Christ's Holy Reign

Take a seat for a moment if you would and find Psalm 99.
For 11 summers, we've been preaching through the Psalms together and as you preach through the book of Psalms, you recognize that the Psalms over many centuries were carefully placed together with great intentionality.
There are five books of the Psalms and book one commences to us in the Psalms of David.
The beauty of what we are called to be.
Psalm 1:2 starts out with us becoming like trees that are planted by streams of water who yields its fruit and season and whose leaves never wither.
Psalm 2 speaks about the Messiah.
And then when you get into Psalm uh book 2 of the Psalms, you begin to see the the beauty of David's kingdom and by the time you get to book 3, you see the kingdom slowly begin to unravel so that by the time you get to Psalm 89, it is the nether, it is the lowest point of the Salter.
It is the point where people are asking, how?
Oh Lord, how are we to live?
If our earthly kingdom, the kingdom of David, has fallen apart.
And book three shows us that all of our earthly kingdoms can't stand.
Book four, which is Psalm 90 through Psalm 106, which is where we are now.
Book four raises our eyes to see you know the true and the true and earthly kingdom only finds its greatest manifestation when Christ comes again to make everything knew that Christ is the king.
Christ is Lord.
And so when you come to Psalm 99, you hear this triumphal call that he is holy.
He is holy.
Holy is the Lord God.
Three times he's called holy.
And so this morning, would you join me as you stand and I read for us Psalm 99 and look together at the importance of worshiping Christ our king because he indeed is holy in his reign, he is holy in his justice, and he is holy in his forgiveness.
And I wonder this morning if you know him.
Psalm 99.
The Lord reigns.
Let the peoples tremble.
He sits and throned upon the cherubim, let the earthquake.
The earth is the Lord is great in Zion.
He is exalted over all the peoples.
Let them praise your great and awesome name.
Holy is he.
The king in his might loves justice.
You have established equity.
You have executed justice in righteousness in Jacob.
Exalt the Lord our God, worship at his footstool.
Holy is he.
Moses and Aaron were among his priests.
Samuel also was among those who called upon his name.
They called to the Lord and he answered them.
In the pillar of the cloud, he spoke to them.
They kept his testimonies and the statute that he gave them.
Oh Lord our God, you answered them.
You were a forgiving God to them, but an avenger of all their wrongdoings.
Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his holy mountain.
For the Lord our God is holy.
The grass withers and the flowers fade, but God's word stands forever.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
You may be seated.
Please.
Father, would you take your word and would you change us by it even on the spot this morning?
Would you show us the beauty of your son by the power of your Holy Spirit?
We pray all these things in Jesus name.
Amen.
Psalm 99 is a song about the kingship of Jesus.
Jesus, you say, "Yes of Jesus." As we'll see as we go through the Psalm this morning.
And it's important that we recognize the kingship of Jesus because there's a lot of people who are being captivated by all kinds of kings right now.
You've seen online and you've lived it, you've seen it, the number of people who post on social media about how they are longing, especially young men, they are longing to follow someone who isn't morally fallible.
People are running away from institutions because they have seen how they are just beginning to crumble.
Everybody it seems has a hammer and everything it right now seems like it's a nail.
And they are destroying institutions left and right.
Why?
Because that is an echo trace of our hearts, friends.
We long for something, someone who is morally upright, someone who will rule with justice, something who will be a place of full integrity and joy.
And even in the church, we've seen plenty of examples where we have placed our faith in, whether it's celebrity pastors, or ministers, or ministries, or some place you follow that is separated from the local congregation in order for us to have some kind of hero to follow or worship.
But this is this is a longing.
God has made you to want to follow a true king.
And Psalm 99 calls us to worship Jesus because he is holy in his reign.
That's verses 1-3.
We are to worship Jesus because he is holy in his justice.
That's verse 4 and 5 and we are to worship Jesus because he is holy in his forgiveness.
And that's verses 6 through 9.
So first, we're called to worship Jesus because he is holy in his reign.
Psalm 99 opens up with a declaration about the one who holds all authority over reality itself.
God doesn't exist in reality.
He upholds all of reality.
Look what the text says.
It says, "The Lord reigns, let the peoples tremble.
He sits and throned upon the chair of them.
Let the earth quake." Now, we know what it means for something to rain, but this in Hebrew parallelism, he sits and throned upon the chair of him is an image to help us understand what raining means and you may remember those of you who grew up in the church or know your Bibles.
It's okay if you don't, I'm going to explain it to you.
God set apart a people for himself to be holy unto him.
He called that people the people of Israel in the Old Testament and he calls us the church today.
And within the nation of Israel in the olden times, he had a place called a Tabernacle before they were able to settle in Jerusalem and build a physical building temple.
