In this sermon, the speaker reflects on the hope that people attach to political leaders and programs every four years. He emphasizes that throughout human history, people have sought help and salvation from sources other than God. The speaker highlights the importance of knowing and having a personal relationship with God, rather than viewing Him as an abstraction or something distant. He concludes by urging listeners not to put their trust in mortal leaders, as they are temporary and ultimately return to the earth.

One of the interesting things in the book of Psalms is the way it ends. All of the last five of the Psalms begin with the same line and end with the same line. And in the translation that I have, each one begins, 146 through the 50th, with the line, Praise the Lord, and ends with Praise the Lord. But the Hebrew of that is Hallelujah. Because in Hebrew, the verb Halal, which means to praise, in a plural imperative form is Hallelujah. And the Yah, which is on the end of it, is the short form for the Old Testament name of God, which God disclosed to Moses at the burning bush when he was ready to lead Israel out of Egypt. And so this section of the Psalms, the last five Psalms, is called Unhalal. And Unhalal is a praise. Now, there are three sections in the Psalms that are called that. One of them is the section which Jesus used. You will remember the night before his death, the Passover, and it was always used by the Jews at the Passover. And that's Psalms 113 to 118. But the book of Psalms ends with what is called the Halil, one of the Halil. Now, I think that what's being said is that that's the way we ought to end our devotional time, that the end of every period of devotion and every period of worship ought to be a Hallelujah. We ought to finish our time with God in praise and in adoration so that when we walk out of our times of worship, we walk into the world with our hearts filled with gratitude, thanksgiving, and praise because Christians are supposed to live that way. You will remember that Paul said that the kingdom of God is not need and drink, but righteousness, joy, and peace in the Holy Spirit. Wesley said that the marks of Christian perfection were those three verses that come together in 1 Thessalonians 5 where he says, we're to pray without ceasing, rejoice evermore, and in everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you, concerning us. Now, you will notice, rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks. There's a sticker in that, isn't it? And it's in the in everything because we have certain things we give thanks for. But Paul said we were supposed to give thanks in everything. So the psalm ends with this attitude of praise. Now, there's something about this psalm that has become very precious to me, which at one time caused me to read it real fast to get through it because there's a monotony in it. As you read it, you will notice the monotony. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God all my life long. Do not put your trust in princes and mortals in whom there is no health. When their breath departs, they return to the earth. On that very day their plans perish. Happy are those whose health is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers. He upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin. The Lord will reign forever. Your God who is thine for all generations. Praise the Lord." Now, it's interesting that the word Lord occurs eleven times in ten verses. It's obvious where he wants to place his emphasis. He does it by repetition, and he does it in an almost monotonous fashion as he repeats and repeats and repeats the term the Lord. Now, I think that is the central thrust of what the psalm is about. He's coming to the close of his worship, and what is it that he gives praise for? It's the Lord. Now, you know that I'm an old Hebrew teacher, and so you'll forgive me for talking a little about that. But it's interesting that in the Hebrew, the word is not Lord at all because the word which is used here is the personal name for God which is included in that Hallelujah. You will remember that when God met Moses in the wilderness to get him ready to lead the children of Israel out, Moses said, I need to know your name, and Yahweh said, I will give you my name, and it was given twice. Once it is given in the third person, and once it is given in the first person. And the third person in Hebrew is YHWH. Probably means he is the one who causes whatever is to be. He's the creator. If it's here, he produced it. If you're here, he's responsible for you. And then another is in the first person where he says I will be what I will be or I will create what I want to create. I'm the one who is the sovereign Lord. But it's a personal name. Now, this may be old hat to you. If it is, let me repeat it for you to be patient with me for those for whom it is an old hat. The Jews believed that they should be very careful about the law to keep it. So they developed a concept of what they call fencing the law. And the idea was that if here was the law, if you didn't get close to it, if you kept the distance between you and the possibility of breaking it, you wouldn't break it. So they built a fence between you and the law so that they'd stop you here and so you would never break it. Like