Kootenai Church Morning Worship

We’re returning now back to Psalm 37. It's been a few weeks, so in case you are new or in case you have forgotten where we were at and what we were doing, I'll give you a brief review of Psalm 37 and what we have covered so far. This is a psalm that addresses the issue of the prosperity of the wicked and how the righteous should respond to that prosperity and to the wicked. And really the emphasis or focus of the psalm is on what the righteous receive from God. Rather than focusing on what the wicked get in this life, the psalmist focuses our hearts and attention upon what the righteous will receive in the life that is to come.
In verses 1–8—well, let me back up. When we started this psalm, I gave you an eight-point outline for this psalm, eight headings, as it were. Verses 1–8 describes the peace of the righteous. This describes how it is that we live. The righteous can be at peace in a world surrounded by the wicked. In verses 1–8, we are told how that is possible: verse 3, we are to trust in the Lord; verse 4, we are to delight ourselves in the Lord; verse 5, commit our way to the Lord; and verse 7, rest in the Lord. That is the path to peace in this world surrounded by the wicked.
Then in verses 9–11 we saw the promise to the righteous—that is, that the righteous will receive an eternal prosperity in a renewed land that is blessed by God and purged of the wicked. The wicked will be cut off and the righteous will inherit the land. That is the central promise of this psalm as the psalmist brings back to our minds again and again that Old Testament promise that the wicked will be cut off and the righteous will receive the land. In fulfillment to what God promised to Abraham, in fulfillment to what God promised to David, in fulfillment to what God promised through all of the prophets even up to the very end of the Old Testament era, the righteous will inherit the land. That is a land that will be renewed, regenerated, and it will be a land that is purged of the wicked.
Now we come to the third heading of the psalm, verses 12–15, and we notice the protection of the righteous. So let's read verses 12–15 and then I'll break this down a little bit and show you how we're going to tackle it today. Verse 12 of Psalm 37:
12 The wicked plots against the righteous and gnashes at him with his teeth.
13 The Lord laughs at him, for He sees his day is coming.
14 The wicked have drawn the sword and bent their bow to cast down the afflicted and the needy, to slay those who are upright in conduct.
15 Their sword will enter their own heart, and their bows will be broken. (NASB)
And in those four verses we see that God's judgment on the wicked will bring all of their evil back upon their own heads. God's judgment on the wicked will bring all of their evil back upon their own heads. What the wicked devise, what they plan, what they plot, what they purpose will all be turned back on them to their own destruction. This is the ultimate end of all the wicked. The evil that the wicked bring upon others is visited on their own heads as they suffer the very things that they had planned and plotted and purposed for others. We would call this poetic justice, and it is certainly an expression of God's justice. It is not unjust for the wicked to receive the very thing that they have plotted and purposed for others in their wickedness and in their oppression.
So verses 12–15 is one unit, and I want you to see how there is a structure to these verses. There's actually two different kinds of Hebrew parallelism here, not only parallelism between verses but parallelism between sets of verses. So notice verses 12 and 14 are parallel ideas. Look at verse 12: “The wicked plots against the righteous and gnashes at him with his teeth.” Verse 14: “The wicked have drawn the sword and bent their bow to cast down the afflicted and the needy, to slay those who are upright in conduct.” Those two verses are saying the same thing in different words. So those two verses are similar; there's a parallelism there between those two.
Then there's a parallelism between verse 13 and verse 15 as well. This is the parallelism of the response or the justice that comes. Look at verse 13: “The Lord laughs at him, for He sees his day is coming.” It’s describing the day of judgment. Verse 15: “Their sword will enter their own heart, and their bows will be broken.”
So in verses 12 and 14, the parallelism describes the actions of the wicked, their plots, their plans, what they're doing, how they're doing it, why they're doing it, describes what they're doing. Then verses 13 and 15 describe the justice that is going to come upon them. So what you have in verses 12–13 is a description of the wicked and a description of something that happens to them. And then in verses 14 and 15, you have a description of the wicked and a description then in verse 15 of something that happens to them. So 12 and 13 go together, 14 and 15 go together, 12 and 14 go together, 13 and 15 go together, so that those two—12 and 13—go together with 14 and 15. Do you see all that? Brilliant, isn't it? You didn't even notice that was there, did you, until I pointed it out? And even some of you still don't understand what I just said. You're like, “I don't have a clue how that's parallel, but I'll take your word for it.”
