Nick Mackison is a former Presbyterian minister who served in a tough part of Glasgow. Presently, Nick is in the final year of a PhD in biblical studies. He is also a fellow of the Chalmers Institute (https://chalmersinstitute.org/ ) which exists to equip church leaders for serving faithfully amid the shifting sands of a changing culture.
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He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his namesake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
For thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Thou anointest my head with oil.
My cup runneth over.
Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Delingpole.
And this is the beginning of a new series, which I've been promising for so long, and I'm really excited to be doing it.
Embarking on my journey in the company of Nick Mackeson.
Welcome to Welcome to the Psalms, Nick.
Oh, it's a real pleasure to be here, James.
I'm delighted to be here.
Listen, I just wanted to say how excited I was to discover you, or kind of to be discovered by you, on, I think, Twitter.
And you were just one of those voices which I found very sympathetic, because you are a Christian.
But as you and I know, Christianity covers a multitude of sins.
You've got what I would call cultural Christians who go to church at Easter and Christmas maybe.
I was one of those as well and it was more about the outward form.
And the tradition and I think those things are important in their way, but it's only in the last three years that I've really discovered the essence of Christianity and discovered that the part that I think has largely been excised from
Our religion, which is the spiritual element, the fact that this stuff is real, that there really is a battle going on between good and evil, and it has been described in the Bible.
I believe that the Bible is the most important handbook for where we are, how to live our lives, and I think you're probably with me on that one.
100%.
I do believe it's the God-breathed word.
As men wrote it, God was inspiring it.
The fact that it's written by human beings and inspired by God, that's not a zero-sum game.
A lot of scholars like to play these facets off against one another, the human component and the divine nature of it.
You know, we can hold both intention.
Well, not even intention, they complement each other nicely.
So yeah, 100% James.
You're still sounding quite faint.
I'm wondering whether maybe you should turn up your sound a bit.
Okay, how's that?
Is that any better?
Yeah, yeah.
I think we need to do that.
Okay.
We're talking about the Psalms, which I don't know about you.
I think the Psalms are a microcosm of everything that is important in the Bible.
And although obviously they're in the Old Testament, not the New Testament, I think they were validated.
for Christians by the fact that Jesus himself was well versed in the Psalms.
He quoted them on the cross even.
And I think that if Jesus thought the Psalms were good and valuable, then that's kind of an indication that they probably are pretty important.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
You know, the importance of the Psalms is assumed in the New Testament.
Paul, as well as Jesus, says to the church in Ephesus, you know, sing to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.
So he's assuming the continuity of the Psalms.
And the importance of the Psalms, I think, is the fact that, you know, it's quite interesting when you look at the Old Testament, the Law of Moses.
The Law of Moses comes to us in five books called the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus through to Deuteronomy.
And Moses outlines You know, the details of following God.
He gives us God's law.
But David, who's the author of most of the Psalms, Jewish tradition has divided the Psalms into five books.
If you notice that there's book one finishing in book five.
Jewish tradition would say, as Moses gave us the five books of Torah, so David gave us the five books of Psalms.
And so the point is, you know, if Moses tells us how to live the law, David teaches us how to rejoice in God's law and sing God's law and he teaches us how to worship basically.
So yeah, the Psalms are important.
They do take the details of following God and express them, that's a big word, doxologically.
They teach us how to sing and rejoice in our walk with God.
So what does doxologically mean?
Doxology means it's a word about glory.
It's singing the glory of God.
It means to rejoice in who God is.
It's turning what you know about God into praise and thanksgiving and song.
And that's what the Psalms are.
They're taking the details of the Mosaic Law and the lived experience of David as he tried to live out that law and all the difficulties that he faced.
He turns it into worship.
Sometimes that worship is expressed in joy and singing.
But it's not all happy clapping, as you read through the Psalms again and again.
There's often lament.
You know, God help me, I'm stuck in a pit.
Or often, there's an enemy after me.
And I think this is where it plays into a lot of what you want to talk about, James.
The Psalms are about warfare.
Almost every, maybe two out of every three, I would imagine, is about some form of conflict and where David or I mean the sons of Korah or Asaph or whoever the author is they're crying out to God for help because they're being pursued by a mortal fool.
Yeah yeah the reason that I've chosen to launch this series with Psalm 23 is well I'm a great believer in learning the Psalms and I think that if you are going to learn the Psalms the first Psalm you should learn is Psalm 23 because it's short apart from anything else so it's So it's not too daunting a task.
It's also, I think, I call it the Master Psalm, just because it's the shortest and punchiest.
St.
Augustine, I don't know whether you know, called it the Martyr's Psalm.
He advocated it as the psalm that Martyrs should recite as they were being martyred.
I suppose if their deaths have been quite quick, you want a short song?
You know what, I'll go to a Psalm 119.
You know what, I'll prolong it.
Yeah, Psalm 119.
You know what, this is the thing.
You know, I prolong it.
Yeah, Psalm 119.
You know what?
This is the thing.
That in medieval times, when you were a novice monk, your first job was to learn the Psalter.
And I was thinking, yeah, I'd like to learn the Psalter, but the one I'm really dreading is Psalm 119, which is the longest psalm, because it's like lots of psalms joined together.
It's also possibly the most boring psalm.
Maybe.
I'm a former Presbyterian minister, you know, and it goes on and on about how brilliant God's law is.
So, you know, that was real worst for my mill.
You know, I loved Psalm 119.
But, you know, I can understand why it would be, you know, to somebody who's not as familiar with it, I can understand why it would look a wee bit repetitive.
It seems to say the same thing over and over again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thank you for mentioning the fact that you were a Presbyterian minister because people are going to be wondering why am I talking to this guy Nick Magson.
So you were a Presbyterian minister and now you are studying the New Testament?
Yeah, I'm studying New Testament.
I'm in the final year of my PhD.
For 13 years I was a maths teacher and then I experienced something of a miraculous call into a different way of life.
I'm not a happy clappy mystical Christian in any way but it was really quite a stunning experience of God's drawing me into Christian ministry.
So I left that in 2015.
I went to seminary and while I studied in seminary I was helping as an assistant minister in a church plant.
A church plant just means a new church that has been started.
This was a church plant in one of the roughest parts of Glasgow, Govan, in the south side.
And quite a remarkable guy, Norman Mackay, had gone into Govan and basically started a church by walking up and down the street, talking to people and seeing if he could make contacts and then starting Bible studies.
And from there, things seemed to snowball and he planted a church.
So I was fortunate enough to be along, you know, come along for the ride.
I was a friend of Norman's and, you know, so I ended up, you know, assisting him.
And from there, after I finished my studies, I did a short time of full-time ministry and then I was asked to do some further study by one of my former lecturers and they're paying me to do it, so what's not to like?
I want to hear a bit more about your time in Govan.
But first of all, your PhD obviously isn't in the New Testament.
Tell me what esoteric angle you've chosen.
Oh, well, yeah, at the risk of losing the entire audience, I'm looking at how the New Testament interprets the verse in Leviticus 18.5, which says, the man who does these things will live by them.
That's Moses talking about the law in the Old Testament, and Paul quotes that text in Romans 10 and in Galatians 3 to speak about obedience to the law.
The one who does the law will live by the law, and he critiques that, the way that the Jewish people have read that.
And I've got another angle on how the traditional interpretation of that verse is going, so I'm not going to... I don't want to bore anyone, but yeah, What it should help us, you know, it teaches us how to read the Bible like Jesus did and the apostles.
That's what I'm trying to do because I think a lot of our reading has been influenced by, you know, enlightenment categories, authorial meaning or historical context.
These things tend to dominate the interpretive landscape and we, you know, we major on these things and we minor on the fact that this is a divinely inspired world as well.
Which is capable of a, you know, what is called a fecundity of meaning.
So, you know, what the author, the original author, may have had in mind could also, you know, it could be superseded by a divine intention as well.
So there's a... Yeah, that's what I'm going to be, that's what I'm looking at.
Sorry if that was a word salad to anyone.
Isn't it amazing?
I was thinking three years ago, I couldn't have imagined anything Duller than doing the sort of thing you're doing and now I think well what a fantastic what a fantastic calling it to get to know the To examine the Bible in depth.
