Well, do take a Bible in hand and turn with me please to page 514 as we continue to look at the teaching of the one hundred and nineteenth psalm. We come this morning to verses 81 through 88, which make up the middle stanza, the eleventh stanza of the twenty-two stanzas of this psalm. It is the darkest stanza in the psalm. Charles Spurgeon said of it, “This octave is the midnight of the psalm and very dark and black it is, but even here,” he adds, “stars however shine out.” It’s the midnight of the psalm, but stars shine out. The psalmist here is at his lowest ebb, suffering under the persecution of enemies, struggling to persevere without any immediate relief.
And as challenging as passages like this one can be, we ought to praise God for them because, let’s face it, a life that follows Jesus is hardly a skip in the sun filled park land of unrelenting happiness and prosperity, is it? It is sometimes tough going. It is sometimes long and slow and sad and sore. And though we long for deliverance from our difficulties, the truth is, deliverance does not always come in the way and on the timetable that we wish it would. Frankly, the Bible would ring hollow and the Christian Gospel would be unmasked as an empty and fraudulent promise if it suggested that in following the Lord we would enjoy nothing but happiness. And were we to trust such a Bible, the moment suffering came, as it inevitably must, our faith would collapse. And so praise God that the Christian Gospel isn’t a Disneyland production. It isn’t a thing of fairy tales and wish fulfillment. It works in the real world and describes unflinchingly the tough, hard, long road that many of us are called to walk as we follow our Savior. This stanza rings with painful honesty. It echoes with the familiar cries of our own struggles to stay faithful when fidelity is costly and obedience can really hurt.
If you take a moment to look at it with me, you’ll see the psalm – the stanza rather – has two large sections. Verses 81 through 84 are dealing with perseverance. He’s longing and enduring in all his pain – perseverance. Then 85 through 88 – persecution. This is the context for his perseverance. He recounts for us the opposition he faces and then he looks to the Lord for help in it all. So perseverance and persecution. Those are the two big themes, but not take another look at the stanza. Notice it is further constructed around a series of four couplets, four pairs of verses – 81 and 82 together, 83 and 84, 85 and 86, and 87 and 88. And each pair of verses contain the same three elements. There is a crisis stated, a commitment affirmed, and a cry to God offered. A crisis, a commitment and a cry.
And so, what I want to do this morning as we look at these two big themes – perseverance and persecution – is to use this grid, this three-fold pattern – the crisis, the commitment, and the cry for help – as an interpretive grid to unpack these two big themes as we work through the passage. The crisis, the commitment, and the cry unlocking what we learn here about perseverance and persecution. So that’s our outline; that’s where we are going. Before we look at it together, let me invite you please to bow your heads with me as we go to the Lord for His help. Let us pray.
Our God and Father, our eyes indeed long for Your promise and we have before now often cried to You, “When will You comfort me?” Would You today, this morning, by Your Word and Spirit, speak comfort to our hurting hearts, point us to Christ in whom we have redemption by His blood, the forgiveness of our sins, in whom we have a High Priest who has been touched with the feeling of our infirmities? And enable us, as we see the psalmist persevere, enable us as we walk with Jesus through the midnight of our own lives perhaps, enable us also to persevere. For we ask it in His name, amen.
Psalm 119 at verse 81. This is the Word of God:
“My soul longs for your salvation; I hope in your word. My eyes long for your promise; I ask, ‘When will you comfort me?’ For I have become like a wineskin in the smoke, yet I have not forgotten your statutes. How long must your servant endure? When will you judge those who persecute me? The insolent have dug pitfalls for me; they do not live according to your law. All your commandments are sure; they persecute me with falsehood; help me! They have almost made an end of me on earth, but I have not forsaken your precepts. In your steadfast love give me life, that I may keep the testimonies of your mouth.”
Amen, and we praise God for His holy Word.
