And we're going to read that psalm. We've sung it, now we're going to read it.
And we're going to think about living for Jesus when truth is under attack.
! But let's again hear God's Word in Psalm 120.
I call on the Lord in my distress, and He answers me.
Save me, Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues.
What will He do to you, and what more besides you, deceitful tongue?
He will punish you with a warrior's sharp arrows, with burning coals of the broom bush.
Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar.
Too long have I lived among those who hate peace.
I am for peace, but when they speak, they are for war.
The truth is under attack.
That was the conclusion of a group of scientists down at Portsmouth University in 2024.
They were responding to misinformation about viruses and vaccines,
about bad science on social media that was affecting treatment that patients were receiving.
But don't we recognize that generally the truth seems to be under attack?
We are told that we live in the post-truth world.
We're constantly having to deal with AI for better and for worse.
Deep fakes and fake news are now part of our everyday vocabulary.
We encounter all too often serious fraud and deception.
And we know words are twisted to generate maximum coverage and maximum outrage.
We see it.
More personally too, don't we recognize that words can often be used as weapons?
And sometimes we are those who weaponize the words.
We find ourselves being lied about, being lied to.
Truth is manipulated so that we can be manipulated.
Our words and our values can be all too easily misrepresented.
Truth can be shaded and hidden to put oneself in the best light to the detriment of others.
The experience of the people singing Psalm 120 is of a people grieved
because they live in a world filled with lies and deception,
with people who are choosing words of war over words of peace.
Now, I suspect we can echo some of that sentiment in our own hearts.
Maybe today some of us are feeling the swords and arrows of lies and slander,
perhaps even because you are a worshiper of God.
This is an experience that may run very close to home for some of us.
And so the question to ask is, how do we navigate that?
How do we face this as a follower of Jesus?
And so we'll come back to that.
But let me just introduce for us these songs of ascent.
So what are they?
What are these songs that we're going to spend time in?
It's a group.
It's 15 Psalms, 120 to 130.
And they were collected for a particular purpose
so that worshipers making their way up, ascending to Jerusalem,
they'd have songs to sing on their journey together.
And the idea of a journey is something that we see within the Psalms themselves.
We're going to move from the groaning that we heard in Psalm 120
towards the rejoicing that we come to in Psalm 133 and 134.
But there's also a geographical journey.
So we're starting here in Psalm 120 in a distant land.
Psalm 121, we're moving towards Jerusalem.
And then Psalm 122 onwards, we're in the city.
And then we're taken right to the heart of the city, to the temple, to the place where God is.
So as we're thinking about this journey and these worshipers on a journey to God,
Augustine, the saint of the early church, captured it memorably when he said this.
He said, the soul, the real us, travels by its affections.
If you are in love with the earth, your journey is taking you far from God.
If you are in love with God, you are claiming towards Him.
So we're going to come to these Psalms and read them as Christians after the New Testament,
after the coming of Jesus, and to recognize they present for us the picture of Christians
as pilgrims on a journey.
Followers of Jesus on the way to, not geographical Jerusalem, but to the heavenly Jerusalem.
Life with God.
And to understand that the journey that we take as Christians is both towards Jesus and
also with Jesus.
So let's follow the pilgrims of Psalm 120 as we recognize that in a world spoiled by lies
and deception, the pilgrim walks with Jesus and waits with hope for His return.
So let's begin in the first couple of verses and to see the distress.
Here are the people distressed by lies and deception.
Words have that power.
They can drive us to distress and despair.
Remember that playground rhyme many of us grew up with?
I think we've all come to know it's not true that sticks and stones may break our bones,
but names will never hurt us.
And most often it's those names, it's those words.
They're the ones that sting the most.
When we come to Psalm 120, there's a really striking contrast with the Psalm that comes before.
Psalm 119 is a celebration of God's words.
God's words are a source of joy and life and light.
They're good and they're trustworthy.
If this is a path, it's a safe and a broad path.
But now we're being confronted by a different kind of language.
For the pilgrim follower of Jesus, we may find that lies like arrows will pierce our own soul too.
And we identify with the pilgrims here and we identify with God's people in all time.
If you were here last week and the week before, you'll remember this was something that was true for Nehemiah.
He was constantly attacked by lies and slander from enemies.
Maybe you know King David, most famous king in the Old Testament.
He was falsely accused by the first king, Saul, and he was betrayed by the lies of his own family.
Come to the New Testament, we meet a man called Stephen, the first person who was killed for being a follower of Jesus.
And he was falsely accused of speaking against God.
It's a pattern.
Words are used sometimes to assault us as Christians too.
And so we might find ourselves being whispered about or openly mocked.
We may find that our faith is misrepresented in our classroom and in our mainstream media.
