The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Truth can often be stated succinctly, but at times we need more space to explore the fullness of its treasures. Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Almost every verse in this Psalm of 176 verses speaks of the word of God. It's been the subject of many sermons and thousands of pages of commentary, and it speaks of the blessings that come to the one who follows the law of the Lord. Join Dr. Boice now as he explores the depths of Psalm 119, the longest Psalm in the Bible, and the truth contained in its inexhaustible fullness.

Dr. James Boice: Several weeks ago, we were studying Psalm 117, which is the shortest Psalm in the Psalter, as well as being the shortest chapter in the Bible. And now, just three weeks later, we come to Psalm 119, which is the longest Psalm in the Psalter, as well as the longest chapter in the Bible. Psalm 117 has two verses and five lines; Psalm 119 has 176 verses and 315 lines. The first tells us to praise God; the second praises God for His word, because it is through His word that we come to know who God is and how we can live in a way that will please Him.

The juxtaposition of the two tell us that sometimes truths can be stated briefly, and at other times they need to be stated at great length—especially, I suppose, when we're talking about the Bible. We can never hear too much about it or be told too much that we need to study it in order that we might grow in grace and become like God. Now, it's a great Psalm. The great German commentator, Franz Delitzsch, wrote, "We have set forth here in inexhaustible fullness what the word of God is to a man and how a man is to behave himself in relation to it."

I've often mentioned Derek Kidner in these studies, one of the great modern commentators on the Psalms. He says this giant among the Psalms shows the full flowering of that delight in the law of the Lord which is described in Psalm 1 and gives its personal witness to the many-sided qualities of Scripture praised in Psalm 19. Now, so much has been said about this Psalm and written about this Psalm that it's almost impossible to do justice to it. For that matter, it's almost impossible to read everything that's been written on this Psalm, which is what I try to do in preparation as I make my way through these studies.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon alone, in that great Treasury of David that contains comments and helpful quotations related to all the Psalms, has 349 pages just on this one Psalm—a book in itself. Charles Bridges, a great Church of England evangelical in the last century, wrote 481 pages on the Psalm in the Banner of Truth edition. His volume has one long chapter for each of the Psalm's 22 sections. And perhaps most remarkable of all, Thomas Manton, the great Puritan and one of the most prolific of the Puritans, wrote three volumes, each of them 500 to 600 pages in length, for a total of 1,677 pages all on this Psalm.

Those three volumes contain 190 sermons, that is, more than one sermon for each of the verses in the Psalm. There are a lot of amusing stories connected with the Psalm, and one of the most amusing contains a man named George Wishart, who was a Bishop of Edinburgh in the 17th century. Sometimes he's confused with a man by the same name who lived a century earlier, who was a great saint and martyr. This is not the same one, but it's a fascinating story. He was condemned to die on the scaffold along with his patron, the Marquis of Montrose.

He would have been, except for this incident. It was a custom in those days, when a person was condemned to be executed, that he could request before he was actually executed the singing of a Psalm. On this occasion, Wishart wisely chose not to pick Psalm 117 and instead chose Psalm 119. Before they had gotten two-thirds of the way through the Psalm, a pardon arrived, and his life was spared. Sometimes that story has been told as illustrating how God uses providence to save the godly, but actually the case is far different.

This man was not known for his godliness so much as for being shrewd. A pardon was expected, and so he wisely picked the Psalm that was longest, and fortunately for him, the pardon came in time. Now, this is an acrostic Psalm. I'm sure you are aware of that. It's the most elaborate acrostic Psalm in the Psalter. There are a number of them: Psalms 9 and 10 together make up an acrostic; Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 145, and this one—nine of them in all.

But this is the most elaborate, as I said. It's divided into 22 sections. Each section has eight verses, and each section is representing one letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And it does it this way: the first word in each section, that is, the word that begins each of the eight verses in the section, begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So the first eight verses, the first word of those verses, each begin with the letter aleph. And then in the next eight verses, the first word of each of those verses begins with beth, and so on until you get to the very end of the Psalm.

Now, this is indicated in some English versions. The New International Version does it, and you notice if you look at that that it's divided into eight-verse sections, and you've not only got the Hebrew word there representing the letter, but you have the Hebrew character also. There are some patterns like this elsewhere in the Bible besides the Psalms. The closest pattern is the third chapter of Lamentations. It's also divided into 22 sections, but each of those sections only has three verses. So here you have a longer section in this case.

The most striking feature of Psalm 119, and one that is referred to by literally every commentator—it has to be because it's the most important thing about the Psalm—is that every single verse with but few exceptions refers to the law of God or the word of God, using different synonyms to do it. The Masoretes, who were the Jewish scribes who added the vowel pointing to the consonantal text, said that the word of God is referred to in every verse except verse 122. I'm not sure they were right about that.

