PSALM 83. O GOD, MAKE YOUR NOISE!. "Keep not Thy silence O God. Hold not Thy peace, sand be not still O God." The psalm was written by a man who was conscious of the pressures surrounding all believers. Asaph the seer knew this very well indeed. He asks God to make His Sound; to make His noise; to make His move. Asaph is conscious all the time of the noise the enemy is making, and of the moves that wicked people were making. In this world we live in a pit of noise and intrigue. Something is taking -place constantly. The cacophony never ceases. O to hear God's sound, and to see God move. In the very first verse of the psalm we have a plea to God. The prayer is that God will not let the wicked go unchecked. The peril of God's people is great in every generation. We have the evidence of history, which Asaph did nit have, that God always sustains His people right through to the end. We have the promise in the New Testament - "and lo I am with you always." Therefore we have to reassure our hearts from time to time that God will move and make His Noise. There are times when it seems that God is doing nothing. When Asaph sang this song it looked as though God was just standing by and letting the Amalekites, and the Philistines, and the Midianites harass Israel to bring them to nought. It really seemed to him that God was doing nothing about the situation. In Febraury 1984 the U.S.A. and G.B. withdrew from Beirut. They evacuated all their own nationals who wanted to come out. Before that happened everyone was asking the question, "Why doesn't our government do something?. Our people are in that situation. Why don't they do something about it?" The Press were really getting hot about it - the people were getting stirred about it. Then, suddenly there was an evacuation. In the light of history it was revealed that the commanders of that expedition had planned the evacuation the day they arrived there. They could not reveal the fact at the time for it could have led to disaster. So whilst everyone was shouting, "Why doesn't the government do something?", the people in charge were doing something very important. When I read this piece of history my mind went to the fact that our Great Commander, the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has planned our evacuation from the very beginning. Christian Believers call it the Rapture, and one and all they are waiting for the Trumpet Sound - God's Noise. Christ spoke of it when He first came to earth. We have the promise from His own lips that He will come again and receive us unto Himself. One day the Trumpet will sound and we will at last hear the lord's sound. When God will make HIS NOISE what a response there will be from all the nations. The world is full of the noise of troublesome men. The world is full of the noise of evil. But one day the Trumpet will sound and we shall arise, for God has already planned our evacuation. Verse two of this psalm refers to the tumult of the wicked. All the tribes mentioned were famous for their hostility to the worship and service of Jehovah. It wasn't so much that they disliked the Jews; they disliked the way they worshipped. It was the way Israel claimed to worship the one and only true and living God. It condemned the way others worshipped, and of course by implication dismissed all their gods. Whenever one talks to the unregenerate, they have strong doubts as to whether their way of living satisfies, and a niggling doubt that maybe what is said about the Living God is true. When that doubt arrives, conviction comes. Conviction is really something the unregenerate mind and heart cannot abide. IF the Bible is true - they are in a terrible predicament. Asaph is faced with ALL the enemies of Jehovah; Edomites, Ishmaelites, Hagarenes, Gebalites, Ammonites, Amelakites, and Philistines alike, At first they were stealthy and cunning. But then they became, in tumult, raging - roaring - malicious. The Italian translation of this part of the psalm says, "THEY AGITATE WITH NOISE." If we think this is just past history, then we need to pause and consider the Sodomites of today with their rampaging world wide, demanding 'their rights'. Those heathens of old time anticipated easy, early, and complete victory. They commenced with crafty counsel, devising their policies in secret. Asaph says, "They have consulted against the hidden ones." (Hidden ones - 'Those who are sheltered by the Almighty') History reveals that God preserved saints in Caeser's household at the height of the mad Emperor's fury against the Christians. the hidden ones are under the special protection of the Almighty even when the heathen are on the rampage. The ungodly have always waged a war of extermination. What Hitler did to the Jews, Satan desires to do to all believers. He is an exterminator.. The Lord Jesus Christ is our deliverer. In the days of this psalm the wonder was that those nations did not wipe out Israel.. Even today it is a hopeless objective. Israel will never be exterminated whilst there is a Covenant keeping God in Heaven. We need to bear in mind that for two millennia the Devil has been trying to exterminate the Church. It will never happen. Asaph makes a request. "Make them like a wheel", literally make them like a rolling thing - a thing of no stability, out of control - going down hill fast. Asaph makes an accusation, "They are confederate against Thee." The word Confederate is used in the sense - 'they have cut the covenant'. This refers to making a covenant by cutting the sacrifice in two and passing between the parts - a solemn right which bound confederates together. Evil has covenanted against the Lord God and His people. Thus the psalmist prayers that God will do to their enemies as He did to the Midianites. Oreb and Zeeb were princes of Midian. The dreadful overthrow of those robbers is recorded in Judges chapter seven. It is the story of Gideon with his 300 men, facing the Midianites and the Amalekites and all the children of the east. "They lay along the valley like grasshoppers for multitude, and their camels as the sand by the sea shore for multitude". That was a way of saying that they were an uncountable number of enemies. You may read the story for yourself. Gideon divided his 300 into three companies. Each man had an earthenware pitcher, a trumpet, and a lamp. At night they spread themselves thinly around that host, holding their lamps under the earthenware pitchers, and having on them a sword and a trumpet. Gideon gave orders that when he blew his trumpet, they would all blow theirs and smash their earthenware jars holding up their lamps. Upon hearing the signal, each man blew his trumpet ,broke his pitcher and light blazed all round the enemy. Gideon's little army stood there, 300 hundred trumpets blowing, bearing their lamps aloft in the dark. Then they shouted, "The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon." THAT NIGHT THEY HEARD GOD'S NOISE, for suddenly "all the host ran, and cried, and fled" When God makes a noise, the enemy flees. When Christ returns, we shall hear the Trumpet sound, and in the darkness of this world a great light will shine, and the world will see the dawn of a New Bright Millennium. Copyright (c) 1996, Hedley Palmer. All rights reserved. ---------------------------------------------------- file: /pub/resources/text/hpalmer/psalms: ps-083.txt .