Teaching for Life
The psalms offer great encouragement and wise words of caution. The psalms give voice to our feelings of joy and sorrow; they are heartfelt prayers, helping us to cultivate the gift of prayer. Consider this nineteenth psalm, full of wonder, staggered by the mind and heart of God, deeply aware of God’s glory, far, vast, and near, and deep, offered to us deeply, to be received deeply into our minds and hearts, consciousness of God’s glory at work in our daily practice of living.
To speak of the glory of God’s Word is to speak not only of Scripture, it is also to praise the logos, the Word, the Son, Jesus Christ, always with the Father in the unity of the Spirit. We speak quite imperfectly, when we separate one Person of the Trinity from another in speaking of God’s actions. I think of the relation this way: the Father wills and the Son carries out. The nineteenth psalm contemplates God’s power and purpose as it contemplates the power of communication. We have a God who communicates with us powerfully, who gives ability.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; / the skies proclaim the work of His hands” (9:1). On a clear night, look up. How far away, those stars, how old the light you are just now seeing! If you have access to a good telescope, look at Jupiter and its moons, or the rings of Saturn; look at Mars, the red, dead planet with polar ice caps in its seasons. The Perseverance rover has recently landed on Mars. For the first time, we can hear the sound of the wind on Mars and see the Martian sunset. Through the rover’s eyes, we also see, still, a planet devoid of life. There is no life on that planet now; perhaps there never was. In all this cosmic vastness, across all the cold, void light years of space, we are the only life we know. Lonely? Sad? Glorious! Amazing! Wonder-inducing. Think what this means; feel what this means, that, here, God has willed life.
The secular theory, to the extent that I am familiar with it, tells of random events, a singularity’s sudden expansion, and subsequent agglomerations. Why the expansion happened, what a singularity actually is, how it functions—well, to be determined. By such an account, how unaccountable that we should ever have gotten to this point! The emptiness is stunning: no purpose, no necessity, no reason. All values, all thought of beauty, truth, or goodness—all arbitrary. Some may call it freedom. The secular story sounds to me rather a tale of hopeless bondage and perfect futility.
The heavens speak, sing, continually: “Day after day they pour forth speech; / night after night they reveal knowledge” (19:2). If we hear, it is in a deeper faculty for knowing and being known. What knowledge did it take to create this? How knowledgeable, the One who caused all this to be! This Creator makes it possible for us to begin to know Him. Attentively to contemplate the sky is to begin to know a Creator who is vast, deep, who fills darkness with light, who causes millions of stars to shine millions of years away, and our own sun to shine in just the right way at just the right distance, giving light, warmth, hope, joy, life.
The psalm sings of our sun “like a bridegroom [. . .] like a champion rejoicing” (19:5): glorious, reflecting glory; joyful, eager, strong, confident—all the things we’d like to be, like to have in our own lives, things which, maybe too often, we feel we lack. Jesus has them, and he has us. “[N]othing is deprived of [the sun’s] warmth” (19:6). God causes His sun to shine upon and give warmth to all. God takes an active interest in all He has made. He nurtures life; He delights in growth, delights in growing our joy.
God doesn’t always speak using human language; He always speaks by His Word. To hear, we must pay close attention; we must reflect upon what we have heard. Attention and reflection are spiritual gifts, gifts for life. Through attention and reflection our lives and our living change: we become more attuned. God causing us to notice uses our noticing to give our lives another direction, a God-direction, leading to God, being directed by God. Seek and ye shall find.
How dangerous, how necessary, how joyful, our sun—its light, its warmth. Life needs both. God gives both. Light and life come by God’s Word, speaking to be heard. If we’re paying attention to and reflecting upon God’s Word, we might begin to perceive, to understand God’s message to us: His love for us, our staggering distance from God, and the way God provides to cross that distance.
The intimations of the heavens are made plain in the written Word. It’s no surprise this psalm in awe of the heavens turns in awe to God’s Word, the Law of the Lord. I’m not sure how you feel about this word, law. You law and order types may like it: law is good, the opposite is disorder, and Lord knows we have enough of that, around us and within. You more rebellious, free-spirited types might feel chafed, chained by this word law: law is imposed, external power; the opposite is freedom. Lord knows how we yearn for freedom, for good and for ill.
This word law, torah in Hebrew, is many-layered. At heart, it has to do with teaching, even nurturing. God’s torah is His teaching for life. His Word is life-giving. We Christians know and affirm this, cherish it with joy. God’s Word saves. Where it comes as law, as Paul tried to explain, it’s lethal for us: the law shows us our inability to do what it requires of us. The law is lethal for us because of sin—that vast distance between us and God which the heavens sing to us, to our wonder, loneliness, and longing. Sin is not simply the regrettable things we say to each other, the horrible things we do to one another. Sin is the name for broken relationship, estrangement, our default state, a gulf we cannot cross.
