Psalm 91: God Keeps His Promises
Pastor Josh Haywood—March 22, 2020
This morning, we are continuing through the Psalms by going through Psalm 91. Last week, we took a look at Psalm 90, where God said to us—and the psalmist asks—“Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
This week, as we look at Psalm 91, I want us to ask the question, “Has God not kept His promises?” This psalm is surely a psalm of promise…surely a psalm of hope and peace. At this point in time, we all need hope. In our second week of not being able to gather together in person, it’s discouraging. This isn’t what want, and I know it’s not what so many of you want: to not be able to gather together…to not see this room filled with people shaking hands, hugging one another. We’re not able to do that, and it doesn’t feel right. Because of that, we are discouraged. But I want us to be encouraged. I want us to be challenged to a new hope through this text this morning.
The psalmist wrote this psalm to someone. You can see his testimony in the first couple verses, then he speaks, “You will not fear.” He wants us to hear the hope that he knows. So I want us to read through the psalm, and we’re going to look at this hope that the psalmist gives us.
Psalm 91
1 I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
2 I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.”
3 For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler
and from the deadly pestilence.
4 He will cover you with his pinions,
and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.
5 You will not fear the terror of the night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
6 nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.
7 A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.
8 You will only look with your eyes
and see the recompense of the wicked.
9 Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place—
the Most High, who is my refuge—
10 no evil shall be allowed to befall you,
no plague come near your tent.
11 For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
12 On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.
13 You will tread on the lion and the adder;
the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot.
14 “Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him;
I will protect him, because he knows my name.
15 When he calls to me, I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will rescue him and honor him.
16 With long life I will satisfy him
and show him my salvation.”
What words of hope we have in this psalm. We see open with wonderful words of hope and promise, the psalmist boldly proclaiming the character of the God whom he serves. Boldly proclaiming the character of God and the surety in which he stands, the psalmist, using four names to describe God, says, “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty” (verse 1, emphasis added). So God is “Most High.” God is “Almighty.”
“I will say to the LORD,” (He’s “the LORD”) ‘My refuge and my fortress, my God” (emphasis added). He’s not some impersonal God. He is “my God,” the psalmist says. God is surely our refuge and our fortress.
God is our refuge and fortress.
We stand firm and can stand confident in His shadow. He is unchanging. He is all-powerful. We need to remember who God is and just what His character is so that we will know where our hope lies. You see, the psalmist starts out with this because he knowns how sure, how important it is for us to know the character of God…to know that He is unchanging…to know that He is strong…to know that He does care for us…to know that He is sovereign and in control…to know that He is holy. He is set apart.
Right now we need this comfort, comfort that only comes from knowing our God, the One who is Most High, the One who is Almighty. We need this comfort, every single one of us. We need hope—hope that only comes from God—that He’ll bring us through this present trial. We know this hopeful because of the character of God, that He is sovereign; that He is above all; that He is all-mighty. We know that He is sure. If it is His promises that we are relying upon, it’s going to be the promises are going to be dependent upon His character, so it’s important that we know His character is sure. It is unchanging; therefore, His promises are sure and unchanging. See, He makes a promise that “no evil shall be allowed to befall you…no plague come near your tent” (verse 10).
It’s important to know: What is this security that God offers? What is this security that He is talking about? Ligon Duncan rightly says this: “If we do not rightly understand the security that we have from God in this world, we may look for security to a change of our circumstances.” What he’s saying is that we will look to something else for security instead of God if we don’t understand the security that we do have. I have to ask the question: Is God our refuge and fortress? Have we trusted in Him to hold us, no matter the circumstances—not just in the current situation as we face a global pandemic, something that none of us has ever experienced—but before this all started: Was God our refuge and our fortress? Is God showing us, perhaps, that He’s not been our refuge and our fortress?
We hear this promise in our human, fleshly hearts, and as we look at this—our present situation—and we may be tempted to ask, “Has God not kept His promise. Does God not keep His promises?” We may come to this point, and even if we think we’re in agreement with the first few verses of this psalm, we look at the promises that lie within it, and we say, “Are they still true?” We ask the question, “Are we not in the midst of a terrible plague? Do we not right now face possible death and defeat? Has evil not fallen on us? Has plague not entered into our homes?”
Has God not kept his promise?