Perseverance
Let’s think first of all about the theme of the first half of this stanza – the theme of perseverance. And look at the first couplet, the first pair of verses – verses 81 and 82 – with me. “My soul longs for your salvation; I hope in your word. My eyes long for your promise; I ask, ‘When will you comfort me?’” Remember our grid – the crisis, the commitment, and the cry. So, let’s look here first of all at the crisis the psalmist states and articulates. He is longing, he says, for salvation. His eyes long for God to keep His promises. Actually, the language he uses there is a little more graphic than our version renders it. The word translated “longs” – “My soul longs, my eyes long” – it’s the same word he uses down in verse 87. Do you see it in verse 87 when he says, “They have almost made an end of me.” And so, to make the parallel clear, Alec Motyer suggests we translate verses 81 and 82 like this. “My soul is at an end for your salvation. My eyes are at an end for your promise.” That’s what he is saying. “I’ve reached the end of my rope waiting for You to rescue me from all of this. My eyes can’t cry any more tears as they look for You to keep Your promises. There is nothing left in the tank.” Emotionally and mentally, he is spent. He is done. That’s the crisis.
It’s a problem with which I know not a few of you are very familiar. The problem of prayer apparently unanswered, or at least of answers delayed. It’s the problem of God saying, “No,” or “Not yet,” or “Not like that,” when we are desperate for relief. You have been crying out day after day and you feel like the psalmist here. You’re at the end of your rope. You’re spent. You’re empty. You’re done. That’s the crisis. Maybe you recognize it in your own heart.
Then notice the commitment. In the context of this crisis, the remarkable commitment the psalmist continues to make. Do you see it? Look at verse 81 again. “My soul longs for your salvation; I hope in your word. My eyes long for your promise.” “I’m longing, I’ve been praying, I’ve been trusting You, and I’m running out of runway here. I’m at the end of what I have left to keep me trusting and waiting and enduring, and yet still somehow, somehow, I hope in Your Word.” It’s a remarkable declaration of tenacious faith, isn’t it? Hoping in the Word of the Lord when God has yet to keep His promises. It’s often the nature of Christian experience that these two things occur simultaneously, if as it often seems to us quite inexplicably in the same believing heart. On the one hand we feel we are at the end of ourselves, and yet still we cling to the Word of God. Charles Bridges, one of the commentators on Psalm 119, he puts it like this. “The strength of the strongest of God’s people proves but small when afflictions press heavily and expected help is delayed. But though the soul fainteth, it cannot fail. We depend not on what we see or feel, but on what the Word promises. If God has engaged, it must be fulfilled. Be the difficulties, nay, the impossibilities what they may.” So the crisis – he’s at an end of himself.
Then the commitment – even still, against all the odds, beyond any human explanation, he hopes in the Word. And then notice the cry. Verse 82 – do you see it? “I ask, ‘When will you comfort me?’” It’s an abrupt, even a heartbroken plea from a child who feels his father has abandoned him. “When will You comfort me?” And in this, can’t you hear an echo of the experience of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, abandoned by His Father to the wrath and curse of the cross and left to cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” And actually hearing that echo here in the psalm, I think, helps us with at least a partial answer to the question the psalmist could not from his own vantage point in history hope fully to have understood. We know what he did not know – that in Jesus Christ, the God for whom our hearts long, has come, Himself, to bear our reproach and endure our condemnation and suffer affliction and abuse. God Himself in Christ, despised and rejected by men. “Surely He has borne our grieves and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chasetisement that has brought us peace and with His wounds we are healed.” And so part of God’s answer to the psalmist’s question, “When will You comfort me?” is right here – isn’t it? At Calvary. At the cross. The Lord has come in person and plumbed the depths of sorrow. He knows the darkest darkness of abandonment and fathoms the abyss of suffering in Jesus Christ. And we may go to Him knowing that in Him we have one touched with the feeling of our infirmities. And He is ordained of God to be the source of our comfort.
