Recently I sat through a sermon on Psalm 112. It was a workshop in moralistic non-redemptive-historical preaching. It wasn't that the content was awful or the exhortations uninspiring, but the preacher missed the essential component of the passage and read it in a Judaized fashion. While disappointing it generated some great and edifying conversation for the drive home.
The psalm opens with an exhortation to fear Jehovah and delight greatly in His commandments. This is of course true, even in the context of the New Covenant. But what does it mean in the New Covenant? What are His commandments? Do we just flip back to Leviticus and apply those commands literally? Is that even possible?
We can read the psalm (and Leviticus to be sure) and yet they must be read through the lens of the New Testament. There we understand that Leviticus has been fulfilled in Christ and that Christ issues a series of Kingdom commands that are of a higher moral order than what Old Testament saints were held to. As the Old Testament proceeds, there is a higher expectation in terms of believer's conduct. One might say as the horizon grows nearer and the teaching (sometimes veiled in prophetic utterance) more and more approaches the New Testament, there is an expectation of a greater and higher calling. This is even more pronounced when one reads through the books that are labeled 'apocrypha' by Magisterial Protestants. It's little wonder the Early Church embraced these books, quoted them as Scripture and were blessed by them, because several of them (especially Wisdom and Sirach) can at times have a real New Testament-like feel to them and it's clear (at least to me) that several episodes in the New Testament refer or hark back to these books at least in passing if not directly so at times.
Verse 2 reads - His seed shall be mighty upon earth: the generation of the upright shall be blessed.
If read as is, this verse could be interpreted as equating blessing with power and prestige on the Earth - which would be appropriate for the Old Testament as Israel (especially under David and Solomon) attained a kind of worldly glory. And yet this too failed (because it was temporal and worldly) and is completely overshadowed by the eschatological splendour of the heavenly Zion. Old Covenant Israel provided a metaphorical glimpse, a snapshot of hope and a typical anticipation of what was to come, but it wasn't the actual thing. And if taken alone it was a ministration of condemnation and death. Those that would simply borrow from Old Covenant law without reference to Christ greatly err and are reading the Scripture in an unfaithful manner. It is clear there are several prominent and popular Bible teachers (such as John MacArthur) that not only fail to understand this point, but repudiate it.
Verse 3 takes this further - Wealth and riches shall be in his house...
It would be easy for a prosperity preacher to launch off from this passage but as I have often argued, that faction simply turns up the dial too far for the mainstream of Protestantism. The truth is both Evangelicals and Confessionalists hold to a de facto prosperity gospel - simply one that appears 'high brow' and restrained when compared to the tastes and proclivities of the TBN audience and the Charismatic movement.
In the case of the aforementioned sermon, the pastor didn't place a great deal of emphasis on this point concerning wealth but he was applying it without any qualification. The New Testament was not informing his thinking, it was not the lens through which he viewed this psalm.
The New Testament presents a Kingdom (and thus eschatological) understanding of wealth at odds with the Old Covenant - if the Old is taken literally and not read through the Christocentric lens of the New. The New reveals (as does Proverbs, the Psalms and much of the Old Covenant writings if one is paying attention) that 'true' wealth is not gold and silver but the knowledge of God and wisdom. And in the New epoch, temporal wealth is almost condemned, and presented as a dangerous stumbling-block for the faithful, a thing that chokes the faith and leads to worldliness and sorrows, a thing that blocks the faithful from the Kingdom.
The earthly glory of the Old is transformed into a higher pilgrim-exile ethic and calling in the New. If one fails to understand this, then all manner of false teaching can be derived from the Old - something we see not only in our day (in Confessionalist, Evangelical, and Charismatic circles) but throughout the post-Constantinian epoch.
Some have grasped the problem here and yet the American tendency is to explain it away by arguing there are no poor in America (rendering the debate moot) or that the wealth here is a sign of God's blessing (in an attempt to cancel out the argument). To be sure, there are some complicated and dynamic aspects to this discussion but the common (even dominant) teachings on it are self-serving and unfaithful in how they deal with the New Testament. I immediately think of the many radio preachers I've heard dealing with this and explaining it away - and no wonder as most of them are (by any standard) rich. If explained in any other way they would only condemn themselves and their so-called 'ministries'.
