John H March 23rd, 2006
The Dick Lucas sermon I mentioned on Monday turned out to be every bit as good as I’d expected.
The core text for the sermon was Psalm 90:12 – Dick fervently denied any suggestion that v.10 might have influenced his choice of text for his eightieth-birthday sermon! – but the sermon covers the whole of the psalm, demonstrating how that psalm summarises “the core of the gospel”. It was powerful stuff – not least because of the strong Law and Gospel dynamic of Psalm 90, verses 3 to 12 crushing us with the Law’s demands, and verses 13 to 17 then lifting us back onto our feet, which Dick’s preaching brought out very strongly.
Here is a brief(ish) summary of the sermon’s main points. Also, a reminder that the sermon is available for free download (free registration required).
First, some observations on the psalm as a whole:
1. Psalm 90 is a psalm for the living, not for the dead
Psalm 90′s inclusion in the Book of Common Prayer’s order for the burial of the dead means that, for English speakers at least, it has become associated with death. (Incidentally, isn’t Cranmer’s title, “The Order for the Burial of the Dead” one of the English language’s finest moments? TS Eliot would certainly agree.)
But this is to misunderstand the psalm, and indeed to misunderstand Cranmer’s service – which was emphatically not a “funeral” service in the medieval sense, but one that focused on reminding the mourners of their own mortality, and of their hope in Christ. As Dick points out, verse 14 could only really be applicable to a young person still facing “all [his] days”, not to an eighty-year old – or a corpse.
2. Psalm 90 is a psalm for those who are willing to submit their minds and their lives to the revelation of God in the Bible
In particular, Dick had in mind the revelation in verses 3-12 of God’s righteous indignation at human wrongdoing – especially the rhetorical question in verse 11, “Who considers the power of your anger?”
Dick argued that the denial of God’s righteous indignation has been disastrous for the church and for our society. One of its consequences is to render incomprehensible the brokenness of our world: while Luke 13 teaches us that we should not assume that suffering is linked to wrongdoing in a direct one-to-one correspondence, the suffering of a broken world can only really be understood at all if we see it as a consequence of God’s righteous anger against sin.
Dick deplored the fact that there are no church leaders today who are willing to warn people of the righteous indignation of God, and of the pains of hell – warnings that Jesus gave very clearly in his own ministry. Indeed, even “some church leaders who know their Bibles” – a reference, I suspect, to Steve Chalke – are now starting to deny substitutionary atonement, a denial whose roots lie in this downgrading of the Bible’s message of God’s anger against sin.
3. Psalm 90 enables us to grasp the absolutely central core of the Christian gospel
In particular, this core message is summed up in “that marvellous word”, grace.
To expand on this last point, Dick then went on to look at the psalm in more detail, splitting it (in true preaching fashion) into three sections:
1. God the Creator (vv.1,2)
Dick pointed out that one of the most important themes of the psalms, but one that is easily misunderstood, is that the God of Israel is the Creator of the world. See, for example, Psalm 121:1 – the God of the hills of Israel is the one “who made heaven and earth”.
Jeremiah 10:11 provides another example of this, and indeed God’s promise in that verse has come to pass. Who now remembers the gods of the nations around Israel? They have “perish[ed] from the earth”, as will all false gods.
Verse 1 also points forward to a key NT theme. God is our home. The NT talks much more about us being in Christ than about Christ being in our hearts. Christ is our home, our dwelling-place, and as Dick put it, “home is the place where you are loved the most”.
2. God the Judge (vv.3-12)
The indignation of God is shown in three things:
i. The humiliation of death and decay (v.3)
ii. The frustrations and transience of life (vv.5,6)
Dick pointed out that there is no sentimentality in the Bible about this second point. We easily become sentimental about these things, and Dick gave the example of the Queen Mother’s funeral, at which the Archbishop of York read Ecclesiastes 12:1-7 – a beautiful and moving passage, but the Archbishop stopped at verse 7 and did not go on to verse 8:
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
After all, he could scarcely have done that, could he? People might have thought he was talking about the Queen Mother. But millions were listening to those words, many of whom would have found that verse resonating with their own hearts, their own experience of life’s futility. As Dick put it, “If you let the Bible speak, it speaks today”.
iii. The terrifying reality of guilt (vv.7,8)
Verses 3 to 12 don’t go beyond death. For the Old Testament, life beyond death was a shadow. But the New Testament frequently takes us beyond death, and the anger of God is still there. Think of the rich man in the parable, referring to “this place of torment”, this place his brothers would need an angelic messenger to warn them about, since no-one in the synagogues had told them about it.
3. God’s loyal love (vv.13-17)
Dick’s first point on these verses was that the NIV’s “unfailing love” can be misleading, giving false comfort where people have rejected God. The ESV’s “steadfast love” is a better translation of the Hebrew word hesed, a word that the psalms only use to describe God’s love for us, never our love for God.
What this word says is this: God is loyal. Loyalty is at the heart of true love – think of how important it is in marriage.
This loyal love of God will never let us go, and this leads on to the two prayers which Dick exhorted us to make our own from this psalm, the two things for which we should ask God.
First, we should ask for a true walk with God (v.14), that we may rejoice in him all our days. This is the only secret of true happiness.
And second, we should ask that whatever we do, we will have a true work for God (vv.15-17). But the order is WALK and then WORK: my walk with God is more important than my work for God.
As a closing observation of my own, this conclusion, despite saying there is something we should “do” (“walk” and “work”), shouldn’t be mistaken for one that throws us back on the Law. That was not the tone of Dick’s message at all. The point is that, after we have been crushed by the Law in verses 3 to 11, God’s grace – his steadfast, loyal love towards his people – lifts us up and makes us able to walk with him and work for him joyfully, “that we may rejoice and be glad all our days”.
– that two years of leaving church with the gospel ringing in my ears had done far more good than the previous ten years of being exhorted, shamed, cajoled into making more of an effort with cross-bearing and being a “good witness”. 
