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I've asked our brother Jason Webb to come and to preach to us tonight and he's selected Psalm 58.! So let's hear the word of God for the director of music to the tune of Do Not Destroy of David, a victim.
Do you rulers indeed speak justly? Do you judge uprightly among men? No, in your heart you devise injustice and your hands mete out violence on the earth.
Even from birth the wicked go astray. From the womb they are wayward and speak lies. Their venom is like the venom of a snake, like that of a cobra that has stopped its ears, that will not heed the tune of the charmer, however skillful the enchanter may be.
Break the teeth in their mouths, O God. Tear out, O Lord, the fangs of the lions. Let them vanish like water that flows away. When they draw the bow, let their arrows be blunted.
Like a slug melting away as it moves along. Like a stillborn child, may they not see the sun. Before your pots can feel the heat of the thorns, whether they be green or dry, the wicked will be swept away.
The righteous will be glad when they are avenged, when they bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked. Then men will say, surely the righteous still are rewarded.
Surely there is a God who judges the earth. This is a true story. On July 29, 2006, less than eight months ago, thousands of Chinese government officials descended on a church with bulldozers and leveled it to the ground.
What was their crime? What was the crime of those believers? Simply, they believed in Jesus Christ. And they would not submit their worship to the rules of the Chinese Communist Party.
And on that day, seven church leaders were arrested and thrown into jail. One was named Wei Lang. In December, he was sentenced for up to three and a half years to go and be in a prison.
And as of today, Wei Lang has spent 240 days in prison. He cannot openly pray. He cannot read a Bible without suffering abuse.
He's forced to make shoes and clothes that people like you and I will buy. And perhaps even you're wearing a pair of shoes that he has made. Why does he suffer?
Is it because he's a thief or a murderer or even as a meddler? No. He suffers for loving the same Savior that so many of you love.
He's been torn away from his family and from his church and from his friends. He's been ripped away from all the people that he loves. Not for a criminal act, but for righteousness, for doing good.
And I hope in your heart you're not hardened towards that story. If you could imagine what it would be like if the FBI were to come in here and level this building to the ground and then arrest our pastors, leave their families without fathers, leave them without any means of support.
Would that bother you? I hope it would. Does the injustice of men ever bother you? Ever grieve you? Sometimes it seems like there's no contest between evil and good.
Evil seems to reign supreme on the earth. Evil men pursue the innocent and hunt them down and injure and kill them.
Remember Abdi who just visited us. He bears the scars of injustice. He bears the scars of a world of evil men that consume the righteous.
And it isn't just a thing that happens in foreign countries far away from here, places that don't have our Constitution or the rights that we enjoy. In our own country, men are fired for being too outspoken about their faith.
And I know one of you who was told that they couldn't talk about Christianity or the church to their patrons. It seems like we can talk about anything filthy and ungodly as long as we don't talk about God.
And so Christians are backed down and they're silenced. And all that, all that injustice pales in comparison to the thousands and millions of infants who are murdered in their mother's womb.
No, injustice is not rare on the earth. The wicked are all around and they're busy. They're busy plotting and scheming.
And then if you don't see it, maybe it's because a callous has grown over your heart. Maybe you've strayed so far from God now that you're so used to breathing the polluted air of this world that you don't see injustice and it no longer offends you.
It's not a new problem either. The author of Ecclesiastes wisely says, Do not say, why were the old days better than these?
For it's not wise to ask such questions. Ever since men fell into sin, injustice has plagued the righteous. And that brings us to Psalm 58, the psalm that we'll be talking about today.
David knew what it was to suffer and suffer grievously injustice and violence.
And David spoke about it in this psalm. And the psalm gives us a righteous man's response to the injustice of the world. The psalm gives us a God-inspired response to injustice in the world.
To the injustice that plagues us in our personal lives, in our nation, in our culture, and in our world at large. It helps us to deal with injustice.
And so that's what we're going to be looking at. We're going to look at this text with three headings. There are three easy headings. The situation, the prayer, and the answer.
