Psalm 119:17-24 (January 5, 2025)

Psalm 119 as a New Year’s Meditation on God’s Word

Amen. We can turn in your Bibles to Psalm 119. Psalm 119. We'll be back, picking back our series up in 1 Timothy next Sunday. We're in the middle of chapter 4 of 1 Timothy where we broke off for Advent back at the beginning of December.

We'll be back there next week. But today we're in Psalm 119. We'll be in verses 17 through 24. And so each year on the first Sunday in January, I aim to preach from Psalm 119. The reason for this is because this psalm is the longest of all the psalms and it extols the Word of God.

And nothing could be better for us at the beginning of a new year than to set our minds and set our hearts on the goodness and glory of God and the goodness and glory of God's Word. If we are going to be faithful and fruitful for the kingdom of Christ in this year or any other year, then we must be attentive to and obedient to what God says to us in the Scriptures.

For God's Word reveals to us God Himself. It tells us who He is. It tells us what He has done and what He is doing. God's Word tells us about the world that He has made and our place in that world. It tells us of God's salvation and reveals to us the person of Jesus Christ, God's Son.

Specifically, Psalm 119 is about God's law. Christians are sometimes mistaken in their view of God's law, thinking it to somehow be burdensome or harsh. But Psalm 119 teaches us that God's law is sweeter than honey.

It's more valuable than gold or silver. And so God's law is not God's Word retired, God's Word emeritus. No, God's law is God's Word, living and active. Of course, we take into our interpretation the new covenant and Christ, who is the end of the law, the goal of the law.

But we do not do away with God's law. Because who wants to do away with honey and gold? You'll see a number of words throughout Psalm 119 to refer to God's Word. In addition to law, you see words like commandments, judgments, testimonies.

If you put all of this together and you read through a new covenant lens, we can say that Psalm 119 is about God's Word in its entirety. It's about the scriptures. And so at the beginning of each year, we turn to Psalm 119 to extol and lift high God and His Word, to encourage our church, to encourage us to devote ourselves to God's Word this year.

That we would go further up and further in, into reading, hearing, obeying, loving, cherishing God's Word. Psalm 119 is an acrostic poem. It's a really long poem. And each stanza, which is about eight verses, begins, in the original Hebrew, it begins with the next successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Now this is my third January here at First Baptist, and so we come to the third stanza of the Psalm, of the poem, beginning with Gamal, the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And that begins down in verse 17.

If all goes according to plan, we'll finish Psalm 119 on January the 3rd, 2044. I hope you plan to stick around. Three verses, 17 to 24. Deal bountifully with your servant, that I may live and keep your word.

Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from your law. I am a stranger in the earth. Do not hide your commandments from me. My soul breaks with longing for your judgments at all times. You rebuke the proud, the cursed, who stray from your commandments.

Remove from me reproach and contempt, for I have kept your testimonies. Princes also sit and speak against me, but your servant meditates on your statutes. Your testimonies are my delight and my counselors.

Amen. This is God's word to us this morning and this year. What we're going to do, we're going to go through this passage about two verses at a time. And like a good Baptist preacher, I'm going to alliterate the outline for you with four words.

Depend, desire, defend, and delight. Depend, desire, defend, and delight. These are words that outline this stanza of Psalm 119. First, we see in verses 17 and 18, depend. Depend on God. Be in dependence on God when you come to his word.

If you're going to live and keep God's word, you must be dependent upon him. Verse 17 is a prayer expressing such dependence, where he says, deal bountifully with your servant. That is, do good to your servant.

Show favor to your servant. Help your servant by doing good to him. The Lord's servant is in need of this favor from this goodness from God. He's in need of grace from God, help from God, assistance from God.

And so we ask God in this prayer, verse 17, that God would deal bountifully with him, that he would be generous with him with his help. And for what aim, for what end? Verse 17, that I may live and keep your word.

You see, without God's grace, without God's help, no one keeps God's word. No one lives truly. And so the lesson for us is this, that you do not rely on your own strength, especially when you come to God's word.

You don't rely on your own strength. You don't rely on your own intellectual prowess. You don't rely on your own insights. You don't rely on your own fortitude or abilities, but you rely on God and his goodness.

Jesus speaks about this in John 15, where he says, abide in me and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches.

He who abides in me and I in him bears much fruit for without me, you can do nothing. We can do nothing outside of the grace and goodness of God. And so depend on God and abide in Christ this year. Verse 18 then shows us that we are dependent upon the Lord to see that which he has said to us in his word, where he says in verse 18, open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from your law.

