Tough Questions - What about?

I wonder if you've ever seen the show Antiques Roadshow.

If you haven't seen it before. A group of experts, they come and people bring their old junk they've had in the back of the cupboard or tucked away in the garage or bought at an OP shop. And the experts look at it and they examine it and they tell them what it is and how much it's worth. It's actually really cool. If you haven't seen that before, probably the young people amongst us, you're probably thinking, I'm really old now, but I'd encourage you to watch it.

But the best thing about Antiques Roadshow is when someone brings something that you can't even work out what it is, and they don't even know what it is, and they bring it. And the antiques expert says, like, this is some 16th century, very rare thing in great condition and it's worth a fortune. And you just see the person's face. They've had it sitting in the top of a cupboard and all of a sudden they've had this fortune there. One episode I saw a clip of online, someone had bought a bowl from an op shop for $3, and that bowl was actually a Chinese songsty bowl, whatever that is, and they then sold it for $2.2 million.

So, you know, watch Antiques Roadshow. I then start thinking, like, what old things do I have that might be a secret fortune? But I think what catches our attention is the idea that something old that doesn't seem to be useful could actually be of significant worth, that it could be this really valuable item. And I think sometimes parts of the Bible are like that. I think there are parts of God's word that maybe you've experienced it, you're doing your own Bible reading and it's all going well.

And then you come across a verse and you think, oh, wow, like, what do I do with that? What does that mean? How do I make sense of this? Or maybe someone's put you on the spot. They've said, you're a Christian, aren't you?

It always is going to go, you know, south. If someone starts with, you're a Christian, you're a Christian, aren't you? What about this? What about this really old thing that happened in the Old Testament? Maybe it's a gruesome story, or it's a verse that appears like it's an antique from another time.

It can be hard to know what to do with those passages. It can feel like that some of God's word doesn't really have much value for us today, you might be aware, some of you would be that we plan our preaching series like 12 months in advance. So one of the things we're going to do next week is we're going to tell you what the next 12 months of teaching topics are going to be, but we plan them in advance. And I really like that. I think it means that we get a really good diet of God's Word, not just the easy bits, but we can really get in across God's Word.

But one of the downsides is that in August or September, October this year, I can guarantee that I'll come to start working on the sermon for that week or the week after. And I will think, what was Simon of 10 months ago thinking when he thought this would be a good idea to preach a sermon on this topic? It happens every year. I think, oh, man, what am I going to do with this? What.

What does this have to say to us and how do we make sense of it? And so if that's something that you've encountered, maybe you've seen those passages and you've just skipped over them and tried to forget about them, pretended they weren't there. We all have that same struggle. And so this morning, our last tough question I've just called. But what about.

What about. What about those passages in God's Word that are hard for us to make sense? And so we're gonna come to God's Word together. And as we do that, let's just pause and pray. God, we thank youk for your Word.

We thank youk that it is truth and life to us. We thank youk that it is all God breathed and useful for us. We pray today that yout would help us to know that better and by knowing that better that we might know youw better. We pray this in your Son's precious name. Amen.

What we're going to do this morning is I can't possibly go through every difficult part of Scripture, otherwise we would be here for quite some time. And so I've picked one. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you four tips, four steps that you take yourself in your own Bible reading, that when you come across a difficult part of God's Word, that you might apply these things and be able to make sense of it before we get there. There are two kind of foundational truths that I want to kind of set the scene with. The first one is up there on the screen.

As Christians, we believe that all scripture is from God and is Useful for us. Paul says it like this in 2nd Timothy 3, 16. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realise what is, what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work.

I want us to notice two things there. Firstly, Paul says all scripture is inspired by God and that's a crucial thing. There's no degrees of inspiration here. Paul doesn't say some of the bits that are easier to read or that like better or that make us feel encouraged more. Those are inspired.

Other stuff is kind of inspired and then the bits, they're not inspired at all. He doesn't say that. He says all scripture is in some versions God breathed that it's from the mouth of God that these are his words. But Paul says something else useful here. He says not only is all scripture from God, he says it's all useful.

It's all useful. Scripture has a purpose. And he very, very nicely puts there what that purpose is. It is to teach us what's true and what's wrong. It corrects and it realigns us to God's purposes.

