The Bible Study Hour

Dr. James Boice: The psalmist tells us that three things in God's universe are eternal: His word in heaven, His faithfulness on earth, and His law, which endures forever. Jesus said that not one jot or tittle of God's law would pass away until all has been accomplished.

Guest (Male): Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Throughout history, the Bible has suffered many enemies and detractors, yet it has endured intact through many generations.

Even more important than its endurance and longevity is what it's meant to believers across those generations. Join Dr. Boice as he studies what the word of God has done for the author of Psalm 119 and why he could say that, "If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction."

Dr. James Boice: The 119th Psalm that we're studying is not presented to us chiefly as personal testimony about the life experiences of the psalmist. It's chiefly a collection of inspired sayings and reflections on the nature and effectiveness of the word of God. But you can't help miss feeling at certain places in the Psalm, at least, that the psalmist really is writing out of his personal experience.

That's especially true in the stanzas we were looking at last time in which he speaks of his affliction, and it's true of the stanza to which we come now. We're moving from the 11th to the 12th of these eight-verse stanzas. The 11th one is identified as the Kaph stanza, based on that letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the stanza to which we come now is the Lamedh stanza, based upon that letter.

What happens as we move from stanza 11 to stanza 12 is that we pass the midpoint, and we move from the lowest point of the Psalm to something which from this point on gets much happier and better. In this previous stanza, the psalmist was going on and on about his affliction. He says that his soul had fainted with longing for God's salvation, verse 81.

He says that his eyes had failed, verse 82. He was like a wine skin twirling in the smoke, verse 83. He says he'd almost perished. "They'd almost wiped me from the earth," he says, verse 87. And the stanza ends with a gasping cry to God for help. "Preserve my life according to your love, and I will obey the stanzas of your mouth."

Now we come to the 12th stanza, and we find that that's exactly what God has done. He cried out to God in his anguish and his misery, crying out in his fear, and God intervened to save him, and he testifies about it now. From this point on, the Psalm begins to build upward again as the psalmist reiterates what he's been doing.

That is, building his life upon the only sure foundation that exists for anyone upon which to build a life, and that foundation is the eternal and enduring word of God. It's almost as if he was sinking in the ocean and the pounding surf and finally, at last, he reached the shore, or as if he were sinking in quicksand and suddenly found that his feet were actually standing on firm ground.

There's a hymn which I think if he had known he might very well have sung. We sing it; it comes from a great collection of hymns by a man named Rippon. Sometimes we sing it at funerals as we stand by the side of a loved person's grave. "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your hope in His excellent word. What more can He say than to you He hath said, to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled."

Well, I said if the psalmist had known that hymn he might have sung it, but actually he has sung it, though not in exactly those words. He's sung it in the stanza to which we come now. Let me give you a quotation about the Bible from Martin Luther. Martin Luther said, "The Bible is alive. It speaks to me. It has feet; it runs after me. It has hands; it lays hold on me. The Bible is not antique or modern; it is eternal."

Now that's the theme of this stanza: the eternal, everlasting nature and quality of the word of God. Each of these first three verses, that is 89, 90, and 91, are more or less parallel to the others, by which I mean each one says virtually the same thing. Verse 89 says, "Your word, O Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens."

Verse 90 says, "Your faithfulness continues through all generations; you established the earth, and it endures." And verse 91 says, "Your laws endure to this day, for all things serve you." There's some question about what the word faithfulness in the second of those three verses means. Is that a way of referring to the Bible?

It might, and the fact that it occurs there in those three parallel statements would suggest it. If that's the case, then these verses are saying that because God's word is eternal in heaven, it can also clearly be counted upon to be lasting and foundational on earth. If the word faithfulness doesn't refer to the word of God, this is only the second verse in the Psalm where that would be true.

But if it doesn't, then what these verses are saying is that there are three things that are eternal: number one, God's word in heaven; number two, God's faithfulness on earth; and number three, the laws of God, which like the heaven and earth endure to this day, endure to the end. As a matter of fact, they endure even further than that because you recall that Jesus said on one occasion, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will never pass away."

The psalmist gets to that at the very end of the stanza because he looks out on life and he says to all perfection I see a limit, but he says your commands are boundless. He means they endure without beginning or without end. Now let's just think about that a little bit. That was the clear teaching of Jesus Christ as well.

You recall in the Sermon on the Mount, a very well-known passage which is probably Jesus's most extensive treatment of the nature of the Bible, he stressed that not a single part of it would ever pass away. And the way he refers to it in our text, the New International Version, is this: "Do not think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I've not come to abolish them but to fulfill them, because I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished."

