Now if you would please take a copy of God’s holy Word in your hand and turn with me, if you’re using a church Bible, to page 514 as we continue our ongoing exposition of the one hundred nineteenth psalm. Today we are considering the twelfth stanza, which begins in verse 89. Last time, when we looked at verses 81 through 88, we found the psalmist in the darkest stanza of the whole psalm. Spurgeon, remember, called it “the midnight octave of the psalm.” His suffering seems to have been at its most acute and his cries to God at their most desperate. And now in this stanza, he is still suffering. In verse 92, he tells us how close he has come to perishing in his affliction. In verse 95, the wicked are still lying in wait to destroy him. So his circumstances haven’t really changed, and yet the tone of this stanza is quite different. After the midnight of verses 81 through 88, we come this morning to the brightening dawn here in 89 through 96. And the thing that makes all the difference for the psalmist in this stanza is his meditation on the total reliability of the Word of God. The total reliability of the Word of God.
When I was first a candidate for the ministry in the mainline, largely liberal Church of Scotland, I attended Glasgow University for my theological training. And there, I was assailed by theological skepticism as my liberal professors marshaled every argument in class to demonstrate that the Bible simply cannot be trusted. And for my first year at seminary at least, I have to tell you, my faith was severely shaken because it seemed to me quite obvious that if the Bible is not true, then Christianity is not true. If you cannot trust the Scriptures, you cannot know Jesus. If you take away the foundation of a reliable Bible, the whole edifice of faith must collapse. Without a dependable Bible, all we have is a fantasy, a religion of make believe, of sentiment and delusion. Now, praise God, there are academically credible, deeply satisfying answers to all the objections that my professors were raising. And though it took me a while to find them, instead of rejecting the Bible, the experience led me to see this miraculous book as the great anchor of Christian hope, the unassailable fortress for life.
And that’s really the psalmist’s great concern as he seeks his own urgent comfort. It is to remind himself he really can trust this book. You can trust the Scriptures. You have a solid rock from which, if you will build your life upon it, nothing can shake you. In the Word of God, if you can trust the Bible, you have a solid rock from which nothing can shake you.
Now look with me for a moment at the stanza, verses 89 through 96. You’ll notice it has two parts – 89 through 92, 93 through 96. Eight-nine through 92, the psalmist rehearses the dependability of the Word. It is stable and sure and solid and secure. The dependability of the Word. And then in light of the dependability of Scripture 93 through 96, the psalmist actively depends on the Word as he goes to God in prayer for deliverance and for fresh help in rescue. He is enabled, as we all must learn to be helped in the latter need by clinging to the former truth. You depend on the Word in the crisis, in your affliction, while the wicked lie in wait. You depend on the Word by reminding yourself that the Word is utterly dependable. So do you see the outline? This is where we are going. The first half of the stanza, 89 through 92 – the dependable Word. Then 93 through 96, the second half, the psalmist depending on the Word. The dependable Word and depending on the Word. Before we look at that outline together, let’s pray and ask for the Lord’s help and then we’ll read the Scriptures. Let us pray.
Lord our God, our hearts are open to Your gaze. Our souls long for Your Word to do its work. We know forever, O Lord, Your Word is firmly fixed in the heavens and Your faithfulness endures to all generations. By Your Word, then, come to us, teach us, and enable us to trust in You and in Jesus Christ whom You have sent. For we ask it in His name, amen.
Psalm 119 at verse 89. This is the Word of God:
“Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens. Your faithfulness endures to all generations; you have established the earth, and it stands fast. By your appointment they stand this day, for all things are your servants. If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction. I will never forget your precepts, for by them you have given me life. I am yours; save me, for I have sought your precepts. The wicked lie in wait to destroy me, but I consider your testimonies. I have seen a limit to all perfection, but your commandment is exceedingly broad.”
Amen, and we praise God for His holy Word.