Now naturally there are some parts of God's word that will appear more useful. Like in a couple of weeks time, this is a sneak peek. We're going to spend a couple of months in the first part of Romans and I suspect as we work through Romans without me even saying much, you will have passages there where you think I can apply this in my life right away, like this is so valuable. Speaks to me where I'm at. If we were to do the same thing, but in Leviticus I suspect you would be thinking, how do I make sense of this?

What do I do with this? But we see that all scripture is both God inspired and it is useful for us. The second foundational truth that I want to encourage you with is that if you take the Bible seriously, it will change the way you think. If you take the Bible seriously, it will change the way you think. I think we often get tripped up with tricky parts in scripture because it's easy for us to feel like the Bible is antiquated, like somehow we are, like we've moved on, we're more enlightened, we're more wise than they were back then because the Bible rubs up against the things that we are taught and hear from this world.

But Paul writes to the church at Rome there in Romans 12:2 he says, don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way that you think. Then you will learn God's will for you, which is good, pleasing, and perfect. Now, if you haven't memorized that verse, that is a great one. You know, we often think about memory verses just for the kids. Can I encourage you, as adults and as teenagers, memorize this passage?

Because Paul says how the work of transformation happens in our lives. It happens as God changes the way that we think. You know, as we read Scripture, as we reflect on it, as we study it, as we apply it in our lives. It exposes our values, it exposes blind spots. It realigns our hearts to what God cares about.

I think sometimes when we come to God's Word, we expect it to be a mirror, that it might somehow reflect the culture of this world, that it would align with what we're told. But yet there should be a tension here, because transformation usually happens when there's a feeling of tension as we grapple with what God's word is saying and what we are hearing from the world. All right, so with those two things there, I want us to turn to Psalm 137. If you've got your Bibles, you can turn there a number of years ago on another show called Q and A, which for the teenagers is just as boring as Antique Roadshow, arguably even more. But on Q and A, if you don't know what that is, it's.

It was a show that was on for a lot of years. There'd be a panel of significant social figures, community leaders, religious leaders, politicians, the whole range, celebrities and members from the audience would ask contentious questions, often to deal with social issues of the day. And in this episode of Q and A, there was a Christian leader on the panel. And an audience member stood up and asked a question, and they quoted from Psalm 137. They quoted the last verse from Psalm 137, which we'll read together in a minute.

And it says, happy are those who seize your children and smash them against the rock. They quoted that, and then they said, how can Christians say the Bible should be read literally sometimes, but then other times insist that it shouldn't. Now, I'm very, very happy that I have never had the opportunity to answer curly questions on national tv. I'd be very happy if that opportunity never came. I'm willing to let other people do that.

But the Christian leader on the spot said something that probably I. I might have Said similar. He said, oh, well, well, hang on. That's from the Old Testament. We have the New Testament, and Jesus tells us to love one another. Now, it's not wrong.

And I suspect that many of us have done the same thing. When someone says something random from the Old Testament, we say, oh, that's part of the Old Covenant, or that's part of the Old Testament. We have the New Testament, and it's different now. But I think I hear that response, and I think that there has to be something more than that. I think there has.

Like, I hear that and I'm not satisfied. Because I think what happens when we really distinctly draw a line between the Old Testament and the New Testament? We can very easily give the impression, or even see the impression ourselves, that somehow God has changed, that the God of the Old Testament was vengeful and mean and angry, and that the God of the New Testament, as revealed in Jesus, is peaceful and loving and kind. But we know that that's not the case. Scripture tells us that God hasn't changed.

And so what do we do with passages like Psalm 137? Let me give you the four steps that you can take, and then we'll apply them together. So just quickly, the first step is, what am I reading? This is what you should ask yourself when you come to a tough passage, what am I reading? Because the Bible isn't one book.

It's 66 books made up of all different types of writing. And so within the Bible, we have poetry, prophecy, and we have narrative. We have other things. And so we should ask ourselves, what is this that I'm reading? And then ask ourselves, is this describing what happened or telling us what should happen?

The second thing is what was happening at the time. Step 2. All Scripture is written in real moments of history. And so we need to ground ourselves in that and say, what is the context in which this was written? Who were they writing to?

What was going on? Number three, this fit. The Bible is one story of God's unfolding relationship with his people, and the story reaches a high point in Jesus. And so we should ask ourselves, when we come to a tricky passage, where does this fit in that overarching, that narrative of Scripture? Fourth, we should ask ourselves, what else does the Bible say on this topic?

