The Bible Study Hour

Dr. James Boice: It's easy to understand how someone could obey and even respect a good law, but loving a law, having an absolute passion for it, is a little beyond our comprehension.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.

The law that the psalmist came to love was a good deal broader than the laws of society by which our lives are governed. The law of the Old Testament contained warnings and judgments, but it also contained blessings and promises. Turn to Psalm 119 verse 97 and join Dr. Boice as he explores the five reasons the psalmist loved God's law, and why that love should apply in our lives as well.

What an uplifting stanza this 13th stanza of Psalm 119 is. It's filled with joy and with love of the Word of God from the beginning to end, so much so that there's not even a single petition in it. It's just one long, continuous, joyful expression of praise for God's law. You ask the question, can this be the same poet who was so near despair in this psalm just two stanzas earlier?

You know the answer to that, the answer is yes, of course. It's exactly the same person, and we also know the reason. The reason is the very thing he's talking about. It's the Bible, or God's law. He was down, discouraged and despair, two stanzas earlier, but he prayed, and the God of the Scripture who teaches him in the Bible what he's really like, answered his prayer and lifted him up.

And so what he says in this prayer is that he loves the law of God. That's the way it begins. The first verse of this stanza 97, oh, how I love your law, I meditate on it all day long. Now this is the theme of the stanza. He's already said several times earlier that he loved the law of God, but not as often as you might have expected in a psalm of this nature.

If you look back over the earlier verses, you'll find him saying that in verses 47 and 48, but that's the only place. Yet here it becomes a theme of the psalm, and he begins to unfold at some great length why it is that he really loves the Bible. C.S. Lewis has an interesting chapter in his little study on the Psalms called Reflection on the Psalms, in which he talks about this love that the psalmist, not only this one, but the other, seemed to have for God's law.

And he confesses in that chapter that when he first began to study the Psalms, this was a problem for him. He said he could understand how someone could respect a good law, or obey a good law, and even do it willingly. But to talk about loving a law just didn't seem right to him. He said it was a little bit like loving the instruments that the dentist uses to pull your teeth.

Well, he said, as he began to study it, he found that actually the matter is more profound than that. One answer to this love for the law of God, of course, is that when the psalmist writes about the law, he's writing about more than what we mean when we use the word law. We mean laws. Don't do this and you must do this. It includes that, of course, but the psalmist is writing about much more.

He's writing about promises, as well as warnings. He's writing about blessings, as well as judgments. And the fact that he uses so many synonyms to talk about the law of God is one clue to that. The rabbi said there are 10 synonyms that occur for the Bible here in this one psalm. He calls it not only commands and laws, but he talks about sayings and promises.

And when you begin to look at all of those, you understand what he's talking about. He's talking about the Bible as a whole, and he's saying it's a great blessing to him. He loves that book.

But then there's also more, because that isn't exactly the full answer. Although it is true that he's talking about more than mere laws. Nevertheless, in this stanza and elsewhere, he does indicate that he loves the laws, because as he says, the laws keep him on the right path. And so Lewis's question is a valid one. How do you actually love law? Now the way Lewis answers it is this.

He says the characteristic of the law, or laws of God, that the psalmist came not merely to admire, but to love, was what Lewis calls the engaging moral order of the divine mind, which is what this psalm and some others that talk about the law of God really are all about. And we talk about love, we think of emotion alone. But this psalm is not a particularly emotional psalm. There are emotional moments, but it's not particularly that.

What it is is an ordered, carefully constructed survey of the significance and meaning of the Bible. That's what impresses the psalmist. It's so complete, that it's so orderly, and he says, well, there's a great beauty in that. And then, quite naturally, there's a beauty of the individual life that conforms to it.

I think it's Francis Schaeffer, who someplace in his writings, commented on the fact that when we construct objects in the natural world that conform to the laws of physics, those objects are quite often beautiful. You take, for example, a great suspension bridge, like the Golden Gate Bridge over the harbor in San Francisco, or the bridges that we have here, there's something beautiful about them.

They're lofty and elegant, but the reason, of course, is that they conform to the laws of physics. If they didn't conform to the given laws of God, they would not only be ugly, but they'd be unsafe, they'd fall down. I think the illustration Schaeffer used was a modern airplane. I suppose he was talking about the Concord. Just there's beauty in that, this supersonic airplane. It gives transportation, but it's because it conforms to the laws of physics.

