Psalm 11—A Psalm about Jesus

Psalm 11 talks about the wrath, fire and judgement of God.

I have some 3/4 formed thoughts about how the Psalm points to Jesus. But I would be delighted for blog readers to add their thoughts to the mix, as I prepare to preach it this Sunday. You can go in the footnotes that all good preachers put into their sermons and read out as people are exiting the building.

To the choirmaster. Of David.

11:1 In the Lord I take refuge;
how can you say to my soul,
“Flee like a bird to your mountain,
2 for behold, the wicked bend the bow;
they have fitted their arrow to the string
to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart;
3 if the foundations are destroyed,
what can the righteous do?” [1]

4 The Lord is in his holy temple;
the Lord’s throne is in heaven;
his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man.
5 The Lord tests the righteous,
but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.
6 Let him rain coals on the wicked;
fire and sulphur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.
7 For the Lord is righteous;
he loves righteous deeds;
the upright shall behold his face.

[1] 11:3 Or for the foundations will be destroyed; what has the righteous done?

After the first line, which really functions as a heading for the Psalm, it’s split into two, and you can imagine it as a dialogue going on between someone asking the Psalmist: “why don’t you run?!” (verses 1-3), and the Psalmist’s response: “I don’t think so!” (verses 4-7).

There is plenty to talk about here: situations we fear; the kindness and wrath of God; his steadfastness and dependability for good (if we are with him) and for ill (if we oppose him). But because I am trying to think about what it is about the Psalm that is particularly Christian, as opposed to Jewish, let me suggest three ways in which what David wrote is all about Jesus.

1. David himself is someone who is like Jesus.

My reasoning here is a bit fiddly and detailed, and were this anything more than a blog post I’d say a bit more. But basically it boils down to this: When I read the Old Testament I ask of the people I’m reading about, “how is this person like Jesus?” And whenever I read about David (as in, “A Psalm of David”, for example) I breathe a great sigh of relief, because the answer is easy. How is David like Jesus? Answer, “very much indeed, except for the bit where he had sex with his neighbour’s wife, murdered the neighbour, hunted his own son to an accidental death, and spent his old age keeping himself warm in bed with young women”. So that apart form the ways in which David is like us, he is like Jesus. Yes, I know, another blog post required there, but let Isaiah 11:1-5 provide the hint that David the Son of Jesse is a lot more like Jesus than he sometimes appears.

In this Psalm, David’s Christlikeness is spelt out by his faith in God: “In the Lord I take refuge”.

2. Second way this Psalm is about Jesus, is that he is—in some sense too awful to contemplate—‘the wicked’. For it is the eternally spotless and sinless Lord Jesus who receives the hot coals of fire and the stink of sulphur poured down upon his head at the time of his death. “Fire and sulphur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup”, says David of the wicked. When Jesus prays in Gethsemane that his Father would remove this cup from me, it was exactly this cup—the cup of God’s anger—that Jesus experienced on the cross, in our place.

3. The third way this Psalm is about Jesus: precisely because Jesus receives on the cross the fiery cup of scorching coals and sulphur, he can now be the Lord in whom “I take refuge”. Jesus experiences in himself the fate that the wicked deserve, so that we might not have to. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

So a Psalm about a man on the run becomes a Psalm about the man to whom we can run for rescue.

9 thoughts on “Psalm 11—A Psalm about Jesus

  1. I might be accused of drawing a slightly long bow here, but I do like the idea of Satan taking a shot in the dark at the crucified Jesus, and not quite getting the result he was after.

    And no, the idea occurred to me before the pun did!

  2. Gordon, I’m surprised that you of all people haven’t mentioned Jesus as Judge. That, to my mind, is the most obvious parallel with the revelation we have in Jesus.

    I also think that we in Sydney do too much Bib theology sometimes. I would hate to hear too many Psalms preached where the three points are “three reasons this is about Jesus”. Kinda preaching our method rather than the text. While there maybe a place for this from time to time, it’s not how psalms should be approached as a general rule. I understand that you may not be intending to do this yourself, but I’ve heard it done often, and I think it’s poor preaching.

    My own approach would be to preach about enemies and the need for refuge and then explain how ultimately Jesus deals with both (Matt 25.31-32). Through faith in him we receive what David is yearning for. That’s all the Bib theology I’d do.

  3. Me again,
    I may have been too quick to judge (irony), as I have seen that you ref Is 11, Root of Jesse being judge and all. Still, I’d like to offer my other two points for what their worth. Apologies.

  4. Hi Martin,

    Jesus is indeed judge, and yes it’s there in Isa 11, but I wouldn’t bring such an idea to the fore when speaking about his death on the cross because I wouldn’t want to inadvertently suggest to peoples’ minds that the God the Son was judging God the Son.

    My current theory on the Psalms is that they should all be preached, all the time, as if they are all about Jesus. However, in the case of Psalm 11, that wouldn’t prevent me from referencing 1 Samuel 23:19-24:2 and suggesting that this may help us understand why David wrote as he did.