Now look down at verses 83 and 84 at the second couplet in this first half of the stanza dealing with the theme of perseverance. And again, notice the crisis stated in verse 83. “I have become,” he says,” like a wineskin in the smoke.” What a graphic image – a wineskin in the smoke. Unlike ceramics or glass, wineskins were fragile things. You might remember Jesus’ parable about new wine in old wine skins. Do you remember? The old wine skins, they get stiff and inflexible and they can’t expand to accommodate the fermenting new wine, and so eventually the new wine skins burst. The image this time is similar, a little different. This time it’s of wineskins that have been used and emptied and hung up in a tent between uses. And the smoke of the campfire has blackened and caused the wineskin to shrink and wrinkle. It’s become brittle and cracked so that now it’s in real danger of being damaged beyond all usefulness.
And that is a vivid picture of what we might call burnout, isn’t it? A wineskin in the smoke. “That’s how I feel right now,” the psalmist says. Parched, smoke damaged, brittle, like a wineskin in the smoke. Sometimes circumstances can do that to us. That’s the crisis. Do you see it?
And given that, again, notice the remarkable commitment that he makes. Against this backdrop of pain and burnout and exhaustion, verse 83, “I have become like a wineskin in the smoke, yet I have not forgotten your statutes.” “Grace,” says Spurgeon, “is a living power which survives that which would suffocate all other forms of existence. Fire cannot consume it. Smoke cannot smother it.” And that’s the testimony of the psalmist here, isn’t it? First Peter 1:5-6, we read of Christians who, by God’s power, are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this,” he says, “you rejoice, though now for a little while if necessary, you have been grieved by various kinds of trials so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise, glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. So Peter is describing this same strange duality the psalmist in this stanza is recounting for us and you may know in your own experience. He talks about God’s people being tested by fire, left feeling like wineskins in the smoke at the end of themselves, he says, grieved by various kinds of trails. And yet at the same time, wonderfully, through it all, they are guarded by the power of God through faith for salvation. And that’s what’s happening here in the psalmist ‘s life. “I’m hurting. I’m worn out. I’m beaten down. I’m parched and brittle and burned and singed. And still, even still, I have not forgotten Your statutes. Still in this extremity, I hope in Your Word. I trust You.”
Dear ones, the only explanation for your continued trust in God in the dark of your sadness or your sickness or your struggle, the only reason you look to Him and do not now run from Him, the only thing that makes any sense of wineskins in the smoke, still trusting the statutes of the Lord is what Peter says. “By the power of God, you are being guarded.” Right now, maybe you don’t feel it, you don’t see it, you don’t realize it, but today, believer in Jesus, in your trial, by the power of God, you are being kept through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. He is keeping you. You are being kept. That’s what’s going on.
The crisis, the commitment, then look at the cry in this second couplet. Verse 84, “How long must your servant endure? When will you judge those who persecute me?” That first question is really, “How many are the days of your servant? I’m running out of time. My days are less and less.” And in the urgency of that reality, he asks his second question of the Lord. “Now you will remember back in verse 82 he was praying for comfort in the middle of his crisis. This time, as he continues to persevere through it all, do you see what he asks for? Not now comfort; he asks, “When will you judge those who persecute me?” Now isn’t that striking? He’s echoing here the cry of the martyr believers under the altar in Revelation 6:10 who represent the suffering church in every age. “They cried out with a loud voice,” John says, “O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” The psalmist is longing for the day of judgment. This is the cry of all the faithful when the enemy comes in like a flood and suffering mount up like a tidal wave ready to crash down on our head. “How long, O God, till judgment comes?” He’s longing for judgment day.