Now there's something about that here in this particular stanza of the psalm. Here's what Lewis wrote about it: The order of the divine mind embodied in the divine law is beautiful. Therefore, what should a man do but try to reproduce it so far as possible in his daily life. His delight is in those statutes. Verse 16. To study them is like finding treasure. Verse 14. They affected him like music. They're his songs. Verse 54. They taste like honey. Verse 103. They're better than silver and gold. Verse 72. As one's eyes are more and more opened, one sees more and more in them, and it excites wonder. Verse 18. This is not priggery. It is the language of a man ravished by moral beauty.

And then he says if we can't share his experience, we're the losers. Lewis also has another interesting comment. He said, I suppose this psalm might be better appreciated by a Christian who comes from a Chinese culture, because the idea of order figures in the aesthetics of a Chinese culture. And, of course, we have something quite different in common experience today.

Well, in this stanza, the writer gives five reasons why he has learned to love God's law, and why we should love it too. It's because first, it's the source of true wisdom. Secondly, it keeps us on the right path and off the wrong ones. Three, when we study it, we have God as our teacher, God himself. Four, the law is sweet to our spiritual taste, like honey.

And five, it not only keeps us from evil, it also causes us to hate every wrong path. Now let's look at that. The first of the psalmist's reasons for why he loves the law of God is that it gives him true wisdom. This is something that he repeats in a parallel fashion in three verses, verses 98, 99, and 100. And like many of the parallel verses in the psalms, there are several levels at which the parallel occurs.

Look at those verses. See if they're not saying the same thing in three different ways, but with slight variations. As far as God's word is concerned, the writer refers to it as your commands, verse 98, your statutes, verse 99, and your precepts, verse 100. As far as wisdom is concerned, which is the theme of these three verses, he reflects on being wiser, verse 98, having more insight, verse 99, and possessing more understanding than otherwise people, verse 100.

As far as comparisons with others who might claim to be wise are concerned, he says that the Bible has made him wiser than his enemies, verse 98, his teachers, verse 99, and the elders of his people, verse 100. Now we say, how can that be? How can this writer claim to be wiser than his enemies? That's bad enough, but even worse, his teachers and the elders of his people.

Is this just a case of a smart young student thinking he has all the answers when actually he doesn't even know the questions? Is he a sophomore in the school of God? The word sophomore, you know, means a wise fool, somebody who's begun to learn just enough to think he knows a great deal more than he actually does. Is that what's going on here? No, of course not, that's not what's happening.

In each of these comparisons, the psalmist is thinking of those who appear to be wise in one way or another by worldly standards, and he's acknowledging that they're wise by those standards, but he says the wisdom which I receive as I study the Bible surpasses that worldly wisdom. Now it's easiest to understand in the case of his enemies. He says he's wiser than his enemies.

What does he mean by that? That they're fools? No, no, he is well aware of the danger that's posed by his enemies. But here he's not talking about the danger. He's rather talking about their skill in manipulating truth and circumstances to their own advantage. In this, they're really shrewd. Jesus himself acknowledged that of the people of the world on one occasion.

Luke 16:18, Jesus said, the people of this world are more shrewd. King James uses the word wiser in dealing with their own kind than are the people of light. So what the psalmist is saying is that although worldly wisdom says, use truth as your weapon and circumstances to your advantage in order to look out for old number one and forget about anybody else, the devil take the hindmost, that's not real wisdom.

It doesn't work very well even in this life. It's destructive not only of other people, but of the person who lives by that kind of a standard. But even if you get by in this life shrewdly, it certainly is not going to pay off in the life to come. Jesus said in one occasion, what does it profit a man if he gained the whole world and lose his soul?

And so the psalmist is saying, I'm a bit smarter than my enemies in that regard. They've set themselves against God's law. But what I have done is submit to God's standards. Well, how about his teachers and his elders? Again, it's not that there's nothing to be learned from his teachers, even worldly ones, they've accumulated knowledge through a lifetime of study and reflection.

And as far as the elders are concerned, they have wisdom that comes from experience. They've lived a long time. They can draw from their accumulated experience of human nature and what happens in life. He's not denying any of that, but he's comparing spiritual learning with worldly wisdom acquired from teachers and worldly experience acquired from the elders.

And he's saying that the truths of God, which are accessible to anyone. You don't have to be a PhD. You don't have to have an IQ in the 200s. The words of God and the truths of the word of God, which are accessible to all the people of God in spiritual terms, the things that really matter, make you wiser than the enemies. And there's this too.