for instance, if the speed limit was 65 and the good Jewish mentality would be to put a governor on your car so you couldn't go over 45 and then there'd be no chance of your, you'd have a 20 mile margin, there'd be no chance of your breaking the law. That's what the rabbis called fencing the law. Now, one of the laws was, you will remember, thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. And so they decided if you never pronounce his name, then you couldn't take it in vain. So the Jews never pronounced, after a certain period of time, never pronounced the name that God gave to Moses in the wilderness. Now, they had a text and they had to write it, but in Hebrew there are no vowels. And if you get a children's book, a religious book from a Jewish synagogue, from a conservative or an orthodox synagogue, as it writes in English, as they write in English, wherever they come to the name God, they will put G, capital G, dash, and a little d. Because they don't even spell in English the word God. They're letting you know that that name is holy, it's sacred, and you're supposed to be very irreverent with it. And if you never pronounce it, then there's no chance of you being irreverent with it. Now, the end result is that we don't know what the vowels are that go with the four consonants that are in the Hebrew text. You've got Y, H, W, H. Now, I suspect most of you know this, but the word Jehovah is a word which never existed until they translated the German Bible, and you had these four consonants and no vowels to go with it. So, what they did was, they did what the Hebrews did. The Hebrews, when they came to the word Yahweh, or however it was pronounced, they would pronounce not the name of God, but they would pronounce the Hebrew word for Lord, Adonai. I was at Princeton, and we had in our class an Orthodox Jewish boy, and we would read the Hebrew. When we came to the Y, H, W, H, the name of God, we would say Yahweh. That's what they taught us to do at Princeton. When he came to it, he'd be reading the Lord, he'd see Y, H, W, H, and he'd pronounce Adonai. That's the Hebrew word for Lord. Now, in your translation, you can tell the difference by, if it is capital L, little o, little r, little d, then it's the Hebrew word Adonai. But if it is in your text, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, then the Hebrew behind it is the personal name of God, which God gave to Moses. Yahweh, let me call it that. So that behind this psalm, you don't have a text that has eleven uses of a title. You have behind this text, or in this text originally, eleven uses of the personal name of the Lord God of Israel, and the psalmist is telling the world, I not only know God, I know His name. And he is exalting in the fact that he knows the name of God. You know, I walk across the campus, and I hear Dr. Tenlaw, and I turn and look. If I walk across the campus and I hear somebody say Dennis, and I turn and look, I turn in with a different attitude. And I think you understand what I'm talking about. Because there are people in your lives that you know their names, and you call them by their personal names. You may even have a nickname for them. And it's interesting, the Yah on Hallelujah may be sort of the counterpart to that nickname bit, because it is a short and a familiar form that occurs in the Old Testament for the name of God. So the psalmist is coming down to the end of his worship in the book of Psalms, and he is talking about God. But he's not talking just about God. He's talking about the God whose name he knows, whom he knows personally, and he is exalting in that. Now, when I deal with this, I always remember a story out of my own ministry. I was pastoring, and I had a ladies' Bible class. I had some fascinating people in that Bible class, which my friends back here from Schenectady will remember and Albany. But I remember one lady came one Tuesday morning, and she had never been there before. Her husband was a steel man in the area. There were prominent Presbyterians and well-to-do people. He could lecture by the hour on all the cathedrals of Europe. And when they did occasionally come to our services for church because we were in their community, he always corrected my grammar at the end of my sermon. As he'd walk out the door, he would tell me where I made my mistakes. One day he looked at me and said, Ken Law, if you want to use like as a conjunction, you can. But it irritates me you wake me up seven times this morning. Now, his wife came into that Bible class. She was a writer and a very gifted, creative person. So we got the Bible class started, and I was going along, and suddenly up went her hand, and I said, yes. And she said, I don't believe a word of that. And everybody blinked, and I said, what's that? She said, I don't believe a word of that. That's not right at all. And so that started, and for about 50 minutes we went at it. So some of the older ladies in the class came to me afterwards, and they said, if it's going to be like this, we don't want to come back. And I said, wait a minute. She's never heard anything like this before in her life. You need to give a little play for the fish to run a little before you yank him. And I said, give us a little time. So the next week when we began, there she was. I bowed my head and prayed, and