Episode 281: Psalm 95 | Tim Henderson

Introduction

Worthy you are, worthy you will be forever, Yahweh, worthy you were. Alright, alright, alright, alright, right, right, stop, stop, stop. I can't take it anymore, stop, enough, stop, stop. Are you listening to the words that you're saying? Do you mean what you are saying? Or are you mouthing words with a hard heart? Friends, I'm not remotely upset with you, forgive me. What we're gonna do this morning is we're gonna look at Psalm 95 and what you just saw probably in a startling, very unpleasant way is a dramatic representation of Psalm 95. I promise you, I'm not remotely upset. In fact, my heart is probably racing much more than yours, okay?

The Context of the Passage

Psalm 95 begins for the first six and three quarter verses with a happy song like you have just been singing. And then right there in the middle of verse seven, it kinda comes in out of nowhere with this harsh rebuke. It's like the people of God are singing and God himself interrupts the song. When you came in this morning, you probably got a really pretty version of it. Brynn Souder, woman here on our staff who helps lead feast with me, she hand calligraphied this, and it's all pretty and all colorful for the top, and then it just gets all black and harsh. Yeah, you're welcome to have a seat. Y'all doing, are we still friends? Is everything okay? Alright.

What you just saw, what you just experienced in a sense of like, has Tim lost his mind? Is really, it's Psalm 95, that's the way the thing works. So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna read it through to you. And as I do, you're gonna find it so happy, it is so cheerful, and then right around here it's like you're coming through an intersection and you just get broadsided by a truck, okay? That's what happens. After we read it, we're gonna talk about it, and this is gonna be we're gonna spend our time in the word trying to understand why did God just do in this Psalm what I just did on this stage. You with me? Alright, let's take a look. Psalm 95, and we'll see what the Lord has for us this morning. And this is gonna be our scripture reading. So all of waiting, where are the gospel readers coming? They don't get to come on today. Okay? We're we're messing stuff up a little bit.

This is Psalm 95. This is the word of the Lord. It says this:

Oh come, let us sing to the Lord.
Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, and let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise.
For the Lord is a great God and a great king.
In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the heights of the mountains are also his.
The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.

Oh, come let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For forty years I loathed that generation and said they are a people who go astray in their heart and they have not known my ways. Therefore, I swore on my wrath in my wrath, they will not enter my rest.

The Hardening of Hearts

Do you see it? Do you feel like this dramatic change that goes on right here? Everything's all bright and colorful and sing songy and then God shows up with a really harsh rebuke. What I wanna do this morning is kinda unpack that rebuke. We're gonna be looking here at what we would call seven d, right? The fourth clause of the seventh verse is where it starts to turn black. We're gonna try to unpack what's going on here this morning. So let me read you that passage because this is really gonna be where we're gonna be and what I want you to understand this morning. Okay? You ready? I'm not gonna yell at you again today. Tomorrow's a new day though, so we'll just see what happens. Here we go, seven d.

Today, this day, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof that they had seen my work.
For forty years, I loathed that generation. That's strong, is it not? And I said, they are a people who go astray in their heart and they have not known my ways.
Therefore, I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.

