_Web.jpg)
When evil still creeps in unchecked and we wonder why God doesn’t swoop down to stop it, it can feel as if He isn’t even paying attention. Psalm 11 speaks to us when we feel that nagging doubt.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
This week there was a remarkable story; I don’t know if any of you caught it, but just ahead of the convening of the United Nations General Assembly, there was a massive attempt to attack the cell phone networks in the area around metro New York. Someone had bought tens of thousands of SIM cards and radios with the intent—although we don’t know the full details—but it would appear to bring the network down. You can kind of imagine, you don’t have to be the most imaginative, what that could have done.
Imagine if that had come down as world leaders, the most significant and powerful men and women from all around the world were gathered in one place. You bring that down; what could you do while the communications network was down? What kind of destruction could you bring? How much chaos could you bring to the world in just a moment? But while it was a story, and it was a story that I’d imagine some of you at least heard about, it wasn’t the story this week for a simple reason: they caught it ahead of time.
They found these hidden stashes of communications equipment that were intended to disrupt communications in New York. And while they hadn’t caught all the people involved, they had a pretty good idea of some of the bad actor terrorist-type groups that might have been related to it, state sponsors of terrorism, and so on. They haven’t released all the details of that. Maybe someday we’ll know; maybe we won’t. But if you read that story, it’s sort of reassuring because it tells us that our anti-terror intelligence works.
Here was someone just less than a week after 9-11, or maybe a little over a week, attempting to do something horrific in New York, and they didn’t get away with it. I think about that, and to me, it encourages me that I don’t want to see a repeat of such an event; none of us do. We see enough horrifying things that show up in the news, so how great it was that it was caught, and we feel maybe a little more peaceful.
But in our own lives, and in the picture of the world in general, we see an awful lot that goes on day in and day out, and we think, well, okay, so the FBI or the CIA or the Department of Homeland Security or whomever, yeah, they caught this. Maybe the other intelligence agencies in the world helped catch this. That’s working, but what about our God? How is it that we can say that He is everywhere and that He is working and that He desires what’s good, and yet there’s an awful lot that happens even in our own lives that we think, God, do you not care? Do you approve of this? I wonder why.
We see these attacks creeping around, and we think, where’s God’s agent? When is He going to swoop down and confiscate it all and stop it? It doesn’t seem like He’s even paying attention, but Psalm 11 tonight is going to remind us that yes, God actually is paying attention. That’s something we desperately need to know. Let’s pray that we sense His awareness and His presence, even tonight when you join me.
Father, we do come before You and ask that You would help us to know that You are with us, to recognize how You are working. And when we wonder why, why aren’t You swooping in like a secret agent and stopping these things? Why aren’t You just outright stopping them in a very non-secret way? Would You remind us of how You are working and that You are with us? We pray in Jesus’ precious name, amen.
Well, if you want to turn there to Psalm 11, go ahead and turn to Psalm 11. We’re going to start in verse 4 tonight, and we read these words: “The Lord is in His holy temple. The Lord’s throne is in heaven. His eyes see, His eyelids test the children of man. The Lord tests the righteous, but His soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.”
There are several important things that are stated in that little set of verses there. And the first one is it tells us where God is because we might say, well, where is God? One correct answer would be He’s everywhere, right? God isn’t centered in any one place, but if we’re trying to say, well, where is His seat of power? It’s not in Jerusalem, it’s not in Washington, D.C., it’s not in London or Paris, it’s not in Tokyo or Beijing, it’s in heaven.
It says God’s presence is in His holy temple. Our first temptation might be to say, oh, that’s why we need to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, it needs to be there so God’s holy presence is here. But notice David goes on and says the Lord’s throne is in heaven. It’s His heavenly temple. In other words, the King of heaven, the creator of everything, He’s not limited to some place we can place on earth like ancient religions thought.
How many ancient religions out there thought they were the city that had been adopted by a god, and so if you just were in that city you’d receive extra blessing as long as you stayed on the right side of that god? David says, no, that’s not the case. And keep in mind that David is king over a prosperous Israel, the place that God has called His people to, so there’d be a lot of reason for him to want to say, and the Lord is right here in my city or in my country. What does David say? David says the Lord is in heaven.