Those of us who memorized those verses before we had the New International Version probably memorized them in the King James, the best-known English version prior to that. And in that case, you know that what Jesus said, according to that translation, and he spoke of a jot or tittle. "Not a jot or a tittle will pass from the law until all of it's fulfilled."

Most people don't know what a jot or a tittle is, of course, which is why the New International translators have rendered it this way. But even with the new translation, you have to give some explanation of what it means. The word that is translated originally jot and then becomes the least stroke of a pen in the translation we know is actually the Hebrew letter Yodh.

And that's the word that we've already seen here in one of these earlier stanzas of our Psalm. It's that little character that is found there before verse 73. It looks like a comma; it's a tiny little thing, smallest of all the letters, except a comma's written near the top of the letters rather than at the bottom. So, a very small letter.

And then the tittle is what we would call a serif. That is a little protrusion on some letters that distinguishes one from another. You can find what that is if you compare a couple letters here in Psalm 119. Look at the letter that occurs before verse 9. It's a Beth. Our equivalent would be a B. And then look at the letter that occurs before verse 81. And that's the Kaph, the stanza we were looking at last time.

The Kaph is like a little circle of a letter, and then the Beth is the same shape, except near the bottom it has a little thing sticking out. And that's the serif or the tittle. You find the same difference between Daleth and Resh and Waw and Zayin, and you can see that just as you compare the text.

So what Jesus said is not that tiniest little part of the written word of God is ever going to be lost. And what the psalmist is saying here when he's picking up on that kind of theme is that every single bit of the word is going to be fulfilled. You can count upon all of it. No matter what you find there, no matter where it is, no matter how insignificant it may appear, that's the word of God and like God it's going to endure forever.

Now you and I can't testify to that from the perspective of eternity because we don't live in eternity, we only live in time. But we can testify to it on the basis of such experience as we do have within human history. We just think of the way the word of God has been preserved in an extraordinary way down through the centuries today when the Bible has been translated literally into hundreds of languages and there are literally millions, undoubtedly billions of copies of the Bible in print all the way around the world. It would be really impossible to destroy it.

But those conditions didn't always exist. There was a time before the invention of the printing press when the Bible spread from scribe to scribe by the laborious process of copying it out letter for letter and word for word. There weren't many copies in those days, and it would have been possible to stamp it out, especially since so many were united against it.

The Bible had many, many enemies in its early history. There were people like Celsus and Porphyry and Lucian who tried to destroy it by arguments and scorn, ridicule. There were emperors like Diocletian and Julian who tried to stamp it out by force. There was a time early in the history of the Roman Empire that it was a capital offense to possess a copy of the Bible.

If it could have been stamped out, it would have been, but it was not. It survived and is one of the great testimonies to the endurance of scripture. The Bible has endured down through all those years, and not only has it endured, it's endured intact. Isaiah said in the 40th chapter of his prophecy, "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever."

Now, I've noticed several times when we have been working through these stanzas and trying to follow the sequence of thought of the writer that he's a very practical man. We see that here. His theme is the eternal nature or the enduring quality of the Bible, but he doesn't simply say that over and over again. After he's stated that in the first three verses, he begins to say in a very practical way what the Bible has actually done for him because it's that kind of Bible.

And what he says is that it has done three things. First of all, it has rescued him in his affliction. He's been preserved by God's word. Find that in verse 92. It's a way of saying God heard the prayer that I uttered and wrote down here at the end of the preceding stanza. We say looking back at those stanzas with their study of suffering and affliction, if you look at them and say, "Well, what is it that got the psalmist through those difficult times?"

The answer of course is God, but that isn't the way he puts it. What he says is that the way I got through was by meditating upon the scriptures. "If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction." So God is doing it, but God's doing it by means. And what actually got him through was his lifelong habit of reading, marking, learning, meditating upon, inwardly digesting, and above all obeying the word of God.

And so even in stanza 11, the previous stanza, the lowest point in the Psalm, you find him talking about the word again and again. Notice that at his lowest point he's almost despairing, but notice what he says. "I've put my hope in your word," verse 81. "I do not forget your decrees," verse 83. "I have not forsaken your precepts," verse 87. "And I will obey the statutes of your mouth," verse 88.

You see, we go to God when we get into trouble. I assume most of us go to God when we get into trouble. Some of us only go to God when we get into trouble. But when we do that, we forget that while the psalmist did that too, he did something else. He took advantage of what God has given him and exercised his own responsibility.