Worldly wisdom is transient, isn't it? It's passing. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13, where there's knowledge, it will vanish away. We're finding that today. People in businesses find that what worked in the last generation, or for that matter, last year, doesn't work anymore. You have to abandon certain ways of doing things, and acquire new ways of doing things.

People used to be settled in a job all their life. Today, the average change of jobs in a lifetime is four or five times. Worldly knowledge doesn't last, it changes. But what you learn from the Bible is eternal. You see, the truths that you find in the Bible are going to be as true and relevant on the day you die as the day you first learn them.

And so the psalmist is saying, a person is wise if he learns to get his wisdom there. Now, the second reason he says he loves God's law is that it keeps him in the paths of righteousness. That is, it keeps him on the right path and off the wrong ones. Earlier in the psalm, in verse 9, in the second stanza, he said, how can a young man keep his way pure?

And he answered by living according to your word. Now he's saying the same thing here, in verse 101. Only he's putting it the other way around. What he says here is, I have kept my feet from every evil path, so that I might obey your laws. In other words, it's exactly what one of the old evangelists had written in the flyleaf of his Bible.

He wrote in his Bible this: This book will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from this book. And that is what the psalmist is saying. The more he loves the law of God, the more he adheres to a path of righteousness. But if he neglects the law of God, then he finds himself getting off the right path and falling into sin. Now, these verses are not saying that the best of many equally valuable ways of learning the path of righteousness is the Bible.

It's not saying that at all. It's saying the only way you're going to learn the path of righteousness is the Bible, because righteousness, being on the right path, is the opposite of sin, and sin is defined in reference to God. Sin is a violation of the law of God, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism says, sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.

And so, if you're going to be kept in the law of righteousness, you have to know what sin is, and sin has to be defined by God. And we have that in the Bible. Karl Menninger, of the Menninger Clinic, wrote a book some years ago, whatever became of sin? He said, we don't have a concept of sin anymore. He bemoaned it, he saw the lack of it in counseling.

And he said, the reason, of course, is that we banished God. Sin is a transgression of the law of God. If you're not thinking about God, you don't have sin anymore. So what happens to sin? Sin becomes crime. And crime is a violation of the law of the state. And then, sadly, he said, in our therapeutic psychological culture, crime becomes a symptom of something that was wrong in my background, over which I had no control.

And so we shrug off responsibility entirely. Now, the only place you get it back, and especially the only place you get it back today, is in the Bible. It's in the Bible that you learn what pleases God. In the Bible, you learn what displeases God. And not only you learn the right way, it's the Bible, or through the Bible, that God actually empowers you to do it.

Because what happens is that the Holy Spirit works through scripture. We've already talked about that. Working through the Bible as the Holy Spirit does not work in merely human books. As the Holy Spirit works through the Bible, he revives us, that is, he makes us live spiritually, illumines our minds, so we understand what it is we're reading, and then he strengthens us actually to do what we find there.

So the psalmist is saying, as a second point, I love God's law because it keeps me on the path of righteousness. How about the third thing? The third reason he says he's learned to love God's law is that when he studies it, he finds God to be his teacher. Verse 102. I have not departed from your laws, for you yourself have taught me.

Now, let me give a little bit of grammar here. In the Hebrew language, as in many ancient languages, and all inflected languages, you don't have to have a separate pronoun in the sentence to indicate how the verb should be taken. In English, you have to have them. So we have a verb, and then we put a pronoun with it, so we know who is committing the action.

We say, I run, you run, he, she, it runs, we run, you run, they run. You have to have the pronoun there in English to understand it. You don't have to have that in inflected languages, because the ending of the verb indicates whether it's I, you, he, she, it, we, you, or they. But in this particular sentence, there is a pronoun. Why is the pronoun there?

It's there, undoubtedly, for emphasis, which is why the New International Version translates it by adding the word yourself. The text says, you yourself have taught me. And that's an important point, because what the writer is saying in this particular verse is that when he comes to the Bible, he doesn't just hear the voice of the human author, the person God used to record the message, but rather when he studies the Bible, what he hears is God himself.

God speaks to him in the Bible. It's the voice of God that speaks when he reads it. It's hard to read this without thinking of Genesis 3:8. Way back there, at the beginning of the Bible, where we're told that God used to come in Eden in the cool of the evening and converse with our first parents once the tasks of the day were done.