He’s not limited to some earthly place. It also means He’s not blind to something happening in some other part of the earth. If He were in Jerusalem, maybe we’d say, but He doesn’t know what’s going on a thousand or two thousand miles away or five thousand miles away. But no, the Lord knows precisely what’s going on wherever we are whenever it happens to be.
The One who created everything remains unmoved in view of everything. And yet, because we don’t always see Him working, we say, well, maybe He doesn’t see. A lot of times that happened in the ancient world, even with the followers of the Lord, and a lot of times it still happens today. It’s not an ancient thing. We go and we search for something else that we know can see, right?
Okay, God can’t see, so maybe I need some earthly power to help me out. We read in Habakkuk chapter two, notice what the prophet’s saying there. He’s saying, you want to go to these things that you can see. You can have this idol, and this idol, you can see it, and you can come up to it, and you can tell it your problems. But it’s a piece of wood.
One might say, ha ha, look at those backwoods, stupid people of old who didn’t understand anything, but don’t we do the same thing? I’ve been reading lately about people who are addicted to AI chatbots, and they become very, very attached to these chatbots. OpenAI updated their chatbot recently, and there were people who were aghast because they lost their friends that were the previous version. They had to bring it back because people are so outraged. Why were they so attached to them?
Come home, you type in your problems at the end of the day, and chatbot responds. And chatbot responds, being programmed to always respond in a way that’s supposed to be what you want it to say. And you think about that for a moment, and okay, it feels pretty good to have someone who you just type in your problem, and bam, I’m going to be exactly what you want me to be in this moment responding to you. But is that really different than talking to a piece of wood, really? No.
Because does chatbot care? No. Does chatbot actually know the solution to most problems? No. Is chatbot thinking about your problem between times that you open up the app? No. It just feels like it in the moment because there’s a simulation of human contact there. And in that, we’ve changed maybe the senses we want to have affected by our idols, our hopes, but it’s really the same thing because what did they do?
Well, okay, the wooden idol didn’t move its mouth or give a perfect response, but the wooden idol could be seen and focused on, and you could say, oh, here’s this thing that I can come to, that I don’t have to wonder where the Lord is. I don’t have to wonder what He’s doing. At least I can come here. I know exactly where I need to be, and I can say certain things. I have set: wooden idol here, wooden idol’s there for me because every time I go, the wooden idol’s still there. Why? Because the wooden idol’s not alive, doesn’t move, unless someone steals it, someone updates the operating system. So we still do it.
But in that oracle, what are the people being told? No, the Lord is the one that actually hears. The Lord is the one who’s on His throne in heaven. And so what should we do? We should be silent before Him. We should quit yapping at all these things that don’t actually understand, don’t actually have any connection to us or any ability to fix things, and we should come before the Lord. All mortal flesh keeps silence. There’s the old, the ancient Christian hymn. It’s right there.
We might say, okay, so God sees, but does He care? You know, at least chatbot feels like it cares. It might not see, it might not actually think, but at least it feels like it cares. I’d almost rather have caring without feeling or genuine existence than something that exists but doesn’t care. Does God just want to watch us suffer? No.
Go on in Psalm 11, verse 5: “The Lord tests the righteous, but His soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.” I don’t know that that necessarily, at first glance, makes me feel better. Okay, He hates the wicked, but He tests the righteous. Thanks, God. I mean, here I am, I’m struggling. I see those who love violence, and what do You do? You say, okay, let’s have a test.
Someone’s breaking into my house, and I call the police. I don’t want them to give me a civics test; I want them to come and arrest the person breaking into my house. Now, there’s a difference in view here. The righteous may be tested, but by testing it’s not referring to trying to see if they measure up. It’s about how God is working in our lives to strengthen us. It’s the term of the metalsmith, who would work with different metals and refine them and purify them so that they can be used properly. We see that in 1 Peter 1:7.