I mean, in your case, to examine one sentence from the Bible.
Yeah, I'm basically becoming an expert in a tiny, tiny field.
You know, that's what a PhD is about.
You know, it's about knowing more and more about less and less.
But at the same time, you know, the other angle is you don't take it too seriously.
It's an extended bit of homework at the end of the day.
Nobody's going to read it.
What it does, it's equipping me for a life of hopefully scholarly endeavour and teaching others, you know, so it's a formative experience.
More than that, it's something that people will actually take up and read.
Were you always a Christian?
No.
I grew up in a Christian home, but it was quite a, maybe a dysfunctional home by, you know, normal standards, whatever that is.
My mum was really a committed Christian.
She was quite a mystic in many ways.
She would do lots of evangelism.
She was actually one of these, she was a kind of cringe God-botherer.
You know, people would have thought of her in that way as, but yeah, so she was a very committed Christian.
My dad as well, he struggled.
He's a believer, but he had his own struggles.
But when I was very young, I think it must have been about when I was about four years old perhaps, my mum was diagnosed with cancer.
And, you know, she just had her third child.
And I mean, you know, cancer's another rabbit hole to go down.
But the doctors had basically said, when I think it was about four or five, that she had three months to live.
And so, you know, she was quite little in her reading of the Bible.
She went to James 5 and says, if anyone is sick, let him call the elders of the church to anoint the sick with oil in the name of the Lord and the sick will be made well.
So she gets in touch with the elders and said, I've been given three months to live.
Come and anoint me with oil, please, and pray for me to be made well.
So I don't think the elders had ever done anything like this before.
It's quite a conservative little church, you know, not into the more charismatic expressions of Christianity.
So they came over to the house, and I was only told this story a few years ago.
One of the elders prayed over her, and I believe under the influence of the Spirit, said, give her seven more years so that she can see her sons grow up.
And it was seven years Pretty much from that point that she passed away.
She died when I was 13, so it must have been when I was 6 that she'd gotten the diagnosis.
She left a real legacy.
One of her friends spoke to me a few years ago as well and she said, She said I used to find her quite overpowering in terms of, she was always talking about, oh I shared the gospel with somebody today and they, you know, they prayed the prayer and they've become a Christian.
And this friend of hers was saying, every week when we spoke about these things your mum would say, oh somebody else became a Christian and somebody else became a Christian.
And she says, I got a wee bit cynical after a while, I thought she is, she is just talking garbage here, you know, I mean nobody can convert that amount of people.
Which is, long story short, after my mum had died, she met every single person that my mum had mentioned to her in prior conversations.
Scores of people, all of whom would say to her, you know, I became a Christian as a result of Eve Makison's influence on my life.
She was quite a remarkable woman in that respect.
I was brought up in that environment, you know, with her guidance and whatnot, but losing her at 13 obviously was a bit of a I'm a blow for a young guy, for my younger brothers.
We went to school in quite a rough part of Glasgow as well.
So, you know, adopting the whole turn-the-other-cheek ethic wasn't exactly an appealing prospect at that point, you know.
It was two types of people in that school, the quick and the dead, and I wasn't very quick.
So, yeah, I was not a Christian until about the age of 18, where One night when I would normally be out drinking with my mates, I stayed in and read a book that somebody had given me.
And yeah, the rest is history.
I saw my peril so that I was in trouble, so that I couldn't kind of coast off my parents' Christian profession.
That I was walking on a path towards destruction.
You know, Jesus says that broad is the way and easy is the road that leads to destruction and many are on it.
I realised that I was on a road to destruction and that I was living off the faith of my parents and it was at that point I just gave in to the hound of heaven, as C.S.
Lewis calls him.
I prayed the prayers like, God, save me.
I'm terrified of telling my pals that I've become a Bible basher, but save me God.
Incredibly, at that point, the Holy Spirit came upon me almost dressedly.
For the first time in years, I wept.
I'd always been quite a hard little guy who couldn't cry at anything and I was just full of tears.
You know, I had this sense that whenever I prayed, there was this huge ear just listening to everything that I was saying.
So it was, yeah, it was a remarkable conversion experience for me as a young man.
That's amazing.
That's amazing.
So when you say you were a hard man, what, you were getting involved in fights?
Were you doing drugs or drinking?
No, I wasn't a hard man at all, James.
I was in a hard area.
I was in a hard school.
I mean, my house, I lived in what they called a bot house.
You know, my dad was a working class man come good.
You know, we had our own sandstone detached house and stuff.
So by Glasgow standards, we were doing quite well.
But we still had this kind of working class ethic.
I was sent to the school in the housing scheme.
There was lots of fighting going on.
And, you know, I was a scared, frightened man.
A frightened wee boy.
So I got into a lot of fights, but I would never have described myself as a hard man.
If I could run away from something, I would.
But I liked to drink.
I experimented with drugs.
Yeah, and that all stopped after a young age of 18, really.
Glasgow is famous for its rival football teams Rangers and Celtic and there's a big sectarian divide, a famous sectarian divide in Glasgow between Protestants and Catholics but I'm presuming that means that generally Glasgow is in one way or another quite Christian relative to the rest of the country?
You would think it would be.
I mean, in the Catholic schools, there's certainly a degree of morality and some kind of ethical standard to which the pupils are appointed.
But the other schools, we don't call them Protestant schools, they're just called non-denominational schools.
And, you know, aside from the odd visit from the local Church of Scotland minister for a school assembly, There's little to nothing of religious instruction in the vast majority of Glasgow schools.
So, it's like you said at the start, if there's any form of Christianity predominating in Glasgow, it tends to be a cultural one.
But people have very little knowledge of the contents of scripture, or the nature of God, who he is, who Jesus is.
I would say it's pretty much as secular as anyone else you'll see in the United Kingdom.
Yeah, so I mean, probably the fact that there's a strong heritage of Protestantism and Catholicism, it tends to be more cultural than anything else.
So people haven't got a clue, generally.
In my experience, I mean, we were the church that, in Govan, that's right in the shadow of Ibrox Stadium, you know, Rangers, who are the traditional team of the Loyalists or the Protestants, but quite remarkably, all around Ibrox and Govan, It's a large Irish Catholic community.
Most of the people around there are Celtic fans and it tends to be also Catholic.
So lots of the folk in Govan Free Church were former Catholics who had turned away from Catholicism because, now I don't want to slag off Catholicism in any way, but it was just the Catholicism that they'd encountered.
They were saying to me, we didn't hear about Jesus or anything about God from the priest.
We've never even opened a Bible.
And that's not to bash the Catholics, because I think it's pretty much the same thing in a lot of Protestant churches too.
In the Church of Scotland, you'll never open a Bible.
It's the Gospel according to the BBC.
So you'll hear more about Ukraine and climate change, I would imagine, than you would about the Lord of Hosts.
Yeah, well, I think this is another area where you and I might be in agreement.
If you were the devil, and your enemy was Christianity, which it is, what would you do?
You would so arrange it that the honest faith of Christianity became politicised, became sectarian, so that it wasn't about Christianity, it wasn't about Christ's message, it was about just petty differences, squabbles.
And that's happened, hasn't it?
No, it definitely has.
The government has It seems it has its tentacles everywhere, even in our church buildings, and it has its operatives everywhere.
So, you know, if you're in a church and the major note that you're hearing about on the Lord's Day morning on a Sunday is the dangers of climate change, Or how evil Vladimir Putin is.
Or, you know, we need to be using hand sanitiser all over the place.
All that stuff.
If that's the major key in your church, then it's not a church.
And, you know, your minister is actually a minister of the state and not an emissary of God and Christ.
So, yeah, no, it's a...
It's a sad state of affairs.
But I think also, James, you have on the other side, these are the obvious very, I suppose, progressive faces of a warped Christianity, but you see it in the, for want of a better expression, the right community, you know.
So you've got somebody like a Jordan Peterson lecturing through the Bible.
I went to hear one of his lectures in Glasgow and he was speaking about Cain and Abel.
And there's nothing there about the nature of God.
There's nothing there about Christ.
It becomes simply a moral tale for the betterment of your life.
To help you tidy your damn room!
The Bible seems to be a means to an end of a good that is not the beatific vision of God and Christ.
