What WE love
Psalm 30
Main Idea: What we love drives what we do and affirms what we believe.
I. What Did David Love?
The plain and simple answer is “the LORD” and David tells us why. He describes a double deliverance in the two main stanzas of this psalm.
First, the LORD delivered David from external threats. (v.1-3)
Second, the LORD delivered David from internal despair. (v. 6-10)
C.S. Lewis calls this God’s “intolerable compliment” to those He loves. Having set His love upon us, the LORD will not let us remain who we were when He found us. He will scrub and clean, and break and mend, and squeeze and mold all our life long, relentlessly striving to make us just a little more like Jesus than we ever were and that much more like we shall be when we see him at last.
II. What Did David’s Love Drive Him to Do?
Again, the answer is simple and straight-forward. It drove him to build the Temple. We get a sense of what the Temple meant to him by looking at how he talks about it in his own words.
Psalm 27, the one thing David asks of the Lord and seeks after is to “dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.”
Psalm 122 indicates that visiting the Temple was David’s “happy place.” “I was glad when they said to him, “Let us go to the house of the LORD!”
According to Psalm 11, “The LORD is in His holy Temple.” It is from there that He sends help (Ps 20:4). It is there that He hears the cries of those who cry to Him. (Ps. 18:6) Those who will worship the LORD do so by “bowing down toward His holy Temple” (Ps. 5:7) and in His Temple, everyone cries, “Glory!” (Ps 29:9) In a life that David describes as being shepherded by goodness and mercy, his highest hope is to “dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” (Ps 23:6)
David’s passion for the Temple is not just exaggerated “religious language” poetically expressed. David literally put his money where his mouth was!
Along with cutting all of the stones that would be needed for the Temple, “David also provided great quantities of iron for nails for the doors of the gates and for clamps, as well as bronze in quantities beyond weighing, and cedar timbers without number... (1 Chron 22:3-5) A little later in that same chapter he says to Solomon: “With great pains I have provided for the house of the LORD 100,000 talents of gold, a million talents of silver, and bronze and iron beyond weighing, for there is so much of it; timber and stone, too, I have provided. To these you must add.” (1 Chron 22:14)
The rest of the chapters talk about how David organized the Levites for the maintenance of the Temple, how he organized the priests for the work of the Temple, how he arranged musicians to rotate through on monthly rhythms to fill the Temple with praise and music, how he structured the administrative infrastructure for guarding and supplying the Temple, and how he drew up the architectural renderings for the Temple.
III. What Did David Believe That Affirmed Such Love?
That there is something more than the current moment that matters most of all. That there is something beyond the Temple that is even better yet.
Psalm 2:10-12: Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
