God Will Protect
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Heavenly Father, through your living Word, teach us to persevere and trust you for the future, however hard and hostile things may seem now. In Jesus name. Amen.
We're working through some of the early Psalms in this series, and this evening we come to Psalm 12. Please turn that up in the Bibles. You'll find it on p 387. It'll be a great help if you have that open in front of you. 'GOD WILL PROTECT' is my title, as you'll see from the outline that's on the back of the service sheet.
If you're concerned about the state of the church and the cause of the gospel in this country and indeed in Western Europe, then this is a Psalm for you. It's a very striking Psalm because the conditions that it describes and the concerns that it talks about fit so very well with our own day. I think you can see that from my four main headings, which sum up what King David has to say about this particular period in his own experience. These headings describe how it was back then. But they fit like a glove our own day too.
Here they are. First, Godliness is in a time of decline. Secondly, Ungodliness is in the ascendancy. Thirdly, Godliness has not entirely gone. And fourthly, God promises that he will act. That final heading is the good news. This is an unflinching and bleak assessment of how things were then – and, I would say, how they are now. But right at the heart of the Psalm there is a wonderful word of hope direct from God. It's a word that speaks, as it were, from the heart of God direct to our hearts. But we'll come to that later. We need to begin with the bleak assessment of the present. So:
First, GODLINESS IS IN A TIME OF DECLINE
King David spells this out with stark simplicity in the opening verse:
Help, Lord, for the godly are no more; the faithful have vanished from among men.
Now, it's a dark spiritual picture that David paints, but it's worth saying straight away that from the very first word it's clear that David isn't in despair here. He's not fooling himself about how bad things are. But he's looking to God to change things. In his very helpful commentary on the Psalms, Derek Kidner has this to say:
Where another man, in a minority of one, might have rethought his position, David signals for help. He is not retreating.
So there's no sense here that David's about to give up, or that he thinks the spiritual war is lost. And we need to learn from him in that. Because we do also inhabit a pretty bleak spiritual situation in this country at the moment. It's been developing for a long time. But it's fair to say that the tide of godliness has gone a long way out.
You only have to look at the numbers to see that. In a few months over at Jesmond Parish Church we'll be marking the 150th anniversary of the founding of that church. A decade before that, in 1851, there was a national religious census in England. That 1851 census found that about 50% of the population attended church. But to my mind the most shocking thing about that is that at the time anxious voices were raised because that was regarded as being worryingly low. To find out that a mere 50% of people were in church on Sunday was very disturbing.
If you jump forward from 1851 to 1998, the average weekly church attendance in England was around six per cent of the population. Now it has fallen further to 5.5 per cent. Imagine what a Christian 150 years ago would have thought if you'd said that church attendance nationally would fall by around 90% by 2010.
What about the Church of England specifically? Over the last 30 years – that is, in my adult lifetime – Church of England attendances have fallen by over 40%. Recent research shows that (I quote):
… the latest Church of England figures (for 2008) revealed a fifth year-on-year decrease in church attendance, and a drop of ten per cent from 2000.
Things are evidently so bad for the church that even the militant atheist Richard Dawkins is worried. He recently said:
There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.
That is, of course, richly ironic given Richard Dawkins' profound hostility towards the Christian faith. But there's something else worth noting. Richard Dawkins is in no doubt whatsoever that Christianity is on the slide. He would have no dispute with this first point that godliness is in a time of decline.
Secondly, UNGODLINESS IS IN THE ASCENDANCY
Patrick Sookdheo is the Director of the Barnabas Fund. You may remember him preaching here not long ago. He has just published a booklet called 'The Way Ahead – Returning Britain to its Christian Roots'. In it he really does for Britain today what King David was doing for Israel when he wrote Psalm 12. David describes a situation in which things used to be better. The godly used to have a strong presence, but now they don't any longer. In his booklet, Patrick Sookdheo has this to say:
… in recent years Christians in Britain have found themselves seriously beset on several fronts. We face both an aggressive and strident secularism that is hostile to all religious faith, and the growth of Islamism (political Islam), which aspires to make Islam the dominant religion in the West. Recent well-intentioned legislation on equality and incitement to hatred has threatened our basic freedoms of speech and religion. And the response of the Church to these perils has often been hesitant and confused.