What else does the Bible say on this topic? It's important that we don't build big beliefs on a single verse. It's also important that we let the clear reveal the unclear, not the other way around. So when we come to a tough topic, we look at the repeated teaching across Scripture. And we let that help us to understand the harder parts.

All right, let's look at Psalm 137. We're going to read from verse one together. It says this. Beside the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept. As we thought of Jerusalem, we put away our harps, hanging them on the branches of poplar trees.

For our captors demanded a song from us. Our tormentors insisted on a joyful hymn. Sing us one of those songs of Jerusalem. But how can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a pagan land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget how to play the harp.

May my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I fail to remember you, if I don't make Jerusalem my greatest joy, O Lord, remember what the Edomites did on the day the armies of Babylon captured Jerusalem. Destroy it, they yelled. Level it to the ground. Oh, Babylon, you will be destroyed. Happy is the one who pays you back for what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rock. Now, it's heavy, isn't it? You're like, thinking, oh, why didn't he pick something nicer? It's heavy. It's confronting.

But let's apply those four steps and let's make sense of it together. So step one, let's ask ourselves, what am I reading? We need to start by zooming out from Psalm 137 and ask ourselves what we know about Psalms. We know the Psalms are a book of poetry and song. And because we know it's poetry and song, we know it should be read in a different way to how we might read narrative and within the form of poetry.

Psalm 137 is a particular type of poem because it's a poem of lament. Now, lament might be a new word for you, suspect you haven't heard that around your office recently. But lament is something we see throughout various parts of the Bible. It's what happens when God's people, when they feel the deepest despair, and instead of trying to hide that from God, they take it to him. They go to God with their grief and their anger and their confusion, trusting that God is patient enough and compassionate enough to receive it.

So it's important for us to see that Psalm 137 isn't God speaking to his people. It's God's people speaking to him. And what we read here is the cry of a broken, grieving people telling God how they feel in the aftermath of Unspeakable loss. In other words, and this is important, this is not prescriptive language telling us how we should act. All right, I want you all to hear that.

This is not prescriptive language telling us how to live. It is descriptive language showing us what human pain sounds like it's confronting, because grief is confronting. And yet I find it incredible that God allows this to remain in Scripture. Like it would have been easier for that Christian leader on Q and A if this wasn't there. And yet God allows this to remain in Scripture.

It isn't censored, it isn't softened. Instead, it's there in all of its brutal and raw honesty, because God is not threatened by our honesty. God is not threatened when his people come to him in the midst of their grief and in the midst of the mess of their emotions and they tell him how they feel. Second, we ask ourselves what's happening at the time? Fortunately, the author of this psalm gives us some wonderful context clues.

The author tells us that this is written after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians around 586 BC. It's important to say here that Scripture is really clear that Israel's exile was not accidental, that it was the painful. The destruction of Jerusalem. The exile was the painful outworking of God's long worn judgment on their sin. They'd refused to listen to God over and over again.

And so the Babylonians came. But even within that judgment, the violence and the injustice inflicted by Babylon were real evils. They were things that God saw that God grieved over and that God would one day judge the Babylonians. Destruction of Jerusalem wasn't just typical warfare. It was a complete razing of the city.

And ancient warfare was brutal. And the Babylonians were known to be particularly cruel. The city of Jerusalem was burned. The walls were torn down. It lay in rubble.

Men, women, children killed. Those that were old were left there to starve. And the young, fit, able ones were carried off into exile. It's likely that the psalmist experienced those atrocities firsthand, that they were there and they witnessed them. And now we find them by the river in Babylon, weeping, and they're thinking of Jerusalem.

Because to them, Jerusalem wasn't just any city. It was the city that God had given to his people.

And now they were in a foreign land. And it gets worse because in verse three, the Babylonians come to them after brutally killing their families. And they say, sing us the songs of Jerusalem. This isn't a genuine request. The Babylonians are mocking the grief of the Israelites.

They're asking for them to turn their sorrow into entertainment. So by the time we reach this last part of the psalm, the grief has turned into rage, thinking not just of injustices carried out by Babylon, but also we read here of the betrayal of the Edomites. These were relatives of Israel who, instead of standing with them, had stood by and cheered on their destruction. So it's in the grief of loss, in the anger of brutal destruction, in the deep hurt from betrayal, that the psalmist pens those words. Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks.

