Creation Fears Him (Through the Psalms) Psalm 114

Welcome to Through the Psalms, a weekend ministry of the Truth Pulpit, teaching God's people God's word. Over time, we'll study all 150 Psalms with Pastor Don Green from Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

We're so glad you're with us. Let's open to the Psalms right now as we join our teacher in the Truth Pulpit. We have a wonderful Psalm again to take a look at this evening, Psalm 114. I invite you to turn there in your Bible with me as we continue our way through the Egyptian Hallel, Psalms 113 through 118. Last time in Psalm 113, we saw the incomparability of God, how there is no one like Him. Now Psalm 114 is going to illustrate that truth with a historical occasion in which God displayed His authority and His power, and creation responded in obedience. Verse 1 of Psalm 114.

When Israel went forth from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language, Judah became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The sea looked and fled, the Jordan turned back. The mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs. What ails you, O sea, that you flee?

O Jordan, that you turn back. O mountains, that you skip like rams, O hills like lambs. Tremble, O Lord, before the Lord, before the God of Jacob, who turned the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a fountain of water. A 19th century commentator says about Psalm 114, this is perhaps the most beautiful of all the Psalms which touch on the early history of Israel. It certainly is the most graphic and the most striking in its boldness, and the beauty of this Psalm and the reason that that commentator said that about this Psalm is this.

It uses a literary technique that is called personification. In other words, it attributes human characteristics to non-human things. It's a creative way to give greater life to the description that is found in the Psalm. And basically what you have in this Psalm is this fact that creation responds to its God as though creation fears him. Creation responds to its God as though creation fears him. When God speaks, creation obeys, and when God acts, creation responds as though it fears him. And you see this in the descriptions as we will go along through the Psalm here this evening.

I want to make a contrast before I forget in case I let it slip my mind toward the end of the message where it more appropriately belongs. Creation responds when God commands it. When Christ told the sea to be still, the raging storm became a sea of glass. Creation obeys its maker because of God's authority over it. And in that way, you could almost say that creation is better than us because man does not obey God implicitly. In fact, man is a rebel against God. Man defies God. Man defies his commandments and breaks them and transgresses against his law. And you see in contrast with the obedience of creation how awful it is that a moral creature like us would not obey in like manner. Why do we not fear God in the same way that creation does? We'll come back to that at the end of the message, I hope, but for now I just want you to see that there is this contrast between the authority of God over creation and this jarring contrast by the fact that men sin against him without compunction and without respect for his position as the creator of all. And so it's very humbling to consider these things. Now before we get into the actual text of Psalm 114, I just want to walk you through a brief overview of Old Testament history because there are a lot of compact references to Old Testament history in this psalm.

And we've reviewed this often in the recent past, so I don't need to dwell on it much. God, you remember, pledged to Abraham that he would give him a nation that would come from him. He would give him descendants as numerous as the stars. And so God had made this promise to Abraham, and an early generation of his descendants of about 70 people went into Egypt. And there they multiplied and flourished, but they came under slavery of the Egyptian Pharaoh. So over 400 years they were in Egypt, multiplied there. And yet the Egyptian leaders put them into slavery where they suffered and grown greatly under the weight of the slavery that they were under. They suffered greatly.

They were not yet a nation because to be a nation you've got to have a land, and they had no land of their own. And through a series of miracles that we see in the book of Exodus, God led them out of Egypt. And Pharaoh had second thoughts about letting that happen, and so he chased them and pursued them to the edge of the Red Sea. And they were facing either certain slaughter or certain drowning in response to that particular historical occasion. And as you know, God delivered them. God delivered them in a mighty way. He parted the Red Sea so that there were walls of water on either side as they walked through and fled through on dry land.

This is absolutely stunning in its display of power. And when the Egyptians tried to follow after them, not a good move, some commander lost his job over this one. When the Egyptians tried to follow, God closed the water over them, and the greatest army in the world at that time was utterly destroyed. God showed his power. God delivered his people by exercising his power over creation, and creation obeyed so that the water supernaturally parted in order to allow a route of escape for his people that was not previously there. Later on, soon after that, God gave his law to his people in Exodus 19 and in Exodus 20, and you recall that it was accompanied with great signs as there was lightning and quaking, and the people were afraid as God gave his law to Moses, and Moses then gave it to them as a sort of a mediator between God and them. But the mountains quaking and shaking in response to the revelation of God. Forty years later, after they had wandered in the wilderness, God parted the Jordan River so that they could safely enter into the Promised Land and begin to take possession of it. During the course of the book of Joshua, God made the sun stand still in order to give the army time to achieve its victory.