Did you know that Christians should be longing for, hoping for, praying for judgment day? Do you ever feel like that – you’re praying for judgment day? Here’s why you should long for, hope for, pray for judgment day. Two reasons. Number one, knowing the day of judgment is surely coming means having the reassuring confidence that final justice that may elude you and every human judge and all human justice, final justice will certainly be done. And in that, there is great comfort. Evil men will not escape the true and just Judge, even if frail, fallible human judges and flawed, broken, human justice does fail. Think about the recent shooting in Lewiston, Maine. Eighteen people gunned down. The gunman commits suicide. Where’s the justice? Even had law enforcement apprehended him and brought him to trial, what earthly justice could we ever have hoped to mete out that could adequately fit the monstrosity of his crime? But as Christian people, we know that man has not really escaped justice at all. Has he? No, true justice, perfectly fitted to match the offense, will be done. None shall escape the just judgment of the Lord. And for that, in a dark world where justice so often seems to prevail, we should praise God. So, the psalmist hopes and longs for the judgment of God.
And secondly, knowing the day of judgment is coming allows us as Christians to commit all justice into the hands of God and not to take revenge ourselves. Romans 12:19 says, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God. For it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine. I will repay,’ says the Lord. To the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. For by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Longing for the day of judgment, committing all judgment to God, helps us reject vengeance and enables us to overcome evil with good. And that’s what the psalmist is doing here when he prays, “When will you judge those who persecute me?” This isn’t spite. He’s not being vindictive. He is crying for God to do justice and he is entrusting justice and judgment into the hands of the just judge. So that’s the first theme I want us to see here – the theme of perseverance. He is enduring, isn’t he, against all the odds, looking to God for comfort, trusting Him for final justice.
Persecution
Now secondly, look at the other half of the stanza, verses 85 through 88, and notice what we learn about the context of his sufferings through which he must persevere. He is being persecuted. So perseverance, now persecution. The first couplet you can see in verses 85 and 86. Remember our grid – the crisis, the commitment and the cry. So notice the crisis first – verse 85. “The insolent have dug pitfalls for me; they do not live according to your law.” So he is surrounded by malicious schemers who are trying purposefully to trip him up and make him fall. This isn’t the kind of passive exclusion that Christians most commonly suffer in our context at the hands of a materialistic and worldly culture. No, this is much more overt and hateful. They are trying to take him down. That’s the crisis; it’s personal. It’s pointed; it’s ugly.
But then in the face of that, again, notice his commitment. Verse 86 – “All your commandments are sure,” even though he says, “they persecute me with falsehood.” “All your commandments are sure.” “Their lies make my life miserable, but I know where solid ground is to be found. I know where to look for stability and security and clarity and wisdom. All your commandments are sure. I’m not going to give as good as I get. I’m not going to take a leaf out of their book. I’m going to live on Your terms, not on their terms.” The crisis – persecution. The commitment – the surety of God’s commandments.
And then the cry, verse 86. It’s really not at all an impressive prayer, isn’t it? Verse 86 – sometimes this is all the prayer we can muster though, isn’t that right? Sometimes all we know to say, all we have left is this prayer. Do you see it? “Help me! Help me!” That’s the best we can do. Actually that was the prayer of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:25. When she came and knelt before Jesus she said, “Lord, help me.” There are times when that’s all we’ve got. But you know, a cry for help from a believing heart is always eloquent in the ears of Jesus Christ. A cry for help, however simple and honest, is always eloquent, compelling in the ears of Jesus Christ. The cry of this woman in Matthew 15:25, on the surface, certainly looks like the epitome of weak, trembling faith at best, small and fragile and timid. All she said is, “Lord, help me.” But Jesus said to her, “O woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire.” Sometimes even great faith prays like this. “Lord, help me.” The truth is, the simplest prayers are often the best. Here is a prayer you could pray. Everyone in this room could pray this prayer; anyone can pray this prayer. “Lord, help me.” Would you go to Christ with your sin and pray this prayer? Go to Him in your fear and pray this prayer. Go to Him in your hurts and in your helplessness. Go to Him in every circumstance. Make this your cry. “Lord, help me. Help me.” He knows what you need before you ask Him, so you don’t need to be eloquent with Him. He’s not impressed by many words. What He wants to hear from you is your heart cry, looking to Him, turning aside from every other source of final confidence to rest all your confidence in Him. “Lord, help me.”