OK, if you're going to take my word for it, then here's what we're going to do. We're going to group together the similar verses—that is, 12 and 14—and deal with those under one heading, since they kind of go together. And then we'll take 13 and 15 and deal with those under one heading, since they kind of go together. So here is our two-point outline for the passage. First, in verses 12 and 14, the psalmist describes the pernicious plans of the wicked. Then in verses 13 and 15, the psalmist describes the poetic punishment of the wicked. Their pernicious plans and their poetic punishment.
All right, so let's deal with 12 and 14. And we're going to deal with that, the pernicious plans of the wicked (verses 12 and 14) today, and then next week we will address the poetic punishment that comes their way. I had originally sort of put all of this together into one message, and then I had to make a game-time, audible decision this morning to break this into two because I thought there's no way that I can talk about the beauty of poetic justice in verses 13 and 15 and cram that in after everything I plan to say this morning. So we're going to break it into two parts.
First, the pernicious plans of the wicked in verses 12 and 14. Let's read together verses 12 and 14 again. “The wicked plots against the righteous and gnashes at him with his teeth” (v. 12). “The wicked have drawn the sword and bent their bow to cast down the afflicted and the needy, to slay those who are upright in conduct” (v. 14). Now you can notice that the language of those two descriptions is the language of conflict and war, opposition, hostility, enmity, strife, conflict. You can see it in the words that are used, the military imagery of the swords and the bows. It is describing a battle between two forces or two camps, the righteous and the wicked, between two forces or camps that are set against each other in an animosity and a hostility one with another. That's what's being described here. The wicked against the righteous.
Now it didn't start in Psalm 37. It didn't start in David's day. It didn't start with David's dad or his grandfather or his great-grandfather. Where did the enmity start? In the garden is where it started. In fact, this distinction between the righteous and the wicked goes all the way back to the garden of Eden in Genesis 3 when after Adam and Eve rebelled and ate the fruit, God condemned the man, condemned the woman, and then also issued a judgment upon the serpent. Genesis 3:15 says, “I will put enmity [notice the language of hostility and conflict] between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.”
Now, that is a prophecy of the Messiah. It is the very first proclamation of God's gospel, that there would come One who would come from a woman—“the seed of the woman” is unique language there in Hebrew, and it is intended, I think, as a foreshadowing of the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. There would come One who would be born of a woman, whose triumph would be to crush the serpent's head, and in the process His—that is, the seed of the woman—His heel would be bruised.
So there is obviously a conflict between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent—that is, the offspring of the woman, all of Adam and Eve's descendants. And there is a conflict—or sorry, the seed of the woman being the righteous seed of the woman—and then there is a conflict between all of those who are of the serpent who go along with his seed, his people. There's two camps, and there is enmity and hostility between these two camps, and there always has been since the garden, and there always will be until the Prince of Peace comes back and until that enmity is removed, when, as we see in Psalm 37, the wicked are cut off and the righteous inherit the land. Then there will be no enmity and no hostility. But until that time, Genesis 3:15 describes this constant conflict, God's people against the serpent's people, the serpent being the devil. So it is a war or a conflict, an enmity between God's people and the devil's people.
This is not a hot conflict in the sense that we use weapons and we go to war and we draw our swords. That is not the point of the passage. The point of the passage is that there is a truth war. There is a spiritual war that is waging between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The righteous are on one side and the wicked on the other, the chosen out of this world on one side in one camp and Satan's offspring, his spiritual descendants, his spiritual workers of iniquity, are on the other side.
Jesus described this hostility in John 15:18–19: “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.” That's John 15. Notice what Jesus did there. He divided all of humanity into two camps: those whom He has chosen, and the world—that is, everyone else. There is no middle ground, no common ground between those two camps, and there is no third category in the middle. All of humanity is divided into those two camps. The sheep and the goat, the wheat and the chaff. It is divided between the righteous and the wicked, the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, between those who belong to God and those who do not, between those who are of Christ and chosen by Him and those who are in the world. Those are the two camps. There is irreconcilable, spiritual, moral, intellectual, and eternal hostility between those two camps. And there can be no partnership between them because there is no common ground and there are no common convictions between them that are of any kind of lasting import or significance.