And on and on we could go. This just gives you a very quick thumbnail recognition of how God controlled the natural elements in order to deliver his people. And remember that we said the Egyptian Hallel is showing forth God's compassion on the helpless.

It's praising God because he is good to the helpless. And we see that this is so much more than just a sentimental comfort inside the hearts of his people. God exercises his sovereignty over his creation in order to deliver his people, and he did it in real time and space, in real history for the nation of Israel. These are not fables. These are not parables of something that didn't happen in order to teach a moral lesson. This is time and space history that took place, recorded for us in the inerrant Word of God.

Now, with that little bit of summary, let me just bring this little statement to clarity here. The nation of Israel was born in the midst of a display of great power and great holiness by God. What gave birth to Israel was God exercising his sovereign might on their behalf. And they were a helpless people. They were under terrible slavery at the time. And you remember how their taskmasters sent them out to gather the materials in order to make bricks, and they were miserable there, and God delivered them.

They could not escape Egypt on their own power. They were not able to do anything to help themselves, and God delivered them. And their deliverance was accompanied by these great acts of his miraculous power exercised over his own creation. And so as we come to Psalm 114, this psalm remembers those kinds of events in their national history, and remembers them with a poetic tribute. It's understandable why this psalm would be a portion of what is read at the Passover that commemorates their deliverance from Egypt. And so supernatural deliverance by the hand of a sovereign God, creation responding to its maker as he delivers his people for them, and now the psalmist remembers these events in order to contribute and add to the praise of this section in the Psalter, Psalms 113 through 118.

So let's look at it and just go through it rather quickly here this evening. And if you're taking notes, this is the first point. God's place among his people. God's place among his people. Now this psalm presupposes that the reader is familiar with the history of the nation of Israel. It says a lot in a few words, and it points back to lengthy narrative portions in the writings of Moses. It would be like us being able to, in a quick summary, say 1776, and instantly you're thinking of George Washington and the Declaration of Independence, and our deliverance from Britain, and our victory over Britain for my English friends who sometimes listen in, our victory over Britain.

You know, 1776 is a shorthand reference for a whole lot, a whole complex of events that resulted in the birth of our nation. Well, in a similar way, Psalm 114 is doing this. Look at verse 1 with me. When Israel went forth from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language. He's calling together everything about the slavery, about the deliverance, about the leading of God, about the parting of the Red Sea. All of this is coming into this shorthand reference as Israel goes forth from Egypt. And then there is a parallel line saying the same thing in a different way at the second part of verse 1. The house of Jacob from a people of strange language. And so these two lines are echoing one another.

The second line echoing the first. Israel and the house of Jacob are describing the same people. Egypt and a people of strange language are the same reference here. And so he's introduced the whole history of the birth of the nation of Israel in that short reference. And when that event happened, when Egypt had to let Israel go, when Israel went forth out of Egypt, there was a spiritual significance to that act that is taking place and is referred to in verse 2.

Put it there with me. Judah became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The people, the tribe of Judah, representing the whole of the nation of Israel, they became in that event, the result of that event was that those people became the sanctuary of God. By which the writer means that God manifested his presence in the midst of those people.

As he led them out, he led them by a pillar of cloud during the day, a pillar of fire by night. He manifested his presence as he fed them with daily manna and all of these wonderful ways in which God manifested his presence. And so God saved his people.

Watch this. This has New Testament significance. God saved his people so that he could manifest his presence in their midst. And in keeping with the broad theme of the Egyptian Hallel, God did this even though that nation was small and unworthy of his presence.

They showed how unworthy they were of his presence by their constant rebellion against him in the midst of the wilderness. But God delivered them for a purpose of his own design, of his own choosing. God delivered them to be with them. God delivered them in order to help them despite their small unworthy nature. He delivered them also to be their God and to exercise authority over them and that authority being expressed as he gave his law to Moses. So he was with them in a gracious way.

He was with them in an authoritative way as well. So that when God led his people out, he led them out to be his, and that they would be a manifestation of his presence to the nations around them. That is the significance of the fact that they became his dominion, his area of domain, his exercising authority over them.

