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Jan. 28, 2025 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:36:39

Psalm 84: Jonny Woodrow

How beloved! James dives into Psalm 84 with Dr Jonny Woodrow, pastor of Christ Church Loughborough. Jonny is married with four children and is co-author of: Ascension: Humanity in the Presence of God↓ ↓ ↓ Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk x

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	Psalm 84. This is the Book of Common Prayer version by Miles Coverdale.
	O how amiable are thy dwellings, thou Lord of hosts!
	My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord.
	My heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.
	Yea, the sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young.
	Even thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.
	Blessed are they that dwell in thy house, for they will be always praising thee.
	Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee, in whose heart are thy ways, who, going through the veil of misery, use it for a well, and the pools are filled with water.
	They will go from strength to strength, and unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them in Zion.
	O Lord God of hosts, hear our prayer.
	Hearken, O God of Jacob.
	Behold, O God, our defender, and look upon the face of thine anointed.
	For one day in thy courts is better than a thousand.
	I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of ungodliness.
	For the Lord God is a light and defense.
	The Lord will give grace and worship, and no good thing shall he withhold from them that live a godly life.
	O Lord God of hosts, blessed is the man that putteth his trust in thee.
	Welcome to The Psalms with me, James Dellingpole, and my very good friend, Johnny Woodrow.
	I can't remember how my Psalms intro goes anymore, so if I fluffed it, tough.
	We're going to do Psalm 84 today.
	I hope you're in agreement with that one.
	Yeah, yeah, no, I am in agreement with that one.
	The reason, if you're watching this in Thailand or somewhere, The reason that Johnny and I addressed wrapped up warmth is because we both live in large old houses which we can't afford to eat.
	Yes, that's right.
	And we're not pensioners yet who've had our money taken away from us.
	We're never going to get a pension.
	Nobody's going to get a pension.
	Never.
	But we can console ourselves with the word of God.
	Can we not?
	That sounds very pious, yes.
	Tell us about yourself.
	You've done a psalm with me before.
	Which psalm did you do before?
	We did Psalm 22, the psalm of the cross.
	Oh, that's a big one.
	They don't get much bigger than Psalm 22, do they?
	No, no, no.
	I think we went for almost two hours on it.
	Yeah, well, it's like doing Everest, I'd say.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And yeah, it was a big one.
	It was a big one.
	I don't remember when we did.
	I think we did that early on in your Psalms series.
	Yeah, it was one of the first Psalms.
	Whereas this one, Psalm 84 is shorter.
	I mean, I love it.
	I love it to bits because it's got animals in it.
	Because I know you said it's got a sparrow in it.
	As you know, I like the Psalms with the animals in them.
	The lions do lack and suffer hunger.
	I like the psalms with lions in them.
	I like the ones with adder and dragons in them.
	That would be Psalm 91. There's some good animal psalms.
	And of course, Psalm 50 has got lots of wildlife in it.
	So we're doing the wildlife psalms a little bit.
	Although I think they ought to be recategorised and we ought to have the wildlife psalms because they're good.
	Do you know what?
	You could do a collection and some Christian publisher would bosh that out.
	They are so hungry for books.
	A guy called John Stott did a book on bird spotting and Bible verses.
	Okay.
	John Stott, famous preacher, teacher.
	There's a market for it.
	If you did James' wildlife trip through the Psalms, somebody...
	How many would it sell?
	Well, I know.
	I think that if you're in the bestseller category in a Christian book, if you're into sort of 30,000 sales, 30,000...
	Ooh!
	Ooh!
	No, I'm thinking actually my book that I'm writing, White Pilled.
	I don't know.
	Is it going to sell 30,000?
	I don't think so, but...
	Well, it's got the intersection between conspiracy theory and Christianity, you see.
	Is that quite niche or is that actually quite broad?
	I think that's got more appeal than people realise, actually.
	When I did the Psalm 22 podcast with you, I had Christians I had no idea knew listen to you.
	Oh, you listen to Tillingpole, do you?
	So, I think that will go very well under tables and, you know, wherever they sell contraband stuff.
	That's good.
	Now, in a moment, I'm going to ask you to put Psalm 64 in context.
	Was it one of David's psalms?
	No, it's...
	Well, I mean, sometimes you get the printed inscription on top.
	It's a psalm of the sons of Korah.
	It comes several hundred years after David.
	Who were the sons of Korah?
	Well...
	We don't know hugely.
	They are mentioned in, I forget where it is now, but in a list of folks involved with music.
	And like a lot of the inscriptions you get above the Psalms, they're there in the original.
	They give you sometimes some clues, but cracking who the Sons of Korah are is not going to crack open Psalm 84. They're probably a dynasty of musicians and Psalm writers.
	There's a band called Sons of Korra.
	Is there?
	Have you heard them?
	Yeah, yeah.
	They're very good.
	I think actually they do do arrangements of psalms, I think.
	They'd be missing a trick if they didn't.
	It would be.
	But it's a good psalm, isn't it?
	Yes, it is.
	And one of the reasons...
	You wanted to do it because, you know, the animals, and my suggestion was to drop into book three of the Psalms because at church this week I've got to start working up an introduction to...
	The third book of the Psalms.
	And Psalm 84 is quite an interesting one to go in.
	Because you know the Psalms are organised into five books.
	And they are kind of thematically organised.
	So I've got to be looking at this section of Psalms.
	So you kind of catch me at a time when I've got my head into it a little bit.
	Not hugely.
	So actually this discussion is preparatory for some of the stuff I'm going to be doing later on.
	Heaven sent.
	Yes, and it also avoids that, you know that where you give the pastor feed lines, where then he gives you three of the points from his pre-prepared sermon, which doesn't really go down very well as a sort of discussional thing, does it?
	So I don't have anything prepared other than a collection of thoughts that are currently in my head.
	I don't know anything about the...
	The sections of the Psalms?
	What book three?
	What are the characteristics of book three?
	So you can tell me.
	Okay.
	Well, so there is a great book on this.
	I don't often recommend many modern commentaries because the older stuff is just better.
	But there's a great book.
	I've got it here in front of me.
	So this isn't from me.
	This is what I'm about to tell you isn't from me.
	It's from this guy, O. Palmer Robertson.
	It's called The Flow of the Psalms.
	And what he's done is he's gone through and he's got, at the back of his book, he's got some brilliant sort of diagrams and maps of how the book of the Psalms is organised.
	And his kind of idea is that you've got your shepherd boy up on the hill, who's not very literate, but he does know the greatest hits of the Israelites.
	And he's got like a concept album in his head.
	There are structural points in the Psalms that you kind of know.
	When we looked at Psalm 22, for instance, it's in the middle Psalm.
	It's got...
	Two or three either side, and it's a pinnacle psalm.
	It's like the crescendo point of a bigger point that's being made.
	And that just helps the shepherd boy, while he's out watching his flocks by night, sing his way through kind of the fortunes of Israel with the Davidic king, who is the king.
	Jesus is the son of David.
	The covenant God makes with David is central to the Psalms.
	That's why Psalm 1 and 2 start where they do.
	And so he sees the history of Israel kind of through singing the history of Israel and can find his way, like a little Bible within the Bible, through the lens of the Davidic covenant, really.
	So here's what O'Palmer Robinson says.
	He says, I'm just...
	He talks about...
	It can be categorised as confrontation.
	So what you've got is...
	This is Psalms 1 to...
	I'm just reading this out from here.
	So you've got...
	Why do the heathens so furiously rage together?
	And why do the people imagine a vain thing?
	You've got all the baddies trying to wage war on God.
	Yeah, and it's very much, book one is very much the Davidic king establishing his kingdom, but it's a struggle.
	So Psalm 2, which you've come to a lot, is this great triumphant, the Christ is installed and God laughs.
	And then Psalm 3 is a real anticlimax because David, who is the Christ of the Old Testament, is...
	He's really struggling.
	He's on the run all of a sudden.
	And when you get to the end of book one, you start to get the king established.
	The Christ established.
	Then book two is very much the God's people and God's king in communicating to the nations.
	So there's a lot less of the name Yahweh, Yod-Heh-Vah-Heh, the covenantal name of God, and much more the name Elohim, which is the general name for God.
	And so O'Palmer Robertson says book two is very much kind of communication with the nations.
	It's like the kingdom is kind of established.
	And now there's always this call to the nations to be reconciled to the God of Israel, Old Testament Israel, in Book 2. Book 3, though, he's labelled up devastation.