You might have already had to deal with people accusing us and people accusing God of being responsible for all the problems in the world.
You may find yourself accused of hatred and bigotry because of what you believe.
And words can bring distress.
Like these pilgrims, trying to live for God means living with a different set of beliefs and values.
And that puts us in the spotlight and sometimes that puts us in the storm of attack.
And this too is not new.
Remember Old Testament Noah.
Faithful to God, building the ark to be spared from judgment.
Preaching that others might come and to be saved.
And he's mocked.
Think about Daniel and his three friends as they determine to live for God in a foreign country.
They're thrown into a furnace.
And they're thrown into a den of lions.
I discovered this week that in some state schools in China,
there are stories being told where Jesus and his disciples are the enemies in the story.
And they're being regarded as evil.
If you know anything about the persecuted church around the world,
you will know that parts of Asia, the Middle East and Africa,
it says that if you call yourself a Christian, you are automatically an enemy of the state.
I call on the Lord in my distress and He answers me.
Save me, Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues.
And in all of this, we need to recognize too that Jesus, the pilgrim, went there too.
As Jesus lived as the man of faith, slander and lies were hurled at Him and they stuck like tar.
You're lying about your identity.
You're not the Son of God.
You're not God's chosen King.
You can't deal with sin.
You can't forgive and save.
Even as He went to the cross, He was mocked and abused and slandered.
Yet did you hear what Peter told us?
Jesus committed no sin.
And no deceit was found in His mouth.
What did Jesus do?
He entrusted Himself to God, His Father who judges justly.
And the journey of faith, that follows His path.
Notice the wisdom of the pilgrim in verse 1.
And we need this.
When we are confronted by lies, when we are confronted by deception, two related things we must do.
First, we must turn to prayer.
I call on the Lord in my distress.
That's wisdom.
To the Savior who sustained His people in the past, who has sustained us in the past.
He is strong and kind and He has promised that He will do so again.
We turn in prayer to the Father of comfort.
Maybe He's the only one who can comfort us in our distress.
So we turn to Him.
And we pray knowing the Spirit of God is within us.
And remember, the Spirit is given to His people to be our comforter.
We turn to prayer.
We take it to the Lord.
Capital letters, Lord.
The personal, covenant-making, covenant-keeping God.
We trust the one who said,
Vengeance is mine, I will repay.
As Christians, we don't get mad.
We don't get even.
We go to our God.
We turn to the Lord Jesus.
That sympathetic high priest in heaven.
We consider what is waiting for us.
That the reward of knowing Jesus and being with Him,
it makes all the suffering worth it.
And we look to Jesus and we remember that He walked the road for us.
And now He walks the road with us.
Pilgrims are often distressed by lies and deception.
Secondly, and this is the middle of the psalm,
we think about the promise of being delivered from lies and deception.
Delivered from lies and deception.
Some of us may have seen in the news this week that in New Zealand,
a surf competition had to be paused this week
because a surf cameraman who was working in the water,
he was attacked.
Some still unknown animal, either shark or a sea lion,
locked their jaws onto his foot.
I know, thankfully, jet skis came and he got the medical attention he needed.
But think about verse 2 and think about that story.
Save me, Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues.
There is an echo here of wild beasts that look to snap and threaten and devour.
Only this time it's not a wild animal.
It's enemies with their words.
John Chrysostom, another church father,
he said, actually, this is worse than any wild animal.
If you see a lion or a bear or a shark,
well, there's trouble.
But at least you know that they have ill intent.
But people, Chrysostom says,
well, they often conceal their nature
with a veil of sweet reasonableness.
And so it's so painful as we discover someone's really nice to our face,
but they're vicious behind our back.
Somebody who's really civilized and sophisticated sometimes,
but become absolutely savage towards us
in attacking what we believe.
From the beginning,
God's people have been assaulted
by the devil and his lies.
Again, to think about Peter,
he talked about the devil as a roaring lion
seeking whom he may devour.
We think about the words of Jesus
describing the devil as the father of lies.
He's been the liar from the beginning.
In the Garden of Eden,
he spoke lies to Adam and Eve.
God is not good.
God's Word can't be trusted.
You won't really be judged
for turning your back on God.
Life will be better without God.
The devil's lies like poison
work their way into the human bloodstream.
And so pilgrims always need to pray,
deliver my soul.
Remember the Lord's Prayer,
deliver me from evil,
deliver us from the evil one.
But there's a promise.
I don't know if you saw it,
the promise in verse 3 and 4.
It's a really necessary promise.
Here it is.
It's the promise that one day
Satan and his lies
will be fully repaid in judgment.
Here's the promise.
A world is coming free of lies and deception forever.
When God deals with all lies and deception.
