The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): A stanza from an old hymn reads, "We praise you for the radiance that from the hallowed page, a lantern to our footsteps, shines on from age to age." For centuries, the Bible has been a light to guide the footsteps of those who follow God. If we honestly embrace it, the Bible will illuminate our path at every crossroads we encounter.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. In Psalm 119, the writer lists the ways God's word speaks to our lives. Then, the writer goes further, clarifying the manner in which we're to view life through a biblical perspective. Let's join Dr. Boice as he continues his study of Psalm 119, comparing the clear vision of the Bible with the foolishness of the world.

Dr. James Boice: If you're familiar with the Old Testament, you would know, I'm sure, that when the people of Israel were conducting their march through the wilderness, they were led by a unique and unparalleled phenomena. It was the appearance of this great cloud that overshadowed them in the daytime, giving shade from the burning rays of the sun, and which also moved before them on their march during the daytime. It was a pillar of cloud. At night, it seemed to be changed into what was described as a pillar of fire, providing light as they made their way through the darkness, following God.

We have something like that in the Christian life. We have the Bible. And that is what the next stanza of the Psalm is talking about when it begins in verse 105, saying, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path." It's telling us that in our nighttime journey through the darkness of this world, we have the light of God shining from the pages of the Bible upon the path before us, indicating the direction we should go.

Alexander McLaren speculates in his commentary a little bit about it being both a lamp and a light. He says a lamp is for the night, a light is for the day. And so this is probably saying that the Bible illuminates our path at all times, or if you want to put it in other language, regardless of the circumstances of our lives, we find the illumination, direction, clarity we need in the pages of God's book.

The Bible is basically clear, lucid, and comprehensible to any open-minded person who will read it. So it doesn't require an official clergyman to tell you what it means, still less a council of the church or an official magisterium to make a ruling.

Now, there are a lot of things they did not mean by that. They didn't mean, for example, that all parts of the Bible are equally clear, or that there are no difficult passages, or that you don't have to work at understanding it. They didn't mean that there is no value in an educated clergy. Quite the contrary, they were educated men themselves, and they greatly valued the ability of people who have time to study the Bible, actually to teach it to those who have less time. Nor did they dismiss the value of the creeds, confessions, or theologies of the church.

When we turn to the creeds, the confessions, and the theologies, all we're doing is turning to the insight that God has given to other people before us. If we don't have any use for those, we actually are exercising a kind of arrogance because we're saying that we alone have the right answer. We don't have to pay attention to what any other Christian has understood.

They weren't dismissing any of those things. They were not saying either that when you speak of the Bible's clarity, you are thereby releasing an undisciplined tide of personal opinion on the church. So what really matters is what the Bible means to me, which is the way we talk about it today. Whatever hair-brained idea I might get out of the Bible, it's equally valid with everybody else. They certainly did not mean that.

What they did mean is that when you study the Bible devotionally, asking God for insight, being humbly open to the teaching, which is readily available as a helpful guide, you find the Bible speaking clearly. You don't have to have a theological degree, you don't have to have passed some examination provided by the leaders of the church to actually find here everything that you need for your salvation.

Somebody would ask a question at that point. They would say, and I think it's a valid question, why then are there so many differing theologies in the church if the Bible's all that clear? There are two answers to that. One answer is that the problem we have is not with the clarity of the Bible, but with our sin.

Because we're sinful human beings, we always have a great propensity to read our own sinful biases into the Bible. As a matter of fact, we do that in everything. That is why, even in secular life, quite apart from anything religious, in the legal sphere, we have all kinds of rules that govern court proceedings simply because we're well aware that people see situations from their own point of view, and almost always they see it in ways which are helpful to themselves and detrimental to others, self-justifying, and self-serving. We have procedures for examining witnesses in courts of law to get behind the prejudices to the truth.

We have that everywhere. We do exactly the same thing in the Bible. That is why, when we study the Bible, we have to study it prayerfully. We have to ask God to humble us and to give us an insight which goes beyond our own sinful biases. It's also why we rightly value, or ought rightly to value, the kind of teaching you receive in a church like this, or that we benefit from if we study those who have been in the word before us.

That's one of the answers. The other answer, however, is that in spite of our sinful distortions of God's word and the theology that's found there, there's far more agreement among real Christians on what the Bible teaches than that objection actually assumes.