You see, God saves but God saves through means. And the means that the psalmist is elaborating here is the study of God's word. In other words, when you're in trouble, you go to God, but in the meantime, you don't just sit back and do nothing. You do what hopefully you've learned to do in better times. That is, you continue to meditate upon the word of God, to study it and to obey it.

Martin Luther must have known that. I mentioned him a moment ago. He loved the Bible, of course. It gave him his strength in all kinds of afflictions, and he wrote out verse 92 in the front of his own Bible. It's preserved in the Brandenburg Mark Museum in Berlin. The date was 1542. "If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction."

You see Martin Luther and the psalmist and the saints throughout the ages know that in tough times what you do is continue to study the word of God. This is probably a good point to think a bit about the various words that the psalmist uses here for the word of God. I mentioned the way he does it in the 11th stanza.

He refers to the word, the decrees, the precepts, and the statutes of God. They're all more or less synonyms for the Bible, but they all have different connotations. The first of these words, dabar, is the most general of all. It refers to everything that God has said, everything in the Bible, whether law or gospel, command or promise. It embraces everything.

The second word, decrees, sometimes also rendered statutes, in verse 83, refers to binding rules or laws such as those that you would set down upon a stone tablet, the Ten Commandments, for example. The third of these words, which we have translated precepts, is somewhat like our word regulations. It's what a government official might issue after he's looked into some problems and set up some guidelines that are intended to solve it: regulations.

And then the last word, statutes, sometimes also translated testimonies, pictures the Bible as God's faithful witness to his people, containing warnings of distress and judgment if we disobey his law and promises of blessing and joy if it's heeded. Now the psalmist is using all those words, and what he's saying is in my affliction, that's what I seized upon because the word of God in all its aspects and in all its parts endures forever.

He was saying, I think, the same sort of thing that the apostle Paul said when he wrote to Timothy, telling him about the hard times that were coming, but telling him to continue in the word of God because, he said, all scripture, every bit of it, is God-breathed and it's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

We never know what portion of the Bible God is going to use or from what verse he's going to speak to us in those difficult times, but he does, and that's what he uses to keep us: the eternal word of God. Well, I said there are three things that this very practical man says the word of God did for him.

And the second one is this: he was renewed by God's word. It's in verse 93. This makes that verse almost synonymous with what he said before. He's emphasizing different parts of it. Here he's talking about renewal. Verses 94 and 95 are synonyms too. So he starts off with three verses that tell about the eternal quality of God's word. Now he's got three verses that are telling about what God did for him, but each of these has a slightly different connotation, and renewal is a bit different from what he talked about earlier.

Renewal is something that you find him talking about again and again throughout the Psalm. I looked up some of the verses. Verse 25 is the first place he introduces the idea: "Renew my life according to your word." It's a sentence that's repeated exactly in verse 37. Verse 40 says, "Renew my life in your righteousness." Verse 50 declares, "Your promise renews my life."

And then in the second half of the Psalm, verses that we're to look at yet, we find the same thing. 107: "Renew my life according to your word." It's repeated again in verse 149. 154 says, "Renew my life according to your promise." Verse 156 says, "Renew my life according to your laws." Now in these verses that we're studying, the psalmist isn't praying for renewal, but what he's doing is declaring that God really has renewed him.

Why? Because God has answered the prayer for renewal that he gave earlier when he was in trouble. He prayed and God actually did it. So he says, "I will never forget your precepts, because by them you have renewed my life." How do we think of renewal? Sort of getting a fresh breath, spiritually speaking.

Well, we think of it as the work of the Holy Spirit. And indeed it is; the Spirit is the breath of God that breathes new life and energy into what we're doing. But we sometimes forget, we mustn't forget, but we sometimes do, the connection between the word and the Spirit. Remember we talked about that earlier.

The Reformers were very strong on that. God works by his Spirit, but his Spirit works through the word. Well, you see you have that here. This man needs renewal; he's beaten down. But he finds that the way it happens is as he studies the Bible and the Holy Spirit makes this come alive. And while we're talking about renewal, we should notice that he does mention affliction again here in stanza 12, the one we're studying, but he does it in a quite different way.

In the previous three stanzas, he's talking about it again and again: he's in the midst of the affliction. Now God has renewed his spirit, and although he mentions it, he mentions his affliction as something in the past, verse 92. He's no longer under that depression of spirit because God has answered his prayer.

