We are continuing to look together at Psalm 34, which I described last week as a psalm of David's reflections on suffering. That is, it is a psalm after David's suffering was over, and he had the distance and the opportunity to look back on it and reflect on it. And this psalm rather naturally divides itself into three parts. And we looked at sort of the center of the psalm last week. We're going to look at the ending part of the psalm this week. And then, Lord willing, next week we'll look at the beginning of the psalm. If that seems like a somewhat strange way of proceeding, I'll try to explain it next week. So you'll have to come back. You'll be on pins and needles all week. So let us give careful attention to the reading of God's Word. Psalm 34. Of David, when he changed his behavior before Abimelech, so that he drove him out and he went away. I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My mouth makes its boast in the Lord. Let the humble hear and be glad. O magnify the Lord with me. and let us exalt his name together. I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers them. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. O fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack. The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. Come, O children, listen to me. I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is there who desires life and loves many days that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good. Seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil to cut off the memory of them from the earth. When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones, not one of them is broken. Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned. The Lord redeems the life of his servants. None of those who take refuge in him will be condemned. So far the reading of God's Word. Well, you remember, boys and girls, that David is looking back on a terrifying moment in his life when he had to flee from Saul, who was trying to kill him, and he was so desperate that he actually fled to the Philistine city of Gath, bearing the sword of Goliath, the champion of Gath, whom he had killed, and putting himself into the hands of the Philistines. And he was so frightened there that we memorably read in 1 Samuel that he pretended to be insane and stood in the city gate and drooled. It's a vivid sort of picture of a great champion of Israel pretending to be insane and drooling because he was so frightened. And it's almost as if it seems to me that he's reconsecrating the use of his mouth in this psalm by praising God and then telling the truth and then crying out, reflecting on that time of distress in the latter part of the psalm. And that's what we want to look at today, focusing our thoughts in some ways around verse 18. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. David is recalling those days when that's how he felt, how he felt broken and felt crushed. What a thing. And yet it's something probably many of you have experienced one way or another. To feel utterly broken and to feel crushed as if some great weight had been put upon you. This is the way Job felt at one point. Job in chapter 6 said, Oh, that my vexation were weighed and all my calamity laid in the balances, for then it would be heavier than the sand of the sea. think of that we go to the sea and we put a little bit of sand in a bucket and it feels a little bit heavy but if you gathered all the sand of the sea what a weight it would be how crushing that would feel and that's what David is reflecting on as the experience he had had of how he had suffered how he had been overwhelmed by it. It was a suffering that was both objective, he really was being chased. You know that old bad joke, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. And that's what David experienced. He was being crushed and broken. That's what Saul wanted. That's what Achish wanted as they pursued him. So there's that objective reality that we can have circumstances so terrible that they are crushing. But it's also the subjective experience that we have. We feel that way. It's interesting that these things are sort of balanced here in this text. Literally, verse 18 says, The Lord is near to the broken and saves the crushed in spirit. There's both that external reality of being broken and that subject experience of being crushed in spirit. And David experienced it. Job experienced it. Almost all of us will experience it to one extent or another. And this psalm is given to us under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by David to help us trace a little bit of how David coped with that crushing experience. How did he survive? What did he do? And again, this is not, in a single psalm, a summary of everything the Bible tells us about how to cope with suffering. But it's a help. It's a beginning. It's a one man's experience that can help and direct us. And so we see in this latter part of Psalm 34 really three ways of coping that David addresses. And the first is that as he is being crushed, he cries out. In this psalm, time and time again, he talks about how he prayed. Four times, specifically, he talks about how he prayed. Verse 4, I sought the Lord, and he answered me. And then verse 6, this poor man called, and the Lord heard him. And then verse 15, the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, and his ears toward their cry. And then verse 17, when the righteous cry out for help, the Lord hears them. And there's a kind of growing intensity in these verbs that describe prayer. Seeking, calling, crying, crying out for help. And this growing intensity talks and reflects on how much David had to turn to the Lord in his crushing experience. How much he had to appeal to the Lord. How he turned again and again to the Lord. And we see the intensity of his emotion here, how insistent he is in turning to the Lord. And that's crucial for us as well. Isn't it true that when our life is going along very smoothly, our prayer life can maybe get a little ordinary, a little bland, a little perfunctory. But when we really have a need, then we can experience more intensely that need for prayer and that value of prayer and that intensity of prayer. And we