When the Foundations Are Destroyed

If you have lived on this coast any length of time, you have watched a house go up along the marsh. Before the walls, before the roof, before anything you would call a house, there are pilings. Long timbers driven down through the mud until they hit something that holds. Nobody takes a picture of the pilings. But when the wind comes off the water at seventy miles an hour, the pilings are the only part of that house anybody cares about.

So what do you do when somebody you trust looks you in the eye and tells you the pilings are gone? Not the paint. Not the porch rail. The pilings, the thing everything else was resting on.

That is where David is standing when he writes this psalm. The counsel coming at him is sincere, it is well meant, and it is wrong. Run, David. Get out while there is still time. Fly off to the mountains like a bird, because there is nothing left down here worth standing on. Some of you have heard that voice this year. A few of you may have heard it this week.

So reads the infallible, the inerrant, the all-sufficient Word of the living God. The whole psalm hangs on the question in verse 3, and here is where it lands: when the foundations are shaking, the righteous do not fly to the mountains. They take refuge in the God whose throne has never moved.

Trust Comes First

Notice where David's declaration sits. It comes first. Before the bows, before the arrows, before the crumbling foundations, before the panic, David tells you where he lives. He does not reason his way toward trust and arrive at it in verse 7. He opens with it and then argues from it.

The word behind “take refuge” is a picture word. It is what a small creature does when the hawk's shadow crosses the ground. It runs for the ledge and gets under the rock. There is nothing dignified about it and nothing theoretical about it. The animal is not weighing options. There is no time to think.

Notice too that David is not saying he will take refuge if matters get worse. This is settled. It was settled before the messenger came with bad news, which is the only reason it holds now.

But back up a bit, lest we miss the superscription: “For the choir director. Of David.” This was not a page in a private journal. David handed it to the music director so the whole congregation could sing it. One man's settled confidence became the assembly's song, which is very nearly what we do with it when we open it together.

There is one more thing here that most people read past. Of all the men in Israel, David actually had mountains available to him. He knew the cave at Adullam. He knew the strongholds of En Gedi by name and had slept in them. When he refuses to fly to the mountain, it is not because he has no mountain. The sons of Korah sang the same conviction:

Even the mountain you were going to run to is shaking. Better to be under the Rock than on top of one.

So when do you settle what you believe about God? If you are waiting on the biopsy result to decide whether God is good, you will decide it badly. My grandfather fought in Korea. He said there are no atheists in foxholes, and I have heard other veterans say the same thing. Do not wait until your life is in immediate danger to settle what you believe about God. Settle it today, while nothing is on fire, so that when the phone rings at two in the morning you are not starting from scratch.

Look at where David puts his weight. He does not say, “In my army I take refuge,” or in my innocence, or in my good name, which is the one most of us reach for when we are accused. He says, “In Yahweh I take refuge.”

The Voice of Fear and Doubt

David has planted his feet. Listen to what comes at him. “How can you say to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?”

Who is talking here? Not Saul. Not the wicked. The “you” is plural in the Hebrew, and the tone is affectionate. These are friends. Advisors. People standing at David's elbow who want him alive by supper. MacArthur says it about as plainly as it can be said: their mood is panic while David's is peace.

Here is the first thing to see, and it is the thing that makes this psalm useful to you. Everything they say is true. The wicked really are bending the bow. The arrow really is on the string. They really do shoot in darkness at the upright in heart, which tells you the shot is aimed and the shooter is hidden. This is not two armies on an open field. This is a sniper in the treeline at dusk. Their report is accurate.

The problem is the conclusion. They took a true report and drew a faithless inference from it.

Watch where they aim. “How can you say to my soul.” Not to his ears or his body. His soul. Discouragement always goes for the soul first, because a man who has already fled on the inside will find his feet catching up soon enough.

If the Foundations Are Destroyed

Then comes verse 3, and it is the question that has been rattling around church parking lots for two thousand years. “If the foundations are destroyed, What can the righteous do?”