Well, third thing, verses 94 and 95: he talks about salvation by God's word. He had enemies, and he's talking about them again here. The enemies were part of his affliction, maybe the chief reason for it. He said, "When will you punish my persecutors? They'd almost wiped me from the earth." And God had delivered him from those people.

He is renewed in his spirit, but as we read this stanza, what we find is that those evil people are still around. God delivered him from their clutches, but they're still out there clutching. And so here he talks about it again. "The wicked," he says, "are still waiting to destroy me," verse 95.

And that's why the third of these parallel statements now becomes a prayer again. You see the previous ones were stating what God did: he had renewed him, he had delivered him. But now he's praying for salvation. He needs salvation constantly, and so do we. We need God's salvation constantly.

Even when we're talking about salvation in spiritual terms, that is salvation from sin, we talk about it in three tenses. We say there's a past tense to our salvation where God by the death of Christ making atonement for our sins has delivered us from their penalty. We never have to fear that God is going to judge us for our sins again because Jesus Christ took all of that punishment in our place.

And then we talk about a present kind of deliverance. It's just a different category. We nevertheless live with sin; we are nevertheless sinners. And what we find is that Jesus Christ by the power of his Holy Spirit increasingly gives us the ability to be victorious over those sins. And then finally we talk about the future: the day when we'll be taken to heaven and we won't even have a sinful nature anymore and we'll have a final deliverance from our sin.

So we're talking about three stages, and it's a way of saying salvation is a lifelong process. And the salvation that the psalmist is talking about is exactly the same. How can we be sure that God will save us in the future and the present? Well, the answer is because he has saved us in the past. It's because we have past salvation that we can trust the work of God now.

"He who hath begun a good work in you will continue it until the day of Jesus Christ," as what Paul wrote in the first chapter of Philippians. In other words, to go back to the theme of this stanza, which is stated at the very beginning, we can know that we will be delivered because the word of God is eternal and stands firm in the heaven and because it continues throughout all generation and endures to this day.

Notice one little phrase there in verse 94. It's worthy of a study all by itself. The psalmist says, "For I am yours." Isn't that a marvelous truth? "For I am yours." We belong to God; we've been purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ. Spurgeon loved that. I suppose he preached many sermons on it, but he called it a comprehensive prayer with a prevailing argument. Saying if we are confident that we are the Lord's, we can be confident that he will save us.

Now we come to the very last verse. This is the summary of it all, and it links the truth that God's law is eternal, which we found in verses 89 to 91, with the salvation that is ours through believing and acting upon God's promises, which is what we have in verses 92 to 95. This last verse says, "To all perfection I see a limit, but your commands are boundless."

Now earlier in this stanza, when he was talking about the eternal quality of the word of God, he compared it to the earth and he says, "You established the earth and it endures." In other words, there's a correspondence between the eternal law of God and the laws of nature. But now, you see, as it were, he recognizes that even the laws of nature, even the earth, even the universe as we know it is not going to endure forever.

We know it's expanding; we know that the suns are burning down. All of that is one day going to reach its completion and, as Jesus said, even the heavens and the earth will pass away. But not the word of God, and not the one who has built his life upon it. So the question we end with, it's the very obvious one, is this: if that's the only thing that's eternal in all the universe, why don't we build upon it?

If you were going to build a house and you had a choice between building it on a solid rock foundation and sand, wouldn't you choose the rock foundation? If you were investing money for your retirement and you had a choice between proven blue-chip stocks and some fly-by-night over-the-counter venture, wouldn't you choose the blue-chip stocks?

Well then, why should you do any less when it comes to building your life? Why should you not put your life in the hands of Jesus Christ and build upon his word? Your life is far more important than a house or a bank account. I like what John Charles Ryle, that great Anglican evangelical bishop of a previous generation, had to say.

He lived in a time when the higher criticism was bursting over England and many who had been stalwart for the faith were falling before it, concluding that they really couldn't trust the Bible anymore. And Ryle knew better than that. He didn't have all the answers to everything that was being raised in that day, but he knew where he stood and here's what he said.

"Give me the plenary verbal theory of biblical inspiration with all its difficulties rather than the doubt. I accept the difficulties and I humbly wait for their solution. But while I wait, I am standing on the rock."

Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you that we have a rock on which to build. You yourself are a rock; you're described that way in scripture. But you've also given us your word as a solid, sure, eternal, everlasting foundation. And we do ask that along with that great gift, you would in your mercy give to each one of us also the wisdom and grace to build upon that and not upon the word of mere men and women which is untrustworthy, or upon the unstable and passing material things of this sad world, but rather upon that which we know will endure forever, even your word. Amen.

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