Well let’s think first of all about verses 89 through 92 and what we learn about the dependable Word. The dependable Word. The very first word of verse 89 strikes a sharp contrast with what has come before it in the previous stanza. Do you see that? Remember near the end of the last stanza in verse 87, the psalmist says of his enemies, “They have almost made an end of me from the earth.” He is contemplating his end. But now in this stanza, he is contemplating forever. He was contemplating his end; now he is contemplating forever. “Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens.” He is impermanent and he feels it, fragile. “All flesh is like grass. The wind blows over it and it is gone and its place remembers it no more.” He feels that deeply, but now he looks away from the impermanence of self to the Word of the Lord and he knows that, unlike him, the Word is forever, firmly fixed in the heavens. He is a flickering candle, guttering in the night, ready to blow out in the wind. But the Word of God, he confesses, is the pole star. It is constant and fixed. You can always navigate safely by the Word of God.
Now to be clear, “the word” in view in verse 89 isn’t the Bible, per se. In this case, it is the sovereign decree of God who speaks all things into being. You remember Genesis 1:1? “In the beginning, God said, ‘Let there be…’ and there was…’” But the point our text is making is that it is the same mind, the same will, the same power, the same utterly sovereign decree that commanded the stars and the sea and every living thing into being that speaks still. And He does so now in the pages of holy Scripture. That is the psalmist’s great theme throughout the psalm but particularly in this stanza.
And to make his point, did you see the way he weaves the solidity and the dependability of the Word of God in Scripture together with the work of God in creation? Did you see that? He knows, verse 90, that God is faithful in every generation, just as the Scriptures promise that He will be. And he is confident of that fact because, he says, verses 90 and 91, God, by His firmly fixed Word, has “established the earth, and it stands fast. By your appointment they stand this day, for all things are your servants.” In other words, God reigns over creation and He reigns in providence. As the shorter catechism puts it, “God preserves and governs all His creatures and all their actions,” and He does it all, the psalmist says, by His word of sovereign decree. And that word is of a peace. It flows from the same mind. It is spoken, if we could put it this way, by the same divine lips. Or to use Paul’s language in his letter to Timothy, it is “breathed out by God,” just as surely as the Word written that you are holding right now in your hands. The source code of the universe is the Word of God. Beneath molecules and atoms and neutrons and electrons and all the infinitesimal building blocks of matter, undergirding and sustaining all that is, is the Word of God. Hebrews 1:3, speaking of Jesus the divine Son reminds us, “He is the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of his being, and he upholds the universe” – how? “By the Word of His power.” So while my professors in Glasgow were blasphemously busy denying the total truthfulness of Scripture, the word of Christ’s power sustained them in their very existence day by day.
And then, notice this, to these great facts the psalmist adds his own personal testimony in verse 92. Do you see his testimony in verse 92? Notice what he says there about the dependability of God’s Word. “If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.” Now it’s important to understand what the psalmist is and is not telling us there. He is not saying that his not perishing in his afflictions was conditioned upon the intensity of his feelings of delight in the Scriptures. He’s not saying, “Because I delighted so much, therefore I did not perish.” If that were his point, this stanza would hardly provide us with the comfort it is made to generate. Instead, it would always leave us wondering, “Do I delight enough? Do I delight at all? Do I have to delight every minute of every day or will intermittent delight be adequate?” Our assurance would rest – do you see – entirely on our subjective feelings. And our feelings, as you probably know, are as stable as quicksand, and yet we do tend to think in those terms so very often, don’t we? We want to crack the spiritual code that will guarantee the positive outcomes we seek. “So just tell me how much delight in the Bible I have to load onto the scale so that I can get the blessing.” That’s often how we tend to think. That’s not the way to peace. In fact, it’s the only way to ensure constant second guessing and the deepest kind of spiritual insecurity. Never knowing if you’ve quite done enough, felt enough, delighted enough.
That’s not at all what the psalmist is teaching us here. No, he’s really saying something simpler and far more helpful. He’s saying it’s not just creation in general that is sustained and upheld and preserved by God’s Word. It’s my life in particular, day after day. “I wouldn’t make it,” he is saying, “without the Word. If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction. Affliction would win every time, except for Your law, Your truth, Your promise, Your Word, it is a life-preserver, keeping me afloat in the storm, keeping my head above the water. The water is a life-preserver. Without it you are going to drown.” That’s what he’s saying.