Notice in the description how the punishment fits the crime.
People have been using lies and slander and deceit to attack.
Verse 4,
He will punish you with a warrior's sharp arrows.
With burning coals of the broom bush.
So, the broom bush was like a really popular charcoal
because it burned hot and long.
And it's a reminder that those who would wound,
those who would slander,
those who would turn their words against God and His people,
if they do not turn from that,
then God's fierce anger burns hot and long.
It's a hard thing to think about.
But do we recognize that judgment is necessary?
The only way for there to be true salvation
and true peace and an end to lies
is if God deals decisively once and for all with those realities.
Think about it in the context of a war.
Imagine a city under siege.
We see it on our news.
The only way for that city to have true and lasting peace
is for the enemy to be so decisively defeated
that there is no prospect for them to attack.
God promises such a day in His Word.
Again, to think about another New Testament story,
some of you will know about the road to Damascus,
Saul's remarkable encounter with Jesus.
He was on his way to Damascus
and he was breathing out threats and murder
against the people of God and the church of God.
And then Jesus appeared
and the glory of Jesus knocked Paul, Saul, off his horse.
And there was a conversation between Jesus
and Saul, the persecutor,
which ended with Jesus saying to Saul,
remember, when you persecute them,
you persecute a Christian, Jesus says,
you persecute me.
Now, remember that.
This psalm is about people turning their hatred,
their lies, their slander against God's people.
To stand against God's people
is an injustice and an assault against them,
but also against their God.
It's to assault God's honor and God's holiness.
And that's a really serious thing.
And if we find ourselves in that situation today,
there is an urgency to turn away from that
because we're reminded of future judgment here.
But back to our pilgrim.
Here they are.
They're facing lies.
They're facing slander.
And so they cry out to God.
And the answer is actually
a glorious vision of the future
where there is no more lies.
There is just truth
because judgment has come
and so salvation has come.
Now, just for a moment,
try to imagine this with me.
Try to imagine new creation.
Try to imagine a redeemed world
where for all eternity,
in any conversation you have,
you will never encounter any gossip.
There will never be any slander.
You will not be called names.
You will not be spoken about behind your back.
There will not be any lies that cause division.
And positively,
every word that you hear
will be truth,
will be life-giving,
will be full of love.
When the bullets and bombs
of cruel lying words
will be melted down,
never to return.
Don't that sound like
the kind of world we all want?
It's a world that God promises
through Jesus.
Truthfully, it's a world
that for us as Christians,
we are looked to,
begin to see now.
And so it's always a reminder
of how we use our words.
But how can we have
this hopeful future?
How can we live with hope
when we're surrounded by lies?
We look to Jesus.
We see Him as the forerunner,
the pilgrim who has gone before us.
In His first coming,
some 2,000 or so years ago,
He faced those lies,
that slander,
as He lived by faith.
And recognize this too,
that He died to pay the punishment
for our lies,
for our slander,
and gossip,
and half-truths,
and broken promises.
Understand that Jesus faced
all the arrows of evil
there on the cross
and won a great
and decisive victory.
And the proof of that,
His resurrection.
So that in Him,
trust in Him today,
your sins are forgiven.
You have new life with God.
You get a new heart.
You have new power.
You have a new motive
to speak the truth
and to seek peace.
And you're now a person
with a new hope.
Because there was the first coming
of Jesus,
but there's the promise
in the Bible
of a second coming.
And when He comes again,
He will finally,
once and for all,
judge all evil,
the devil,
and his lies.
There will be a decisive punishment
and an end to that
so He can establish
a new and renewed
and redeemed world forever.
With Him
and in Him,
we have this promise
of a new world
and a new home
where it's only truth
and it's never lies,
where it's always peace
and it's never warfare.
And to have this wonderful hope
in our hearts,
we need to ask God
to help us
to cut through
the lies of the devil,
the lies that we encounter
in this world
to the truth,
to Jesus,
the way,
the truth,
and the life.
But we need to keep going
and we need to see thirdly
and finally
what it looks like
for the pilgrim dwelling
among lies and deception.
After the hope
and the promise
of verse 4,
verse 5 to 7,
kind of take us back
down to earth
with a crash somewhat.
Here is the pilgrim.
He's prayed in distress
and he's been given
a hopeful answer
for the future,
but in the present
still loaded with groaning
and with woe
and the longing for home
which makes the distance
a source of grief.
Woe to me
that I dwell in Meshech,
that I live among
the tents of Kedar.
Too long have I lived
among those who hate peace.
I am for peace,
but when they speak
they are for war.
I wonder,
do you know homesickness?
Have you ever felt homesick?
I remember as a student,
actually both at the beginning
of my student days
and the end of my student days,
having those pangs
of wanting to be home.