Now later on, as you read on in the New Testament, God placed a temporary tabernacle in their midst, and then the temple was established in the days of Solomon. And so God, you see, has this plan by which he is manifesting his presence in the midst of his people. Now, I said that has a New Testament significance, and if you think about it, some of the accompanying signs are different, and the way in which God manifests his presence are different, but that is exactly what God has done with his church, with the Church of Christ. Christ delivered his people, though they were small and though they were unworthy, though we were unworthy in our sinfulness, Christ saved us, saved us individually and incorporated us into a body in which he manifests his presence. He manifests his presence among us, not by a pillar of fire, but by the indwelling Holy Spirit. He manifests his presence by the love that his people have for one another.

Jesus said, by this all men will know that you are my disciples because you have love for one another. He manifests his presence in the church through the preaching and the proclamation of his word. And as God manifests his presence in these ways and others in this New Testament sense, we see the outworking of the broader principle that was at work when he established the people of Israel. He saved them in order to be their God and to manifest his presence in them and through them. He saves his people today, one by one, delivering them from sin as he powerfully and effectively draws them to Christ through the proclamation of the gospel. He draws them to himself so that this body would be his and this body would be that through which he manifests his presence to the earth.

He was with Israel. Scripture says that he is with us now. Jesus said at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, lo, I am with you always even to the end of the age. And you may not think about it this way, but just as it took miraculous power, supernatural power, for God to deliver Israel from Egypt, it takes no less an exercise of supernatural power to deliver you from your sins. It takes supernatural power to impart new life to a dead creature. It takes supernatural resurrection ability to raise a sinner from death unto spiritual life. And so while we don't see the outward manifestation of the signs as Israel did, they are no less miraculous.

They are no less powerful, and the significance of them is the same. God delivering his people to be with them and to help them and to rule over them. Now, that gives us a sense of God's place among his people as we see it there in verses one and two. Now, as we move on to our second point this evening, we can see God's power over his creation. God's power over his creation. And as we read into these next four verses, let me just read them now, it is personifying different aspects of creation in order to display and establish for the reader the power of God.

Look at verses three through six, and then we'll step back and look at them a little more closely. The sea looked and fled. The Jordan turned back. The mountains skipped like rams. The hills like lambs. What ails you, O sea, that you flee? O Jordan, that you turn back. O mountains that you skip like rams.

O hills like lambs. Now, he's not actually talking to the hills and the seas. He's using, it's a poetic device to bring out the majesty of what happened in the deliverance of Israel. He personifies the bodies of water to establish the power of God over them. Verse three, the sea looked and fled.

The Jordan turned back. The fearful revelation of God at Mount Sinai is alluded to in verse four. The mountains skipped like rams. The hills like lambs. And there was this dark foreboding nature to his revelation at Sinai to Moses. And the people turned back and didn't even want to see it. They were so frightened by it all.

And then our poet here in Psalm 114 carries the personification even further and acts as though they are intelligent beings that are able to respond to his rhetorical questions. What ails you, O sea, that you flee? O Jordan, that you turn back. O mountains that you skip like rams.

O hills like lambs. What's he saying here? What are we supposed to draw from this? What he's saying is this. Having given us these capsule summaries of the history of Israel and personifying creation like he does, what he's doing for us, what the reader of this text is supposed to be drawn into, is this question.

What does all of this mean? As we look at this miraculous history that gave birth to the nation of Israel, what does it all mean? We're to enter into the rhetoric and understand the point that he's driving at that something spectacular and significant was taking place as these historical events unfolded in the nation of Israel. And this is masterful rhetoric.

He doesn't even answer the question. The rhetoric assumes that you will supply the answer, and to this point through the first six verses, the writer has not even yet mentioned the name of God. We've been using the name of God for the sake of the ease of exposition, but as the psalm is written and as you follow along, the name of God hasn't even been mentioned yet. It's simply looking at the natural events from an outward perspective and then asks these questions to say, what does this history of Israel mean? And what it indicates, to state it in another way, saying the same thing in many different ways, the geography of the earth was under the power of God.

Creation responds to its creator, responds to its presence, responds to the command of its creator. And the sea and the mountains obey him as though they fear him. That when God shows up, they run.

They tremble. They are manifesting an aspect of fear that humans would show by running away from his presence because the power and the sovereignty of God is so very, very great. Now, with that in mind, the psalmist now calls on humanity to respond in the same way to this holy God. And that brings us to our third and final section here this evening, God's praise in holy fear. First of all, we saw God's place among his people. Then we saw secondly God's power over his creation. And now thirdly, we see God's praise in holy fear.