find that reflected here for us. I sometimes say that the lesson we take from the history of Israel in the Old Testament is that in good times they were ungrateful and in bad times they complained. And what we really need to learn is exactly the opposite. that in good times we should be grateful, and in bad times we need to cry out to the Lord and seek his help and his mercy. And that's what David is doing here. This is how David is directing us here. And his prayer is not only insistent, but his prayer is persistent. He perseveres in prayer. And we don't know how long he went through this terror, as he calls it, in this psalm. Weeks, maybe? Months? Maybe longer? After all, he was fleeing, fleeing on foot, traveling significant distances, hiding out in the wilderness, going to Gath, fleeing from Gath, hiding in the cave of Adullam. This is a protracted period of time in which David is undergoing this crushing experience. And in that whole time, he cried to the Lord, he turned to the Lord, he appealed to the Lord, and he shows us how important that is. Now, I said this is a psalm that reflects on suffering rather than is born in the midst of the suffering itself, but in some of those psalms that do emerge from suffering while it's going on, we see something similar. The bleakest psalm in the Psalter, you know, is Psalm 88, and it begins this way, O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you. Let my prayer come before you. Incline your ear to my cry. Then down at verse 9 of Psalm 88, Every day I call upon you, O Lord. And down in verse 15. Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors. I'm helpless. You see, here's a psalm in which for years, apparently, the psalmist in distress has turned to the Lord. And this is such an important lesson for us that we turn to the Lord for as long as the suffering continues. We don't know His timing. I said last time that one of the great difficulties we face with suffering is that while we know general things about suffering, we never know why this suffering now. And what the Lord is teaching us through this Psalm of David is that in this suffering now, we must keep turning to the Lord. We must keep praying to the Lord. We must cry out to Him. And what David then shows is that as we cry out to Him, there are comforts that surround us and encourage us. There are comforts that surround us and encourage us even in the distress. And we find that the first that David celebrates here is that in my distress, I can be comforted to know that God is present with me. God is present with me. He sees what is going on in my life. And he hears my prayer. This is so important for us to keep clearly in our hearts and in our minds. When we are suffering severely, it's very tempting to think that God has abandoned us. David gave a powerful expression to that, didn't he, in Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But he wasn't forsaken. And we need to be aware of that. we need to return to that. In my suffering, God sees. God knows. He is not absent. He is not too busy somewhere else. That's not the answer to why affliction may come upon us. And David gives such powerful expression to that. One of the great burdens of suffering can be the feeling no one listens. No one understands. I'm all alone in this. And part of the great blessing of the Psalter is that whatever we're suffering, we can find in the Psalms, a Psalm that says, see, you're not alone. Someone else has gone through this. And they have come through and they know that the Lord is with us in it. He hears, he sees, he cares. There's also the comfort of knowing that God is promising future deliverance. David comes back to that again and again. God hears and he will answer. God sees and he will deliver. Again, we don't know the timetable, and that can be part of the great frustration. I was tempted to try to find a way to sum up this psalm in really brief statements. And you all know I'm a great fan of rap music. Actually, that's not true. I don't understand rap music at all. But somebody maybe could take some of these phrases and make a useful summary of them. God is near to hear. God is sure to cure. But we hate to wait. That's sort of the condition we find ourselves in. God is near to hear. We believe that. God is sure to cure. We believe that. But we hate to wait. We hate to wait. But while we're waiting, and while we're hating the waiting, we always have to remember He will come. He will deliver. He will rescue. And it's interesting that that Hebrew word of deliver has that little sense of snatching us away from the suffering. And almost like David here in this psalm, when we are delivered, we'll be able to look back and feel that God did come and snatch us away, deliver us in a wonderful way. So he's present with us in our suffering. He's promising to deliver us from our suffering. And then he preserves us in our suffering. I think we see that in this otherwise rather curious verse in Psalm 34, verse 20. He keeps all his bones, not one of them is broken. Did you think that was a slightly curious verse as we read it? Maybe you're all too pious to think that any verses in the Bible are curious. But it's good to notice verses that feel a little strange and invite us then to reflect. What do they mean? Why is it there? What can it point us to? Well, it's interesting. In about 12 different Psalms, we have references to bones. Bones wasting away. Bones rejoicing. What is it with bones? What is the meaning of these bones? And one of the commentators put it well when he said bones seem to be an emphatic way of talking about us at our deepest level, at our profoundest experience. He said the closest we can get to it in an English expression is the expression, I feel it in my bones. You ever used that expression? I feel it in my bones. Somehow deep down inside of me I know this. And what the psalmist seems to be saying is, even though I felt crushed as if all the weight of the sand of the sea was on me, God kept my bones together. I wasn't utterly abandoned and lost. I wasn't left alone. I wasn't utterly given over to the suffering and the trial and the difficulty. Verse 20, he keeps all my bones, not one of them is broken. It seems that this