God’s Word for You
Psalm 119:123-125 The revealed knowledge of God
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, November 16, 2024
123 My eyes are exhausted as I watch for your salvation,
and your righteous promise
124 Deal with your servant according to your mercy
and teach me your statutes.
I recently finished a drive that took six hours each way. When there is a companion the trip is much easier than the solo jaunt. “My eyes are exhausted” was a phrase I visited in my mind and out loud more than once. People like one or two dear uncles of mine who drive one of the big rigs have another, much deeper acquaintance with that thought. Our poet is standing himself on a wall as a lookout, like Habakkuk does (Habakkuk 2:1), keeping watch at his post and waiting for the Lord to come.
The salvation, the righteous promise, is the deliverance from sin through Christ. The promise came first to Eve, but it had been in the Lord’s mind before the creation began: “This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time” (2 Timothy 1:9). This was both his plan of salvation and our election to glory, but our poet has his feet planted firmly in the present life. His thoughts are on our life of struggling against the sinful nature and the theological drowsiness that Christ warns against: “Are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour?” (Mark 14:37). Our watchfulness is for many things:
1, First, our own salvation. This is the point of verse 124 and the familiar use of the piel verb, “teach.” The force of the verb and its stem is that God would cause us to learn by repeatedly teaching us lessons to bring home the point, lesson after lesson, word by word, point by point. We ask God to teach us, we remember that in the piel verb stem, “teach” is an act that can require multiple attempts (occurrences), that it is often a frequent or repetitive act, and that it shows the aim of the action.
2, We are concerned about the salvation of the people around us. We teach them as God teaches us, and we encourage the people we love to come and learn about Jesus.
3, We are concerned about the well-being of the Christians around us. Paul encourages to do good “especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Galatians 6:10).
4, We are also concerned about the well-being of other people. This is the realm of the Second Table of the Law of Moses. For God often works through us to bring about his will in the world, including the common care of any human being, for this is who our neighbor is (Luke 10:29-37). For while it is certainly true that “some people have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2), God also has messengers who have flesh and blood, for “if we love one another, God lives in us” (1 John 4:12).
5, We are concerned about the creatures of God’s world (Proverbs 12:10) as we fulfill God’s command, “Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28).
125 I am your servant; give me understanding
so that I may truly know your testimonies.
Here the Ayin-stanza moves into the idea of a return to the word of God and hating every wrong path. The poet asks for understanding. He wants to know, really know, God’s word, so that he can confess his faith without misunderstanding what he is saying. He wants to be walked all the way around each and every teaching, each and every doctrine, and truly this is the way one teaches and explains in the Hebrew language. This is why there are so many kinds of parallelism in the poetry of the Bible. Hebrew is not quite as precise a language as Greek, where one can take a single verb and shoot it like an arrow dead-center to a concept and leave no question as to the meaning (“It is finished!” is an example we often hear explained on Good Friday, as should be the case, John 19:30). Our poet wants to be taken all through the word of God by the Holy Spirit himself, as Luther said, “in order to grab hold of every branch in the forest and give it a shake.”
Knowledge of God is present in all human beings. We learn from nature and from our conscience that God exists, that he hates sin, that there must be a punishment for sin in hell, and that God is the creator of all things. Some foolish people reject this, either because they think too much of their accomplishments to imagine that the world could be other than what they themselves can perceive, or because they are human ostriches and think that if they pretend not to see the lion he won’t chase them down and tear them to rags.
But that natural knowledge of God doesn’t tell anyone who God truly is, who the Savior is, or what the gospel promises of God are. Nature only echoes the cross; it does not proclaim it. That is why man has been given the word of God. “In order that man might know who the true God is, and how to worship him rightly, God has revealed himself more fully in the Bible. The Bible not only corroborates the knowledge of God which men have from and by nature, but it amplifies this and add such things that could never be learned otherwise (1 Corinthians 2:7-11).”
This verse, then, is an excellent prayer. “Give me understanding so that I may truly know your word.”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.