Derek Kidner, whom I mentioned a moment ago, says there are three exceptions. He mentions verses 84 and 121, along with 122. He seems to be right about verse 84 and probably about 121 as well, but it may not be an exception if the words righteous and just in that verse can be understood as an oblique reference to the word of God. That may be the case. On the other hand, as I look at the Psalm, it seems to me that verses 90 and 132 also fail to mention the Bible unless in the first case the word faithfulness can be an oblique reference to the Bible, and the word name in verse 132 can mean God's word.

Now, I don't know exactly how some of those words are to be taken, but in any case, by any reckoning, 171 of the 176 verses in the Psalm refer to the Bible explicitly. They refer to it as the precepts, words, laws, commandments, and decrees of God, which brings us to the words that are used, the synonyms that are used for the Bible in this Psalm. Let me just review them. We're sort of looking at this in an introductory way. There are at least eight synonyms that occur over and over again. First is law, the way we would translate it; it's the well-known Hebrew word "Torah". It occurs 25 times.

There's the Hebrew word "dabar", which means word; it occurs 24 times. There's a word which we translate as rulings or ordinances; that occurs 23 times. Testimonies: 23 times. Commandments: 22 times. Statutes: 21 times. Precepts or charges: 21 times. And sayings, promise, or word—the Hebrew word "imrah"—19 times. And then there are other words that are close to being synonyms: a word like way. You talk about the way of the Lord. In a Psalm like this, it's a reference to the Bible. There's the word path: "I want to walk in your pathway." In a Psalm like this, that refers to Bible teaching.

The rabbis said that there are 10 synonyms for the Scriptures in this Psalm, one for each of the 10 Commandments. Now, I don't know if that's stretching it a bit, but at any rate, you get the idea. Now, when I started this a moment ago, I said that Derek Kidner had an interesting comment, and part of it had to do with this being the full flowering of that delight in the law of the Lord that you find at the very beginning of the Psalter. Psalm 1 begins that way, and that is a very fortuitous reference because Psalm 1 begins with a blessing to the person who bases his or her life upon the word of God.

You know the verse, it goes like this: "Blessed is the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord." That's the way the Psalm starts, and therefore, that's the first verse of the Psalter as well. Now, that's exactly what you also have in Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is the Bible's most thorough exposition of the blessing that you have in the first verse of Psalm 1. And so it begins this way: "Blessed are they whose ways are blameless, who walk according to the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep his statutes and seek him with all their heart."

Blessed means happy; that's the word we would use for it, although of course, it's a fuller word than what we mean by the word happy. But it's what most people try to be. Most observers of human nature say that most people want to be happy above all else. We seek it in different ways: some seek it through power, others through pleasure, wealth—all of those things. People think that if they can accumulate enough of these things, they can be happy. But the universal testimony of the human race is that these things alone don't bring happiness. Where does happiness come from? Well, what the Bible says and what this Psalm says is that the path to a happy life—the Bible uses the word blessedness for it—is conforming to the law of God.

Now, I need to say a word about the law of God and these various synonyms that are used in reference to the Bible. When we talk about the law, we are usually thinking in terms of local, state, or federal laws, and our understanding of law has to do with such bodies of jurisdiction as environmental laws, traffic laws, tax laws, and things like that. And although these things are meant for our good and are for our good in a general way, essentially they're negative: don't do this, you mustn't do that, you get in trouble if you do this, and so on.

And generally, we don't have a very positive feeling about law. Now, the Bible also contains some negatives, some prohibitions: you shall not bear false witness, you shall not murder, you shall not covet, and so on. But when the Bible speaks of law and above all when it uses the other synonyms that I mentioned, it's thinking of something far more than that—not just these limited negative prohibitions, but rather the entire revelation of God. So the law of God is the Bible, as it's spoken of here in the Psalm.

And what this is saying, then, is that the ones who would be happy are those who, by the grace of God, learn to base their entire lives upon the wholeness of God's revelation, knowing it and also living by it. Now, let me stress living by it. That's because knowing the Bible isn't enough. It's a place we have to begin, but it's not enough in itself. You notice here at the very beginning of this Psalm, the blessedness that's being spoken of is for those who walk according to God's law and who keep His statutes.

In other words, from the very start of the Psalm, we're being told that this is a practical matter, not just a cerebral thing that we just store up a lot of ideas in our head. As I said, you have to begin that way, but what the psalmist is concerned about is that having learned the law of God, studying the law of God, we then also begin to live by the law of God. In other words, it's the way it's spoken of in the first Psalm, which says that the man or woman is blessed who meditates upon God's law day and night.