The situation, the prayer, and the answer. First, the situation. Let's reread the first five verses and familiarize ourselves with the situation.
Do you rulers indeed speak justly? Do you judge uprightly among men? No. In your heart you devise injustice, and your hands mete out violence on the earth.
Even from birth the wicked go astray. From the womb they are wayward and speak lies. Their venom is like the venom of a snake, like that of a cobra that has stopped its ears, that will not heed the tune of the charmer, however skillful the enchanter may be.
Do you rulers indeed speak justly? David asks these men. And as soon as he asks, he gives the answer to his own question, and he says, no, you do not.
Instead of speaking justly, you devise in your hearts. You do the exact opposite. You devise in your hearts injustice. And you plot, and you scheme violence.
Instead of handing out just judgments, you are meeting out violence. There's two opposites. Who exactly David is talking about, we can't be sure.
He doesn't give us the details, and really the details are unimportant. They might have been foreign kings who were persecuting the Israelites. It might have been Saul and his government officials who were pursuing David and trying to kill him.
But as I said before, the details are irrelevant for us right now. David, when he wrote the psalm, wanted to give us a response that we could use whenever wicked men bore down upon us and bore down upon the godly.
And we do know that they were officials and leaders. They were men with power and authority, and they could wield that power and that authority to hurt and to harm the wicked or the weak and the innocent.
And though we don't have an exact job description for these people, we don't know what they were specifically, the psalm does open up their hearts to us.
And it explains why they are acting the way they are acting. The psalm says that these men have wicked hearts.
That's their problem. They have wicked hearts. Verse 2 says they devise injustice in their hearts. Their hearts are like underground workshops that you can't tell are there except for the thick, dark smoke that's pouring forth from them.
Their hearts are like underground factories that just have become experts at producing sin and violence. They relish in the thought of doing injustice.
It's something they think about and enjoy. They see a weak person. They see a person who's unable to defend themselves, and they think about, what can I do to that person?
They plot wickedness. And out of the overflow of their heart, their hand strikes, and they take a hold of the righteous and tear them apart. And with their hands, they mete out violence.
The word meet in the original, for you children and for anyone else, the word meet in English means to hand out. In the original, it carries with it the idea of weighing.
You weigh it in their hands. They consider it. Think about it. Consider how it can do the most damage. And then, they give it to someone. After mauling over the violence, they lash out against the weak.
Well, why are they so wicked? How did they get here? Well, the psalm says, they've been twisted and warped from birth. They were born that way. From birth, they have been wayward and deceitful.
And they started out on the wrong path. They started out going evil. And because they started so early, by the time that they're in this time, by the time they've grown up and matured, they're now very wicked.
They're experts at it. They've been thinking about evil for so long. They've become skilled at it. Spurgeon says, he who starts early in the morning will get far by the evening.
You start early in the morning of life, you're going to be very far in the evening of life. And so now that they have grown mature and older, they haven't been growing better and better.
They've been growing more and more cunning, more and more violent. They've become like venomous cobras, biting and destroying those around them. They've become bent on doing evil so that no one can convince them to do otherwise.
The psalm compares them to a cobra that has shut its ears and will no longer obey the charmer. We've all seen those men from India. And you can imagine that basket.
The basket and the Indian person is sitting there and there's a snake in the basket and he plays his flute. And up from the basket comes the cobra moving back and forth in a trance.
Well, these men are like a cobra that won't listen to the charmer. The charmer plays. And he plays skillfully. But the snake will not listen.
They are snakes that won't be controlled by anyone. The most earnest pleading and begging and prayers for mercy fall on deaf ears. They cannot leave the innocent alone.
They cannot control themselves. And no one else can control them either. They have an evil heart. And out of an evil heart they act. That is why the Chinese government has murdered and destroyed churches.
That's why they leveled this building and destroyed it and arrested these men. They have evil hearts. And these men are under the dominion of Satan and of darkness.