Then look at the final couplet, verses 87 and 88. The crisis, again, verse 87 – “They have almost made an end of me on earth.” Here’s how extreme his circumstance really is at this point. These persecutors, they’ve almost succeeded in their plan. He has escaped destruction by the skin of his teeth so far, and yet still he declares his commitment, verse 87, “but I have not forsaken your precepts.” I think we’d all understand if under these circumstances, so extreme, so unusual, he filled his attention with some other concerns, wouldn’t we? We’d all understand. But even in this extremity of need, when they’ve almost made an end of him, he is preoccupied with the precepts of the Lord. “I have not forsaken your precepts.” The crisis. The commitment.
Finally, the cry in verse 88. Do you see it? “In your steadfast love give me life, that I may keep the testimonies of your mouth.” That is to me a remarkable prayer. He is not simply praying, “O Lord, give me life.” He is praying, “Give me life so that I can go on obeying You under the gaze of a watching world. I want to show them that Your grace is reliable and strong and true, so give me life that I may keep Your Word.” A remarkable expression of a devoted heart.
So look, step back for a minute. What’s the big idea? Well sometimes, when the battles rages hot and we are hurt and exhausted and wonder if we are going to make it, sometimes when we feel ourselves saying with the psalmist, “My soul is at an end. My eyes are at an end. They’ve almost made an end of me,” sometimes we wonder if God’s promise of preserving and persevering grace can really be trusted. Can we hang on? Will we persevere? We feel like we’re holding on by the slimmest of threads. Every minute our grip is slipping. Friends, on days like that, read Psalm 119:81-88. Look at the psalmist here in the darkest stanza of the psalm. What did Spurgeon call it? “The midnight octave of the psalm.” Look there and see this poor man against all the odds, really beyond any human explanation, still saying, “I hope in Your Word. I have not forgotten Your statutes. All Your commandments are sure. I have not forgotten Your precepts. They persecute me. They’ve almost made an end of me. I’m a wineskin in the smoke, and yet still, inexplicably, I can’t help but trust You. I look at myself and I say, ‘I’m done. My tank is empty. My strength is spent. My hope is gone.’ And then I look at You and somehow I keep going, despite it all.”
Would you look at the psalmist and please take heart. Here he is, being kept. Do you see it? He is being kept by the power of God right in front of our eyes. Here’s a man in whom the grace of perseverance, the grace of divine preservation is on display. Now certainly he doesn’t feel like he’s being kept. On the contrary, he feels like he is done, but he is being kept and so he keeps looking to the Lord. He keeps trusting Him and following Him. And listen, the one who kept him, dear hurting brother or sister, the one who kept him will surely keep you. He will. He will. “The work which His goodness began, the arm of His strength will complete. His promise is yea and amen, and never was forfeited yet. Things future nor things that are now, nor all things below or above, can make Him His purpose forgo or sever my soul from His love. My name from the palms of His hands, eternity will not erase. Impressed on His heart it remains, in marks of indelible grace. Yes, I to the end shall endure, as sure as the earnest is given. More happy, but not more secure, the glorified spirits in heaven.”
You are kept. He will, He will, He will keep you. So press on. Let’s pray together.
O our God and Father, as we bow before You, we confess with the psalmist we have often felt, maybe right now we feel, like wineskins in the smoke, ready to burst – broken, brittle, cracked, damaged. We feel at the end of ourselves. And yet with the psalmist, miraculously we are also saying, “We look to You. We trust You. Our hope is in Your Word.” And so hear our prayers. Keep Your promise. Comfort our hurting hearts and preserve us by Your power. Guard us and keep us by faith for salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. For Jesus’ sake, amen.