone. Amen.