Now, here's what you need to know. Psalm 95, and in particular, this chunk of it, the end of it, exists in your Bible between two great pillars. Between Exodus chapter 17 on the one hand, and Hebrews chapters three and four on the other. Okay, what's happening here in this little passage is it's an allusion back to a historical event that happened with Israel in Exodus 17, we'll see that. And then it gets unpacked and explained in Hebrews three and four. It's a strange passage, not only because of this, like, shock attack that God comes in with this rebuke in the middle of a song, but also because it is a, it's very rare in as much as there is a sermon in your Bible about this passage. And that sermon is is called the book of Hebrews. We tend to think of the letters of the New Testament as letters. Somebody sat down and write, you know, dear John, here's the thing, da da da, love Tim, right? And that's true for many many of the letters, but Hebrews is strange. Hebrews is a sermon manuscript. It has lots of clues in it that it's really actually a sermon. Has the cadences of spoken language rather than written language. He repeats things very frequently the way that you would to an audience who doesn't have the text to scroll back up to to look at, but has to be reminded of what you just said. So Hebrews is a sermon, and one of the things that he does in Hebrews is he basically exposits this passage of Psalm 95. So we're gonna go back and we're gonna look at it, we're gonna see what it is, and kinda what it all what it all means, so that the the great advantage of that is we don't have to guess. My work is done for me this morning. Right? I don't have to do the work to figure out what does what does Psalm 95 really mean, because Hebrews tells us, it's a little bit like when Jesus tells these parables, and he tells story after story, and some of the time you can figure it out, but some of the time Jesus' parables just leave you scratching your head. You're like, I don't know where you're going with this. And every once in a while, Jesus will stop and then turn to his disciples and be like, here's what that story meant. Right, he kinda takes the cookies and puts them on the bottom shelf. Psalm 95 is one of those bottom shelf kinda things because Hebrews unpacks it for us. So we're gonna be, we're gonna first go back, we're gonna see what are we talking about, what's going on in Exodus 17, and then we're gonna go forward to Hebrews three, and if we go from Exodus to Psalm 95 to Hebrews three, then we're gonna figure out, okay, I get it, I understand what's going on here, and that's the goal. Alright?

The Call to Faithfulness

Psalm 95 says this, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness. Okay? And when he says this, he's talking about something specific. It looks like he's talking about two locations, but it's really just one. Massah and Meribah is the double name of a single place. Okay? Massah means testing, and Meribah means quarreling, and this is a a that God gave to a particular place because the people of God did chiefly two things there. Would you like to guess what they were doing there? They were testing God. They were quarreling. And so God names this place testing and quarreling to remind them of their rebellion.

Does anybody know what Roanoke, sweet, sweet Roanoke used to be called? Big Lick, alright. So whatever that's, so there is a, supposedly we have like salt marshes where the deer and the elk and the buffalo, whatever's roaming around here, would come, and so the hunters were like that because they would come in, and so they named this place Big Lick, which I think makes it sound like we are just a bunch of hicks, right? But we changed the name from Big Lick to Roanoke. These guys didn't get to change the name of their town. They lit this is welcome to testing and quarreling because we are the people who test and quarrel with God.

Take a look. Go back to Exodus 17. I'll put it on screen for you and you can kinda pick up what's going on. In Exodus seventeen one, it says this, all the congregation of the people of Israel moved on from the wilderness of sin by stages. Don't overstate sin. That's not really meaningful in that sense, not the way we mean it. According to the commandment of the Lord in the camp to Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. Therefore, the people quarreled with Moses and said, give us water to drink. And Moses said to them, why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord? But the people thirsted for water there and the people grumbled against Moses and said, well, why did you bring us up out of Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst? So Moses cried to the Lord, what shall I do with this people? They're almost ready to stone me. And the Lord said to Moses, pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel, and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. Despite their quarreling and their testing, he still provides them with water. Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink. Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel, and he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, and because they tested the Lord by saying, is the Lord among us or not?

You got it? So we're in the middle of the Exodus, the people of God had been rescued out of slavery in Egypt, but they're not yet in the promised land. They're in this middle space. And in between the slavery of Egypt and the rest in the promised land, they get super grouchy, super grumpy, and they're really, really a very unhappy people. And writing about that moment, four hundred years later, when David is writing Psalm 95, he looks back at that and he says, y'all haven't changed that much. You've never outgrown this inclination to grumble and to test. And so the risk that those people were under here in the desert is still very much a live risk for you. Right? And you continue to have a heart inclined to testing and quarreling.