If you don't have that, then chuck the Bible out.
What's the point of it?
One of the things that, on my search for the true meaning of Christianity, I've tried to escape all the excrescences which have sort of coated
Christianity like a kind of rust or a sort of fungus over time and hidden the truth underneath.
And I've tried to strip away all the stuff that's the accretions of time and politics and find out what is the core of the message.
And it seems to me that the Psalms are one of the things that really do that.
Yeah.
Because, well, the point I made at the beginning about Jesus.
I'm quoting them.
But also they seem to be like the distilled essence of the teaching of the Old Testament.
They're like the kind of greatest hits of the Old Testament condensed in something which also happens to be beautiful poetry.
Let's have a look at Psalm 23.
One of the things that strikes me when you look at the Psalms is how the Perspective changes within a psalm.
So it starts off sort of almost impersonal, third person, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
But then later on it's about thou.
Suddenly one is addressing, well the speaker of the psalm, presumably David, suddenly addresses God by that intimate word thou.
And it becomes suddenly very, very personal.
This happens quite a lot in the Psalms.
Do you know anything about why that is?
I think it's possibly a poetic device.
I mean, I'm a New Testament guy, obviously, so there may be some Old Testament guys out there listening and, you know, shouting at their screens, but I think it's more of a poetic, literary device in order to draw you into the drama of the moment.
But I think you do make a good point there, James, about the You know, the progression, because there is that progression there.
There's that kind of third person, the Lord is my shepherd.
You have the sheep out in the field or out in the plains looking for pasture.
But then it seems to progress through along the right path and into the dark valley of the shadow of death.
And then it ends up with the David himself sitting in the House of the Lord having a feast.
He's gone on this pilgrimage.
It seems to map out and rhyme with our experience.
Life is often out in the wilderness.
And the only way that we are going to reach refreshment, the only way that we are going to reach that state of restoration of the soul, as the texts talk about, is through the valley of the shadow of death.
And the other side of that will be sitting in the presence of the King.
But the glory of the psalm is that through all these stations of our lives, thou art with me, you said it there, that intimacy there, that's actually the centre, the literary crux of the psalm because in the Hebrew there's 26 lines above thou art with me and there's 26 lines below it and so often
The authors use these literary devices to cause you to focus on a certain verse, and the whole message of the psalm here is, Thou art with me, and all the changing scenes of life, and whatever I'm experiencing, God's covenant presence is fatherly care, it is with me.
So we might want to talk a bit more about that in detail later on, but just as an overview, I'm so glad that you're familiar with the Hebrew.
Were the original Psalms, the original language was Hebrew, yeah?
Yeah, it was written in Hebrew, yeah.
Most of the Old Testament was Hebrew, apart from parts of Daniel which were written in Aramaic.
But yeah, most of it was Hebrew.
And Hebrew dating from different centuries, so there's a... That's why it's so difficult to read the Biblical Hebrew, because you read parts of the narrative, you could read through I'm presuming the answer is yes.
Genesis through to Deuteronomy and you think you've cracked it.
But then you come to the Psalms, which is written in a different style and probably in a different era too.
It can be the difference between Elizabethan English and modern Cockney, if you like.
You can run into real difficulties and feel completely de-skilled again.
I'm presuming the answer is yes.
Is there a dimension in the Hebrew version which is missing from the translation?
The translation I used there was the King James Version, which we know was done by a committee.
Published in what, was it 1611, I think?
1611, yeah.
1611.
There are other versions.
I mean, the Book of Common Prayer, which is still just clinging on by its fingernails as the Church of England's... I've got that here.
For a Scot, I shouldn't have one, but I do.
It's very... I love it.
I mean, I actually prefer, when I started learning the Psalms, I just assumed that the King James Version would be the best, because I'd heard of the King James Version, it was old and sonorous and stuff, but actually Generally, I prefer the, well, they're about a hundred years earlier, the translation by Coverdale, Miles Coverdale, who translated all Psalms.
His translations are used in the Book of Common Prayer.
And a lot of his translations, the KJV translators borrowed heavily from Coverdale.
But there's not much in it.
I mean, I like the version I've quoted.
The Count James is excellent because I'm still probably beginning slash intermediate level in Hebrew and if I ever come across a tricky passage, I don't understand the word order in the Hebrew, I'm thinking what is that trying to say?
I'll look at a variety of translations to help me.
Nine times out of ten, the King James Version will have not only managed to preserve the word order in an amazing way, and make sense of the word order in English, but also do it with a poetic and literary flair.
It is utterly remarkable as an achievement.
When you're reading it, actually, you can I'd be quite assured that it is mirroring the structure of the underlying language pretty closely, I would say.
So, yeah, it is pretty outstanding, the mapping.
The longer I've been trying to read through these original languages, the more impressed I've become with the authorised, or the King James Version, as it's more commonly known.
But you see, you've just introduced me to a dimension that I wasn't familiar with, that thou art with me is the center of the psalm.
And it's surrounded by that really chilling moment.
I mean, I think most people who've even a passing familiarity with the scriptures will be aware of that concept of the valley of the shadow of death.
In the period before I became really interested in the Psalms, I got little hints of their significance.
Thou art with me.
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
And in the period before I became really interested in the Psalms, I got little hints of their significance.
Just a brief bit of autobiography.
I went to a traditional English prep school where we went to chapel seven days a week and twice on Sundays.
We would sing hymns but there would always be a psalm as well.
And as a nine-year-old boy, I really could not see the point at all of these dirgey, I mean they were like dirges, they didn't have jaunty tunes like the hymns and they had this old language which didn't make much sense to me as a child.
But of course later on in life, You realise that these words have been imprinted on you, so that even now when I say some of the psalms in my head, for example, the God is our hope and strength, Psalm 46, I remember how it was sung.
Because, after all, psalms are designed to be sung, aren't they?
Yeah, they are meant to be sung.
That's one of the things the Presbyterians do quite well, and they've managed to Put the psalms to metre and sing through them.
So the denomination I was a part of, they would sing through at least two psalms for every service.
Some congregations sang psalms exclusively rather than any of the modern worship songs.
I do think you miss a lot if you're not singing the psalms regularly.
It's what you had Doug Wilson on recently, and he was talking about that.
The Psalms are just replete with the warfare motif, and there's virtually zero modern hymns that have that trope.
They tend to be about having a smashing time with Jesus.
Yeah, isn't Jesus great?
Jesus is my boyfriend, and it's all this stuff.
The problem is, I think that we don't have Psalms about warfare, because the people that write songs about warfare, because modern hymn writers haven't suffered.
Thank you.
You know, so David was able to write his Psalms because he was a great man that had suffered greatly.
And it's only if you have to become a great man, you know, you suffer greatly.
We saw that he'd been pursued by Saul.
through the wilderness.
He was hiding in caves.
His own son turned against him, turned the whole country in a military coup against him, and he was again on the run.
So David had a few hard times of which to write, and a lot of these psalms are forged in the times of David's most extreme suffering.
Yes.
What do you like, James?
No, this is...
I worry, well, I think it's inevitable, that we are heading towards times as dark as any that human beings have lived through.
And I think increasingly the message of the Psalms is going to be More and more relevant to us.
I mean, we know that in times of, well, we've mentioned martyrdom, but also in times of war, for example, during the Civil War, I know that the parliamentarians certainly sang the Psalms, and I expect the ruralist forces did too, because they were much more God-fearing, but you can just imagine, you'd need the solace of the Psalms.
As you were marching towards death or dismemberment.
Absolutely.
And I think that's what's particularly powerful about this, Sam.
I mean, if we look at the flow of it, if you may be talking through the first couple of verses.
Yeah.
You know, so David has started it off quite in a remarkable way.
He said, the Lord is my shepherd.
Now, David at the time of this writing, he's the king of Israel.
He's probably the superpower in the Middle East.
He was a badass.
His armies had crushed the Philistines.
He had a harem of wives.
He was at the peak of his powers.
And often military rulers or gods in the ancient Near Eastern context were called shepherds of their people.
And you'd have images depicting the gods holding a rod and a staff, or a mattock and a crook.
These were the symbols of royal office.
