A righteous versus wicked conflict permeates Scripture from Genesis to modern times. Through Psalm 37, we see how the wicked plot against God's people with drawn swords and bent bows. Yet despite this hostility, the righteous are assured of God's protection and ultimate victory. The sermon examines this spiritual warfare and its implications for believers today—an exposition of Psalm 37:12-15.
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What is Kootenai Church Morning Worship?
The expository preaching ministry of Kootenai Community Church by Pastors/Elders Jim Osman, Jess Whetsel, Dave Rich, and Cornel Rasor. This podcast feed contains the weekly sermons preached from the pulpit on Sunday mornings at Kootenai Church.
The Elders/Teachers of Kootenai Church exposit verse-by-verse through whole books of the Bible. These sermons can be found within their own podcast series by visiting the KCC Audio Archive.
Psalm 37, we're going to read together verses 12–15.
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 this is the passage that we started last week. We got partway through it and looked at verses 12–14 to consider together the description there of the wicked and their violence against the righteous.
Today we are looking at verses 13 and 15. And we're taking them in that way, 12 and 14, and 13 and 15, not just because we're grouping odd verses together and even verses together but because there's a pattern here in this chunk of the psalm that unfolds here. And the intention of the author is to restate in verses 14 and 15 what he says in verses 12 and 13. So verse 12 makes the statement about the plotting of the wicked and the anger of the wicked. Then verse 14 unfolds that a little bit, gives more detail: “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.” And then verse 13 describes God's response to that, His judgment, which is the Lord laughs at them. And verse 15 adds more detail to that.
So there's this alternating pattern in the psalm. And we are grouping together verses 12 and 14 because they both describe the pernicious plans of the wicked. And we saw there last week the anger and the hatred, the violent intent and hostility of the wicked toward the righteous. We saw last week that that war, that hostility, goes back to the garden and it is really a tale that is as old as time itself. The war that is unfolding between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent—that is really the tale of all of Scripture.
We saw in those verses, 12 and 14, that the wicked have not only violent hatred and hostility toward the righteous, but they also have the means to carry out their nefarious ends. They have drawn their sword, they have bent their bow, they are ready to draw blood, ready to destroy. So their anger and violence is not just a pipe dream, it's not just something that they hope for, it is actually something that the wicked have within their means to inflict on the righteous. We saw there that the righteous are their target. The wicked go after the vulnerable and those who are without the means to defend themselves in order to destroy and to despoil the righteous.
And then we saw that the central idea of this part of the psalm, these four verses, is that God in His judgment on the wicked will turn the evil of the wicked and all of their plots and intentions back upon their own heads. There is a poetic justice that is to come. And that's what these four verses are describing.
So verses 12 and 14, the pernicious plans of the wicked. And now we pick it up almost like this is part two of last week's sermon, which it is, with the poetic punishment on the wicked in verses 13 and 15. Let's read verse 13 and 15 together. And notice how verse 15 repeats and—gives added detail, I should say. It doesn't repeat. It gives added detail to what we find in verse 13. Verse 13: “The Lord laughs at him [that is, at the wicked], for He [the Lord] sees his [the wicked’s] day is coming.” Verse 15: “Their sword will enter their own heart, and their bows will be broken.”
Psalm 37:13 describes God as laughing at the wicked. Now you remember, this is not the first time that we have seen this in this time that we have spent in the Psalms. We saw this back in Psalm 2:4: “He who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord scoffs at them.” This word for “laugh” in verse 13 is the same word used for laughter back in Psalm 2:4, describing how the Lord responds to the wicked of Psalm 2:4. The word translated “laugh” here describes mockery and derision. It means to make sport of someone or to hold them in ridicule. Now that might make you slightly uncomfortable to think of God doing that to the wicked, but I want to briefly lay out for you the case that this is entirely justified and entirely righteous mockery and derision. This is the judgment upon the wicked.
Now there are different kinds of laughter, and we recognize this. I mentioned these, I kind of expanded on this a little bit in Psalm 2. There are different kinds of laughter. There is the laughter that finds something funny because something is unexpected, like the punch line of a joke or a situation that unfolds that has a certain note of irony in it or we see something that kind of catches us out of the blue and so we laugh at that because it's kind of humorous. That's one kind of laughter.
