The Bible Study Hour

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Dr. James Boice: I hope you have your Bibles and that you'll turn to Psalm 116 as we study it this morning. Psalm 116 is a hymn by an individual who is celebrating God's deliverance from a sickness that was so severe he thought he was going to die. But more than that, it is also a poem about prayer and thanksgiving.

The first line is important. He says, "I love the Lord, for he heard my voice." If God heard his voice, he had to call upon the Lord, which is what he did. He says God heard the call, and what he says in the next verse is that therefore he is going to call upon him. Now, those two statements, "I called" and "I will call," really are the theme of the psalm, and you find them throughout.

If you mark this sort of thing in your Bibles, you can do it. You'll find them in verses 2, 4, 13, and 17. Since the psalmist is saying over and over again in the psalm that he was helpless, that there was no hope for him in anyone but God, but he called upon God and God heard him, what he's really talking about here is the fact that because of God, there is hope for the hopeless.

When I think of that theme, a couplet from a well-known hymn comes to mind. The hymn is "Abide with Me," written by Henry Lyte in 1847, and the couplet goes like this: "When other helpers fail and comforts flee, help of the helpless, Lord, abide with me." That's what the psalm is about.

This psalm is also part of the Egyptian Hallel. We've talked about that—these psalms that were sung on certain feast days and were linked in one way or another to the deliverance of the Jewish people from Egypt. That's why they're called the Egyptian Hallel. At first glance, it's somewhat of a puzzle to understand why this is one of them, because this is such an individualistic kind of psalm. It doesn't seem nationalistic at all.

But it may be that that's exactly the point: that when we're praising God for his help to us as a nation—the Jews doing this on their part for his deliverance of them—this should not exclude the thanksgiving and praise of the individual. Because just as God delivered the Jewish people plural, so does God work to deliver individuals.

That's true today, isn't it? We talk about salvation in a broad way—the church of Jesus Christ has been saved by the blood of Jesus Christ—but that happens one by one. Now, there's another thing you might notice about this psalm. If you look at it carefully, you'll find that the first-person pronoun occurs again and again: "I," "me," or "my."

It's in every verse of the psalm except for two, and it occurs a lot. "I" occurs 18 times, "my" occurs 9 times, and "me" occurs 7 times. If we're going to praise God, we have to do it. Let's forget even about "we." You have to do it. I have to do it. That's the way God's going to be praised.

Now, the Septuagint and the Vulgate versions divide this psalm. It's divided into two parts. You've got verses 1 through 9, and then verses 10 through 19. In some of them, the division is slightly different. It does point to two main themes in the psalm. In the first half of it, the psalmist is telling what God did for him. Then in the second half of the psalm, he's going to say what he will do for God.

But that may be too simple because when you begin to trace this out, you find that things that are mentioned in the first part have echoes in the second, and the main theme of the second part is also suggested in the first. It doesn't really help you a lot to outline it that way, but it does give you an idea what the psalm is about.

So we're going to look at what God did for the psalmist, and then we're going to look at what the psalmist recommends that he's going to do, and you and I ought to do as well as a response. So what did God do? Well, what he tells us over and over again is that God delivered him from the threshold of the grave.

Now look at the verses. It's there in verse 3: "The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came upon me; I was overcome by trouble and sorrow." He says it again in verse 6, second part: "I was in great need." You find it in verse 8: "You, O Lord, have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling."

You find it in verse 10: "I believed, therefore I said, 'I am greatly afflicted.'" And I said, what is in the first part also has echoes in the second. You have it echoed there in verse 16 in the latter half: "You have freed me from my chains." So there's some great affliction, some great trouble. What was it? Commentators speculate on that.

It could be a number of things. He could be using language of sickness and death symbolically to speak of any great problem, but it is probably best just to take it at face value. There was a man who was sick, he was troubled, expected to die; he called on God, and God delivered him.

Because God delivered him, he learned something about God. He learned that God is the deliverer, the God who hears the cry of the helpless. There's an interesting link between the past, the present, and the future in this psalm. He called upon the Lord in the past and God heard him; therefore, God hears in the present and God will hear.