They walk in the darkness because they are the darkness. They have said in their hearts, we will not let God reign over us. They have stood with Satan in the great contest between God and Satan.
They have sided with Satan. And that's why men have lashed out against our brother Abdi. Because they have sided with Satan and they love violence.
That's why the blood of the martyrs filled the Roman Colosseum. Because every day, men and women side with Satan and seek to hurt God's people.
That's why Christians are fired. That's why teachers tell students that they can't speak about Jesus. That's why students aren't allowed to pray or things like that.
Because the teachers and the people in authority have sided with Satan and have loved sin rather than righteousness. And it's the same reason that some of you have refused to come to the light even though you've heard the gospel time and time again.
And even though you know it's the truth, you don't love the truth. You love the darkness and you want to keep doing the things of the darkness. You too have sided with Satan.
Rather than repenting and coming to Jesus and being washed and cleansed and forgiven, you say, I don't love God. I don't love those things. I prefer my own way.
I prefer dark things. And so, you have sided with your father, Satan. That's the big picture.
The big picture is that Satan's kingdom is at war with God's kingdom. And God's kingdom is aggressively marching on Satan's kingdom. There's a great conflict between the two.
Remember in the Garden of Eden, God placed enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. God put hostility between those two.
And ever since then, there's been a great war going on. And ever since then, injustice has been placed and put on the righteous.
Cain killed Abel and so began the violence and injustice. Cain was acting like his father, the devil, who was a murderer from the beginning. And all those who side with Satan are and act the same way.
And David was caught up in this battle. He was caught up in the battle. He sought for what it was. These men who judged so unjustly and who meted out violence, who hunted down righteous men and hurt them and killed them, they were a part of Satan's kingdom.
They were the seed of the serpent. And David was a child of God. He was the seed of the woman. And he was at war with these men as we are all at war. And you too are at this war.
You're either on Satan's side or God's side. It's not like Baskin-Robbins' 31 flavors of ice cream. You don't have lots of choices. It's either God's side or Satan's side.
And Jesus himself said, you're either for me or against me. There's no other place to be. You're either with me or you're against me.
There's no neutrality. There's no Switzerland out there where you can stand and be apart from the war. You either are on God's side or Satan's side.
So, the smart thing to do is to ask yourself, what side are you on? There's no, there's no good and lying to yourself. You're either on Satan's side or God's side.
So, which is it? And you need to decide which side will you serve on. Will you serve Satan or will you serve God? And Joshua said, as for me and my family, we will serve the Lord.
So, we all have to make that decision. That's the, that's the situation. And so, I have to ask you, are your eyes open to the war that's going on around you?
Or, you don't see the war going on. You don't see the battle. If a soldier doesn't know he's in the battle, it's hard for him to fight well, isn't it?
On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese, in a surprise attack, raided Pearl Harbor. And before anyone knew what could, what was happening, 10 battleships were sunk, thousands of men were dead, 200 airplanes were destroyed, America was off to a bad start in World War II.
The whole time, America did not see that the war was on their footstep or on their doorstep. They didn't see it coming, and so they suffered greatly, and so you shouldn't let that happen to you.
Satan is busy at work. He's a roaring lion, lion seeking, whom he may destroy.
So we are at war. We need to be ready. So we need to watch and pray. That's the situation. Now let's look at the prayer. The prayer.
Verses 6 through 8. I'll read that. Break the teeth in their mouths, O God. Tear out, O Lord, the fangs of the lions. Let them vanish like water that flows away.
When they draw the bow, let their arrows be blunted like a slug melting away as it moves along, like a stillborn child. May they not see the sun. It's pretty heavy stuff.
I don't think any of us would choose that to really put on our refrigerator or choose that to be our life verse or something like that. It's not up there with our favorite passages, but it's in our Bibles nonetheless, and so we have to deal with it.
So before I explain this prayer, this is David's prayer to God against his enemies. Let me put up some hedges. There's a lot of room in these prayers to lead to sinful misunderstanding.