The way that's written indicates that that was a common experience for Adam and Eve. And the reason they ran away in that chapter when they heard God in the garden, was not because they were frightened at the presence of God. They had been used to that, but because they'd sinned in the meantime, and now they were afraid to face him in their sin. Now, Christians sometimes look back on those days in Eden, somewhat nostalgically.

And they think, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could walk with God that way. As a matter of fact, we've even incorporated it in some of our hymns. One of them that comes to mind is this hymn by Austin Miles, written earlier in this century. I'm sure you've heard it sung. I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses. And the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.

And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own. And the voice I hear falling on my ear, none other has ever known. That's a bit sentimental, nostalgic, not very good poetry. And what it probably suggests to most people is the wrong thing. Just me and Jesus. I don't need any Bible, I don't need any church, I don't need any instruction, I don't need any creed, just me and Jesus.

I hear his voice ringing in my ears. That's terrible theology. But there is something to it. As long as you remember that where God speaks is in the Bible. And I think that's sort of what the psalmist is saying. When he comes to the Bible, there's a sense in which it takes him back to Eden, not in an unfallen state to be sure, but to a place where he hears the voice of God.

Or perhaps it would be even better to say it gives him a foretaste of heaven. This is in slightly different terms, what the Reformers meant when they talked about the self-authenticating nature of scripture. They say the Bible is its own authenticator. You don't need the church to tell you that the Bible is the Word of God. When you read it, God speaks, and you know it's the Word of God.

It's a very important point. And so, is it any wonder the psalmist says, I love the Bible. I come to the Bible, I find something there, I don't find anywhere else. Calvin at one point says you read Cicero and all of the great writers of the past, and he knew them, he read them well, he knew them in the Latin. He said they thrill you, I grant you that. But he said, not like this book.

Because in this book you hear the voice of God. Oh, how I love your law, it's my meditation every day.

And then there's a fourth thing the psalmist mentions. The fourth reason why he loves God's law, and that it's sweet to his taste. Verse 103. How sweet are your promises to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth. That's almost the same thing that David wrote in the 19th Psalm, verse 10. He spoke about God's ordinances being sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb.

It probably indicates that the author of this later psalm was acquainted with the psalm written by David, probably hundreds of years before. Now, how are we to think about the Bible being sweet? We hardly think of anything being sweet today except food. Like good Ivor chocolates, or honey, perhaps, things like that. Maybe glazed donuts. We don't think of the Bible being sweet.

That's a problem, you see, that really puzzled C.S. Lewis. It has to do with the love of God. How do you love the laws? How do you regard precepts and commandments as being sweet? Do we ever think of the scriptures being sweet? Do we even have any idea what that means? Let me see if I can help us work through that. One clue, I think, to what the psalmist has in mind here is that he speaks of the promises or sayings of God in the plural.

He's not thinking, as I understand it, of the Bible as a whole, all of it from Genesis to Revelation, although he certainly believes it and loves it. When he's talking about that which is sweet, it's not like that. None of us can absorb the whole. He's spent a whole lifetime studying the Bible. You don't get it all. But he's talking about the particular sayings, the particular words.

And he's saying, that's what I find sweet. When I read them and study them and meditate upon them, yes, and inwardly digest what they have to say. I find my soul nourished, and I find it not to be a discouraging thing, but a sweet thing that keeps me coming back again and again. Now, that's a hard matter to get across for several reasons. One I've already indicated, most of us don't think this way.

Most of us don't know the Bible well enough to have it be sweet, but even for those who do, it's hard to get across because different portions of the Bible appeal to different people, and rightly so. God speaks to his people in a variety of ways. But let me try to suggest it by a few examples. Take the 23rd Psalm, for example. Most people love it. Why?

Because it speaks of God in that beautiful image of the shepherd caring for his sheep. That is an image that's inspired human poetry, it's inspired art, it's inspired novels. Because we read, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul.

I'm sure the psalmist knew that. He probably turned it over and over and over in his mind again and again. And the more he meditated upon it, the more he loved it. Something about the beauty of the words and the images that touches you, or should. I remember during my seminary days studying in Switzerland, there was a student there who was much older and wiser than I was, and we were talking about the Bible and Bible translations.

And somehow we got talking about the 23rd Psalm, and I remember him saying, that psalm is so beautiful. And he said, you know what the most important word is in the whole psalm? I had no idea. He said, it's yay. What do you mean? I say, yay, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The New International Version eliminates that, probably unnecessary.

