The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Men walk in different ways. They glide, they creep, and they swagger. They walk tall, and they slouch. A Christian, on the other hand, is to walk in an entirely different manner.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. A Christian is to walk worthy of his calling, upright, humbly before his God, and he is to walk in the light. But to move in that fashion, he must see his path clearly. Let's join Dr. Boice as he continues his study of Psalm 119 and describes the person who walks circumspectly before the Lord.

Dr. James Boice: If you've ever spent any time reading novels, you may have noticed that novelists, when they're writing about their characters, often refer to the way they walk as an indication of their character. Men who are proud walk erect, their heads are held high. Beautiful women glide or float. And as far as villains go, well, they slouch, sneak, creep, or swagger.

I have two grandchildren, two grandsons, that never walk at all. They leap and bound. And we all know that teenagers don't walk either. They either slouch or hang. At any rate, we have all kinds of words for that, and yet the English language is not the richest of all languages for describing the way people walk. Eugene Nida of the American Bible Society says that in the Zulu language, there are 120 different verbs for indicating the way in which people walk: to walk pompously, to walk with a swagger, to walk crouched down as you might when you're hunting an animal, and so forth.

That raises the question, how should a Christian walk? The Bible gives us some answers. It says we're to walk worthy of our calling, Ephesians 4:1. We're to walk uprightly, Isaiah 57, verse 2. We are to walk in the light, 1 John 1:7. Or perhaps a verse which is best known of all, Micah 6:8: what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

We've come to a section of Psalm 119 in which the psalmist is concerned with his walk. His burden, his concern as he writes about this is that his walk, and of course he's recommending the same thing to us, be according to God's word. We're looking at the two stanzas beginning with verse 113, but the theme actually is introduced a stanza before this, in the Nun stanza and verse 105, which starts out, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path."

When we were looking at that last stanza, I looked at it for what it teaches about the clarity of God's word. God's word throws light upon our path. But what we need to see here as we move on is that this stanza and the next two deal with walking. The point of this stanza, so far as walking is concerned, is that the Bible illuminates our path so we can actually walk in it or choose the right way.

If I can give a theme, a point, a critical argument for each one of these three stanzas, let me suggest that the argument for the first is this: if we are to walk as God wants us to walk, we must be able to see the right way clearly. Now, how are we going to see it in this dark world? We're never going to get any illumination upon it from the world. The light of the world is utter darkness. If we're going to find the right way to walk, obviously it's going to have to come from the Bible. The Bible must shine upon our path and illuminate the right way for us.

The stanza that I'm treating briefly because we looked at it last time has two ideas in regard to walking. One is positive and the other is negative. As far as the positive side is concerned, the psalmist says in verse 106 that he's taken an oath to follow your righteous laws. His idea of walking in God's way is positive obedience, doing what God tells him to do.

This has a negative side too. All worthwhile or rational positives have a negative. If they don't have a negative, the positive doesn't mean anything at all. Here's the negative, verse 110: the wicked have set a snare for me, but I have not strayed from your precepts. The positive is this: I'm going to walk in your way. And the negative is this: I am not going to stray, or in other words, I'm not going to follow wrong or evil paths.

This puts us in mind of the way the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy in that second letter where he's instructing him how he's to carry out a ministry after Paul is gone, and in particular the third chapter where he talks about the last days when he says evil times will come. In other words, what Paul is talking about is a new dark age, and he begins to explain what these days will be like.

He says people in those days will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. That's a very good description of the kind of age we live in. If we were taking time to teach that text rather than expound the 119th Psalm, we could look at every single one of those words and say, yes, that is exactly the kind of thing we see about us every single day in our lifetime.

If you don't believe the world is like this, pick up the daily newspaper. Just read it. You could almost match up the stories in the newspaper with the epithets that Paul gives here in the third chapter of 2 Timothy: men are lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, and so forth. That's the kind of dark age in which the Apostle Paul tells Timothy he will live. We look at that and we say yes, but there's something even worse than that.