Now this is a great prayer for you to pray when you come to your personal Bible reading each day. It's short, it is simple, and it acknowledges the truth that we need God to open our eyes. We need God to illuminate his word so that we see the wondrous things that are there.

Now there are three things I want you to see in this verse, verse 18, and the first thing is that there is such a thing as spiritual sight that we need our eyes open in order to see. There is such a thing as spiritual sight and those who do not have the Holy Spirit do not have that spiritual sight.

Those who are not united by faith to Jesus Christ cannot see the wondrous things of God's law. They're blind to the things of God. First Corinthians 2 14 says, but the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned.

This is why I'm leery of somebody like, you may have heard Jordan Peterson, he has a series, I believe with Daily Wire, where he's doing a series on the Bible, most recently the Gospels. I'm leery of something like that because even though I've appreciated some of his maybe cultural analysis over the last few years, he has no business lecturing on the Bible because he does not have living faith in Jesus Christ.

There are things in the Bible he's just blind to and he needs his eyes opened by the Holy Spirit. This is also why I don't believe it's fruitful to have unbelieving scholars working on biblical texts and making decisions that affect Bible translation because no matter how much they are learned in ancient Hebrew, they are spiritually blind and ignorant to the things of God if they do not have the Holy Spirit, if they do not have faith.

This is also why this is a verse that is a great prayer, not only for your personal Bible reading, but it's a great prayer for your lost family members and friends. They can't open their own eyes, they cannot give life to their own dead souls, they need the Holy Spirit to act, they need the grace of God.

We all depend on that until we can pray for them that God would open their eyes to see wondrous things from his Word. Second thing we would see in this verse is that though we as believers have been given such spiritual sight because we do have the Holy Spirit and he has made us able to discern spiritual things, we also know we don't see everything at once.

We are continually learning and relearning. We depend on the Holy Spirit to illuminate the scriptures for us as we read so that we read with profit, so that we read with understanding, so that we read with devotion, so that we see what God is actually saying and not just what we wish him to be saying.

And so I would encourage to be prayerful as you go to the Bible and reading this year. Be prayerful as you do so, asking God to open your eyes to the wondrous things that he has said in his Word. And then the third thing to see from this verse is that the law of God actually is wondrous.

There are wondrous things contained here. He says, open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from your law. There's deep insight into the world in the scriptures. There's deep insight into people and how things work and how people relate about God and about his ways all right there.

God's law specifically and God's Word, the entirety of the scriptures generally. Whether it's insight into how people operate or maybe it's the meticulous structure with which God has written the Bible and the attention to detail.

Or maybe it's the sweetness that we see of God's long-suffering love for his people or the glory of his majesty when we read, for instance, that he dwells in unapproachable light. Oh that we would have eyes to see the wondrous things that are in the Word of God.

And so we go to him in prayer asking to see because you need him in order to see. And so depend on God as you read his Word this year. And I want to encourage you to give yourself to the regular reading or listening to the scriptures but do so in dependence on the Lord.

So that's the first word, depend. Second one is desire. Verses 19 and 20, I am a stranger in the earth. Do not hide your commandments from me. My soul breaks with longing for your judgments at all times.

Desire. Verse 19 says I'm a stranger in the earth. Other translations have that word as sojourner. Other places in scripture speak of being exiles on earth. Now there's a way of of understanding that language of sojourner or exile or stranger that's mistaken.

And so, for example, in recent years I've noticed a lot of talk framing Christians as sojourners and exiles on the earth in such a way to neuter any effective Christian agency or action on earth, particularly in earthly affairs, particularly politics, for example.

The thought is that we're just exiles awaiting heaven and so we must just bear with the rulers we have and accept our defeat here knowing that we have victory in Jesus and we'll find our final home in heaven.

And it's true, we have victory in Jesus and we'll find our final home in heaven. But this framing is a mistake because it causes Christians to shirk their natural earthly duties to God and neighbor. And so we don't want to understand being strangers in the earth in that way because we still have duties here and we want to give ourselves full-heartedly to them.

So how should we understand verse 19 and its language of being a stranger on the earth? I think at least one way to understand that is the way James speaks of life in James 4 .14, that life is a vapor and it appears for a little time and then vanishes away and his life is short.

We're strangers on this earth because our lives on this earth are short in the grand scheme of things. Some of you, you're in your 80s. Has life not gone by so fast? I mean wasn't it like yesterday you were a child playing with your friends?