It will lead to all sorts of problems. And so before we start, let me put up some hedges so that we can stay out of danger. First, let's look at what this prayer is or what this prayer is not, and then we're going to look at what this prayer is, and then we're actually going to look at the prayer itself.
First, what this prayer is not. What this prayer is not. This prayer is not just, it's not an angry man venting his hateful, vindictive feelings on others.
David is not sinfully angry in this psalm. This is a prayer. David is pouring out his heart to God. He's talking to God.
He's talking about other men. He's not talking to these men. He's not talking to the wicked. He's primarily speaking to God. And David was brutally honest and open in his language.
He's not as careful as some of us are because he's a lot more honest than some of us are. And it's an expression of his heart that he's presenting to God.
So it's not a sinful lashing out against the wicked. He's not complaining. He's not cursing them. in such a way that's sinful.
This is not a prayer for personal vengeance. David repeatedly says in the Psalms that he has spurned personal vengeance. He has spurned revenge.
Twice David had opportunities to take the life of Saul who was hunting him. And twice he didn't take the life of Saul. in Psalm 35 David says they repay me evil for good and leave my soul forlorn.
He's talking about his enemies. I do good to them and they do evil to me yet when they were ill I put on sackcloth and humbled myself with fasting.
When his enemies were ill he fasted for them. He mourned for them. David loved his enemies even when they continued being evil.
So this prayer is not a prayer for personal vengeance or revenge. This prayer is not a contradiction of Jesus' command to love our enemies.
We all know that passage from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. David is not breaking that command here.
The psalm is not suggesting that we shouldn't love our enemies in the sense that Jesus meant it. The psalm and other psalms like it you'll find repeatedly throughout the book of Psalms psalms like this they're not in contradiction to Jesus' command.
They're not. There's certainly a paradox there and you know what I mean by a paradox they seem they appear to be contradictory but in reality they're not and we're going to find out how they fit together a little bit later.
But we need to keep that in mind that this prayer is not just hateful speech it's not a prayer for personal vengeance it's not even contradictory to what Jesus commands us when he says love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
So what is this prayer? What is this prayer? This prayer is God inspired. 2 Timothy 3.16 All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching rebuking correcting and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
David here is speaking the very words of God. And while a lot of men and maybe a lot of you might have problems with what we find in Psalm 58 God doesn't have a problem with it.
God doesn't have a problem with that. He gave them to David. He gave them to us. And we need these words as much as we need John 3.16 or Romans 8.28 We can't ignore them.
We can't belittle them. We can't deny them. The prayer is God inspired. Next. This prayer is a prayer for the destruction of Satan's kingdom.
It's a prayer for the destruction of Satan's kingdom. Remember just a few minutes ago I said we're either in God's kingdom or we're in Satan's kingdom. And those kingdoms are at war with each other.
Well David was at war against Satan's kingdom. And here he's showing how a Christian fights against Satan's kingdom. He's praying that Satan's kingdom and all those who belong to the seed of the serpent would be crushed under God's kingdom.
That they would be overcome. That God would rule over all. That men would either repent or be destroyed. They must be overcome.
They must be overcome one way or the other. David prays for them to be overcome. His heart is not on retaliation but it's on God's kingdom.
That's the thing that he's most concerned with. His heart is beating for the glory of God and for his fame on the earth. And David is praying that God's kingdom would come.
That his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. This prayer is a prayer for the salvation of the righteous. Do you realize that we will not be truly saved, all of us, until we are liberated from the oppression of the wicked?
It's part of God's plan for us to be liberated from the oppressors. The righteous will never experience the full enjoyment of God's salvation until their oppressors are overcome.
So David here is praying for all the people who are in the land who are suffering because of oppression. He's praying for families that are hurting and who don't have their moms and dads because the wicked have taken them away.
And realistically, sometimes the only way that the righteous will experience salvation is when their oppressors experience the judgment of God.
So David is praying not out of a hatred, a sinful hatred for the wicked. He's praying out of a love for God and a love for God's people.