	So when we come to Psalm 84...
	Book 3, again, you can get this off Amazon, it's very helpful.
	It's organised into two blocks.
	You've got the Psalms of Asaph, which go from Psalm 73 to Psalm 83, and then you get the rest of the Psalms in Book 3, Psalm 84 through to 89, are the sons of Korah, and they strike a slightly different tone to the rest of the book.
	The rest of the book is all about the nations coming in and devastating Israel, carting off, destroying the northern kingdom.
	So it's post-Solomon.
	You know, David's the king, and then Solomon has the high point of the kingdom under Solomon.
	And then Solomon goes off after other gods, and eventually the kingdom is split.
	Well, Psalm, book three, really sings the songs of devastation of the kingdom.
	You've just answered a question that you didn't know, that's been in my head for some time, which is, I've now learned about 30-ish psalms, and none of them is between 70 and 84. Right, okay.
	And I was thinking, well, why is that?
	Is it that just they're a bit...
	That nothing stands out.
	But it sounds like, subconsciously, I've edited out the kind of depressing ones where everyone's being oppressed.
	That might be the case.
	I mean, there are...
	There's also...
	I was just reading through Palmer Robertson's summary of Book 3. There's lots of slightly complicated allusions to things.
	Like Psalm 80 is apparently...
	It's actually the central psalm of the Book of Psalms.
	But talks about, in the middle of the devastation, two potential leaders, a son of David but a son of Joseph.
	And it does a lot of bringing the tribes together.
	But one particular figure and the covenant with David and that God promised a man on the throne of David who would rule for eternity.
	That's the central idea.
	So while you've got devastation going on, you've got this, the Davidic...
	King thing is the big promise in amongst all the devastation.
	So they are, it's quite interesting that Psalm 84 is the first of the ones that sound a bit more like you'd expect a psalm.
	Yeah.
	You know what I mean?
	Something that you don't really need the outside context to get hugely into, more so.
	And then just to say that then the devastation, they return Psalm 89. He's a real cliffhanger.
	I mean, Psalm 89 is the final psalm of the book, and it finishes with the Lord destroying the crown of David.
	So the big promise, I mean, so it's utter devastation.
	The big promise is always connected to the son of David, and redemption, salvation, renewal of...
	The universe and everything will be through this promised Davidic king, this Christ of Psalm 2. But when you get to, it all looks utterly devastated.
	By Psalm 89, it even looks like God has given up on the Davidic throne and the promises.
	Then you get into Book 4, which is kind of like the wilderness years, the exile years.
	Generally, so O'Palmer Robertson calls it maturation.
	They start to learn to live in a world devastated, longing for the presence of God, and then book five, he calls consummation, that's where you get the real, like, all celebratory.
	They're all, like, God has won.
	And actually what happens is, as you go through the whole five books, You get this constant, the throne of the Christ and God enthroned in heaven.
	And by the time you get to book five, the two thrones are the same.
	There's this idea that the Christ is God enthroned.
	But you can see if you're the shepherd boy up on the hills, and you're going through your basic story of Israel, but through the Davidic promises.
	You've got the struggling king, you've got the establishment of the kingdom, you've got the call to the nations, you've got the sin of the people and the devastation, and then you've got the promise that one day the throne will be restored.
	You've got the people learning to...
	Understand God again in those wilderness years, and then you've got the final, it's all going to be all right in it.
	This shepherd boy?
	Yeah.
	Does he know the Psalms by heart?
	Well, Palmer Robertson says he would have done, because, I mean, they would have, part of organised worship, they'd been singing them.
	And so his argument is that they are arranged.
	When you get the themes for memorization, that's what they're arranged for.
	Rather, a lot of folks, I mean, some great early church fathers go through the Psalms and go, I can't work out the keys to this book.
	It just seems to be a bit of a...
	But O'Palmer Robertson makes the argument that they are actually organized.
	You read through Spurgeon and he doesn't, you know, the great preacher Spurgeon, he doesn't really see much order in the Psalms.
	I think O. Palmer Robertson has offered us something really quite helpful.
	So these books, these five books, he's just invented them?
	No, no, no.
	They're in the original.
	They are there marked up.
	So there are five big collections within which there are smaller collections.
	So The Shepherd Boy would have known I've gone from Concept Album 1 to Concept Album 2. I think that's the idea.
	Do you think it's like those Yes album covers?
	You know, by the same artist who did Yes?
	No, I'm a bit rubbish on...
	Look, look, look.
	Behind me, I've got a bit of Star Wars, James.
	I'm not that sophisticated on my pop culture.
	I have missed that.
	And I'm a big fan of ABBA. Are you?
	Yes, yes, yeah.
	And Roger Whittaker.
	I don't think...
	I don't think...
	It's very easy to dislike ABBA. But of course they're designed that way.
	Well, I know.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	I mean, once you go down the Sweden rabbit hole, I mean, I don't want to infect too much my Psalms podcast with conspiracy theorists, but Sweden.
	Sweden.
	Sweden.
	I see actually you've arranged your facial hair in honour of Bjorn.
	Benny Bjorn.
	Certainly not one of the women.
	Not one of the women, but you're definitely, you're the one with the beard.
	Well, that's all right, because the other fellow was funny looking.
	Actually, he was, wasn't he?
	Yeah, he was.
	It is.
	I don't think he's dead.
	So, shall we start?
	Oh, how amiable are thy dwellings, thou Lord of hosts, my heart and my flesh.
	Sorry, sorry, sorry.
	My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord, my heart and my flesh.
	Rejoice in the living God.
	So, given the context of a devastated Israel, overrun by foreign invasion, carted off into exile and things, these verses really then pop.
	Because they're not just, I'm wandering around Israel, I quite like some of the buildings.
	That temple one's my fave.
	I like to hang out there a bit.
	There's now a deep longing to be in the presence of God and all that the temple, the tabernacle and the temple, stood for.
	So, one of the things, just looking through Psalm 84, There's some huge Bible themes here.
	One is, they all come together in what the temple stood for, and then how it gets fulfilled later on.
	1 Kings chapter 6 describes the building of the temple.
	If you think about this for a moment, the temple was the place where God's presence could be encountered on earth.
	And so the architecture of the temple, because that's what's in view here, where does God dwell on earth?
	Or where did he place his presence everywhere, but in a particular way to be known, it was in...
	It was in the temple.
	And so he gave the designs.
	The Lord gives the designs to David to pass on to Solomon to then build the temple.
	And if you read the details of the temple, you'll like this because it's very animals stuff.
	In 1 Kings 6, the temple's filled with images of nature.
	It's all...
	Palm trees, ornamental gourds, all covered in gold, and all the walls are lined with gold, and in the middle of the temple, there's the square room of the Holy of Holies, where the priest would only go in once a year, because that's where the presence of God was.
	But even in there, there's ornamental gourds, it's like golden nature, and it's all filled with...
	Lamp stands.
	And there's also light coming in from the top.
	Now, if you've got highly polished gold surfaces everywhere and this place looks like a garden, then the idea is somebody...
	And they go through the curtains which have cherubim on.
	They go...
	The priest, once a year, would go into the Holy of Holies, into this golden garden, ablaze with light, through a curtain with cherubim on, into the presence of God, by sacrifice.
	That's a picture of Adam re-entering the garden, because the Garden of Eden...
	Of course, was this place of, it's been described as a temple garden.
	God's present there is filled with the glorious light of the Lord with Adam, the first man, and Eve living there.
	And when, of course, they're thrown out because of sin, they are blocked from going back in by the serpent with the fiery, you know, literally the only way you get back in is through death.
	Yes.
	And the tabernacle is a model of that in tent form.
	A re-entry.
	And then it gets done in brick form.
	All the plans given by God.
	And so this is a calling in the Old Testament.
	This is the person longing to re-enter the garden.
	To re-enter.
	Not just into a religious building.
	But into a model of the renewed world.
	To live in the presence of God.
	So Psalm 84 in the middle of devastation.
	It is an Old Testament.
	Goals for life.
	This is what life should be about.
	Yes.
	I was going to ask you that.
	Isn't that essentially the job of all Christians as well?
	What's that?
	Although obviously we should have a care for this life which has been given to us and this world which has been created for us, ultimately the real priority is to keep your eyes fixed on God.
	Yes, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, because, you know, so when you're thinking about the temple and all of it, it's all a great big, sort of, very expensive...
	Play school illustration of who Jesus is.