We come to this text, and we ask the question—because of our situation, we’re forced to ask—“Has God not kept His promise?” We must answer this carefully, for to answer it rashly or based only upon our limited human wisdom would be disastrous.
One perspective may help. According to some scholars, this Psalm was written by King David. He wrote many of the Psalms, so this isn’t beyond reason. It could be very likely that he did. Particularly though they believe that he wrote this psalm during or right after the events of 2 Samuel 24. If you don’t know the story of 2 Samuel 24, it’s when David, in the middle of his reign (at the height of his reign), decides to take a census of the kingdom. This census is contrary to God’s Word, contrary to the direction that God gave in the Law to Israel, and because of that, God punishes Israel. He punishes David through a plague that comes upon them.
God brought this plague upon the people because of David’s bad judgment—because David was trusting in a refuge other than God. What was David doing in that census? He was doing that census among his people so that he would know how many men he would have in his army…so that he would know how many people he could tax. He was putting his hope in the amount of manpower he had, the amount of wealth that he could garner. He was putting his hope in the power of his armies—and God judged him, judged the nation, so that he would know his hope could be in nothing other than God himself.
This plague for David in 2nd Samuel was judgment against David and Israel, but it turns out this judgment was grace for it brought David to his knees. It literally brought David to his knees in worship and in fear. Not only did it bring David to his knees, but God held his hand, by the grace of God, after the repentance of David. It was there that God would give direction for David to build the temple, so that God might dwell among His people.
I believe, after you look at this psalm, you see this very well could be the purpose of writing this psalm. It was the psalmist telling us, “Your hope is in the One who is Most High. Your hope is in the One who is Almighty. Your hope must be in the LORD.” He must be your refuge.
In verses 9 and 10, we read, “Because you have made the LORD your dwelling place—the Most High, who is my refuge—no evil shall be allowed to befall you, no plague come near your tent.” So we see, when judgment, in the form of a plague, came upon David, it was grace that David and Israel would place their hope in God instead of the world.
We must ask ourselves what is the greatest evil that could befall us? For if God’s promise is to remain true from this text, what is the evil the greatest evil that could befall us? What is God protecting us from? What does He save us from? Why can we have hope in the promises that He gives us in this psalm? The greatest evil that could befall us is to remain apart—unreconciled—in enmity with God. The greatest evil that could befall us is judgment. The problem is that this judgment is just. The worst evil that could happen to us is not this epidemic, not this pandemic. You may come back at me, and you may say, “What are you trying to say, Josh? Are you trying to say that God is using this epidemic for my good?”
Is God using this epidemic for my good?
Absolutely!
Is God using this pandemic to humble a nation, to humble a world?
Absolutely!
And if that’s the case, He’s doing this for our good.
He has humbled us, has He not? He has taken away all of our earthly assurances. He has shown us how our depraved selfishness is evident in our obsessiveness over self-preservation. He has shown our absolute frailty. He has shown us in the stock markets that money does nothing in the midst of fear and the unknown that comes in this uncertainty. He has shown us in this plague that our individualism will kill us. He has shown us that we desperately need a healing—not just on this earth, but a healing from above.
God’s promises are sure. So we can know that this epidemic surely is being used by God for our good. For if God has kept His promises, we know that the worst is not this epidemic. The worst is something far worse: It’s separation from our Creator. It’s condemnation that we’ve brought on ourselves. The worst evil that can happen to us is to remain apart from him.
W.S. Plumer, a Puritan theologian, says this: “Although God has not promised that his people shall not leave the world by casualty or malady, as he did respecting the Lord; yet this is their rejoicing that the manner of their departure is settled not by caprice or luck, but by infinite wisdom; not by malice, but by unfailing love.” And Plumer, writing this hundreds of years before this current epidemic, says this: “Epidemics have no power but as they have a commission from God.” This epidemic has no power other than what God has given it.
You see, what we’re tempted to do at this point in time is to say, “How can God accomplish good in this?” We’re tempted to say, “But I deserve to be happy and healthy.” We look at ourselves, and we start doubting the character of God, and we fail to see what’s really going on. This is exactly where Satan wants us to be.
How does this psalm start out? It starts out with the declaration of the character of God, His sureness, His faithfulness, why He is our refuge. So, exactly what we don’t want to do, but what Satan would love for us to do, is to doubt God’s character so that we will fail to trust Him. If we were to doubt His character, if we doubt God’s character, then we deny the very truths that are the very foundation of the promises of this psalm. We deny that God is who He says He is.