It's graphic and it's brutal, but the context tells us that it's not reflective of God's heart. It comes from the heart of someone who is crying out to God in the midst of their trauma. Step three. We ask ourselves, where does this fit in the overarching story of scripture? Psalm 137 isn't at the end.

It sits in a moment of the story where God's people knew some things very clearly. They knew that God is just. They know that injustice matters to God, and they know that evil will not simply be ignored. Ignored. But they don't yet know how God will ultimately deal with sin in a way that is both deeply just and fully redemptive.

They haven't yet seen the cross. They haven't yet seen justice and mercy meet in the person of Christ. And so they turn to God, and they say there in verse seven, o Lord, remember. They don't think that God has forgotten. Rather, they are calling on God to act.

They're appealing to God's character, to his justice, and to his covenantal faithfulness to his people. The psalmist is saying, God, you've seen this. You know what has happened. We're placing this in your hands. And so they use the words of justice that is available to them at that point.

They're reaching for justice using the language that they know, which is violence, because they haven't yet seen how God will end violence. So Psalm 137 is not where the story ends, when we locate it there and when we see it there clearly, it's not a permission for violence. Instead, it's the desperate cry of a people, a desperate cry for justice, that ultimately finds its answer in Christ. And then lastly, what else does the Bible say we should ask ourselves? Because we know that this isn't the only passage that speaks about grief.

It's not the only passage that speaks about injustice. Both of these things are spoken about extensively throughout Scripture. And so we should ask what else do we know? We only need to turn to the pages of the New Testament to see that suffering and justice are not minimized, but instead Jesus shows us that sin is not overcome by returning violence, but by defeating it on the cross. And so Jesus models to us how we can live in a world that is full of sin and violence.

He says, love your enemies. Love. Pray for those who persecute you. We're told that we can leave injustice to God, confident that nothing is unseen and nothing is left unresolved. And so the purpose of this psalm is not to shape our behavior towards injustice, but rather to show us that we can cry out to God.

It shows us where we can take our pain and other parts of Scripture show us how we can live in the light of our pain. I wonder if that Christian leader on Q and A, if they had their time again, they might have said something like, Psalm 137 is not a blueprint for how God's people are meant to behave. It's a lament. It's the honest prayer of people who are deeply wounded so they bring their pain to God because they don't know what else to do with comes from a moment in the story before the cross, before God has fully revealed how he would deal with evil. When we read that psalm carefully in its context and in light of Jesus, we find permission to be honest with God.

We see a God who would rather his people bring their darkest thoughts to him than carry them alone. And as the story continues, we discover that the longing for justice expressed in this psalm ultimately finds its full answer in Christ.

As we close today, my hope for you is this, that when you come to difficult parts of Scripture, or maybe when you're put on the spot, that you wouldn't over them, that you wouldn't just ignore them, that maybe you would slow down, that you would read them carefully, that you would remember what you know to be true about God and about His Word. And that you might be comfortable enough to say, I don't fully understand this yet, but I trust the God who gave it to us. And then you spend time grappling with it. I want you to hear from me today that asking hard questions about Scripture isn't a lack of faith. It's actually a sign that you're taking God's Word seriously.

And God says, come to me with your questions and your confusion and even your discomfort. Bring it to me. Because as we keep reading and as we look as Jesus at the centre, we discover that even the hardest parts of God's Word are given to us for our good, to shape us. That we might know God better, that we might know him. That we might understand his character.

And that he might transform us into his likeness. Let's pray together. Oh God, we thank you for all of your word. Even the hard bits. Even the bits that are confronting and are difficult.

Even the bits that seem like they're from another time. God, we thank you that we can come to it and that through your Holy Spirit that you bring it to life in our lives. That even those difficult parts of scripture can give us a clear picture, an image of who you are.

Lord, we just pray that you would let that word sit in our hearts. That we might take your word seriously. That where it rubs up against our thinking or our attitude or our values. That we might see that tension as a good thing. That we might be transformed into your likeness.

Give us this year a hunger for your word. Give us a hunger for you and for your Holy Spirit. That we might grow in our faith. That we might grow in our knowledge and our understanding of who you are. We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.