Wasn't it like yesterday you were nursing your babies to sleep? You were at the job site each day. Wasn't it just like yesterday? Or maybe some of you, all of us, various stations of life, you're there on New Year's Eve this past week.

And didn't it seem just like 2024 just flew by? It's January already. Where did the time go? I think about how do I have an almost 13-year-old son? We're on the downward swing of the days that he'll spend in our home.

Just a few short years and he's off to charge his own way in the world. Life is a vapor and we're strangers on the earth. If that's true, and it is, then what could be more important than to know the commandments of the Lord that we might do them?

Do not hide your commandments from me. I'm a stranger on the earth. Life is short. Do not hide your commandments from me, David. The psalmist prayed. Life is short. We must focus on that which is most important.

And so teach me your commandments, God, that I might do them, that I might live and conform my life into how you have said that I am to live. And so contemplating the brevity of life, do you desire to know and to do and to keep the commandments of the Lord?

It's a question for you to ask and answer for yourself. Knowing the shortness of life, do you desire to know and do the commandments of the Lord? Does your soul break with longing for the judgments of the Lord at all times?

Verse 20 says, notice the intensity of desire there in verse 20. My soul breaks with long year. I've seen it translated. My soul is rent with desire. David longs for the judgments of God. And this is not a fleeting desire.

It's not something that's here today and gone tomorrow, distracted by the regularities of life, but it is a deep longing for the judgments of God. It says in verse 20, at all times, I want to encourage you to cultivate a desire for God's word to hear from God, what he has judged, what he has said about certain things, cultivate that desire for what God has said about himself and about the world that you live in and about people generally and you specifically in history and all things.

Long for the words of the Lord. Psalm 12 says that the words of the Lord are pure words like silver tried in a furnace of earth purified seven times long for the words of the Lord. Do you desire his word and his judgments depend desire.

The next word is defend versus 21 and 22. You rebuke the proud, the cursed who stray from your commandments, remove from me reproach and contempt for I have kept your testimonies. God rebukes the proud and here verse 21, he calls them cursed.

These are the ones who rebel against God's word. They rebel against his commandments. They live with unbridled licentiousness. They are proud because they disregard the Lord and they set themselves up as gods.

They say they have a better way to live than what God has said and what God commands. And they're flipping about God's authority over them and over the world and refuse to submit to him. And God will rebuke them or another way to translate that word is God will destroy them.

And this is something that we see throughout the scriptures that God opposes the proud. He sets his face and his fist against the proud. So do not be proud. Do not think more highly of yourself than you all.

Do not disregard the commandments of the Lord or set yourself up as your own God. The Lord will oppose you if you do that and you do not want to be in opposition to God. Rather, humble yourself by keeping God's testimonies, keeping God's commandment, keeping God's word because God gives grace to the humble.

God opposes the proud but he gives grace to the humble. Now I said the third word here in this outline is defend. This is God defending his people. One way God defends the righteous is by dealing with the rebuking and opposing the proud.

He casts down the wicked and defends his people. Mary sings about this in Luke chapter 1 where she says, he has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy.

God defends us. God also defends us when we live according to his word but doing so leads to reproaching contempt from the world around us. First Peter chapter 4 talks about this where people are amazed and surprised that you don't go along with them in sin and that they do evil to God's people.

I don't know if you've noticed this or not but obeying God is not always popular. Holding to the exclusivity of Christ will get you called a religious fundamentalist. Maintaining moral standards and entertainment will get you called a prude.

Insisting on confession and true reprentance from sin in order to restore right relationships will get you called unforgiving and mean. Acknowledging the hierarchies inherent in life will get you called a misogynist.

Wanting two or three lines of evidence to admit a charge will get you called unjust and siding with abusers and racists. Saying that you have a duty to give your kids a Christian education will get you called weird.

Holding to a Christian sexual ethic will get you called a bigot. Saying you ought to be in worship every Lord's day unless you're providentially hindered will get you called a legalist and a Pharisee.

In other words just reading the Bible and believing what it says and doing what it says and holding to what it says and living by what it says will put you at odds with other people often even at odds with other Christians.

The sad fact of reality is that people do not want to obey God and people will go to great lengths to get out of obeying God. And when you read in the scriptures and simply obey what the word says other people maybe to cover their own shame of not obeying God maybe for some other reasons malign you in various ways.

They will insult slander lie and otherwise throw shade at you but God will defend you. God will remove from you reproach and contempt for you have kept his testimonies. God will defend you when you obey his word and I fall in sinful world.

And so don't let the negative worldly consequences of obeying God keep you from obeying God. As you read his word this year keep his commandments do what he says and if it costs you trust that the Lord will defend you.