So those are the four big trends in our society that Patrick Sookdheo identifies that threaten the Christian faith in this country: strident secularism, political Islam, hostile legislation, and confusion in the church.
When we look back to the days of Psalm 12, we can see that King David identified three big trends in his own day which chime in with our own experience. You can see these three big trends in verses 2, 4 and 8.
First of all, there is widespread lying. Verse 2:
Everyone lies to his neighbour ; their flattering lips speak deception.
Kidner comments:
Lies, here, are more accurately 'emptiness', a term which embraces falsehood but also its fringe of the insincere and the irresponsible, which cheapen and corrode all human intercourse.
If that isn't a description of so much that's pumped out day after day through multiple media channels into the homes of this land I don't know what is. Maybe James even had this Psalm in mind when he wrote (this is James 3.5-6):
… the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.
Words are powerful. When people listen to the lies of the ungodly, then the effect is powerfully corrosive and destructive of a godly society.
Secondly, there is arrogant triumphalism. Look from verse 3:
3May the Lord cut off all flattering lips and every boastful tongue4that says, "We will triumph with our tongues; we own our lips – who is our master?
We'll come back to verse 3, but do you see that in verse 4? The attitude of the ungodly is, in effect "We're the gods now. We win. We're in control. What we say goes. We're beyond challenge. God is dead."
A spokesman of the National Secular Society said in 2008:
Church attendance has already been in decline for over 60 years, all over Britain, in all major denominations and across all age-groups, except the over-65s. Independent statisticians now have enough data to predict confidently that the decline will continue until Christianity becomes a minority sect of largely elderly people, in little more than a generation.
There is arrogant triumphalism for you.
Then, thirdly, there is the honouring of what God hates. You can see that at the end of the Psalm, in verse 8:
The wicked freely strut about when what is vile is honoured among men.
Our culture is deeply influenced by politics, education and the media. One big media presence is, of course, the BBC. The BBC presenter and journalist Andrew Marr has been in the news because of his recent interview with Tony Blair. He recently spoke rather candidly about the culture of the BBC. He said:
[The BBC] is not impartial or neutral. It's a publically funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. [It has] a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.
For liberal, you can pretty much read, among other things, 'anti-biblical-Christianity'. The word of God is despised and rejected.
With regard to legislation, there has been a string of new laws on equality and diversity which is in effect intolerant of biblical stances taken by Christians especially on moral issues relating to sex, marriage and the family. The journalist Peter Hitchens has written movingly of his own difficult journey to a robust Christian faith. His brother is Christopher Hitchens, the militant atheist ally of Richard Dawkins. Peter Hitchens writes:
The Public Order Act of 1986 was not meant to permit the arrest of Christian preachers in English towns for quoting from the Bible. But it has… The Civil Partnership Act 2004 has not meant to force public servants to approve of homosexuality. But it has… The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 was not meant to lead to a state of affairs where it is increasingly dangerous to say anything critical about homosexuality. But it did… We have travelled in almost no time from repression, through a brief moment of mutual tolerance, to a new repression.
It's perhaps not surprising to hear someone like Peter Hitchens warning in those terms. But it is certainly striking when Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights campaign group Liberty, says that the law is bending…
… over backwards for Muslims and Sikhs while Christians are being persecuted with impunity.
Ungodliness is in the ascendancy. It would be easy to fall into passive despair and conclude that things can only get worse. But as I said at the start, King David in Psalm 12 doesn't despair. So:
Thirdly, GODLINESS HAS NOT ENTIRELY GONE
It's true that King David in verse 1 says that …
… the godly are no more; the faithful have vanished…
And the situation is certainly dire. But it's obvious that at least some of the godly remain. Otherwise there would be no cry for help from David, the godly man. And it's not just him left either. So he says in verse 7:
O Lord, you will keep us safe and protect us …
What, then, are the marks of the godly in this hostile environment? What can we see of the kind of people they are in Psalm 12?