Now, it's not just that he's personifying creation. He is drawing his reader into this fear of God that responds in obedience, that responds in reverence, that responds even in terror. And I know that many of us are not used to thinking about the Lord God in these ways. We've been conditioned by soft preaching to think only of the gentleness of God, the grace of God, and we lose a sense of balance about what the Scripture teaches about him. John MacArthur has often said that soft preaching makes for hard hearts. In other words, if we are not taught the holiness of God and to reverence him and to fear him, it conditions people to have a hard attitude against him.

A hard attitude, not a heart attitude, H-A-R-D, a hard attitude against him, thinking that obedience is not that serious. God's just here for me, and I can respond to him however I wish. Psalm 114 disabuses us of that false notion and condemns so much of the false preaching of our present age. You see, my friends, the Bible says in places like Proverbs 1-7 and Proverbs 9-10 and Ecclesiastes 12-13 and others that we could consider, the Bible tells us that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

The Bible tells us at the end of Ecclesiastes that the end of all things, the sum of all things, the sum of earthly life is this, is to fear God and to keep his commandments. And so Psalm 114 is drawing our heart into that realm through its great poetic ability. The fear of the Lord, my friends, involves an element of genuine terror, certainly and especially for the unsaved man, the person who is not in Christ, or the one who claims to be in Christ but is living a pattern of unbroken sin that contradicts their claim to be a regenerate person.

Terror and fear should strike the hearts of ones like that. Look at verse 7 with me. The psalmist draws the conclusion from his poetic masterpiece in the prior six verses, and now he calls upon the earth to respond. He calls upon the people of the world to respond. Tremble, O earth, before the Lord, before the God of Jacob.

This represents the climax of the psalm as the name of God for the first time appears. He's been building up this rhetorical tension. Why is the sea acting this way? Why are the mountains acting this way? Tell me, O sea, tell me, O mountain, why are you behaving this way? And there's just this literary tension that's built up, crying out for an answer, and the answer is not an explanation as much as it is a command. An imperative is given to release this tension. Tremble, O earth, before the Lord. Why tremble? Why tremble? Why would any one of us tremble before God?

Well, a couple of things come to my mind. First of all, the idea of trembling expresses conscious unworthiness before the sovereign majesty of his holiness. Conscious unworthiness, conscious recognition of his surpassing greatness. My friends, if he can split a sea, imagine what he can do with you should his wrath be unleashed against you. Scripture says in the book of Hebrews, it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Hebrews 10 31, I believe it is. And so what the psalmist has done here is he has recounted the past of Israel in order to call for repentance and praise in the present. This is not simply history for history's sake. This is not simply history for poetic's sake.

This is history designed to evoke a spiritual response in you, the reader of the word, and to recognize that this majesty of God calls for a response of reverence and awe and fear and trembling before him. Much more, much more when you realize and remember that creation is not a moral creature like we are. Creation does not have moral accountability like you and I do. The rocks and mountain and sea are not going to stand before either the great white throne in utter judgment as an unsaved person or stand before the judgment seat of Christ where we will all give an account of ourselves before God. Creation doesn't do any of that.

We do. And we are all marching toward an appointment where we will stand alone before God and give an account. And in that way, these majestic manifestations of God's power in creation cause us to tremble because it gives us a sense of the solemnity and the majesty and the the august nature of what it will be like to stand before him. Creation couldn't stand it.

The mountains and seas couldn't stand it. And we see in the book of Revelation, we see that when God's judgment starts to be displayed, that unsaved men are calling on rocks and hills to fall on them and if it might somehow save them and somehow protect them and somehow hide them from the judgment of God, yet they call out in vain. There won't be any joking about the terror of God at this time. There won't be any ignoring it at that time. It will be manifest and then it will be too late. And I wonder if, in the agony of my heart as I say this, I wonder if it won't be that way for some under the sound of my voice.

The thought's too awful to contemplate. If a great sea flees at the command of God and creation fears God, my friend, what's going to happen to you, a mere creature of mortal flesh? Clothed in your rags of unrighteousness? Clothed in your sin appearing before God without anyone to intercede before you?

What is going to happen to you? God rules over all the earth and all the earth fears him. And you can see why the fear of the Lord would be the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord as we now enjoy the fullness of the finality of the revelation of God to realize the full extent of our sinfulness as it's laid forth to us in Scripture, dead in trespasses and sins dominated by the devil, doomed to suffer the wrath of God, Ephesians 2, 1-3. Recognizing that there's a fullness of judgment that is coming, recognizing that we're guilty before him. All of this, recognizing the condemning nature of the law of God, the Ten Commandments, an expression of the moral law of God, and many of us in this room couldn't recite half of them. And if that is God's moral law and the standard by which we are going to be judged, how can it possibly, possibly go well for us if we don't even know what they are? And when Scripture says, Scripture condemns us all under the judgment of God, saying that if you've broken one of the commandments of God, it's as though you've broken them all.