Peter picks up the same language: “So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” If you’re working with gold, you test it, you refine it, you put it in the fire to purify it because you want to provide a certain level of purity in the finished metal. But if you’re working with gold, you don’t pick up a piece of pyrite, fool’s gold, and do that. You don’t pick up copper and do that. You don’t pick up iron and do that. You pick up gold because what you’re looking for is gold.
And the point here that David is making is that God tests us, God refines us because we’re actually the ones He cares about and He wants in His presence. So far be it from God saying, okay, you’re facing the people who love violence; now let me make it even harder on you, I’m going to test you. What testing says is that He actually cares about us.
Some translations actually pick a different word about taking notice of or observing. It’s not quite as literally what’s written, but they’re trying to get that sense that what it really means is God’s saying, here’s the ones that I actually care about, here’s the ones whom I love, I’m paying attention. So the contrast there isn’t between the righteous who are just getting it from both sides, God’s coming at them on one side and the evil are coming at them on the other side, and they don’t know what to do, but rather, yes, they’re getting it on the side of evil, but on the other side God’s saying, you’re the ones that I care about and I’m working on, and I want you here, and I care about you. I really do see you. I love you.
Sometimes, though, it just isn’t apparent in the moment. I mentioned that amazing intelligence coup of detecting what was going on before the UN General Assembly last week, and sometimes that’s how it goes with criminal operations. We don’t even know they were happening. We didn’t know anyone was going to do that. I don’t think any of us did, unless we have a secret agent here that I don’t know about.
You probably didn’t know that that was going to happen until it had already been taken care of. And that’s how we’d like everything to be with our God: that we don’t even know the evil’s happening because He just always takes care of it. But in His plans, sometimes He instead waits.
Not every time the intelligence community, the human intelligence community, gets involved with something, does it take care of it all before we even know about it. About 10, 15 years ago, actually closer to 15 now, there was an internet dark website called Silk Road. Silk Road was designed to be sort of the Amazon of illegal things. The founder wanted to be nice, so he said, okay, we’re not going to sell assassinations and that kind of illegal things on here, but other black market things — drugs and things of that nature, fake IDs, that sort of thing — would go on Silk Road.
The idea was to create a place where people could go and buy these things and it would be next to impossible to trace it. He didn’t go by his real name; he went by Dread Pirate Roberts, and that was the only way you were going to know him. It looked like he could just flaunt the governments of the world. There were intelligence agencies all around the world that wanted to find him, and they didn’t know where his server was located that was doing this; they didn’t know whom it was that was working with him, and they didn’t know who he was.
Well, it turns out Dread Pirate Roberts was actually named Ross Ulbricht. He lived in San Francisco, and over time, as Silk Road grew, he needed to hire somebody to help him out. There was an agent, Jared Deryegian, and Jared was working detecting packages being mailed into the country illegally, and started seeing packages that had certain similarities and realized over time they were coming from this new-fangled thing called the Silk Road.
So he sought to locate it. He found out that through the various message boards that customers on the Silk Road would frequent, that the Dread Pirate Roberts was looking to hire somebody to help him out. He built trust in the community and eventually became one of the workers for the Dread Pirate Roberts. It was a full-time job. He was on, cleaning up the message board, making sure things were moving, administering things and so on, until the day that they started to get a sense of where this man was located, and yet they couldn’t quite prove it was him.
And so intelligence agents went to San Francisco, and Jared started messaging his boss asking for him to walk through fixing something, and the intelligence community watched to see the internet signals go out trying to connect to this alleged problem. When they realized it was coming from a public library in San Francisco, the agent kept talking to him until they swooped in, created a giant commotion, and seized the laptop from Ross before he could close it and delete all the evidence. He spent almost a decade and a half in prison.
But for several years it looked like it was going on, as there were these embedded agents, like Jared, who were working to piece together the pieces so that the criminal conviction could happen. Now, we might say, take some action. How could it be that a law-abiding, faithful civil servant could spend years actually helping a criminal enterprise do its work? Why didn’t he just try to yell at Ross and say, how dare you? I’m with the FBI, and you shouldn’t be doing this.