This conflict is repeatedly described in the Psalms, and we already looked at two of them when we were in Psalm 1 and Psalm 2. You remember, we saw the same conflict. There are those who walk according to the counsel of the wicked, who stand in the path of sinners, and sit in the seat of the scoffer, and then there is the blessed man. Those are the two camps. And “the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish” (Ps. 1:6). There are two ways. And the righteous are like a tree planted by the rivers of water that flourishes and prospers and bears its fruit in its season, and the wicked are like chaff. There is that distinction right at the head of the Psalter, the very first psalm.
And then Psalm 2 gets into that same conflict. Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot a vain thing? “The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying, ‘Let us tear their fetters apart and cast away their cords from us!’” (Ps. 2:2–3) There is this conflict or this war. The kings of the earth take their stand against the King of kings. And those who follow the kings of the earth take their stand and wage war in hostility and animosity against those who belong to the King of kings. And so there is this war between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. The war between the righteous and the wicked. It is a war ultimately that is the world's hatred of the righteous because they represent Jesus Christ. That's really what it boils down to. Their hatred of the righteous is a hatred of us because we represent Jesus Christ.
How do they express it? Look at verse 12: “The wicked plots against the righteous.” Those are the two camps. Look at verse 12: he “gnashes at him with his teeth.” The imagery there shows their hatred and their anger. This is how the wicked fret. Remember we talked about fretting back in verses 1–8. Do not fret over the evildoer or be envious of the wicked. What does it mean to fret? Fretting in verse 1 and mentioned again in verse 7 and then in verse 8—that fretting meant to become hot or angry, to heat oneself up in vexation. You get stirred up in your spirit, anxious, driven over these things. You get boiling on the inside. It's a form of anger. Fretting is a form of anger. That word fret is sometimes used to describe God's anger. It's sometimes used to describe man's anger. How is it that the righteous are tempted to respond to the wicked? By fretting, getting angry.
But look at the anger as it describes the wicked. The wicked are angry as well, and that is expressed through the gnashing of the teeth. That is vivid imagery, isn't it? The gnashing of the teeth. Do you live with somebody who just grinds their teeth all the time? Sometimes that can be just like a habit that you have because nobody's ever slapped you and told you not to grind your teeth, so you just grind your teeth. It's not that kind of a habit. This is the same idea, the grinding or the gnashing of the teeth, but here it describes the deep-seated anger. It's the imagery of a wild beast that would chew and consume and devour something. The gnawing of the teeth, the clenched jaw.
The imagery, the language, is intended to describe not just sort of a casual hostility that might exist between two irreconcilable camps, but on the one side—that is, with the wicked—the very real, angry, murderous, and violent desire to destroy those who are the righteous. They would devour if they could. And let us not be confused about this. If there were no restraining hand of government and law, and if there were no restraining hand of God's grace, and if there were no restraining hand in others able to defend themselves, the wicked, if they had their way, would devour the righteous off the face of the earth, eliminate them entirely. We should realize that and be thankful that we have the restraints in place that we do have that keep that from happening to the degree that it would happen if it were not for those restraints.
Psalm 2:1 describes the nations in an uproar. We talked about that in Psalm 2. The language there describes like the tossing of the sea, the raging, the frothing of the waves. This describes the nations. The nations are in this uproar, this angry, frothing state. Why is that? Because they are allied against the Lord and against His Anointed. It is the righteous that they hate. They grind their teeth. Spurgeon says this: “The wicked show by their gestures what they would do if they could. If they cannot gnaw, they will gnash. And if they may not bite, they will at least bark.” That's beautiful, that's poetic. Speaking about poetic justice, that's poetic language. If they can't gnaw at you, then they will gnash their teeth without you. But it does describe their anger, their visceral hatred.
