“…ACCORDING TO YOUR WORD”

A sermon based upon Psalm 119: 73-80, CSB

By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership, 

August 25th, 2019

Kathleen Norris, in her book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, tells the ‘scariest story’ she knows about the Bible”

“One Saturday night in a local steakhouse, she and her husband were talking to an old-timer, a rough, self-made man in the classic American sense. His grandparents had been dirt-poor immigrants, homesteading in western South Dakota, living in a sod house, barely making a living off the land in the early years.   But the family had prospered, and he and his brothers had built up a large ranch of many thousands of acres. This man had gotten where he was by being single-minded when it came to money; making as much of it as possible, and spending as little as he could, except when it came to his wife and kids: they always drove new cars.

We knew “Arlo” as a rather reserved man, but that night he was in a talkative mood; he was facing chemotherapy for an advanced, probably terminal, cancer.  During their conversation, out of the blue, Arlo began talking about his grandfather, who had been a deeply religious man, or as Arlo put it, “a darn good Presbyterian.” His wedding present to Arlo and his bride had been a Bible, which he admitted he had admired mostly because it was an expensive gift, bound in white leather with their names and the date of their wedding set in gold lettering on the cover.

“I left it in its box and it ended up in our bedroom closet,” Arlo told them. “But,” he said, “for months afterward, every time we saw grandpa he would ask me how I liked that Bible. The wife had written and thank-you note, and we’d thanked him in person, but somehow he couldn’t let it lie, he’d always ask about it.”

Finally, Arlo grew curious as to why the old man kept after him. “Well,” he said, “the joke was on me. I finally took that Bible out of the closet and I found that granddad had placed a twenty-dollar bill at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, and at the beginning of every book of the of the whole Bible, over thirteen hundred dollars in all. And he knew I’d never find it.”   After laughing with Arlo, he began talking about the interest he could have made had he found the money sooner. “Thirteen hundred bucks was a lot of money in them days,” he said, shaking his head.

What was Arlo’s grandpa thinking when he stuck all that money into that Bible he gave as Arlo’s wedding gift?  Maybe it was one line from Psalm 119: “…I love your commandments more than gold, even more than pure gold.”  (Ps. 119:127 CEB). 

Psalm 119 is a daunting Psalm to read in one setting.  It seems the biblical writers or editors knew this, because they broke it up in readable sections, divided up by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.   You can note this, especially in older Bible Versions.   

We certainly can’t consider all 176 verses, which is, as one bible scholar coined it, ‘a monument of devotion dedicated to God’s law.’  What we can do is underscore the primary reason the Psalmist was devoted to God’s law (or God’s word).   The law, statues, and commandments, which eventually became the first five books of the Bible, were the only ‘Bible’ or ‘word from God’ that he could to read, study, and learn.  By reading them, and devoting himself to them, he learned what Arlo’s grandpa was trying to teach Arlo: God’s word can be like ‘pure gold’. 

BLESSING:  “YOUR INSTRUCTION IS MY DELIGHT” (77)

When in our text, the Psalmist spoke of God’s ‘instruction’ or ‘law’ (KJV) being his ‘delight’, he points back to the opening verses of Psalm 119, opening with words similar to Psalm 1.  “Those who walk in the Lord’s way”, meaning in the ‘law of the Lord’ are ‘blessed’ or ‘happy’ (119:1).

The reason God gave and still gives us his law and his word today, is the very same reason the truth was revealed to Adam and Eve in the Garden.  Remember? God said:  “Don’t eat, or you will die!”; which the Snake twisted to say,  “Did God really say that?”   All the way back to the so called ‘original sin’ which is found in all of us too, we find humans struggling to take God’s word seriously as a blessing, rather than as a curse.   When we move just further along in the book of Genesis, we encounter God calling Abraham to both ‘receive God’s blessing’ and to ‘be a blessing’ to the nations.  Here, again, God’s word was God’s call to ‘blessing’, not just so that Abraham would be bless, but so that the world could be ‘blessed’ too (Gen. 18:18).