There is agreement, for example, in spite of our ecclesiastical denominational differences, some of which have become very deeply entrenched over centuries of ecclesiastical warfare, that God is a trinitarian God, so revealed in the Bible. There is great agreement about the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus Christ. We believe in human sin, our own sin included.

We believe in Jesus' vicarious death in our place for sin so that we might be saved from it. We believe in the work of the Holy Spirit to regenerate and provide illumination for things we do not understand. We believe in the importance of the church, the moral law of God, the return of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the body, the final judgment, and many, many other things.

That's just a short list, but that's a very significant list. That sets Christians apart from the world. People who believe that are not like those in the world, and that's a unity that we find in the Bible because the Bible actually teaches it. Our problem with the Bible at this point, therefore, when we talk about clarity, is not a lack of clarity in the Bible, the problem is a lack of clarity in us. So we pray for God to give us understanding.

Recently, I read an article by a theological professor which I found quite illuminating. He was from a major theological seminary on the East Coast and it was written about the truth of the Bible and he was saying you can't really know anything about the truth of the Bible because the Bible is complex. But he didn't want to dispel the complexity because he said, and here I quote him directly, "Complexity is what keeps us in our jobs."

I suppose that if there's no complexity there, what you try to do is throw confusion on the light people actually have. Now, that's what we're talking about in this stanza of the Psalm. This 14th stanza speaks of the clarity of God's word, and it does it in a number of areas. It's not only that the Bible itself is clear, it clarifies.

If you say, what does the Bible clarify? Here are the answers: the way we should go, verse 105; righteous behavior, verse 106; suffering, verse 107; right worship, verse 108; the dangers of this life, verse 109; enemies, verse 110; and finally our heritage, verse 111. Therefore, the Psalmist says, when he gets to the end, "My heart is set on keeping your decrees to the very end."

Now let's just think about each of these. The first thing the word of God clarifies for us is the way we should go, or which is another way of saying the same thing, the way we should lead our lives. That's what it's really talking about when it says, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." We don't know how to live our lives by ourselves. We just don't know how to do it. But the Bible shines on our path to illuminate what's ahead of us and indicates the right way that we should go and tell us not to take the wrong ones.

Many people have a wrong idea of how this works. It's very common among evangelical circles to think that what you do when you come to the Bible is find specific direction for the little decisions we have to make in our lives, like who should I marry? What job should I take? What community should I live in and what church should I join? The Bible does not tell you that sort of thing.

If it was going to do that, it would have to have your name in it, that particular situation, year, date, and a specific recommendation. It would have to do that for all the Christians that ever lived in the whole course of history from the first giving of the word. It would just be an impossible thing. Besides, it wouldn't work because if it had your name in it, you'd say, maybe that applies to somebody else who has the same name.

The Bible doesn't do that. What the Bible does is give us principles and priorities. It tells us that we exist to glorify God, not to live for ourselves. It tells us that our duty is to believe him and obey him and tell others about the gospel. It exalts the moral law of God as a standard according to which we should conform. It tells us to renounce our sin and go in the way of righteousness.

That's what the Bible does. And if you say, yes, and how should I do that best? The answer is if you're trying to follow those directions, use your best judgment illuminated by the word of God. God will bless it. He'll lead you in the way that you should go. It's only the Bible that does that. Nothing in the world is going to do that. You're not going to get right priorities and proper moral principles, that kind of illumination from the world. On the contrary, the world always sets the wrong priorities and it exalts and glorifies and even worships perverted behavior.

Secondly, verse 106 talks about righteous behavior. It says, "I have taken an oath and confirmed it that I will follow your righteous laws." That's not talking about God's righteousness imputed to us through the work of Jesus Christ. That is an important doctrine. We find it in other places, especially in the New Testament, above all in the book of Romans and in Galatians. But that's not what it's talking about here. What it's talking about here is the function of the Bible to tell us what is right and what is wrong.

Someone might say at that point, now a moment ago, you said that the world possesses nothing that will indicate how we should go. Isn't it true when we talk about righteous behavior that the world has some sense of a right and wrong? That is true. It's what we talk about when we talk about natural law. The world has some sense of what really is proper behavior. It's something of the law of God still implanted upon the human conscience.

Not only does the world have some sense of what is right and wrong, it has a conscience that condemns it when it does the wrong. So when you investigate world cultures, even those that have heard nothing of Christianity, generally speaking, there is a sense that the preservation of life is right, that it's wrong to murder. There is a sense that stealing is wrong, private property is an important thing to be protected, that we are not to lie, that we are not to dishonor our parents and a number of things. That is true.

