Monday Morning Coffee with Mark
Monday Morning Coffee with Mark. A spiritual boost to start the week.
Monday Morning Coffee with Mark
The Questions Jesus Asked- #2 My God, why have you forsaken me?
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Welcome to the Westside church’s special Monday Morning Coffee podcast with Mark Roberts. Mark is a disciple, a husband, father and grand dad, as well as a certified coffee geek, fan of CS Lewis’ writings and he loves his big red Jeep. He’s also the preacher for Westside church.
Hello, and welcome to the West Side Church's special Monday Morning Coffee Podcast. On this podcast, our preacher, Mark Roberts, will help you get your week started right with a look back at yesterday's sermon so that we can think through each other and better work the applications into our daily life. Mark will then look forward into this week's final reading so that we can know what to expect and watch for. And he may have some extra bonus thoughts from time to time. So grab a cup of coffee as we start the week together on Monday morning coffee with Mark.
SPEAKER_01:Roasted this coffee, and it's just pretty spectacular, no question about that at all. I hope you thought yesterday's sermon was spectacular. I do think our reading this week is spectacular. So there's plenty of spectacular happening. Grab your Bible, grab your coffee. Let's grow together. Let's think a little bit about that sermon yesterday. This is the 11th in the preaching theme series. The question that you voted as number two when Jesus asks from the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This is a very difficult question. And I would pull the curtain back a little bit and let you take a look at what it's like to prep that kind of thing and get ready to preach that and ask you for some additional feedback. Lots of people going all kinds of places on Sunday. And I always get lots of encouragement at West Side, not really looking for that, just looking, was it clear, was it understandable? Because as I tried to unpack yesterday, it's possible to take this too far to say some things about Jesus on the cross that would run aground against other clear passages of scripture, notably that Jesus became a sinner, that Jesus literally has the sins of the world transferred to him. That's not true, and as I said yesterday as well, can lead to some wrong conclusions about what happens in our own salvation. On the other hand, I think you can go too far in the other direction where nothing really terrible is happening to Jesus. He's got this, it's no big deal, came to do this, knew he's going to do it, bang, cross, it's all good, no problem. And that's not the case either. And so I'm trying to find that middle ground to say we don't want to take an extreme position that attributes some false things to Jesus. But at the same time, I want to say that was inexpressibly and unfathomably horrible for Jesus. Something is happening there at the cross beyond anything that we can even begin to know. And we need to think about that and see that and realize that to appreciate the cross better. And if that came across to you across, can we see what I did there? If that came across to you, I would like to know. And yes, if it didn't come across, if it was just a muddled mess, kind of need to know that too. So would appreciate your ideas and your feedback about that sermon. Now, let me give you an extra thought here that will get us started for the week. Let's have some coffee. You may have noticed that a couple of times I referenced the Elijah passage and that people say Jesus is calling for Elijah. Have you ever thought about why did they think that? Is it just because of the words in Jesus' mouth, Eli, Eli? There's more to it than that. Elijah in Jewish traditions, that's outside of the Bible, is not just a prophet. He's the prophet who was expected to return and set all things right. There's some misunderstanding of scripture that led to that. But by Jesus' time, people have decided Elijah's the one who will come and start the revolution and fix all the political problems. So when Jesus cries out loudly, what the crowd does is hear what they want to hear, what they think Jesus is supposed to be saying, and they don't hear what he really says. And I think that is a timeless problem. People hear what they want to hear instead of hearing what Jesus really said. And that can happen today. For example, a couple of weeks ago in my sermon on the social gospel and why that will never go away. I talked about how if you select the right verses, emphasis the right verses and only those verses, you can stuff the social gospel in Jesus' mouth and you can say, I'm hearing what Jesus says. Or you can shove John 3.16 in Jesus' mouth and say, I hear Jesus say that faith only saves you. The crowd didn't misunderstand because they didn't hear Jesus. I think they misunderstood because they didn't want to hear what Jesus was really saying. They didn't want the kind of Messiah who dies for their sins. They were looking to hear something else. Surprise, surprise. That's what they heard. And I think it's fair to say if you want the wrong kind of Jesus, you will never hear the true Jesus. Hope that helps you. And