Exposition of Psalm
119
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TAU
The
Psalmist’s Closing Prayer
Psalm
119:169-176
Let
my cry come near before thee, O LORD: give me
understanding according to thy
word.
Let
my supplication come before thee: deliver me according
to thy word.
My
lips shall utter praise, when thou hast taught me thy
statutes.
My
tongue shall speak of thy word: for all thy commandments
are righteousness.
Let
thine hand help me; for I have chosen thy
precepts.
I
have longed for thy salvation, O LORD; and thy law is my
delight.
Let
my soul live, and it shall praise thee; and let thy
judgments help me.
I
have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant;
for I do not forget thy
commandments.
There is a great
difference between this stanza and the previous one (and
even much of the rest of the Psalm, for that matter).
The previous one was all proclamation, while this
one is all petition. The previous is all
singing, while this one all sobbing. The
previous is about what the Psalmist has, while
this one is all about what he needs.
All humans have needs, of
course, such as: food, clothing, shelter, protection,
purpose, acceptance, belonging, and others. Philosophers
have debated for centuries if one of man’s basic needs
is a belief that there is some kind of God. It was the
French skeptic Voltaire who made the now famous
statement, “If there were no God it would be necessary
to invent one.” The whole debate is rather silly, but
that very need is obviously true, because every man has
a god, whatever he makes it to be.
Well, in this closing
stanza, David voices what his greatest needs are. While
we hear many people today talk about their needs, which
quite often are simply fleshly and self-centered, David
writes about something much different. He says, I need
the depth of God’s Word, deliverance from adversity, the
discipline of God’s commands.
I. I Need
the Depth of Your Word (vs. 169, 171-172)
Let
my cry come near before thee, O LORD: give me
understanding according to thy word. . . .
My
lips shall utter praise, when thou hast taught me thy
statutes.
My
tongue shall speak of thy word: for all thy commandments
are righteousness.
If there is one thing I
pray this series has impressed upon our hearts and
minds, it is the fact of our deep, desperate, and
definitive need for the Word of God. Realizing this for
the uncounted time, this portion of David’s prayer
involves three principles.
Pleading for
Understanding (v. 169)
Let
my cry come near before thee, O LORD: give me
understanding according to thy
word.
We first saw the
word understanding
in verse 27, then in verse 34, 73, and elsewhere. Once
again, the Hebrew (bîn) means “to discern, to
perceive, to observe, to pay attention to, to be
intelligent, to be discreet, to understand.” What should
strike us here is that this is the first thing David
prays for in this closing stanza. Compared to what we
have today, David had very little Scripture at his
disposal, so he cried for discernment. In sad
contrast, we have the complete revelation but don’t even
care about discernment.
Our English word
discernment comes from the Latin
discernere, which is comprised of dis,
“apart,” and cernere, “to
sift.” The Bible constantly, over and over again,
emphasizes this principle, to separate and distinguish
between in order to see and understand the difference.
In perhaps the pivotal text on discernment in Scripture
Paul writes in Ephesians
4:14:
That
we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro,
and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the
sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie
in wait to deceive.
A lack of
discernment today, an almost total lack of sifting
through what is taught, has lead to Christians being
tolerant and even embracing all kinds false teaching.
From mysticism, to prosperity teaching, to
seeker-sensitive church ministry, to user-friendliness,
it’s
been this fad, that book, and this other movement, one
after the other, year after
year.
So what does
discernment mean? There is only a single
principle: what
does the Word of God say? It doesn’t matter if some
new idea or teaching “sounds good,” but whether or not
it’s right according to Scripture. At the very heart of
the Reformation was Sola Scriptura,
that it, is “Scripture Alone,” that dictates all we
believe and practice, not church tradition, human
opinion, or anything else. The discerning of
truth from error is a recurring theme throughout
Scripture:
Give therefore thy servant
[Solomon] an understanding heart to judge thy people,
that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able
to judge this thy so great a people? (I Kings
3:9).
Teach [God’s] people the
difference between the holy and profane, and cause them
to discern between the unclean and the clean (Ezek.
44:23).
[The Bereans] were more noble
than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the
word with all readiness of mind, and searched the
scriptures daily, whether those things were so (Acts
17:11).