But generally speaking, that's not the kind of problems we have when we talk about right and wrong. Our problems arise from the fact that in the complicated situations of this world, we again and again face problems that are not, at least as we perceive them, clearly black and white, but rather they're gray. And if they don't seem gray at first, you begin to ask your friends what you should do and pretty soon they become gray because everybody's got a different point of view.

That's where you need the Bible to illuminate the path and show you what is right. It needs to clarify your thinking. And it does. There are things in the Bible we may not fully understand, I've already acknowledged that. But when we do understand them, which is often enough, and when God provides understanding, which he does as we need it, then our problem isn't failing to understand what we should do, but actually doing it. The way becomes clear. Our path is dark because the world is dark, but the Bible clarifies the issues and shows us how to walk through the darkness.

Now, thirdly, suffering. It's what he's talking about in verse 107. He says, "I have suffered much." And the question is, does the Bible help here? The answer is yes, of course it does. One way it helps is by showing us God's purposes in suffering. It's a great help to know what suffering is all about. We talked about that earlier when we were studying verses 65 to 88 because it was dealt with extensively there. We saw that suffering is sometimes merely common to man, sometimes corrective, still other times constructive, and then also God-glorifying. Thank you for providing that fourth 'c' in the list, many of you helped with that, and then finally also cosmic. The Bible tells us that.

But that's not what he's saying here. What he says here is quite a different point. He's saying that when he was suffering, he turned to the Bible and he found God to be present in its pages and also promising renewal of his life when the time of darkness shall have passed. That's why he talks about renewing my life according to your word in that verse.

When he was going through the suffering, when things were really bad for him, when he couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel, that's the time when above all others he needed the clarity of the word of God. And so he turned to its pages. He wasn't finding any in his circumstances, that's why his way was dark. But when he turned to the Bible, the light began to shine and God began to renew him in a supernatural way.

Fourthly, the Bible clarifies what should be right worship. Verse 108. It speaks of two things that really go together: praising God with our mouth and also being taught God's laws. They go together because they're what right worship and the practice of true religion are all about. Or to put it another way, they're what go on in church. What ought to happen when we come to church? Well, first and most important, we should be taught the Bible.

God's spoken in the Bible. You want to hear a word from God? Study the Bible. When people come to church, they want to hear from God. They don't hear from God in some mystic way, they hear from the Bible. So we need to teach the Bible. There's nothing more important for Christian growth and conduct than to be taught the Bible. Yet sadly, in today's church, and I'm not speaking merely of the liberal church, though it's sadly enough true there, but I'm speaking of even evangelical churches, the Bible is being sadly neglected.

Instead of Bible teaching, people are being fed a diet of superficial pop psychology, self-help therapy, feel-good stimulants, and entertainment. The ignorance of the Bible is just appalling. The pollsters tell us this, and it's always far worse than you can imagine when they survey Christian communities and even evangelical communities. They find results like this: George Gallup tells us that Americans in general revere the Bible. They think very highly of it.

Virtually every home in America has a Bible, and many have multiple copies of the Bible. If you ask people if they believe it, high percentages say they believe the Bible, I mean like 95 percent say they believe the Bible. But the ignorance of the Bible is appalling. Very few know who wrote the Sermon on the Mount or spoke it. Very few can name the four Gospels or even one of the Ten Commandments.

Here are some statistics. Now, talking not about Americans in general, but these are evangelicals in particular, evangelicals, people who would call themselves born-again Christians. 77 percent say that man is basically good, basically good nature, overlooking the doctrine of original sin and corruption. 87 percent say that God will certainly save us if we do our best. That's a medieval idea. It's what existed in the Roman Catholic Church before the Reformation. God will not withhold his grace from those who do the best they can. Our version of that is God helps those who help themselves, and we think that's true, we evangelicals. Some of us even think it's in the Bible.

35 percent of alleged evangelicals say that Jesus is not necessary for salvation, but God will save everybody somehow even though they don't know about Christ, and so there's no need to evangelize. Here's an interesting story. I talked about the Ten Commandments a moment ago. Not long ago, the staff of CURE, Christians United for Reformation, were present at the Christian Booksellers Convention and Shane Rosenthal, who is the producer for the radio program, The White Horse Inn, went around and interviewed people.