God delivered him in the past; therefore, God delivers in the present and God will deliver. Now the only reason that is true is because God is God. Because being God, he's unchanging and he can be counted upon to be in the present and the future what he's been in the past. There's nothing else that we can count upon like that.

You can't count upon people; people change. You can't count upon ourselves; we change. We stumble and fall and do terrible things that we never thought we would do. If people were depending upon us, they'd find us utterly untrustworthy. You can't even count on the laws of nature, as the Bible tells us that one day even the sun is going to pass away. Heaven and earth are going to be gone.

There's nothing in all of creation that you can count upon like that. But the one you can count upon is the Creator, the one who made it all, and that is God. Alexander McLaren said, "His past, that is God's past, is the guarantee and the revelation of the future, and every person that grasps him in faith has the right to pray with assurance."

Now I'd like you to look at verses 10 and 11 because they're a little hard to understand. And the reason for that is because the connecting Hebrew particle that the New International Version translates "therefore" can mean different things. It's one of those vague kinds of connecting particles, and I want to suggest some of the meanings. This is important because the real thrust of the psalm depends upon it.

First of all, what the psalmist could be saying here is, "I believed even when I said these bad things: 'I'm greatly afflicted' and 'All men are liars.'" Now if that's what he means, what he would be saying here is that he had said some wrong things in the past when he was sick, but he wants us to know that he was trusting God even then.

Now we do that, of course. We can understand that. We all say things we don't really mean and we make accusations that we know aren't true even when we're trusting God. And in a sober frame of mind later, we look back and say, "Well, yes, I shouldn't have said that, but I was trusting God even then."

That's a possible explanation. The difficulty with it, as a preacher in England, Roy Clemens, points out in one of his studies, is that it does sound rather smug in the circumstances. It doesn't fit in very well with the rest of the psalm. Here is a man saying, "Yeah, I said bad things, but I was still trusting God, and I want you to understand that about me. I'm still a believer and a strong one at that." But what he's really doing in the rest of the psalm is confessing his helplessness.

It just doesn't seem to go together too well, so we probably can dismiss that. The second meaning would be this: "I believed in God even though I said 'All men are liars'" and so on. Now if that's the case, what he would be doing here is clarifying. He would be saying, "Now in my sickness I said things that might be misconstrued as making people think that somehow I had abandoned my faith, but that really isn't the case. I didn't do that at all."

Now another commentator that I mentioned before, a man named Leupold—he's a Lutheran scholar—takes that view. Here's the way he paraphrases it: "I did not cast away my faith at the time when I said what could be misconstrued. It's true I was greatly afflicted and I spoke under the stress of strong emotion. But what I said at that time was 'All men are utterly unreliable.' But that wasn't so much a pessimistic reflection upon how evil other men are, but just a statement to the effect that in the last analysis, help must be sought from God alone."

Well, that's a possible explanation too. The difficulty is it's rather elaborate. You sort of have to go to great lengths to make that fit in. It's true enough, could mean that, but it's somewhat hard to think that that's what he's saying. It's a very simple psalm. Well, here's a third possibility: "I believed in God because I said..." You see, the first case, "even when," the second case, "even though," and now the meaning would be "because."

Now this would mean that the writer came to faith because he had nowhere else to turn. He looked at human beings and he said, "Nobody trustworthy there. I can't get strength from other people. Therefore, I have to turn to God." Now that would be a very possible idea. Stewart Perowne, one of the other commentators, takes that view.

Here's the way he quotes it: "He stayed himself upon God because he had looked to himself and there had been nothing there but weakness, and he had looked to other men and found them all deceitful." Well, the fourth view is the one that's reflected in the translation of the New International Version, and this is probably the right one.

It's best for a number of ways. I won't go into all of them, but for one thing, it greatly changes the effect of these remembered words: "I am greatly afflicted" and "All men are liars." Instead of being sullen, cynical comments, they become insights into his own desperate condition and the unreliability of other human beings.

In other words, you have to take it in sequence. Roy Clemens, whom I mentioned a moment ago, sees it that way, and he says here's what he has done: he has been in desperate straits, he's about to die, he doesn't find help anywhere else, he turns to God, he calls upon God and God answers him, and it strengthens his faith.