For
the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than
any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing
asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and
marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents
of the heart (Heb. 4:12)
Beloved, believe not every
spirit, but try the spirits whether
they are of God: because many false prophets are gone
out into the world (I Jn. 4:1, emphasis
added).
And the long list goes on
(Isa. 8:20; Matt. 7:15-16; 24:23-26; Acts
20:28-31; I Cor. 2:15; II Cor.
11:3, 13-14; I Thes.
5:21-22; I Tim.
6:20-21; Phil. 3:2; Col. 2:8; II Pet.
2:1-2).[i]
Oh, that we would pray
with David, give
me understanding according to thy
word.
Praise of
Worship (v. 171)
My
lips shall utter praise, when thou hast taught me thy
statutes.
What is the
automatic response to learning truth? We praise
God for that truth. And what is an integral part of
prayer? Praise. Oh, how thankful we should be for God’s Word!
Many Christians today take it for granted. Many
preachers do not make it central in their ministry. As
David has made clear throughout this Psalm, there is
nothing more precious, valuable, and sustaining than
God’s Word.
Proclamation
of Truth (v. 172)
My
tongue shall speak of thy word: for all thy commandments
are righteousness.
Once we discern truth and
then praise God for it, there is only one thing left to
do: speak
it, proclaim it as absolute truth.
Unlike our day, so central
was the proclamation of the Word of God to John Calvin,
for example, that he ordered that all altars (which for
centuries had been the focal point of the mass, a
clearly pagan practice) removed from the churches and
that a pulpit with a Bible on it be placed in the center
of the building.[ii] Everything pointed to
that alone. (We might also interject that all images and
relics were removed from Reformation churches, unlike
churches today that still want to hold on to certain
pagan practices and the trappings of Rome.) The very
center of worship is the preaching of the Word of
God.
II. I Need
Deliverance from Adversity (vs. 170,
173-175)
Let
my supplication come before thee: deliver me according
to thy word. . . .
Let
thine hand help me; for I have chosen thy
precepts.
I
have longed for thy salvation, O LORD; and thy law is my
delight.
Let
my soul live, and it shall praise thee; and let thy
judgments help me.
The second thing that
David knew that he needed, and could not accomplish on
his own, was God’s deliverance from adversity. We also
see three emphases here.
The Need for
Rescue (v. 170, 173)
Let
my supplication come before thee: deliver me according
to thy word. . . .
Let
thine hand help me; for I have chosen thy
precepts.
We have seen two
other words that David uses for the idea of deliver.
The one in verse 134 (padâ) speaks of redeeming
something by paying a ransom, while the one in verse 154
(ga’al) is more specific in speaking of redeeming
a kinsman from difficulty or danger. He now uses
still another (nasal) that
pictures the power of one entity overcoming the power of
another, as when God “delivered [David] out of the hand
of all his enemies, and out of the hand of Saul (II Sam.
22:1) and when God said to Jeremiah, “Be not afraid of
their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith
the LORD” (Jer. 1:8).
Not only is Satan, his
minions, and ungodly men our adversaries, but most often
we are our own worst adversary. This is what Paul meant
when he wrote that “we all had our conversation in times
past in the lusts of our flesh” (Eph. 2:3a) and what he
expounded earlier to the Romans:
For I know that in me (that is,
in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is
present with me; but how to perform that which is good I
find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the
evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that
I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that
dwelleth in me. . . . But I see another law in my
members, warring against the law of my mind, and
bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in
my members (Rom. 7:18-20,
23).
The flesh that Paul speaks
of refers to man’s selfish propensity, his evil
inclination, his tendency toward self-gratification and
self-satisfaction. What is the answer to such a dilemma?
Where is the victory? Thankfully, Paul goes on to
write:
For they that are after the flesh
do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after
the Spirit the things of the Spirit. . . . But ye are
not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the
Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the
Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ be in
you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is
life because of righteousness. . . . But if the
Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell
in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall
also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that
dwelleth in you (Rom. 8:5, 8-9,
11).
That is our
rescue.
The Note of
Reveling (vs. 174-175a)
I
have longed for thy salvation, O LORD; and thy law is my
delight.
Let
my soul live, and it shall praise
thee;
Our rescue
through God’s salvation
cannot help but bring reveling, so David once
again uses the word delight, total pleasure in the Word of God.