There is another kind of laughter that is a coping mechanism. You laugh at something that is not necessarily funny, we wouldn't find it humorous, but in order to cope or to vent something inside of us, we sort of laugh at it as a way of just coping with reality when reality gets tough. Or sometimes we laugh to relieve tension. Or we laugh because we are nervous or anxious. There is a nervous laughter, kind of a [laughs] where you don't know what's coming, that kind of a laughter. You're not sure what's happening. Somebody gives you a gag gift. You're not sure what you see coming, so you kind of laugh nervously at it.
But none of that is the kind of laughter that God has with the wicked. He's not surprised by what they're doing. He certainly doesn't find it humorous. “Oh, the wicked are oppressing the righteous. They're trafficking people. They're oppressing people. They're stealing things. They're looting. They're murdering. They're going to war. They're heaping up their possessions and despoiling the righteous. Isn't that funny? I didn't see that coming.” That's not the kind of laughter. Nor is it God coping with reality or relieving tension, nor is this a nervous or anxious kind of laughter. The type of laughter that is described here is a scoffing and a derision. The Lord holds them in contempt in the sense that He makes sport of them or mocks them.
Consider, if you would, going back to Psalm 2, not turning there, but I mean if you were not here for the messages on Psalm 2 and this is something that perplexes you—how can God laugh at the wicked?—go back to that psalm and watch how we unfolded this. This is a just God. For God to scoff or deride or to ridicule those who have scoffed at and derided and ridiculed His truth and His Son and His kingdom and His righteousness and His law, that is entirely just, entirely righteous, entirely appropriate. I would say to you, if your view of God does not have room for that kind of theology, you have a small God. You need to understand that this is in fact God doing to the wicked the very thing that they have done to the righteous, to His people, and to His truth. And God is simply turning back upon their own heads the very thing that they deserve and warrant for what they have done. This is the justice of God inflicting upon them what they have inflicted upon Him and upon His people.
Psalm 2—the parallels here are quite striking because in Psalm 2 we see something similar happening that we have happening in Psalm 37, namely the wicked are plotting against the righteous, raging in their hatred and their animosity and enmity against God and His people to persecute through violence, to cast off, to throw down, to destroy, to despoil people. In fact, Psalm 2:1 says, “Why are the nations in an uproar and the peoples devising a vain thing?” Remember what Psalm 37:12 says: “The wicked plots against the righteous.”
You have the same kind of plotting in Psalm 2, but in Psalm 2, it is not the wicked, generally speaking. In Psalm 2, it is the rulers and the leaders and the kings of the earth who are doing this plotting against the Lord and against His Anointed. Psalm 2:2: “The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His Anointed.” There is a plotting and a planning. There is a particular target that is in view, namely the Lord, His truth, His kingdom, His law, His Word, His righteousness, and His Anointed, which is the King who would come from David's line. They're really persecuting or prosecuting Christ in Psalm 2. And so that's the activity of the wicked there.
It is obviously a violent, angry, rage-filled rebellion going on in Psalm 2. It’s described in verse 3: “Let us tear their fetters apart and cast away their cords from us!” There is this rash thrashing about, casting off restraint in almost a violent way that is described in Psalm 2. So the psalmist in Psalm 37 describes that type of rebellion, anger, violence, and hostility, and then he says in verse 13, “The Lord laughs at him, for He sees his day is coming.” In Psalm 2, the psalmist describes that same type of violent anger and hostility and rage against the Lord and His truth, and the response in verse 4 of Psalm 2 is the Lord laughs at them. “He who sits in the heavens laughs,” not because He finds it humorous, not because He's relieving nervous tension. But Psalm 2:4 says, “The Lord scoffs at them.” This is a scoffing laughter. Consider also Psalm 59:8: “But you, O Lord, laugh at them; You scoff at all the nations.” This is an appropriate response. And notice how appropriate this response is.
Let me back up a second. There is an intentional mirroring of the act with the response in this passage. So what is the act? The act in verse 13 is the wicked gnashing their teeth at the righteous. When I say that, gnashing their teeth, you can see the jaws clenched and the mouth shut and the teeth grinding. You can see the anger and the hostility in the countenance of the wicked through that description. The Lord's response is to laugh at them, which highlights the countenance and the face of the Lord, not that the Lord has a face, not that He has a mouth, but the idea of God laughing puts in your mind the picture of somebody laughing with their mouth and with their face. So the wicked gnashing their teeth, and the Lord laughing at that. You see the contrast there in those two images? It's an appropriate imagery and an appropriate response. The wicked use their tongues as swords and gnash at the righteous, and the Lord uses His mouth to condemn the wicked and to laugh at them, and that in fact is their judgment. Yahweh laughs at the wicked.
