Psalm 119 - MEM

 Themes from the Psalm of Psalms

(Loving the God of Psalm 119)

Stanza 13

MEM: Loving God’s law means growing in wisdom, avoiding evil & hating false ways

97. Oh, how I love Your law! / It is my meditation all the day.

98. You, through Your commandments, make me wiser than my enemies, / For they are ever with me.

99. I have more understanding than all my teachers, /  For Your testimonies are my meditation.

100. I understand more than the ancients, / Because I keep Your precepts.

101. I have restrained my feet from every evil way, / That I may keep Your word.

102. I have not departed from Your judgments, / For You Yourself have taught me.

103. How sweet are Your words to my taste, / Sweeter than honey to my mouth!

104. Through Your precepts I get understanding, / Therefore I hate every false way.

It’s been a wonderful journey thus far in our study of David’s Psalm of psalms. His Spirit-inspired poetry is filled with marvelous lessons for the Christian–those who have trusted in King David’s greatest Son, the Lord Jesus. The psalmist’s experiences with God and His word are often a forecasting image of the life and experience of our Lord when He walked the earth. Like David, Jesus was oppressed and afflicted by enemies, slandered and forsaken, even by those closest to Him. 

In our last study of this Psalm, stanza twelve, we saw the writer turning a corner from focusing on his enemies to being mindful of the word, works, and faithfulness of his God Yahweh. He stopped dwelling on his own weakness and helplessness, and remembered who he belonged to: a trustworthy God whose “faithfulness endures to all generations” (v. 90). With this God-ward confidence, the wicked who waited to destroy David could be easily dismissed (v. 95). Like Jesus before his accusers, King David could freely confess his faith in the future judgment of His heavenly Father (1 Timothy 6:13; Matthew 26:64).

This brings us to the thirteenth stanza of Psalm 119, each verse beginning with the M of the Hebrew alphabet, the letter MEM. This letter comes from the symbol for “water,” and it represents to the Jewish tradition the idea of God’s ocean of wisdom and knowledge. Interestingly, there are two forms of this letter: an “open” form and a “closed” form. To the Jewish teachers, God has opened up much of His wisdom for His creatures to hear and understand, but much of His knowledge is still hidden from our finite minds and remains unknown and mysterious (Deuteronomy 29:29).

David’s love for, and praise of, God’s revealed wisdom is obvious in this thirteenth stanza. He loves God’s law–referring not only to the legislative decrees God gave to Israel through Moses, but to all of the utterances from His mouth that are given by the Spirit’s inspiration–loves it with a passionate love that causes him to exclaim, “Oh, how I love Your law!” Like any thing or person that truly inspires our love, David’s heart and mind are drawn to the words of Yahweh continually, like a moth to a flame: “It is my meditation all the day,” he freely admits. His love for God’s word is echoed here as he said it in two previous verses of this same Psalm: verses 47 and 48. But in verse 97 he repeats it more emphatically!

Where has this love come from and where does it lead? How does a true, God-given love for the Scripture manifest itself in a Christian’s life? David goes on in this stanza to tell us what Yahweh’s words have done for him. And here, we can see some royal teaching that prefigures what David’s son King Solomon will teach in the opening lines of Proverbs: 

The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel:

To know wisdom and instruction, To perceive the words of understanding, To receive the instruction of wisdom, Justice, judgment, and equity; To give prudence to the simple, To the young man knowledge and discretion—A wise man will hear and increase learning, And a man of understanding will attain wise counsel, To understand a proverb and an enigma, The words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, But fools despise wisdom and instruction.

David praises the words of Yahweh as the supreme source of both wisdom and understanding. God’s commandments, he says, “make me wiser than my enemies.” Or, rather, the way God has USED those commandments in his mind and heart have MADE his wisdom superior to that of his adversaries. James the New Testament writer, points us to the same Giver of wisdom: “If anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him” (James 1:5).

God gives us wisdom greater than those who would oppose Him and His people, because He loves us, and likewise, as a result of us returning that love for the words He has spoken. It is a two-way street! Those who truly love the Lord, truly will love His word–with all that love implies–and will grow in wisdom and understanding by entering the Lord’s classroom on a continual basis. Hearing, reading, digesting, studying, meditating on God’s revealed truth is what true lovers of the word will gladly do!

Think back to your own school days, especially to those teachers who made learning both challenging and enjoyable. You’ll agree that those teachers were not a dime a dozen–they were very rare! Most school children would rather stay home during a snowstorm and get a day off. But there was that ONE teacher who you always would look forward to learning from. It may have been because they encouraged you to be your best, or because their lessons were always doorways into something that interested you personally. You might lose track of the time in their classroom and be amazed when the bell went off!

Well, when was the last occasion that found you losing track of the time you spent in Bible study or listening to the Scripture read or explained? God is waiting each day for his children to take a seat in His classroom and gain more and more wisdom and understanding. Jesus came to teach us what God is really like. All of His teaching was meant to make us “wise for salvation,” as Paul wrote to Timothy (2 Timothy 3:15). This is the very kind of wisdom that makes one superior to all the brainiacs and egg-heads of this world who look down on the Bible as an old-fashioned, outdated book!