You may not be a murderer, but you're an adulterer or a liar or a thief, or if nothing else, a covetous person. And beyond that, Scripture, as it condemns us, all the sinners saying to break one is to break them all, James chapter 2. Scripture goes on and Jesus taught us that the law actually governs the motions of the human heart, governs the thoughts, the motives, the intentions, the sinful inclinations. And in all of this, we just see that we are utterly shattered under the law of God. How could we not fear Him? How could we not feel trembling in the august majesty of His holiness? How could we not, as the Word of God empowered, pressed upon our minds and hearts by the Holy Spirit, how could we not cry out with Isaiah, woe is me, for I'm undone. I'm a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, and here I am in the presence of the holiness of a sovereign, majestic, powerful God, before whom creation flees.

It's humbling. This incomparable God does things that no one else can do. Verse 8, look at it here with me. Tremble before the Lord, before the God of Jacob, what did He do? He turned the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a fountain of water.

You remember how in a couple of times in Israel's history they had no water to drink, and Moses spoke or struck a rock, and water gushed out, and God miraculously through a rock provided a flowing water in order to sustain them and to satisfy their thirst. This who, verse 8, is the climax of the psalm making the focus on God Himself. Now, with all of this great power, those that are not in Christ should be utterly, utterly, utterly shocked and frightened into turning to Christ. That's the import of the law of God.

That's what the law is designed to do. The law is designed to expose your sinfulness, introduce you to the holiness of God so that you would see how far short you fall, how worthy of judgment you are, and not just to leave you in that hopeless condition, but to make you flee to Christ who alone can save you and deliver you from your judgment. For us as His people, we get a fresh sense of the shelter under which we dwell. He who dwells in the shelter of the Almighty shall abide in the shadow of God, is a bad paraphrase of the first verse of Psalm 91. James Montgomery Boice says this, If God is for His people, what can possibly stand in their way to oppose them? The answer is nothing at all, neither seas nor rivers nor mountains. Now, this all tells us something about the Lord Jesus Christ as well, because this power over creation that we see God exercising in the Old Testament, this is what Christ is doing in the New Testament.

Let's just see one example of it. Turn to the Gospel of Luke chapter 8 verses 22 and following. Luke 8 22.

And I just choose this passage sort of at random. There are all kinds of displays of Christ's power in the Gospels that we could have looked at. Luke 8 22. Now on one of those days, Jesus and his disciples got into a boat, and he said to them, Let us go over to the other side of the lake.

So they launched out. But as they were sailing along, he fell asleep and a fierce gale of wind descended on the lake, and they began to be swamped and to be in danger. They came to Jesus and woke him up saying, Master, Master, we are perishing. And he got up and rebuked the wind and the surging waves, and they stopped and it became calm. The creation obeyed Christ in the same way that it obeyed Yahweh in the Old Testament. Verse 25. He said to them, Where is your faith? They were fearful and amazed, saying to one another, Who then is this that he commands even the winds and the water and they obey him? The answer to that question is this is God in human flesh. This is no mere man. This is no mere prophet.

This is God manifesting and Christ manifesting his deity by his control over creation. And the point of all of this, the point of all of this is that the God who is sovereign like that, the Christ who is sovereign like that should be feared by men now. Your sin is no trifling matter.

It's no small matter, my friends. It should make you flee, but flee in the right direction. It should cause you to flee to the one who alone can be your deliverer, your shelter, your protection from the judgment that you deserve. Rather than fleeing from the presence of God, it should cause you to flee to the presence of Christ and go to Christ and cry out to him saying, Save me from my desperate condition. And Christ invites you to do that. Come to me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble and hard and you'll find rest for your souls. Do you realize that we're talking about things of such transcendence, importance, that we're talking about the very things that determine the ultimate outcome of your destiny?

The things that define and determine your destiny is no less than what we're addressing here today. If you feel the weight of the power of God, if you feel the weight of your guilt and sin, then run to Christ and flee to him and ask him to save you, to have mercy on you, the sinner. And the same sovereign God who exercises power over creation and delivered his people from Egypt is the same God in Christ who is able to deliver you from the guilt and the power and dominion of your sin and to welcome you into his family and to forgive you and to give you eternal life.