So with all that in our minds, let's look at this prayer. I don't think it's too difficult to understand in and of itself. It's just it has a lot of sticky situations where we can get caught up and we can start thinking the wrong things and we can get lost.
We don't understand how everything works together. And so it doesn't have the desired effect on us. I think if we can come with it with the right perspective and with some of these other things cleared out of the way, we can understand it pretty easily.
David basically has three requests. They all start with a D. He asks for disarmament, disappearance, and destruction.
Disarmament, disappearance, and destruction. David longs to see the violent and the wicked men disarmed. He wants their ability to harm the righteous to be taken away.
In verse 6, he likens the violent to wild lions that are tearing apart the righteous and they're biting like lions. And he says, oh God, take out the fangs of the lions, break their teeth in their mouth, and tear out their fangs.
They have ripped and torn apart the righteous, and so let their teeth be ripped and torn apart, and so that they are rendered harmless. So that their ability to hurt the righteous is taken away.
In verse 7, he says, when they draw their bow, let their arrows be blunted. The violent have put the righteous in their sights, and they're looking to shoot their arrows of violence at them.
And David cries out, when they do draw their bow, and when they do fire their arrows, let their arrows be blunted. let the righteous not be harmed. So when they are fired upon by the violent and the wicked, let no harm come to the righteous.
Do you see what David is asking for? He doesn't want them to be able to hurt God's people anymore. And isn't that an admirable thing to pray for? I mean, shouldn't we be praying like that?
The Chinese government would be disarmed, that they wouldn't be able to hurt God's people and tear down churches and destroy God's people, that they wouldn't be able to arrest pastors, that their plans for violence and wicked would be frustrated.
We should be praying like that, that the ways and the schemes of the violent and the oppressors would be thwarted. David goes even further in his prayer, though.
he prays for the disappearance of the wicked. He asks that they might vanish away like water that flows away. One of Eowyn's favorite activities is to go down to the Yellow River and what she does is she picks up sticks and pine cones and whatever else she can find, and then when we get there, she throws them off the bridge and they go away.
Well, when she has a stick and she throws it in the river, how long does it take for the stick to totally disappear? Well, the Yellow River is a pretty slow river and it doesn't take very long at all.
It's in the water and moments later, you can't see it anymore. It's gone. And David is asking for that, that they would just vanish away, that the wicked would be no more, that he would never see them again.
Or in verse 8, he asks that they would meld away like a slug as it moves along. And you can imagine in the dry heat of Palestine, it's hot, it's dry, that a slug doesn't have very long that it can live in the sun before it's dead, it's gone, it's disappeared.
And David is asking that the wicked would disappear like that, that as they went about doing their mischief, and as they went about plotting and scheming and hurting the righteous, that they would just meld away.
Thirdly, David asks that the wicked be destroyed, to be cut off in the middle of their devising and violence. He wants to see the hopes of the wicked dashed. And he says, I wish that they were like a stillborn child, that they would not see the sun.
I think there's not very many things out there in the world that's more horrifying than a stillborn baby. A newborn baby is so full of life and joy and hopes, they come out and there seems to be no limit to their possibilities.
They're going to grow and they make you so happy. But on the other hand, a stillborn child that comes out and it's a horror. It had promise.
It had life. And now it's dead. Now it's gone. The joy that the mother should have enjoyed has turned into a knife that's piercing her heart with grief. The nine months were in vain.
The promise of life has been cut off. All the hopes and joys that the family was hoping to experience with this baby are dead. And so in the same way, David says, may the wicked be like that.
May their hopes and dreams be cut off. They're hoping for wickedness and they're hoping and dreaming and scheming about violence. Well, may they be like a stillborn child.
May they be cut off and reduced to death and pain. And may the knife that they're using to hurt others turn about on themselves and pierce their own hearts.
May they be destroyed and buried without joy and without hope. It's a very powerful thing that David is praying. It shows us the seriousness of the battle that we're in.