The Lord will vindicate you. There's an old evangelist he died a couple years ago whenever he was asked how his reputation was he'd respond better than it ought to be. Meaning he knew his reputation would take a hit when he was obedient to God because the ways of the world are at war with the ways of God and he knew that he should be more obedient trusting the Lord to defend him.

So he said his reputation is better than it ought to be. Shouldn't we all be more obedient? Shouldn't we all trust the Lord to come to our defense? Are we too focused on our reputations before other people?

Do we fear man too much and God too little? Do we care too much what other people think and does that keep us from obeying God's to defend you in your good name at any point in time when keeping God's word puts you at odds with the world.

And then lastly verses 23 and 24 delight, depend, desire, defend, delight. Princes also sit and speak against me but your servant meditates on your statutes. Your testimonies also are my delight and my counselors.

The opposition that the faithful Christian experiences as a result of obedience in verse 22 is from other people, just other peers, other ordinary people around. Verse 23 shows that sometimes the opposition gets ramped up just a little bit and here we see princes in opposition to the psalmist, princes in opposition to the faithful Christian, princes referring to the government authorities.

And we see that they sit and speak against, that they sit in opposition. That language shows that this is official formal opposition from the princes. We can relate to this today. We have governing officials who are formally opposed to Christianity.

In some cases holding to Orthodox Christian doctrine is considered a hate crime. There are those with massive government authority and power who hate Christ and hate Christians. So what are we to do? The psalmist's remedy here in Psalm 119, the psalmist's remedy against Satan's devices here is to meditate on God's statutes and to delight in them, to delight in his testimonies.

We're taught here to rightly order our loves. We are to love the delight of God's word more than the approval or good graces of man, even man with power. We are to find more pleasure in doing right by God than by being well thought of by men.

Delighting in God and his word keeps us on the right path even in the midst of conflict and opposition. Calvin commenting on this passage says, to adhere unflinchingly to our purpose when the world takes up an unjust opinion of us and at the same time constantly to meditate on God's law is an example of Christian fortitude seldom to be met with.

This is the type of Christian fortitude that we need in our day and we get it by delighting in God's word. For delighting in God's word leads to doing our duty in God's world. I'm not saying that all we do is just kind of read the Bible and everything else will just work out.

No, we have actions that we need to do, we have duties that we need to do out in the world, but it starts with the scriptures. They're our authority and it starts with our delight and our love for what God has said.

Delighting in God's word leads to doing our duty in God's world. The psalmist also says that God's testimonies are his counselors. That is, he does not rely on his own judgment or the judgment of other people, but he relies on God's word as his guide and his counselor.

And so as you meet this new year, resolve to let God's word be your counselor, to let God's word be your guide, to let God's word set the course for your life, offering you insights, guidance, and direction.

Make God and his word your source of delight for nothing else and no one else can lead you to happiness in the way that God can. Take more pleasure in obeying God than in the approval of other people.

Trust God to defend you at every turn. It is better to obey God and suffer reproach than to side with the fleeting pleasures of sin. Sin always leads to death, but God will always come to your defense.

Desire God's word. Cultivate a longing for his commandments and judgments, knowing that life is a vapor. And what else could be more important in this short life than keeping God's word? Depend on God to give you sight to see the wondrous things in his word, to give you the grace to live and to keep his word.

Make 2025 a year in which you are devoted to God's word. Make a plan to regularly take in the scriptures, read the scriptures, listen to the scriptures, even if it's just a little bit of time. Treat Bible reading like eating.

Sometimes you sit down for a five course meal and sometimes you grab a sandwich and go. And if all you can do is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich worth of reading, do that. You won't go hungry. God's word never returns void.

And so open your Bible and open your eyes and by God's grace, see the wondrous things from his word. Let's pray together. Our father in heaven, this year, may we delight in your word, loving everything that you have said, everything that proceeds from your mouth.

We don't live by bread alone, but we live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. And may we delight in every word that comes from the mouth of God. May we desire it. Cultivate in us, cultivate in our hearts a longing to hear what you have said.

And may we read it and listen to your word with dependence on you. Oh Lord, would you open our eyes to see wondrous things in your word. And when we are faithful to keep your word and father, I pray that you will make us faithful to keep your word.

And when we are, defend us from any reproach that would come from following you in a fallen world, remove from us any contempt and defend us. Oh father, give us our daily bread, strengthen us with your grace through your word.

We pray and we ask all of this in the name of Jesus.

Amen.