when I looked up, her hand went up. And I thought, uh-oh. And so I said, yes, Betsy? And she looked up at me and said, you know, something interesting. I went home last week and checked, and you were right, and I was wrong. I thought, well, that's nice. And so we started into the Bible class, and a few minutes, up went her hand again, and around we went at it again. But one day Betsy turned to me, and she said, you know, this is interesting, but some of this I don't like. She said, now, this love of God, I can tolerate that. But this love of Jesus bit nauseates me. And I sort of blinked, and I said, what do you mean, Betsy? Oh, this love of Jesus bit. It nauseates me. Well, I thought, well, I understand that. Most of us are more comfortable with God when he's long ways off, but we don't know him. One Sunday, Elsie and I, we'd had three sessions that morning, and we had come home, and we were sitting at our table, dinner table, about 115, 120, and the phone rang. And when the phone rang, I went to answer it, and it was Betsy. And Betsy said she was not a member of our church. She hadn't been in church that morning. So I said, yes, Betsy. She said, could you come over? And I said, you mean right now? She said, yes, right now. And so I said, you know, I thought, wait a minute, something's happened. So I said, all right. So I left my lunch, my family, and I went. Walked into this palatial home on Colonial Drive. She was standing in the corridor. Their home opened. There was a corridor at the door. And so as I walked into it, there she stood, and the tears were streaming down her cheek. And I said, Betsy, what happened? And she looked back at me and said, Dennis, I see it. I see it. I have never seen it before in my life. But this morning, I saw it. And I said, Betsy, what'd you see? She said, I was sitting in the choir, and we were having communion. And he took the bread, and he broke it, and said, this is my body which is broken for you. And he took the cup, and he said, this is my blood which was shed for you and the remission of your sins. And she said, Dennis, I saw it. He did it for me. And you know, she got comfortable with the love of Jesus there. And it's interesting, she began talking about Jesus instead of God. Now the wonderful thing is that God is Jesus, and Jesus is God. But it's interesting, there's a different relationship reflected in the language, isn't there? Now the psalm is from a guy who's gotten into that personal stage. And he's finishing his time of prayer, and he's saying, I want to tell you what I'm glorying. And I want to tell you what's in my heart. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. As long as I live, I will praise the Lord. And then you get down in the middle of it, and every line begins with the Lord. Except every line begins with that personal name of God. He knows him personally. You remember when old Peter Bowler was working on John Wesley, and he said, do you believe Jesus is the Savior of the world? Yes, he said, I believe he's the Savior of the world. Well, do you believe he's your Savior? Well, he said, I believe he died for the sins of the world. And old Peter Bowler kept pushing. And the day came, you remember, when Wesley suddenly said, and I felt that God, for Christ's sake, had forgiven me my sins, even mine. And I think in that passage there are six personal pronouns, singular personal pronouns jammed right together. I felt that God, for Christ's sake, had forgiven me my sins, even mine. Now that's what our business is. It's to get God out of the distance and get him right down in the middle of us and get us related to him where we know him. And we're not talking about something, an abstraction or something other piece, but we're talking about somebody we know. Now, that's the beautiful thing in the psalm. But now notice what his conclusions are. Look at verses 3 and 4. It's amazing to me what we were saying yesterday about how the Old Testament contains within it implicitly everything you're going to find in the New Testament. And there's a consonance between the two. Now look at these two verses. Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth. On that very day their plans perish. Now, you know, I thought, what do I say? Don't put your trust in princes, noble persons. It's the nobility. The Hebrew is the word for a nobleman. Don't put your trust in mortals. And the Hebrew there is don't put your trust in a son of man. You remember how Jesus used the term son of man of himself? Really what he was saying was, I'm a human. That's what ben adam means. It means one of us, one of us. He said don't put your trust in princes in whom there is no help. And the Hebrew word for help is the word teshuah, which is a noun form of the name Yeshua, which is the name of Jesus and which is the word for salvation. So really the word could be translated here. Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, in whom there is no salvation. If there's any salvation, it ain't going to come from us. It's going to come from a higher realm because our breath will depart and we'll return to the earth and when we do everything we've dreamed will go with us. So what he's saying is there's no hope from our level. Our hope comes from the level where Yahweh is. Now, I wish we had time to deal with that. But do you know what we perpetually do? We perpetually think there's hope somewhere else other than in God. And do you know what human history is? Human history is the story of men trying to find help somewhere else. You think of all the political programs that we've had and you watch them all go sour. You think of all the hope that we attach. Every four years we try to put together, somebody tries to put together a program that can catch the fancy and we say, ah, we're going to bring the kingdom in, you know. And then four years later somebody's got another one or if they last eight years, eight years later, or if you get an administration that will stay in like FDR and their Democrats did a long time, sooner or later it'll turn. Human history is the story of our efforts to find help somewhere other than in God. And that basically is what idolatry is. You know, America believed that if you got everybody educated that'd solve all their problems. And I've lived to see the day when education, and I'm in education. Education isn't going to do it. We've got more people with college degrees and university degrees than any time in history. And now we've got people with university degrees who can't read and write. Did you know that 78% of the colleges and universities in this country do not require a course in history of Western civilization to graduate to get a degree? 41% of all the colleges and universities in the United States don't require a course in history of any kind? That's what you call voluntary amnesia. Cultural voluntary amnesia. Yeah, I could keep on going on down the line. It is incredible. Education's not going to be an answer. I'm an educator. I've given most of my life to it. But we keep looking. This is the Old Testament teaching on what Luther calls sola gratia. That the only thing saving is in God, not in us. You know, when the revival broke at Asbury, the thing that kept coming to me was, you know, I'd rather have one moment of divine activity than a thousand years of the best of you and me, because there's a qualitative distinction between the two. We keep thinking that somewhere or other, if we stack up enough human effort, enough of what we've got, that we can cross the line into something significant. But the psalmist says, why am I so happy about Yahweh? Because I found out where the hope is. It is not in us. It's not at this level. It is in him. Now, who is he? He is the God of Jacob. Our time's almost out, so we're not going to be able to develop. He's the God of Jacob. Just let me say this. He is the God of history. He's not starting something new today. It's something that's been going on since the patriarchs back there, and we have a chance to get into it. And if we want to know what he's like and what he wants to do, all you've got to do is start back there with the patriarchs and see what he's been doing all along, and he wants us to be right in the middle of that stream. And he's not going to quit now. He's just gotten started in the best he's yet to be. But if you want to know what's coming, you've got clues in what he's done behind. The God of Jacob. And who is the God of Jacob? He's a God who can take a rascal and make a person who prevailed with God out of him. And I remember one preacher in this country who said he had an Irish cop in his church who'd come to prayer meetings every Wednesday night in Detroit. And he said every time he had a testimony, he'd say, I worship the God of Jacob. If God can do anything with Jacob, he can do something with me. And there you've got the story. You know, the sneak thief, the supplanter, the God of Jacob. But he's that God. He's been in business a long time, and we need to know it. We need to know what he's done, because what he's done is a clue to what he wants to do, and he's got more to do now than he ever had to do before, and he's not quitting. He's not going out of business. He's just gotten a good start, and we have a chance to be a part of that. And so the psalmist says, that's the God who is Yahweh. Now he says, happy are those whose health is in Him and whose hope is in the Lord, Yahweh their God, who made the heaven and the earth. He's the Creator. He made it all. And if He made it all, then you notice the last verse in the psalm, Yahweh will reign forever. He's in control, and He's never abdicated. Now that makes a difference. Yesterday I was going to use in closing, and I forgot it. Do you remember a story that comes out of the life of David Livingstone? He had been traveling all day, running from a band of cannibals who wanted to capture him. And he had managed to stay a relatively safe distance ahead of them. But he was worn out, had traveled all day running to escape. And so he needed some food, and he knew if he didn't, he'd slow his pace down. And so he stopped and built a fire and was preparing him some food. And while he was preparing his food, he picked his Bible, flipped it open, and read, and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. And he said, I read that, and I thought about who he was, that he's the Lord of Lords. And he said, I closed my Bible, ate my food, gave thanks, prepared my bedding, and went to sleep. Because he said, I figured he could take care of it. Now, that's the thing that the Christian knows that nobody else knows. In the