So you've got David, the most powerful man in the known world at the time, and he's saying, before the presence of the Lord, I am just this sheep.
I am this vulnerable creature who needs brought to safe pasture, who's prone to straying.
Isaiah 53, verse 6, it talks about sheep as animals that are prone to strain.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray.
We've turned to his own way.
The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
So sheep are prone to strain.
And David is basically confessing, I've got all this power, I've got all this regal authority, I've got this massive army.
But before the presence of the Lord, I'm nothing.
I'm just like this vulnerable sheep, who's hungry, who's thirsty, who needs his soul refreshed.
All I can offer God, for all my military pop, all I can offer Him is my dependence and my neediness.
And that's the first thing that the Psalm is teaching us.
We don't offer God our achievements.
He's not impressed by them.
There's no such thing as being too good for God and there's no such thing as being too bad for Him either.
The Psalm is saying God wants our dependence and that's the beginning of the shepherd-sheep relationship.
But David is talking here about what does a sheep do?
The sheep looks for green pastures.
The sheep needs the quiet waters.
The sheep needs refreshment because back in those days, you know, it was very seasonal weather and the shepherd would often have to take the sheep out into the wilderness to find pasture.
He would be searching around in these kind of places for green pasture and for water.
And this would leave them exposed because they're out in an open area.
So they don't just need provision, but they need protection.
And David's confessing that, for all my riches and for all my military authority, I still trust in the Lord ultimately for my provision and my protection.
Without him, I lack everything.
But with him, I lack nothing.
And I think something that, as you talked about the original languages, you see things in the original text.
That you wouldn't get in English.
And I think one of the features of verse 2 and 3 is that when he says, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures.
These are imperfect verbs in the Hebrew.
Now, an imperfect verb could express frequent behaviour or habit.
So, for instance, verse 2 could be saying, the Lord's my shepherd.
He often makes me lie down in green pastures.
You know, he regularly leads me beside the quiet waters.
So there could be that notion of Regularity, I think that does train with our experience.
Often we feel dry, we feel washed out, we feel that life is having its way with us and all of a sudden God brings something into our life that jeezes up, that refreshes us.
But instead of a habitual reading, it could also mean a future reference.
So, the sheep here could be saying, he will make me lie down in green pastures, and he will lead me beside the quiet waters, and he will restore my soul.
The picture here could be the sheep is starving, the sheep is thirsty, and the sheep is exhausted, but he's still trusting in the shepherd.
You know, so he's following this shepherd.
The shepherd hasn't come up with the goods.
Life's a trap at the moment, you know, but he's saying, the Lord is my shepherd and I'll lack nothing.
And I think this is important for us, James, because often as Christians or followers of God, we feel that when things go wrong in our lives, you know, let's say, You know, you try to follow God and your finances go to pot.
You know, your skin.
I mean, you launched out pretty much in faith after you went down the rabbit hole.
And it was a costly thing for you, you know?
And it can be tempting to think, when I follow God and things go wrong, that I'm doing something wrong.
You know, I'm not doing this Christian thing right because it says, oh, you know, I thought you had an abundant life if you were a Christian or whatever.
But David's saying here, the Lord is my shepherd and in this life I'm starving and I'm thirsty and I'm exhausted but I trust in him that for the future he's going to provide for and meet all of these needs.
I think as you go to the book of Revelation that future sense is brought out in Revelation 7 where you know there's a vision of the throne room of heaven and Jesus is standing there And he's described as the lamb, the sacrificial lamb who was slain for our sins.
And it says, the lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd and he will lead them beside the flowing waters.
And so the writer of Revelation has obviously read into the future tenses of these verbs and said, oh, this is something that Jesus is going to do for us in the new Jerusalem and the new heavens and the new earth.
He's going to provide for us, for our wants, our needs.
He's going to refresh us at that point.
So I think, sorry for that extended monologue, James, but I think it's, you know, we're talking about life can be arid and difficult and then you look for a solution and then the next place is, you know, you're in the middle of a dark valley in verse 4.
So the psalm should disabuse us of any notion that following God is a life of, you know, Let's say poops and giggles, just to keep it parentally friendly.
It's going to be hard.
And if it's hard, it's not because you're doing it wrong.
It's probably because you're authentically following after the shepherds.
And I think that's an encouragement.
Just because your marriage isn't going well, just because your skin Just because you're struggling with anxiety, mental health issues, etc, does that mean that you're doing it wrong if you take your eye off the bubble?
Well, not necessarily.
That sense of dissatisfaction and spiritual thirst and hunger and exhaustion, it can be an authentic mark of somebody who's following their shepherd.
Yes.
No, thank you for that.
You shouldn't apologize for your for your extended monologue.
That was exactly exactly what I was.
I was hoping for just on that the pastoral theme.
I think particularly for a an English audience, but I mean, yes, I've got a British audience really the wool trade.
has been very important to our national prosperity.
I live surrounded by sheep, and I love eating.
I love the fat of the lamb.
Me too.
Americans don't seem to eat as much lamb as we do, but in this country, England, it's key.
And I think that I'm an English Literature graduate.
And there's a very strong theme in English literature, the pastoral we think about.
It evokes calm and beauty and a sort of prelapsarian state of bliss.
I think that may be part of the appeal of that psalm for later generations.
Sometimes I think it gets a bit twee and ploying.
I don't know whether you're familiar with the version of Of Psalm 23, which is sung to a tune called Crimmond.
Yeah.
And I find it warbly and rather ghastly.
Yeah.
Just saccharine.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, singing Metallica lyrics to a Girls Aloud tune.
You know, it's that type of thing, the two things.
You tend to clash a wee bit and you miss out on something of the gravitas and the ancestral richness that the words should evoke.
The tune should get in the way of the lyrics, basically, should it?
You've nailed it.
I mean, it is getting close to Jesus Is My Girlfriend kind of Christianity, which I think did infect quite a lot of late 19th century and certainly 20th century Christian songwriting.
I mean, I think the devil has the best tunes, they say, but I think he also wrote some of the worst tunes for the church between 1880 and No, absolutely.
There's a trapping video out by Lutheran Sartang where it's a cartoon of Cliff, not Cliff, which is the Clint Eastwood reading modern Christian hymn lyrics and it's hilarious, you know, he said these These hymn lyrics sound like my daughter married her Barbie to her care bear and wrote the wedding vows.
That's what a lot of the lyrics sound like.
You know, in a place like Govan, if you're going to ask these battle-hardened men to start singing about You know, how beautiful Jesus is and what a great boyfriend he'll be.
You're not really going to sell that.
It's not just Hardman, it's just regular men.
They don't want to sing homoerotic songs to God.
It seems to go against the grain.
But yeah, I mean, I have been looking at the SAM itself as well, you know, the The content there.
You're talking about how difficult times could be ahead of us.
With all your guests listening through it, there can be a temptation, I think, to hear about the cabal or the regime And, you know, Klaus Schwab and all these guys, and there can be a temptation to despair.
I know I've felt that temptation myself.
But the Psalms tell us, you know, fret not yourself when the evil man prospers, or when his plans succeed.
The Psalms are there basically to say, right, okay, these guys may look as if they're in charge, but all of a sudden, They're going to be gone, like snow off a dike, and you're going to be looking around and asking, what was the problem the whole time?
You're talking about Psalm 37, aren't you?
Yeah.
I love that.
I'm looking forward to learning Psalm 37.
It's quite a longie, but there's that bit, isn't there, towards the end where it talks about, find it for me, go on.
Yeah, I'll find it for you.
I love that bit.
Yeah, let's see.
Okay, yeah.
So wait on the Lord and keep his way, and he shall exalt thee to inherit the land.
Thank you.
When the wicked are cut off, thou shalt see it.
I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.
Yet he passed away, and lo, he was not.
Yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.
Then it goes on to say, Mark the perfect man and behold the upright.
The end of that man is peace, but the transgressors shall be destroyed together.
The end of the wicked shall be cut off.
Yeah, it's the bay tree.
Yeah.
I love that.
I love that line.
It's beautiful, isn't it?
That's the thing about the Psalms.
There's this idea of the wicked being everywhere, the psalmist being surrounded.
But all of a sudden you move from that context into something completely different, where they're gone.