And in the tabernacle and in the temple, the architecture was the same.
There were courts of increasing holiness as you came into those courts.
There was the court of the Gentiles outside the gate and then there was the court of women just inside of the gate.
And then there was the there was the hall of the Levites and then there was the hall of the priests and then there was the the holy place where the priests would go in to serve and then once a year, the priest on the day of atonement would go all the way into the most holy place it's called.
And in the most holy place there was the ark of the covenant.
And the ark of the covenant was a box made of gopher wood where the priests would offer sacrifices and they would pour the blood upon this ark and at the ends of the ark were two angel like animal human looking things called cherubim.
Cherubim.
And they had wings that that hung over the ark as if to remind everybody in Israel that this is the most holy place where signified by these cherubim, it is as though they are lifting up God's holiness even to heaven.
It is where heaven and earth met.
And so when do you read of cherubim, that he is between the cherubim or he is upon the cherubim.
He sits in throne there.
That is God's infinite holiness signified in this architecture of the ancient people of God.
And he says, "Let the people tremble.
Let the earth quake." That doesn't mean to be afraid.
To tremble or to quake.
In Hebrew means at least, you know, three things.
It means that there is complete attention before divine majesty.
Distractions are gone.
You stand before such infinite beauty, your eyes are captivated by it.
Some of you have been to the beautiful museums in our city and you know that when you see something beautiful, you're just captivated by it.
You can't take your eyes off of it.
You stand with complete attention before his divine majesty.
That's what it means to tremble.
Secondly, it means that there's submission before his divine authority.
Nations do not confer legitimacy upon God.
He already reigns.
It means complete attention before his divine majesty.
It means total submission before his divine authority.
And thirdly, it means that there is awe before his divine holiness.
You can't take your eyes off of them, but you can't Look at him because you're not holy.
You're You're You're constantly trembling back and forth.
You're You're You're stuck between two worlds, your own sinfulness and yet looking at something so holy and beautiful that you just long to be near it.
In the last several years, it has been striking for me to watch.
How many young men are searching for authority and for structure and for a voice that has a weight-bearing moral authority.
So many young men and want someone to just tell them what to do.
We gather around people who whether you're on the right of the political spectrum or on the left.
We gather around voices that offer some kind of sense of identity to a tribe.
To a way to interpret the instability of our life and you can feel, you can see it, especially online.
Even in talking to friends in this church, you can see the trembling, the deep kind of insecurity, of longing.
This is why, for example, 10 years ago, men, some of you were just captivated by Jordan Peterson.
The philosopher in Canada who began to tell us 12 rules for life.
And it's as though so many men didn't have fathers to direct them how to walk in obedience to all that God has commanded us.
And so when they heard a voice that was beautiful, they gave attention to him.
And it was though without even trying to do it.
Most young many young men not but many heard him speak and they were like "Dad, is that you?" And it was a quite an indictment on the church if I can say so myself as one who leads the church.
Because do you want to know where the beauty of what God calls us to do is held?
It is held in his word in his law.
And we were called to walk in holiness and truth as he has shown us.
But the reason why so many of us don't quite see it is because there are examples in the church that you see that you've placed your faith in that have let you down.
And there are people even here this morning who are here because they have been so hurt by the church.
Let's try out this new place.
It looks pretty.
Let's see what it's like.
And oh friends, do you know that the only one who will never let you down is the one that we worship the Lord Jesus, who is holy in his reign.
Hallelujah.
And older brothers, let me say something to you as direct as I can.
Wisdom does not flow up.
It flows down.
And so, please step into your responsibility as men to lead and guide these younger brothers in the church.
They are desperate for you.
And if we don't captivate each other by the beauty of Jesus, there are plenty of people waiting to captivate them by something far more dangerous.
Are you with me?
It was interesting for me as I listen some of you send me videos, some sometimes I all see guys that are speaking.
Um and a lot of guys who don't profess faith, they aren't in church.
You know one of the things that they're telling people right now?
They're saying, "Do you want to know how to grow as a human being?" Heard this from three different people this week.
Public intellectuals, you know what they say?
Go to church.
Now that may not knock your socks off, but why do they say that?
Because you have isolated yourself in all these media channels where you're constantly hearing people only reaffirm your own opinions.
But it's in the church where you get to rub shoulders with each other.
And we may not always agree on things outside of what God's word clearly teaches.
And that is okay because you're learning how to listen to each other because we stand as those who submit our self as we worship Jesus who is holy in his reign.
The Lord is great great in Zion.
He is exalted over all peoples.
Let them praise your great and awesome name.
Holy is he.
Hallelujah.
That's how you begin to heal.
Not some great experience.
Many of you are going to have great experiences this summer as you travel.
It's wonderful, wonderful.
