Delighting In God's Law

[This talk was quite dependent on PowerPoint slides. I’ve indicated where I used slides with ***]

INTRODUCTION

Today we’re looking at Psalm 119. One of Psalm 119’s claims to fame is the fact that it’s the longest chapter in the Bible. It’s 176 verses long! It’s way in the lead. In second place is a chapter in Numbers, with 89 verses.

Because the chapter is so long it’s a bit tricky to know how to approach it. I clearly can’t look at all of it in detail! Should I just pick one section? Should I try to give a general overview? I think the main theme of the psalm is the psalmist’s attitude towards God’s word, and I’ve decided to try to pick out a few things in the psalm which indicate his (or maybe her?) attitude.

But before we do that, I’d like to give you a bit of an introduction, and also tell you some ‘fun facts’ about the psalm. I’m not sure that these ‘fun facts’ are very relevant to us understanding the psalm, but it seems a shame not to include them.

Who wrote it? No-one knows. Scholars think it was written by David, Ezra, or Daniel.

When was it written? We don’t know. But if it was written by David, that would have been about 1000 B.C.

What is it mainly about? Delight in God’s law.

Now onto some ‘fun facts.’ The first ‘fact’ actually seems rather dodgy to me…

The famous Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, in a commentary on the psalms, related the account of a certain George Wishart who, sometime after 1650, was sentenced to death by hanging. It was the custom at the time to permit the condemned person to choose a psalm to be sung. Wishart clearly knew that the 119th Psalm is the longest chapter in the Bible and he asked for that psalm to be sung. Spurgeon tells us that ‘before two-thirds of the psalm had been sung, a pardon arrived, and his life was preserved.’ Whether the story of the hanging is true or not I don’t know. But Psalm 119 definitely IS the longest chapter in the Bible, and the story IS in Spurgeon’s commentary.

A second fact, which is definitely true, is that the poem is written as an acrostic poem. It has 22 stanzas of eight lines each, and each verse of each stanza starts with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in order. I tried to create a poem along the same lines:

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At school

Before the bell rings,

Children scurry.

Discussing everything.

Every day.

For ten months.

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The psalm is like that, except that there are blocks of eight verses starting with the same letter.

There is an Orthodox tradition that King David used this psalm to teach his son Solomon the alphabet, but not just the alphabet for writing letters: the alphabet of the spiritual life.

Another interesting fact is the eminent people in history have memorised this psalm.

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Pictures of the people below.

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They include William Wilberforce, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery; Henry Martyn, a missionary to India; David Livingstone, the missionary and explorer in Africa; Frenchman Blaise Pascal, who was a famous philosopher and mathematician; and John Ruskin, a 19th century British writer. I like this psalm a lot, but I have no plans to memorise it! As a family we memorised Psalm 91 recently. That’s just 16 verses long and I found it very difficult. I just can’t imagine memorising 176 verses! But it’s interesting that these eminent and no doubt busy people were willing to commit the time needed to learn it. It makes us wonder, what’s so special about this psalm? What’s it about?

I said I would look at the psalmist's attitude towards God's word. In any kind of reading, if you want to get a clue as to what the material is about, a good plan is to look at the beginning and at the ending. We'll do that, and also look at some verses in the middle.

THE GOAL

Here are verses 1 and 2:

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Blessed are those whose way is blameless,

who walk in the law of the Lord!

Blessed are those who keep his testimonies,

who seek him with their whole heart…

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The psalm starts with the word ‘blessed’ in verse 1, ‘Blessed are those...’ This is repeated in verse 2, ‘Blessed are those...’ After that, the word ‘blessed’ comes once more in the psalm, in verse 12. The psalmist says ‘Blessed are you, O Lord.’ ‘Blessed are you, O Lord’ is a different sense of the word blessed, and it’s a different Hebrew word.

So, from the opening two verses we understand that the theme of the psalm is being blessed, and we may expect that the psalm will unpack that theme.