	That's where it goes, because Jesus describes his own body as the temple.
	If you want somewhere where the presence of God dwells bodily, the fullness of deity dwells bodily in Christ, so you come to the temple of God, that is Christ in the first instance.
	And what does he do in his resurrection?
	Well, according to Colossians chapter 1, he's the firstborn from the dead.
	He is the image of the invisible God.
	He's the image bearer.
	He is the new Adam.
	And by his resurrection, he's the beginning of the renewal of all things.
	But that will be seen, according to Revelation, when he returns.
	So the Christian is supposed to be focused on...
	Christ, to be focused on God, because he is the Son of God incarnate, and rather than going to a temple, we come to Christ.
	Right.
	John 17 verse 3 is one of my go-to verses, because it tells you what eternal life is.
	That's not going to be low down your priority list, does it, to find out what eternal life is.
	I mean, eternal life is the fulfillment of humanity.
	And Jesus says, this is eternal life, that they may know the one true God and the one whom you sent.
	So the very purpose of life, the fulfillment of humanity, is to know God, to dwell in his presence.
	And in that high priestly prayer of John 17, Jesus says, he longs...
	That his people will see his glory.
	So how are we going to see the glory of the Father?
	We'll see it in the glory of the Son when he returns.
	That's the fulfillment of humanity.
	That's the renewal of creation, which will be in Revelation 21, the new heavens and a new earth.
	So Christians are supposed to sort of enjoy the world.
	But we're not here to somehow bring the kingdom of God about through political structures and the rest of it.
	We're supposed to desire the fulfilment of our very natures in the presence of God and pursue knowing him.
	Yes.
	Which is why, of course, the non-Christian awake people get slightly peeved with us because they say, well, all you're doing is hanging around waiting for...
	Waiting for the second coming.
	Yes.
	You're not blowing up 5G towers and stuff.
	No.
	I haven't got my angle grinder yet for...
	Have you?
	No.
	I wouldn't know how to use an angle grinder.
	It's not my skill set.
	It's not your skill set.
	That's why you're not a blade runner.
	It's not my skill set, no.
	Yeah.
	I mean, so there is the problem that you can become so heavenly minded you're no earthly good.
	But actually, I think, again, Colossians, Paul says, the Christian's life is hidden with Christ on high.
	And therefore, we can get on with, in this world, stopping lying, starting to live according to the Ten Commandments.
	So we don't become of earthly no use.
	And you call...
	The whole world to account.
	You call them to live by God's moral law.
	So there's plenty to do and plenty to say.
	But our ultimate goal is not somehow the recovery of all political structures and culture and the rest of it to somehow make the world Christian.
	No, that would be kind of bucking the trend of God's plan anyway.
	I mean, it's fairly clear if you read Revelation.
	Well, actually, it's not clear if you read Revelation, but you can infer from the Revelation and other bits of the Bible that all this has been foretold.
	And so you can be fairly reliant that it's going to turn out pretty much as described.
	By the way, I have to say something.
	This is not really relevant to the psalm, but this will amuse you, and maybe some of the viewers as well.
	Something that happened to me last night.
	So I was worried about these complicated things, about my schedule for today.
	And it all depended on getting texts from people and juggling schedules and stuff.
	And it was really gnawing away at me.
	And I was thinking, hang on a second.
	All you've got to do...
	Is saying, God, I trust in you that you will sort this out.
	And I thought of Matthew 6, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
	Don't worry about tomorrow.
	It will be sorted.
	God will sort it out.
	And if you believe that, then you won't have to waste any time tonight worrying about this.
	You put it out of your mind because God will sort it out.
	So I did it.
	And sure enough, today, God sorted it out.
	Do you know, we do have to tell ourselves that every day though, don't we?
	I mean, to remind ourselves of that, do not worry about tomorrow and trust the Lord for the plans of the day.
	That's the opposite, isn't it?
	That's Fleetwood Mac saying don't stop thinking about tomorrow.
	So no wonder pop music is evil.
	Well, thinking back to ABBA, as I realised, it's all very jolly sounding, but it's all melancholy.
	Isn't it?
	Oh, the one about the underage girl.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It sort of does you into a pretty bleak view of reality and relationships.
	But, yeah.
	So where were we?
	Well, you're handing over worry to the Lord and the plans for the day.
	And it works.
	Yes, it does.
	This is the thing.
	I would like to impress upon...
	Non-Christians.
	Because I don't want to seem like one of those kind of starry-eyed, happy-clappy people that kind of, I think, frightens off a lot of people who have yet to find God.
	They think, oh, I don't want to go there.
	I don't want to be like that.
	But I'm saying this stuff really works.
	It's just, on a practical level, it actually works.
	Doesn't it?
	Yes, no, I agree.
	And because I hope I'm not one of those starry-eyed kind of...
	No, you're not.
	You're not at all.
	It is a daily battle to remember because we have this kind of magnetic pull to self-sufficiency, self-trust and all the rest of it.
	And you do have...
	Luke 12's there for a reason.
	When Jesus says, do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow, worry about itself, consider the birds of the air.
	They do not sow or reap or store away in barns.
	And he's talking to disciples who he knows are freaking out about what it's costing to follow him.
	And he doesn't rebuke them in that sense, not like a smack round the head.
	There's a, like taking the hands off of whatever they've got a white knuckle gripping onto and saying...
	My Father in Heaven has already determined to give you a kingdom.
	So you can chill.
	You don't have to pursue the things that the non-Christian world goes crazy after in order to secure some kind of security in this world.
	But that just tells me that the Lord knows our hearts and so knows that we're going to need to get that reminder every day.
	And you get more practice at it.
	But sometimes, you know, anyone who knows me will know that I'm one of life's biggest flappers.
	You know, that kind of like...
	Gosh!
	So were you flapping a lot when I started the podcast late?
	No, no, no, no, I wasn't actually.
	Here's what I was...
	I've been lecturing all morning.
	I'm highly caffeinated.
	I've been doing lectures on the doctrine of God.
	And I was really quite appreciative of the 15 minutes.
	To how many people were you giving these lectures?
	It was all on Zoom into Belfast, so it might have been 15. I'm not sure.
	It's a small gang.
	But we're going through what was called systematic theology.
	Who's God?
	What's the Bible?
	And those sorts of things.
	So I was all kind of like...
	But then I quite appreciated the extra 15 minutes, and then I've got caffeinated.
	And so I don't know what's going to happen, James.
	I really don't.
	I could just come back.
	I've forgotten, because apart from being very funny, And, you know, a man of God.
	You're also incredibly erudite and well-informed on the subject.
	So it's great to have you.
	Thanks.
	I was thinking, so I keep coming back to this.
	Why am I doing a podcast about the Psalms?
	It's because the Psalms contain the essence of everything.
	Kind of condensed form of the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
	And what we were just talking about, about keeping your eyes fixed on God, remembering that ultimately he's going to sort things out for you, because that's the deal.
	And the Psalms are constantly reminding you of this.
	And if you learn them and recite them, Every day, as I do.
	It's very reassuring.
	It just reinforces the message.
	You were saying how hard it is to keep yourself on track.
	They're very good for that, which is why I'm sure that one of the first missions of a novice monk was to learn the Santa.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I think Luther described them as a Bible within the Bible.
	And doing that trip through the five books, you do get that.
	And what's quite interesting about them is the way they kind of bridge to the New Testament is that they're obviously a different form of literature than kings or something like that.
	They're not historical literature in the sense that they're not just a bare telling of things.
	They do repeat the history of Israel, but they do it in a promissory way.
	They do it in...
	It is the book where you get them...
	I think you get...
	It's reflecting on the events, the temple, for instance, of Israel's history.
	And so it is the place where you see most of the silhouettes of Christ.
	And it is why I think it's the book that informed him as to his human nature, as to...
	As to his mission, because it is the Old Testament reflecting on the promises and the spiritual significance of key events in the Old Testament.
	It's a book that when you get to the end of, if you didn't have...
	The New Testament, it's pregnant for the arrival of the Christ who rules over all things.
	It's pregnant for the arrival of the Christ who brings people into the presence of God and renews heaven and earth.
	It's pregnant for the arrival of one who would suffer and then go through death to bring his people back to the Lord.
	It's all pushing towards that.
	And given that it's in song format, it's designed for memory, and it does bridge you into...
	If you get your head into the Psalms, you'll really understand the New Testament.
	And understanding the New Testament really helps you understand the Psalms.