The foundations are the pillars of the moral and civil order: justice, the law, the throne itself. Consider what David was actually looking at. An anointed king was using the machinery of the state to hunt an innocent man. Priests had been slaughtered at Nob. The courts had become an instrument in the hands of the powerful. The question was not paranoid. It was a fair reading of the evening news.

People still ask it. The vocabulary changes and the fear does not. What good is one faithful family when the culture has come loose from its moorings? What good is one small church? What can we possibly do?

John MacArthur, writing in the Study Bible many of you own, puts it this way: “These are the words of a committed but confused saint. The person's philosophical problem is, ‘In view of the crumbling of the theocratic society, what can one righteous person, out of a shrinking remnant, do?’”

There is an assumption buried in that question, and you need to dig it out and look at it in the light. The question assumes that what the righteous can do depends on whether the foundations are standing. That is the lie. It sounds like realism. It is unbelief with a good vocabulary.

Truth be told, this verse gets pulled out of context to describe problems that have nothing to do with foundations being destroyed. In many churches and fellowships, what is crumbling is not a foundation at all but a manmade tradition: King James Onlyism, a dress code, a hymnbook of a certain color. Find out what is actually falling before you decide the house is coming down.

You need to learn to tell this voice apart, because it almost never arrives sounding wicked. It comes from someone who loves you, over coffee, in a tone of real concern. So run it through two questions.

First, what is actually falling? Before you grieve over a crumbling foundation, make sure it is a foundation. If what is going is the gospel, the authority of Scripture, the person of Christ, then grieve and contend. If what is going is a preference your grandfather held, let it go and quit calling it a foundation. There are men who have left good churches over a Bible translation and told themselves they were being faithful.

Second, where does this counsel leave me? Fear always talks about distance. It suggests you quit the class you teach, skip the meeting, pull the children back a little, let somebody else carry it for a while. Ask the plain question: does this end with me at my post, or off it? Be honest about who is talking, too. Sometimes it is not a friend at all. Sometimes it is your own heart at three in the morning, using your own voice, quoting facts at you.

The Throne Has Not Moved

The counselors have made their case, and they made it well. Verse 4 is David's answer, and notice that he does not answer with a plan. He answers with a throne. “Yahweh is in His holy temple; Yahweh's throne is in heaven.”

They said the foundations are destroyed. David answers that they are looking at the wrong foundation. There is a temple no enemy can enter and a throne no arrow can reach, and it was not built by anybody who can be voted out.

The writer of Hebrews says the shaking is not an accident:

The shaking is real. It is also a sorting operation rather than a demolition. What falls was going to fall.

God has not evacuated. Nobody ever suggested to God that He flee like a bird to His mountain. He is seated, which in the ancient world was the posture of a king who is not worried.

Then David turns the camera from the throne room to the ground: “His eyes behold, His eyelids test the sons of men.” That word about the eyelids is worth a minute. It describes the narrowing of the eye. A man examining something closely squints at it. You have watched a jeweler hold a stone up to the window and pull his eyelids tight to see whether there is a flaw down in it. That is the picture God gives us of Himself. His transcendence does not put Him at a distance from you. He is high above it all and He is looking hard at every one of us.

Verse 5 pushes it further: “Yahweh tests the righteous.” Put that next to verse 2. The arrows are not outside His government. The very trouble the counselors offered as proof that God had left the building is the instrument God is using to prove His own people. Hear me carefully, because this is easy to say sloppy. That does not mean the arrows are harmless. It means the arrows are governed.

Then comes a line preachers get nervous about. “But the wicked and the one who loves violence His soul hates.” Modern day evangelists want to rush in and explain that God hates the sin and loves the sinner, and that is not what the verse says. His soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. That is the deepest word Hebrew has for the seat of a person, and it is applied here to God's own settled opposition against a man who has made peace with violence. This is not a temper. This is holiness with its mind made up.

That matters, because while it may feel good to say God hates the sin and loves the sinner, the reality is that sins do not go to hell. Sinners do. Unless you repent and believe in Jesus Christ, that is where you will go.

