Chris McCurley: Thank you, Blake. Good to see everyone this evening. It's especially good to see some friends from Carnes. Many of you remember Michael Moon, who was our intern last summer here. He is with ⁓ about ten guys from the Carnes Congregation where he now works, along with Christian, who is the youth minister there, and with us also this evening. Glad you guys would travel through and stop. And sorry you have to listen to me, but thank you for being here tonight. So thankful for all of you being here tonight, too. As you know, we're in a series on the Psalms all summer long, Sunday morning, Sunday night, and tonight we're looking at Psalm twenty-nine. You know, back long, long ago in a galaxy. high school ⁓ health teacher and pe but ⁓ one of my responsibilities in being a health teacher was to cover the different systems of the body and when we came to the respiratory system I had an idea I thought you know I can talk about the respiratory system we can look at the diagrams in the book I can illustrate it on an overhead or whatever like but wouldn't it be great if I could actually get some lungs to bring to class that we could look at. So I went to the local meat packing plant And I said, I need six sets of lungs. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And I said, Well, it's for a ⁓ project in class. He goes, ⁓ okay. He said, Come back next week and you can get them. So I came in, I got my six sets of cow lungs. I brought ⁓ to class that day. The kids were super excited because, you know, high school kids like to be grossed out. I gave ⁓ all a a straw and so we would blow into the straw and inflate the lungs. And I thought it went pretty well. I mean, one kid sucked in instead of blowing out, that was kind of gross. But other than that Other than that, I thought it went really well. You know, there's a difference in lecturing, listening to someone tell you something, and actually experiencing it. I could tell the kids, hey, these are a set of lungs, and you know, show them a diagram on the board. I could say, hey, here's a cow and it's got lungs just like you do, but to actually see them on a table, to touch them, to feel them, to cut them open and see all the inner workings, that's something much different. And that's what we have the opportunity to do with the Psalms. We have an opportunity to dissect them, to look at them, to see what is going on around the writer of them. You know, it's one thing to watch a butterfly dance majestically from flower to flower. It's another thing to dissect that butterfly and look at its inner working. So that's what I want to do tonight with Psalm 29. Turn there with me. I don't have it on the board. Psalm 29, starting in verse 1. Ascribe to the Lord O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory do his name. Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. The voice of the Lord is over the waters, the God of glory thunders, the Lord over many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. The Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon. He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf. And Syrian like a young wild ox. The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness. The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth and strips the forest bare, and in his temple all cry glory. The Lord sits enthroned over the flood. The Lord sits enthroned as King forever. May the Lord give strength to his people. May the Lord bless his people with peace. So the reason I want to cover Psalm 29 is because, well, really twofold. First and obviously, I want us to look at what is going on in this psalm and how it can apply to our lives. But secondly, I want us to observe the way it was written. You know, biblical poetry matters, and we need to understand the different genres that are used in the Bible, the different writings, and poetry is one of them that is used, especially here in Psalms. This is biblical poetry. So what is David saying? what is going on in his life that he would say this. What is the culture of the time? All that matters as we dissect this. This is how we experience the butterfly by dissecting the communication strategy and the pattern. What is being communicated and how is it being communicated? Also what is going on in the world at this time. And so this is not just applicable to the Psalms. We see it throughout The Bible. It's important for us to always understand that the Bible was written to a specific people at a specific time in a specific culture, going through a specific set of circumstances. And so how do we take from that a principle or principles and apply them to our lives? It's highly important for us to connect the dots here with what's going on in the Psalms and how that connects with prayer and then, of course, our lives. Just a quick recap. Remember. Psalms are the prayer book for exiles. And that's us. We are exiles. We are strangers. We're pilgrims in this world. And it's someday the exile is going to be lifted and we're going to get to go home. But for now, we can see ourselves in these psalms because we too are exiles. Also, the Psalms are a literary temple. The temple is where God made his presence known. The temple is where God said, I'm moving in with you. I'm gonna come move in with you, and I'm I'm gonna be there, and you're gonna be there with me. And so the Psalms is a literary temple. You open up the Bible to connect with God and you find God dwelling there. So you enter the Psalms to meet with God and to hear the entire story of God's kingdom being sung back to you in poetry. So when you open your Bible, when you open it to Psalms, you are encountering God. While meditating on his word, you are engaging in the very same thing that God's people were engaging in at the time. They were meditating on Torah while they waited for the Messiah. And that's exactly what we're doing. We are meditating on God's word as we wait for the Messiah to return. So, with all that in mind, let's dissect the butterfly. And looking at the communication strategy or pattern, what do you notice in Psalm 29? As we read it, you see probably a pattern of repetition, right? This is key to understanding biblical poetry. A pattern of repetition is used over and over again in biblical poetry. Patterns of repetition are really the name of the game, and therefore we need to know how these patterns work. Look at the repeated words in verses one and two. Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings. Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory do his name. Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. Ascribe, ascribe, ascribe, then worship. It's a one, two, three punchline setup. Did you catch that? Ascribe, ascribe, ascribe. Ascribe what? Glory and strength. And when you ascribe glory and strength to God, what are you doing? Well, you're worshiping him, right? And there's a really cool feature here about the poetic literature in the Psalms. It's called framing or inclusio. Some call it bracketing. You see this often in the Psalms, where the first line or two matches up with the last line or two. You go to the end, verse 11 May the Lord give strength to his people, may the Lord bless his people with peace. So glory and strength are what the worshiper ascribes to God. And when you ascribe glory and strength to God, guess what he does? He gives it back to his people, glory and strength and and and peace. So similarity signals inversion. We as his worshipers give him strength and glory. He as the object of our worship gives us strength and shalom. Again, this is called inclusio or bracketing or framing, and it's when certain words appear in the opening and the closing moments of a psalm. And this is very important to biblical poetry. You know what's funny? I had a friend several years ago in a church that I was at. We were talking about singing and we were talking about some of the new songs. And he said, I just, I just don't really like the new songs. And I said, Really? What do you not like about them? He said, Well, they're just repetitive. I mean, if you notice a lot of the new songs, they just repeat the same thing over and over. And I said, Yeah, because a lot of the new songs are psalms. And if you read the psalms, they repeat over and over. We sing many new songs that are just psalms, some of them taken directly from the Psalms, not even changed too much. And yes, they're gonna repeat. They are very repetitive. And that's okay. I I it made me wonder if the ⁓ Israelites ever lobbied a similar complaint. Anyway, repetition matters in scripture, especially in the biblical poetry, and we see this right here in the s this Psalm 29. This are this is a pattern and a strategy. And we see this unfold as we go further. But there's another repeating phrase. It is the voice of the Lord. Or in Hebrew, coal Adonai. Cal Adonai is coal, sound, noise, ⁓ voice. Adonai, of course, is God, meaning Lord or Master. It is used in a more personal sense. So when coal derives from a personal source, it is translated voice. When it's an impersonal source, it's more of a noise. And when the source is a storm or translated as thunder, S coal can mean my voice, the sound coming out of a speaker, or the sound of thunder. That probably comes as no surprise, but when the word of the Lord shows up in Scripture, it means something. Remember the old E. F. Hutton commercials? When EF Hutton talks, people listen. When God spoke, people listened. When God speaks, it's important that we listen, to hear his voice. And what do we learn about the voice of the Lord from this psalm? Well, it's powerful, it's full of majesty. It breaks trees, it flashes forth flames of fire, it shakes the wilderness, it makes wildlife like deer give birth, it strips the forest bears bear. That the first time we see coal adulai show up in scripture, it's Genesis three and eight. Look at that with me. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Now this of course is after Adam and Eve eat from the wrong menu. And the fall is in full effect, and the first couple in history are frightened because the coal Adonai put the fear of the Lord in them. So they run. Literally, they run and they hide because they hear the coal Adonai, the sound of the Lord. Another place that we see the coal Adonai is at Mount Sinai. It's where we hear the word or the voice of the Lord sound forth. But here In Psalm twenty nine, it seems that a thunderstorm is the means by which God displays his power and strength. And the poet is observing a thunderstorm rolling in off the Mediterranean Sea, sweeping inward from the mountains of Lebanon, south of the desert of Kadesh, leaving destruction in its wake. By the way, this is not the Lebanon that is ⁓ east of Nashville. So, verse three, the voice of the Lord is over the waters. The God of glory thunders. The Lord over many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. The Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon. He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf, and Syrian like a young wild ox. The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness. The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. And David has an actual physical landscape in mind here as he's writing these words. Lebanon, Syrian, and Kadesh. Lebanon is in the north hill country, even really north of this map, couldn't fit it all on there. But it is a heavily forested region. Some of the tallest trees, some of the strongest trees were in this forested region. Think ⁓ sequoias, red woods. That's how big these trees were and how strong they were. They were used to build the temple, if you remember. So that's Lebanon. Then you have then you have Syrion, which refers to Mount Hermon. And Mount Hermon in ancient times was a name for this key landmark in the region. Actually, I should say it like this: Syrian was the name that was used interchangeably