Now, let me take a moment to think about that. If we're going to meditate on God's law day and night, we obviously have to have it in our heads and not merely in a book that we carry around with us. That's a way of saying we're going to have to know it, and parts of it we're going to have to memorize. When I was preaching on Psalm 117 a number of weeks ago, that short Psalm, I mentioned it's a great praise Psalm. That would be a good thing for you to memorize, and at least one person afterwards in the receiving line said that was his intention to do that—he was going to go memorize that Psalm that week.

Now, what would you think if I would tell you that in past ages in the church, it was customary for the people of God to memorize Psalm 119? It was not unusual. They did it. Let me give you some examples. First of all, John Ruskin. John Ruskin wasn't a minister or even a theologian. He lived in the 19th century. He was a British writer who specialized in works of art criticism. But as he was growing up, he had a Calvinistic mother who, we are told, was unsparing both of herself and others, and who in his youth made him memorize the Bible.

He memorized, for example, Psalms 23, 32, 90, 91, 103, 112, 119, and 139, just to give a few examples. Now, later in life, he wrote something about Psalm 119, which is why I use him as an example. Here's what he said: "It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me most to learn and which was in my childish mind chiefly repulsive, the 119th Psalm, has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the law of God."

Well, maybe you say someone like John Ruskin must have had a lot of time to memorize it, especially in his childhood. Let me give you another example: William Wilberforce, great British statesman. If anybody was busy, it was Wilberforce—the man God used, humanly speaking, for the emancipation of the slaves. He wrote in his diary in the year 1819, "Walked today from Hyde Park Corner repeating the 119th Psalm in great comfort." You might say, "Well, must be another exception." Let me give you a few more examples.

Henry Martyn, the great pioneer missionary to India, memorized Psalm 119 as an adult in the year 1804. He was extremely vigorous in his missionary work. He suffered a great deal for it under difficult circumstances, but he confessed that it was the Bible alone that gave him the strength to keep going. He died in exhaustion in his work in the year 1812. One more example: David Livingstone, great pioneer missionary. He won a Bible from his Sunday school teacher by repeating Psalm 119 by heart when he was only nine years old.

Well, each of these people achieved a great deal for God, and who is to say that it was not in large measure because they had done what the Bible itself tells us to do—that is, they took up the word of God and they hid it in their hearts so that, among other things, they might not sin against God? We're going to come to that next time, but above all so they might get to know God and actually trust Him. I want to give you a contemporary story. When I was in England for the great Keswick Convention in 1986, I made the acquaintance of a great Irish lay preacher; his name is Derek Bingham.

He has a marvelous ministry to young people in Northern Ireland. And we fell to conversing during those days, and he told me a story about his mother as she was dying. It seems that every Irishman has a story about his dying mother. At any rate, that was the case of Derek Bingham, and he said that as his mother lay dying, she said to him, "Derek, my boy, you have the gift of gab, but you don't know the word. If you'd get to know the word, the Lord might be able to use you." That's how Derek Bingham received his call to the ministry.

And he told me that within three weeks of the death of his mother, he was out preaching the gospel. Not all of us are called to be preachers, of course, but I am sure that we would all accomplish a great deal more than we do for God if we would simply get to know it—know the Bible as John Ruskin, William Wilberforce, Henry Martyn, David Livingstone, and Derek Bingham did. The problem, of course, is that we don't. Instead, we allow ourselves to be taken captive by the patterns of this world and fill our heads with its idle pleasures and fantasies.

Now, maybe I've said too much about knowing the Bible. That's where we have to start, as I said, but Psalm 119 isn't merely about knowing the Bible. The point of it is that we must also determine to live by it, that we can keep it and obey it. Now, that's already been stated in verses one and two. I mentioned that a moment ago, but the point is made even stronger as soon as we go on to verses three and four: "They do nothing wrong, they walk in his ways. You have laid down precepts that are to be fully obeyed."

Remember the Psalm starts out talking about happiness or blessedness. The reason we're not happy is because we sin, and one of the chief reasons why we sin is that we don't know the Bible, or at any rate, we're not determined to obey the Bible. The great Lutheran commentator on the Psalms, H.C. Leupold, whom I mentioned before, asks us to note that throughout the Psalm the law is sought for the very purpose of being kept, not for the sake of attaining a theoretical knowledge of it. Now, that's a truth taught elsewhere in the Bible, of course, but it's very apparent in Psalm 119.

