Sermon Tone Analysis

Psalm 40 is so beautiful.

I have meditated on the first paragraph so many times, especially as a young man.

I felt as if my struggle against sin was a miry bog; and God's forgiveness was a rock I could stand on.

And when I stood on that rock, I wanted to sing!

I wanted to sing praise to God.

And I wanted that praise to result in others seeing and fearing and putting their trust in the Lord.

I knelt by my bed with Psalm 40 under my nose and asked that God do these things described here.

I also took comfort in the words of the next paragraph, beginning in v. 4:

It really struck me that God actually thought about me.

His thoughts toward us were "many."

As a young person not sure of my place in the world, it meant a lot to me—and still does—that God would inspire the psalmist to say this.

"In sacrifice you have not delighted"

But it's Psalm 40:6–8 that we'll be focusing on today, along with one passage in the New Testament that quotes it, Hebrews 10.

We'll be training our attention on these words about sacrifice, about delighting to do God's will.

I have never made a sacrifice.

I say that not in the sense of missionary David Livingstone, who meant that compared to the reward of Christ none of his hard physical and spiritual labors in Africa were truly difficult.

Whatever hardships I’ve undergone in life, it’s true, are nothing compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ.

But when I say I’ve never made a sacrifice, I mean I’ve never killed a goat.

I’ve never wrung the neck of a dove.

I’ve never sprinkled blood on anything with a hyssop branch or waved grain over an altar.

I am a New Covenant Christian, and all those old sacrificial laws were fulfilled on my behalf long before I was born.

The closest I’ve come to watching a lamb die was on a flannelgraph board in 1985.

And I’m pretty sure there wasn’t even any blood.

And it was brought back from the dead the next week.

Or maybe that was it's twin.

But believers in the one true God, taken as a whole, have spent more time under these sacrificial requirements than we have spent free from them.

Even Noah, more than 2,000 years before Christ, made sacrifices and somehow knew the difference between clean and unclean animals, Genesis tells us.

For countless men and women and children among the “B.C.” people of God, sacrifices were something they dared not give up.

So you can imagine being an ancient worshiper of Yahweh in the kingdom of David and being pretty shocked and confused when your king writes,

You, ancient Jewish person, would say, What, David?

God opened your ears to tell you he didn’t mean all that stuff about blood sacrifices?

There goes Leviticus.

Or, King David, do you mean that God gave you deliverance in some individual circumstance—some pit, some miry bog—without requiring any sacrifice that particular time?

Or are you just saying that something else is more important than sacrifice?

Now, that would be okay: Samuel already told us that “to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams” (1 Sam.

15:22).

But no, David seems to be going further than this.

Glance at the next two verses, which we'll spend more time on later:

David is almost pitting sacrifices against delighting to do God’s will and having it in his heart.

The two are in some kind of tension here.

He seems to be planting the seed of a tree which will one day grow taller than the sacrificial system and overshadow it, even starve it of light.

"You have given me an open ear"

And David insists not only that what he's saying about God is true, but that he got this truth from God.

That's what he means by, "You have given me an open ear."

That may not be obvious, so let's talk about it a bit.

If you make a habit of comparing Bible translations whenever a phrase strikes you—and the internet makes this so easy—then you might notice something a little strange about this verse.

Most translations say, "My ears you have opened."

But a few say things like, "My ears you have pierced," or even "My ears you have dug"!

Whenever you see the translations vary that much, you can guess that one of two things is going on: 1) either this is very difficult language and they're doing their best to understand it, or 2) this is an idiom, a figure of speech like "you're pulling my leg," that some translations translate literally and others choose not to.

It is not a sign of unfaithfulness to the Bible to give an interpretive translation of an idiom.

Neither is it necessarily more faithful or righteous to be literal, because literal translations can sometimes be meaningless if the idiom just doesn't translate well.

Translate "holy cow" literally into Spanish and you get "santa vaca," which is gobbledygook.

Meaningless.

Translate "you're pulling my leg" literally into German, and you'll get very funny looks in Berlin, or indignant denials.

"I'm not even touching your leg!"

In this case, the text does literally say, "My ears you have dug."

What could this mean?

Yesterday, all three of our kids got haircuts at a ritzy salon called Great Clips.

As the curls fell off of good little Ellery's ears, it became apparent that there was an excess of a waxy substance in there that we hadn't noticed.

Poor kid.

Needed a few Q-tips.

That may be the picture here.

Or I think of the time a puppet on a show I remember watching 30 years ago accidentally left cotton balls in his ears and started misunderstanding everything people said.

Once he dug them out he could hear again just fine.

I don't usually mention ear wax in sermons, in fact, "Don't mention ear wax in sermons" was one of the first things they taught us in school.

But I'm just trying to explain what David said!

David is talking as if there was a blockage that the Lord rid him of.

God opened up his ears.

Why? Apparently so he could hear a truth that he wanted to make sure David got.

And here's that truth again; look at it.

God hasn't delighted in sacrifice and offering; he hasn't asked for burnt offerings and sin offerings.

You can see why even a faithful person like David would need to have his ears cleared out to really hear this, because it is very easy to let religious duties form a hard crust all over the soft heart of love for God that is supposed to be driving them.

It sometimes takes shocking language to get people to really listen—like when Jesus says that if you don't "hate father and mother and sister and lands for my sake, you won't inherit the kingdom of heaven."

That's shocking.

So is Psalm 40:6, I believe, for an ancient Jewish person.

God is not here trying to overturn the sacrificial system that, in his own plan, would last for another thousand years.

And there's simply no way David, the man whose heart’s desire it was to build the temple, was purposefully seeking to overturn, then and there, the entire sacrificial system.

"Behold, I have come"

It would take someone far more powerful to do that.

And in the very next lines, David transposes his psalm into a higher key and presages the arrival, the revelation, of just such a powerful person.

This is Jesus talking.

And I know it’s Jesus.

I’ll tell you why in a moment.

But I'm not saying David couldn't have said such things.

It’s perfectly true that it’s precisely David, of all Old Testament figures, who most delighted to do God’s will.

It’s true that it’s David, a man after God’s own heart, who had God’s law in his heart as much or more than anyone.

It’s David who wrote Psalm 119, a huge and effervescent list of praise to that divine law.

It's David who tells us in my favorite Psalm, Psalm 51, what precisely it was that God wanted instead of sacrifices, namely,

And in Psalm 40:7–8 it sounds like David is saying the same thing: inner heart delight in doing God's will is the thing that's more important than sacrifices.

That, of course, is true.

But there’s still something in vv.7–8 that transcends David.

This is Jesus, because it is only Jesus who could take the seed David planted here and make it grow.

It is only he who could undo the sacrificial system and institute doing God’s law from the delight of the heart.

I have to pause and press this home just a bit on you: do you do God's will from the heart?

Is God's law written on your heart, so that even when you do sin, your conscience always accuses you?

It is not true to say that the Old Testament made doing good works the way to get into God's kingdom and the New Testament shifted the requirement to faith, hope, and love.

Both testaments make human heart change the real goal of God's work in the world.

The whole Bible shows over and over, from Jacob in Genesis to Paul in Acts, that a change of heart is absolutely necessary for all people.

But hearts don't like to change.

They're naturally tougher than gristle.

Just go on the internet and try to persuade someone else of anything.