Dr. Ed Young - The Smile of God

We read in Psalm 3 how Absalom, the son of King David, launched a revolution. Every time a decision was made by David and those in power, Absalom would go take the opposite course. In other words, he set up a new system of justice that was contrary to the biblical principles that David tried to operate on — the truth of Scripture. Therefore, he changed the whole system of justice. Absalom went around and changed the history of Israel, pushing out any precedent.

Now, we see in Psalm chapter 3 that he is engulfed; he’s surrounded by thousands of people, while David and his little band fled from Jerusalem. The king fled barefoot, covered in tears, weeping and broken. He crosses the Kidron and climbs to the other side. Remember, he sends the Ark of the Covenant back, the presence of God, and then he crosses the Jordan, hiding and desperate. Remember that little phrase in Psalm 3, «the bottom’s falling out,» and David says there’s no hope; it’s all over for the kingdom. The people of God have been exploited and oppressed. Then comes that little phrase, «But Thou, O Lord.» What a great phrase! Whatever is going on in my life, whatever is going on in your life, however we’re oppressed, confused, broken, or sick-if we can look up and say, «But Thou, O Lord,» that changes everything. David did that.

Then he comes to the next chapter, where the problem is different. It’s not fear; evidently, the army was gathering to resist the godlessness of his son Absalom. Now David faces another problem: he is being attacked personally by those who opposed him. They were slandering, fabricating lies, gossiping, and recalling all of David’s sins, throwing them back in his face. We see a strange thing here that I didn’t notice as I read the Psalm over and over again. Go back to something you’ve heard in church all your life if you’ve been around- «The Old Testament is the New Testament concealed.» You’ve heard that «The New Testament is the Old Testament revealed.»

Oh, it sounds good, but what does it mean? It means that in the Old Testament, there are the first notes, the first inklings, the first moments of fulfilled prophecy. We see it in lies; we see it in the Halitta- that’s the German word for salvation history. Indeed, that’s what the Bible is аbout: salvation history. We observe little themes, notes, and chords in the Old Testament pointing to fulfillment in the New Testament. Here we have the law, and the law is fulfilled inside of grace in the New Testament. You have little themes in the Old Testament that are fulfilled in the New Testament. We can see that in Psalm 4, which beautifully illustrates what happens in the New Testament as we see the gleam of it in Psalm chapter 4, pointing to the fulfillment in the New Testament.

Open your Bibles to Psalm chapter 4, verses 1 and 2: «Answer me when I call, O Lord, God of my righteousness; You have relieved me in my distress; be gracious to me and hear my prayer.» By the way, this is the word of salvation. Well, that’s a New Testament word, isn’t it? But here we see the gleaming typology pointing to salvation. Now David is saying, in light of all of this, «I am saved.» Here it is again: «Answer me when I call.» The picture there of «call» and «answer» is that of a child trying to get the attention of their father. David is saying, «Father, here I am! I am desperate!» I had desperation physically; now I have desperation emotionally, as everybody is attacking me and they slander. He says, «Hear me.» In other words, he’s saying, «I want to see Your face!»

When I had been away from home for a day or two, I came back, and my boys were young. Ben was about three or four years old. I will never forget this. I came in, probably gave him some little gift, and talked for a minute. I sat down in my chair and got all my papers out, reading what had happened. Ben was still on the floor playing, talking to me, and I was saying, «Uh-huh, yeah, okay.» All of a sudden, he got up, crashed through the paper in my lap, and got right in my face. He pulled my face around to his and said, «Daddy, I want you to look at me when I talk to you!» This is what David is saying. He is alienated from family and friends; he’s desperate. Now he calls to God when all those who are slandering him and bringing up old sins that had long since been forgiven are attacking. He says, «I want to look at Your face!» Boy, have you ever felt like that? «God, I want to see Your face!» This is exactly the picture we see here in this Psalm: «Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness; You have relieved me in my distress.» That is salvation. «Be gracious to me and hear my prayer.» That is when we are saved.

«O sons of men, how long will my honor become a reproach? How long will you love what is worthless and aim at deception?» There are two parts to salvation here. By the way, this is sort of a preamble; this is the planting of seeds that will be fulfilled in the New Testament. This is salvation seen here in the Old Testament. First of all, it is personal salvation; that’s what we need. First, personal salvation. Here’s the word grace, here’s the word renew, here’s the word relationship — he’s saying, «I am now righteous.» These are the early notes, the early chords of what we will see in fulfillment in salvation. It is a personal salvation.

A guy went to the beach and waded out into the water, as many of us have. He steps into a hole, a cliff; he just falls down. He thought he was wading, and when he bobs up, he shouted, «Help me; save me! I can’t swim!» The guy sitting on the beach says, «I can’t swim either, but I’m not making such a fuss out of it.» You see, the guy who was over his head-man, that was personal, wasn’t it? The guy on the beach had the same problem; he was doomed himself, but he didn’t know it yet. What David is talking about is wanting personal salvation. He has been drowned by the rebellion of his son and half the nation. Now he has come up, and he sees that he has been saved-that’s personal.