And Moses and so essentially, the people jump in with this language from the Moses era during the David era that says, today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness when your fathers put me to the test. The author of Hebrews is gonna kinda make a play on this notion of today, and he's basically saying, it was today in Exodus 17 when the people of God were testing and quarreling. And it was today when David wrote Psalm 95 and said things have not changed all that much. And we'll see in a moment, it was today, another two thousand years later, when Hebrews was being preached. And it is today, another two thousand years later. And we remain at the same risk that each of these people were to have a heart that grows hard, that quarrels and tests. That's what this message is about. We're under that same risk. And if you want to know what I keep saying because this thing keeps saying, you have a hard heart, you're hardening your heart, your heart is growing hard. It's worth understanding what that means. And the way to find out what that means, or the best inspired explanation of what that means, is Hebrews three and four.

Explanation of Hard Heart and Warning

Turn there, I'll have it on screen, if you wanna understand Hebrews three and four. Like as I said, this was almost certainly not a letter, It's a sermon transcript. Reads like this. And if you look if you script through it, if you look go down to Hebrews three verse seven, he quotes this passage of Psalm ninety five seven d and and following. And then, I won't read it again, but in verse 12, he begins to explain it. So this is the divinely inspired explanation of the passage that we just read. You with me? I know we're jumping around. You with me? Exodus 17, Psalm 95, we're now in Hebrews three looking back to see what does this thing mean that was a reflection back on Exodus 17.

Here's the explanation.

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God.
But exhort one another every day as long as it is called today, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.
As it is said, today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.

Okay? So Hebrews is keying in on this notion of hard heart. It's all about the hard heart, And he picks up the two main ways that we harden our hearts. Okay? What are they? Did you notice what they were in the passage? What is it that What is the What are the factors that lead to a hard heart? Did you see it in the text? Okay. Test testing and quarreling is the name of the place, yes. But he and that's that's out of Psalm 95. But in Hebrews, he's gonna distill it down to two things. You wanna take a shot, Lily? Unbelief. Unbelief is one. And so I'm gonna say disbelief for the sake of alliterative memorization. Yes. Disbelief. And so you guys see the other one? It's disobedience. It's disbelief and disobedience. I'll show it to you again in a minute here. Let's talk about disbelief first. Okay? There is this common temptation to disbelieve what God has said. Right? That rarely happens in a vacuum. It's rarely the case that you're like, well God said this and I don't believe it. It's far more often the case that we live in a sea of competing claims. God has said this, and then the world says this, and we're like, you know what, that's a really good point, I think you're right, and as our belief in some lie begins to grow, then our belief in the truth tends to diminish, and we're trading, you're exchanging one belief for another. Are you familiar with this? This happens like all the time, right? I believe what God has said until somebody else shows up, right? I mean, this is literally as old as the garden, right? God says something to Adam and Eve, and Satan comes up and says, did God really say? Right? And he begins to say, let replace your existing belief with a new set of beliefs. This is a very old game, and it's been happening to us, not just to these guys, not just to these schmoes in Exodus 17, and to the era of Psalm 95 or to the people who heard Hebrews three and four. This is live right now and our hearts are moved to a different set of beliefs. He says it again. Take a look. Look at verse 16. For who listen again for the disbelief and the disobedience. For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness?

And here it comes.

And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient?

So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief, disbelief. Right? We have those two things, disbelief and disobedience. And there's no one in this room that is exempt from trading in old beliefs for new ones, that is exempt from just slipping into disobedience. It's super common. In my experience, we don't start disobeying with like murder and a torrid affair. Right? But it's little by little by little. Do you know this phenomena in your own life? It's not a big deal, you just do this little thing.

Here's what I wanna warn you of because what this passage is warning us of, is those little things that if there's some little thing and there's a check in your spirit, your conscience bothers you, the Spirit of God whispers to you. Right? And you're like, yeah, I shouldn't do that, but I think I'm going to do it anyway. Have you ever noticed that voice that was telling you not to do it, it starts to grow dim. Right? That when you when you when you do something, when you sin against your own conscience, when you violate your conscience, here's what happens. The way that we're the way just that we are built is that if you ignore your conscience, if you seek not to hear the Holy Spirit, the voice will go away. And when it does, not only does it enable you to live with what you've just done, but it makes it so much easier to do the next thing too.