Of course, Ross Ulbricht would have said, oh, I didn’t realize this was wrong. I’m so sorry, I’ll stop. You know, he would have just shut the guy down, and he never would have been caught. Well, as we read through the Psalms, what we see is that our God, for reasons we don’t fully know, says it’s not time yet to drop the net. We know that His mercy continues to delay His action.
We talked about that last week in Sunday School Express, 2 Peter 3, verses 8 and 9. We know that what we’re told is that God has mercy, He has patience, He’s waiting out of love. Sometimes when something in this world, there are bad actors, the authorities wait to try to stop them because they want to get innocent people out of the way first. God withholds His judgment on evil to get the people He is saving out of the way first.
Do we fully understand why, how that works? No, we don’t. But we know that our God is faithful, and He wants us to know that He’s working on refining us, on strengthening us, even as He says, just to be clear, I don’t want you to think just because I’m allowing this that I’m somehow in league with those who do evil, that I don’t care that they’re doing evil. I want you to know that I hate evil, I hate violence, I’m opposed to it. Here’s what sometimes I need to internalize because I may know it intellectually, but I don’t feel it.
God’s apparent inaction in a moment doesn’t mean His inaction. His apparent inaction doesn’t mean His inaction. The fact that Jared hadn’t yet caught Ross Ulbricht didn’t mean that he wasn’t acting; it meant he was going to a certain point, and it was only at that point that it was right. And in God’s plan, there’s a point where He will act, a point where He will return, that there will be judgment over this world, but He’s withholding, and He says, I want you to know that I’m here with you in that time.
So far from being disquieting, what we’re called to do is to understand that God is aware of us, He is with us, and that He’s withholding His judgment because He is working continued salvation. And so that means there’s a time that is coming; there’s a time where there’ll be judgment, and we should seize His comfort now, that His comfort’s for us, and we should take it.
Hebrews chapter 3, verse 12: “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.”
The author of Hebrews is writing to people who are likely facing violence against themselves. Some of them are going to die for their faith. He says, hold on to your real hope. Your real hope isn’t that everything’s peaceful in this moment, and you shouldn’t sense that your hope is not really a valid hope because things aren’t going exactly how you would hope in this moment. Your hope is in God, and He is faithful, so hold on to His rest because it’s there, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
And so God’s awareness, it’s meant to be a comfort. He’s aware, and He’s working in us, and He says, “I know, I know.” If you’d walked up to Jared, the agent, and said, I’m so worried about all the… and you knew that he worked on illegal drug trade and so on, I’m so worried about all this, all these drugs that are coming into the country, I’ve heard about this black market marketplace, you wouldn’t have said, well, I’m actually now one of the lieutenants of the leader of that and just wait, I’m eventually going to get him. No, he wouldn’t have said that, right? You can’t blow the cover.
He would have said, what? I know it’s disturbing. It’s worrisome. You have to be patient. God says, I know, I know it’s painful right now. The world’s broken right now. You’re hurting right now, and I’m with you, and I’m aware. I want you to know that because you know that I am the God who sits on the throne in heaven. The world doesn’t feel like it right now, but I’m with you. I haven’t forgotten.
So we’re told that it’s a comfort, but there’s a second part to this. We’re also confronted by His awareness. Take a look at verse 6: “Let Him rain coals on the wicked, fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.”
The fact that the Lord’s aware and that He’s going to do something, well, on the one hand, if we’re trusting in Him, if we’re following Him, it’s meant to be a comfort to say God really is with us. But the second part of reading this is that He’s saying, if you’ve been thinking about whether you do want to hold on to My rest or not, do it. Just because the marketplace is selling all these illegal things and getting away with it, and those who are involved in it are getting rich right now, doesn’t mean they’re actually going to remain rich and free. It doesn’t mean that.