Now if you are the righteous and you are suffering at the hands of the wicked, you might be thinking to yourself, “Jim, it's great that the Lord laughs at the wicked, but I would like Him to do something more than just laugh at their wickedness.” In fact, Calvin in his commentary on this passage says, “The fact that God doesn't seem to be doing anything to counter the wickedness of the wicked and appears to us only to be laughing at it tends to bring us little comfort and little consolation as we reflect upon what the wicked do to the righteous.”
You might wonder, Why doesn't God do something, move, rise up and defend the righteous, rise up and destroy the wicked even now? I mean, laughter seems like an inadequate response given the reality of their evil. It feels as if God should come forth armed for our defense, should Himself come out with His sword drawn and His bow bent with all of the armies of Heaven to defend the righteous whom He loves and whom He has died for. So the imagery that He sits in Heaven and merely laughs at the wicked would tend to conjure up within us this desire to see Him do far more than simply laugh at them.
The fact that God is waiting in that laughing and waiting to deal with the wicked is what tries our patience in a difficult world. That is what is difficult for the righteous to deal with. It's the Habakkuk problem. “Lord, this is what I see going on around me: No justice in the land, the wicked just flourishing in all that they do. The kings are promoting immorality and wickedness. People turn against Your law. The priesthood is corrupt. The monarchy is corrupt. The people are corrupt. I feel like I'm the only righteous one in all of the land, and I cry to Heaven and You seem to be silent. You seem to be doing nothing. You're just waiting, and waiting for what?” That's the angst of Habakkuk 1.
It's also the angst of Psalm 73. Why is it that the wicked prosper and the righteous seem to have nothing and God seems to do nothing in this? And there seems to be this reality in our world where this happens for the wicked and this is happening to the righteous and God seems content with that circumstance for both the righteous and the wicked. And we want God to do something more than simply laugh at it.
And again, it helps us if we remember that the laughter is not finding it humorous. The laughter is itself the certainty of their judgment. Notice what verse 13 says: “He sees his day is coming.” God laughs at them because God sees the day of the wicked is coming upon them. And from God's perspective, it is not a long time. For us, it feels like a long time. From God's vantage point, it is not.
And listen, brethren, I want to promise you something. There will come a time when you will look back upon this time and you will say, “You know, it wasn't that long after all. It felt like a long time in the moment, but, boy, those events unfolded quickly, like that. And my suffering was not really that much. My suffering was not really that long.” It was a whole lifetime. But you're going to be dead a lot longer than you will be alive here. Now eternally speaking, in terms of resurrection, you're going to be alive a lot longer than you will have been dying. You understand that? But I mean, when you die, you're going into an eternity and you're going to look back upon this life and you're going to realize that the Lord laughing at them was just the Lord preparing for their judgment. That is what the psalm is teaching. “The Lord laughs at him, for He sees his day is coming” (Ps. 37:13), his day of judgment and the destruction of the wicked.
And given the parallelism of the passage, verse 15 describes that judgment. We're not there yet. But the plans of the wicked are destined to fail, they cannot succeed, their triumph is temporary, and their resistance is futile because the wicked have an appointed day. And this is how Paul wrapped up his sermon on Mars Hill in Acts 17—God has overlooked the times of ignorance in the past, but now He is declaring to all men everywhere that they should repent because He has fixed a day upon which He will judge the world in righteousness and He has furnished proof to all men by raising that Judge from the dead. That's Acts 17:30–31.
God has fixed a day, that day is coming, it is unalterable, it cannot be delayed, and every day that we live brings us one day closer to that final day, but it is certain. The judgment and the execution of justice upon the wicked and the exaltation of the righteous is as fixed and certain as anything could be fixed and certain. And therefore, God is able in His judgment to laugh at the wicked.
And while we wait for the wicked to be cut off and the righteous to inherit the land—that is the repeated promise of Psalm 37, remember? So while we wait for that to happen, the wicked plot and scheme. They plan destruction and unrighteousness and seek to overthrow the righteous and to destroy them, but the wicked might as well plan to put out the sun with a cup of water because it will be just as effective. They can't do it and they won't do it. So everything that they have plotted will eventually come to nothing.