Is this a is this a strategy with which you are familiar? You just just leave it alone, just give it a week, and it won't bother you so much, and then you can do it again. This is the process by which our hearts grow hard. A little sin, a little disobedience, a little disbelief, and then it just goes away. And you're developing, like just like you develop a callus, you know, begins to hurt, working with a rake hurts until the callus is formed, and then it doesn't hurt anymore. And that's great if you're raking. It's pretty bad if you're sinning, and it becomes easier and easier to sin, and your calluses are forming on your heart. Your heart is developing a hardness. This is what he's warning of. Okay?

Personal Illustration and Application

So I wanna illustrate this with a story that I absolutely hate because it's a story about me, but kind of the nature of teaching the scriptures is sometimes we just have to put ourselves on display. So here's a story here. What I want to illustrate to you is that the problem with doing something wrong is not always the wrong thing that you have done, but is the way it facilitates the next wrong thing that you might do.

So a couple weeks ago, I was filing my taxes and just going through all the rigmarole of our, you know, whatever, the ten ninety nine DIVs and the all, you know, or W twos and all that kind of stuff. And I have, for the last couple years, I've taught a leadership class to pastors in the Roanoke Valley. Super fun. It's kinda just this side gig, and a friend of mine asked me if I'd be willing to teach some people and it developed into something.

So every year, I hold this class. We do once a month, and it's super fun. I love it, and I get paid to do it, and they just pay me directly. The first year I did it, everybody that paid me gave me $10.90 nine's, which is like a special document. You give one to me, one to the IRS, and it says, hey, this is legitimate income. It's like a W-2 for contractors, essentially. So you take it, you file it, you tell the government you made all this money, and then they tax you for it.

Well this year, for whatever reason, nobody gave me a 1099. And so I emailed them, I was doing my taxes and I'm going through the paperwork and there's no 1099. I emailed them and I'm like, you guys are gonna send me a 1099? Nah, it's fine, don't worry about it. So then I filed my taxes and I submitted it because if I don't have the 1099, it's kind of a gray area, you don't really have to report it, it's not just getting paid under the table. And so I filed it and I submitted my taxes except did you hear that I just lied to you? Okay? Because it's not really a gray area. It's just a black and white area that the IRS doesn't know. And they have no right to know, thank you very much, because it's my money. Do you understand?

Okay. So this happens. And then we're praying for revival, and we're asking the Spirit of God to come. This stuff is happening in Kentucky, we're so excited, Lord, come. Spirit, come. And when I'm praying for the Spirit to come, and revival to come, and I'm thinking, when you come Lord, you're gonna convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment because that's what you do. But come Lord, and then like, oh no, if you come, I'm gonna have to confess that. And I'm gonna have to go file an amended return because I could kinda justify why it's, you know, it's like you don't file taxes when you're shoveling the snow for your neighbor. And I'm thinking, but if you, the Spirit, so now I'm like, I don't really want the Holy Spirit to come. I don't really want a revival because I wanna save a couple thousand dollars on my tax bill.

You see, you hear the problem? Okay. Now here's the thing, in that moment, I'm thinking like, it'll be fine, give it a week and it'll go away. And I'm right. I could have done that. And it just drifts off into a distant memory. And the consequence of that would have been number one, the IRS would have missed out on a couple thousand dollars that I'm sure they would use very well. Right? But the secondary effect is it would have been easier to do it again. Do you understand that? That phenomena of like, in that moment, as I'm like realizing, that's not great, you're lying to yourself. Stop lying to yourself and repent and confess, and let your own hard heart grow soft again.

So I got out a calculator, I did the math, filed the thing, submitted the amended return, and gave them my money. And it was the absolute right thing to do. And I hate everything about that story. I hate the fact that the first time I filed my taxes, was like willing to like kinda wink at it. And I hate the fact that I lost a bunch of money. Okay? There's nothing about that story that I like. But the reality is, this is the function of being a Christian. Right? This is the process that you're probably may not get on a stage and admit it to a bunch of people. You probably face those same kind of decisions all the time. Will I do the shady thing that I can totally get away with and thereby harden my heart? Or will I live open and soft and repentant and make restitution if I've done something wrong?