I greatly appreciated an
illustration offered by one commentator. Think of a
popular game show where once a person has won something,
they are given a choice to trade the valuable item they
now have for another that is hidden behind the curtain.
The host explains, “Now, the prize behind the curtain is
extremely valuable. Some people have died to possess it,
others would give all they have to possess it, and still
others would rather die than live without it. What’s
your choice?” The contest chooses what’s behind the
curtain, only to discover that the prize is just a
plain, unadorned Bible.[iii] How do you think the
contestant would react? More importantly, what if you
were the contestant?
Do we truly delight
in the Word of God and praise
Him for it?
The
Necessity of Reliability (v. 175b)
and
let thy judgments help me.
Once again, the
first two principles lead inevitably to a third. Our
rescue and reveling challenge us with the
demand for reliability. David pleads for help because he realizes the necessity that he remain
faithful and reliable. This leads to one other major
need.
III. I Need
the Discipline of Your Commands (v. 176)
I
have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant;
for I do not forget thy
commandments.
How could one end a Psalm
like this one? What could possibly be said to close a
psalm of this magnitude and depth? To be honest, when I
came to this last verse, I thought it a little odd. At
first it just didn’t appear to be an appropriate ending.
It seems to be a let down. Such thoughts, however,
demonstrate my own lack of perception. Let us note three
closing principles.
David’s
Profession (v. 176a)
David first admits,
I
have gone astray like a lost sheep. Flowing out
of the need for help in the previous verse, David makes
a truly solemn and honest confession, one of the very
few, in fact, in the whole Psalm. It is in the very
nature of a sheep to wander, and God calls us sheep (I
Pet. 2:25). Because we lack discernment, we
wander into false teaching and other error. Because we
lack discipline, we wander into emotionalism and
impetuousness. Because we lack
dedication, we wander into
selfishness and self-direction. We are, indeed,
sheep.
David’s Plea
(v. 176b)
Next, David writes,
seek
thy servant. Based on his profession, this
plea is obvious. In essence,
he prays, “Please don’t give up on me. I know I wander,
but please come after me just as the loving shepherd
leaves ‘the ninety and nine, and goeth into the
mountains, and seeketh’ the one that ‘is gone astray’”
(Matt. 18:12). Is that what we pray? And how do we come
back to our Lord? By seeking His Word. While David
didn’t have the completed Scripture, we do. Let us
revere them and seek them alone.
David’s
Promise (v. 176c)
Finally, David
prays, I
do not forget thy commandments. Through it all,
David writes, even when I stray, I do not
forget.
That is the character of the true believer. One who can
sin without conscience, conviction, or concern, is not a
sheep but a ram outside the fold. It is the genuine
believer who recognizes sin in his life because God’s
commandments are always working there. As commentator Albert
Barnes wonderfully puts it:
In all my wandering; with my
consciousness of error; with my sense of guilt, I still
do feel that I love thy law, thy service, thy
commandments. They are the joy of my heart, and I desire
to be recalled from all my wanderings, that I may find
perfect happiness in thee and in thy service evermore.
Such is the earnest wish of every regenerated heart. Far
as such an one may have wandered from God, yet he is
conscious of true attachment to him and his service; he
desires and earnestly prays that he may be “sought out,”
brought back, and kept from wandering
anymore.
That is the
prayer of the true believer.
While I didn’t want
this study to end as I was preaching it, it was
inevitable. I was actually profoundly struck by how this
Psalm ends, however. After all his singing and
soaring, it seems that David is now almost
sinking into dreariness. But when we really look
closely, we see that he simply brings us back down to
where we live. Visiting the mountaintop and soaring
with the eagle are exciting and useful for a time, but
we live in the valley. It is there that the Word
of God alone will meet every single need. It is there
that the Word of God alone will feed, protect, and
shelter. As the wandering sheep will not never find its
way alone, we will never find ours without the Shepherd
and His Word. As Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice,
and I know them, and they follow me” (Jn. 10:27). So
where do we hear His voice? Not in visions. Not in
experiences. Not in new revelations. We hear His
voice in His Word.
We close by asking one
more time: Dear Christian, do you love the Word of God?
[i] For an in-depth
examination of discernment, see the author’s book,
The Christian’s Wealth and Walk: An Expository
Commentary on Ephesians
(exposition of 4:14).
[iii] Adapted from Phillips, p.
412-413.