Verse 6 tells you where it ends. “May He rain snares upon the wicked; Fire and brimstone and burning wind will be the portion of their cup.” The language is not chosen at random. Every Israelite who sang this psalm knew exactly what raining fire and brimstone meant:

That word “portion” is the language of an allotment. It is what gets measured out to a man and handed to him. Hold onto that cup. We are coming back to it.

Think about the person you are having trouble forgiving. The supervisor who lied and got promoted for it. The man who wrecked a family and moved two counties over and started fresh like nothing ever happened. The ruling that went the way it went. You do not have to even that score, and the reason is right here in verse 6. There is a cup with his name on it. God is not slow, He is patient, and patience is not the same thing as approval. Your work is not to be the arrow. Your work is to stay upright in heart while God keeps His own books.

The Upright Will Behold His Face

We have a throne that is occupied, an eye that misses nothing, and a cup for the wicked. Verse 7 gives us the reason all of it holds together. “For Yahweh is righteous, He loves righteousness; The upright will behold His face.”

That little word “for” at the front is carrying the weight of the whole psalm. Everything in verses 4 through 6 rests on what verse 7 says God is. God does not consult a standard of righteousness that sits outside of Him. He is the standard. When Scripture says He loves righteousness, it does not mean He admires a principle floating somewhere in the moral universe. He loves what He Himself is, and every man, every court, every decision, every one of us gets measured against Him. That is why verse 5 is not cruelty and verse 6 is not excess. Perfect retribution comes out of perfect righteousness, and neither one is watered down.

Look at what the psalm does with the counselors' question. They asked, “What can the righteous do?” David never answers that question on their terms. He lets it die where it stands, because it was the wrong question from the start. He answers a better one. Not what the righteous will do, but what the righteous will see.

“The upright will behold His face.” Set that beside verse 6 and let the contrast do its work. The wicked get a cup. The upright get a face. To see the king's face in the ancient world was to be received, to be in favor, to have the run of the throne room instead of standing outside the gate. Moses asked for that and got the cleft of the rock and a glimpse of God's back. What Moses was denied is promised here to every upright man, and John saw it finished:

That is where the psalm ends. Not with the bows unstrung or the foundations repaired, but with the Lord's face.

So what are you actually asking God for when you pray about the hard thing? Be honest. Most of us are asking Him to stop the arrows. That prayer is not wrong, but it is small. Ask for the bigger thing. Ask that when this trial is over you will know Him better than you did when it started. Take the word “upright” seriously, too, because this promise does not cover everybody. It covers the upright, and no man is upright on his own account, which brings us to the only place this psalm can end.

The Cup and the Face

Two voices spoke to David, and one of them was wrong. Notice that the psalm never calls the counselors wicked. They were not enemies and they were not fools. They were frightened men giving frightened advice, and David simply did not take it. He listened, he weighed it, and he answered with a throne. Institutions rot, denominations drift, buildings change hands, good men fail, and the news does not get better on any given Tuesday. The throne in verse 4 has not shifted once. The man who has taken refuge there is standing on something the storm cannot reach.

Go back to the cup. Fire and brimstone and burning wind will be the portion of their cup. That is what God measures out to a man who dies in his sin. If you have never come to Christ, verse 6 is your portion and verse 7 is not your promise. You will behold His face, but you will behold it as your judge, and on that day there is no mountain to fly to. That is the plain reading of this psalm and I would be lying to you if I softened it.

A thousand years after David wrote it, a Man knelt in a garden with that cup in front of Him.

He knew what was in it. He had sung this psalm since He was a boy. Every drop of what verse 6 measures out to the wicked was poured into a cup and handed to the one Man who was upright in heart in a way David never managed a single day of his life. The cup did not pass. He drank it to the bottom.

Look at the exchange. The cup that belonged to me went to Him, and the face that belonged to Him is promised to me. If you are in Christ, verse 7 is yours, not because you are upright in yourself but because He was upright for you.

If you have never trusted Him, do not fly to the mountains. Come to the refuge in verse 1. Turn from your sin and get under the Lord Jesus Christ the way a hunted thing gets under the rock, and you will find that the God whose eyes test the sons of men is the same God who receives sinners.