As we read through it, you have to notice the words that are used. You can find them even in this one stanza: we're told to walk in God's ways, to keep His commandments, to obey the law, and to learn His teachings. Now, we're going to see each of those words again, as well as other terms, as we go on. Now, sometimes when we think about Bible characters and we get to a point like this, we find ourselves supposing that they must have been people very much unlike ourselves. And perhaps we're inclined to do that at this point of the Psalm.

Here you have a man who is talking about the Bible and his determination to learn it, to memorize it, to meditate on it, to keep it, to obey it, in order that he might live for God and live a holy life, and we think, "Well, that's something really extraordinary. He must be a saint far beyond anything that you and I could ever attain." But we don't get very far into the Psalm when we discover that this writer, this poet, is a person very much like ourselves—at least in this respect: he knows that he hasn't yet attained what he's talking about.

So what you find him saying in verse five is this, it's a prayer: "Oh, that my ways were steadfast in obeying your decrees." Now, he fully intends to do that, and he's encouraging himself by the writing of the Psalm, just as he's encouraging us, but he's acknowledging that he doesn't really attain it or hasn't attained it yet. I think what he's saying in that one verse is exactly what Paul is saying in the seventh chapter of Romans that we were studying some years ago. You recall how Paul writes in that chapter, he says, "I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do I do not do, what I hate to do, that's what I do.

I have the desire to do what's good, but I can't carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; the evil I do not want to do, that's what I keep on doing. So I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being, I delight in God's law, but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin that is at work within my members." Now, I know that there are people who have looked at that great seventh chapter of Romans and read what Paul is saying and have concluded that he couldn't possibly have been a Christian and be saying that, let alone an apostle.

How could one who was an apostle or a Christian say that he has this great struggle going on within and he's not doing what he really wants to do? Others have looked at that and have said, "Well, at least he wants to do the right thing, so he probably is a Christian, but he must be a carnal Christian—one who isn't living up to what he wants and doesn't really intend to do it." But that isn't a good answer either. This is a man who wants to do it, but honestly is confessing that he fails. J.I. Packer, I think, is right on track when he says in his book on the Holy Spirit, "This is a case of spiritual realism."

It's simply the case of an individual, in this case Paul, being honest before God. Now, the psalmist is doing the same thing. He's being honest. He says, "This is what I want to do. This is what I intend to do. I know the way to do it is by learning the word of God, studying it, meditating upon it, trying to live it out day by day, but I'm not there yet. And so what I'm doing is calling upon God to help me." The promise of the Bible is that God will assist us when we do that. I said a moment ago when we think about this writer, we tend to think of him and other people like him as being somehow different from us, and I made the point that he's just like us in his weakness and his honesty.

But the question that we have to ask here is not: is the psalmist like us? But are we like the psalmist in our desire to do as he does? You see, we're in the same position—we're sinners—but the psalmist is determining to do the right thing. He wants to know the word of God; he wants to grow by the word of God. And the question is: do we have that same desire and commitment? Well, we come to the very end. I ask the question: how determined was he? You find it here in the last verse. He says, "I will obey your decrees; do not utterly forsake me."

That last verse all at one time has three elements: it's a strong resolution, it's a sincere confession, and it's an urgent plea. Here's the resolution: "I am resolved to obey God's decrees." Here's the confession; it's implied: "I cannot obey God's decrees unless God enables me to do it." Therefore the plea: "Do not forsake me, oh my God." When the psalmist says, "Do not forsake me, oh my God," he's not talking about losing his salvation. He's not thinking about that at all. He's talking about keeping God's commands.

He says, "I can't do it by myself." So what he's saying is, "Don't forsake me in my desire to keep your commands. Assist me, enable me to do it. You get them into my mind first of all, and then actually to live them out." I wonder if you've noticed as we've been going through these first eight verses how they move from general statements to something very personal. It starts out with the blessedness that is for those—whoever they may be, wherever they may live, in whatever denomination, whatever nationality—who keep the law of God.

But by the time you get eight verses into the Psalm, you find the psalmist speaking in a very personal way, saying, "I will praise you with an upright heart, and I will obey your decrees. Do not forsake me, oh my God." Can we make it personal? If the study of this Psalm is going to be of any value to us, it has to be personal. And so the place to begin is with that last statement: "I am going to do it. So don't forsake me, Lord. I need you if I'm going to obey your word."

Our Father, we're thankful that we've had time to begin a study of this great Psalm. We ask you to bless it as we work through it, not only this week in our own minds as we think over what we've studied today, but also week by week as we go through the Psalm carefully. This Psalm is intended to be a blessing to us; it's the way it begins. Grant by your grace that we might not miss that blessing, but rather might go on to grow in exactly the way the psalmist himself wants to grow and commends to us. For we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

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