like I said, we'd be interested in your feedback from that sermon. Let's think about our Bible reading. Let's turn our Bibles to the Psalms. It is part of the Psalms of Ascent. That's Psalms 120 through 134. These were the Psalms that were used by people journeying to Jerusalem for the annual feast. They would sing along the way. And those songs have a lot in common with royal psalms that celebrate the king and the songs of Zion that celebrate Jerusalem. And this is a celebration of Jerusalem. It is a hymn of praise. It would be spoken by a large group. The idea here would be: let's learn this together. Let's all do this together. It is difficult to date this psalm, although because it is about Jerusalem and Jerusalem being the capital, one wonders if this was not written after David. David does capture the city and establish it as the capital, but it is not the site of the temple, of course, until the time of Solomon. Couple of pieces to this psalm. First, the joy of arrival in verses one and two, and this is the famous verse that could be translated, I rejoice whenever they say to me. And then the idea, verse two, of we're here, our feet are standing inside the city. Then there is a celebration of unity, verses three, four, and five. Jerusalem is very compact, and you get a little bit of that in the ESV, built as a city bound firmly together. It is very small. Uh, as far as cities go today, at least, Dallas Fort Worth is spread out all over everywhere, but we don't have to put it behind a wall. When you have a city wall, that necessarily limits the size of the city. You don't want to be involved in urban sprawl. If that means you have to build a big old wall around 50 miles of city, that's that's not doable. So cities in the Bible times have a tendency to be rather compact. And Jerusalem is the capital. Verse 5 is getting at that. And then there is this idea, verses 6, 7, 8, and 9, of unity and peace because the land and the nation that they would do well when the city does well, because it is where God's presence is. It's where the temple is. So what do we make of Psalm 122? Now, without any doubt, the Bible is certainly centered very tightly on the city of Jerusalem. It is enormously important. It's important in the Old Testament, and when we open the New Testament, guess what? Yeah, it's still super, super important. And you probably are aware there are people who would use Psalm 122 and other places, other parts of the Bible, and make Jerusalem still theologically significant and important. Sometimes you hear religious leaders say, I stand with Jerusalem, or you'll see the bumper sticker pray for Jerusalem. Sometimes in that bumper sticker, the letters in the middle, USA, are in red, white, and blue. I I wow, that that blending of politics and religion is so offensive and so wrong. Please don't do that. But you know people who say that the city of Jerusalem still has value and weight in the eyes of the Lord. And this is not a lesson about premillennialism and that set of doctrines and so forth, but that comes from a failure to understand the promises of God, that they have been fulfilled to Israel and completely fulfilled. God owes them nothing. Joshua 21, 43, for example, failure to understand who is really part of the true Israel of God. Romans chapter 2 and verse 28. Anybody can be an Israelite today, a true son of Abraham, a true daughter of Abraham. And of course, then there's a failure to understand that Christianity does not have a single center, shrine, or sanctuary where we worship. So Jerusalem was very, very important. But I would suggest it is not important today. Yes, it's an incredible place to visit. I have been privileged to be there, and it is awe-inspiring to see and to think about Jesus being there and walking there, and to see the sights and the things that are happening there. But God's presence is not in Jerusalem today. There is no temple there. It is not the center of all things for the people of God. Jesus came, John 1 14. He is the temple of God, God among us, and then the church, the saved, become the body of Christ, the household of God, the temple of God today. It's a mistake to attribute all of that to a geographical location today. So while the psalmist may have prayed specifically for Jerusalem, I do not do so, nor do I think we are obligated to do so. Instead, I would urge you to pray for the unity of God's people. Pick up 6, 7, 8, 9 and apply that to the church. Verse 6, pray the peace of the church. May they prosper who love you. Peace be within the walls of the church. Look at the concern for others in verse 8. Do we have that concern? I will only do that which makes for peace before I speak that word, before I criticize, before I make that phone call, before I jump on somebody, will I evaluate? How does this affect our unity? How does this affect our peace? I think there's a good application of Psalm 122 to the church, but I don't think the application should be made to the physical city of Jerusalem today. Our reading for Monday, hope that's helpful to you. And our reading for Monday is Psalm 122. It is Tuesday. It is Tuesday. And today we're reading the 124th Psalm. We will have Zoom tonight, Westsiders, looking