God’s displeasure is against the wicked, and that doesn’t change by the fact that He withholds His judgment for a time. Not only does He care about and have awareness and pay attention to those whom He loves, and that’s what we’re told with that testing phrase, as much as it seems to feel differently, but we have that second part. He does not love; He hates those who love violence.
We can love God, we can love violence, but we can’t do both. We need to understand that as Christians, those who love to speak of violence and glory and use of force are not doing what the Lord has called them to do. Now to be clear, that doesn’t mean that people should never use force, right? We have faithful men and women serving in our military and in our police departments that sometimes have to use force. But I think we know in those situations there’s a profound difference, for example, between a good soldier who doesn’t want to shoot at anyone but knows it’s necessary to protect freedom and protect innocent life, and someone who can’t wait to go and have an opportunity to fire the gun.
That’s what we’re talking about here—love of violence, those who love to do what’s evil. And God says those people are not My people. I do not love people who love to do what is evil. And yet those people seem to get ahead.
The language here is reminding us of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah going all the way back to Genesis 19. And if you go back there, the people looked like they were doing well. Here were some of the first cities. They’re building up; they’re prospering; there’s all kinds of people, and those people are doing whatever they want; they love violence; they love everything that is against what God has called them to be and to do, and they’re getting away with it. But we know the rest of the story, and that’s what’s alluded to here.
Fire and sulfur, fire and brimstone—an alternate phrase for sulfur—we’re told rained down on them. The cities were destroyed. Those who love violence experienced exactly what they love. God says, remember, I will bring judgment, and it will be just; it will be exactly what should be, and it is coming. And you know those people in Sodom and Gomorrah? They didn’t know it was coming when it was coming.
They couldn’t play it just a little risky and say, we’ll keep doing what’s displeasing to God, but we’ll hear the storm of fire and brimstone coming, and we’ll repent when it’s headed our way. The other picture here, a scorching wind shall be a portion of their cup, is referring to a wind that blows through the Middle East, the shirab that would come in. When it comes in, it’s so hot and so dry that even if the vegetation is lush and green the night before, you wake up in the morning and it’s dried out. It comes and it takes away life.
David says here, the one who loves doing what’s wicked, who loves violence, that person will think they’re prospering. Their leaves are lush and green until the day that that hot scorching wind comes, and then it won’t be any longer. There’s no judgment at all; it feels like right now. And so often that’s true.
We read about those times in the Bible where God brings down judgment; we say that seems so much cleaner and simpler, right? You follow the Lord and it goes well with you; you don’t follow the Lord and the earth opens up and swallows you. Isn’t that so much easier? Why doesn’t God do that? We’re told because of His patience, because all of us would be those eligible for being swallowed up, and thankfully He gives us time to come to know Him, and He doesn’t swallow us up. But that doesn’t mean that He’s given up on standing for what’s right.
Jesus in Luke 17 says, “Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot,” back to Sodom and Gomorrah, “they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all, so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, let the one who is on the housetop with his goods in the house not come down to take them away, and likewise, let the one who is in the field not turn back and remember Lot’s wife.” She looks back and receives God’s judgment.
Jesus says, no, it’s going to come; it’s going to come when you’re busy doing normal stuff. And for some of us, that comes just very personally, right? One day we’re going about our business and we have a heart attack or something, and we just die, it’s over. Some group of people, we don’t know which group of people yet, whether it’s our generation or a future generation, but someday there’ll be a group that are going about doing their daily business, doing their duties, and the Lord returns.
But all of us will meet an end and meet a time where, as we say, our phrase in the English language, we’ll meet our maker. We will do that. And the question is, am I going to have comfort in the fact that God is aware and is present and offers His rest or not? And He confronts us with the fact that He’s aware; there’s no judgment now, but someday there will be. Where do we want to be?
And right now, if we’re sitting here, the question’s an open question to each of us: where do we want to be? I was reading about a man who went to walk on an aptly named Savage Gulf Nature Trail, I believe that’s in Tennessee. He was on a walk—presumably lots of people go on walks on Savage Gulf Nature Trail—but as he was, he came across on the path a timber rattlesnake, one of the most venomous snakes in our part of the world.
