Surely Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow Me
April 17, 2022
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Psalm 23:1-6
1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
3 He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.
4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
We’ve been teaching through Psalm 23 each week leading up to Easter. And now we’re here; it’s Easter morning, the true Super Bowl Sunday. The sermon will be shorter this morning because of all that’s already taken place, but I can tell you that we are going to get to the classic Easter story of the empty tomb. But we’ll get there by starting here in Psalm 23:6. We’ll start here because that’s what we planned—and who doesn’t love following through with a good plan? It’s very satisfying. But why did we plan it this way? We planned Easter Sunday this way because if we start with Psalm 23:6, our understanding of the Easter story will be fuller and richer. If we start here, we’ll see that, rather than the Easter story being an aberration or strange outlier in the big story of God with his people, we’ll instead see the Easter story for what it is: the outworking of the story that God has always been telling and is indeed still telling.
This morning, we have more children in the sanctuary than normal—a wonderful thing!—because Sunday school classes were suspended. Kids, we’ll be talking about the way that God chases his people. If you have something to color or draw with, maybe you can draw a picture of being chased, which can be a scary thing, or when Jesus is chasing you, it’s a good thing.
Speaking of being chased, there was a time as a kid when I was being chased. When I was a kid my family lived in England for a few years. We moved back to the States in the winter of fourth grade. When I first arrived at Southwest Elementary School in Jefferson City, Missouri, there was a bully in that grade named David. As a stereotypical bully, he seemed taller than the rest of us. He may have been in the fourth grade a few more times than the rest of us. I don’t remember why, but he didn’t like me. And it came to the moment when he was going to “get me” at the next recess. I was worried. At that next recess, David chased me around the blacktop for a bit, and I ran as though my life depended on it because it felt like it did. But what David didn’t know is that I had taken karate for the last two years. I wish I had some cool story about how I gave him a roundhouse kick, but the pursuit around the playground ended more simply. When he got close, I stepped to the side a bit, bent down, stuck out my leg, and David went flying across the blacktop. Then it was over; teachers got involved.
The whole story feels a little silly now. But as I was thinking about this passage and the idea of being pursued, this is the story that came back to me. I could remember the fear of being pursued. Sometimes, the fear of being pursued can pounce upon us seemingly out of nowhere. The other day I left the church office, and in the alley was a woman walking her dog. When the dog saw me, it moved aggressively toward me, with a bark and growl. The woman yanked on the leash and said, “Woah.” I took a step backward. Then she shouted, “Stay, Hercules.” What I haven’t told you yet is that Hercules probably only weighed four pounds. Which emphasizes that what is pursuing us matters. A three-pound dog? Not so scary. A bully? Kinda scary. I read a book this summer by a former President in which he described the “President’s Daily Briefing.” Basically, if you’re the President, while you go to sleep at night, all the various relevant agencies assess the greatest threats pursuing you and this country. And every morning you’re handed a list, a briefing, of the scariest things pursuing you. Sometimes we wish we were President. Every morning at 8 am I’d not be so happy to find out I was President when I learned what was pursuing me each day.
Yet, look again with me at Psalm 23:6. David writes,
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me / all the days of my life, / and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD / forever.”
That word “follow” isn’t as jarring to us as it might be to someone reading a Hebrew Bible. That word used for follow is used most often in the context of violence and military threats (Gen. 44:4; Deut. 28:22; Judg. 20:43; Amo.1:11), or we might say, the context of a bully chasing his prey, a scared kid at a new school. You don’t simply follow an enemy; you pursue an enemy. You hunt an enemy down. You put your enemy on missile lock. A pastor friend of mine once likened the word used here to a wolf that has been starved of food for a week as he hunts for dinner. These are the ways the word is most often used in the Bible, which is why one popular English version translates the word as “pursue” (CSB; also NET) instead of the more traditional “follow.”
But what, according to the text, hunts you down each day? Look again. “Surely,” writes King David, “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” Not a bully. Not an enemy fighter plane. Not a terrorist threat. Not a ravenous wolf. But goodness and mercy. If you’re a Christian, your daily briefing on Easter reads, “Good morning, Mr. or Ms. Christian. Today, the goodness and mercy of God are hunting you down.” And tomorrow it will read, “Good morning, Mr. or Ms. Christian. Today, the goodness and mercy of God are hunting you down.” I wonder if that’s how you think about God?
A moment ago I mentioned that if on Easter we start here in Psalm 23:6, we’ll see that, rather than the Easter story being an aberration or a strange outlier in the big story of God with his people, we’ll see the Easter story for what it is: the outworking of the story that God has always been telling and is indeed still telling.
In the beginning of the Bible we read of Adam and Eve sinning against God. And the response of God is to pursue them. We read God say, “Adam, where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). God didn’t have to ask that question because, first of all, God already knew where Adam was. You can’t hide from God. And God could have left Adam where he was, namely, left Adam to die in his own sin. But God chose to pursue. To hunt Adam down.
This is what I mean by saying the Easter story is the outworking of the story that God has always been telling and is indeed still telling—the story of God pursuing those who don’t deserve his goodness and couldn’t earn his mercy. Easter is the continuation, even the apex, of Goodness and Mercy pursuing sinners for their good.