forward to talking with you about this Psalm this evening. But let's work on it together now. Psalm 124 is the reading for Tuesday. This is a good place to think about what-if scenarios. Sometimes when we play that game of what if this, it's very sad and very depressing. If only I had studied harder? What if I hadn't said that harsh word? What if our team had gone for it on fourth down? Lots of that kind of thing. But this is another kind of what-if. What if God wasn't helping us? What if God wasn't for us? What if God was for our enemies? The psalmist David here says, it certainly is a good thing that God is on our side, and we want to thank God for that. This is part of the Psalm Songs of Ascent, talked about that yesterday. And this is written by David, probably reflecting some of the early perils of his kingdom. Remember, by the time David is finally anointed king over the entire kingdom, Saul had pretty much messed everything up, and most of the kingdom actually was in the hands of the Philistines. And so in 2 Samuel chapter 5, beginning in about verse 17, we get the record of David reuniting the kingdom and driving the Philistines out. It was a tough, tough job, and I think this psalm reflects some of the things that David faced during that time. There is lots of repetitive imagery and phrasing in the Psalm. And the key idea, again, is the if-then structure. If God was not on our side, look what would have happened to us. And there is a great deal in this early section of repetition, and that is for emphasis, not for us to just skip past. And then in verse 4, there's the emphasis on water as a destructive force. That's a very common image in the Old Testament. Lamentations 3, verse 54. There's plenty of other places like that. Remember what I said when I preached from the 65th Psalm. Water, especially the sea, in the Bible, generally not great. Generally not great. Uncontrollable, out of control, chaos, destruction, all that. Water, not anybody's favorite, at least not floodwaters, in the Bible. And I do think that what you're seeing here in Psalm 124 is an important part of what it is to be truly grateful before the Lord. A clear acknowledgement of the depth of our problems and how devastating they are, and how we can't do anything with this is essential to being truly grateful. If we get ourselves in a jam, and then when everything gets resolved in the good providence of God, we say, well, you know, it wasn't that big a deal. Then where's our incentive to really praise God? The praise of God, beginning in verse six, forms a transition here between the past acts of God and now the look in confidence and hope to the future acts of God. And if you'll look at verse eight, God's presence begins and ends the Psalms, the name, this Psalm. The name of the Lord stands for his character, particularly as it is known through his saving acts. I'll see you on Zoom tonight, Westsiders. We don't have a whole lot of those left during this holiday season. So make sure if you can be, be with us tonight at 7. If you're not a member of the Westside Church, I'll see you on the podcast tomorrow, reading for Tuesday, Psalm 124. Welcome to Wednesday. Welcome to Wednesday. And today we're reading the 138th Psalm. Psalm 138 is the reading for Wednesday. This is a wonderful Thanksgiving psalm. This is a psalm that I could preach from the Sunday before Thanksgiving because it is about being thankful. Specifically, it is about being thankful. Verse 3 for answered prayer. That's worth thinking about maybe a lot more than we do. Where would we be if God did not hear and answer our prayers? This is a psalm of David. There are many times in David's life when he is praying, when he is in lots and lots of trouble. But don't lose the value of the psalm because we decide it's only about kings who are being chased around by another king or by Philistines or by their rebellious son. No, all of us can be thankful for answered prayer. That's what this psalm celebrates. And so I would give an outline something like this: thankful for answered prayer, verses one, two, and three. Then answered prayers for kings, verses four, five, and six, and finally answered prayer in God working in our lives, verses seven and eight. Notice in verse one this idea of the gods, and that's always troublesome to people, but it should not be. The Psalms a couple of times will talk about gods, and that just represents that there are false gods around the psalmist that must be cast down. That could be the idols of the Philistines, for example. Some have tried to tie this to Psalm 82, where there's the discussion of the council of the gods. I'm probably not real keen on that idea, but the key here is to see that David's victories over these armies around him were God's victories, and God needed to get the glory. In Old Testament times, if you beat another nation, another country, that meant your God was stronger than their God. The last part of verse 2, by the way, is very difficult in the Hebrew. There's a number of different options there. I think the ESV probably is doing the best it can with what you have to work with there. But then we get this verses 4, 5, and 6, where God is not only greater than the gods of the