After having listed those bad things in the first four verses of that critical chapter, Paul goes on to say in the fifth verse, yes, having a form of godliness but denying the truth thereof. You ask the question, who's he talking about when he talks about those who have a form of godliness? I point out frequently he's not talking about the pagan world of the Greeks and Romans, the people that were out there in his day, though all of these characteristics were certainly seen in that ancient pagan world. He would never have said that these people have a form of godliness. That just wouldn't be Paul's way of speaking.

If he talks about a form of godliness, what he means is formal Christianity: people who seem to believe the Bible, people who come to church, people who acknowledge the triune God and perhaps even consider that they are saved through the work of Jesus Christ, but who nevertheless are living exactly like this—people who are in the world and of the world. What he's saying to Timothy is that's when the days are really dark.

We have that kind of a situation today where the world's standards and the world's values have entered the church of Jesus Christ, so much so that the pollsters who try to analyze what's going on out there religiously say that with the exception of a few unique doctrines or moral social concerns, the attitudes and beliefs of the alleged Christians, including those who claim to be born again, are indistinguishable from the secular world outside. If that's the case, where in the world is a Christian ever going to get light on his dark path?

He's not going to get it from the world. We've already dismissed that. But maybe not even in the church. Where is he going to get it? Where is she going to find illumination? The only answer is in the Bible. That's what the psalmist is talking about. Paul says it also in 2 Timothy 3 because he tells Timothy that in these terrible days, he's not to look for something else, something that has never been seen before, some special provision by God, because he said what God has already given is not only adequate, it's utterly adequate.

He explains it. He says it's the Bible, and he explains why: all Scripture is God-breathed. It has the light of God within it, has the life of God within it. All Scripture, he says, is God-breathed. Therefore, it is useful. One of the old versions said profitable for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. While we're at it, notice those are the positives and the negatives again. Teaching and training are the positive terms; rebuking and correcting are the negative terms. We need both of them if we're going to have light upon our path.

The first of these three stanzas teaches that. Beginning with verse 113, we have a stanza that makes an additional point, and the point of this stanza is this: if we are to walk as God wants us to walk, we must determine to do it since there are so many contrary paths and there's much opposition. Alexander MacLaren has a sermon in which he studies this particular passage, and he says that it is interesting here to find an outline. The chief idea is the psalmist's determination to follow after the law of God.

The outline goes like this: verses 113 to 115 breathe love and determination. This passes in verses 116 and 117 into prayer to God for help in view of the psalmist's weakness. In other words, he's determined to go in God's way, but he knows he doesn't have the power to do it of himself. So he turns to God to ask his help. Finally, in verses 118 to 120, the concluding portion of this middle stanza of the three, the fate of the despisers of the law intensifies the psalmist's clinging grasp of awestruck love.

Let me just look at those points because I think they really are what that stanza is doing. The first is this determination to obey God's law. How are you and I ever going to be able to obey God's law in a world like this? There are many answers to that question. The stanza alone gives several of them. The Psalms as a whole gives many more. The Bible as a whole gives many more. One thing is certain: as a starting point, we are never going to do it unless we determine to do it.

That's what the psalmist says here. If we are to live for God, we must determine to obey him regardless of any enticing siren calls to sin. What's our chief problem in this area? I think the biggest problem we face is suggested in verse 113 where the writer says, "I hate double-minded men." That word translated double-minded is exactly the same word that occurs in 1 Kings 18:21 in that story about Elijah's challenge to the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel.

You know that he assembled them all, and each built altars. The prophets of Baal were invited to call down fire upon their altar, and of course nothing happened. Elijah, after having made his sacrifices and doused the altar of Jehovah with water and filled a trench round about it with water so it was absolutely soaking, prayed and immediately fire fell from heaven. In the context of that great demonstration of the power of God, Elijah had this challenge for the people. He said, "How long will you halt between two opinions?"

That's exactly the word that is translated double-minded in our Psalm. How long will you halt between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him, but if Baal is God, follow him. What is this talking about? It's talking about people who just can't quite make up their mind. It's not that the Jews that were assembled there on Mount Carmel necessarily repudiated Jehovah. After all, that was the ancestral God that they had worshipped and brought them up out of Egypt. But this Baal god was kind of attractive too, and he had a few things to offer.