    Anthony, that is quite a nice thought. It also does strike me that while it is a fearful thing to have someone shooting at you in the dark, it does also suggest an enemy blundering around not knowing what he is doing.

    The wicked man does not see; the LORD, however, sees even through closed eyelids!! (Psalm 11:4) The terror.

  5. For what it is worth, here in 3 parts is the full text of the sermon, typos and all. It falls apart towards the end, but it is the exact basis of what I ended up saying (although I did not read the text in full, it was in front of me all the time).

    To the choirmaster. Of David.

    11:1 In the Lord I take refuge;
    how can you say to my soul,
    “Flee like a bird to your mountain,
    2 for behold, the wicked bend the bow;
    they have fitted their arrow to the string
    to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart;
    3 if the foundations are destroyed,
    what can the righteous do?” [1]

    4 The Lord is in his holy temple;
    the Lord’s throne is in heaven;
    his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man.
    5 The Lord tests the righteous,
    but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.
    6 Let him rain coals on the wicked;
    fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.
    7 For the Lord is righteous;
    he loves righteous deeds;
    the upright shall behold his face.
    Footnotes

    [1] 11:3 Or for the foundations will be destroyed; what has the righteous done?

    Thanks for inviting me to speak. I’m a friend of A and K [the new minister and his wife at the church where I was preaching], so delighted for them and for you, and will be praying for you as you welcome them to ministry here.

    Psalm 11 splits into two parts, and they can be summarized as follows. First part, Good advice.

    Second part, response to good advice.

    So I want to look at those 2 bits, and then say, how do we read this Psalm as Christians, recognizing that every single word of the Old Testament including the Psalms is fulfilled in Jesus.

    ONE
    What is the good advice? In verse 1 we have really what is a heading for the Psalm by the writer of the Psalm. The heading is ‘In the LORD I take refuge’, and the speaker is king David, you see that it says at the top of the Psalm ‘To the Choirmaster: Of David” which, unlike every other heading in the book of Psalms , is actually in the original so we are meant to read this Psalm and think of King David

    Now the good advice is that David who is writing the Psalm should run for the hills, can you see it there in verse 1 ‘Flee like a bird to your mountain’, David actually quotes the person giving the advice and says ‘how can you say to my soul, “Flee like a bird to your mountain”.
    I’m here, you’re telling me to run away.
    And can I say that running away is not necessarily bad advice.

    A friend of mine got a citizen’s bravery award for chasing a burglar after witnessing him stealing a large amount of money. He caught up to him and got stabbed and as he tells the story he was thinking well I caught up, now what do I do?

    The answer being not a lot, stand where you are and get stabbed in the arm.

    Sometimes it just makes sense to run away.

    Run away from what? And like almost all of the Psalms, the answer is we’re not 100% sure of what the situation is.

    Now when I go down the margin of my ESV study Bible which has some excellent cross-references that point you to other parts of the Bible, in the case of this Psalm they point me back to 1 Samuel 23 and 24, no need to flip over to there but it is the bit where David is, in fact, hiding in the mountains—remember how verse 1 is saying ‘flee like a bird to your mountain’—and 3000 soldiers are chasing after him specifically and his small band of men.

  6. [cont’d—Part 2/3]

    So it could be that, but really that is just an educated guess that comes through reading the rest of the Old Testament carefully, because the bottom line is that David as he’s writing doesn’t say what the situation is.

    but the beauty of the Psalms, and the beauty of deliberately not being told, is you could just as easily read and identify with the words of this Psalm if you were sitting in a hotel room in Christchurch in New Zealand, trying to survive an earthquake! You can imagine someone giving almost exactly this advice, Flee like a bird to your mountain! Head for the hills! Or v 3 “If the foundations are destroyed what can the righteous do” Even v 2 about the wicked bending the bow to shoot could be read in spiritual terms—seeing as how what we’re reading is a piece of poetry— as if Satan and his forces were attacking from round about.

    Now our inability to nail down the context, even though we have the clue that this is a Psalm of David, could be frustrating at first, because you want to keep asking what is going on to provoke David to write in this way,

    but I take it that since the absence of clear context is deliberate, it means we can pick up this Psalm 3000 years later and say, actually this is my Psalm as well, there are all sorts of things in this life that I fear and David who wrote the Psalm was clearly a man not completely different from me. There were scary things in his world, he had reason to be scared.

    Verse 2 gives a tiny bit more detail about wicked people bending their bow and shooting in the dark at the upright in heart, again could be military attack, could be and I would say is also poetic language for spiritual attack.

    What we do know is that as far as the advice giver is concerned, the whole world is under threat: “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do” If you King David are killed, or if this hotel room we’re in collapses and buries us, what can the righteous do?

    Just one little observation, note that it is the wicked firing at the righteous but there is just the slightest hint that these wicked forces may not be as powerful or as dangerous as they seem. v 2 says ‘they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart’, which of course is terrifying when you’re on the receiving end.