And because he came to God and believed in God by the grace of God, now he turns the situation around him and he says, "All men are deceitful, I'm afflicted, I'm weak." You see what he's saying is he got God in his perspective. He began to think from that point of view, and it recast how he looked at everything else.

Now let me just quote how Clemens rephrases it. He's saying this: "In my moment of crisis, I discovered I was a believer, a real believer, not just a nominal churchgoer. And the faith I discovered enabled me to verbalize my distraught emotions, not just to myself, but to God. I told God exactly how I felt. In that situation, there was only one thing I could be with God, and that is brutally honest. And maybe that's why he listened, because he did listen."

"I tell you that I never really realized it was possible to feel so much devotion to God until the day I realized that he had paid attention to me, deliberately turning his ear to my prayer. And I love the Lord because he heard my voice." Now maybe at this point you see why I said it's important to work through that, to see exactly the thrust that the psalmist is developing.

Now in one sense that's preliminary. The experience of his having been sick and having prayed and having God answer him so directly and personally made such an impression upon the psalmist that he spent a lot of time reflecting on it. And what he tells us as we read through the psalm is that he learned a lot of things that he hadn't really learned before.

He came to see them in a fresh way. There's no particular logical order to this; these things just leap out at us as we read through the psalm. Look at some of them. First of all, verse 5: "The Lord is gracious and righteous, full of compassion." That's the first thing that struck him: how gracious the Lord has been.

Some commentators, when they look at this, look at that word "righteous" and they get all hung up on that. They say, "Why does the word righteous come in here? It must be because the way God shows his righteousness is at the cross of Jesus Christ, and it's because of the death of Jesus that he was able to be righteous," and so forth.

All of that is perfectly true, but that's not what the psalmist is talking about. All he says is that God remembered his covenant. He was righteous to remember his promises. And what he has promised to be is compassionate and gracious, and that is what I found in my weakness. I called upon him and I found that he really is a gracious and merciful God.

Now have you found that? Have you experienced that of God, that he's gracious and compassionate? It's hard for me to imagine that you haven't if you're a Christian. Any Christian ought to be able to say, "God is merciful and compassionate. I wouldn't be a Christian if he weren't." And not only that, as I look back over my life, I can see time and time again when God has been merciful to me.

We've not gotten, any of us, what we deserved, but God is gracious and he spares us, as he did the psalmist. Now if that's true, we ought to reflect upon it and tell others how good God is. In verse 6, there's a second thing that he learned and is reflecting on, and that is that the Lord protects the simple-hearted.

You see, the point here is not just that God is gracious. We could say, "Oh yes, God is a gracious God and he shows his mercy to the saints, but certainly not to someone like me." But what the psalmist discovered is that God is gracious even to somebody like him—that is, the simple-hearted. God is gracious to the little people.

God is gracious to the plain people. God is gracious to the unattractive people. God is gracious to the disadvantaged people. God is gracious to the everyday person who's riding there on the bus or who comes into your shop or who works for you or whom you meet just casually on the street. That's one of the glories of our God.

When Jesus called his disciples, he didn't call the high and mighty; he called fishermen and tax collectors. And when God sent his angels to announce the birth of the Savior, the angels came to shepherds who were considered almost nobody by the people of their day. Isn't that a wonderful thing about the Gospel: that he makes it known to you, to the simple?

I don't mean to insult you, but if you're thinking, "I'm not in that category. I'm not among the simple," then you probably don't know anything about the Gospel. Because the Bible says that God takes his truth and reveals it to children. You have to, in a certain sense, become children before God before you can actually hear him speaking.

Well, verse 7: "Be at rest once more, O my soul." This means the psalmist concluded that he could rest in God once more, and more securely and with greater trust than he had possessed before. In other words, what he's saying here is he was a believer before, he was trusting God, but it's when he went through the difficulty that he came to understand how great God was and how much he could really trust him.