He was an agricultural god associated with the sexuality of the world and universe as they understood it. You followed God and maybe he'd make your crops grow if Baal was the one you actually followed. They were double-minded. What Elijah challenged them to do is make up their mind once for all. You don't have two gods. Either Baal is God and if Baal is God, follow Baal, or Jehovah is God and if Jehovah is God, follow Jehovah.

That's what's coming through here. The psalmist is talking about double-minded men. He says he hates them. He repudiates that frame of mind. But isn't it true as he speaks that the reason he's speaking so forcefully is that he also hates exactly the same thing in himself? Isn't that why he expresses himself so strongly in this stanza saying that he is determined to follow after God and after God's word?

He recognizes that our difficulty is double-mindedness. It's not that we repudiate our Christianity; it's that we love the world too. We have to grapple with this at a very personal level. James recognized that the people of his day had this problem because he encouraged them not to waver through any indecision and doubt. He says the one who does waver should not think he'll receive anything from the Lord. He's a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.

The problem, of course, is that we do waver. We are unstable and we are double-minded. So let's ask the question: is the situation hopeless then? No, it's not hopeless. As a matter of fact, there's great grounds for confidence except that the grounds of confidence are not in us. We are sinful and we waver and we are double-minded, but God is not sinful, God does not waver, and God is not double-minded.

Therefore, we turn to God and we recognize that in God we have one who actually can do for us what we cannot do ourselves. Notice that in verse 115, the psalmist refers to God as "my God." That's the only time in the Psalm, surprisingly, where those words occur—"God as my God." Not that God isn't his God elsewhere, but it's very appropriate that he says that here. What does it mean? "God is my God" means that he has seized upon God, but even more significantly, it means that God has seized upon him.

Remember what Jesus said to his disciples? He said, "You didn't choose me, but I chose you." And so it is. God has chosen us. That's why he is our God and we are his people. Therefore, because God is not double-minded, we don't need to be double-minded and wishy-washy in our Christianity either.

This leads to a second point of MacLaren's outline and a good one, and that is that the psalmist prays for God's grace. He's recognizing his weakness, and he understands that if he's going to persevere in this task of obedience that he has set before himself, it's going to be by the grace of God alone. He turns to God and he begins to ask for the help he needs. Notice it there in verses 116 and 117: "Sustain me according to your promise and I will live. Do not let my hopes be dashed. Uphold me and I will be delivered."

It's an interesting sideline on this verse that it was used in the Middle Ages in the monastic order of the Benedictines. Whenever a novice had come under the rule of the order and had been trained for induction or ordination into the order, the time came when the novice presented himself, having completed his time of preparation, and prostrating himself before the altar repeated this verse, verse 116, three times: "Sustain me according to your promise and I will live. Do not let my hopes be dashed. Sustain me according to your promise and I will live. Do not let my hopes be dashed. Sustain me according to your promise and I will live. Do not let my hopes be dashed."

Having said that three times, all of the assembled monks who were already members of the order repeated it. They're saying the same thing for themselves: "Sustain me according to your promise and I will live. Do not let my hopes be dashed." Then, together, they broke into singing the Gloria Patri: "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost," and so on. It's their way of saying, if we're going to be sustained, it has to be by God, but because God is God and he is our God, therefore we can pray confidently: "Glory be to the Father."

It's the same for us. If we are to read, study, understand, and actually obey God's word, it'll only be by God's grace helping us to do that. In order to have that grace, we have to get into the habit of praying to him and asking for it often.

There's a third thing that emerges in this stanza. It comes in at the very end. In the last three verses, the psalmist passes to what we would have to call a reordered outlook on the world and God. It's something undoubtedly that comes out of his time of prayer. He has understood his inability to obey God's law. He has sought God's help. Having been with God, he sees afresh the deceitful vanity or emptiness of the world and the greatness of God before he now trembles in reverential awe.

The verses say, "All the wicked of the earth you discard like dross. Therefore, I love your statutes. My flesh trembles in awe of you. I stand in awe of your laws." You see those two things go together. If we don't stand in awe of God, we certainly will not want to repudiate the world and its values. On the contrary, the world and its standards will appear attractive. But where we do bow before God and catch a glimpse of his holiness and the wonder of his laws, then these other things inevitably appear tawdry by comparison.