	And it's the most quoted of all the books by Christ.
	In the scriptures.
	Yeah.
	I mean, we may speculate about the shepherd boy, but we know that definitely Jesus knew the Psalms inside out.
	Yeah, and I mean, the New Testament, one of the interesting things to do when you're reading through the New Testament is to see if you get one of those editions where they put in bolder type all the Old Testament quotations.
	It's very helpful.
	And sometimes some do an Old Testament allusion.
	So it indicates where a theme of the Old Testament is being taken up.
	It might not be a direct quote.
	And you see how frequently the Psalms are used by New Testament writers, by Paul, for instance, or Luke or whatever, to describe the events of who Jesus is.
	Because...
	The Old Testament was their Bible.
	And as the New Testament's being written, where do they prove the deity of Christ from?
	Where do they show that you're justified by, you're declared right with God by faith because of Jesus' substitutionary atonement?
	They go to the Psalms.
	So it is the book that gets...
	The opening chapter to the book of Hebrews, which is likely a sermon that's recorded, that's written down like a letter, it's showing the deity of Christ from the Psalms, why he's...
	Higher than the angels, made lower than the angels.
	And the Psalms have these kind of dramatised discussions between the Father and the Son that later on you discover that's what they are.
	But there's the God talking to a suffering servant or to his Christ.
	And then the New Testament takes those up and goes, that teaches you the triune nature of God.
	Psalm 110 is the most obvious one of that, isn't there?
	Where the Lord said unto my Lord.
	Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And Jesus is being sort of sent, being given the rod of power.
	Yeah.
	And it's a repeat of the idea of Psalm 2, where there's an intra-Trinitarian, you might call it, conversation.
	And it's not obvious immediately from Psalm 2, just reading Psalm 2, but when you go to Hebrews chapter 1...
	The writer or the preacher to the Hebrews says that's an intra-Trinitarian conversation where the father says, today I have begotten you, meaning an eternal today.
	But it uses Psalm 2 to argue for the deity of Christ.
	So, yeah, if you're in the Psalms and you're learning the Psalms and you get some of those big structural points, you are...
	You are at a high point of revelation, which you do need to move into the New Testament to see how it's all taken up and concluded.
	But you are right at that pregnant moment where it's all going to be birthed in the New Testament.
	So, we can move on to the animals now.
	Yea, a sparrow hath found her an house.
	I love that.
	Found her an house.
	And the swallow a nest where she may lay her young.
	Even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.
	Great, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	You think about the swallow's nest underneath the eaves, and it's like in the temple.
	And if you get that devastation, imagine this kind of post-apocalyptic Sort of devastating environment.
	And there's this moment, there's just this one place where you know there's safety.
	And you get these images of safety and the world being okay in nature, because nature is all a reflection.
	Of the attributes of God, in some kind of way.
	And it is, nature is book one.
	The Bible is book two.
	And so you can look at book one, through book two, and see swallows, nesting, feeding young, illustrates something of God's care.
	Jesus uses exactly that image, doesn't he?
	Consider the birds of the air, they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, yet your Heavenly Father feeds them.
	I'm glad you said that, because you're reinforcing a point I made.
	I was doing a podcast the other day with somebody who wasn't a Christian, and he was explaining, he was asking me, you know, what my Welt and Xiaowang was, although I didn't use that word.
	Well, I like to use it as much as I can.
	And, you know, he was asking me, well, so what's your theory?
	I said, well, you know, God created this world.
	And he said, well, what's your evidence for it?
	And I said, well...
	One of the pieces of evidence is to look at nature, literally to consider the lilies, and just watch nature and marvel at it, and this is a manifestation of God.
	This sort of thing couldn't have happened by accident.
	There's clearly a kind of an intent behind it, and the fact that it is so beautiful.
	I mean, there's a reason that we all marvel at David Attenborough documentaries, and it's not because there's a whispery-voiced Malthusian in the background brainwashing us with climate rubbish.
	We don't care about the whispery-voiced old man.
	He's just...
	What we care about is the actual wonders of creation.
	And that's God's work, not David Attenborough's.
	That example is quite an interesting illustration of how evil works because it's parasitical on what is good.
	Yes.
	And it claims for itself, this belongs to me and my narrative of evolution and the rest of it.
	And then you sort of take aside that narrative.
	For a moment, and then you test it for three seconds, and it utterly falls apart, and it doesn't make any sense, and doesn't account for what we've just seen.
	And has a, you know, for all sorts of reasons you could rehearse.
	But it does show you that evil is parasitical.
	It doesn't create anything.
	It can't make anything.
	It claims things off of God.
	For itself and gives an alternative explanation for it.
	It's good.
	I didn't think we'd get on to the evil of David Attenborough in this podcast, but we seem to have got there nicely and sort of organically.
	Organically.
	We've got birds in the text.
	We've got birds.
	Isn't it interesting that even in biblical times, their taxonomy extended towards sparrows and swallows.
	I mean, I suppose they were common birds, but there's...
	You remember the section on the dietary laws?
	There's all sorts of birds detailed in that.
	Oh, ones you can and can't eat and all that.
	Yes.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	No, it's true.
	But think about, so Psalm 84, there's several elements.
	You've got nature as an illustration, but also finding its own fulfillment in the presence of God.
	Because that's what's indicated here, which says that the Lord has plans for this planet.
	You've got the temple, which was that very, very visible, visceral presence of God setting up for the coming of Christ.
	But also what's central to Psalm 84 is the anointed.
	And so this takes us to Solomon and taxonomy, right?
	So let me beat the path there.
	If you go down to...
	Let me see.
	I've got the ESV open here, just because that's one I had to hand.
	Oh, look.
	When you know that this is about the beatific vision, this is about the fulfilment of humanity and all of nature in the presence of God, and you read verse 10, for a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.
	Of course it is.
	Don't cheat there by going too far ahead.
	No, I won't.
	Okay.
	Well, back up.
	Verse 9. Behold...
	Our shield, our God, look on the face of your anointed.
	Now, what's really important here is it wasn't in the Old Testament regime.
	It wasn't the temple in the end that guaranteed the presence of the Lord with his people.
	It was the conduct of the anointed, the Christ, the king.
	So if you go back to 1 Kings 6. There's all the description of the building of the temple, but there's a repeat of the Davidic covenant where God said to David, if you obey my statutes and you keep my laws, then there will always be a king on your throne.
	And so Solomon, King Solomon, who builds a temple, in the middle of the temple building, the same promise is there.
	So it all comes down to the fulfillment of God forgiving the sins of his people, bringing them into his presence, is all in the end not fulfilled in the temple.
	Kingship.
	So Psalm 84 has temple in it, but it is because the father looks with delight on the anointed.
	That all of this is there.
	Now, Solomon is the, although David is a Davidic promise, and he is that Jesus describes as the son of David, that Solomon is even, is a...
	More fulfilled picture of the Christ to come.
	Because he, David, rules over the kingdom at the time of war.
	Solomon gets the temple built.
	He's given peace.
	The riches of the nations flow in.
	It's like they're living in the New Eden.
	And what is Solomon given?
	Wisdom, which includes, I told you I'll get to the taxonomy of the birds, description writing endlessly about nature.
	Botany.
	Did he?
	Ornithology.
	He wrote on everything.
	Because he's the new Adam at that point in the garden who was given the task.
	What was Adam told to do?
	Go name the animals.
	So right at the beginning, that's been a part of being human.
	Presumably we don't...
	Solomon's writings are mostly...
	I mean, he wrote Proverbs, didn't he?
	He wrote Proverbs.
	He wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, which we've just finished going through at church, which is just brilliant.
	Oh, so he was quite poetic.
	He wrote some Psalms.
	Oh, yeah.
	So he's the wisest person that ever lived, which means he knew his way, not just head knowledge, but knew his way around materials, the physical, spiritual world.
	And when Jesus says one greater than Solomon is here, he's making quite a claim.
	Oh, I see.
	But he went...
	All that wisdom wasn't good in the end, was it?
	No, because he goes off on one.
	See, that's what the Old Testament sets up.
	Once you get to the Davidic Covenant, the question is now, we need a king that won't screw it up in order to bring about the promises of a renewed world with people.
	In God's presence with their sins forgiven.
	And where the temple, the tabernacle, its walls are exploded open because it's now the whole universe.
	And it all focuses on the Davidic king.
	And so you go, Solomon, is it him?
	Oh, no!