And the wicked do not see just how close they are to ruin. That's one of the underlying implications of the passage. The wicked don't see just how close they are to ruin. They are sinners in the hands of an angry God, plotting against God's people, and there is barely a hair's breadth between them and their eternal damnation, and they march along in their folly and rebellion, acting as if they are the rulers of time and eternity. And every breath that the wicked take, they take by nothing less than the bare permission of a God who is long-suffering and patient with them. And every heartbeat that is theirs is the only thing that separates them from everything they have and instantaneous and eternal loss. It's the only thing between them and eternal destruction.
And once that day has arrived, all their evil will turn back upon their own heads. It will return to their own pate, as the Scriptures say. Now this returning back upon them is what we would refer to as poetic justice. Matthew Henry says this: “Men have their day now, but God will have His day shortly, a day of recompenses, a day which will set all to rights and render that ridiculous which now passes for glorious.” That's a great phrase. God will render that ridiculous which now passes for glorious when He makes everything right. This is poetic justice. Verse 15 says, “Their sword will enter their own heart, and their bows will be broken.”
Now, given the parallel structure of this part of this psalm—12 and 14 are paralleling one another; 13 and 15 parallel one another—verse 15, I think, is the explanation of the kind of judgment that is coming that is mentioned in verse 13, “For [God] sees his day is coming.” What is that day? Verse 15: “Their sword will enter their own heart, and their bows will be broken.” The sword and the bow are the symbols of their strength, symbols of their military prowess, their ability to do harm, their violence. Their might is being crushed here in verse 15. The tools of their oppression are brought to nothing, and their violence is inflicted upon them.
Judgment here is described as the undoing or the reversal of their plots. Remember verse 12 says, “The wicked plots against the righteous and gnashes at him.” No, sorry, 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. Their sword will enter their own heart, and their bows will be broken” (vv. 14–15). So verse 15 is the reversal, the undoing of verse 14. The wicked have drawn their sword, they have bent or walked back their bow, stretched it out, and they are ready and aiming at the righteous. And the judgment that is mentioned in verse 13 is that judgment which turns those instruments right back upon them so that their sword pierces themselves, not the righteous, and their bow is ultimately broken. This is the judgment, the total destruction of the means that they use to oppress the righteous. Their sword enters them and their bow is broken.
Now, if you've ever had a bow break on you in the middle of pulling it back and stretching it back, you know that that in itself can be very painful, right? When I was a kid, I used to shoot a slingshot all the time, and it had the surgical rubber that we used for the bands on the slingshot. I made it out of a tree. It wasn't one of the slingshots that you get that sort of wrap around your wrist, come up, and you hold on to it, that can never leave your wrist. We just—those were for sissies and pansies. None of my friends ever shot those things. We mocked and ridiculed, scoffed at and laughed—just like God laughs at the wicked—we scoffed at and laughed at the kids who used those. We had the chunks of tree that we held in our hand and we made our own slingshots.
And I was wicked good with that slingshot because we used to go practice all the time. Back in my day, you could go to the landfill and you could go down into everybody's garbage and pull their stuff out and shoot stuff—rocks and marbles—at it and shoot them with the guns. You could throw bottles up and shoot them out of the sky with your shotgun. We lived in a good country once. We lived in a great country once. Never forget what they have taken away from you. That was great because you could do your target practice and your Christmas shopping all at the same time in one place. It was a great time to be alive.
But with that slingshot, you would pull that back, and if that surgical tubing broke, it would, in the twinkling of an eye, it would twist that in your hand, pull it out of your grip, and that chunk of wood would come hurtling back at your head before you could even blink. And it happened quite frequently when I was a kid. Quite frequently. I used that thing constantly and always tried to get more out of that surgical tubing than anybody should have gotten out of that surgical tubing.
So if that happens with a slingshot, that's the type of destruction, that's the type of thwarting and judgment that is pictured here. They step it back and when that bow breaks, it crushes in on them. They get the effects of that. They are the one who is wounded by that. They are the one who is destroyed by that. That is poetic judgment. The very thing that they sought to do to somebody else comes back upon them when God destroys the wicked.
