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Hymn: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

The Good Word: A Time to Fight

Hymn: Onward Christian Soldiers

Benediction

The Bible Study of Psalm 18 and the Text of the Sermon (A Time to Fight)

Psalm 18: Contextualizing and Absorbing the Text

The Obvious

The first thing we notice (in the superscription) is that the text is attributed to David, King of Israel, who has been through a traumatic experience that almost destroyed him. In the end David was delivered, but not  before his enemies almost did him in.  Psalm 18 is David’s account of this crisis.  But not in narrative form.  Instead, he gives us a graphic impression of his raw feelings.  We are left to look elsewhere in the Bible for the story behind this collage of emotions.

Psalm 18 features eight acts.  In Act I, without giving us any historical account, David describes himself as being encompassed in the cords of death, assailed by the torrents of perdition, entangled in the cords of Sheol, confronted by the snares of death.  The lack of any historical setting invites us to extrapolate our own specific frets and terrors.

In Act II, David calls upon the Lord for help.  

In Act III, the Lord stirs and comes to David’s aid.  Again, we are given metaphors, not historical details:  the earth reels and rocks, mountains tremble, smoke pours from God’s nostrils, and God shoots down from bowed heavens like an arrow. God is riding a cherub, a bright light slashing through thick darkness. The world yields, the sea parts, the earth quakes and foundations are exposed.

In Act IV, God snatches David from the mess—drawing him out of “mighty waters,” taking him to a broad place.  

In Act V, David declares that he has earned God’s deliverance through his righteousness, cleanliness, loyalty, blamelessness, humility, and obedience.  Theirs is a tit for tat relationship.

In Act VI, David is empowered to take the fight to the enemy.  God lights his lamp, gives him the power to crush a troop, to leap over a wall.  God shields David from all attacks and girds him with strength.  His feet can now run like a deer.  His hands are trained for war.  His arms are strong enough and coordinated enough to shoot arrows from bows of bronze.  God’s right hand has made David great.  

Act VII finds David defeating his enemies:  pursuing them and striking them down. They cry for help.  But God does not help them.  David beats them into dust and throws them out like garbage littering the street. 

In act VIII, David is now internationally renowned.  People from other lands serve him.  Foreigners come cringing and offering their obedience.  David gives God all the thanks and credit.

The Less Obvious

Psalm 18 is almost a word for word copy of 2 Samuel 22: 2-51.  In Samuel’s narrative, it occurs near the end of David’s life.  This poem/prayer is a victory song after David’s final skirmish with the Philistines.  David and the Israelites are fighting the descendants of giants in this battle. The giant Ishbibenob attacks David with a heavy spear and some other newly invented weapons. Before Ishbibenob can reach the King, however, David’s own men come to his aid and save him.  They then demand that David get off the battlefield and let them do the fighting. They tell him that if he is injured or killed, it will “quench the lamp of Israel.”  He steps aside.  Several other battles are fought before the giants are finally eliminated, the last one being a nameless man who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. 

The context of 2 Samuel indicates that David was an old man at the writing of this song and that he had been delivered from the physical dangers and strain of the fight by the loyalty of his own men.  

•  The Hebrew word for “anointed” (v. 50) is “Messiah.”  Anointed ones usually go on to become kings, generals, or prophets.  To be “anointed” literally means to have oil smeared on one’s head as a sign that God has drafted you for a special task.  In the New Testament, Jesus becomes the latest and final Messiah.  

David understood himself to be a messiah for his own times.  David’s messianic work was aided by God’s powers, which came in the form of David’s followers who helped rescue and protect him.  They finished the battle he had started.

As Christians, to see ourselves followers of Jesus the Messiah, is to see ourselves drawn into the same struggles that Jesus faced.  Psalm 18 suggests that we carry on Christ’s battles against the giants of our own day.  

