God’s Word for You
Psalm 119:53-54 A stopover
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, June 17, 2024
We have our District Convention this week. I will return to Galations soon, but please accept these verses from the Psalms for the present.
53 Indignation grips me because of the wicked,
who forsake your law.
David is angry because he understands just how precious a gift the Law is that God has given to mankind. How many religions wonder what their god or gods want from them? How many religions invent stories about their gods, gods of wrath and anger and selfish passions, or gods that are aloof and incomprehensible? Yet the true God, the Maker, has given us his will in definite words. Man can know exactly what God thinks about worship, about the family, about marriage, about divorce, about hurting, killing, loving, stealing, and generally how people should treat each other.
But then, having the voice, the words, of God (which no one else in the world has), there are so many who don’t care about his law, and who forsake the law. This, David says, “burns me up.” The word for “indigation” is translated “a scorching wind” in Psalm 11:6, and “fever(ish)” in Lamentations 5:10. Maybe the implication is that what angers and sets the believer on fire in this lifetime will kindle God’s anger on Judgment day and therefore set the unbeliever in the fire of God’s judgment (Amos 7:4; 2 Peter 3:7).
54 Your statutes are songs for me
wherever I lodge.
Remember that the meaning of “statute” is the Law of God with an emphasis on its permanence. The unbeliever is led away from God’s statutes “by their lying idols” (Amos 2:4) and by the failure of parents and grandparents to instruct their families (Malachi 3:7). To walk in the statutes of a wicked king is to abandon the statutes of the Living God (Micah 6:16).
For David, God’s statutes are like music. There are themes throughout the law that are regular and perfect. The law is harmonious in all of its statements, in its treatment of human beings; in the glory it demands for God.
He is thinking of the lodging places he has spent nights in throughout his life. The life of a shepherd, and then of a captain in Saul’s army, and then as a refugee running for his life, gave David many experiences in strange places, far from home, never anywhere near his mother’s quiet little kitchen in Bethlehem. But in every single one of those strange places over the long years of David’s life, one thing was always with him: God’s holy word. Even though he heard songs in odd dialects, the music of the Gentiles of Galilee, the music of the Philistines of Gath, and the music of the nomads of the desert wastes—the Word of God is what David calls “songs for me.” This is a strange thing to say from Israel’s “singer of songs” (2 Samuel 23:1). But even though David knew thousands of songs, and probably wrote many hundreds of his own, including more than half of the Bible’s Psalms, it was the holy Word of God that was the best music to this singer’s ears.
“Wherever I lodge” can also mean everywhere we are on this earth. God has given the earth to man (Psalm 115:16), but it is just a temporary resting place. We are like Jacob “living as an alien in the land of Ham” (Psalm 105:23). This world is not our eternal home, and as we meditate on that, we become less and less attached to the things of this world. In one sense, the pastor lives this attitude out with his life. He goes where he is called, not where he wants to live; not at home near his parents. He takes his cue and his comfort from young Samuel, who went to live in the tabernacle, “a boy wearing a linen ephod” (1 Samuel 2:18), although as a grown man Samuel returned to visit his parents often: “He always went back to Ramah, where his home was, and there he also judged Israel” (1 Samuel 7:17). The Christian treats the world, as delightful as God’s created world is, as a stopover on the way to the true Paradise. While we are here, there is a huge variety of entertainment, of music, of songs and dances both sacred and profane. But too often they are simply not sacred, or veer away from right teaching and correct doctrine. And so we might find ourselves whistling a tune that does not have godly lyrics. Is that song sinful? At the very least it is a dangerous path—one that we all walk without thinking almost every day. Don’t let a catchy song change the way that you put your faith in Jesus. The best music, the finest lyrics to hear, are the eternal words of God himself. As God the Father said to James, Peter and John: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!”
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.