So as believers, we are told not to fret. We are called to not fret. Verse 1: “Do not fret because of evildoers, be not envious toward wrongdoers.” Verses 7–8: “Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him; do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who carries out wicked schemes. Cease from anger and forsake wrath; do not fret; it leads only to evildoing.” So here we, as the righteous, are called, are commanded, to not respond in our own form of anxious, vitriolic anger over the prosperity of the wicked that the psalm describes.
So there's an anger that we can fall into as well. We need to be aware of that. And there is an anger that the wicked have at the righteous, and that is described in verse 12 with that phrase, “he gnashes at him with his teeth.” We are not called to gnash our teeth back in response at the wicked. That is easy to do. When you see people who deserve prison given Presidential Medals of Freedom, lined up like candy in a PEZ dispenser, and they're handed out one right after another, the response of the righteous could be to just gnash your teeth at such injustice and corruption. Probably most of us here wanted to do that at some point, say, in the last three or four days. We’re just tempted to do that, but our response is not to do that, not to fret and not to gnash our teeth back at the wicked, especially when they prosper in their way. That's the point of the psalm.
One has to wonder then, why is it that the wicked in this psalm are so angry? Why are they so angry? You see the language that's used to describe it. They're gnashing their teeth. Why are they so angry? What have the righteous ever done to deserve that? You wonder that? What did I ever do to elicit the hatred of the wicked? The answer to that is nothing, likely, unless you've done something, but I guess I'll speak for myself personally. I don't think I've ever done anything to elicit the hatred of the wicked.
Why are they so angry? Why should they be so angry since they are the ones prospering in their way, right? Isn't that what verse 7 says, “do not fret because of him who prospers in his way”? Isn't it true that the wicked in this world usually get all the things that they want and desire? They have their way, they do their sin, they commit their sin, and they're the one who prospers in it. Meanwhile, we would adopt the language of Psalm 73 where Asaph says, “I've been chastened every day. I go without. I'm under affliction. I have to deal with difficulties and trials and temptations and tribulations and illnesses and sicknesses and want, and these things are the things that come upon the righteous.” And then you look at the wicked and you see them, they are at ease and they are comfortable and they die at ease and they die in comfort and they are remembered and everybody lauds them and celebrates them, and the righteous don't get any of that.
Why are the wicked so angry? Why are they so hostile when they are the ones who are prospering in this world? Their plans succeed, they benefit from their iniquity, they are in ease and comfort, they have this world's goods, it seems, in abundant measure. The world applauds their iniquities and celebrates their perversions. There are entire months of our calendar year that are dedicated to celebrating sexual perversion and immorality. And there are entire legislative branches of government and committees of government that are designed and intended to do nothing but give themselves entirely to the promotion of all this iniquity so that the world lauds its own perversions and celebrates its own immorality and prospers itself in all that it does. And since they get everything that they want and they enjoy everything that they're pursuing, and since it seems that at least in the short term they lack nothing, why would they be so angry? What is it that causes them to be so angry?
You know what it is? It is because “this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light” (John 3:19). That's why they hate it. They hate the Light. Jesus said, “Men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.” That's John 3:19–20. Scripture calls the righteous the “children of Light” (Eph. 5:8). It calls us children of the day, sons of the day, and sons of light in 1 Thessalonians 5:5. And darkness hates the light because the light is a constant reminder to those who are in darkness that their judgment is coming and that there's something beyond this world that they are not living for that they are going to be held accountable to. And that constant reminder is enough to fill them with rage. The wicked are reminded at least of the eschatological judgment that is to come, and so they lash out in hatred, in anger, with visceral hatred, gnashing at the righteous with their teeth.