Let me suggest that this 120th verse should be read carefully, prayerfully, and with repentance, constant repentance by every Christian, particularly by the evangelicals of our day. It's speaking of a reverent awe of God, an important element in our walking uprightly before him. But there is very little of that spirit of awe of God in our churches today, at least so far as I see it. Instead of being in awe of God, many in our day simply regard him as a buddy, taking him lightly, which really shows not that they know God well and are on intimate terms with him, but that they hardly know God at all.

In "No Place for Truth," David Wells speaks wisely and importantly of the weightlessness of God for most evangelicals today. He means by that it's not a case of the evangelicals becoming heretics. They're not repudiating the God of the Bible for Baal, at least on the surface. They believe in God, but God has very little bearing upon them. He's weightless in their experience, which simply means that they have not really learned what it means to stand in awe of the just, holy, and sovereign God of all the universe.

I'm sure you've heard at one time or another of this fascinating essay written by William Hazlitt. He lived from 1778 to 1830. It's an essay called "On Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen." He describes a gathering, presumably a historical gathering that contained a number of the great literary figures of the day—Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt—Hazlitt being among them. They posed for this evening a discussion topic, a presentation of people that they would wish to have seen, people from the past that they were unable to see because of the point at which they were born in history.

They proposed all of the people that you would naturally think of plus quite a few besides. They spoke of Dante and Homer and Shakespeare, Columbus, Caesar, Napoleon, even surprising to me, Jonathan Edwards, who hadn't been dead very long before this particular gathering took place. The climax of this essay comes in a word attributed in the latest editions to Charles Lamb but was attributed to Leigh Hunt in the earliest editions, in which he talks about Jesus Christ. He doesn't use the name, but he calls him that person. Lamb or Hunt said, "There is only one other person I can ever think of after this. If Shakespeare were to come into the room, we should all rise up to meet him. But if that person was to come into it, we should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of his garment."

That's reverence. That's important, isn't it? Not nearly reverent enough, but it's got the right idea. It recognizes that Jesus is someone entirely different from all of these other greats that have emerged down through the course of history. God the Father and God the Son ought, if we really understand them and know who they are, inspire awe. Instead of that, what do we have today? We have a chumminess with God. Let's look at that again. If that person were to come into this room in our day, what would people say? I'm afraid we would say, "Hey Jesus, come on over here and take a seat. We've been talking about you. How's it going?" You see quite a difference with what we find in the Psalm.

We come to the last of these three stanzas which have to do with walking by God's word, and some of the contrast we've seen already reoccur here. You have a distinction between the right way and this dark world. There's mention of enemies. There's hatred of sin versus the love of God. What is unique to this stanza is this: if we are to walk as God wants us to walk, we must keep looking to him intently at all times. As far as his commandments go, we have to look to them to avoid sin. As far as deliverance from dangers goes, we have to look to God for deliverance.

What ties these words together is the phrase "your servant," which is found in verses 122, 124, and 125. He's presenting himself as God's servant in opposition to those who are God's enemies. He's already introduced the enemies and he said a lot of things about them. It's not so much that they're his enemies; the important thing is that they're enemies of God and God's truth. These are the double-minded persons that were mentioned in stanza 15. They're the wicked of stanza 14. Here they're said to be opposing him because he's looking to God for God's deliverance.

According to the Masoretes, the 122nd verse which occurs here is the only verse in the Psalm that doesn't actually refer to the Bible by one of the various synonyms used throughout the Psalm. We saw that verse 84 doesn't seem to mention it either, and there are a couple of other verses that are questionable. The fact that the Bible is not mentioned here specifically may be an indication of the depth to which the psalmist has fallen at this point or which he is remembering and expressing in this verse.

He's saying when he contemplated his enemies, he actually got his eyes off God, and that's what brought him down. But it didn't hold him down for long because he's God's servant. As God's servant, he's there in the presence of God and he has to look to God. He begins to do it here, and in this stanza he gives a number of reasons why God should intervene to deliver him. First of all, because God is a loving God. He's learned that God is not a God who is unconcerned or doesn't know what's going on. He's a God who knows and loves and cares.