They've just all of a sudden disappeared.
And it can be a bit disorientating, you know, because the psalmist at one moment is going, oh I'm surrounded, God help me, and then the next moment he's like, yeah man, I'm in the house of the Lord, looking at the beauty of the Lord, it's all good.
Yeah, forever.
Yeah, forever.
So therefore I will not fear if an army besiege me.
And there's that idea of the fragility of the wicked man, even though they look like they're in the ascendancy, even though they appear to be winning.
That's the facade.
That's the illusion.
The wicked man being in control.
It's actually Sam too.
It's the son, the royal son, who sits on the throne.
Jesus himself, who laughs at the wicked.
So he's the one who's in control, and it says his wrath can flare up any moment.
The end of the record will happen in an instant, according to the Sam's.
We'll be looking around, we'll be saying, where's Klaus Schwab gone?
Remember that guy stroking his cat?
Or, what happened to the The Western political regime, they've gone.
What a glorious day that's going to be, James.
When there's no such thing as the Tory party left subverting politics.
We won't even need them.
We'll have a based monarchy, a theocracy.
You know, God wins.
He's already won.
So, you know, that's one of the glorious things about these, Sam, that instills that in us.
Because if we don't believe that God has already won and that God wins, you know, we should despair, you know?
Yeah, no, I'm totally with you.
If it were not... Yeah.
Sorry, my dog.
Nick, you're copying me!
Often my dog interrupts podcasts, and there's no shame in that!
I can only apologize!
So, it's interesting what you say there, because it's why I think that it is so important to learn the Psalms, so that they become part of your being.
I've heard it said that the Psalms are the Christian equivalent of spells.
They're like incantations.
They have a magical power, more powerful than magic.
And through repetition, especially if you speak them out loud, they go out into the ether and somehow change the nature of... they go out into the world and there is neither speech nor language but their word is heard among them.
FAM 19, yeah.
Nice.
Well done, well spotted.
Yeah, your memory about the psalms has been brilliant, man.
The more I do it, the more I love it.
Every day, when I go off to my runs, my morning run with the dog, I recite the psalms in my head.
And I'll tell you a story about that in a moment, which I know will strike a chord, because you're familiar with the podcast I'm about to cite.
But my first inkling that the psalms have power A few years ago, I did this series of interviews.
I was obsessed with World War II at the time, and I did a series of interviews with World War II veterans, a number of whom were still around at the time.
I mean, they're really quite old now.
And one of the chaps I befriended was this lovely man called David Heersey.
And he won a DFC flying, I think he flew certainly 30 missions, may even have been 50, flying Halifax bombers.
From a an airfield.
I think it may have been in in in Lincolnshire.
It was somewhere.
It was somewhere very bleak and and and flat and he told me the story about what it was like being a bomber pilot and it was really they used to call themselves bus drivers.
Because that's what they were doing.
They were simply flying on a course that was provided for them in that day's or night's briefing.
Well, they'd normally fly by night.
The Americans flew day missions.
The RAF tended to fly night missions.
And you'd be given the coordinates of where you were supposed to drop your bombs and the time that you had to deliver Your, your payload on, on target.
And beyond that, it was very much up to you as the, as, as the, as the captain of the pilots of the bomber, you could decide pretty much how you got there.
Uh, and, and what, what the rules were on your particular bomber.
And so, for example.
David would not allow drinking or smoking on his flights and a few other things he did.
For example, when he went over enemy territory, he would fly in a really erratic fashion.
So he would sort of be flying level and then suddenly he would he would he would drop like this and then drop again like that sort of like a single barrel rolling.
I forget the term anyway.
He said it was very unpleasant to be on a plane when you're doing this very unpleasant for his crew.
But he said the reason I did this is because if there's a German fighter looking for a target It's going to be much more attracted to a bomber, which is flying even then it is for one doing these crazy these crazy maneuvers and it must have worked because after all he lived to tell the tale.
He lived many years after and I said what?
It must have been terrifying.
How did you, how did you cope?
Because, I mean, it took a very long time to get from Lincolnshire or whatever to these targets in Germany, heavily guarded by AK-AK.
The worst thing that could happen to you would be being coned, which is where all the ACAC, all the anti-aircraft, pinpoints you and you get coned, which means you're at the point of the pyramid, as it were.
And that's what we've got.
There's no way out.
And, you know, you could hear the sort of the screams of your comrades as they came down.
He said that the fighter pilots had it relatively easy because they were fighting, particularly in the early stages of the war, they were defending british territory so if they got shot down in a dog fight they would parachute down into where if they were unlucky into the channel but if they were lucky into a into the green fields of kent
um if you're on a bombing raid the likelihood was when you got shot down you were probably quite likely going to be well he he said sort of spiked in the ass by a pitchfork but actually i think that was a euphemism for being lynched on my Lynched by angry mobs who were understandably furious at having had their homes torched and their Their families killed by by bombers.
So it was a very ugly unglamorous business.
I said, how did you get through it?
So there's a long long way to reach this.
He said, um the 23rd Psalm and when he told me that I thought well, of course that was a Christian generation, but actually with hindsight, I realize that it was more than that that I believe.
That the Second World War was not as it was sold to us.
What it really was was a blood sacrifice and and that one of the things it did was give a massive feast to the demons that that stalk the earth.
They feed on they feed on fear.
They feed on on on terror.
And what he was doing, little did he know it, was that he was, by reciting the 23rd Psalm, he was warding off the demons that were feeding on his terror and his crew's terror.
Yeah, I would agree with that James.
There's no It's little surprise because you see Jesus doing that himself and, you know, he's in the wilderness and Satan's there, whispering into his ear, I'll give you this if you bow down and worship me or why don't you turn the stones into bread?
And Jesus comes back, it is written, it is written, it is written, he speaks out the word of God to the devil and the devil flees from him in the end and, you know, angels are ministering to him.
And I think that similarly with the Psalms, these are God's word.
You speak out God's word.
God's word comes with force.
It has creative agency but it's also described as the sword of the spirit in Ephesians 6.
And that's explicitly in the context of spiritual war against the powers, the principalities.
Speaking out the word of God, it's a slicing weapon when dealing with an immaterial foe.
Yeah, there's very little in that that surprises me.
I think there's something powerful in speaking it out, rather than just, you know, meditating on the words in your head.
But I mean, even if you think about that, James, as you were speaking about, you know, the pilot there, in verse 4 I was looking at this, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
Now this is, you know, the psalm It's kind of gotten dark all of a sudden because he's, you know, the sheep is, you know, he's been, he's hungry, he's thirsty and he's exhausted.
And he's looking for restoration.
But he's going to walk along the righteous path.
So verse 3 says, you lead me along paths of righteousness for your name's sake, for your own honour.
So, you know, he's following his shepherd diligently and faithfully.
And where that's led him is the Dark Valley.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Following the shepherd has brought him into danger.
And you know that again I keep speaking about disabusing us of false notions about the Christian life.
Following the Lord is going to bring you into conflict.
You know you've signed up for service in the struggle against the unseen powers.
Now in the Old Testament when you read through the Psalms that the enemies of God are Our mortal enemies, you know, it's the Philistines, the Moabites, the Ammonites, you know, they all surrounded that little strip of Israel wanting to invade the country, knock down the temple and impose their own pagan religion upon the Israelite people.
But as we move to the New Testament, there's a change in register or note whereby the veil is lifted.
We're no longer trying to preserve a physical strip of land in Israel.
We're no longer fighting against these mortal foes.
We're seeing the hidden malevolent hand as we move to the New Testament.
And it's the powers, the principalities, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
So as we sing these Psalms, as we read through them, we are waging war against these unseen malevolent forces that are opposed to us.
And when we follow God, we are going to be brought into this cosmic conflict.
Which will often lead us into the Dark Valley, the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
And if you're facing a fearful situation just now, if you're in fear of your life, you might be tempted to ask, where's God in all this?
I remember Chief Wiggum when he arrests Flanders for drunk driving.
He's like, where's the Messiah now, Flanders?
You feel the world laughing at you.
Everything's going tits up.
And you're meant to be following God.
Well, the psalm writer's saying here, the shepherd doesn't just take you through dry places, it takes you to dangerous places.