This notion of poetic judgment is sprinkled all the way throughout Scripture. Obadiah 15—I call Obadiah the prophet of poetic judgment. I borrowed that from somebody somewhere. Not sure who it was. Obadiah 15 says, “For the day of the Lord draws near on all the nations. [Now listen to this] As you have done, it will be done to you. Your dealings will return on your own head” (v. 15). That's poetic judgment. Now Obadiah is pronouncing judgment against the Edomites. And the Edomites—if you read Obadiah and understand the context of it, it mentions this. The Edomites, which came from Esau—that was Jacob's brother—they stood back and allowed the invading armies to come in and despoil God's people, the Israelites. And they actually sat there and kept the Israelites from escaping that. They hedged them in, as it were, and rejoiced in their judgment. And so the Lord in the book of Obadiah says, “What you have done is going to come back upon you,” and guess what. That's exactly what happened in that time period.
Psalm 7:14–16—we read that at the beginning of the service. “Behold, he travails with wickedness, and he conceives mischief and brings forth falsehood. He has dug a pit and hollowed it out, and has fallen into the hole which he made” (vv. 14–15). He digs the pit and he falls into the pit that he digs. Psalm 7:16: “His mischief will return upon his own head, and his violence will descend upon his own pate.”
Psalm 35:7: “For without cause they hid their net for me; without cause they dug a pit for my soul. Let destruction come upon him unawares, and let the net which he hid catch himself; into that very destruction let him fall” (vv. 7–8). The wicked sets the trap, intending to ensnare the righteous. And the psalmist's prayer is, “Let the wicked fall into and be caught in the very trap that they have set for someone else.”
Psalm 10:2: “In pride the wicked hotly pursue the afflicted; let them be caught in the plots which they have devised.” Do you hear it? It's sprinkled all the way through Scripture.
So Israel sins and they commit iniquity and idolatry and bow down to their idols and the Lord says, “All right, you like idols? I'll give you idols. I'll come in and destroy you with a nation and I'll send you off to worship all those idols in a place where I am not known and you're surrounded with nothing but idols.” That's poetic justice.
And then to the Babylonians who did that, the Lord says to the Babylonians, “You like violence? Well, I'm raising up a nation far more violent than you, the Medes and the Persians, and they're going to come in and they're going to destroy you.” And then to the Medes and the Persians, He says, “You like violence? I'll tell you what, I got a nation more violent than you that's going to come in and they're going to destroy you.” This is the cycle of justice all the way through the Old Testament.
And I promise you, it is the very kind of justice that is going to fall upon the wicked if they will not repent. In the ultimate sense, in God's judgment upon the wicked, He visits upon them the very things that they have sought to do to the righteous. So, they seek to take from the righteous what they have in their lives and God's judgment is to take from the wicked not only their lives but to remove from them everything they have ever enjoyed. They intend to rob others and they ultimately will lose everything. They are cut off and the righteous inherit the land even though the wicked have desired to cut off the righteous and take all of their land and all of their stuff. The wicked seek to establish their own kingdom and in short, they suffer all of that loss, for they miss the real kingdom. They want to exalt themselves, be remembered, have a reputation, have their own little fiefdom, their own little kingdom, and ultimately they will be forgotten. That is the promise of Scripture.
Now the reality is that sometimes in this life, this is true, the wicked do triumph over the righteous. That happens. And sometimes in this life, the wicked kill, persecute, cast down, destroy, oppress, and take everything from the righteous. This psalm is not suggesting that that will never happen to the righteous because that would be unrealistic. The psalmist is not describing that. Instead he is pointing to the ultimate triumph of God's judgment over the wicked and God's exaltation of the righteous. For the psalmist continually says, “Yes, the wicked do this, but in the end the righteous will inherit the land and the wicked will be cut off.” So this is a temporary situation that we have going on in this world. Ultimately all of this is going to be reversed.
A couple weeks ago when Jeff Miller was preaching, he talked about eschatological reversal, and he made a statement that I have to correct, but it's a correction that I think Jeff would agree with. He made the statement that eventually God's going to flip everything upside down. I would correct that and say eventually God's going to flip everything right side up. It's all upside down right now. And so we're hanging upside down, and when you're hanging upside down and everything's upside down, everything looks right side up. But eventually, God is going to flip all of it right side up when He cuts off the wicked and the righteous inherit the land. That is the promise of this psalm.
