Psalm 17:1-15

June 30, 2019

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts at 15:40 in the audio file.

Or, Deliverance from Those Satisfied Too Soon

Series: The Soundtrack of the Righteous

I’ve been reading through, and really enjoying, the Wingfeather Saga books and (hopefully without giving any spoilers) I appreciated this conversation (in book 4) between the Armulyn the Bard and the Sara Cobbler (about something that happened in book 1):

“And the sea dragons?” Armulyn asked. “What about their songs?” “I don’t know how to put it,” Sara said. “But they made me feel like I could see better—farther, for a thousand miles. And closer, too, like I could count the veins in a butterfly’s wing.” “Did the music make you brave?” “Yes sir,” Sara said. “Brave and—homesick.” “Exactly,” (Andrew Peterson, The Warden and the Wolf King)

This is not a novel idea. There are some songs that enable and ennoble, that open up our eyes and lift up our heads. They fill up our heads, and they also cause our hearts to beat a little bit braver. The best songs put things into perspective, including helping us to process and enjoy, or at least face up to, the present better.

This is one of the reasons we need the Psalms. The Psalms are inspired, in a technical sense, referring to their source; they are God’s revelation through His poets of choice. But they are surprisingly earthy, that is, these songs deal with imminent things, both problems and praises. We’re given God-breathed lyrics about His eternal, omnipotent glory, and about fruit and friends and sleep and sickness. As we sing, or as we hear the way God’s people ought to sing, we are made brave in the now and homesick for His presence.

Current Christians are bad at this, and Christians are bad at it in the name of Christianity. We are not good disciples on earth, which is where He want us to obey. It’s like an actor who has his lines nailed in the bathroom but who avoids going on stage by principle. Consider this worldview observation by a conservative with sympathy for religion:

“Christianity, like all religions, focuses on the spiritual to the exclusion of the physical. And that failure to take into account the drive for betterment in the physical world would be used as a club wielded against Christianity itself before long.” (Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 71)

There is some truth that Christianity “focuses on the spiritual,” but we ought to learn how to focus on the spiritual to the integration of the physical, not “to the exclusion” of it. There may be no better place to learn it than our songs.

Psalm 17 is not the only, probably not even the ideal, song for sake of harmonizing our steward-soldier-sojourner status as spiritual men on earth. But it is the next psalm to study after Psalm 16 a few years ago. I think of this study in the Psalms as “The Soundtrack of the Righteous,” starting in Psalm 1 with the contrast between the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked, ways which are picked up in Psalm 17. These are the songs to play in our minds “day and night.”

The heading of Psalm 17 tells us that this is a Prayer of David, but we don’t know the circumstances in which he wrote other than clues from the content of the song itself. He’s dealing with “deadly enemies” (verse 9), those without pity (verse 10), who desire his humiliation (verse 11). So it is a prayer for redress, part lament and part appeal. David cries to Yahweh for “vindication” (verse 2), as well as protection (verses 8-9), and ultimately satisfaction (verse 15). There are three levels in the song, increasing in intensity: Attend (verses 1-5), Answer (verses 6-12), and Arise (verses 13-15).

Attend, O LORD (verses 1-5)

When David was under pressure from criticism, when his reputation, and even his life, was attacked, he wrote a poetic and lyrical plea for the Lord to judge [...]