They were going to be doing something on the law, talking about the Ten Commandments, and so at the Christian Booksellers Convention, moving around among those who are the leaders of the evangelical church involved in all the staff ministries, began to ask people just off the top of their heads if they could name the Ten Commandments. He interviewed 256 people and only one in that huge assembly could actually name the Ten Commandments.

The results of the interviews were fascinating. One evangelical man said, "I don't know what they are but I sure keep them." These are the very people who are lobbying Congress to get the Ten Commandments restored to the walls of our courtrooms and our public schools. We don't even know what they are ourselves. Well, the Bible needs to be taught.

The other element of religion that's mentioned in this verse is willing praise of God with our mouths. We praise God whenever we speak of him gratefully, of course. That's part of what goes on in public testimony or witness. But it's hard to read that without thinking of our praise of God by singing. And so we ask the question, do we really praise him this way? There's much emotional music, of course, in our churches, much more than there ever used to be. And it's sometimes moving, there are a lot of repeated words and slogans, but one thing I notice as I travel around the country, and I have spoken of it before, is that the great hymns of the faith that embody the theology of the Bible are vanishing.

People are beginning to throw them out. They don't want to sing them anymore. I think it's connected with the thing I just talked about. We don't know the theology so we sing the hymns, we don't understand the hymns, and so what we have to do is water down the hymns to the low level of theological understanding which sometimes is even misunderstanding in order that people have some idea of what it is they're actually doing.

I suppose having new hymns is all right if the theology of the hymns is all right. It's not a question of the music itself necessarily. If we're writing better hymns than we used to have, that's fine, let's do it. But who can really suppose that what's being sung in the majority of evangelical churches today is actually better? The hymns are not better, they're usually trite, theologically vacuous, man-centered and often simply misleading. All of that goes along with an ignorance of the Bible. If we were teaching the truths of the Bible so people loved the doctrines, then they would be glad to sing the hymns that praise God for the truths that are embodied in the doctrines. Instead, we have the shallowness of which we're all aware.

The fifth thing the Psalmist says God clarifies is the dangers of this life. The Hebrew of verse 109 literally says "my soul in my hands constantly," but the translation gets it right because it uses our equivalent idiom. We say "I'm always taking my life in my hands." In other words, I'm in constant danger. Now, we usually think of physical danger, and it's true when we read the Psalms, especially those of David, we find that he talks about physical danger all the time.

I suppose he's thinking of warfare, he could be killed in any battle, maybe assassinations and so forth. But here, while not forgetting that, the writer is also thinking of spiritual danger because the second stanza says, "I will not forget your law." So what he's saying here is that although physical danger is real, a far greater danger is the spiritual danger which would be his if he would forget the law of God. If he stopped living by the law of God, then he would really be in trouble.

Let me apply that. Do we think this way? Do we really think of spiritual danger? I don't think we do very often, and let me put into evidence for that opinion the nature of our prayers. When we meet together to pray, isn't it usually the case that we're praying for somebody's illness? That's the kind of thing we bring up. I am not suggesting for a moment we shouldn't pray for that, of course we should. God is the one who heals, we look to him for healing. But that in many cases seems to be the whole substance of our prayer life.

If we really considered ourselves to be in spiritual danger, wouldn't we pray to God for protection from that danger? And so instead of praying all the time for so-and-so who's sick and this person who's lost a job and so forth, though we certainly should do that, we should be praying for holiness, that God would keep us on his path, that we might be faithful to his law, that we might actually serve and love Jesus Christ as we've not been doing previously.

That leads to verse 110. He's talking about his enemies. In a sense, this is talking about the same thing he just talked about in the previous verse, dangers, and the enemies were the dangers. We should say that we also have similar experiences. People will hate us if we really stand for Jesus Christ, we're to expect that, Jesus said so, and so they try to undermine us at our work, they try to make us look bad in our jobs and all of that.

But when we read a verse like this that talks about enemies, how can we not, knowing what we do from the New Testament, fail to think of the devil who is our great enemy? The devil is described as the enemy of Christian people. He's the father of lies. He's a great roaring lion walking about seeking whom he may devour. If we're going to triumph over this most terrible enemy, we have to know the Bible, we have to be feeding on the Bible.

We have to know what the Bible says about the devil, that he's a limited being but he's a dangerous one all the same. We have to know what the Bible says about our spiritual warfare. In Ephesians, it says that we're wrestling not against flesh and blood. It means that the kind of things that people do in a physical sense, in the context of our lives, are not the important thing, all their problems and so forth. They make it difficult for us sometimes, but that's not the great danger. It says in Ephesians that our real warfare is against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

The Bible clarifies that for us. The Bible shows us that that really is the case. Moreover, the Bible opens to our eyes the resources that are available to us that we might be shielded against the fiery darts of the evil one and actually wield the sword of the spirit effectively for God's glory.