Now, the thing with rattlesnakes is they don’t generally want to attack us; they’d rather avoid humans. But here was this snake and here was this man, and the question was, what was he going to do? There was a choice there on what he could do. He could ignore the snake, maybe just keep walking towards it, that’s probably not the best idea. He could actually do something to the snake, or he could back away. The snake doesn’t want anything to do with him. He doesn’t want anything to do with the snake and go about his business. He could choose life.
Well, there were witnesses, and someone saw that he chose unwisely. He decided the thing to do with the snake that was in his way was to pick it up. And so he picked up the snake; the snake bit him, and the man died. He didn’t have to pick it up, but he did. Because, well, I don’t know why; he lived to tell us why. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but a lot of the things we do don’t make a whole lot of sense.
And what we’re being called to here is: don’t pick up the snake. Don’t pick up the snake.
2 Peter, chapter 2, verse 9: “Then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment.” He’ll offer rescue if we take it. But which snakes am I tempted to pick up? I think we need to ask that. Every one of us should ask that: which snakes do I say, I just, I feel this urge that somehow the only way I’m going to move forward is to pick up this snake?
God says, know that I’m going to rescue you; you don’t have to pick up the snake. Even if you need to go that way on the path, you don’t have to pick it up. Wait on Me. Turn to Me. Trust in Me. Which snakes are you tempted to pick up? Which snakes am I tempted to pick up?
Sometimes I think, when we see those snakes, we say, well, I’m so imperfect, I deserve whatever came of Sodom and Gomorrah, and so I might as well pick up the snake because God’s not going to do it for me. If God loves the righteous and hates the wicked, well, I look in my own heart; I have plenty of wickedness in there. Maybe God hates me.
As Peter reflects there on what God does, he says, no, God will preserve His people if you trust in Him. You’re His people. But what about what we deserve? We do wickedness; don’t we deserve a portion of it? Yes, we do. When Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, He actually refers to the portion. The portion of this cup would pass Him, and yet He took it for us. When He went to the cross, He went there to drink of the portion that we deserve.
Yes, we do deserve the judgment of the wicked. It’s part of our own wickedness when we think that we don’t. We deserve it, but Jesus took it.
And so when we see that snake, we can say, but God’s going to rescue me. I don’t need to pick up the rattlesnake. I don’t need to because God is there with me. Yes, He may be testing me. Yes, He’s refining me. But God doesn’t support evil, but He is aware and supportive and ultimately the One who shares His victory with those whom He loves.
So what do we do? I think that man had looked beyond the immediate. There’s a snake in my path, and He’s in my way. And he tried to pick him up. But what was I hoping to do tomorrow? Is it so important that I get across that path right now that I pick up that snake? I think the safe answer is no.
And with whatever snakes that we’re thinking about picking up, we say, I need to pick that up because, as we talked about last week, it feels like the foundations are destroyed, the righteous are being chased after. But David says here, God’s going to bring ultimate judgment. He is righteous. He is the perfect judge.
And so we need to look beyond the immediate, those snakes, and look to God and say, if He has it all under control and He’s aware of it and He loves me, then I don’t need to pick up the snake.
God’s awareness: it’s a comfort and it’s a warning. We need to remember in the warning, it’s not a warning of how much God hates you or despises you or looks down upon you. It’s a warning not to miss out on the hope He is offering you. I hope He’s offering each and every one of us.
Let’s pray that we feel that hope tonight. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, would You be with us? We think we see the snakes we need to pick up. We think it seems like there is no justice, no righteousness. We see evil prevail. We wonder if You’re even paying attention, but would You remind us that You are paying attention, that You are with us, that even as You test us, You’re testing us because You love us and You have a good plan for us? Even as the wicked prosper, it’s not because You don’t care, but because in Your patience You withhold precisely because You do care.
As we take that all in, Lord, would You soothe our hearts, would You comfort us, and would You direct us towards Your love and the ultimate hope that we have, that as we trust in You, we are invited into Your rest? We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Start the Conversation