In the meantime, while we wait for their day to come, we are called to trust and wait patiently. And I would just remind you of what we have already studied in this psalm. Look at verse 5: “Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgment as the noonday. 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” (vv. 5–7). Look down at verse 9: “For evildoers will be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord, they will inherit the land.” Trust in the Lord, wait patiently for Him, do not fret, wait for the Lord, you will inherit the land.
Now, sometimes this poetic justice happens in this life. I've given you a couple of examples from the Old Testament. Let me give you a couple more. Do you remember Balak hired Balaam to go curse the Israelites? And what happened? He got up there and spoke and ended up cursing Balak and blessing the Israelites, right? That was a judgment. That was the reversal of what Balak had hired Balaam to do.
You remember Haman and Mordecai? Haman thought to himself, “How can I glorify myself before the king and all of the people?” He came up with this great scheme when the king asked him, “What shall I do to the man whom I want to honor?” And Haman thought, “Well, who would the king want to honor more than me? Of course!” So he gives him this whole thing. And then the king says, “All right, do that to the person that you hate, to Mordecai.” And so Haman had to do that. And then you remember what happened? Haman went back that very night and said to his wife, “Here's what the king made me do.” And his wife said, “Oh, yeah, you've got it coming. If you started to fall, your destruction is certain.” And eventually, the very gallows that he built to hang Mordecai on, he and his family were hung from those gallows. That's poetic justice.
Nebuchadnezzar strutted about on the rooftop of his palace, standing up over everything that he had built, and he said, “Look, what I have built for my glory.” And God says, “You are not going to stand over what you have built, you are going to be under what you have built,” and makes him walk on his hands and knees eating grass for seven years. That is a poetic switching of the roles. And rather than being in his glory and in his dominion and in his sovereignty, all of the stuff that he gloated about was instantly stripped from him, and he was given nothing.
Belshazzar, descendant of Nebuchadnezzar—I think Belshazzar was Nebuchadnezzar's grandson. Belshazzar used the instruments of God to participate in a drunken orgy inside of his own palace while the Medes and the Persians were outside of the gate finding a way to get inside of the city. And meanwhile, he is flaunting the God of Israel and cursing the God of Israel and engaging in all kinds of immorality. And Daniel 5 ends with some of the most glorious words in all of the Scripture. It just says, “And that night the kingdom was given to Darius the Mede.” It was just taken from him like that. Belshazzar thought he was so secure, and he was not at all. God stripped him of all of that in one night.
Saul persecuted David, tried to put him to death. And how did Saul end? He fell on his own sword in battle and ended up giving the kingdom to David anyway.
Sennacherib—this is in Isaiah and 2 Chronicles. Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, came and invaded the land of Israel and besieged the city of Jerusalem. And meanwhile, inside the city gate, the righteous were there, held up for their lives. And Sennacherib taunted the God of Israel from outside and said, “Your God whom you serve will not be able to deliver you from my hands. None of the gods of any of the other nations have been able to deliver their people from my hand. Your God will not be able to deliver you from my hand.” And that night God destroyed 185,000 of the Assyrians. And Sennacherib went back to Assyria, and Scripture says that he bowed down in the temple to worship his god and while he was in the temple in front of his god, his sons came in and slew him and killed him and then fled. So here was somebody who stood there and said, “Your God whom you serve cannot deliver you,” and he goes back and dies in the presence of his god while his sons slay him, while he's standing there right in front of his idol. That is poetic justice. His god could not deliver him even from his own sons.
And on and on it goes. God uses one nation to punish another, using Babylon to punish Israel, using the Medes and the Persians to punish Babylon, using the Greeks to punish the Medes and the Persians, using Israel or using other nations to punish Edom when they had executed violence against Israel.
And then in the New Testament, an example of this—Herod, in the book of Acts, in all of his pomp, gets up there and struts about. It's Acts 12. He struts about in front of the people in this big ceremony and Herod speaks and the people say, “Oh, the voice of a god and not of a man!” And the text says that he refused to give God glory, so God struck him and he was eaten by worms and he died. That doesn't sound like the way that a god dies, does it? To be eaten by worms? See how God takes the glory and turns it into the most disgusting thing that you could possibly do, takes that from him and gives him the lowest possible thing to be written across his tombstone—“He was eaten by worms and he died.” I don't know if that was written across his tombstone, but if I were in charge of things, it would have been. I would have done that. Psalm 37:15: “Their sword will enter their own heart, and their bows will be broken.”