	And then you go, is it his son?
	Oh no!
	Oh no, there's two of them now.
	They've split the kingdom.
	Oh my goodness, where are the promises?
	And then you get to book three of the Psalms and you're like, oh, it's because the king screwed up.
	There's a principle in reading the Old Testament that goes like this.
	As goes the king, so goes the people.
	If the king is faithful, it goes well for Israel.
	Old Testament Israel.
	If the king sins, they're sent into exile.
	So when Matthew's Gospel begins, it gives a genealogy of Jesus that says he's the son of Abraham, he's the son of David, and then, if you read through the genealogy, the history seems to be that they're still in exile in Babylon, and then it says the birth of the Christ.
	So he is the true son of David, who comes to fulfill the promises to Abraham of...
	A blessing to the nations.
	And is the end of the exile of the people of God because he's the true king who comes and fulfills all that David was supposed to do.
	So you are supposed to keep your eye on the king.
	And so, yeah, you get these high points and he goes, oh, he's blown it.
	Blessed are they that dwell in thy house, for they will be always...
	I love this one.
	Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee, in whose heart are thy ways, who, going through the veil of misery, use it for a well, and the pools are filled with water.
	How consoling is that?
	I know.
	Yeah.
	It's beyond cognitive behavioural therapy, isn't it?
	It is.
	I mean, I think CBT was...
	It was ripped off from that, wasn't it?
	Well, it's what you have if you think that all a human is is a wet computer.
	I just need different inputs for different outputs.
	But there's something mystical going on here, which is in the presence of the Lord, there is a refreshing, because he is the God of light and life and love, the inexhaustible supply of those things, because he is the self-sufficient source of those things.
	And when you're in fellowship with him, even when you're going through utter crap and devastation, there will be moments of...
	Of renewal, refreshing that come from him, not from a process that you can kind of run off away from him and sort of just have positive thinking.
	It's absolutely in fellowship with the God who is light and life and love.
	It's why Jesus says what is eternal life?
	It is to know the one true God and the one whom he sent.
	It is to know, to be in fellowship with this God and grow in understanding him.
	And so even in affliction, Romans 5 talks about when you are in affliction, It is used by God to cause you to come to him for moments of refreshing.
	And you always know the Lord is close in those worst of times.
	We never want to go into the worst of times.
	But you have these pools of refreshing in dry deserts because of him.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The next line...
	I'm wondering, I don't know whether this is a question you can answer, whether this bequeathed its phrase to the English language.
	They will go from strength to strength, and unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them in Zion.
	That phrase, going from strength to strength, I wonder whether that phrase pre-existed, or whether it was a translation that was used in the Book of Common Prayer and then entered the language.
	I don't know.
	Yeah.
	No.
	No, I don't know on that one.
	I don't expect everyone to know everything.
	So, Johnny, you...
	I'm very much a jack of several trades and master of none.
	I don't know.
	And I got a good mate, a good friend, Jeff Riddle, who knows his way around the original languages very well.
	I'm sure he'd be able to...
	I'm sure the idea of strength to strength is there in the Hebrew.
	But it is a very neat...
	So I'm reading from the ESV here, and it says go from strength to strength.
	But this is the thing about the Word of God, isn't it?
	That even when translated, it nails it.
	It's not like it just sort of gets near the truth.
	It nails the truth.
	It gives you these...
	It is just soul nourishment.
	To be in weakness, but then to find strength and then...
	Sort of like compound interest in some way.
	But on the way somewhere, each one appears before God in Zion.
	So there is strength for the pilgrimage in life toward God to know God.
	So it's not like, you know, the health, wealth and prosperity gospel, which is kind of just positive thinking in...
	From the States with Christianese sort of stuck over the top, that God's going to strengthen you in your pursuit of everything else other than him in some kind of way.
	In your pursuit of mammon.
	Yes, in your pursuit of mammon, you go from strength to strength.
	He's not the divine careers advisor or the guy who throws you a bottle of water from the side as you run on your marathon to wherever you like.
	The focus of this psalm, in the devastation of book three, is the presence of the Lord, seeking the presence of the Lord, coming to the presence of the Lord.
	Everybody needs to be asking the question, where is God and how can I know him?
	Where do I go to meet him?
	It's not a building anymore.
	It's in Christ.
	Can I ask you a complicated question?
	I know you've often got an answer to this.
	How much earthly pleasure do you think we're allowed within the context of being a good Christian?
	I mean, it is possible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, you know, even though it's harder than it is for a camel to enter the needle.
	But even so, there is a kind of an allowance for...
	I mean...
	I think.
	Yeah.
	So, Timothy, 1 Timothy, is it 1 verse, is it 1, verse 6?
	God is, Paul describes to Timothy, he says, God is the blessed God.
	What does that mean?
	It means God is the happy God.
	So, God is bottomless, infinite, all the attributes of God applied to happiness.
	Infinite, personal, Bottomless bliss is God in himself.
	So, our task as Christians is to find we should be absolutely devoted to our own happiness.
	And if you know what's good for you, you'll find that in the Lord, and he will enable you to enjoy his creation and give thanks and praise.
	1 Timothy 4, you've got a whole bunch of a seat saying, don't get married, don't enjoy food, you know, that's how to be godly.
	And that's in 1 Timothy chapter 4, and Paul says that's the teaching of demons.
	So he says everything is to be enjoyed.
	So he begins the letter with the blessed God.
	Who is this God that we know?
	The God in whose presence we want to have pleasure forevermore.
	In fact, I forget which psalm he talks about.
	There's pleasures with God forevermore.
	God is the joy.
	And because we're creatures, he gives us experiences of that deep joy.
	Now the thing that curbs the joy is our sin and we're not yet...
	We're waiting for the resurrection of the body when Christ comes back and we will be fitted with resurrection bodies to enjoy God face to face in the beatific vision.
	So there's always a struggle in this world, but the goal is joy in the presence of God.
	And so, take all the joy you can and give thanks to God for it is the right way to go.
	I sort of get that.
	I mean, I don't think that God is a...
	A Puritan, is that the word?
	He doesn't want you not to have pleasure.
	I mean, like, I don't think God doesn't want us to enjoy foie gras, for example, because it's delicious.
	Yeah.
	And, and I always feel when I go, for example, hunting and I've shown fear or I've sort of suffered from the cold or I haven't, you know, I've been, yeah, I've been frightened mainly.
	I always feel like I've let down God because I think what God wants is, is for you to, yeah.
	Okay.
	When you have a cigarette, um, he, he doesn't want you to be going, Oh, I don't know if I should be having this or not.
	I don't, you know, if you're going to have a cigarette, Enjoy your fag.
	Have a cigarette?
	Enjoy your fag.
	And it's very hard to...
	Separate what I think is probably true, and what God does want, and what the Bible tells us that God wants, versus all these kind of notions that creep into your head, which I think are probably demonically sent.
	One should worry about this stuff, because that's part of the job.
	You need to worry about where I am with God.
	But at the same time, you don't want to get it wrong.
	Well, I think the thing that always creeps into the Christian life, which is not from the Lord, but is our tendency to try and find a sweet spot, and then we end up doing a ton of navel-gazing, where we're going, well, did I have the...
	The extra whatever cake at Christmas because I really wanted it for the glory of God.
	Yes, yes.
	And I don't see anywhere where that kind of not making is godly.
	The Bible's just much more realistic.
	It's not a kind of a...
	I think that stuff's a little bit post-Freudian, frankly, where people are kind of going on an internal trip trying to find their godly motivations.
	Jesus says, look, it's obvious what's evil.
	The Ten Commandments, which everyone kind of knows, you don't have to go on a hunt for how was that sinful in this sort of thing.
	And he says, what comes out of you is, you know, if I'm angry at somebody for no good reason, I don't have to do some analysis.
	I just know.
	It's just kind of obvious.
	Sin isn't this sort of...
	I just, it's in pastoral care.
	You find, particularly teenagers, who are just obsessed with getting everything right.
	But what they're getting, trying to get right, is their own little cooked up psychological switch rules.
	Like, you know, did I do it for the right reasons?
	I'm not sure.
	Maybe I should deny myself something for ten minutes in order to make myself a purity.
	That's nonsense!
	It's for freedom you have been set free.
	And God's law tells us what is sinful and what's not.
	And it's not as long as people think it is.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Sin's more awful than people think it is.
	Sorry?
	Sin's more awful than people think it is, but...