Look at the weapons of their warfare described in verse 14: “The wicked have drawn the sword and bent their bow to cast down the afflicted and the needy, to slay those who are upright in conduct.” That's verse 14. This military imagery that is used, bow and sword, these are the weapons of warfare and destruction, violence, murderous weapons. Destruction is in their paths. The sword, it says in verse 14, is drawn. They have drawn the sword. Not just that they have a sword, but like a soldier who has pulled his weapon and unsheathed his sword, he is ready and stationed and positioned for battle. And not just that, but he has bent his bow. That word bent there means to march out or to tread out. And the idea is they've grabbed the bow and they have marched it out. They have bent that bow back, they have pulled it back as far as they can, and they have put an arrow in that bow, and it is aimed not randomly in any sense whatsoever. It is aimed at the righteous. The sword is drawn because they are ready to shed blood for their cause and to persecute and prosecute those who are the righteous. This is the nature of that warfare, a bloody, murderous, and violent imagery. They stand ready to devour, gnashing their teeth, swords drawn, bows bent back, ready to do their mischief.
And they have the means—and this is the scary part—they have the means to carry out their ends. This is what the psalmist is describing. Not just somebody who gnashes their teeth but has no power in their hands to commit their atrocities, but one who is filled with anger, gnashing his teeth, and then he has all of the weapons necessary to wage his warfare against the sons of light. So he has the weapons and they're drawn and they're primed and they're ready to draw blood.
This could describe both verbal assaults as well as physical assaults. There's some who suggest that all that's being described here is just how the wicked use their tongues. They're like arrows or they're like swords. They pierce, they go after, they harm, and they hurt us, and that's what the wicked do with their violent gnashing of the teeth, that this is just the words of their mouth that is intended. False accusations, ridicule, verbal abuse, slander. The Lord did suffer this. He was reviled, and He reviled not back. It's true that the wicked do sometimes lash out at the righteous with their mouths, with their words.
But I don't think that that's all that the psalmist has in mind because down in verse 32 he describes the works of the wicked. Psalm 37:32: “The wicked spies upon the righteous and seeks to kill him.” So it seems as if the psalmist, David, has in mind here not just some sort of verbal assault but actually physical intention to kill and destroy the righteous. To oppress, to jail, to persecute, to pursue, to kill and exploit, to rob the righteous—this is what the wicked intend to do. Shouldn't surprise us since in John 8:44 Jesus said to the Pharisees of His day, “You are of your father the devil. . . . He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.” So if there is an enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, it should not surprise us that those who are of the seed of the serpent, his spiritual offspring, would themselves wage war and it would be bloody and violent and murderous against the righteous. Those who rage against the righteous serve the interests of the serpent.
The heart of unbelieving man is full of hatred and violence, and this really is what hatred is. It is a violation of that commandment to not murder: “You shall not murder” (Exod. 20:13). So the one whose heart is full of violence and hatred is one in whose heart murderous intent dwells. They hate and they gnash with their teeth. They have bent their bows. They have drawn their sword. They are ready and willing and able.
Now that is a daunting picture, is it not? It's a daunting picture. It's one that you will see repeated in the Psalms in multitudes of locations in the Psalms. If you're familiar with the Psalms, you've read through it, you know of the passage that we read at the beginning of the service today from Psalm 10. Psalm 7 is another. Psalm 22 is another. There's this language all the way through the Psalms of the advantage that the wicked have in their war against the righteous and how the righteous are the undefended and the vulnerable ones against whom the wicked wage their violent warfare.
Examples of this in Scripture abound even from the very beginning. There will be enmity between your seed and her seed, between the seed of the woman and your seed, and between you and the woman. There is this enmity that exists. And then what do we see in the very next chapter? Cain kills Abel. Why? Abel had a sacrifice that got approved and Cain did not, and so Cain slew his brother. Had Abel ever done anything worthy of such treatment at the hands of his brother? No, but there is enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. And that enmity existed in the garden, and it cost Abel his life. Even in Noah's day, it says that the hearts of men were full of evil, and the intentions of their hearts was evil continually, and that the violence had filled the earth, Genesis 6 says. That's the hostility.
Saul hunts David and tries to kill David. The prophets are persecuted. The church throughout history has been persecuted, believers put to death. Today, street preachers are imprisoned in countries all over the planet, even in the one that is to the north of us not very far away. Pro-lifers are jailed and labeled terrorists, domestic terrorists, preachers who preach against immorality and the profaning of marriage or stand against the narrative of this world are targeted, sometimes jailed and imprisoned, sometimes prosecuted by an unrighteous government. The true church is persecuted even today all the way around the world. That's the reality of the world in which we live. And I am grateful that the Word of God is honest about this situation and doesn’t sugarcoat any of it because there’s no sugarcoating going on with any of this.