David compares what his love for God and His word have produced in him, with the wisdom and understanding of: his enemies…all his teachers…even “the ancients” or “the aged.” Did you know that just because you grow older, doesn’t necessarily equal getting WISER? So many people all over the world live their entire lives unaware of the riches of knowledge they are missing out on by neglecting the Bible. David credits Yahweh’s commandments as “ever with me”--always on his mind, guiding his thoughts. 

He says that the Lord’s testimonies are his meditation–matters of deep, continual reflection and study. His claim that he keeps God’s precepts means that the lessons he has learned through the word are held close and treasured like “thousands of pieces of gold and silver,” as he wrote in verse 72 of this Psalm. David’s love for the Scriptures considered their worth to be more than any amount of worldly wealth you could name. Is that true for you and me? Do we value the Scriptures that much?

In the remaining four verses of this stanza, King David again mirrors Solomon’s proverbs by giving the results and outworking of the superior wisdom God gives. Proverbs 2 declares:

When wisdom enters your heart, And knowledge is pleasant to your soul, Discretion will preserve you; Understanding will keep you, To deliver you from the way of evil, From the man who speaks perverse things, From those who leave the paths of uprightness To walk in the ways of darkness;

Applying the wisdom of the Almighty always leads our steps away from evil, as the psalmist writes in verse 101. Wisdom and what the Bible calls “folly” or foolishness, are both proven by a person’s behavior and the way he directs his steps. There are ways “that seem right to a man, but the end thereof is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12). Biblical folly is not necessarily a lack of intelligence, but is rather a failure to act in a way that pleases God and is in accord with righteousness. David writes that “I have restrained my feet from every evil way, That I may keep Your word.” Loving God’s word causes us to restrain ourselves, much like wearing a wedding ring may restrain us from offering our love to people other than our spouses. We cannot travel a path of loving God’s word and tread an evil path at the same time!

The title character in the Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan was instructed never to leave the straight and narrow path to the Celestial City, no matter how rugged and rough that path became. Even though that road was crossed by other ways, many of which promised that they, too, would lead him to his goal, the Pilgrim had to make a choice NOT to depart from the path he’d been given. The correct “judgment” had already been determined before he set out. “You Yourself have taught me,” David says to Yahweh. His God is the only Person who declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10). Therefore, it is sheer folly to think we can judge our correct pathway better than He can!

Doing what seems to make sense…doing what comes naturally…doing what “feels right”…living for the pleasures of the moment…going for the gusto…getting what we “deserve”… “following your heart.” Those are all approaches to happiness that come so quickly to our minds as fallen human beings. Our sinful natures are perfectly satisfied to proceed down a road that ignores God’s words and the path He tells us is the wisest and leads to our highest good. 

King David, however, found a way to happiness that was far “sweeter.” Verse 103 exclaims, not just “Sweet,” but “HOW sweet are Your words to my taste, Sweeter than honey to my mouth!” In ancient eastern cultures, nothing could compare with honey for sweetness. They knew nothing of sugar cane or maple syrup in those days. Sweetening common foods was practically unheard of, making honey from the bees like the nectar of the gods. The law of God had become such a thing of delight in this king’s mind, he was compelled to compare its “flavor” in his soul with the sweetest confection he could imagine. After all, the One who’d given him the words of life promised David pleasures that would be savored forever!

David then completes this stanza by giving a summary of what has come before: “Through Your precepts I get understanding; Therefore I hate every false way.” To understand something is to learn and hold onto the TRUTH of that thing. To see it as it really is. There are many kinds of teaching or doctrines at large in the world today:

HUMANISM, which teaches that mankind is the measure of what is good and true and normal. This teaching assumes that people are all basically good, and that the problem with the world is that men and women are just ignorant and must get better education and just “try harder to be kind.” This teaching borrows its ideals from the Bible, but sees them as just good suggestions, not really the words of God.

SECULARISM, which claims that we are better off without any religious beliefs being expressed in the public arenas of education, legislation, finances, politics, etc. Better to just rule on the basis of what the most people are comfortable with at the moment, and forget things like the ten commandments or the faith of the founding fathers. This doctrine would prefer that Christians just keep quiet about their beliefs.

SCIENTISM, the idea that practical science will eventually solve all our problems by conquering nature and analyzing the chemistry of human beings, one day re-making people into a brand new species, free from things like fear and hate and jealousy. Belief in the Bible is seen as unscientific and faith in Christ as unnecessary or even dangerous.

Those are just three of the “false ways” that seek to offer their understandings of reality. There are many more out there, and many more will come in the future. But to King David, the precepts, or teachings, of his God Yahweh are superior because they are TRUE. The Apostle Paul encourages his readers to be “speaking the truth in love,” so that they may become mature in the faith (Ephesians 4:15). God Himself is the One who began this pattern by speaking truth in love to his beloved people. The Bible is called by many God’s “love letter” to his church.

Our culture is telling us that there IS no absolute truth to be found, only “truths” that vary from person to person. The Bible, the words of Yahweh, the great I AM, David’s beloved Lord, sees reality in a different way. And He has shared His absolute view of reality in a way that can be understood by you and me, if we will humble ourselves along with the psalmist and say, “Oh, how I love Your law!”

Amen