	It's not also all those trivial little things that we start to generate rules for ourselves in order to get ourselves into...
	I mean, it's a very Roman Catholic kind of way of going, that grace is a state you find yourself in, and then you've got to fight your way back there.
	No, Romans 5, because by faith in Christ, you are in a state of grace.
	Permanently as a Christian.
	And so you don't have to fight your way back into this state of grace.
	There'll be times when we know we've sinned.
	We've gone against God's word.
	You need to know God's word well.
	But as you do that, you get less uptight about things.
	And you'll experience the discipline of our Heavenly Father.
	But it's always to bring repentance and come back to him.
	Sin's not complicated.
	It just isn't.
	Although, I was talking to a fellow Christian in the sauna the other day, and he uses that line for Romans as this kind of complete get-out.
	His view is, you know, I've got grace.
	Therefore, you know, that's me sorted.
	Yeah, no, no, no.
	And I'm not sure that it works that way.
	No, no, no.
	Because, so, this is why I think the Ten Commandments are very important.
	Because they are actually then the guide for life, for the Christian.
	Not in order to earn your place with God, but as the right response to people who are now set aside by the blood of Christ as treasured vessels in the household of the Lord, as his children.
	And so what happens in Romans 5 is the great declaration of the gospel.
	And Paul then anticipates a question.
	Oh, so if grace abounds when I sin, well, then I can keep sinning.
	And he says in Romans 6, no, you've been baptized into Christ, so you've died to the old way of life.
	You now live according to the power of the Spirit.
	And then he goes on to talk about what that looks like.
	And it's all an unpacking of the Ten Commandments lived under the power of the Spirit.
	So, rather than a kind of a deeply psychologized, constantly going...
	So, for instance, that passage I think I'll refer to, 1 Colossians...
	1 Colossians, not a second one.
	Colossians 3, when he says, look, your life is hid with Christ on high.
	That means...
	As a Christian, whatever they do to the body, it doesn't matter if they come and kill you, it's fine.
	You're going to be with Christ.
	That's where your life is hidden, and he will be revealed when he comes back and will be raised.
	And so Paul says, because of that, you can now stop living in sexual immorality, stop lying to one another, and lists a number of things.
	They're all the Ten Commandments, but in slightly different language.
	So God doesn't leave us guessing as to what sin is.
	Neither does he call us to just live freely as if it doesn't matter.
	Sin doesn't matter.
	But he does give us, he does tell us, he doesn't leave us guessing.
	He tells us what sin is and how to live.
	And not to live in a kind of a state of fear of loss of salvation in that sense.
	Although, thou shalt have no other God but God.
	Is that how it goes?
	That's often interpreted to mean, well, you can't enjoy anything too much because you're making it your God.
	Well, 1 Timothy 4 says everything's been given and sanctified by the word and prayer.
	Enjoy.
	Well, we had an awesome piece of organic grass-fed beef on Sunday.
	Did you?
	I'll tell you what.
	I knew it was better than the supermarket stuff just because of the way my rather blunt knife slid through it like butter.
	And I got thin slices off it.
	It was just amazing.
	That must have cost a packet.
	Yeah, it did.
	It did.
	But we had some friends visiting and, you know, we'll eat less well.
	Well, there's still a big lot left.
	I mean, so, you know.
	But anyway.
	I don't need to go up and look up a passage to bless it.
	I know it's a good gift from the Lord, because I've read my Bible, we gave thanks for it, and we enjoyed it as a good gift from Him.
	And actually, that does have a disciplining effect in this sense, that I know if I'm like, and I'm keeping going, and keeping going, and keeping going, I've sort of lost sight of God.
	I don't have to...
	You know, to really see...
	Coming back to the birds, the created order as filled with visceral, tangible sights and smells that show us the goodness of the creator because he is the first cause and all effects have the thumbprint of their cause in them.
	I'm not calling for gluttony, but...
	But we ought to be more celebratory as Christians, I think, than we are.
	You know what I mean?
	I want to campaign for...
	The reason I don't want to walk around in anxiety and worrying about tomorrow is because I'm missing out on enjoying the Lord and His provision.
	And He doesn't tell us what's going to happen tomorrow because that keeps us trusting Him.
	Keeping the focus on God and who he is and who he's shown himself to be is key to living the Christian life.
	Also, just from intellectual, I know we have to be wary of the intellect, but just from inference here, if we can suppose that the world is an expression of God's love, we are made in God's image.
	And we look around us and we see this extraordinary world.
	I mean, it is just, I marvel at its beauty every day.
	And would the person, the entity, would a god that created such things go, yeah, I'm going to make these humans, but I'm going to make sure they're not going to, they're going to live for three score years and ten.
	I really don't want them to enjoy any of this stuff, you know.
	That would be over-egging the pudding, you know.
	I want them to be miserable.
	I want them to feel guilty all the time.
	It doesn't quite square, does it, with what we...
	No, no it doesn't.
	And it's one of those ways in which those kind of Greek stories of the gods sort of accidentally replace our kind of biblical view of God, where he's just a kind of a landlord somewhere who actually wants to keep the rent high and wants to make it a little bit difficult so you don't get above your station.
	He's a rackman.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's not that...
	As you go back to the Garden of Eden, and one of the key things that Satan does is he primarily challenges Eve's view of God.
	So much in the Christian life gets back into place when we get an accurate view of God.
	Quite quickly.
	So Satan suggests he is that kind of God who's keeping something from you.
	You could be better than you are.
	And he's a little bit paranoid.
	Well, he's just given them the wrong doctrine of God.
	And they've gone, oh, yeah, all right.
	And in the Christian life, it's very easy to lose sight of the true teaching of who God is and start to make him the landlord who's a bit miffed that you might and you've got to keep the noise down a little bit because otherwise he's really going to be quite angry with you in some kind of way.
	Why?
	Psalms like Psalm 84 are kind of North Star Psalms.
	They get you back into, you know, you've got to pursue God for who he is.
	Do not rest.
	You know, Thomas Aquinas, don't agree with him on justification or the doctrine of the church, but he's absolutely extraordinary on pursuing the beatific vision.
	He wanted to see...
	God and be in his presence.
	And actually, it gave him, I think, it was key to him being extraordinarily wise and very, very good at describing being and metaphysics and all those kinds of things.
	He was absolutely dedicated to what would it be to see God and be in his presence.
	So that makes you contemplate God.
	You want to go to who Christ is because he's the one who's shown God to us because he's shown us the Father because nobody's seen God, says John 1.18, but the one who is at the right hand of the Father has shown him to us.
	We have to, there's a subtle form of idolatry that happens where the true image of God, the true teaching of God gets replaced in our heads and our hearts with this landlord view and we need to constantly push it out with accurate statements about who God is and celebrate who he is from scripture.
	That sorts out an awful lot.
	O Lord God of hosts, hear our prayer.
	Hearken, O God of Jacob.
	Behold, O God, our defender, and look upon the face of thine anointed.
	Well, that's the anointed one, isn't it?
	That's Jesus.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So by this time, and again, if you've got the devastation theme going, and you know your Old Testament theology, you know that the covenantal relationship between God and his anointed, his Messiah, Is key to the renewal of all things.
	And actually, like that 1 Kings 6 passage where you've got the presence of the Lord is going to be in this extraordinary building, but it's actually, it's not, the temple wasn't a God trap to sort of ground him somehow.
	It was all down to the obedience of the king.
	So here, the good news is, we are now...
	Post the death and resurrection and the ascension, the ascension as Christ ascends to the true throne of creation, to the true Davidic throne in the presence of God, we know that the Lord beholds the face of the anointed.
	He's enthroned.
	And so we know we're not looking for the moment where the true Davidic son, where is he?
	Who is he going to be?
	We need the Lord to show favor to him because the way a covenant works, and actually getting your head around the covenants of scripture is very important for understanding the Bible story.
	A covenant is always or tends to be made between God and a...
	What theologians call a federal head, a head of a group of people.
	And the covenant determines the relationship between God and that group of people through that head.
	So there's a covenant with Adam that he breaks in Genesis 1 and 2. He breaks it in Genesis 3. And so all humanity fall in him.
	There's lots of mystery there.
	That's a whole other category of theology.
	The covenant with the Davidic king was, as the king keeps the Mosaic law, he would get, and the people would get, the promises to Abraham of being a people in the land.
	So by being one of Abraham's people, you look to the Davidic king, and it's his performance that determined whether or not you were going to get invaded.