But returning to the question of moralism and the psalm, the second part of verse 3 provides a bit of information which completely changes the nature of the passage.
..and his righteousness endureth for ever.
This psalm is revealed as prophetic and thus messianic. It is not just wisdom literature or poetry but also prophecy and as such it operates under the same kind of perspective that we see in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and elsewhere. The prophet is a type of Christ and so often when he speaks in the first person, he also speaks with the voice of Christ. When he looks forward and speaks of future happenings, these are often blurred and indistinguishable from eschatological events. In this case the psalmist is speaking of the 'righteous man'. On the one hand it's a hypothetical ideal or descriptive of the man who walks with God. But ultimately the righteous man is Christ Himself - a point that becomes very clear as we move through the passage. The psalm is about Christ.
None of this was touched on in the sermon. It was all exhortations toward righteousness, how it's characterized, and what the result will be in your life and witness to the world. It's all true enough, but it's not a faithful rendering of the psalm. The sermon represented a hermeneutical failure in that it did not recognize Christ as both the voice of the prophet and the object of the prophet's reflection and it failed to read the passage in light of New Testament doctrine. 'Be righteous' is a good message but a better one is Christ is Righteous - therefore trust in Him and be like Him for you are in union with Him - and thus dead to yourself.
The sermon was great in terms of practical exhortation and the preacher said many good things and peppered the discourse with lots of sound advice. If he simply wanted to turn the psalm into a 'Be the righteous man' moralizing discourse, he was successful.
But it was not faithful to Scripture in terms of his exegesis. If it was meant to be an expository sermon, he failed.
Consider verse 8: His heart is established, he shall not be afraid, until he see his desire upon his enemies.
How should this be understood in light of the New Testament? We are to leave vengeance in the hands of the Lord. We are called to turn the other cheek and to bear the cross. We are told to expect persecution even while we pray for and love our enemies. We're not to relish the thought of revenge or of delight in our enemies perishing. If we do, then we have failed to understand grace. And as such (since we all fail in this regard) we must repent and revisit the gospel continually. This righteousness ever evades us.
But Christ's destruction of His enemies is not analogous to our situation as He is the Righteous Man and His judgment and wrath are right and proper, expressions of holiness in the face of sin. The perspective belongs to Christ and not to us - though we rejoice in His judgments and in His righteousness, and of course in His grace. We will judge but in the context of glorification and with the mind of Christ.
And if the reader had any doubts about the identity of the man, verse 9 is indisputable:
He hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor; his righteousness endureth for ever; his horn shall be exalted with honour.
This verse is directly quoted in 2 Corinthians 9.9 - but interestingly instead of Christ, Paul simply speaks of God giving to the poor and his righteousness enduring for ever. Though usually not thought of or appealed to, this combination also attests to the identity of Christ as God.
Paul does not use Psalm 112 in the sense of the righteous man - the moralizing paradigm described above. The preacher in question would do well to study how Paul (and the other apostles) uses such text as it's very informative and teaches a great deal about how to properly read and expound the Old Testament. Paul's use of Psalm 112 in 2 Corinthians 9 is incompatible with the moralizing application of the psalm. Again, it doesn't mean that what the preacher said was wrong but it wasn't what the psalm was teaching - at least not primarily. Such incomplete understandings can in other cases lead to serious error.
His horn shall be exalted with honour and as a result the wicked shall be grieved and gnash their teeth and melt away. The desire of the wicked shall perish.
This is another case of blended language - applicable in the temporal to a point but it is primarily eschatological - as we recognize the language well enough in the gospels. There the language is associated with judgment and hell - once again only applicable to Christ who is the Judge.
It is possible to have sound advice and good moral exhortation and yet be unfaithful to the text. At the very least it represents an impoverished reading of the text and misses the central point of what is being revealed - once again, Christ the righteous man.
It's not something I would leave a church over to be sure, but it's a cause for concern as in some cases such methodology can be rather misleading, and since it strays from the meaning of the text, it can be manipulated - sometimes by men not meaning to, but they are nevertheless affected by their own attitudes and the issues of the day.
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