    My father-in-law, Fiona’s dad was in PNG during the 2nd world war and he was under no illusions at all as to how terrifying it was to be in the dark with a Japanese sniper nearby ready to kill. But when you’re no longer in the situation—and clearly David as he writes is sitting somewhere where he has leisure to compose something for the choirmaster—then you can reflect that just as you are in the dark, so also is the enemy, and he cannot see you any more than you can see him.

    TWO
    Once that picture is outlined, verses 4 to 7 give us the second half of the Psalm, which is the response to the good advice.

    Which is something along the lines of, ‘Are you crazy?’

    The hint of this is back even in verse 1, ‘How can you say to my soul, flee like a bird to your mountain?’ David has quoted the advice but in quoting it he has made it clear that he thinks it is dumb advice

    The reason this good advice is actually bad advice is that the LORD is in his holy temple, and remember that the heading of this Psalm is ‘in the LORD I take refuge’. I’m here, why would I go there?

    And, as far as David is concerned, and as far as any Christian is concerned, that is an entirely satisfactory answer! If I am surrounded by enemies or bad things, then the LORD is my refuge, and there is a striking saying there in verse 4,

    “his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man”.

  7. [cont’d-part 3/3]

    God is a powerful judge, and he is watching, watching over us, and he sees our enemies and everything and everyone that threatens as well

    I’m imagining a judge sitting in court, he is looking at the accused, the defendant, the person who has been brought into court actually having done the wrong thing and he is staring at the wrongdoer, who knows he has done the wrong thing and is very pleased to see that the judge’s eyes are closed. Only he looks at the judge’s eyelids, thinking that he’s fallen asleep, and the judge’s eyelids are looking at him, it is a vision out of a nightmare, you have a judge that can see through skin and bone and even his own eyelids.

    There’s a twofold resolution here.

    The first part is that the wicked will indeed be judged! Fire and sulphur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. If you are under attack by people, God will judge the wicked person attacking you.

    The other part of the resolution is in the final verse, which is that because the LORD is righteous, there will be a reward, he loves righteous deeds and the upright will behold his face.

    So really our reading of this Psalm assures us that the basic structure of the universe is intact. The wicked will be judged, the righteous will see the face of the Lord, don’t fear, don’t be scared, just make sure you are not one of the wicked!

    Three
    But we want to say one more thing, and that is because we are Christians, we want to ask how does this Psalm of David living 1000 years before Christ find its fulfilment in Christ, because every promise that God makes and every word he speaks sooner or later points to the Lord Jesus.

    And just like the Psalm there are 2 parts to the answer.

    Part one
    The first is quite shocking, in that this terrible anger of God that is poured out on the wicked, once you get to the story of Jesus, he is the one who actually bears it when he is on the cross!
    So in v 6 is the picture of wrath
    Read v 6
    Remember his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane? Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives, just before he was arrested and crucified. And as he is in the garden he prays:
    “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
    and indeed Jesus is arrested, and he does suffer, and he does die on the cross, which according to Old Testament teaching is a sign of the curse of God, ‘cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree’ (Deut 21:23), so that he is the one experiencing the anger of God against the wicked, the raining coals, the fire and sulphur and scorching wind.

    I don’t know about you but when I read a Psalm like this, like so many of the Psalms which are very clear that you have righteous people over on one side and the LORD upholding them, and the wicked on the other being judged by God, I don’t actually feel like I identify very well with either of them. I wouldn’t be like the wicked shooting arrows at King David, at least I hope not. But then I don’t have that confidence that the righteous seem to feel that they actually are righteous and God is on my side.

    So that when I come to Psalm 11, I say—and I think this is probably right—well I’m not King David. But I’m not really his enemy either! I’m more like the advice giver saying, David, come on, what can the righteous do, head for the hills. No citizens bravery award for me as I chase down the burglar with the knife!

    But if you ask me to jump either way, then God forbid that I should be numbered with the wicked, and experience that terrible judgement of fire and sulphur and scorching wind from the God who even with his eyes closed is looking straight at me, his eyelids test in just the way that a parent with unerring precision can tell that their five year old has been up to no good in the next room.

    Yet Jesus, when he died on the cross, died for me. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:21)

    Doesn’t matter who I am or what I have done, doesn’t matter who you are or what you have done, you can be saved from the fire and sulphur and scorching wind if you trust in Jesus.

    Have you trusted?
    Part two
    The second thing is to say that, no matter what your life circumstances are, ‘Be comforted!’ Why? Because of this Psalm. Because of Psalm 11:1 “In the LORD I take refuge”.

    It is right to be scared of God if you are a wicked person, and for that reason you and I ought to be scared of God!
    But it is just as true, even more true to say that if the anger of God has been completely dealt with by Jesus on the cross, then you and I ought to look to him now as the God who protects, and that even if our enemies are out there in the dark, God is able to save us and protect us from them, because he sees everything.

    Isn’t that wonderful?

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