Also, even a little further, in the time of Moses, at the time of the giving of God’s law, we discover much more than the ‘thou shalt nots’ of the 10 commandments, but God’s law also includes the command ‘to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your neighbor too.’  In the last book of Law, Deuteronomy, we understand that the law was given to Israel for ‘blessing’, rather than to be a curse.  It was God’s intention to give the law to redeem people from the ‘curse’, not to put a burden on people’s back or to invite a curse into their lives.

Then, finally, the key message of the entire New Testament, is not to ‘destroy’ the law, but to ‘fulfill’ the law.  The law is ‘fulfilled’ when Jesus explained what the God’s word and the law was originally about.   Jesus, then, came redeemed people not only from the curse of sin, but also from the curse of the misunderstanding the law.   Jesus came to ‘bless’ and give ‘freedom’ with God’s saving and redeeming love.  Jesus and Paul both agreed on this main point: that the true law that comes from the heart of God is to bless us, to save us and to restore us to living our best and fullest life.  

Isn’t this something we should must be clear about, especially today, when it comes to understanding the great purpose of God’s law and God’s word?  Everything the Bible and God’s word ever was, and still is about, everything the church was, and still is about, everything Jesus was, and is still about: is to bringing ‘blessing’, ‘delight’, and life into this world.  If you missed that, you’ve missed ‘the delight’ of God’s word.

Many years ago, in the 1700’s, Soren Kierkegaard, Danish pastor and philosopher, who still captivates modern minds, both philosophically and religiously, wrote seriously and poignantly about some of the things he saw wrong with the established church in his time: “The Bible is very easy to understand.  But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly…..  OUCH!

And wasn’t just people in the pew that Kierkegaard scolded, but he also went after professionals too, adding “…. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close….(From Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard).  OUCH, OUCH, again!  But more recently, Stanley Hauerwas, reminded that the ‘Dane’ also had something shocking and challenging to say about how the Bible is misused.  He even suggested that the church would be better off without the Bible, since people often use it to learn about God, rather than follow Jesus in how we live our lives  Ouch!  Ouch!  Triple Ouch!  

It hurts, and it stings, but shouldn’t we still hear Kierkegaard’s very valid point, even if he says it what he even called a the most ‘dreadful’ way?  He was saying that if we don’t find the ‘blessing’ of how God intended the Bible to be read, understood, and answered with our own lives, then what good is it anyway?  If we can’t find the ‘blessing’ or the ‘delight’, God intended, then we missed everything God was trying to do for us, when he gave his Word. 

So, let’s turn again to the blessing and the ‘delight’ of God’s truth.  The Bible was never intended to confuse us, divide us, or make us fight over differing interpretations and opinions; but the Bible was intended to be, as the text says, to be a ‘blessing’ because it is, as it says elsewhere in this Psalm, a ‘lamp’ and a ‘light unto our path’.  Of course, we sometimes differ in how we ‘interpret’ this ancient book, but if we will seek to discover even the ‘delight’ of having differences too, we can again find ‘gold’, ‘pure gold’ in these ancient words.

PROMISE: “BE FOR MY COMFORT…” (76)

Speaking of ‘differences’ brings us to the one reason, above all other reasons, that this Psalmist was ‘blessed’ by God’s word:  “Please let your faithful love comfort me, according to what you've said to your servant (Ps. 119:76 CEB).  It is the ‘comfort’ in God’s law that makes God’s law worth reading, and this ‘comfort’ is from God’s ‘faithful love’ that comes in how God speaks, individually to his ‘servant’.  

Isn’t this why any of us come to Scripture, and what we need most from Scripture?  We don’t turn to God’s word because it feels good, nor do we always turn to God’s word because we like it, or we begging to hear what it says, but we come to God’s word, and keep coming to God’s word, because behind everything that is being written, revealed or told, is a story about God’s faithful love.   

Several years ago, when I was living in the Western German, attending language school, I met a man who was a psychologist, specializing in something called “Logos therapy”.  Logos therapy simply means using ‘words’ to help people deal with emotional and mental stress, but this guy, hearing that I was going a missionary, wanted to tell me what he was doing that was unique.  He was prescribing, not just reassuring words, but nightly ‘Bible Readings’ to his patients, even to those who weren’t Christian.  By doing this, he said his patients were finding that their nerves were calmed, their anxieties were leaving, and that they were falling asleep and resting better.  (My sermons work the same way).   Even when they didn’t believe anything they read, he said the Bible was bringing them comfort and peace.