Then the second part is more than personal-it’s practical salvation. That’s the guy who is going down. «O sons of men, how long will my honor become a reproach? How long will you love what is worthless and aim at deception?» Are you around people all the time who are negative and critical? Every glass is half empty. No matter what comes up, they see the dark side of it. I read this week that the oldest living person in the world today, as far as we know, is a woman in Spain who is 115 years old. When someone lives a long time, the question is always asked: «What do you attribute the length of your life to?» They say all kinds of things. If you’ve studied that or bumped into it through the years, you know what she said: «I attribute my long life to staying away from toxic people.» That’s good counsel, folks! What David is saying is, «I’m in Christ, I’m saved, I’m righteous, but there are toxic people around me who keep blasting away, recalling all of my sins, past and present.» He says, «I want salvation from them-a personal relationship with God and salvation from all the toxicity that surrounds so many of us.»

Salvation is in verses one and two, and then we look at verses three and four. It is sanctification. He said, «But know that the Lord has set apart the godly man for Himself; the Lord hears when I call to Him. Therefore tremble and do not sin; meditate in your heart upon your bed and be still.» This is sanctification. He said, «I have been set apart.» David knows that all the challenges facing him are part of God’s process of setting him apart. He is finding out how God has indeed blessed him, how God has indeed used him, how God has indeed called him, and how God indeed is preparing him for the future.

How do you know some little things or big things that come up in life and you say, «You know, God is purifying me? God is cleaning up my act? God is challenging me»? I read this, and I thought about when Jo Beth and I were first married. We dated for five and a half years. I went to be an interim pastor of a church in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for the summer. We got into my car, which had a little cart we pulled behind us, containing literally everything we owned. What was in that cart? Just our wedding present — that’s all we had. We were making our way back to Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest, where I had been one year before we got married, and Jo Beth finished college. We get to the seminary, and I had maybe $400 to our name, period-that was it! We drove all the way to Wake Forest, and I had no place to stay. She didn’t have a job. I had already tried to preach for some churches, but I wasn’t married; I didn’t have a wife who could play the piano. Therefore, those little churches weren’t interested in me, besides being a poor preacher at that time.

So, we went to Wake Forest. I got in line to register. There was a long line. I was in front of someone I knew fairly well from the first year of seminary and behind someone I knew casually. While we were waiting in line and talking, I said, «You know I got married!» «Oh, good!» he said. «You know, Jo Beth needs to find a job. Jobs are scarce around here. All the students are competing.» He said, «My wife works at NC State, and there' s a professor looking for a secretary to help him write his thesis.» I’ll never forget what his thesis was: «The Hog Phase in Eastern North Carolina.»

He did it and got a Ph.D., folks! Anyway, Jo Beth went and applied for that job. He said, «My wife is going to work; why don’t you let her ride along so she can apply for the job?» I said, «That sounds great.» Then I said, «I don’t have a place to stay; I didn’t plan for that.» You know how advanced my planning was! The guy behind me said, «Everything on campus is full, but you know, there’s a dorm mother named Mrs. Winders about ten miles from town. She has a real log cabin-a real one, not a made-up one.» I said, «That sounds perfect!» So, we went to see Mrs. Winders. Jo Beth and I saw the log cabin, and let me tell you, it was so romantic! You go up these steps to sleep in a loft. It was literally one room: a little kitchen and a little sitting area, all in a log cabin out in the woods. Boy, could you find a better place than that! So, we planned to go to school together.

Jo Beth goes to Raleigh, applies for that job. There were about 70 or 80 other young ladies trying to get the same job. Jo Beth got it because she was a college graduate. That wasn’t the reason; she had taken typing and shorthand in high school, so she got the job. Now she had a job making the lofty salary of $19 a month! Where could you live with more influence than that and go to school? I could study, go to school, and play basketball in the afternoons, and that’s what I did. Everything was great until it got cold.

It gets cold in North Carolina. It snowed, and we could look out and see outside through those logs. The heating was inadequate. I said we have to do something; we’re going to freeze to death! So, I went to the registrar’s office. It was Christmas, and everybody was leaving. I said, «Look, you’re building some new little apartments over here, four of them. I’d like to see if I could stay in one.» He said, «My goodness! We’ve got a waiting list for 20 or 30 couples.» I said, «Oh, dear!» He said, «What’s your problem?» I said, «I’m staying in a log cabin that’s freezing to death; that’s my problem! Other than that, we’re fine.» I said, «Thank you; may I put my name on the list? If I stayed here for 20 years, I might get one of them.» As I was walking out, he said, «You know, they’re just finishing one over here, and it needs to be heated.» We were staying there through Christmas, and he said, «If you can move in right now, it’s yours.» I said, «It’s done!»