Go and enjoy those places.
But the way that you heal is actually the slow incremental worship with God's people in weekly worship week after week after week where you get to claim again, holy is he.
And secondly, we worship Jesus because he's holy in his justice.
Look at verse four.
The king in his might loves justice.
This is one of the most striking sentences about the character of God in all of the Bible.
He loves justice.
He is love.
And he is the embodiment of true justice.
He loves justice.
He loves what is straight and fair and true and right.
He establishes equity.
He executes justice and righteousness among his people.
And the psalm the psalmist teaches us here that we see that for all people, justice is what holiness looks like in public.
Justice is what holiness looks like in public for all people because he truly executes justice.
It is not found in any nation ultimately, it is found in him who upholds justice perfectly, who is true and who is right and who himself is justice.
And notice what happens in the text as you look at verse 4, the first one, the king and his might loves justice and then notice the switch from the third person to the second person.
Praise becomes prayer.
You have established equity.
You have executed justice.
It's as though the psalmist proclaims the character of God and as soon as he sees the character of God, he immediately shifts into prayer.
And that is the mark of someone who knows Jesus intimately.
When they begin to describe him, it's not just theology abstractly, it becomes prayer intrinsically.
St.
Augustine, you You probably heard me say this many times, who wrote the confessions, one of the most famous, indeed the first spiritual autobiography in all of Western literature is profound in its impact because it is a 300-page prayer to God.
Where this great theologian, this great bishop of Hippo begins to shift his description of who God is and he begins to pray, praise as he writes the spiritual autobiography.
And he says things like our heart, my heart is restless until it finds rest in you, oh Lord.
And that's what the Psalmist here is doing.
Augustine is following the example of the Psalmist in Psalm 99.
He is praying his worship.
In the second person, you, Lord, are the one who satisfy me most deeply And I wonder if that happens for you.
I wonder, I wonder as if you as you're being discipled, as you're growing in your relationship with Jesus, even as you hear sermons on Sunday, do you shift at some point to hearing in the third person about God to begin to pray, oh Lord, make this true of me.
May I be able to worship you because of your holy reign?
May I be able to worship you?
Because you are the one who is holy in justice.
Some of the men, some of the men met last night and they read this great little book, the Golden Booklet by John Calvin that on the Christian life.
This group is called the dead theologians society.
It's a great group of guys who read good literature to think about the beauty of who God has called us to be.
And one of the things that Calvin says in the Golden Booklet, as he says, "You want to see a man who's walking with Jesus, he begins to humble himself before the God who created him in his infinite goodness." and mercy.
We belong to God.
We stop living as though we were the lead character.
We hear that the king loves justice and we are brought low.
We are taught again and again that God is God and that we are not and justice is not something that we admire from a distance.
It is something to bow before.
It calls us to self-denial and you see the way that the psalmist in his Hebrew poetry begins to mark off these sections with this refrain, "Holy is he.
Exalt the Lord our God.
Worship at his footstool.
A footstool is a place where you would lay your feet like you see in Luke chapter 10:38-42 and Mary sits before Jesus.
While her sister Martha is busy in the kitchen, Mary just sits at his feet and listens to him.
May we commend that to each other, to listen, to put the phone down, to turn off the radio and drive without music, to pray to him, to turn all of your knowledge of theology into prayer, to shift as the Psalmist does in verse 4 and 5 from praise in the third person to prayer in the second person.
Oh, how much that will make a difference in your life.
Oh, how it will shape and reform you because it will remind you as Augustine said and as Calvin says, it is not about you.
You are not God.
You worship at his footstool.
Holy is he.
So we are called to worship Jesus because he's holy in his reign.
We worship Jesus verses 4 and 5 because he is holy in his justice.
And if verse one shakes us, we tremble.
Verse four searches us and humbles us and sets us up for what we see thirdly that we worship Jesus because he is holy in his forgiveness.
Now, it's interesting as you prepare sermons week after week, it's easy to talk about Jesus being holy in his reign.
He is completely other.
I am the creature.
He is the creator.
He is totally holy in his justice.
He is the objective true, the beautiful, and the good.
But when you get to this third section, how can Jesus be holy in his mercy, in his forgiveness?
Those things are contradictions, aren't they?
He's holy other and yet he's also merciful.
He's infinitely beauty beautiful.
He stands on God from all things.
He is the creator.
He defines reality itself and yet also he forgives us.
How can those two things coexist?
And you see it here.
Moses and Aaron were among his priests.
Samuel also was among those who called upon his name.
What do these three people have in common?
Notice the Hebrew parallelism.
They were Samuel also was among those who called upon his name.
They called upon the name of the Lord.
When Moses came down from Sinai and he saw Israel worshiping a golden calf, do you remember what he did?