midst of incredible uncertainty, they can have peace because of the one whom they were. He's the creator. He made it all. He started it, and he's going to finish it. I had an old prophet, Princeton, that was, those were the days when the Presbyterian church was massive. Most of its leadership was what we used to style, old style modernism, you know. They ruled out all the miraculous and all the rest. Otto Pieper was invited to speak to a group of Presbyterian preachers, and he spoke. And in it, there was some implication that Jesus was going to come back. And so, when they opened the question and answer period, one of the preachers stood up and said, Now, Dr. Pieper, you're one of the most renowned New Testament scholars in the world. German scholar, you know. All the great ones were supposed to come from Germany. And he said, Did I get a trace of an implication in what you said that you believed in the second coming? And Dr. Pieper said, Well, yes. He started it all. I figured he'd wind it up, too. Now, that's the kind of God he's saying, I know him. And I belong to him, and he belongs to me. We ought to walk through life differently from other people. But I'm just now, all my time's gone, but I've just now gotten to what I wanted to get to. So, you'll have to give me a minute to look at that. Look at what he says about him. I know him. Now, he says, Now, the incredible thing is that this was written at least a half a millennium before Christ, and maybe the better part of a millennium. Now, I want you to notice the God he's gotten acquainted with. I've decided he got pretty close. Most of us don't get close. Most of us get close enough that we see the fireworks, but he got close enough to see his nature. You remember yesterday, we were talking about the Psalmist in the 86, says, I want to know you. Look at what he says. You made the heavens and the earth, and you keep faith forever. You're the covenant God. You're the God of history, the God of creation, the God of covenant. You execute justice for the oppressed. You give food to the hungry. Yahweh sets the prisoners free. Yahweh opens the eyes of the blind. Yahweh lifts up those who are bowed down. Yahweh loves the righteous. Yahweh watches over the strangers. He upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin. Yahweh will reign forever. You're God of Zion for all generations. Praise Yahweh. Hallelujah. Now, do you notice what he says he does? His works are an indication of his nature. He executes justice for the oppressed. He gives food to the hungry. He sets the prisoners free. He opens the eyes of the blind. He lifts those who are bowed down, those that are broken. He loves the righteous. He takes care, and Yahweh watches over strangers, the orphan, and the widow. Now, do you notice the list? The oppressed, the hungry, the prisoner, the blind, the broken, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. That's who Yahweh is. He's the God who cares about all those people. You know who they are? They're the people who can't take care of themselves. They're the people who can't do much for Yahweh either. And here is the God that he says, I want to praise Him forever, because He reigns forever. He's the God who cares about those who can't care for themselves. I was thinking about what we heard last night. You know, we said yesterday the Old Testament cries out for more. This is a cry for the one we heard about last night. The psalmist saw a God who was not interested in the powerful. He was not interested unless they had need. He was not interested in the noble unless they had need. He was interested in those who needed what he had to give to them. Now, it is an astounding social gospel passage coming out of personal religion. You know, in our day, we tried to pit those two against each other. But you know, what I notice is that personal religion that doesn't make me care about the people who can't care for themselves is not God's religion. And social gospel that wants to meet the needs of the people that doesn't spring out of a personal knowledge of the one true God is ultimately destructive of human self-interest and human best interest. If we had time, I wish we could go into it first. But you know what I've noticed? I've noticed that when people really meet God, I'm not talking about having a religious experience, really meet the one true God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, their interests get turned out instead of in. And everything in human life turns our interests this way except for Him. But when we meet Him, it all goes this way. You know, we could spend six months discussing that and documenting it. I've just been reading a biography of William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a nobleman, one of these nobles from England, upper class, wealthy. He'd take six months off with his family to take them down to the Riviera and go by carriage and ship down across Europe, live in the Alps, you know, and all of this, six and eight months at a time. Money was no problem. Rich upper class. When he was 21, he was elected to parliament. And he determined he was, you know, going to be a great parliamentarian and a great political figure. He was a little, short, funny-looking guy with a turned-up nose, which made him all the more ambitious to make