enemy, he's greater than their rulers. And David seems to be very humble in what he is saying here. I love verse 6. For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly, but the haughty he knows from afar. David realizes how insignificant he really is, but God has used him and blessed him in a great way. And then verses 7 and 8 would talk some here about what God is doing in the psalmist's life. And I love how this is very real and how God deals with what is going on. God is greater than gods, and God is greater than rulers. But what makes him truly great is that he stoops down, he regards the lowly, verse 6, and he stretches out his hand against the enemies and saves the psalmist. Because the Lord is fulfilling his purpose, verse 8, his steadfast love, the covenant loyalty, that love because he promised lasts forever. God never changes, and that is a cause for thanksgiving indeed. Our reading for Wednesday, Psalm 138. Let's go. It's Thursday, and today we're reading the 144th Psalm. This is a longer psalm than some of the other psalms that we have read, and it is an amazing psalm. It is, I have a note in my Bible, a mutt psalm. I hope that's not offensive, a Heinz 57 Psalm, an all-American psalm. I know some people don't like their dog getting called mutts, but this psalm is a mix of a whole bunch of different kinds of psalms. It's a royal psalm, a lament, it has praise for God, it's got some wisdom in it, and it uses pieces of all kinds of psalms all over the rest of the book of Psalms. So verse 3 comes out of Psalm 8, verse 4 comes out of Psalm 39 and Psalm 109, verse 9 comes from Psalm 33. There's a lot of stuff in here that's in other places in the Psalm, and it's all kind of put together, kind of like I said, makes it into a mutt psalm. How about that? I'm not sure anybody's gonna be real happy that I said that, but it's out there now. This is a song about war, and it is the most warlike of all of the psalms, and that will make some people very uncomfortable. The battles in the Old Testament, that bothers people. But we need to be mindful that the Lord gave the Canaanite peoples time to repent. Genesis 15 talks about this, and those people were tremendously perverse in their idolatry, and the idolatrous rites that they practiced and the things that they did were sick and immoral and horrible and needed to be judged. And so God is at war with evil through these Canaanite battles. And as one scholar wrote, behind the idols stood demonic powers that determined their influence. Thus, when Israel as a nation goes into battle against her neighbor, she's engaged not only in a military struggle, but in a spiritual struggle as well. Yahweh, the God of Israel, is fighting against the false gods through her. So at the same time, God is king over his people, and one of his covenant treaty responsibilities is to defend them from their enemies. No wonder that he not only goes to battle for Israel, but also uses angelic powers in even nature itself, which is under his command to fight for Israel. I think that's exactly correct, and maybe we should make good application of that to the spiritual battle that we're still involved in as we fight against evil powers and forces in heavenly places, Ephesians chapter 6. So this is a mosaic, maybe that's a better word than mutt, and it's drawn from all kinds of other psalms, and here's a little outline. The Lord is blessed, verses 1 and 2. The psalmist is concerned, verses 3 to 11, and then the people are happy, verses 12 to 15. And so at the opening here, David praises God for his ability to make war effectively. Especially look at verse 4, because human beings are so fragile and so frail. Then as he begins to develop those ideas of needing help, it gets very lamenty here. The king makes a vow, verse 9, to sing and play in the temple a song of thanksgiving. And I've talked before about how when you have a Thanksgiving song, oftentimes that would be paired with a lament. In the lament, the psalmist says, If you'll rescue me, I will sing your praises. And then we get that praise song as a song of thanksgiving. And so verses nine and 10 represent that vow. And of course, here a new song is a victory song. It's a song of war. Then you get all these happy people, verses 12 to 15. What's the connection here? Well, the connection is God rescued them, God fought for them, God saved them. And so the conditions of that and how they live now at peace, because God fights for them, are sketched out in dramatic language. Notice the conclusion of the psalm. There's an affirmation of the happiness of God's people. Blessed are the people to whom such blessings fall. Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord. It's a beatitude, a double beatitude. And of course, blessed here doesn't mean happy in the American sense of happiness. I talk about that all the time. And somebody still manages to come out after a sermon or email me and say, blessed means happy, or if they hear anybody say that, you bet. I absolutely don't bet. But you don't have any tongue in cheek. Somebody will send me a clip where somebody is saying, Blessed means happiness in the very American way of life, liberty, in the pursuit of happiness. That's not it, verse 15. Blessed here is satisfaction and joy. It's the contentment that comes because you are accepted by God. And in this context, it comes because God fought for his people and saved them. The reading for Thursday is Psalm 144. Welcome to Friday. Welcome to Friday. Today's reading is Psalm 145. The reading for Friday is Psalm 145. This is the last Psalm attributed to David in the book of Psalms. It is also the last of eight acrostic psalms. Acrostic Psalms are those Psalms that begin each stanza with the letter of the Hebrew Bible in order. It's kind of an A to Z approach to the subject matter. Now, this one is not perfect, but it's missing the noon, the letter N, roughly corresponding to the letter N, although there is a text from Qumran that has that missing verse. So there's discussion of that, and you may find that in the bracket here after verse 13. That's what that's doing there. It comes from the Septuagint and some other manuscripts. Difficult decision for the translators. What are they doing with that? How are they rating that? What are they working with that? But that's why you have those brackets there. It is a hymn of praise, and it is closely related to Psalm 111. And we do need to think more about this kind of song. I believe we sing a lot of songs that edify one another, but there is a place for praise anthems for singing to God his praise, his glory, his amazing power, might, strength, and love for us. And so this Psalm breaks down, here's an outline that I'm going to use here. Who we praise, the great king, verses one to three, why we praise the great king, verses four to nine, who will praise the great king, verses ten to thirteen, and who is the great king that we are praising, verses fourteen to twenty one. So these first three verses, who we praise, the great king, fundamentally talk about God as being a wonderful and amazing God, not like other gods, but great is the Lord. His greatness is unsearchable, he is incredible. And then in verse four, as David begins to think about why we praise this great king, he says, Our generation, one generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts. I I couldn't help but think. What would David what would David say if he knew that more than 3,000 years later, people are still praising this great God and they're using the stuff that David wrote to do that? What would David think of this podcast? Kind of boggles the mind a little bit, doesn't it? Then in verses 10 to 13, who will praise the great king? And the idea here, of course, is that everybody should do that. All your works, verse 10, all your saints, verse 10, speak of the glory of your kingdom and tell of your power. God is great. By the way, part of verse 13 reappears in Daniel chapter 4 and verse 3 in Nebuchadnezzar's Confession. I wonder if Daniel had been praising God with this psalm, and Nebuchadnezzar is able to pick up on that. Or he may have even asked Daniel to instruct him and to help him praise the God who answered his prayer and interpreted his dream. Then who is the great king that we praise? Verses 14 to 21. And the chief observation here about this whole section is that it really stresses the dependability of God. He helps the inadequate. Verse 14, he provides food, verses 15 and 16. I really love verse 18 and 19. He answers those who pray. The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desires of those who fear him, but also hears their cry and saves them. We'll go back to something that I said yesterday about being blessed. Look at verse 19. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him. Don't take that wrong. Oh, because I go to church, God's supposed to give me anything I want. No, if we're the kind of person that praises God like this Psalm talks about, that will change our desires. And God will want to give us our desires because we will want what God wants to give us. Does that make sense at all? I think it does. And the idea here is that God watches over his creation. And so if he watches over his creation, how much more does God watch over his people? And that is the very idea that Jesus advances in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 6. Psalm 145, that's our reading for Friday. That's the podcast for the week. Thank you so much for listening. I hope it is a help to you. It is certainly a blessing to me to get to talk to you and work with you in the Word of God, think a little bit more about the sermon from Sunday, and just put all that together with a cup of coffee and have a great week serving the Lord, drawing closer to the Lord through his word. Thanks for listening to the podcast. I'm Mark Roberts. I want to go to heaven. I want you to come too. I'll see you on Monday with a cup of coffee.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for listening to the Westside Church of Christ podcast, Monday Morning Coffee with Mark. For more information about Westside, you can connect with us through our website, justChristians.com, and our Facebook page. Our music is from Upbeat.io. That's Upbeat with two P's, U-P-P-B-E-A-T, where creators can get free music. Please share our podcast with others, and we look forward to seeing you again with a cup of coffee, of course, on next Monday.