Number seven, the believer's heritage. Verse 111. What do you suppose the writer is going to refer to as his heritage, what he's going to inherit? Is he going to talk about a heavenly reward? Perhaps a crown in glory? Maybe praise from God? Surprisingly, he doesn't talk about any of those things. What he says is that his heritage is the Bible. "Your statutes are my heritage forever. They're the joy of my heart." Isn't that remarkable? He's saying his heritage is something he already has.

So you say, why in the world does he say it that way? First of all, of all the many seemingly weighty and important things we experience and possess in this life, only the Bible is going to last forever, that is the truth of God's word. Your house is not going to last forever, and I'm not sure my house is going to last through next week. Your bank account is not going to last forever, your stocks are not going to last forever, and your body itself is not going to last forever.

The only thing we possess here that's going to last forever is the word of God. That's what Jesus told us. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will not pass away. So the Psalmist wisely says, I'm going to fix my eyes upon an everlasting heritage. Why should I spend my life trying to accumulate wealth which as soon as I'm gone won't do me any good anymore, and besides that my heirs are going to be fighting over it?

Secondly, he calls the word of God his heritage because it's actually a part of God himself. Just as our words are a part of what we are. Moreover, it's what we possess of God here. What do we possess of God here? The Holy Spirit, yes, I know that. But if you think beyond that in a slight way, what do we actually have of God? What we have is his word. A little earlier in the Psalm, verse 57, he said, "You are my portion, oh Lord." It's the same thing. You're my inheritance, oh Lord. But what it is is the word of God, you see.

So when he possesses and values the word of God above all things, valuing it as his heritage, he has God himself. Then there's this third thing he's already said and he continues to say that God's statutes are the joy of his heart. You see it there in verse 11? They're not only his heritage forever, they're the joy of his heart. What he means is that he's fully satisfied with them.

If he's fully satisfied with what God has already given and given abundantly, the very words of God that are able to help him in all these ways he's just been talking about, why should he try and aspire for anything else? They've satisfied him here, they will satisfy him there. The word of God alone satisfies forever. Are we satisfied with God's word? I don't think so. We strive for all sorts of other things. We're rich in things, but we're poor in soul.

I've already pointed out several times in these studies that the Psalmist is a very practical person, and he does demonstrate that here as well. It's the way this stanza ends, with this fierce statement of determination: "My heart is set on keeping your decrees to the very end." Why does he want to keep God's decrees to the very end? For all of the above, right?

Because God's decrees will enable him to live a God-pleasing life, he'll understand the nature of true righteousness, he'll possess a divine perspective on suffering and triumph in it, he'll be able to worship God rightly, he'll not be turned aside from obedience to God's law by any physical danger, nor be distracted by the snares of evil men, and he will also have a heritage that will last forever.

Sometimes when we meet together and we're talking about a theological framework, we talk about a biblical world and life view. It means seeing things from the perspective of God's revelation, not from the perspective of our secular counterparts around us in the world. Everything that comes to us in the world, constantly day by day in every way from the world, is a secular viewpoint, not a biblical one.

How are we going to get a Christian world and life view? A genuinely Christian world and life view? It's from things just like this. I hardly know a comparable portion of the word of God that gives us an outline for what a Christian world and life view is all about than this particular stanza.

You want a Christian world and life view? You want to begin to think as a Christian, to act as a Christian? Then a stanza like this provides it. The evangelical church very much needs this in our day. The church is worldly, which means it's secular. What we need is a new Reformation. Let's pray.

Our Father, we are thankful that you have given us this immense, inexhaustible treasure which we call the Bible, your word. We confess that we don't value it as we ought. We don't read it as we ought. We don't study it as we ought. Because we don't know it, we don't live it as we ought. Because we don't do any of those things, we become in large measure, even though Christians, like the world around us. So we suffer all the problems and confusions and disappointments, failures and sins of the world.

Our Father, give us grace to treasure once again that which at one time was the great heritage of the church, that for which the people of God would willingly die. Feed upon it that we might grow strong, believe it that we might be obedient and grow in grace to the praise of the honor of the glory of Jesus Christ our Savior. 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.

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