• Notice the mix of active and passive metaphors for God’s work.  In a passive way, God is a rock and a fortress.  If we are agents of God’s work, sometimes our work demands our inertia and refusal to change.  Other times God is quite active:  flying through the sky, blowing smoke from his nostrils, thrusting lightening into the darkness.  God’s battles sometimes call for such powerful and vigorous action on our part. 

• It is interesting that the old man David muses about the gifts God gives him.  He is a lamp—as his people reminded him in 2 Samuel 22.  But it is God who fuels his lamp and lights up his own darkness.  David goes on to say that he has the power to 1) crush a troop and 2) leap over a wall.  Is this the braggadocio of an old man—or a metaphor which describes new strengths David has in his last years?

• The superscription indicates that this song is a celebration of David’s deliverance from all his enemies and the hand of Saul.  David’s public life began with the slaying of the giant Goliath.  It would end with his army defeating the giants of Gath (cf. 2 Samuel 22).  The giants were David’s foreign enemies.  But there were two other types of internal giants that David had to fight in the intervening years:  those closest to him who were jealous—Saul and Absolom, and his own self-centeredness and inner sin—played out in the stories of Uriah and Bathsheba.  The mention of Saul in the superscription suggests that this Psalm is an overview of gratitude—covering all the times that David was in danger, from external or internal forces.  In every case, it was God who lifted him out of “treacherous waters.” 

• The cherub that God rides is not the “dimpled darling of Renaissance painting” (Robert Alter, “The Hebrew Bible:  The Writings, pg. 56) but a fierce winged beast, found in Canaanite mythology.  

There is imagery in this Psalm that will stock the phrases used by apocalyptic writers. One of the aims of such imagery is to keep us from boxing God into domesticated metaphors of our own choosing and comfort.  

Sermon

Psalm 18 was a part of my devotional reading this past week.  And what snagged me in that Psalm, and made me want to preach from it, was its fighting spirit.  It’s a Psalm about Fighting death.  Fighting despair.  Fighting troublemakers.  Fighting giants.  Fighting evil.  Fighting over the future of the country.  

I’ve read this Psalm many times, and perhaps what made it stand out for me this time is:  I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many of my friends in a fighting mood as I’m seeing these days.  People are in a mood:  on social media, in churches, in social gatherings, in the news.  Not everyone is lathered up–but it’s more people than since the Viet Nam War.  People were worked up in the 60s also.  But back then, the communication of both outrage and misinformation was slower and clumsier.  There was no 24-hour news, internet news feeds, and social media.  All the major news networks promoted a stabile center.  Today, every major news TV and radio source traffics in emotion.  Americans have not fought each other to this degree in my lifetime.  Only the 1850s were worse.

I grew up learning about a Jesus who was relatively pacifist.  Turn the other cheek.  Love your enemies.  Forgive those who do you wrong.  Make peace with your adversary before you get to the judge.  Take the log out of your own eye before taking the speck out of your brother’s.  I have spent over 5 decades in ministry trying to get people to stop fighting.  The very first sermon I ever preached was on peace.  At home and abroad.  

But now, I can barely fathom peace.  Not between Gaza and Israel, not between Russia and Ukraine, not between Donald Trump and the half of the country that despises him, not between blue and red, not between globalists and nationalists, not between the religious right and humanitarian Christians.  Peace has become as unfashionable as it is unfathomable.

It is hard for old liberals to affirm fighting.  It’s just as hard for a tempermental conservative to stoop to scrapping and skirmishing. I remember when we had dispute over which hymns to include in the 1989 UMC hymnal. Peace advocates had trouble with hymns like “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  Those songs seemed to be relics of an embarrassing past, colonial aggression in the name of Christian mission, or trust in the myth of redemptive violence. A bit too Old Testament for a modern world.  Psalm 18 is of that vintage.  And in fact, when the Psalms got put in the back of the hymnal, Psalm 18 got left out.  And not only that, but the 18^th Psalm was censored entirely from the three year lectionary—scriptures and songs that we read and use in worship.  Well, all you have to do is censor a Psalm—and that’s enough for most of us to want to read it, maybe even preach a sermon from it.