And you need not fear, it says, because thou art with me, the center of the psalm.
God promises us himself.
That's the great glory of the message of the Bible, that we get brought into a communion as little, frail, sinful creatures.
With the immortal, the infinite, the eternal one, he cares for us.
And so it says here, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
He says, I'm not scared because the shepherd's got a rod and a staff.
Now, interestingly there, the rod, it's like a matic, it was a wee short weapon with a big club in the end.
And the shepherd, We'd use that as a weapon to fend off predators or thieves.
You could kill a bear with it.
David himself spoke about in 1 Samuel, I think it's chapter 17, he was giving a shepherd CV to Saul and he said, you know, I've been a shepherd my whole life.
He says, when a bear or a lion attacked the flock and took off one of my sheep, I would run after it and I would take the sheep out of its mouth.
And when it turned on me, I would grab it by the hair and strike it and kill it.
Now the weapon that he would use to kill bears and lions was the mattock, the rod.
And the shepherd had that, it's a little cosh type thing, he had that on him at all times.
He would, as the sheep were sleeping, he would be there kind of half dozing, holding this weapon, ready to strike anybody that comes near his people.
And so, sorry, come near the sheep.
And that's the disposition God has towards us.
He's like, he's waiting over us with his rod in his hand.
And the interesting thing is, the word for rod there, it's used in Psalm 2.9, where the sun will smash the nations with a rod of iron.
You know, he's sitting on the throne with his rod, the shepherd's rod, and he's looking at the enemies of his people, and he's just waiting for his time, when he uses that rod by which he protects us to smash the evil.
We should be filled with confidence.
We should be filled with confidence because our shepherd is strong and he's a violent shepherd who won't put up with this crap forever that we're facing.
He will use his power and his arm to bring about a definitive victory.
But I think this is what is the real comfort of this arm.
When you come to know God, you have this shepherd.
When you're asleep, he's waiting over you, jealously guarding you.
Ready to fend off evil?
I mean, who wouldn't want that?
Did you ever see the South Park episode with Jesus?
No, I've seen a couple of them.
Oh, it's fantastic.
The South Park Jesus is really cool.
And there's a great moment where he says, I'm packing and he opens his robes to reveal that he's got all these machine guns underneath.
And actually, as so often, South Park is completely on the money.
Because you and I know, That that part of the war on Christianity in the last while it's been it's been it's been ongoing since since the time of Christ But recently all the kind of the tough elements of Jesus have been removed.
We've been encouraged to forget the fact that he's also angry and vengeful and that God is a jealous, jealous God.
Because we're so keen to pretend that it's all about my feelings and nice and fluffy.
There's that other element I didn't know about.
What's the tool called?
A mattock, you say?
A mattock.
In Hebrew, it's a shevet.
It's the Hebrew word, shevet.
So he has, it's basically a shot weapon by which he will, you know, fend off the enemies of his people.
The line after that I love, where it goes, Thou preparest the table before me in the presence of one enemies, Thou anointest my head with oil, and my cup runneth over.
And I love the image of, in the presence of mine enemies, so there he is, he's surrounded, the enemy is plain in view.
He is being treated to this lavish feast.
It's almost like God is trolling the enemy.
He is trolling.
Sam 2 is laughing at them and Sam 23 is trolling them.
It's right what you say there, James, that Jesus has been I say this reverently, but there's an emasculated image of Jesus whereby we absolutise the record of the gospel.
So the one who suffered and died and bled on the cross.
But the problem with that is that while that is a significant note in the scriptural witness, Jesus did die for our sins.
It was necessary for him to lay down his life in order that we might be forgiven.
We forget the other side of things, that the cross, while he was crucified in weakness, it was also, I think Hugh Martin, the old Scottish preacher, called it, the cross was his chariot of glory, by which he rode through the heavens and subdued the powers and the principalities.
And there is this note of Jesus as conqueror, exalted king, ruling monarch, who crushes his enemies.
So, you know, Revelation chapter 14, You see, when Jesus returns, you know, he treads the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty, Jesus is coming back to do some business.
And, you know, it talks about the blood of his victims, you know, when Jesus comes back and, you know, wages war.
It says, you know, the blood rose to a horse's bridle for something like seven miles.
Right.
So Jesus is Jesus isn't just kicking ass, Jesus is murdering and slaughtering his enemies.
And, you know, we forget that Jesus is a scary Lord.
You know, I mean, we read the text like, you know, Matthew 11, 28, where Jesus has come to me, O ye that are weary and burdened and heavy laden, and I will give you rest, because I'm gentle and I'm lowly of heart.
So this gentle and lowly Jesus is a true picture of Jesus, but it's an incomplete one.
You know, if you can't handle Jesus at Revelation 14, you don't deserve him at Matthew 11, 28.
It's that type of thing.
You get the whole Christ.
It's like when they were speaking about Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia.
Is he safe?
No, he's never safe.
Also, is he tame?
No, he's not tame, but he's safe.
Following untamed Messiah, he's scary at points.
But that fearfulness he's going to bring to bear for the vindication of his people, that's what I love about that.
Kiss the son, lest ye be angry, and so ye perish from the right way.
If his wrath be kindled, yea, but a little, blessed are all they that put their trust in him.
That's not a pussy Jesus.
I think it's so prominent, particularly in the Old Testament, and it's so prominent in the Old, this exalted, ruling, strong monarch.
That's why the disciples of Jesus couldn't get their heads around the fact that he had to die.
But you're the Messiah.
You're here to kick out the Romans.
You're here to put Emperor Schwab or whatever he is in a headlock and cause us to reign.
But Jesus says no, the path to conquering is the path of suffering.
This is a Christian theme.
Martin Luther was pretty strong on it.
The path to glory always comes via the cross.
I think you see that here in the psalm.
You know, David doesn't get to sit in the house of the Lord and have a nice slap-up meal with Him without going through the dark valley first.
It's similar for us, you know, that the path to glory is the way of the cross, it's the way of suffering.
It's quite interesting, I think, in Mark chapter 10 when Jesus to disciples James and John, they get their mum to stick in a word for them with the boss and they said, you know, The mum, a middle class aspirational woman, goes up to Jesus and says, let my son sit beside you, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.
And Jesus says, you haven't got a clue what you're asking.
This isn't for me to give anyway, it's for my father, etc.
But to sit on my right and on my left, that's not for me to grant.
But it involves a way of suffering.
He says, can you drink the cup I'm going to drink?
Well, interestingly, at the end of the Gospel, end of Mark, we do see somebody at the right hand and another person at the left hand of Jesus.
It's the two insurrectionists, the two thieves, if you like, crucified either side of them.
You know, so Jesus is saying, if you want to reign at my right hand and at my left hand, you have to let me suffer at my right and my left hand first.
And the Psalms reminding us of that.
We walk through the valley of the shadow of death on our way to the house of the Lord to that slap up meal.
So it's not going to be a bed of roses, and the payoff is always future for us.
It's not like crypto investment.
I've invested in a few things, and you always get some YouTube influencer saying, oh, next bull run, it's going to kick off.
It's going to blow off top.
It's going to be great.
To the moon?
Yeah, it's going to moon.
The moon boys, B-O-I.
Well, everyone I touch seems to turn to crap and miss their bull runs.
But this isn't selling you a crypto scam.
This is saying, there is a future.
There is a future bill run.
There is a future blow off top.
It's going to involve you sitting in the house of the Lord with a head anointed with oil and your cup running over.
Basically, you're part of the household of God.
You've been invited into his family.
That, I think, is what the image is getting across.
Interestingly, James, in verse 6, some writer says, goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.
We know from other passages in scripture that the shepherd follows the sheep.
He doesn't walk ahead of them.
No, the sheep go ahead of the shepherd.
And it looks like the sheep are calling the shots and that the shepherd is just, you know, basically doing kind of retrospective damage control.
It says that in 1 Samuel, I think it's chapter 7, where God speaks to David.
Verse 8 says, I took you from following the sheep.
You know, that was the kind of metaphor for being a shepherd.
You know, a guy who just walks after a bunch of stupid sheep.
So there's this image that the shepherd is behind us.
We seem to be running out of control, but he's in control the whole way, actually.