So he came out on the far side of the tribulation a stronger believer than he had been before. Many people would confess to that. We have many in the congregation that would say, "That's been exactly my experience this year. It's the hard thing that I went through that has made me strong." It's true, it was hard and I struggled with it, and maybe I even said things in the suffering that I shouldn't have said, but I came out stronger as a result, and I see that God really is my strength.

Here's a fourth thing, verses 8 and 9: "You have delivered my soul from death, that I may walk before the Lord in the land of the living." Now the point here is that God delivers his people, not only that we might have an appreciation of his grace and tell other people about it—though we ought to do that—but that we might walk before him, that we might follow him, that we might live for him.

In other words, there's work to do. And if God has spared us so that we're still living instead of being in heaven at this moment, it's in order that we might get on with the work he's given us to do. One commentator says that resting in God is a matter of our confidence in God. Walking before him has to do with our obedience.

Further on in the psalm, the psalmist spells it out a little bit more. Verse 16, he says, "O Lord, truly I am your servant; I am your servant, the son of your maidservant." When we look at that, we have to think back on things that Jesus Christ said because he called us to be his servants, to follow after him.

You know how he expressed discipleship? He said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me." So in a sense we renounce ourselves in order to follow after Jesus Christ. He's the Master, he's the Lord, we're the servant, we're the slave. But at the same time, we also remember that shortly before his crucifixion, Jesus said to the disciples who were gathered around him, "Henceforth, I don't call you servants, I'm not going to call you servants anymore; I'm going to call you friends, because a friend knows what his friend is doing."

In other words, we're called not to ignorant, slavish service, but intelligent service as we enter in actually to the mind and thinking of our Master. Now if we're going to do that, we're going to have to study the Bible because that's where the mind of God is unfolded. If you say to yourself, "How am I going to find out what Jesus Christ wants? I know he's leading, I want to follow him. I'll do it if he tells me to do it, but where am I going to get understanding about what he's doing?"

The answer is in the Bible. That's where you find it. It's where God unfolds his mind to us. Well, one more thing, verse 15. This is perhaps in some ways the most obvious of all. The psalmist says, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints." That seems to involve at least two things.

One is that God watches over his people when they're sick and dying, and he's particularly close to them in their final hours. Many people can testify to that. Many who have been sick and close to death testify to it. Others who have looked on and have testified about what happens acknowledge that as well. God in a special way comes close to his people in the hour of their death.

That's an encouragement for many who are afraid of death, who fear the end. It's a reminder that it's not the end, but it's the beginning of a new life, a freedom from the body in the presence of the Lord. That's the first thing. The second thing is this: that God sometimes, perhaps frequently, intervenes and does deliver his people from death, and he does so in order that they might go on and live for him.

In any way, in any case, what God does is what's best. Here's the way Paul spoke about death. Paul said, "If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me." In other words, if God spares me and I'm not executed—he was writing to the Philippians—it's so I have work to do. I'm going to do it. "Yet what shall I choose? I don't know. I'm torn between the two. I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far, but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body." Philippians 1:22-24. One thing is certain: the people of God are immortal until their work is done.

Now those are some of the things that the psalmist learned through his experience. We come to the final part of the psalm, the second part that I suggested earlier, where he now begins to reflect on what he's going to do. He's told us about what God did for him, and he's expressed throughout the psalm things that he learned as a result of that. Now he's going to talk about what he will do.

So he asks the question, "How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?" Verse 12. It's really where the second half of the psalm begins. That's a good question. What can we give him? What can you and I give God? He doesn't need anything. You and I don't have anything to give him except what he's already given us. We can't enrich God in any way.

Paul asks that question in Romans in the 11th chapter. He says, "Who has ever given to God that God should repay him?" And the obvious answer is no one. No one has ever given anything to God. And the reason for that, he says at the very end of that chapter, is because "from him and through him and to him are all things." So everything there is comes from God. It's not anything we give to God.

So we say, what is there for us to do? How can we respond to God? We can't repay him in the literal sense, but how can we respond? Well, the psalmist suggests two things. First of all, he says we need to tell others about God's mercy to us. And that's obvious, isn't it? That's a good way to respond.

If God has been good and gracious and righteous in his dealings with us, shouldn't we tell other people about that? He says that in verses 18 and 19. He's thanking God in the presence of all his people in the courts of the house of the Lord. In other words, he's saying he wants to give public testimony to God's grace.