God’s Word, the torah of God, His teaching for life, for living and for having life, is Jesus Christ, who comes not as law but as grace. Christ teaches the way of the Cross as he travels the way to the Cross, the way none of us would have him go, the way he knows he must go, for us, to bring us the healing we cannot obtain for ourselves, to give us the forgiveness apart from which there is no life. What we cannot do, he can do, and wants to do, and has done, for us. We turned ourselves against God’s Word; God sends His Word for us. We die by the law; we live by Christ. Truly, God is love.
Truly, “[the torah] of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul” (19:7). The teaching of God’s Word perfectly accomplishes what God sends it to do. His Word does not return to Him empty. God’s teaching for life refreshes the soul: His Word is rest for our weariness, encouragement for our dejection, hope for our discouragement, drink for our thirst, food for our hunger. God has made food and drink for us; He has made us for His Word.
God’s Word “is trustworthy, making wise the simple” (19:7). Some of us are naturally trusting, others have a harder time, perhaps because of hard hurts. What evidence do we have that Jesus is trustworthy? Without the testimony of the Spirit, we have no evidence worthy of the name, no evidence of any compelling weight. You’re each of you here now, in church, singing God’s praises, praying to a God who listens, hearing the Word of our trustworthy God. God is urging you to stake your life upon His Word, the truth and power of the Word, for the Word is power, creating all things, and the Word is truth: away and apart from the Word is darkness and falsehood. You can trust that God’s Word will give wisdom: that fear of the Lord apart from which there can only be disaster, for you and others; wisdom—that fear of the Lord keeping you attentive and reflecting upon His teaching for life, to walk with the Lord in the light of His Word.
God’s Word is “right, giving joy to the heart” (19:8). There was a time when we found what we thought was pleasure, even truth, in what the Bible says is wrong: you can name your wrong, I can name mine; we’re ashamed of it all, though not as much as we ought to be. Joyful hearts—how we long for that feeling of safety, radiance, faithful perseverance, no matter what happens in this life, and oh, how this life happens! Joy is found in what is right. When you have and cherish what is right, truly right, you will have joy. When you cling to what is wrong, you will not. The heart rejoices in what is right because the heart rejoices in truth. God made our hearts so, and though sin deforms and ruins our hearts beyond recognition, God’s Word sets about to repair and restore us.
God has the power to do it, through His Son, His Spirit, His Word, through something as simple, and holy, as a taste of bread, a taste of juice: the power of restoration, grace made visible. The hungry heart rejoices in the presence of truth; eyes accustomed to darkness rejoice in the presence of light; weary souls rejoice in the presence of love. Our spirits rejoice in the presence of wonder, the sure sign that God is near.
Light to guide us, our light in this life, lighting our way to the next, life with God, life forever—our light of hope, our light of joy. God’s Word is light. How brightly he shone on that darkest day, there upon the cross. How bright in our heart, even in the depths of that dark tomb. The power of the Word opens the tomb; God’s light pours in. Where there was no life, God causes life.
The Old Testament speaks often of this fear of the Lord. We don’t understand. Fear means afraid, right? Afraid of God? Should we be? Is He scary? Is he angry? Beloved, He is always angry with sin, particularly yours and mine. He is angry because sin, our sin, damages the relationship we have with Him, the relationship He has with us. The fear of the Lord is not so hard to understand: it is that healthy, good sense that warns us away from knowingly, willingly doing damage to this relationship. The psalm says this fear “is pure, enduring forever” (19:9). I take that to mean that the fear of the Lord—this wise fear, this conscientious, loving fear—is pure and purifying, just as the love of God. As we walk in the fear of the Lord, we become less afraid. Imagine! As we receive and cherish above all the love of God, we will love God more, and better. This purifying love endures forever, will help us to endure, so that we may enjoy forever, with God. The word that expresses this life-giving, strengthening, holy union of fear and love is faith.
The psalms are candid: set over against gratitude for warning and for the hope of the promise of reward is clear awareness that we are blind most of all to our own shortcomings. I think Jesus said something about that, too.[1] What shall we do? With the psalm, let’s pray for forgiveness; let’s have faith that our prayer is heard, and being answered, in Jesus Christ. Let us continually pray with the surgical precision of the psalm that God would “Keep [us] also from willful sins; may they not rule over [us]” (19:13). But that’s a sermon for another day.
We have come in faith to hear by faith what God may say to us. We have come in faith to receive by faith God’s Word of Life. May you always encounter that Word, Christ, here. May others always encounter Christ, that Word, in you.
Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!
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