Now, here’s where this psalm gets really interesting. This psalm is famous not only because of its wonderful promises, but this psalm is famous because it’s quoted in the New Testament—but perhaps not by whom you might think.
Satan’s Deceit
In Luke’s Gospel, as Jesus is in the wilderness at the beginning of His ministry, Satan appears to Jesus, and he says this in Luke 4:9–13. Satan “9took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 10for it is written [quoting Psalm 91], “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,’ 11and “ ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ ”
What is Satan doing quoting Scripture? Satan is doing what he’s done since the Garden: He’s taking the words of God and twisting them to serve his means, to make us question the character of God—and in this moment in Luke, he’s challenging Jesus to question the character of God…to question the character of His Father. So he quotes Psalm 91, and he says, “Is this not true?”
See, this is where we must learn from Jesus’ answer: “12And Jesus answered him, “It is said, [quoting Scripture again] ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”
“You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”
Satan took God’s promise, tried to put in light, and he challenged Jesus to test the promises of God by doing something rash, by doing something foolish. But Jesus said, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” Satan was attempting to deceive even Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior of the world. But Jesus knows the character of the Father.
Jesus’ Challenge
Jesus challenged Satan; therefore, I think we should be challenged by Jesus’ challenging of Satan: Do not put the Lord your God to the test. He’s quoting from Deuteronomy 6:16–19: 16“You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah. 17You shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and his testimonies and his statutes, which he has commanded you. 18And you shall do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that it may go well with you, and that you may go in and take possession of the good land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers 19by thrusting out all your enemies from before you, as the Lord has promised.”
Jesus is quoting from Deuteronomy—and if we know that context of that quote in Deuteronomy, he says, “You shall not test the Lord as you did at Massah,” when Israel grumbled because of the challenges they were facing. They grumbled because they doubted God’s character and God’s promise to bring them to the Promised Land, to bring them home to fulfill all that He said.
The people—in Deuteronomy, in Israel—they tested God by questioning his character. Satan did the same thing when he sought to tempt Christ—and he’s doing the same thing to us right now by challenging us to question, “Is God’s promise true? Is God’s promise true?”
Now we must go back: What is the worst evil that could befall us? It is not plague. It is not epidemic. It is not, the enemies that, as the psalmist says, fall at your right side and at your left (verse 7). The worst evil, we realize, is the judgment that comes because of our wickedness. This wickedness that we see all around us, the brokenness that we see even in this plague, they have their origins in the events of Genesis 3. When God created the world, He created it good. But the Serpent, Satan, entered into the Garden, and he came to Eve. What did he say to her? “Did God say… Is God who He says He is?”
What we see from Genesis all the way to Luke, from Psalm 91 to Deuteronomy, what we see through all of it: He is our peace. It is in Him that we have these things. If we are in Christ, we do not have to fear death. This is the hope—the promise—of this psalm, because He holds fast those who trust in Him. “I will deliver him; I will protect him, because he knows my name” (verse 14). What they only knew in a mist, in a cloud, before in the Old Testament, we now know fully: that Jesus is the Son of God, the fulfillment of these promises…that He is the One who has defeated sin and death. In Him, we have hope—and if we know Christ, and we know what He has rescued us from, we don’t fear death. We don’t have to fear death because we have life and life eternal. We’ve been reconciled to God. The thing—the evil—that we should fear the most—the condemnation that we deserve because of our rebellion, because of our sin—we no longer have to fear when we trust in Christ.
One emperor, the Emperor Julian, was concerned about the rise of Christianity. He wanted to reverse this rise of Christianity and restore paganism, but the problem was that pagans did not have a doctrinal basis to have hope after death. They had no doctrinal basis to compel them to help others because this life wasn’t all that there was to be worth living. They couldn’t build an idea of what charity would look like here and now, because their charity—or lack thereof—did not risk their salvation. Their charity, their hope in life after death, was not based in a life that would be with God.
One author, Rodney Stark, talks of this. He says of the famous Roman physician Galen, “He lacked belief in life beyond death. [He ran from the city when plague came.] The Christians were certain that this life was but prelude” to the eternity that was to come, and the Christians were the ones who ran to serve and to care for those who were affected by this plague.