While this is certainly not normally what Bible reading means, what is very much the same is that God gives his word, not only to bless our lives, but also to bring us ‘comfort’ and ‘hope’; two very both powerful words being used in this text.  But the most important word here, is not just the word ‘comfort’, but the word ‘promise’.   As the New Living Translation puts the Psalmist prayer in verse 76: “Please let your unfailing love comfort me, just as you’ve promised…”

RIGHTEOUSNESS:  “LET MY HEART BE BLAMELESS”  (80)

The Psalmist, understood, however, that the way God’s blessing and promise are best known to us, is when we live in that blessing, and when we live toward God’s promise.  This is what he means when he prays, “Let my heart be blameless” or in another place, he says, “…they oppressed me with lies---but meanwhile, I will be contemplating your precepts!”   Isn’t that a very interesting way to face the problems and the problem people in your life?  “…Meanwhile, I will be contemplating your commandments!”   In other words, they can do what they please, but I will put my focus on what you, o God!  In other words: With what God has commanded me to do, I will live for him.

There are many places the in Psalm 119, that the Psalmist not only speaks of God’s blessing, or God’s comforting promise, but he keeps coming back over and over to how how God’s blessing, and how God’s comfort, challenges and changes how he lives his life.   The Psalmist rejoices in God’s law, not because he merely reads God’s law, but he also rejoices in how God’s words reads him, and calls him to think about the kind of person he should be and the way that he should live.

Isn’t this where it all comes down to, for us, as well?  The Bible is a very old book, and it looks at life from many different angles, and sometimes the Bible raises more questions than it gives us answers.  But what the Bible does, quite remarkably well, is that it doesn’t give us all the answers, but it challenges us to start asking the right kinds of questions, and more than this, it challenges do our part in being the answer.

When the newly formed church of Henry the VIII, was forcing all the clergy to move away from the mother Catholic Church, not on the count of beliefs, but because King Henry wanted to have the women he wanted, Thomas Crammer went along with King Henry.  He even signed a covenant saying that he denounced the Catholic Church.  But after watching two of his colleagues being burned at the stake because they refused to renounce the Church, Crammer recanted, and told the King he wanted those papers torn up, knowing that he would too would die in the ‘fire’.  When that moment came, it is said that Crammer went bravely, unafraid; that he even put his hand in the fire first, because he said, this is the hand that betrayed his faithfulness to the truth of God and the Church.

The Psalmist finds that the greatest blessing, and the greatest comfort comes in his life, by knowing that when he stays with the core truth of God’s love, both mediating upon it and living it, he ‘will not be put to shame’ and he remains ‘blameless’ before God and others.  Nothing gave this Psalmist greater peace, greater hope, and greater purpose in life, than to know that he stood ‘blameless’ and true to the God who by his faithful, unfailing love, remains true to him.  Now, that may not sound like much of a way to find blessing, comfort or faith to many people, either in his world or ours, but it was ‘pure gold’ to him.  

So, as we close today, thinking about the blessing of having God’s word; both his written Word, the Bible, and the living Word, the one who was God’s word in the flesh, but remains God’s word in Spirit, ask yourself what God’s word means, or should mean to you.  Do you take time to study it, understand it, and allow yourself to be challenged and changed by it; or have you already read everything you need to read, heard everything you want to hear, and done everything you are going to do.  Sadly, the living Word doesn’t have any effect on us, when we make it a ‘dead’ word of the ‘letter’, rather than the ‘living’ words of life.

In one of the most powerful moments in Jesus ministry, Jesus was speaking to those Bible experts, who knew the Bible better than most people.  Jesus said, however, that they were still missing something important.  Jesus observed how diligent they were in ‘searching the Scriptures’ to find ‘eternal life’, but what they were still missing was that ‘The Scriptures pointed to him!” And they ‘refused’ to come to him”! (John 5: 39-40).   

So, let’s read the Bible, but it won’t help us the way it was intended to help us and save us,  unless we find life in him.  Finding life is Jesus Christ, is the ‘gold’ and ‘the treasure’ that the Law, the Prophets, and all the Bible is about.  Amen.