And look at the targets of their prosecution and persecution in verse 14. The goal of the wicked is to cast down the afflicted and the needy and to slay those who are upright in conduct. I love how David describes the righteous in that verse, the afflicted and the needy. These are the objects of the malice of the wicked—the afflicted and the needy and those who are upright in their conduct.
Now it is not to say that all of the righteous, that all of them are always afflicted and always needy, but it is David's way of describing that the wicked do not target those who can defend themselves or target those who are deserving of such treatment. The wicked do not prosecute and go after their equals. They go after those who are in many ways less in terms of their ability to defend than themselves. These people, the afflicted and the needy, these are people who because of their poverty or because of their inability, physical inability, are unable to defend themselves against the wicked, so they are sitting ducks in front of the wicked. The schoolyard bully never goes out and finds the biggest, tallest, toughest, strongest kid on the playground to bully him. He doesn't do that. The bully avoids that person and finds the little kid who shows up looking needy and afflicted and can't defend himself. That's who the bully targets. The wicked do the same thing. The wicked are not after engaging their equals. The wicked are after engaging the afflicted and the needy, to prosecute and go after those who cannot defend themselves. They're easy pickings.
And in this sense, humanly speaking, this conflict is a lopsided conflict, isn't it? I mean, it seems to suggest that the righteous in this passage have neither bow, nor sword, nor shield, nor anything to defend themselves. They are lying undefended and unarmed, and the wicked have all of the advantages on their side. You might say that they have all the levers of power, they have all the levers of influence, they have all the positions of strength, they have all of the ability to do these things if they want to. And the righteous, if you happen to be in the path or become the target of the wicked, there is almost nothing you could do. You can see how lopsided it feels.
Those whom the wicked go after are those who are upright in their conduct, meaning this is undeserved. The righteous have done nothing to court this, they didn't bring this on themselves, they didn't do anything or live in such a way as to treat the unbelievers in any kind of way that deserves this. What did Abel do to Cain to deserve being murdered? Nothing. What did Noah do in his day to deserve the taunts and the heckles and the hatred of those around him while he built the ark? Nothing. What did David do to Saul to court Saul's violent and murderous rage? Nothing. He slayed a Philistine, rallied the army, gave it all back to Saul, and then went into Saul's court and played a harp for him and calmed him down and strengthened his kingdom, if anything. And yet Saul aimed all of his weapons of warfare against David so as to kill David.
What did Jeremiah ever do to the leaders of his day? He proclaimed faithfully the word of God, told them Nebuchadnezzar was coming, why Nebuchadnezzar was coming, gave them an escape route, told them what they could do to get God's blessing, and what did they do to Jeremiah? They threw him in a pit, they threw him down in the mire, they beat him, they prosecuted him, they burned his scrolls. What did the righteous ever do to the wicked to be treated that way? The answer is nothing.
What did Stephen ever do to deserve being buried beneath a pile of stones? What did Jesus ever do to the people of His day to deserve being hung on a cross in the heat of the day and to endure the taunts and afflictions of the people walking by that day? What did He ever do to them? He healed their sick, He raised their dead, He gave sight to the blind, He made the lame walk. He taught them the Word of God. He responded to them with grace and mercy and compassion. He called them to repentance. In short, He did nothing to deserve that.
What did Peter do to deserve being crucified upside down? What did Paul do to deserve being beaten five times and shipwrecked and enduring hunger and taunts and being falsely accused by his brethren and chased from city to city and eventually being arrested and spending two years in Caesarea and then shipped off to Rome where he spends two years under house arrest in Rome only to be released and then hunted and hounded again, chastened, thrown into a prison cell where he has to write to Timothy, “Hey, winter is coming. Send me my books, bring me my cloak, come to me and see me before they take my head off” (my paraphrase). What did Paul ever do to deserve that? The answer is nothing.