You see, in Christ, we don’t have to fear death. In Christ, we don’t have to worry about what we might lose here on this earth. In Christ, we can be bold to love the world and to tell the world the truth. In Christ, we have assurance, hope, and peace.
Jesus: Our Dwelling Place, Our Assurance, Our Hope, and Our Peace
But see, it’s only in Christ.
I love Romans 8, where Paul sums up our assurance in Christ. He says this: “35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35–39)
Did you hear that promise? That is not a promise to escape from death. He says right there: “For your sake we are being killed all the day long.” What’s most important—the evil that’s the most evil that could befall us—would be to be separated from God—and apart from the work, apart from the faith in Jesus Christ, we truly are. But if we trust in Christ, nothing can separate us from the love of God.
My brothers and sisters, if you have faith in Christ, you have a hope that is beyond this life, so don’t fear death. Don’t fear death. You do not have to be afraid of COVID-19. You do not have to be afraid of not having enough if your job is lost, if the market tanks, if our government were to crumble, we’d have nothing to fear, for nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. So have hope. If you know Christ, you know God, for He says, “I have made the Father known. If you know me, then you know the Father.” Christian, you do not have to fear death. You do not have to fear pandemics. You do not have to fear trial, for your hope is sure in Jesus Christ.
This hope, though, should lead us to bold, selfless love. We can enter into the darkness—we can sacrifice our security—because we know where our true safety is assured from. We can even gather remotely via the Internet in boldness because we know that it is God who holds His church together, and while this is painful and burdensome, we know in this point in time we can do it and do it boldly because it enables us to love our neighbor well—and we can know, in confidence, that God is using this epidemic for our good.
So my prayer is this: May this epidemic be an opportunity for our confidence in God to be put on display. May it be an opportunity, and may we see it just as that. May it be an opportunity for us to put on display our love for one another—even if that means social distancing. Let us put on our love for one another, and let us love for the world. This is an opportunity for us to proclaim our hope, just as the psalmist did.
Ligon Duncan said this: “Christianity does not promise you that you will escape from suffering, but it does promise you that God will use the suffering which He has appointed for His own purposes and that He will cover you, even though He deliver you not.” Our hope is not in this life, but in the life to come—life that only comes in Christ. So my brother or sister, do not fear. If you know Christ, you do not have to fear death.
But I also want to speak to you who are listening who don’t have this hope, if you don’t have this peace, if you are trembling in fear, listen: You may not know Christ. To know Christ is to know this peace, so I want to invite you to trust in Him. Realize that you are separated from God because of your sin. Realize that, in this moment in time—this providential pandemic—is being used by God to humble you, to bring you, to make you aware of your need, to show all things that you have put your hope in that cannot guarantee you a thing. He has done all of this so that you might trust in Him. Listen then to the words of warning that Jesus gave in the Gospel of Luke: 4“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. 5But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!” (Luke 12:4–5)
Know right now that we all will face the judgment. Those who trust in Christ through repentance and faith, they know that these promises are true, for God says,
14 “Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him;
I will protect him, because he knows my name.
15 When he calls to me, I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will rescue him and honor him.
16 With long life I will satisfy him
and show him my salvation.”
My hope and my prayer is that all of you who are watching will know this salvation that God offers, that you will know that He offers life and life abundant—eternal life with Him for those who trust in Him. My hope and my prayer is that you would know the peace that comes in knowing God, the peace that comes from trusting in Christ as your Savior.
I want you to know that you can do that right here, right now. You can do that in your home. What you are called to do is not some outward act, but what you are called to do right now is to come before God, to confess your sins, to repent, and say, “Lord, I know You’re my only hope.” God promises to give life to those who trust in Him. I hope you’ll do that right here, right now. If you have questions about what it looks like to trust Christ, you can contact me, contact us at the church. We’d love to encourage you in your newfound life, in your newfound faith with God. But don’t wait. Christ warned us: Don’t fear those who kill the body. Fear the judgment that is to come. God has warned us of our sin. He’s warned us of our frailty through this plague. Realize that that’s grace: For the Christian, it’s grace to show us even more so the idols we’ve begun to worship, how we’ve failed to trust in God; for those who have yet to believe, this plague is grace so that your hope would be not in this world, but in Christ—and in Christ alone. I hope we’ll all trust in him today.