So, here we go.  Let’s review this 18^th Psalm and then highlight some of the wisdom and good words that are in it for us today.

Psalm 18 is actually a copy of another chapter from the Bible:  2 Samuel 22, which, by the way, has also been omitted from the lectionary.  In both the Psalm and the 2 Samuel text, the words are the lyrics of a song attributed to King David.    

2 Samuel 22 places the song at the end of David’s last official battle.  Once this song is composed,  David will go home and soon die peacefully in his own bed. 

Let’s look at the battle that immediately proceeded this writing .  A giant has come at King David with a humongous spear.  But Abishai (one of David’s loyal soldiers) comes to David’s rescue, attacks the giant, and kills him.  David’s men then whisk the king off the battle field to keep him safe.  They tell him that he is the Lamp of Israel, their inspiration and enlightenment.  They say that if David gets killed in the vanguard of the battle, it will do no one any good.  And so the old man is kept physically safe—at a distance– while his men defeat the giants of the Philistine army.  

Soon afterward, David writes of his moments of despair, how he felt encompassed and ensnared by the cords of death.  He writes of pleading to the Lord for help.  He vividly describes the suspense waiting for God to arrive and deliver him.  He testifies to being rescued—like a man being drawn up out of raging waters.  He reflects on why God might want to keep him alive and give him victory.  And he tells of the roles he has played in defeating his the enemies. 

As befits an all-out fight, there is a violence and ruthlessness throughout Psalm 18.  The words may not be to our liking, but they are true to life, true to the way this world often works.  

In reading this passage, we get the sense that David has no choice but to fight. The Philistines and the giants they employ are the aggressors.  We have to fight aggressors that would take away our lives, destroy our environment, enslave our neighbors and relatives, vandalize our bodies, restrict the liberties of our faith and thought.  The real world is full of aggressors—both internal and external to who we are.  Very few of us are ever given a pass from being drafted into some fight or another.  Fighting may not be our choice, but it too often is our calling.

After all, what’s a person to do, but fight back whenever cancer cells invade the body?  What’s an adult to do, who sees children being bullied?  What are good people to do when they notice the poor being pushed out of their ancestorial lands?  What kind of world is left if no one fights the good fight against rapists and drug lords and cyber criminals and the KKK?  How can we not fight against those who fill the world with lies, turning neighbors and nations against one another?  

For many of us, however, the problem is that we don’t know how to fight.  We know how to get worked up—but both our savvy and our skills in fighting evil are immature.  And if we are Christians, how can we fight and deny the spirit and teachings of Jesus? How do we fight evil in a way that reconciles both the militant King David and the non-violent Jesus of Nazareth? 

From David, we learn that fighting involves allies.  It involves asking for help.  It involves creativity and imagination.  It involves character—righteousness, obedience, and humility.  It involves strength, agility, and purpose.  It involves knowing the task and completing it—all the way.  It involves flexibility and adaptation to reality.  It involves a vision of a better future.  

Jesus and David both turn to God for help.  Neither trusts a worldly deliverer or messiah.  They are open to humble, unexpected personalities being sent by God instead. Both recognize this paradox—a fighting spirit must never wander off on its own, detached from a humble heart. This odd couple must always stay together in the same personality:  the feisty fighter and the humble soul.  It can be done.      

In the midpoint of Psalm 18, in the very crux of the text, we find a pointed and poignant verse:  “You deliver a humble people, but those of haughty eyes you- bring down.”  In other words, in a battle between gigantic egos, God generally doesn’t help either side. But when we learn humility, God drafts us and uses us to accomplish divine justice and righteousness.  

Being humble is hard for me—especially when I hear of people doing despicable things.  I want to shed all humility and ride on the wings of self-righteous anger.  I want to suspend my values and ignore the lessons I have learned from Jesus of Nazareth.  To forgo his slow ways of transforming both my own heart and the heart of my enemy—and instead dispense with the bad guys quickly.  I usually don’t have time to first take the log out of my own eye.  There isn’t time to pray for my enemies, or forgive, or seek deeper understanding.  I’m too impatient to refine my impulsive feelings so I can channel them strategically.  