So how is he preserved, enabled to persevere through affliction? He delights in God’s holy Word. The great doctrine of the perseverance of the saints is mysterious in many ways. God promises to keep us so that none that the Father gives to His Son can be lost – John 17:12. He that began a good work in you, if you are a Christian, will carry it on to completion – Philippians 1:6. It is a sovereign, mysterious work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of His children so that those whom He justified, those whom He called, He justified, whom He justified, He infallibly, 100 times out of 100, also glorified – Romans 8:30. It is a precious but mysterious truth, especially when you look at your heart. As I look at mine and I see so much remaining sin, I see how fickle and prone to wander I continue to be. How will God cause me to persevere? It’s mysterious, yet it is His promise.
But in verse 92, the psalmist is reminding us that for all the mystery of the Holy Spirit’s preserving work, God nevertheless works by means, and those means are not so terribly mysterious. What is the principle means of your preservation, your perseverance according to verse 92. How are you going to make it? What instrument will God use to keep you? Do you see it in verse 92? It is delighting in the Word of God. “No wonder that’s the case,” the psalmist is saying, because the God who speaks here in this book, who promises to keep you and guard you and work in you and sanctify you and bring you infallibly home to glory one day when the work is done, this same God speaks when the sun shines, He speaks when the seasons change, He speaks in the rainfalls, He speaks your heart beats. The same word that upholds the universe, that is the rebar of reality, is the Word you hold in your hand and is utterly dependable. It can bear all your weight.
Christopher Ash says of these opening four verses of the stanza that when Christians walk according to the word, “We do not carve out for ourselves as some little minority religious grouping, a social order of our own construction.” And here’s the phrase – “No, we walk along the grain of the universe.” Isn’t that a helpful phrase? When you walk according to Scripture’s direction, you are walking along the grain of the universe. Delight in God’s law. Build your life on God’s Word. Trust God’s promises. Obey God’s precepts. Believe God’s Gospel. Walk in God’s way. And as you do, remember you are not scratching out a marginal, alternative lifestyle that we hope our non-Christian neighbors will indulge and excuse and permit. No, we are living along the grain of the universe. The Word of God is the Word that makes the moon work and the birds fly and cells divide. And when we live according to the Word, we are living in harmony with the way God has ordained things to be, with the way things really are. The unbelieving world, they are the ones living across the grain, against the grain, not just of the Bible, but of the fabric of reality, the fundamental set and frame of the way God has ordained things to be.
If you are not a Christian here today, maybe you’ve been living actually with a sense of that for some time. You know at some basic level your life is out of step somehow; it is dislocated. There is an awareness of the wrongness of your life as you currently live it. Well here is the explanation. Do you see it? You have been living against the grain of the universe when you’ve lived without regard to the Word of God. Reality itself is framed by the Word of God’s decree. It is upheld and sustained by the Word of Christ’s power and it is redeemed and made new by the Word of the Gospel of grace. And so to live your life without the Word is to wander blindly in the dark. “What if your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in the way.” The Word of God is your life-preserver. It’s your roadmap. It’s the pole star. You never, never will live your life aright until you come to live it under the Word, obedient to the Word. And so that’s the first thing the psalmist is teaching us here – the dependability, the reliability, the stability and permanence of the Word of God.
Then secondly, look down at verses 93 through 96 please. Notice the psalmist, now strengthened by his meditation on the dependability of Scripture, turns actively to depend on Scripture. He now is depending on the Word. Remember the first word of the stanza in verse 89 was “Forever.” “Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens.” Our English version doesn’t bring it out, doesn’t translate it, but the word “forever” also begins the first sentence of this second half of the stanza in verse 93. Literally, the psalmist said, “Forever, I will not forget your precepts. There is no situation in my life where I can do without the Word. Forever, at all times, in every place, under every circumstance, I will not forget your precepts.” And then he adds a motive, a reason. Here’s why I’ll never forget the Word of God – “For by the Word, for by Your precepts,” he says, “You have given me life. You have given me life.” Life, in fellowship with God, comes from God’s Word. The psalmist here really is saying much the same thing the apostle Peter says in 1 Peter chapter 1 beginning at verse 22. “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth, for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding Word of God. ‘For all flesh is like grass and it’s glory like the flower of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of the Lord remains forever.’ And this Word was the good news that was preached to you.” You were born again, he says, through the living and abiding Word of God. The Word of the Gospel that was preached to you. You have life through the Word.