for the area, ⁓ key landmark in this region. Then you have Kadesh, which is the desert south of Judah where the Israelites wandered. You may remember that region coming up in your Old Testament readings. So on one level, The psalmist is talking about a storm, but on another level, the poet is meditating on the fact that the Almighty God expresses his great power, wonder, and majesty. Just as his voice can shake the wilderness, just as his voice can break the tallest trees on the planet, just as his voice can shake the wilderness, he made all of it, and he can destroy all of it with just a word. Did you ever play with Legos as a kid? I'd play with Legos now if I had them. When I was younger, my dad came home with a big piece of plywood and we put it in my room and I, over the course of a summer, built a Lego city, complete with an airport and and police station, fire station. And when I got done, it was it was nice to observe and to look at my Lego city. But looking at it wasn't nearly as fun as building it. So I pretended that there was an earthquake and I busted it all up so that I could rebuild it, so I could construct it. Again. That's the closest I'll ever come to knowing what it's like to be God. My little Lego universe, I was the God and I was in control. But God set all of this up. He made order out of chaos, and he can deconstruct it anytime he wants. And in fact, that is a theme that you see throughout the Bible, especially in Psalms, is God creating order out of chaos. And then when he wants to bring judgment, Taking that order and making disorder in order to get people's attention. And he can do that. He made it, he can deconstruct it. He is God. He is the coal adulne. And David is paying homage to that because poets, writers, authors, they write about what's going on around them. They often put their experiences into words. The biblical authors build out their theology of God's character and essence and purpose. From within their worldview. And what you see as their worldview many times is the Genesis account. Many times that's what they will refer back to is creation and what God did to create this world. And so David is hearkening back to creation and he's acknowledging that the God who created all of this can also undo it. Notice verses ⁓ just verse 10. The Lord sits enthroned over the flood. The Lord sits enthroned as king forever. This is a reference back to Genesis 1, 6 and 7, which reads, And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. Now, if you ever read through the Psalms, or if you have ever read through the Psalms in their entirety, you will find Genesis language throughout. You will find Eden in the language throughout. What David does here in this Psalm is he harkens back to creation. And the word for expanse in Genesis 1, 6 and 7 is the Hebrew word rakia, and it means firmament or visible arch of the sky. If you're reading Genesis 1, 6 and 7 along with me, your version may say dome or arch or something of that nature, vault maybe. Rakia is a word picture and it refers to a blacksmith hammering out or smoothing out Something. So you you think of a shield, a protective shield. You think of it being shaped to be used and to be useful. And so what does a shield do? It protects. So when we're talking about rakia, we're talking about the dome of protection. God separated the waters from the waters, the waters above from the waters below, and he did so with a dome, with a rakia, like a force field, right? Now humans have a place to live because he added on day three. ⁓ land and so there's a garden. But when God decided to destroy the earth with a flood, what did he do? Genesis seven and eleven. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened. So in the flood narrative we see the undoing of the second day of creation, don't we? God had separated the waters and provided a rakia, a dome. But when he enacted the flood, he took away that rakia, at least momentarily. The water above, the water below was unleashed. God established a boundary of order so that life can emerge. But as the flood ⁓ came, he removed it. No more protective dome. Think of it like a snow globe. You got this happy little life inside this snow globe, but you take away, you take away the globe or the dome around it. No more protection, no more rakiah. But then notice how the psalm ends. May the Lord give strength to his people. May the Lord bless his people with peace. Again, you see this major feature with biblical poetry, this inclusio. It especially applies to the Psalms. Similarity signals inversion. So we worship the God of the storm. We ascribe to him strength and glory. And in return, what does he do? He gives strength to his people. He blesses his people with peace. You ascribe to him glory and strength, and he gives it back to you in the end. He gives strength and glory to his people. This psalm doesn't end in terror, it ends on a high note. I don't know if you're following along with us on ⁓ the UVersion app. I know many of you are on there, but I'm doing a daily Bible study by the Bible Project, and some of you are doing it as well. But you've noticed up to this point in the year how many times the Bible talks about. Judgment and about a day of judgment, especially the minor prophets, which is where we're looking at right now in that daily study. But they always end with hope, don't they? That the terror never lasts forever. That while you can draw a breath, you have fo hope, and God does his best to remind us of that through the prophets, through his word, we know that there is hope that this isn't as good as it gets, that even as bad as it may get. That there's something better. Back in ⁓ I think it was nineteen seventy-nine, April 10th. You know, there's a town in Texas not far from where I was at called Wichita Falls, and they experienced something called Terrible Tuesday. Twenty-two tornadoes tore through that town in one day back in nineteen seventy-nine. I think two