Secondly, because he's God's servant, verse 125. Masters normally care about their servants; they have a responsibility toward them. That's true on the human level, has to be much more true on the divine level. Because he's God's servant, God must care. Thirdly, verse 126, because it's time for God to act. We might expect the writer to say at this point, "It's time to act because I'm in trouble, and if you don't act now they're going to get me and it's going to be too late." There are other places in the Psalms where that very argument is used, but that's not what he says here. "It's time for you to act," he says, "because your law is being broken."

Isn't that interesting? He's more concerned with God's law and God's standards than he is with his own condition. Why is that? Because he has been in prayer on his knees before the holy awesome God. When that happens and the people of God actually bow before God and understand that they're in the presence of God, they will always be more concerned with the glory and the honor of God than they are with their own well-being. They are willing to die if necessary that God might be honored. But as I say, we have very little of that today.

We come to the very end and it gets back to this contrast again. "Because I love your commands more than gold, more than pure gold, and because I consider all your precepts right, I hate every wrong path." We live in a day when it's hard for people, even Christians, to make a statement like that because our age is described as an age of postmodernity. What that really means is that we passed beyond modernism where all things were actually relative to a kind of militant negation of any kind of standard.

The way the argument goes today is if anybody insists on a standard, that is if anybody insists on absolutes—if they say this is true and this is false, this is right and this is wrong—because there are no absolutes, that isn't any meaningful statement. All it really is is a power play on the part of the one who is making it. So all good people have to be opposed to that kind of statement, and it becomes, I am afraid in time, literally a criminal act.

If everything is defined in terms of human rights and it's the state that guarantees the rights, then if anybody speaks against the standard that's expressed in those rights, it becomes the duty of the state to oppose the one who is making the opposition. What I'm afraid, if this age goes on in the way it is, that Christians who make such statements, who say, "Yes, this is right and this is wrong," are going to be regarded virtually as criminals and perhaps actually in time prosecuted as such.

Christians do hold to standards. They always have. They have been persecuted and they will be, but we have to do it if we believe that God is God and that God has spoken. Moreover, we have to do it in order to be Christians because you can't hold to the standards of God and the world's standards too. You can't love God and love Satan at the same time. You can't love the right path without hating the wrong one. Jesus put it this way: he said, "No one can serve two masters because either he'll love the one and hate the other or he will hate the one and love the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon."

I end with this question: are you willing to hate what God hates? If not, you'll never learn to love God, and you'll certainly never begin to walk in the way that brings true blessing. If you're hesitating, let me encourage you to go back to the very beginning of the Psalter and read Psalm 1 again. It contrasts the way of the wicked with the way of the godly measured by the absolute standard of God's law. And here's what it says of the wicked: "They walk in the counsel of the wicked, they stand in the way of sinners, and they sit in the seat of mockers."

By contrast, the godly delight in the law of the Lord, and they meditate on it day and night, as a result of which their lives are like trees planted by abundant streams of water that flourish and bring forth fruit in their season. The Psalm ends by observing, "For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish."

Let's pray. Our Father, when we begin to study verses like these and in any serious measure try to evaluate our lives by the standard that we find here, we confess ourselves to come up woefully short and acknowledge that we are double-minded, that our values are quite often, if not consistently, the values of this world. If we were left to ourselves, not only would there be no health in us, there'd be no hope for us either.

There is hope for those who are your people because you are stable and you have given us your word and your Holy Spirit speaks through your word to empower those who read it and who try to obey it and pray and ask you for assistance. Our Father, that's exactly what we pray: not that we might be like the world, not that we might have the world's success, not that we might be praised by those who are our contemporaries in the workplace, but that we might be your servants living by your word, who one day when they stand before that ultimate bar of judgment, may hear you say, "Well done, good and faithful servant. Come and enjoy your master's happiness." Amen.

Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to this message from the Bible Study Hour, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is a coalition of pastors, scholars, and churchmen who hold to the historic creeds and confessions of the Reformed faith and who proclaim biblical doctrine in order to foster a Reformed awakening in today's church. To learn more about the Alliance, visit Alliancenet.org. While you're there, visit our online store, Reformed Resources, where you can find messages and books from Dr. Boice and other outstanding teachers and theologians. Or ask for a free Reformed Resources catalog by calling 1-800-488-1888.

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