It shows us the seriousness of their sin. And there's no easier way to say it than David prays death upon the oppressors. So that's David's prayer.
He asks for disarmament, disappearance, and destruction. And so let me ask you, how can we pray this way? How can we pray this way? And some of you are thinking, well, I know what you said earlier about these things not contradicting what Jesus said about loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you, but I don't see that.
So let me ask you some questions first as a way of answering that. Does God owe the evil mercy? Does God owe evil men mercy?
Does God owe any of you mercy? Is justice a stranger to God's heart? When David is praying for these things, is God not really agreeing with that?
Is God saying, you know what, I don't know about this justice thing, it's not really my style. well, we know that justice is just at home in God's heart as graces.
They live together quite well. God loves justice so much that when all of our sins were heaped upon his son, justice gladly went out and killed his own son.
And so when the righteous pray for justice, they aren't praying for some strange thing. They're not praying for something that God doesn't understand or that's not God's will.
God is a God of justice. He loves equity. He loves righteousness. And when we pray for those things, for justice to come on the earth, we're praying according to God's will.
We're praying according to God's heart. So maybe that doesn't satisfy you. Jesus says we need to pray for those who persecute us.
Well, how can we pray for those who persecute us and also pray that those who persecute us would be destroyed? How do we pray both things? Well, we're definitely to pray for those who oppress us and pray for those who persecute us.
We want to see them saved. It's not a contradiction. There's no contradiction there. We want God to have mercy on those who are persecuting us.
We want God to save them. We want to see them come to the cross and confess their sin and be forgiven and be cleansed. We want them claimed for God's kingdom.
We want to see them be God's children. But more than that, we want to see God glorified. And that's the important thing. We want that very much.
We want to see them saved, but we want God to be glorified more. And that's the key. And the strange truth is, and strange to our modern ears, that sometimes God is more glorified in the death of the wicked than in their salvation.
God is just as glorified in hell as he is in heaven.
And so when we pray, we must keep God's glory ever before us. That's the target. And when we have that as our bullseye, when we're seeking God's glory above everything else, then we can pray like this.
We don't have to worry about loving my enemies, and I need to pray for the salvation of the righteous, or something like that. There's no problems there.
We can pray, God, have mercy on these people. God, have mercy on the Islamic terrorists who would rather kill a Christian than anything else.
Have mercy on them and turn them to Christ. Make them see the beauty of Jesus Christ. Have mercy on them and do it for your glory. Do it for the praise of your grace.
Save them. Hurt them even. Bring them to their senses that they might seek you. And, oh, Lord, if they won't repent and they won't turn aside, then destroy them for your great name's sake.
If they won't repent, then overcome them. They deny you, oh, Lord. they're fighting against you. May your kingdom come. May your will be done.
And so, when we have God's glory and God's kingdom first in our hearts and minds, we can pray this way. We can pray Psalm 58. We don't have to worry about, is this a matter of my own heart and vengeance, vengeance, or am I just being hateful?
We leave vengeance to God. We let him decide whether he will have mercy or he will have justice. We plead that God would do something for his name's sake.
So, finally, and very quickly, we see God's answer. Verses 9 through 11. Before your pots can fill the heat of the thorns, whether they be green or dry, the wicked will be swept away, the righteous will be glad when they are avenged, when they bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked, then men will say, surely the righteous still are rewarded, surely there is a God who judges the earth.
How long does it take when you throw some thorns into the fire, whether they're green and wet and dry, before the fire consumes the thorns?
Seconds, minutes at the very most, certainly not long enough to cook anything over. And that's what he's saying. When God answers the prayers of the righteous, in moments, the wicked are swept away.
When the divine warrior comes and the great scatterer comes, like we heard from Nahum, the wicked will be swept away, the battle will be momentary, and every knee will bow, whether willingly or unwillingly, some will bow in thanksgiving, and others will bow because they have been broken with the iron scepter.
Verse 10 gives us a hint that the righteous will participate in the judgment upon the wicked. The righteous will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.