	Well, that sets up that it is Christ's, it is Jesus' performance, his life lived, His keeping of the law, his death and resurrection are all given to us and we are united to him.
	That's what a Christian is.
	And so if the Father looks on his anointed and is pleased with him, he is pleased with us because we are covenantally, Christians are bound to Christ.
	That's the key.
	So we know this verse is fulfilled.
	We know when we feel in doubt about...
	About God's love for us.
	We have to ask ourselves, is the father going to kick Jesus out of the throne?
	Is the father going to be dissatisfied with his son?
	Answer, no.
	And therefore, he's not dissatisfied with us because when he looks on us, he sees his son because of our union with him.
	That's very nicely put.
	Thank you for that.
	And these are some of the most quotable verses from the Psalms.
	For one day in thy courts is better than a thousand.
	I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of ungodliness.
	I love those lines.
	And they make sense, don't they?
	There's a lot of ink spilt on the building of the temple and the tabernacle, and it can be bewildering for Christians to read.
	But if you sit in the detail, it's a visual image.
	Of the restoration of all things and the glory of being in the presence of God.
	And so, if God is just some sort of sovereign landlord, why would you want to show up and have dinner with him?
	You wouldn't, would you?
	Again, why would you want to hang out with him?
	But if he is the God of life and love...
	Self-sufficient life and love in himself, the blessed God, then you want to be where he is, because where he is, life is.
	C.S. Lewis did a brilliant job with Aslan, where he walks, kind of nature revives where his paws go.
	You know, that sort of thing.
	It's getting at that idea.
	So this isn't just a nice place to hang out.
	It's where your humanity is brought to its fulfillment.
	But it's also a very helpful guide to the nature of the fallen world versus God's world.
	You get this a lot in the Psalms.
	You are reminded that material wealth is irrelevant.
	You shouldn't think about material wealth.
	You shouldn't dwell in the tents of ungodliness because often that accompanies material wealth, dwelling in the tents of the ungodly.
	And you don't want that.
	And it just repeatedly reinforces this message.
	Yeah, I think if you...
	As I read this, my head did go to...
	The cabal.
	I know you don't want to get the conspiracy stuff in there necessarily, but given the line of garden to tabernacle to temple to Christ to the new heavens and the new earth, we are living, that is God's plan,
	and everything else that competes against that competes in a way that, sorry, transhumanism, A New World Order are all attempts, Babylonian attempts, to recreate the world with humanity at the centre, a particular group of humanity at the centre, and to make an alternative and to seek all that God provides without God.
	And so the tense of the image of the amazing temple building, where it was all built in near silence, Because of reverence to the Lord, and a tent.
	Puts the, whatever the World Economic Forum or New World Order are cooking up, it's tent of wickedness compared to the restoration of all of creation.
	Because that's where the tabernacle goes to.
	It is in Revelation 21, as you know, the new heavens and new earth are described in the same dimensions as the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle.
	So in other words, All of the heavens and the earth, new heavens and the earth, are the dwelling place of God with humanity.
	That's the world that he's bringing around.
	And every other attempt, everything else, is an attempt to create something other than that or to do it ourselves.
	It's why, for instance, I'm really bothered by that kind of Christian nationalism that assumes that what we've got to do is somehow grab hold of...
	The church needs to somehow take hold of the reins of society again and steer it towards some wonderful moment.
	I don't know when it was in the 1950s.
	I'm not really sure.
	That, for me, it only ever ends in tyranny.
	And I don't want to have a Christianised kind of...
	Try and recover this world so that this world becomes the dwelling place of God at my hands.
	That's...
	Anyway, that's where my head went on that verse.
	Yeah.
	I hadn't thought about it in that way, that it's the tents of ungodliness, not the palaces of ungodliness.
	Not the palaces of ungodliness.
	Yeah.
	For the Lord God is a light and defence.
	The Lord will give grace and worship.
	And no good thing shall he withhold from them that live a godly life.
	I like that line as well.
	Very reassuring.
	It was very reassuring.
	No good thing.
	No good thing.
	And if, again, I guess it's the landlord issue, isn't it?
	If he's the landlord, then who's fed up with you for making a lot of noise, you sort of want to avoid him.
	Or if he's the headmaster and you feel like you failed your homework, you don't really want to.
	You don't go to them for blessing.
	But if he is the source of light and life, and in your light do I see light, and all those other verses, if at his right hand are pleasures forevermore because he is the blessed God, then in seeking him and knowing him, the extraordinary thing about the God of the universe, about the God of the Bible, is he doesn't need us.
	He didn't need to create anything, but he did so.
	Because he desired, he decreed to share his blessedness with a creature.
	He didn't need to.
	So he's absolutely...
	So this shouldn't be...
	If we know our doctrine of God, this shouldn't be a surprise that the God of the Bible wants to not withhold good things for his children.
	Yeah.
	But if your doctrine of God is off, then this doesn't make any sense.
	So kind of people who say that God has created this world as some sort of nasty test.
	Do you go to him for blessing?
	I'm with you.
	But I do sometimes ask myself, like, how much can we rely on the Psalms?
	I mean, is it possible to kind of, might there be lines in the Psalms that are kind of misleading?
	Or do you think they are a reflection of God's intentions?
	Well, I think it's God's Word.
	I think Jesus related to the Psalms as it was God's Word, and God's Word doesn't err.
	God's Word is inspired by the Holy Spirit.
	That's the technical phrase.
	There is one author of Scripture.
	It is the Holy Spirit through the people he used to write.
	If it's there in the original Greek and Hebrew autographs, then it is God's word.
	Sometimes translations screw up a bit or you get...
	But we've got so much knowledge of what the original text said that you can kind of sort that out.
	But when you get strange moments and you think, I don't know, how is that fulfilled?
	So we should read Psalm 84 and go, do you know what?
	Actually, and anyone who's been a Christian for any period of time, you'll have moments where it has been pretty dark and difficult.
	Unfair things have happened to you.
	But read through the book of Ecclesiastes, it's filled with bad stuff happens to good people and all the rest of it.
	And sometimes you are left wondering when the blessing's going to come.
	And so you do have to wait on the Lord, and it says that.
	So there are true statements, but...
	But he's not a vending machine.
	When you put the slot money in, you know, then the cans come out when you want them.
	But Romans 5, all affliction is in the hands of the Lord to bring us blessing.
	It just might not be the blessing you think you need at that moment.
	It will come down the line.
	And sometimes it might take a few years to look back and say, I know I see what the Lord was doing.
	But I couldn't see it at the time.
	I commend to you, if you haven't heard it yet, the podcast I did with Nathan Reynolds.
	Do you know about Nathan Reynolds?
	No, no, no.
	I need to go and look at that.
	Nathan Reynolds, short version, one of the Bloodline families.
	He became an Illuminati hitman.
	Oh, I did see that.
	Yeah, I haven't listened to it yet, but I did see that was gone out.
	So what was interesting about it was particularly interesting, I thought, towards the end where we talked about...
	Obviously, he's now a Christian and he's under God's protection.
	Otherwise, I'm sure he'd be dead by now.
	But he was talking about the contrast between his old religion, i.e.
	serving the devil, essentially, and the new one.
	And he said, look, when you're serving the devil, you can be given the most extraordinary powers.
	You have demons that can give you...
	Superhuman strength.
	You get riches, whatever you want, showered on you if you do the right evil things.
	He said, with God, it's the other way around.
	You get the stuff often at the end.
	It's very, very slow.
	There's a lot of waiting and suffering.
	It's not the instant fix.
	But, he said, it's so much more satisfying because When you're working for the dark side, you're constantly aware that you pay a terrible price for all these treats.
	It's a banquet in the grave, isn't it?
	I think it's a line from, is it from Isaiah?
	I'm not sure, I can't quite remember.
	It's a good line.
	I will do what I think, what Paul says, somewhere it is written.
	Somewhere it is.
	Somewhere it is written.
	It is a banquet in the grave.
	That's really interesting.
	I'm going to go and listen to that.
	I knew a guy, I've lost contact with him now, who was, I believe he's a pastor now, who, as a teenager, got into Ouija boards and started passing exams.
	I mean, he got himself possessed by demons.
	And then they threw him down on a train track.
	And the train was coming.
	And something grabbed his by the scruff of the neck and yanked him up and he swears it was Jesus.
	Now, he was a bit...
	He then went to church.
	Well, he owed Jesus that one, I thought.
	He owed Jesus that one.