He said, «Now you’ve got to write a check for $40 for a down payment to confirm it.» I said, «Great!» So, I wrote a check for $40 and gave it to him. I drove back, picked up Jo Beth, and told her the news. I said, «You know, I just wrote a check for $40.» She said, «How much?» I said, «Well, $40.» She said, «Let me look it up.» She said we only had $11 in the bank! So, I had written a bad check to a seminary that was training me to be a pastor and supposedly a man of God. I didn’t know what to do.

The campus was empty; all my friends were gone. I had no way back then to get $40, and I knew they would probably cash it during the holidays. Here I would be, Pastor to be, or not to be, having written a bad check to the seminary. We were praying and wondering how we could get $40. As we drove in, we thought about who we could ask. The campus was closed down; it was snowy; it was all over. We passed by our post office box and opened it. I had an aunt, who was like my second mother. She had no children, and I hadn' t heard from her in a long time. We pulled out an envelope; there were two $20 bills!

She was a beautician who fixed hair in her home. That $40 felt like $100,000 to us. I looked at it, looked at Jo Beth, and said, «But Thou, O Lord!» You see, God affirmed so many times, when we seek to walk with Him, things happen that we say are accidents or circumstantial, but it’s «But Thou, O Lord!» That’s what David was experiencing in sanctification.

Then the next thing is worship -a powerful thing. Verse 5: «Offer the sacrifices of righteousness and trust in the Lord.» Verse 6: «Many are saying, 'Who will show us any good? ' Lift up the light of Your countenance upon us.» What does that mean-"Lift up the light of Your countenance»? It means, «Lord, I want to see Your face!» Serve the Lord with gladness; come before His presence with singing! Know that the Lord, He is God! May the Lord bless you and keep you! May the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious unto you! Oh, yes, and give you peace!

The face of God-does anybody here want to see the face of God, the smile of God? Boy, how is that possible? Listen, we have to understand one basic premise of life: God created all of us so that we could know Him and so He could know us. But how do we see Him? How do we see the very face of God? Quickly, follow me; you have to think and concentrate for a moment. You remember when Jesus was crucified, a lot of things supernaturally happened. «My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?» Immediately following that, remember there was darkness, earthquakes, the opening of graves-so many things happened. But the first thing, Matthew tells us, that happened after Jesus said, «It is finished,» was that the veil in the temple was torn- not from bottom to top but from top to bottom.

That veil was what kept everybody out of the Holy of Holies, which is where the Ark was, where God was in Shekinah glory in the temple. Now, for the first time, anybody and everybody could go and look into the presence of God and enter the Holy of Holies. You see, what happened? Jesus died for sin; He took sin upon all of humanity. Therefore, now when people have said in the Old Testament, «If you look at God, you’ll die"-right? Anyone who sees God will die-but now in the New Testament, if you want to see God, you just look at Jesus.

That was God in human flesh. When Jesus died and took all of our sin, the sins of the world, upon Himself, the access to God opened up. We can go in, because as David talks about the righteousness of God in his life, we can go. We can look into the Holy of Holies, and we can see into the Holy of Holies. Nobody went in there during the days of the temple except the high priest once a year to make a sacrifice on the altar, but Jesus made the total sacrifice and made the smile of God, the presence of God, available to everybody.

Let me ask you something: why is it that so many of us have stayed outside the Holy of Holies? Why? Why have we never gone in and experienced the face, the literal presence of God? Why have we never entered? We can qualify because Jesus, in Christ, has made you and me righteous, right? We’ve been forgiven; we’ve been cleansed. Why do we not go in? Why do we sort of stay outside and never see the smile of God? You know why? It’s because we still have a lot in our lives that has not yet been crucified.

Galatians 2:20: many of us know it, and a lot of us are familiar with it: «I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.» Well, have I really been crucified with Christ? Let me tell you something about being crucified. Being crucified means blood is shed, right? Can you have a crucifixion without the shedding of blood? Can anyone here be crucified without shedding blood? What we’ve done is take the cross and eliminate its reality because, by the way, when you get on a cross, you die. Death is never good; death is never fun. Death is horrific; it is a result of sin.

Therefore, if you and I are to know something of the very smile of God, the countenance of God, we have to genuinely go to that cross. The cross is horrible; it’s horrific; it’s brutal. It’s painful, and we must experience something of the pain in your life and my life to be crucified. When we stay there and die, what is the veil keeping us from going into the Holy of Holies? It’s the veil of flesh, pride, and self that covers our hearts and minds. That must be crucified and cut out of us for us to be able to enter the Holy of Holies and see the smile of God. Spend some time at the foot of the cross and die, and then like Jesus, we will be resurrected. Suddenly, we begin to see, to feel, and to know the presence of God in the lives of people and the events of life, and God will do a miraculous work in all of us and in the America in which we live.