By the way, that’s why preaching is so very important, why we cannot do without it. You have life through the Word. You are born again through the living and abiding Word. This Word was preached to you. Preaching is the primary means of grace for the salvation of the lost and the sanctification of the church. And so the psalmist says, “Since you have given me life through your precepts, I will never forget them.” “Since you are born again,” Peter says, “through the Word, live in its light.” The Word made you a Christian and the Word is how you will grow as a Christian. You will never be anything but a stunted and immature Christian, deformed, unfaithful, with a closed Bible.
That doesn’t mean, however, that so long as we pay attention to the Bible we are all set, as if living the Christian life was no more demanding than following with sufficient care the self assembly instructions on a new bookcase from IKEA. So long as you do exactly what it says in the step-by-step guide, all will be well. The Bible is vital, indispensable, but the Bible isn’t God. And no matter how well you know it, how resolutely you follow the Bible, unless you also make the words of verse 94 yours, your own, that Word will never bear fruit in your life. Look at what the psalmist says in verse 94. “I am yours; save me, for I have sought your precepts.” “I have sought your precepts” – so I am using the means of grace, I am not neglecting the Bible, but unless by Your Spirit You work the truth of the Word into me, unless You Yourself come to me to save me, the Bible will do me no good. That’s what he’s saying.
So listen, listen, you need more than formal diligence in using the means of grace. You read your Bible. You come to church. You listen to preaching. Good, you are commanded to do that, but you need more. You need more than the means of grace. You need grace of the means. That is to say, you mustn’t rest content with a solid dose of Bible now and then and conclude that all is well. You must come to Jesus Christ for yourself and say with the psalmist, “I am yours; save me!” Like Peter sinking in the storm when he tried to walk across the waves to Jesus – do you remember? We need to cry to Christ every day, “I am Yours. Lord, Lord save me!” That was Peter’s prayer; I wonder if it’s yours. As you pray it, I want you to remember that the Lord Jesus, as He contemplated the storm of His own coming sufferings and the horrors of crucifixion that lay ahead of Him, I want you to remember He refused to pray this prayer -”Save Me.” He refused to pray it. John 12:27, “Now is my soul troubled and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour.’ But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.” In other words, “I am not going to pray, ‘Save Me.’ I am going to pray, ‘Father, get glory by My obedience as I head purposefully, intentionally to Calvary.’” He went to the cross refusing to seek rescue that payment might be made in full for sinners like me and you who do not deserve to be rescued at all. By His sufferings He secured salvation for every person who comes to Him crying, “I am Yours. Save me.”
Please don’t confuse Bible intake, church attendance, or any of the outward disciplines of the Christian religion with salvation itself. Please don’t confuse them. You can have a memory stuff full of Scripture and still not know for yourself anything of the rescue Jesus died to provide. And what a dreadful irony that would be since your mind stuffed with Scripture, those Scriptures are constantly preaching Christ to you, urging you to come to Him. And so however familiar you may be with the Scriptures, you do not yet understand them as you must till you go where they point you. Come to Jesus Christ, abandon yourself to Him, cry with the psalmist – would you cry with the psalmist today, “Lord, I am Yours; save me!” And let’s remember too that that cry, that posture of personal abandonment to the care of the Lord, that’s not just for the beginning of the Christian life; it’s for every day. Every day cry, “Lord, I’m Yours. Save me.”
And verse 95 in the stanza gives us a sense, I think, of how urgently the psalmist was praying this prayer. Look down at verse 95 please. He cries for God’s salvation, in this case because, “The wicked lie in wait to destroy me, but I consider your testimonies.” “I am Yours; save me,” is the daily prayer of a believer and sometimes it’s really urgent, as it was here for the psalmist. And don’t miss the contrast in verse 95 between the wicked on the one hand and the psalmist on the other. Look at them both – the wicked and the psalmist. The attention of each is fixed in radically different directions, isn’t it? “The wicked lie in wait to destroy him” – so they are preoccupied with him and all their schemes to do him harm. That’s their preoccupation.