	But it's quite interesting.
	He didn't immediately become a Christian, but then he became a Christian.
	I think he's a pastor now.
	It was fascinating.
	He would go along to these...
	Like at the NEC or these kind of pagan, you know, like the Good Food Show or something like that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It was all like there would be sort of yoga mats and then you're kind of, you know, all the different tarot.
	It was like a trade fair for that sort of stuff.
	Yeah.
	And he would sit there with a bowl of Bible verses.
	And, you know, you've got all these fortune tellers around.
	Right?
	And so he played into that, right?
	I don't know, lots of people are like, ooh, because I don't know many evangelicals that do this.
	I certainly don't know any confessional Baptists that do this.
	And then people will come up and he said, just take a line, and then he'd explain the Bible verse.
	So he basically sat there explaining the Bible to people every day at these trade fairs.
	But he really had insight into...
	That kind of supernatural power and foresight that the demons will give you.
	But it's a banquet in the grave.
	I like that story.
	It's somewhere.
	You can get it on YouTube.
	I'd love to have been sitting alongside him and seeing their reaction.
	Yeah, I think...
	So, yeah.
	Yeah, he had...
	Fascinating story.
	There aren't many people I know who are going into that context to share the Bible.
	But the thing is that there are people there who do believe in a world behind this world and they're very confused about what it is.
	And so, you know, anyway, but yeah.
	We do the final line.
	O Lord God of hosts, blessed is the man that putteth his trust in thee.
	I do this psalm.
	I go through the Psalms at different stages of my morning run with the dog, or jog with the dog.
	So I know exactly where...
	That's just before I go into the dingle.
	Okay.
	The Lord is the dingle.
	I could describe the stretch of ground, but yeah, I mean, I think that's self-explanatory.
	A Lord God of hosts, blessed is the man that putteth his trust in thee.
	I wanted to ask you one thing, which was inspired by something you said earlier on.
	So, in the old times, There was a special part of the temple where God, and then we had the tabernacle as well, and the Holy of Holies.
	God actually lived there, and if you went in there, you'd die, wouldn't you?
	You'd be like that man who accidentally stumbled and touched the Ark of the Covenant and just got zapped.
	Yeah, yeah.
	There's nowhere in the world now where God does that, is there?
	He doesn't live anywhere.
	No.
	No.
	The understanding of God's presence is really fascinating.
	Actually, I think we can't really leave Psalm 84 behind without going to this.
	So, the temple language is obviously the temple.
	God was present there.
	And the temple didn't contain God.
	It was where you could engage with him on his terms according to the sacrificial system that he set out, which is all a big illustration of how there needs to be bloodshed for sins in order to enter the presence of God.
	And it has to be through a representative of the people, which is why the priest would wear the ephod covered in the jewels that represented his people.
	So it was an illustration.
	So Jesus is the one who...
	He offers himself up.
	His blood is shed, but he's raised to life.
	That's why the resurrection is necessary, because he continues the journey of the priest into the true Holy of Holies through his ascension into the presence of God.
	So that tent, which then became the brick building, was all an illustration of actually the journey of Jesus through death into resurrection and into the presence of God.
	God was present in the temple then for that purpose, and then he is ultimately present in the incarnation, so that you come to him by faith and you come to Christ.
	But now, because Christ is not here physically, he's in the presence of the Father, We are all, says the New Testament, if you're a Christian, you are counted as in the Holy of Holies with him.
	Now, what happens is, so the temple language goes garden, tabernacle, temple, Christ, but then before the new heavens and the new earth, there's one other temple language.
	Well, there is the body, the Holy Spirit, now lives in us in a particular way.
	But the church, the local church is described in temple terms.
	Ephesians chapter 2 describes the local gathered church in terms of the temple.
	So not the building, but the people who are gathered.
	God dwells amongst them.
	And now he dwells amongst with us all through the week, but his presence has been promised in a particular way.
	On the gathering of God's people, Jesus says, where two or three are gathered, there I am, by his Spirit.
	And so, actually, the way in which we look forward to being in the presence of God eternally is by finding a church that teaches the Bible and gathering because he is there.
	If you want to meet Jesus, then he does business with people in a local congregation every Sunday when his word is proclaimed.
	That's actually where the Bible goes on the stop-off to...
	So, Psalm 84, if we're longing to be in the presence of God, how do we do that now?
	We come to Christ, but we also, we go to where has Christ said he will be found?
	amongst his people gathered for worship according to the new covenant uh design of worship which isn't a gold line brew room it's it's through the word and prayer and the um baptism and the lord's supper but the thing is they're very hard to find bible teaching churches i should i should put in a plug for your for your church in in in loughborough i i
	If anyone is passing by on a Sunday, they should definitely go to Johnny's church.
	It's great.
	I mean, I wouldn't say it's the most spectacular architecture I've ever seen.
	Oh, it's awful!
	The building's just a box.
	It was put up in the 1950s, and we're trying to make it livable.
	We've had new heating put in recently, because it was cold when you came.
	I tell you, the congregation are absolutely top-notch, and the services are great, and there's real Bible knowledge and Bible learning, and there's a really good vibe.
	Tell us where it is, Johnny.
	What's it called?
	It's called Christ Church, Christ Gap Church, Loughborough.
	It's on Herbert Street.
	If you go to our website, which is ChristChurchLoughborough, I think,.org or something, you'll see the horrible building.
	That James is talking about.
	But we've come to love it because, you know, you sort of move in.
	We've been there a few years now.
	We're renovating it a little bit.
	One day we might extend it.
	We would like to extend it because it can be quite packed.
	Sunday mornings we're very full.
	Sunday evenings less full.
	But we teach through the Bible morning and evening.
	That's what we do.
	Thanks for the plug.
	No.
	If only one person.
	As a result of this podcast, it will have been worthwhile.
	And I liked your message about the importance of ekklesia, I suppose, would be the Greek word for the church.
	Yeah, which is a gathering of people.
	Yes, that's what that means.
	But, yeah.
	So, where can Tricky's two?
	Are we covered off?
	84 now?
	I think we've done 84, I think.
	I mean, I'm going to go and continue studying it because I've got to preach on this portion of the Psalms.
	And so I reserve the right to retract anything I said in case it was off on one.
	But, you know, it's been a fab discussion.
	Thanks very much.
	The other thing I'd say before we go about Psalm 84 is that I asked...
	Alex Thompson, who's done some of this psalm series, what his top five psalms were.
	The ones that one should know.
	And 84 was one of his top five.
	Well, Johnny, where can people find you?
	Your writings and your...
	Well, so I do, you know, the preaching and teaching in the church every Sunday.
	I'm either doing in the morning or the evening.
	I have started this little...
	Actually, off the back of doing the first podcast, you connected me with Abby Roberts, and Abby and I have been having all sorts of digital world fun in the last 18 months to two years, or however long it was.
	I did some stuff with her on TNT Radio, and...
	When that was going, I've set up something called Stop It, You're Killing Me, which is my little sub stack where I do a bit of theology, but mainly a kind of thinking philosophically, theologically about what's going on in the world as much as I can.
	And I do every now and again, I do when I can get a guest, I do a podcast on there.
	So I think there are three or four on there.
	I really wanted to talk to comedians to begin with who stood up against the plandemic convid nonsense and ran out of it quite quickly.
	So I had to do a bit of a pivot.
	But I quite like the idea of, stop it, you're killing me!
	No, you're killing me.
	No, stop it.
	You're killing me.
	I get it.
	Do you see?
	Do you like that?
	A joke explained is a joke lost, John.
	I know!
	I probably just destroyed the title of my podcast because it was so...
	Oh, gosh.
	Edit that.
	No, don't.
	If you enjoy this podcast, and I always say this about the end of my sales podcast.
	I mean, obviously, I love it when you support me, when you become a patron of my Patreon or my Substack or my locals or whatever.
	And you support my sponsors.
	But what I want most is for, whether you're a Christian or non-Christian, to share this podcast and encourage your friends to listen to it.
	Because I think there's something in it for everyone, even if you're not a Christian yet.
	The Psalms, check them out.
	Seriously, I don't think I'm wasting my life when I recite the Psalms every day and I learn them.
	And there's some great poetry in there and some great truths.
	And if you make them part of your life, You'll probably have a better life.
	No, not probably.
	You will certainly have a better life.
	So, thank you for listening.
	And thank you again, Johnny Woodrow.
	Thanks, James.
	Lots of fun.

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