And actually behind us, goodness and mercy are following us.
In the original Hebrew, again, the word for follow means to pursue.
It's used when an enemy is in battle and he's hunting down his foe.
He's basically saying, the Lord's loving kindness and his mercy, that is going to hunt you down.
It's not going to miss you.
You know, you might feel that your life is taking a wrong turn.
You might feel it's chaotic.
David said, don't worry, man.
Goodness and mercy are hunting you down if you belong to the shepherd.
He's always behind you and he's always going to overtake you with it.
For me, that's a great comfort.
That's interesting.
It's the exact opposite of the Eumenides, the Furies, the Kindly Ones that pursue the... in Greek myth... I don't know about that.
So there were the Furies which chase you and tear you to pieces when they catch up with you as your kind of punishment for your sins.
And they're called the Eumenides, which means the kindly ones.
It's a kind of euphemism to try and buy them off with a nice friendly word, even though they are the Furies.
But here you've got the Anti-Furies, these goodness and mercy, which are kind of chasing you remorselessly because that's the inevitable deal of trusting in the Lord.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think it's really encouraging, isn't it?
Because, I mean, we're going to make a lot of mistakes in our Christian life.
We're going to screw up.
We're going to let God down with our own sins.
But also we're going to make some unwise choices as well.
And it's good to know that That, you know, that withstanding, our incompetence notwithstanding, it's God's goodness and mercy that triumph in the end.
It's quite interesting in verse 3, you know, the paths of righteousness.
Some texts say the right paths and I think some people interpret that to mean that God will lead me to right decisions all the time.
He'll help me to You know, help me not to make a blunder and career choice or marriage partner choice or whatever.
The text isn't saying that.
It's saying paths of righteousness, paths of right living, paths of living in conformity to God's covenant demands.
Because that's a theme throughout the Psalms, you know, that the life of faith and trust in the Sovereign Lord is like a journey, you know, so from birth to death.
You're on a path.
You're either on the way of the righteous, Psalm 1, or you're on the pathway of the wicked, which leads to destruction.
Language that Jesus himself takes up.
And so the Psalms are basically saying if you want to be safe in glory, you need to walk the path of righteousness.
And this could cause a lot of fear, because I think for Protestants to think, well, does that, is that works righteousness?
You know, am I earning my way to heaven by being a good boy or girl?
But that's not what the text is talking about.
Often, particularly Puritan ministers, they would say that when you believe in God or believe in Christ, God gives you the right to eternal life.
So it's like a deed.
He says here, you have the right to eternal life.
But you have to go about cashing that deed.
You have to go and do something with it.
So the attainment of life is gotten through walking the path of righteousness and walking in the path of holiness.
So the right to life is given to us when we trust in Christ.
But the possession of eternal life is gotten through walking the path of righteousness and holiness.
And I think language like that can be quite discouraging because we can think, well, my life's a bit of a shambles.
You know, I still struggle as a Christian.
I, you know, too many sins to count.
How am I going to walk the path of righteousness to glory?
And David is saying here that it doesn't depend on you.
He's going to lead you on the righteous path.
He is going to school you in godly living for his name's sake.
His reputation depends on it.
So that fear of, could I ever live that Christian life?
Or could I keep it up?
It's not a biblical fear.
It's saying when you are looking at the shepherd and when you're trusting in the shepherd, leave the results with him.
It's all up to him.
You might screw up regularly, but he'll help you live and walk a righteous path in the midst of your terrible decision-making, let's just say.
I find that encouraging too.
I can be a bit of a clown sometimes.
My wife knows that as well.
The last thing she said to me before the episode was, don't say anything stupid.
Don't slag anyone off.
Don't slag any other denomination.
You know, don't say anything that basically will make you unemployable in the future." And I was thinking to myself, "Yeah." And she said, "Because I've listened to Dellen Poulk," she said as well, "and he's just as bad as you." She was saying to me, so I'm like, "Okay, the two of you, well, it could be a dangerous combination." So I think, so far, we've managed to keep it fully...
We've been very good, Nick.
I think so.
I think the Shepherd will be pleased with our restraint.
I think so.
Before we go, we've got to talk about the Jerry Marzynski podcast, or the two of them, because I mentioned my early sort of brush with the power of the psalm with David Heersey, the RF bomber pilot, but then More recently I did a podcast, two podcasts, with Jerry Marzynski.
And it's been one of my most popular podcasts.
It's resonated with a lot of people.
I mean, to give them credit, I discovered him on the Sheep Farm podcast first.
They got there first.
But anyway, Jerry Malzinski, as you know, is an Arizona psychotherapist, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, who had great success working in US prisons and high security mental hospitals.
Treating the people who'd been classified as paranoid schizophrenics the kind of people who hear voices in their heads and I mean people who haven't heard the podcast should listen to them but Jerry Intuited that these these voices which conventional medical wisdom has it are kind of auditory hallucinations.
They just invented by deranged people are in fact, not not hallucinations at all.
They're real and that they are manifest.
They are demonic entities.
And Marzinski discovered that the most effective of all the methods were certainly for patients from a kind of Christian background.
was if they recited the 23rd Psalm.
The 23rd Psalm literally warded off the demons.
Now, I think that was quite an eye-opener for a lot of listeners.
It certainly was for me.
But you were saying to me that in your experience in Glasgow, you'd witnessed this kind of thing yourself.
Yeah.
I have, yes.
You know, you see particularly in areas where there's large drug-taking cultures.
I think that you alluded to there, James, the kind of scientism of a lot of people.
They would say, oh, these voices are auditory hallucinations, etc.
And they suspect that because they're auditory hallucinations, they cannot also at the same time be something else.
See, I'm of the opinion that you can have both a medical and a spiritual explanation for something They don't have to be mutually exclusive categories.
And so, when somebody takes drugs, you might say, well, some kind of chemical, biological process is occurring in the brain and that's why they're seeing various things or conversing with various entities.
But they assume that because that is the case, because there is a scientific side to it, that the spiritual side is an illusion.
But I'm saying that that scientific experiment, that scientific process is actually the gateway into another dimension.
And so, I had one of my friends in the church, he said that a couple of times when he was on heroin, He saw the devil and spoke to him face to face.
And people would say to him, well that was just you having a bad experience of the smack.
But he was like, no, it was more than that.
There was something visceral about it.
So I do believe that drugs can be a gateway to the supernatural.
I mean, in Greek, the Greek for sorcery is pharmacos.
It seems to allude to the fact that back in the ancient times, people would take certain substances to encounter the spiritual world.
I found that when we were ministering in contexts like that, you would often encounter something very dark with people who were using it.
I think also it explains The pool and the slavery of addiction, in a way, because it's not just a chemical, biological process that's going on in somebody's mind.
There's a spiritual slavery going on there.
So, yeah, a lot of the time, I think people who are trying to recover from addiction need some form of exorcism and some form of renouncing of the devil and all his works.
In terms of Sam's, I have a friend who was called to exercise a house and there had been stuff going on in the house.
The kids, particularly the children of this family, there was a lot of all of a sudden really quite rebellious behaviour, terrible language coming out of their mouths.
And, you know, the parents are like, what's happening?
Why?
The kids have just changed overnight.
I mean, there's something demonic and dark about it.
So they asked this minister, Logan.
My friend went up to the house and he walked around the rooms praying the Psalms, you know, being the 23rd Psalm, whatever else.
And he says he came into a certain room and as he was reading the Psalm, his attention became arrested on an object on, I think it was a mantelpiece.
And he said, what's that?
Householder said, well, I bought that on my travels.
I think it had come from Africa or something.
He was like, get that out of your house.
And he believed that the reading of the Psalms had kind of led him to this object.
And so they got rid of the object, they smashed it up and threw it away.
Overnight, the children went back to normal.
No more rebellious behaviour, no more filthy talk coming from them.
It was like the next day and they were on the phone to the minister saying this is incredible but at the same time the minister went on their worst and darkest depression of his life.
He was off work for months after that and he thinks that some kind of transaction had happened and the The spiritual realm whereby what was in the house had fastened on him for an extended period and it took him a long time to divest himself of that darkness which hung over him.
And for him it was a text of scripture.