There are those who keep on praying. This whole Psalm is a prayer, of course, but there's a clear prayer request in verse 3:
May the Lord cut off all flattering lips and every boastful tongue…
It's graphic language, not to be taken literally. The prayer is that the voice of the ungodly will no more be heard in the land. Maybe we could turn that into a prayer, for instance, that Christians will have wide access to the broadcast media, replacing anti-Christian propaganda.
Then there are those who love God's word. Look at verse 6:
And the words of the Lord are flawless, like silver refined in a furnace of clay, purified seven times.
The Bible may be despised and rejected in the wider culture, but many hunger for its truth and love it as the words of eternal life. Are you aware of that longing to know more of Christ in the Scriptures in your own heart? Feed that longing. And know that you're not alone. Not by a long way.
What is more, there are those who trust God for the future. Look again at the wonderful confidence in verse 7:
O Lord, you will keep us safe and protect us from such people for ever.
Love for God's word isn't a matter of theory but of practice. When you take God at his word, then you trust what he says. You know that the future is secure in his hands, whatever things might look like now.
Yes, we have to be pretty ruthless with ourselves in facing the facts about just how bad things have got. We have to be realistic. But it's vital that we're realistic optimists, and not realistic pessimists. In the end, even when you're in a minority of one, when you're on God's side, you're on the winning side. And in fact there are lots of us who, for all our failures, want to be godly by the grace of God and in the power of the crucified and risen Christ. We must listen to God and not to those who claim that the church is dying. It is not. Far from it. Things will change. How do we know that? Well that brings me to my fourth and final point:
Fourthly, GOD PROMISES THAT HE WILL ACT
Right at the heart of this Psalm there is a direct word from God for those of us who are worried about the state of our nation and our church. It's there in verse 5:
Because of the oppression of the weak and the groaning of the needy, I will now arise," says the Lord. "I will protect them from those who malign them.
We should not, and must not, doubt that word because, as verse 6 immediately goes on to say…
… the words of the Lord are flawless…
The twisted words of the ungodly can't be trusted for one moment. The pure word of God can be trusted absolutely and always. And God says he will arise.
Over the summer we went for a walk on a long beach that shelved very gradually into the sea. At low tide the water was a long way out. But when the tide turns, things change very quickly. The water rushes in. So it is in the spiritual life of a nation when God arises and decides in his wisdom that it's time for him to act. Things change very quickly. We need to pray for that time. We need to work for it. But above all, we need to trust for it. The timing is in God's hands. But we know the day will come. "I will now arise," says the Lord.
The Bible teacher Don Carson has compiled a moving account of his father called, 'Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor'. Tom Carson was an unspectacular missionary pastor of a very small church in French-speaking Canada. When he started his ministry in the 1940s and 50s, it was hard going. I quote:
Most of the French works in Quebec at this time were stalled. A strong work might climb to thirty or forty people but usually did not stay there very long. Almost ten years would pass before there was a dramatic improvement… This was still slogging work in a fairly hostile environment.
Tom Carson was tempted to despair – of himself and of his ministry. But in the teeth of this temptation, he kept on praying. He kept on loving God's word. And he kept on trusting God for the future. Then, as Don Carson his son remembers:
In the decade of the seventies, evangelical work in French Canada exploded. From about forty evangelical churches, the work grew to just under five hundred churches and preaching points before settling down to just over four hundred.
When God so decides, everything changes. Do you find your own Christian service to be hard, slogging work in a fairly hostile environment? Don't despair. Pray Psalm 12. God promises that he will act. The church is not dying. The cause of the gospel of Christ is not lost. If we're on the side of the crucified and risen Christ, then we're on the winning side.
Let's pray:
Heavenly Father, we thank you for another powerful Psalm. Lord, in our own day, godliness is in decline and the ungodly seem to be in the ascendancy. Help us to keep on praying, loving your word and trusting you in a tough environment. We praise you for the work of your Spirit in many lives in this land. Forgive us our failures. Thank you that you promise to act. Lord, please act soon. Change this nation. Grow your church. And make godliness widespread once more, that your name might be glorified. Amen.