Where is the psalmist’s attention, however? He is not preoccupied with them at all, is he? Isn’t that remarkable? I don’t know about you, but when the crisis comes, especially when it’s interpersonal conflict, when there is opposition and hostility, I can hardly stop thinking about it and my heart is a mess of insecurity and anxiety and stress and fear. But where is the psalmist’s attention? “The wicked lie in wait to destroy me,” and if it was me, the rest of that sentence would be, “and I can’t stop thinking about it and worrying about it and fretting about it.” Where is the psalmist’s attention? “The wicked lie in wait to destroy me, but I consider your testimonies.” “But,” warns Charles Bridges, one of the commentators, “it is the considering of the Lord’s testimonies that draws out their staying support.” He gets support, he is helped in the crisis by considering, by meditating, by milking the Word for all its worth, to get all he can from it.
What do we do when the wicked lie in wait to destroy us? What should we do when the crisis comes, when trials grow, when affliction looms large? We must learn to draw by faith the staying support of the Lord from a renewed consideration of its testimonies. It’s not like Peter on the wind and the waves that we should fix our attention, but on Christ and on His call to us to come to Him that sounds in Scripture. When we notice the storm, we soon begin to sink. Isn’t that so? And so the psalmist says, “The wicked lie in wait to destroy me, but I consider your testimonies. I am fixing my attention on the Word of God and not on the waves of the storm, not on the lies of the world, not on the fears of my own heart. I consider your testimonies. I am sticking to the Scriptures.”
And all of that leads to the final summary declaration of verse 96. Do you see the psalmist’s great conclusion, having reflected on the dependability of the Word and having sought to depend upon it himself? Look at verse 96. “I have seen a limit to all perfection, but your commandment is exceedingly broad.” The perfection he is talking about there is the best of the best that human beings can offer. And yet he says, “The limitations of all human invention cannot be hidden. I have seen a limit to all perfection. The best we can do, I know, is still flawed.” But he also knows he is sure of one thing, only one thing that will defy those limits, that is endlessly suitable for every circumstance, unfailingly relevant for every situation, unerringly helpful in every trial. Your commandment is exceedingly broad.” There is a wideness, a sufficiency, a dexterity, a universal applicability in the Word of God. God is speaking in it. How could it be otherwise? And that word leads us back to Him. His Word is exceedingly broad. That is to say, there is room for you. There is room for your need, for your crisis, for your heart. There is room for you. The word extends to cover you, accommodate you, deal with you, speak to you, call to you.
We sometimes sing in Henry Francis Lyte’s great hymn, “Abide with Me,” the words, “Change and decay in all around I see, O Thou that changest not abide with me.” That’s really the sentiment the psalmist is expressing here, isn’t it? Everything else, all the perfections of the very best that life has to offer, they all run out, they all break down, they all fade away. I’ve seen the limit of all of them. “Change and decay in all around I see.” But like God Himself who changest not, the Word that He speaks to us never fails, never fades, never falls. So what will I do, what will you do? The psalmist says, “I will trust this Word.” Will you? If you are still dazzles by the fleeting perfections of this world, I want you to know you are building your house on sand. But if you have come to learn that there is exceeding breadth, there is room for all your heart needs, provision for all your soul requires, in only one place, in this book, if you will come there, you will find a solid rock upon which to build – a dependable Word.
May the Lord give us grace to see the dependability of the Word and like the psalmist, to depend upon it. Amen. Let us pray.
O Lord, there may be some here who have been living against the grain, across the grain of reality of the way You have wired all things to be, having spoken them into being by Your Word. And they’ve been living ignorant of the Scriptures, unwilling to yield to their claims, resisting the call of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, refusing the authority of Your Word. And so their lives are dislocated and disjointed and broken. Would You come to them now by Your Spirit, through the Word that has been preached, and all them back. Cause them, like Peter spoke of the Christians in Asia Minor, to step forth in newness of life. Grant to them the new birth, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding Word. Call them, irresistibly, gloriously, wonderfully to Jesus. And for those of us here who have been walking with you for years and years, our cry remains the same as our cry that first day we trusted Christ – “Lord, I am Yours. Save me.” For Jesus’ sake, amen.