He laid himself before God and said, "God, if I could be blotted out, blot me out but save my people." And he prayed and interceded for them.
Aaron in the same way in Numbers chapter 16 after a group of men followed Korah and they rebelled against Moses and Aaron.
There is a plague that came upon the people people of Israel.
And Moses told Aaron, "You go take a censor of fire and you go stand between the living and the dead." And so Aaron goes out amongst the people and he offers a censor, a sacrifice to the Lord.
He yields himself.
And he stands, it says in Numbers chapter 16, verse 18.
I think he stands between the living and the dead and he intercedes for God's people.
They were priests before God and then and then Samuel.
Samuel comes in Samuel chapter 7 and Israel is trembling before the Philistines in battle.
And Samuel gathers everybody up and he offers a lamb as a sacrifice before God's people and he cries out to the Lord for them and the Lord it says he answers him.
2nd Samuel 7:5.
through nine.
And then again, chapter 12 of of of 1st Samuel, rather, 1st Samuel.
Samuel says, "Far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you." That's the role of a pastor.
And Samuel and 1st Samuel intercedes for his people and he understands that spiritual leadership means intercession.
It means bringing needy and failing people before the Lord, begging for his mercy.
And so the psalmist gives these three examples of Moses, of Aaron, and of Samuel to us.
Different men and different situations and they all had one thing in common.
They interceded for the people of God because they are setting up examples for the psalmist of the one who will come, the Messiah, who is the true mediator between God and man.
And it says in verse 7, "In the pillar of cloud, he spoke to them." You see the pillar of cloud in Exodus chapter 13 You see it later in Numbers 12 or in Deuteronomy chapter 31, the cloud led the people of God through the day in the wilderness.
And his Shekinah glory settled on the people of God.
He says, "There is one coming who will be my embodiment Shekinah glory who will take on flesh, the Lord Jesus Christ." There will be one day who is the true and better Moses, the true and better Aaron, the true and better Samuel.
And that's where these three figures point us to Jesus.
Because friends, it's only in Jesus.
And our Jewish friends even today are struggling to know how can God this infinitely holy God allow forgiveness.
And while they're waiting for the Messiah, we know he has come.
He was born of a virgin, demonstrated his ministry through miracles, he died on the cross, he rose again on the third day.
And whereas in the ancient world in Israel, they had a cherubim and God came between the cherubim and in our day and age we look back at God who came in flesh, the Lord Jesus, who also stood on the true holy mercy seat, wasn't an ark of the covenant, he was the ark of the covenant and he hung on a cross.
And he didn't die between two chair of them, although he could have called the angels to immediately take him to heaven, he didn't do it.
He, 2nd Corinthians 5:21 says, "Who knew no sin became sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Friends, this is worthy of our worship.
Jesus accomplished for us double imputation.
That means that Jesus took upon himself our sin and he gave us His righteousness.
Our sin was imputed to him and we received imputed to us his perfect record of holiness because Jesus was the one who faced holy justice and he's the only one who was truly innocent and didn't deserve it.
And he did it for you so that you would quit looking online for your saviors and you would look to the Lord Jesus Christ.
And you would lean into this strange thing called the local church where God intends to change you and to mold you despite all the weaknesses of her.
We become the kind of people we long to be as we bow ourselves before his holy reign in humility and joy and love and care and it starts with you.
Not the person next to you, with you in a thousand little decisions and praying for the elders and the deacons of this church And leaning into your community group to finding mission together as a community group, even maybe going to do stuff for Furniture Fest with ISM.
Praying for those dear brothers and sisters who go overseas to defend our country, it means you you in a thousand little ways you begin to yield yourself and worship Jesus because he is holy in his reign.
The Lord Jesus Christ, he is holy in his justice and the Lord Jesus, oh, he is holy.
in his forgiveness because he's offered himself for you.
And the watching world looks at you, oh Trinity Presbyterian Church, some small little outpost in his larger kingdom, and you have the opportunity to extend that good news to others.
And when you begin to see that all of your hopes and dreams aren't found in earthly men that are found ultimately in the Lord Jesus, the earthly embodiment of Christ through the local church becomes something beautiful to you.
And you join with the Psalmist and all who have treasured the Psalms and you lean into God's people and you are able together to say, "Holy is he." Hallelujah.
Let's pray.
Father, thank you for your perfect rule, justice, your merciful forgiveness.
Thank you that you are the answer to our longing for true authority, justice and mercy.
I pray Lord that you would help those in this room who don't yet know you personally that they would place their faith in you.
That you would allow their curiosity about the gospel to keep bringing them here week after week after week.
But help your word to shape us and mold us as we look to your son, the living word, in whose name we pray.
Amen.

Sermon transcript is computer generated.