Let me give you three closing considerations from this passage of the psalm. First, you and I are not promised peace and prosperity in this life. I think we understand that. That is not what we are promised. David is not promising that kind of peace and prosperity, even though in the next verses, 16 and following, he talks about God's provision for the righteous. He talks about the righteous never going without, the righteous being given what they need. He's not there promising that we will never have want in this life. We can expect to be the objects of hatred and hostility and enmity and the violence of the wicked. That is something we can expect in this life as the righteous. It may be in this life that we are slain by the wicked, cast down, robbed, abused, harshly treated, slandered, reviled, persecuted, hated, and suffer loss. That's the reality of God's people in nations that have not been our own around the world for all of human history. That is the tale that is as old as time.
But ultimately what the psalm is promising is that ultimately that will not be the end. The wicked will not prevail in that because even if they kill the righteous in this life, that is not ultimately prevailing. If they lose everything and the wicked are cut off and the righteous are resurrected to inherit the land, that is the ultimate victory. The Lord is the one who will right every wrong and He will execute justice and righteousness in the earth. He will restore to the righteous what was lost. He will bless His people with abundant Shalom. He will exalt the humble. He will turn the plans of the wicked to nothing and bring about their ultimate destruction. Their day is coming. Look at verse 10 of this psalm: “Yet a little while and the wicked man will be no more; and you will look carefully for his place and he will not be there.”
So number one, we are not promised prosperity and ease and protection in this life. It may be that God's purpose for you or for me, for our good, our sanctification, His glory, His purposes, the advancement of His kingdom, it may be that in this world, it would ultimately appear like we are undone by the wicked, that the righteous are slain by the wicked, that they're cast down by the wicked and ultimately suffer loss in this world. But from the eternal vantage point, from the perspective of eternity, that is not how things are going to unfold. That is not going to be the final line of the story. That's the promise.
Second, we don't seek vengeance on our own against our enemies or the Lord's enemies. This is why Scripture says do not return evil for evil, do not seek vengeance, do not take vengeance and revenge into your own hands. Why? Because you and I can be confident, we can be confident that the Lord will handle that and He will handle it better than we ever could and perfectly. And so we don't have to take vengeance upon our enemies.
Instead, and this would be my third consideration from the passage, instead you and I have a message for the wicked. And that is that this indeed is what is going to happen to them unless they turn from and repent of their wickedness and trust in the Savior. We have good news for the wicked, and the good news is that God became a man in the Person of Christ and lived a perfect life in this world and then died the death they were required to die so that they would not have to go to Hell if they will repent and trust in that Savior. That is the good news. The good news is that God takes rebels and wicked, which describes at one time everybody in this room and everybody outside of this room, and He turns them into sons by wooing their hearts, overwhelming their will, making Christ precious, granting them repentance and faith, and drawing them to the Son and redeeming them, giving them forgiveness of sins and righteousness. This is the gracious and loving God who does that for the wicked.
This destruction that we are reading about in Psalm 37 and all the other passages that I've quoted, that destruction and that judgment, you and I deserve for our lying and our rebellion, for our lies, for our adultery of heart, for our blasphemy, for our lust, our greed, our selfishness, disobedience to parents, our taking God's name in vain. That was the judgment that we deserve. That is not going to be visited upon the righteous, not even in the smallest measure. Why? Because One came who bore our wrath for us, who paid the penalty for us, lived and died in our stead so that we would never be condemned along with the world but instead might have the righteousness of that Savior and the forgiveness of sins that comes through His work on the cross. He died, and three days later He rose again, and now He is ascended to the Father's right hand, and He is coming again, Scripture says, to judge the living and the dead, and He has appointed a day for judgment.
So our message to the wicked is you may triumph in this world, but like with the devastation going on in the other parts of the country with the fires, everything you have and everything you cherish in this life can be taken away from you, and you will stand before God clothed in the robes of your own self-righteousness and give an account for every evil deed that you have ever done. And God commands you this day to repent and to trust in His Son lest you face the wrath that is to come. That is our message in love and in grace, not vengeance, not crying and whining and fussing about the inequities of this life, but to call the wicked to repentance. So may God give us the grace to do that very thing.