He says, even though I walk through the valley. But yay, it added something special. It means yes. Oh, yes, yes, is what it says, you see. Right in the middle of the psalm, that's what touches our hearts. If you can't find anything beautiful, or lovely in that, or sweet to the taste, you've got dull taste buds, and blind eyes spiritually.

You need to have them vivified by God. Oh, how about this? I'll give you another example. Psalm 8:1 and 9. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. That's quite a different kind of beauty, but it's wonderful. It's my favorite psalm. I think every syllable in that psalm is marvelous. It gives an overview of the whole creation.

Talking about the stars and the heavens and the angels and man made in the image of God, slightly lower than the angels. And then it talks about the beasts of the field and the fish that swim in the sea. And it ends exactly the way it began. Oh, Lord, how our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. There's something in that that's sweet to the Christian's taste.

You ought to thrill to think that that's the God we worship. And that somehow by his grace, we fit into that picture. There's a psalm that's very structure reinforces what the psalm is all about. Or how about John 3:16, the best loved verse in the Bible? Or Romans 8:28, all things work together for good to those who love God, or the great doxology that comes at the end of Romans 11.

Or even the very end of the Bible. Revelation 22:20. Jesus is speaking. He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon. And then there's that great echo of the human heart. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. You see, those things are sweet. We live not in a beautiful or sweet world. We live in a garish, loud, mean, harsh, strident, ugly, and abusive age.

Don't you think it would be wise from time to time to turn from all that, which is assaulting us constantly, and turn to that which is truly beautiful and fill your heart with that? If you've never done it, why don't you try? Try memorizing some great portion of the Bible, if you've never done that before. Feed upon it. It's a very good image for what we do when we memorize, study, meditate, and inwardly digest God's word.

You'll find that it will soothe the bitter experience of life with God's sweetness, the ugly things with God's beauty, and the sad times with a genuine joy.

Yes, but the Christian life isn't all sweetness, is it? And that brings us to the last thing. The Christian life has its sweet moments, and there is great beauty in God, but we still have to live in this sour, ugly world. And because we do, it's important that we learn to hate the evil as much as we love the good. That's the way this ends. Verse 104.

I gain understanding from your precepts, and therefore I hate every wrong path. Isn't it interesting that the psalm ends on that note? It started with love. It's the exact opposite of the way it began. It began, oh, how I love your law, and then it ends with hate. Therefore, I hate every wrong path. Does that seem strange to you? Offensive, absurd, it's none of the above.

It's only the proper response of one who has come to know and love what is really good. If you don't hate what is bad, you don't love what is good. If you're not repulsed by what is ugly, you have no idea of the beautiful. Derek Kidner, one of the great commentators on the Psalm, a modern one writing for InterVarsity, is talking about this attraction to the true, and this revulsion against the evil, what the psalmist is speaking of here.

And he says, I think rightly, it's an acquired taste. Love of the good is always an acquired taste. Love of the beauty is something you have to learn, but it's worth it. And here in the case of moral good and moral beauty, that which is found in the character of our God, it's something we not only have to learn and acquire, but we have to learn it from the Bible.

And when we do, we learn discrimination. And discrimination is the only real test of wisdom. And hatred of evil is the only ultimate proof that we truly love God. So I ask, are you indifferent to the Bible? Do you find it boring or unattractive? If so, you'll not be kept from sin. You won't be kept from the ugliness of the world. You'll drift along and you'll think that the ugly is the beautiful.

And your soul and mind and heart will be correspondingly impoverished. But if instead, you read, study, learn, and meditate upon God's word, you'll find not only that it's sweet, but that it becomes sweeter day by day. And you'll find that it not only teaches you about the holiness of God, it teaches you the nature of sin and empowers you to keep from it at all costs.

Let's pray. Our Father, we come to this little bit of poetry that we have been studying today, and we find so much there. It's talking about the beauty of your law and the truth of your word. We have very little appreciation of either, but we need it above all in the age in which we live. And so we look to you for blessing. You've promised to bless your word.

You say it will never return to you void. It always accomplishes the purpose for which you've sent it. So we pray now, believing, accomplish those purposes in our lives, that we might become more like this man whose spiritual experience is reflected in the Psalm. And may we one day actually and truly say, I love your law. And for that reason, I meditate on it all the day.

In Jesus' name. Amen.

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