a mark for himself, you know. He didn't have the kind of stature and stuff that other people admired. He was going to do it with his political career. And his mother and two of his sisters were not too well, and so he decided to take them to the Riviera. And the way they were going was by coach. His mother and two sisters and, I think, a servant in one, and he was going to be in the other one, so he needed company. So he asked a friend who couldn't go, and so he looked around for somebody who'd, you know, spend six months. And so he asked for a tutor that he knew in Cambridge, I think it was. And so this fellow worked it out and went with him. And before they left, they said, We'll need some reading material. And so he had been visiting, and he saw a book called The Rise and Development of Religion in the Soul by Philip Goddry. And it was sort of a bestseller at the time. And so he turned to his friend that had given him no indication of anything religious about him and said, Do you know anything about this? And the guy said, Yeah, I've heard it highly recommended. Let's take it. So in their coach riding down across France, William Wilberforce's eyes were bad. And so his friend read Philip Goddry to him. And so Wilberforce, a basically agnostic, asked all these questions of his friend. At the end of six months, when they deposited Wilberforce at Number 10 Downing Street, which is where his trip ended, he had become convinced of the biblical view of man and of God and of Christ. But he was not a Christian. Four months later, his family took off again, this time for four months. And this time the same guy went with him. But this time, instead of taking the book, they both took Greek New Testament. And so all the way down across Europe, they read the Greek New Testament together. It's interesting. I'd be interested in how many members of the House of Representatives could read their Greek New Testament. We're more educated, you know. But anyway, they read their Greek New Testament. By the time that they started in June, by September, Wilberforce said, I knew that Christ was the only way of salvation and that I was on the outside. And by the time they landed back October the 22nd, 1785, at Number 10 Downing Street, he said, I knew I had no hope apart from Christ. And slowly his life began to change. Do you know, for 48 years, he was the chief spokesman for the abolition of slavery in the British Parliament. Forty-eight years he fought the battle, again and again and again. And on the 26th of July in 1833, the House of Commons in England voted the abolition of slavery. And they came and told William Wilberforce, who was a very old man, that was on Friday, and on Monday morning at three o'clock, William Wilberforce died. You know why Ralph's sitting here? Because of that. You know why we aren't bigger sinners than we are? Because of William Wilberforce. Now what happened? Social interest, it was locked up with Philip Doddridge's The Rise and Fall of Religion and the Soul of Man and the Greek New Testament and Western culture. Civilization is different. Nobody ever meets the one true God and gets to know Him, but they get turned inside out. And somebody else's well-being becomes more important than his own. And the funny thing is, when I get to the place where your well-being is more important than mine, you've got a chance of getting to the place where my well-being is more important than yours. And it's a different world when you're the guarantor of my rights and I'm the guarantor of yours. That's heaven. But when I'm the guarantor of mine and you're the guarantor of yours, that's hell. And it's dark. The only way to turn it around is to see the nature of God that we heard about last night. And you know, I don't think that happens in the ordinary church service. Laughter I don't think it happens in the ordinary church service. Some way or other, I don't think it can. But you know what I do believe? I believe if you can get a group like this together that just spends a little time opening themselves to God and to His Spirit and to His Word, who knows what will come out. And that's the purpose of these sessions. It's not so we can be with each other. As much as we like that. But you know why you like being with each other? Because you get Him in the package. He's the one we're looking for. Let's pray together for a moment. Lord, there are days when we think we're the most privileged people in the world because of what we know as well as because of what we have. And then there are days when we don't think it, we know it. But don't let us play lightly with what we know and the truth we have. But don't let us stop just with truth about You, Lord. Don't let us stop until we've met You and seen You for who You are. Because when we see You for who You are, then we find out who we're supposed to be. So help us, Lord. Thank You for these hours we have together. And as we go, let us go from the fellowship of each other. But Lord, thank You that we don't have to go from Your fellowship. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Christ of the Cross and the Spirit of Pentecost can go abiding within our hearts in intimate fellowship with us. And that's what we want. And we give You praise for it. And we join with the psalmist as he says, Hallelujah. Amen.