I think of the apostle Paul. Paul had assumed he could earn God’s goodness by being as morally righteous as possible. Paul had the perfect spiritual pedigree. He had the right parents and went to the right pastor’s university; all of that. And Paul lived zealously, so much so that when Paul thought people were out of line theologically, he hunted them down. And in the process, who appeared to Paul? Jesus appeared to Paul in blinding light (Acts 9). And let’s be clear. At first, Jesus’s pursuit of Paul didn’t look like goodness and mercy hunting him down, did it? Paul, like Adam, probably thought at first he was being pursued by a hungry wolf. This is because when God first confronts a sinner, that confrontation might not at first feel like a confrontation with goodness and mercy. It didn’t feel that way for Paul. It didn’t feel that way to me. When God first started revealing himself to me, it felt as though God was there to blind me and rob me of what I most treasured. Maybe you feel the same. But there’s another way to look at it. Maybe he’s not blinding you but opening your eyes. Maybe he wants you to see that you treasure the wrong things, and maybe the robbery is for your good. What feels like a robbery is God disarming you before you hurt yourself worse than you already have.
A dozen or so years after this encounter with Jesus, Paul writes these words to a church:
[T]he life I now live . . . I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal. 2:20)
Paul describes Jesus as the one “who loved me and gave himself for me.” Think about that. It reminds me of what we read in Psalm 23:6. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me / all the days of my life.” The pursuit of God is personal. Adam, where are you? we read in Genesis. Goodness and mercy will follow me, we read in Psalm 23. The Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me, we read in Paul. The love of God for you is personal. The Good Shepherd is pursuing you. You may feel like he’s not a good shepherd because he’s blinding you, and you’re terrified. I get it. But I’d suggest it’s probably part of how sinners should feel when pursued by a holy God.
Do you know how Adam responded when God went looking for him? “Adam, where are you?” God asks. Adam responds, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself” (Gen. 3:10).
An encounter with the real God that begins with fear can end with joy if you’re willing to let go of what you think is valuable and let God put in your hands what he thinks is valuable. An encounter with God that begins with fear can end with joy if you let God have your sin and let God give you his savior. An encounter with God that begins with fear can end with joy if you let God clothe your nakedness with the life of Christ.
We are right to think of God as high and lofty, as the one above the heavens; indeed, the maker of heaven and earth, as the Bible so often says (cf., Jonah 1:9; Acts 4:24; and many other verses). And if those Sovereign-Creator-God Verses (the “maker-of-heaven-and-earth” verses) were all the verses we had, we’d be right to think of God, not at arm’s length away from us but at the length of a galaxy. When the Bible speaks of God as “holy,” this is the intended sense. He is other. He is different. He is, to use a bigger word, transcendent. It would almost feel arrogant to say something more personal, to say that Jesus lived and died and rose for me. It would almost feel arrogant to say the goodness and mercy of the Lord are following me all my days because the Son of God died for me. But Jesus invites you to personalize his redemption, to personalize God’s pursuit, not merely of all sinners, but of you. Indeed, you must.
The idea of individualism, where every person thinks Christianity can be made into whatever the person wants, is a real problem. It’s a real problem that so many people think they can walk with God apart from his people, apart from the church. A hundred verses, or maybe a thousand, in the Bible teach this. God loves all his people and he loves all his church. But at the same time, the salvation that connects us to God and connects us to his people begins with a personal encounter.
Jesus is the kind of Good Shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to pursue one lost sheep. In fact, when Jesus was on earth, he said that he came “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). When the mercy of God hunts you down, he’s doing exactly what he said he does. And so, rather than the Easter story being an aberration or a strange outlier in the big story of God with his people, Easter is the outworking of the story that God has always been telling and is indeed still telling. God is the kind of God who would orchestrate your life in such a way that you’d be here this morning.
We see in the Easter story the ways that God has done everything so that you can be with him forever. To use the words of David from Psalm 23:6, we see in the Easter story the ways that God has done everything so that you can “dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” The Son of God was born, lived, died, and rose again. And the first thing he did when he rose and the tomb was empty, he appeared to a woman who loved him, and Jesus told her to get the men who also loved him, but the same men who had fled from him when he needed them most. On Easter morning Jesus pursued sinners who had failed him. And he still is.
For just a moment as we close, I’d love to blow away all the pageantry and extraneous aspects of Easter, that of families and meals and eggs and all of that, because while they can be helpful to a point, they can also be a distraction. To get right down to the matter, some of you have been running from the God who is following you. And that’s not a race you want to win. Surrender to the goodness and mercy of God that have been hunting you down. Do not wait until the summer or next Easter or next year or the next some time. The goodness and mercy of God have followed you to this moment. He’s not here to kill you but to save you. And if it feels like he’s taking something from your hands, he probably is. But that’s so he can fill your hands with more of him.
To those of you who have walked with God for many years, and the trials in your life are such that you need to be reminded that if the tomb was empty, then even though many other things in the world may conspire against you, your daily briefing on Easter reads, “Good morning, Mr. or Ms. Christian. Today, the goodness and mercy of God are hunting you down. Because Jesus lived and died and rose, he’s making all things new, including you, through all the days of your life until you dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Let’s pray . . .