Makes sense? It's live all the time. Probably sometimes when you're in this room and you hear something from this stage, some sermon that is preached. It might be a couple weeks ago, and I was talking about sex and marriage. Some of you may have been like, la la la la la, I don't wanna hear it. And just go away, and it'll all get better. You can just ignore it. Or maybe, some of you are like, ah, yeah, I've been playing this game, and it's time to soften my heart.

What this passage is telling us, not only not only do disobedience and disbelief lead to a hard heart, but a hard heart leads to something even worse. So come back to our passage here. Take a look at this. Go back to Hebrews chapter four. Listen to the, I think the most ominous line in this whole thing.

Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.
For good news came to us just as to them, but the message that they heard did not benefit them because they were not united by faith with those who listened.
For we who have believed enter that rest — as he said, and I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.

And this right here, this is the risk of allowing our hearts to grow hard through disbelief and disobedience. We can get ourselves to the point that we cannot enter the promised love and rest. This is actually a major, major theme in the book of Hebrews, and good evangelicals just don't know what to do with it. Because I was twelve years old and I prayed a prayer and walked the line, and we're like, I don't know how to do what do we do with these warning texts? Hebrews is filled with warning texts.

There were thousands, hundreds of thousands, who left slavery in Egypt but never made it into the promised land. Their bodies fell in the desert. They were redeemed from the land of slavery, but they were barred from entering the promised land. And we have a tendency to be like, well, I don't know what that means, so it doesn't mean anything. But that's a mistake. It does not mean nothing. It means that we are to cling to faith, to depend on the Lord for his gift of righteousness, believing his grace, believing his promises, and demonstrating our love for him through our obedience.

Friends, we are at risk. You live in the land between rescue and rest, and you are at risk of letting small disobedience and small disbelief grow into large disobedience and large disbelief. We are at risk of letting hard hearts bar us from entering his rest, which is why he says, today today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. Because Jesus is the great heart softener. He is the one who speaks to us. It is his word that calls us. It is he is the one who allows us to take a step back. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. From our disobedience and from our disbelief and to move toward him.

It is when we observe his extremity of his obedience, the lunatic fringe of his own belief and obedience, coupled with his supreme patience in enduring our disobedience and our disbelief. When those things come together, it makes us wanna sing. It makes us wanna live out the first half of that psalm, of Psalm 95. And that's where we wanna be, that we would be a people that declare the praises of him who called us out of darkness and into his wonderful light, and then we stay there. We don't shrink back into the shadows where we might be able to get away with stuff. It's where we live in a happy, deep consciousness of his supremacy in all things. And when he warns you, is perhaps he's doing this very moment. I don't know what's the thing that's niggling your mind. What's what is it? But whatever it is, don't don't push it aside. Don't don't be like, yeah, let it go. Don't harden your heart right now. Come.

We have this this mechanism every week where we invite people to come forward. Come, kneel before him right now. As Hebrews says, today, right now, this is the moment to take whatever that little shady thing is that's not that big of a deal, but that will grow if you leave it. Or perhaps has already become a big deal, and now you're like, don't know what to do. Come. Come forward. And speak to him. Clear your heart. Repent. Let it go. And know that his grace to you is overwhelming and enormous. His mercy to you will flow that you might sing that song without a check-in your heart, living in the freedom that was purchased for you by the blood of Christ.

Conclusion

Dig it. Lord Jesus, we love you. We adore you. And yet, so many things compete with you in our heart. Let us pray that today, right now, this morning, there would be a cleansing effect. Lord, if you wanna come in power as you have throughout history on the life of one person or ten or a hundred or everyone here or only on me. We invite you, Lord. Would you come today? Would you soften our hearts wherever they grow hard, that we would praise you as you deserve to be adored. We love you. Amen.