God’s Word for You
Psalm 119:76-77 Mercy and Comfort
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, September 2, 2024
76 Please let your mercy be my comfort,
according to your saying to your servant.
77 Let your compassion come to me that I may live,
for your law is my delight.
These two verses have a similar theme: The believer, surrounded by sin, reaches out to God for help. Whether the sin is his own or his own sin compounded by the many sins of others, or persecution on account of his faith, he must look to God for help, since there is no other help to be sought. Therefore he looks to God’s mercy, and to God’s compassion. We learn about these things in God’s holy word (“according to your saying… your law is my delight”). In fact, without the Word of God, the sinner cannot know that God is compassionate. The world thinks of God as an angry, punishing God (or else the world wants to pretend that God isn’t there at all). But the Word brings us knowledge of God’s compassion that overlooks our sins for the sake of Christ.
We ask for mercy because of the sufferings of this lifetime, and this fits with the theme of this stanza and the persecutions that come today. God promises us mercy, and therefore we look to him for comfort.
Whether the poet is David, Asaph, one of the Sons of Korah, or some other Psalm writer, his statement stands in the heart of every believer: “According to your saying to your servant.” That is to say, God’s holy Word is not spoken only to Moses and the prophets, but to all of us who read it and put our trust in him. And the Word of God is that word which we all have in the inspired canon, that is, the Old and New Testaments. It is true that Jesus said,”I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you in all truth” (John 16:12-13). But Jesus absolutely did not mean that after the New Testament was finished and accepted by the church that the Holy Spirit would continue to give new truths or that doctrine would be developed and shaped by other means than the plain revelation of Scripture. The conscience of Christians is bound by the Word of God, not by the words of men.
Where God has spoken to us in the Scriptures, we have confidence that his judgment stands. When he says that he is merciful, we can be certain that this is most certainly true.
Before the Psalm writer turns our attention to persecution that comes from the wicked (verse 78), we remember that our own wickedness is covered by the blood of Christ. We often think of our sins that come in our actions or in our words. For these we surely repent, and ask God to forgive us. But we also sin with our thoughts. Jesus illustrated this in the Sermon on the Mount drawing our attention to sins like anger (Matthew 5:22), lust (5:28), and failing to love an enemy (5:46-47). God’s mercy covers even such sins, all sins, and for this we thank God and trust in his mercy. If he judged us only based on our thoughts, which of us could ever stand before him on Judgment Day? Not one. But our Lord’s mercy endures forever.
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.