There are times
when it is hard going
to be far from friends
and family
and what is familiar.
As these pilgrims
begin their ascent,
as they begin
the long road
to Jerusalem,
they are living
as exiles
and they have
that sense
of homesickness.
So they speak
of woe.
They lament
the misery
of their exile.
They long
for Jerusalem.
That's their spiritual home.
That's where they can
share faith together
and they can share
worship together.
But these places,
Meshach and Kedar,
they're like way out here
in the frontiers,
in the badlands.
It's places of darkness
and aggression
where people are hostile
to God.
And so they find themselves
saying,
too long have I lived there.
It's the lament
of a foreigner.
I want to be home
among my own people,
my own values,
my own culture.
Sometimes I think
if we're honest
as Christians,
living in this world
can weight us down.
maybe it's because
we're surrounded
by blasphemy
where Jesus
and His Word
and His name
has been so cheapened,
where we live every day
with a disrespect
for God
and His church.
Or maybe it's because
we feel surrounded
by lies
and anger
and rumor
where the truth
is tossed aside.
It can be hard
to live
when there is
a spirit of lies
and warfare,
when people's beliefs,
when people's values,
when people themselves
are being attacked
can feel like a war zone.
And so the psalm ends
with a sense of grief
and groaning
and longing.
It literally begins,
I, peace,
but they, war.
The pilgrim worships
the God of peace
and longs for peace
but he feels
beaten down
by lies
and longs
to be home
with God
and the people
of peace.
In here,
by God's design,
there ought
to be
peace.
We meet
with the God
of peace
and we are
to pursue
peace.
And we think
about that
in all our conversations
and as we worship.
But what about
Monday
when we're
the only Christian
in our classroom
or our workplace
or in our family?
What about
the next time
we read
our social media feed
and someone else
is looking
to tear down
our Christian faith?
What about
if our family
and our friends,
they don't accept
Jesus as truth
and don't accept us
because we do?
Do we find
ourselves groaning?
Here's what I want
us to finish.
How can we
dwell well
if we feel
that we're living
in our Meshach
and Kedar
places?
Two things.
One way.
Commit
to saying
even when it's
hard,
I am
for peace.
Commit
to pursuing
the truth
even when
it's costly.
Stay
on the path
that Jesus
has placed us
on.
Commit
to being
a peacemaker
in relationships.
Pour water,
not oil,
on flames
even if
our instinct
tells us
otherwise.
Practice
the truth
in every
part of life.
Let God's
Word sink
so deeply
into our hearts
and our minds
that it shapes
all of our
interactions.
Ask yourself,
think about
what are my
patterns of
speech and
conversation
in my family
or in my
friendship
group.
Can my
colleagues
spot there
is something
different about
me because
of the way
that I choose
to speak?
How would
Jesus assess
my social
media feed?
Aim for
peace
within the
church.
Come back
this evening,
John 17,
we're thinking
about Jesus
praying,
Jesus praying
for unity.
It matters
to Jesus,
it needs to
matter to
us.
We need
for Beclu
to be a
safe place.
It's only a
safe place for
people if we
choose to
practice truth
and to
pursue peace
with love.
As the Bible
teaches us,
we are to aim
for peace
with everyone.
Romans 12,
if it is
possible on
your part,
live at
peace with
everyone.
Some people
may be for
war.
For the
Christian,
we need to
get our
responses right
and pursue
peace.
So we
commit to
saying,
I am for
peace.
That's one
way to
dwell well
as we
groan.
The second
way,
dwell well
by looking
to Jesus,
the Prince
of Peace.
Remember
this,
Jesus
sang Psalm
120.
Jesus
made lots
of visits
to Jerusalem
for festivals.
He would
have joined
his voice
with others.
He knew
what it was
to be a
pilgrim
who was
grieved
as he
heard false
teaching about
God,
as he
faced lies
and slanders.
Jesus,
too,
felt that
sense of
homesickness
for heaven
while he
lived as
an exile
on this
earth.
Now,
wonderfully,
Jesus has
returned to
the glory
of heaven
where he
rules in
victory.
He is
the Prince
of Peace.
And for
us,
we look
to him
grateful for
what he
has done,
that he
has gone
under the
sword of
God's
judgment,
that we
might have
the peace
of God.
He has
made peace
by his
blood shed
on the
cross,
and right
now he
is preparing
a home
for his
people,
a wonderful
kingdom of
eternal
truth and
peace and
love.
So,
may God
use this
psalm to
help us
to dwell
well even
as we
groan,
as we
find the
truth is
under attack.
Let's pray
together briefly.
God, our
Father, thank
you for this
psalm, because
we recognize
it's tough
honesty.
We know
lies,
deception,
slander are
all around
us.