He turned on the radio one day I happened to have a broadcast from a church service and as the minister wrote from this passage, I can't remember what it was, it was coming through the radio, my friend said, suddenly the dark was lifted from him on the hearing of a verse of scripture.
And he went back to work the next day.
So, I mean, absolutely bizarre stuff, terrifying stuff.
But I think, James, that the important thing to remember is that Spiritual conflict can be scary.
Peter says in 1 Peter 5.18, your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.
So be sober and be vigilant.
It's important that we don't give way to fear.
Interestingly, Peter doesn't say there's this malevolent spiritual entity prowling around like a roaring lion.
So be afraid.
Be very afraid.
He says be sober and be vigilant.
He says the same in the Psalms.
I'm walking through the valley of the shadow of death but I'm not scared.
Over and again the command is don't give way to fear, fear not.
And it's important to bring that on because we are people who are prone to fear.
Our sinful natures make us susceptible to giving way to anxiety.
I think we need to also qualify that by noting that when the Bible tells us do not fear or fear not or be courageous It's not commanding you to just magically turn off the pounding heart or the churning stomach or the shaking limbs or the sweaty hands.
It says, even though you're feeling sensations of fear, don't let these sensations determine how you act.
Don't act on fear.
Don't make a decision on the basis of fear.
And this is difficult for us because fear is kind of hardwired into us for good reasons.
You know, we fear putting our hand in the fire.
Or, you know, we fear getting bollock naked and walking down the street because we know what the consequences are going to be.
You know, fear can be a help to us in many situations.
But in the spiritual conflict, fear is our enemy and we mustn't listen to its directives.
There's an interesting passage, 1 Corinthians 2, where the Apostle Paul says, I came to you in weakness and in fear and with much trembling to preach the gospel in Corinth.
And I think what's notable there is, there's the Apostle, you know, the godliest man that ever lived after Christ, you know, that wrote most of the New Testament.
And he says, I was terrified, I was shaking, I was trembling that I was so, you know, I was so afraid.
But that didn't determine what he would or wouldn't do.
He says, I came to you in weakness and fear.
He says, I had weakness and fear, but I still came, you know.
And I think that, The fear knots are there to remind us that though you have these sensations, though your stomach's churning, your knees are knocking, and you feel almost sick with anxiety, it's saying don't listen to that.
I'll give you a wee story that I heard on this, James, if you don't mind.
Again, extended monologue here, but this was told to me by Norrie McCowell, Minister, and it's a good one.
It's about fear and how we react.
There's a story about lions.
So when an elderly male lion gets too old to, you know, fight and protect the pride and whatnot, he needs to make himself useful in some kind of a way.
You know, the lionesses won't tolerate, you know, passengers.
I know how he fails.
Aye, I was thinking that myself.
As I was speaking I felt, yeah, this decrepit lion who's of no use.
So basically what the elderly lion does is he lies on, you know, There's a particular place in the African Plain where he roars in the direction of the tree.
He roars at the wildebeest.
The wildebeest hear this roaring noise coming at them from this direction, and their flight response kicks in.
Their instinct tells them to run in the opposite direction, so that's what they do.
The roar is coming from there, so I'm going to go there.
So they run in the opposite direction, but as they run in the opposite direction, they encounter an ambush of hungry lionesses who tear them limb from limb and have a good old feast and then bring some of the spoils back to the decrepit old lion that they can't hunt.
The moral of this story is that had the wildebeest run towards the roar, they would have been safe.
Because that lion was too old to get up and chase after them.
It was too weak.
It was riddled with arthritis.
If they'd run towards the roar, they would have been safe.
And I think often Satan roars at us because he wants us to go in the opposite direction.
He wants us to run away from the thing that is causing us the greatest anxiety.
You know, the thing that we're thinking maybe I have a risky venture of serving God in a certain way or doing a certain thing or having an encounter with a certain individual or whatever.
Satan roars at you to run in the opposite direction.
But when he does that, actually that is his backhanded way.
That's God's providential way of saying you need to go in that direction.
You need to run towards the roar.
Because he's a toothless old lion.
All he can do is roar.
He's been defenestrated by Christ.
You know, he's riddled with arthritis now.
He serves the interests of the Son and the Throne.
So when he roars in a particular direction and he tells you to go the opposite way, you run right towards that.
And though it might be terrifying, you'll never be truly in danger at the heart of God's will.
So that was a... That's helped me.
Nick I am so so glad because I know you you were reluctant about doing this this podcast because you thought where you know what I've never done this before and like you were absolutely brilliant.
Oh, thank you James.
It's a really I hope the sound works because it would be a disaster if you were and actually by the way, not untypical of I do find that Dark forces do tend to sabotage my podcast, particularly when they are to do with the demonic or to do with Christianity.
It's just that they don't like this stuff getting out.
But I really appreciate your knowledge and experience and thank you for, if it hadn't been for you Nick, This Psalm 23 podcast would have been, you know, on the back burner forever because I needed somebody to help me give birth to my psalm series and you've done it!
Thank you!
It's an honour to be here at the inception of your psalm series but I also want to say to you James, just by way of encouragement, I believe God's hand is on you in a powerful way and all of these things that you experience, especially Your episodes on Christianity, which seem to be fraught with sound difficulties, technical problems.
Man, you've stirred up a hornet's nest in the spirit realm, I think, and I feel that guys like you, you shame the religious establishment.
As somebody from the religious establishment, I'm looking at God doing a new thing, where he's using certain individuals You know, from outside the traditional boundaries, to get his word out there.
I mean, you're bolder about Jesus than a lot of ministers I know.
And it's the same with Alistair Williams, you know, a comedian.
Yeah, Alistair is something else.
He is unbelievable.
His boldness, he's not refined, he's not had theological training, he's not been through seminary.
He's getting the word of Christ out there amongst dissident communities, if you like, in a way that the church never could.
Nick Dixon as well now.
So it's really exciting to see, and it's humbling, that God is saying, right, all you guys that have had training, I'm not going to use you.
I'm going to use this journalist guy who burned all his bridges.
I'm going to use this comedian guy who gets banned from everywhere because you lot are useless.
The regular man can't relate to you.
So I just encourage you, man, to keep going.
Well, thank you.
The way I feel is that it's a privilege to have been, because I just find this stuff really, really interesting and exciting.
And if I didn't, I wouldn't be doing it.
I've got a very low attention, very short attention span.
Ah, me too.
I find this stuff certainly at least as interesting as when I used to study English literature and stuff.
I mean the Bible Christianity is just an enormous rabbit hole and I'm just I'm just frolicking around like a happy bunny discovering all these and trying to the intellectual side of things really appeals to me because I think that
There's a strain in Christianity which I don't like, which is the kind of what I call the trust-the-plan element, where people just sort of want to just let themselves go to Jesus and it will take care... It's a fideistic kind of, you know, it's bypassing the brain a lot of the time.
Yes!
Just, you know, They're scared of rational enquiry or honest questions.
And I think one of the important things is, James, and you do this, you embody this well, is you ask honest questions.
If you encounter something in Scripture that disturbs you, I've seen you doing this in the Telegram group, some people say this, you'll ask an honest question.
And some of our brothers and our sisters in Christ, They get upset by that.
To be fair on them, they have been subjected to years and years of subversives coming to them asking questions.
It can often be Satan's way.
That's the initial attempt, did God really say But it makes it incumbent upon us to discern the difference between a subversive bad actor and an honest questioner.
And I think we need to continue to ask honest questions because I think fear, if you bury your questions due to fear, you can end up with cognitive dissonance.
So I think you've modelled well asking questions.
That's funny.
You've now frozen.
Sorry, I lost you there James.
But we can end it there anyway because it's brilliant.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you.
Likewise, likewise.
Let's hope it records.
And thank you again, Nick Maguson.
I hope after you've done your doctorate, what are you planning on doing?
Well, I've got no idea.
I've had thoughts about either lecturing.
I've managed to get a part-time gig doing lecturing in Greek to First year students, New Testament students.
So there could be perhaps opportunities in that way or maybe going back into the past of it.
I don't know.
I've got no idea.
I'll tell you who does have an idea.
I've learned actually not to make too many plans now because they tend to go Not the way you'd hoped.