psalm is quoted precisely at this peculiar verse by the Apostle John in his gospel at the crucifixion of our Lord. Do you remember John 19, verse 36? Soldiers are coming because it is reaching late afternoon on the day of preparation before the Sabbath, and the Jews don't want these bodies to defile the land by being left on the cross for the Sabbath day, and so they get the Roman governor to agree to go out and break the legs of those being crucified so that they will die more quickly. One of the ways you survived for a time on the cross, crucified is by pushing up with your legs so that you could breathe. Because the weight of being crucified put great pressure on the lungs, and as you weakened, you couldn't breathe. And so if the legs are broken, you can't push up anymore, and you die rather quickly. And so the soldiers come to break the legs. They break the legs of the thieves, and they come to Jesus, and they find him dead already. And John says that was to fulfill what was written in the scripture. John 19.36, not one of his bones will be broken. Now the commentators debate a little bit about exactly the background of this verse. Some refer it to the Passover statement in Exodus 12 that not a bone of the Passover lamb was to be broken, and that may be in John's mind, but I think Psalm 34 is very much in his mind. God, even in this ultimate suffering, bearing the sins of his people on the cross, does not utterly abandon his son, but preserves him at this point, in this moment, so that the bones of Jesus are not broken. And when we think about that a little bit, we realize that this is a promise that God had made to his son, it's God's presence with his son to deliver him from this additional assault and affliction, but also it points to God's timing, doesn't it? John makes very clear that on the cross, Jesus reached the point in his suffering when he said, it is finished. And then John records, and he bowed his head and gave up the spirit. Jesus' life in a profound sense wasn't taken from him. It was given by him. And he didn't need to be hurried in his work by having his legs broken. But he did his work just on God's time. And when it was finished, when the work was finished, when God's plan was fulfilled, then he died. And I think that captures what's going on here in verse 20 of Psalm 34, that God is with us in our suffering. He preserves us in our suffering so that we are not utterly lost or abandoned. And he works out his own timing and plan in our experience, just as he did for Jesus, just as he did for David. He works out his timing and plan in his own way. And his timing is right and good, however hard it may be for us to see it. We hate to wait, but God will keep his sheep. That's what this verse is saying. God is near to hear, God is sure to cure, and even though we hate to wait, he'll keep his sheep. That's what has comforted David in this whole experience of intense suffering. And these are the kind of things that we need to remember as we face afflictions, great and small. God hears, God helps, God holds. The reason why I'm trying to summarize these in memorable terms is that in suffering, sometimes it's so hard to remember. We're sort of so overwhelmed. We need simple statements out of Scripture to help us. God hears, God helps, God holds. That's the promise. And so David shows us that in his suffering he cried out, in his suffering he was comforted, and in his suffering he maintained his commitment to the Lord. Verses 16 and 21 talk about the rebellion of the wicked against God and how tragic that rebellion is because the wicked then will find an everlasting suffering from which they'll never be delivered. But David shows that in his suffering he didn't become a rebel. But in his suffering he found refuge in God. He committed himself to God. And while this psalm very much emphasizes the work of God, it reminds us that we are not to be passive in our relationship to God. Verse 22, the Lord redeems the life of his servants. That's the Lord's work. None of those who take refuge in him will be condemned. We need to take refuge in him. We're called to action. Not obviously in our own strength or by our own ability, but the Christian life is an active life of taking refuge in God and finding him to be our Savior. We commit ourselves to God, and God commits himself to us. And that refuge that we find is in Jesus. And it's interesting if we were to look at Isaiah 53, we find that Jesus is presented to us there as our refuge because he was crushed in our place. Isaiah 53, 5, he was crushed for our iniquities. Verse 10, it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He was objectively crushed as the punishment and payment of our sins. and he experienced subjectively what it was to be crushed. Verse 3, he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Or verse 4, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. That should strengthen us in our commitment to him. He knows exactly what we're going through. He has been crushed. He has been grief-stricken, and he has borne those things for us. Jesus is our refuge when we are being crushed in sorrow and suffering. And so in this week of preparation, as we think about our need of the Savior, as we're perhaps crushed in some way, great or small, by a sense of our sin and our need of forgiveness, May this pattern that David laid down for us, that we cry out to the Lord, that we are comforted by the Lord, that we are committed to the Lord, encourage us and direct us so that we may gather next Sunday evening around the Lord's table and rejoice that Jesus is our refuge and our Savior. May that be true for every one of us here. Amen. Let us pray. O Lord our God, how wonderful your word is to anticipate the various circumstances of our lives. We are thankful that most of us are not crushed most of the time. But we recognize, O Lord, that this is a fallen world in which there is much misery and in which it is true that many are the afflictions of the righteous. and we pray, O Lord, that you will prepare us to be able to stand in the day of trouble and that we will turn always anew and confidently to Jesus, our Savior, and to find our hope in him. Hear us, for we pray in his name. Amen.