Psalm 19:7-14
I
have a hard time following the directions of someone who has lived in the same
area forever. They go something like this.
“Well,
you go down to the old Baylor place, but don’t turn there. After the spot where
the lighting took out the old tree on Wally’s place, turn down that lane. Well,
it isn’t a lane, really. It got taken over after the flood of ’62 and the new
bridge was built. It’s down there a piece on the right.”
There is too much information missing to
make these types of direction really useful. They point in the existence of
your destination, but they lack enough usable current information to get you
there.
If
you have ever tried to use a GPS in a city with very tall buildings your device
has a hard time getting a lock on the satellite signals. You keep traveling,
but device doesn’t catch up with you. The directions it renders are not correct
because your current location is different than your GPS’s. They need the
information from the satellite to update and pinpoint your current location
before it can give accurate directions. And now we don’t even carry maps in our
cars to help us in an emergency.
The
creation orients us to the existence of the Creator God, but that isn’t
sufficient to bring us into relationship with Him. This second half of this
psalm takes us to the second element needed for us to reconnect to the Creator.
We need more than the stars and sun. They can point us in the right direction,
but they don’t tell us enough.
God’s
Word, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, give us the specifics
needed to bring us restoration and life. These verses give us a series of attributes
of God’s Word. It is not an exhaustive list, but a compliment to the beginning
part of the psalm. The first part of the psalm is about general revelation,
what God tells everyone about Himself in creation. There is much more than what
is written here, but even what is written is enough to get us oriented in the
right direction. Our portion today is about special revelation, the specifics
of the LORD’s intervention in creation as revealed in the written record. Again,
much more could have been written, but what was written is sufficient to bring
us to salvation.
There
are five different words used to describe God’s Word: law, statutes, precepts,
command, and decrees. Each word speaks of the same body of literature. There
are slight differences in meaning, but because of the structure of Hebrew
poetry, those differences aren’t really important. These all have their origin
in the LORD. They are all His law, statutes, precepts, commands and decrees.
Just as He endures, so what He says endures. They have an infinite value.
The
Word refreshes the soul, and brings wisdom, joy and light. If ever we needed
these things in our world, it is now. But so many don’t heed the warning. Even
we ourselves need the Word to show us our own faults. The Scriptures bring
light into our dark souls. They keep us from diving off the deep end. They
provide reward and warning. They point their finger at our willful choices to
disobey. In other words, they mess with us.
May
we pray the prayer of verse fourteen, may our words and meditation be pleasing to
Him.