And the story could be told of every martyr and every righteous person who has died at the hands of the wicked throughout all of history. We have done nothing to deserve that. The issue of the psalm, the issue of the prosecution of the righteous by the wicked, is not an issue of what they have deserved, it is an issue of who we belong to and what we are. That's what it boils down to. What we stand for, who we are, who we belong to. These are the ones who are upright in their conduct.
Peter says in 1 Peter 4:15–16, “Make sure that none of you suffers as a murderer, or thief, or evildoer, . . . but if anyone suffers as a Christian, he is not to be ashamed, but is to glorify God in this name.” So if you are going to become the target of the wicked, make sure that it's not because you have done anything worthy of being a target. And then if you become a target of the wicked, then rejoice. Bear that name well. In the language of Hebrews, bear the reproach of Christ and go outside the gate because that's where the righteous belong, outside the gate. And there we bear the reproach of Christ.
So what have the righteous done to deserve this type of hatred? Nothing, and yet these are the pernicious plans of the wicked. We can expect this in this life. This is what we are called to. This is what is described for us, Old Testament and New Testament. Until the wicked are cut off and the righteous inherit the land, this is going to describe what we should expect in this world. “All who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12).
Now if you're not under this kind of affliction, if you walk out of here today and think, “You know what, for forty minutes, Jim, I gave it some thought. I can't think of any unbeliever who wants me dead right now. Does that mean I'm not a believer? Does it mean I'm not righteous?” No, not necessarily. There are all kinds of restraints in place right now that keep that from being expressed each and every day against the righteous. But understand that what is being described here is the very real war that exists between these two kingdoms, and you and I are in the middle of that conflict. You are on one side of that or you are on the other side of that. So, you might not have to fear for your life as you walk out of here, take your firearm and shoot your way to your car to get out of here on your way home. That's not what the psalmist is describing, but it is suggesting and it is telling us that in this world, this is the conflict, this is the hostility that exists.
You and I, believers, we can thank God that He has rescued us from the seed of the serpent, that He has taken us out of that camp, that if you are in this conflict and you are on the side of the seed of the woman, on the side of Christ, you are among God's people, you're the chosen, you're not of this world because you've been chosen out of this world, you owe that to nothing but the grace of God. If it were not for that grace, we would be rebels in our hearts, but God by His grace has subdued our rebellious hearts, He has subdued our rebellious wills, and by His grace He has adopted His enemies into His family, adopting us as His sons.
And He did this not without changing our nature, but instead, by His grace and the work of the Holy Spirit, He made Christ precious to us as believers so that we see in the Son our salvation, our deliverance, our redemption, our eternal joy, our eternal glory. All of that we see in Christ, not because we have the ability in and of ourselves to see that, but because God, by His grace, has changed our hearts and opened our eyes to that reality. And by an act of His grace and His regenerating work, God has taken sinners and saved them out of their rebellion, subduing their wicked will, subduing their gnashing teeth, and turned them into sons who gladly receive that adoption and believe that Christ is precious. That is what God has done to you, Christian. So we thank God for His rescue of us from the marketplace of sin, that He has paid the price necessary to redeem us from that iniquity, and that He has paid the price and the penalty for our sin.
That wickedness, this describes, if you are in Jesus Christ, this describes what you once were. So meditate upon that, and then think, I've been rescued from that, saved from that. God has redeemed me from that. He has changed me from that. So yeah, now I'm moved into the vulnerable camp. I'm in the camp that in this world feels like it is upside down, in this world feels like we are the targets of all the wicked, but the eternal promise is that in the world that is to come, God will cut off the wicked and the righteous will inherit the land. And we owe that solely and only to the work of God's grace, that He has not winked at our sin, He does not ignore our sin, but that He sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to atone for our sin, to pay the price for our sin. Every last one of your iniquities, transgressions, and sins was laid upon the Lord Jesus Christ if you are in Him. He has taken your sin and He has provided for you His righteousness. That is the good news of the gospel.
So you would be in this camp, the wicked plotting against the righteous, gnashing your teeth at the light, hating the light and loving darkness, basking in your iniquity. That would describe you if it were not for the sovereign and gracious mercy of a God who loves sinners, saves rebels, and brings them to His table to dine with Him. That is a merciful salvation.