But in Psalm 18, David gives wide berth to God’s way, not his own.  It is God’s battle, not David’s.  And in the life of Jesus, one fights not for the sake of victory, but for the sake of human hearts being changed.  

David takes inventory of the skills he brings to the battle at the moment.  Advancing age gave David new perspectives in fighting aggression.  As an old man, he will leaps over walls–only in a metaphorical sense.  His wisdom and his strength and his quickness are of a different sort—from his younger days.  David understands that his enemies vary from battle to battle—posing different threats, using different weapons than before, hiding different vulnerabilities.  

Throughout his life, David always had to wait until the battle was upon him before he was able to figure out what HE could do.  But he was determined to never shirk his call.

From Jesus, and from the epistle of Ephesians, devoted to the ways of Jesus, we know that the goal of every battle is to change human hearts.  Aggression is caused by greed, anger, fear, pride, lust, jealousy, envy, malice, ancient enmities, alienation, unprocessed grief—and so much more.  All aggression starts with something wrong in the hearts of people.  And the only true way to overcome evil is to get at the heart of the matter—the heart of those who have abandoned humanitarian decency, who no longer entertain the notion that we should do to others as we would have them to unto us.

God never calls us into a fight without showing us the simple and ultimate divine goal of any particular battle.  God’s goal always includes truth, peace, justice, and goodwill among people.  It is possible, in the midst of our being worked into a froth, that we might lose sight of what God most desires of us in a fight.  In our energy and rage, we can often destroy the things God most desires.  

There are so many things I read about in the news right now that offend me.  From where I see things, evil seems to be having a field day.  I am pretty sure that much of my agitation is the stirring of the Holy Spirit—that God wants me to get off the sideline and get involved in the fight.  Just as I am sure that God wants me to do so with humility.  

I think about the passage in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians—warning us that we are not fighting against someone with a first name and a last name, flesh and blood—but we are fighting against powers and principalities. Indeed, the battle is with our fellow humans beings, arrogant politicians, Christian nationalists, outright thugs.  But the goal is not to destroy the person, but to defeat the powers and principalities for which they stand.  In other words, our godly task is not to destroy people, but to undo and then restore systems.  To obsess over the face or the name of a person is a sure way for me to lose my principles, and my humility, and my capacity to fight powers and principalities.  

I still have quite a bit of work to do to figure out how I can deal with today’s problems.  But it looks like these problems are going to hang around for quite a while—and patience is a critical virtue when it comes to godly fighting.  God will undoubtedly show me what to do. 

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get better at humility. I’m absolutely sure that God can’t use me in the heat of this battle until I become more humble.  For me, humility means demanding reliable evidence before I accept something I hear or read as true.  Humility means being open to truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be for my side in the battles.  Humility means to not get personal about people on the other side—even the leaders.  We are all made in the image of God, and we are all children of God, and we all have the light of God somewhere within us, even those I despise the most.  Humility means every day confessing my own sins rather than rehearsing the lists of wrongs done by the other side.  Humility means finding people on the other side who will argue with me—helping me deepen my understanding of their hearts.  Humility means to stop quarantining myself with people who only think like I do. 

Right now, my fighting is very much behind the scenes, learning history, ferreting out truth, stimulating curiosity and empathy among my readers and friends—slowly nudging hearts and minds—including my own toward God’s mercy and justice—trying to make sure I’m staying in touch with God’s mysterious ways, and playing the long game—or rather, fighting the long battle—to change the world one heart at a time with grace, curiosity.  Right now, for me, active fighting is writing, and doing these podcasts, and having conversations with people, and infiltrating every conversation by planting some good natured cognitive dissonance.  Planting seeds is one of the ways we fight.  Fight to keep ourselves in the way of Jesus, fight to open the door for others.

May God bless us all in our struggling, agitation, and our wondering how we might fight the best fight of our lives.