of them were F four or F five. They did like four hundred million dollars worth of damage. I've been there many times to preach at the Faith Village congregation there. Faith Village was the area of town that was named because of what went on there on Terrible Tuesday. They had faith as they rebuilt and they called it Faith Village, that part of town. But one thing about it is if you go back today, that was in 1979. If you go back today, you would never know that there was a Terrible Tuesday. You drive through that town. You would never know that they had 22 tornadoes, two of them being F-4, F5 back in 1979. You would never know it. You go through the whole Red River Valley, which all of it was affected by storms that day. You would never know that they experienced so much tragedy. Because that's the thing about storms, right? They come and they go. They come and they're there many times are tragic. They wreak havoc and they cause so much death and destruction. Forty-five people died on terrible Tuesday. 1,800 were injured. So I mean it was a devastating day for many people. But that's the thing about storms. They come and they go. And as devastating as they may be, there's calm and they're wake. And the poet here is reminding us that God may come in a thunderstorm. With just his voice, he can cause major destruction. But God is powerful, but he's also personal. That even though he's powerful, he's personal. And he wants what's best for his people. And in Jewish tradition, the rabbis they had a term called Dorshini or Dorshini. Dorshina is a Hebrew word that means research me, probe me, study me. The rabbis would use this word when they came to a moment in the text that would require further research or observation because it was obviously there for a reason. And so the Psalms are full of these moments, these little hidden gems. And in fact, Just as a side note, you see this throughout the Bible. If you look at how the rabbis, how the Jews would ⁓ parse out scripture, they had their own hermeneutic as well. Hermeneutic is, you know, how we interpret the Bible. They had their own. And one of the things that they would come to was like in the parables, ⁓ they believed that there was always something hidden in the teaching. And in their own parables, they hid things within the teaching that you had to really probe and discover. Because they didn't want you to just figure it out just by reading it or just by studying it right off the bat. They wanted you have to search and dig. And if they couldn't find it right off the bat, if the student, if the rabbi's students couldn't find it right off the bat, you know what they did? They rejoiced. They danced. Because it meant there was more to learn. That is so opposite of me and all of us. We want to know the facts. And it drives us nuts until we know it. Not for them. And so there's these hidden gems, and you see it throughout. That's why Jesus spoke in parables to find that hidden gem. And so there's this Dorshenai or Dorsini, which means research me, probe me, study me. And we see that in the Psalms upon further investigation, what we discover in Psalm 29 is how biblical poetry operates. But that's watching the butterfly float through the air. It's beautiful to witness. But if we want to understand the why behind the what, Then we must capture the butterfly and dissect it to see the real action and to encounter what's happening. And once we probe the inner workings of the butterfly, we find the message of the poetry. What's the message of Psalm twenty-nine? I think it's pretty clear and just in a condensed form, I think it's this put God in his place. Put God in his place. And there's only one place that he belongs. There's only one place that any of us should be placing him. On Mount Sinai, the Kol Adonai spoke to Moses to give him the Ten Commandments. And the first one was about putting God in his place. I'm the Lord your God, you are to have no other gods before me. And this was at a time where the people were living in Egypt, and Egypt Egypt's ⁓ Egyptians had no shortage of gods. It's like baskin robins, you know, you just pick your flavor. And among this myriad of gods, the col Adonai is saying. I'm it. You shall have no other gods before me. And how we often read that is well, God's got to be first place, right? Nothing else in your life should overpower God on your priority list. It's God and then everything else. But that's not really the message here. When it says, you shall have no other gods before me, what it really means is in my presence. There is no priority list. I if you're going to make a priority list, it should be this. Number one, God. Number two, there is no number two. It's only God. But when he says, have no other gods in my ⁓ before me, it means in my presence. No other gods in my presence. It's just me. I'm the only one in your presence. No other gods around. I'm it. That's what it means to put God in his place. I love how Kyle Iderman puts it in his book, God's at War. God declines to sit atop of an organizational flow chart. He is the organization. He is not interested in being president of the board. He is the board. And life doesn't work until everyone else sitting around the table in the boardroom of your heart is fired. He is God, and there are no other applicants for the position. That's what David was trying to get across, I believe, in Psalm 29. He is almighty, he is powerful. Our only position is on our knees and on our faces before him. Ascribe him glory and strength. And guess what we get in the end? Glory and strength. Can we help you tonight? Can we pray with you? Maybe you'd like to set up a Bible study with someone, we certainly would love to do that as well. Maybe you're ready to put on Christ in baptism tonight. Certainly we'd love to do that as well because there's no good reason to leave here tonight without being right with God. So if we can help you. Why don't you come as we stand and as we sing?