It seems that they're going to participate with God in his vengeance. God's people, with God as their strength, will overcome the ungodly and the wicked.
They will fight, and they will win because God the warrior is coming. And so I want to ask you, if you're lost and you're fighting against God, well let me just tell you, the time of grace is not very long.
Jesus says the way to eternal life is like a narrow door, and there's very many who never even find it. So don't be one of those. It's a narrow way.
It's a narrow space of time that you must be saved. And your mom and your dad and your brothers and your sisters and your friends and your pastors are only going to pray for you so long.
They're only going to pray for mercy for so long. There comes a time when Christ comes that they will no longer pray for you. They will no longer pray for your salvation.
They will not ask God, have mercy on my son or on my daughter. They won't pray that anymore. They will instead be on the other side and they will judge you.
They will say, this one knew the way to life and they scorned it. Just imagine your own mom standing and saying, this one is guilty and deserves to go to hell.
And some of you will see that. They've ignored God's grace. They have scorned Jesus Christ. The way, the truth, and the life was presented to them and they love darkness more.
And your pleas for mercy on that day will fall on deaf ears. Your parents won't hear you. The Lord won't hear you. You'll go to your place and all your friends and all those who know the Lord will go to their place.
They will rest in God's justice. No one's going to be regretting God's actions in heaven. They're going to rest in God's glory. Then men will say, surely the righteous still are rewarded.
That day, men will say, surely the righteous still are rewarded. Surely there's a God who judges the earth. That brings us back to where we started. Does the injustice of the world bother you?
And when you see Satan's kingdom advancing and tearing down Christians and tearing down godliness, when you see righteousness overthrown and trampled down, then we need to pray.
We need to pray. We need to pray as we find in Psalm 58. We need to pray for the destruction of Satan's kingdom. We need to pray for justice, pray for God's glory on the earth, and pray that those who war against God would be overcome, either with justice or with grace, that they would be overcome, that God's kingdom would come.
So we can pray and hope. God has told us the answer to our prayer, that one day every eye will see that the Lord is just, and no one will be wondering, is there a God who even judges between men?
No one will be wondering that. The day is coming when the Lord will hear the cries of his elect who are crying out continually for justice on the earth, and he will answer them. So we are called to battle, we are called to war, and we have a good hope as we fight, because we are fighting on the winning team, the winning cause.
We sing about it in hymn 490, Christian soldiers marching as to war. Heavenly Father, when we are confronted with a text like Psalm 58, we realize again that it is not about us, but it's about you.
It's not about men and their comfort, their desires, but it's about you. you have put us in our place, and you do not revolve around us waiting to hear and waiting for our agreement, but you have put us in our place, and we are to watch and follow you.
Father, will you help us to put these things into practice? keep us from the snares that can come up when we are praying against our enemies.
Will you keep us from a vengeful heart that would seek to hurt our personal enemies, forgetting that it is not about us, but it is about you.
Father, thank you that one day you will send your son for us, for your church, that you will scatter your foes and you will bring down the evil, bring down the wicked.
God, thank you that we are looking forward to that day and as sure as we woke up this morning, we will wake up that morning and we will see you in your glory and you will have mercy on us and you will spare us the sword of your anger and in amazement of your grace, we will walk into heaven and wonder at your goodness even as we see the wicked overthrown.
Father, prepare every one of us for that day that none of us would be still on Satan's side, still fighting against the God who made us, still in love with the world and with darkness and with ourselves.
Father, thank you for the rebuke that is in this psalm about our own concerns and our own ideas that you have centered us once again on who you are and what you have called us to do.
Father, we pray that you would have mercy on your people, that you would have mercy on those who are outside of Christ, that they might see your glory, see the glory of Jesus Christ, see him to be such a perfect savior.
Will you spare them? Father, we pray that whatever happens, that you would bring yourself glory and honor, that your kingdom would come, that your will would be done on earth as it is done in heaven.
And we pray these things for Jesus' sake and as he taught us. Amen.