We have an opportunity to do that tonight. I hope you'll come back and do it in our testimony service. And then secondly, he says in verse 13 that we need to lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. Now that's a metaphor, of course, but it's a very powerful one, and it's pointing to something very important.

As far as the metaphor is concerned, it's based on the drink offerings or libations, which was part of the worship of the Jewish people. The rabbis made a lot of that. The libation or drink offering is described in Numbers 28 in the Old Testament. The rabbis pointed to that. They looked at Joel 1:9, which links sacrificial gifts with libations. They said the two always go together.

They loved Judges 9:13. It says that it is wine that cheers the hearts both of God and men. They loved that. They said, "That's the blessing you ought to pronounce when you drink the cup." All of that was part of the background. But you see, there's a big difference between the drink offering that's described in Numbers 28 and what the rabbis made so much of and what the psalmist is saying here.

Because in Psalm 116, he's not talking about giving God anything, though that's what you might expect in answer to the question, "How can I repay the Lord? I'll give him a drink offering." He's not saying that. What he's talking about is taking something, not giving something. He says, "I will take the cup of salvation."

Now that's a profound insight because what it means is the only way you can repay God is not by giving him anything, but by taking more from his hand. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great preacher and pastor, understood that, and in his study he quotes a little verse at this point. I don't know the source, but it goes like this: "The best return for one like me, so wretched and so poor, is from his gifts to draw a plea and ask him still for more."

You see, that's why he talks about lifting up the cup of salvation and immediately after links it to calling on the name of the Lord. You see, that's our theme again. He began that way. He said, "I called upon the name of the Lord and he heard me." So how shall I repay him for hearing me? I'll call upon the name of the Lord.

You see, that's what would please God. You say, "Well, I'll give him my money." He doesn't need your money. The church does, but God doesn't need it. Yeah, how shall you repay him? Ask him for more. God is pleased by that, you see, because it's your way of saying, "I know you're a gracious God. I know you delight to give. I am so needy, and so I come to you for everything I need."

Isn't it wonderful to enter into the new year that way, knowing that we do so in the fellowship of a gracious and loving and faithful and unchangeable God? And there's one more thing. We remember that this is one of the psalms of the Egyptian Hallel, and we remember that Jesus and his disciples were singing this on the night of his arrest, which is also the night in which he instituted what we call the Lord's Supper.

And the part of that Lord's Supper was the cup, which is the cup of salvation. How could it be possible that they would sing this, or certainly that Jesus Christ would lead them in the singing of it, without thinking of that cup—the cup of salvation, which is his shed blood poured out for us—as being the very heart of the psalm?

You see, that symbolizes his work for us, and it also indicates our response to it. It's not just a matter of hearing it and saying, "Oh yes, Jesus died. I understand that's what is taught in the Bible, and I can even study it academically and I can use the right words for it." It's not that; it's taking the cup.

Because that's what Jesus said. He said, "This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood; drink ye all of it," and he passed it around and each one participated. It's a way of saying that it's our share of Christ, that that salvation becomes part of us. And the way that happens today, apart from the symbolism, is by our faith.

And so I end by saying: have you taken that cup of salvation by believing on Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? If you haven't, you mean to tell me you've gone through another whole year and you haven't committed yourself to Jesus Christ to follow after him? He's a gracious and compassionate God, but one day you're going to die and you're going to stand before the bar of his judgment.

Do you really want to wait? What you need to do is trust him, believe on him, follow him, take him as your Savior right now. Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for this psalm. We're thankful that we've had the opportunity to study it together in this hour, and we are thankful that it speaks so clearly and so directly to our need and to your grace.

We would ask especially if there is anyone who has not personally trusted Christ as his or her Savior that this might be the hour in which they do that and pass from death to life. And for those who do know you, who recognize their helplessness—that they are, as we all are, just among the simple of the earth—may there be a new sense of your greatness and compassion and the knowledge that you hear, respond in our need, and may we be moved to praise you wholeheartedly in the assembly of your people and before all men and women as we testify to your grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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