It is stunning to me. I never ever get over the side-by-side truths of these things. Sovereign majestic holiness, sovereign authority over creation, the judge of all the earth being one who in this window of time extends a hand of mercy and grace to undeserving sinners and says, come to me and I'll forgive all of your sins. It's why he went to the cross.

He went there knowing the full weight of guilt of sin, knowing his people had an insuperable barrier to keep them from reconciliation with God. This one who is the ultimate judge, this one who is sovereign over creation, humbled himself to death on a cross as a substitute to go there in your place, to go there in love for you, to go there in matchless grace and patience and kindness for you, the guilty one, the Creator takes on the sin of the creature in order that the sinful one might be reconciled to him. As James Boyce goes on to say, and kind of tying in with the authority theme which I started with, beloved, in light of this power over creation, in light of the free offer of grace in the gospel, one to lead to the damnation of your soul, one to lead to the salvation of your soul, all of us in utter dependence upon God and in futility, trying to evade the consequences of either one. In light of the great authority of God, James Montgomery Boyce says it well. He says, The startling and utterly inexplicable thing is that human beings who are in far greater danger than the earth, which is actually in no danger at all, these human beings fail to do what the earth does. Human beings face judgment apart from Jesus Christ, yet they go on as if all is well with them and as if they do not need a Savior.

Wow, end quote. What a miserably lost generation we are. What a miserably lost race of humanity we are. Fallen in Adam, ignoring the gospel, mindless and indifferent to the reality of coming judgment, and for some, when the gospel is laid forth before them in the plainest simplicity possible, still harden their heart and walk away. Got better things to do.

Sports center's almost on. What's going to happen to the people that respond to the word of God like that? I ask you, well, for us, we look to Christ. We realize that we deserve that judgment, and yet we look to Christ and we flee to him and we take refuge in him. We realize that Christ in his perfect life and in his death and resurrection satisfied everything that the law of God demands, that God is pleased with his son, and by extension, he is pleased by any that have faith in his son, that are in union with his son, that have been born again into life in his son. And we realize out of all of this, rises once again the great majesty of our Lord Jesus Christ, all of the sovereign authority of God, and yet here he is in sovereign grace, interceding for his people at the cross, interceding for them in their new birth, interceding for them at the right hand of God, one day interceding for us when he comes back to take us to the home that he's prepared for us in heaven. Astounding.

I would almost say unbelievable, but that's entirely the wrong thing to say. Believable, true, accurate, taught by the inerrant, infallible Word of God. And what does it all mean? What does the cross mean in light of this? What does the cross mean in light of this, this God whom creation itself fears? The God of Sinai, the God of judgment, has provided access to us into his holy presence.

He offers eternal life and forgiveness of sin freely, and he did so at the cost of his own son. Look at what God did to nature, and know that your sin provokes his holiness. If you've been redeemed in Christ, realize how great and gracious the gift is, and give him your praise and tremble before him. Come in grateful trembling. Come in thankful trembling.

Come again to the one who alone can make peace between you and a holy God through his atoning death and his glorious resurrection. Let's pray together. Father, with the psalmist, as the psalmist has called us to do, we tremble before you. We tremble in fear at your majesty. We tremble in gratitude at the cross. We tremble in anticipation at our final redemption. Oh, the greatness, oh, the majesty, oh, the supremacy of the holiness of your being.

You are a great God, and creation flees before you in fear. Father, were it not for Christ, we too would have fled and called upon rocks to fall upon us when we stood before you in judgment. But now, Lord, we gloriously flee to Christ and find our safety, find our refuge. We find in Christ everything that you require from men and women. We find in Christ perfection of righteousness.

We find in Christ the satisfaction of the penalty that the law requires for transgressors. And we realize that in free grace, as a free gift of God, you have delivered us from all of these things in your Son. We honor you for the greatness of your sovereignty, the greatness of your power, and we honor you even more, Father, for the greatness of our salvation in Christ. We honor you, thank you, and bless your holy name. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, friend, thank you for joining us for Through the Psalms, a weekly ministry of The Truth Pulpit. And if you have the opportunity, we would love to invite you to join us on Sundays at 9 a.m. Eastern and Tuesdays 7 p.m. Eastern for our live stream from Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

You can find the link at thetruthpulpit.com. Thanks, Don. And, friend, Through the Psalms is a weekend ministry of The Truth Pulpit. Be sure to join us next week for our study as Don continues teaching God's people God's word. This message is copyrighted by Don Green. All rights reserved.