Psalm 119:97-105 – Loving God's Word (1 Timothy 3:10-17)
97 Oh, how I
love your law!
I meditate
on it all day long.
98 Your commands are always with me
and make me
wiser than my enemies.
99 I have more insight than all my
teachers,
for I meditate
on your statutes.
100 I have more understanding than the
elders,
for I obey
your precepts.
101 I have kept my feet from every evil
path
so that I
might obey your word.
102 I have not departed from your laws,
for you
yourself have taught me.
103 How sweet are your words to my
taste,
sweeter than
honey to my mouth!
104 I gain understanding from your
precepts;
therefore I
hate every wrong path.
105 Your word is
a lamp for my feet,
a light on
my path.
48 years ago, my wife and I were living in Grand Rapids in Michigan. We were there for a school year while I studied at a Theological Seminary in the city. During that year we attended a Church where it was their practice to learn by heart various passages of Scripture. We would then recite the verses together as a congregation during the morning service. We learnt Matthew 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount, learning a few more verses each week. Most weeks we would just recite that week’s six or eight verses, but occasionally, just to ensure we had not forgotten what we had been learning, we would go back to the beginning and recite a whole chapter.
I remember that we also learnt Psalm 119 off by heart. This was far more difficult than Matthew's Gospel as it did not have the same narrative flow. It took a real effort of memory to remember the blocks of eight verses, but by reciting them together on a Sunday morning, those who had learnt them imperfectly, or not at all, were carried along by those who had learnt them well.
There were some verses that made a lasting impression on me. One was verse 9 "How can a young person stay on the path of purity? By living according to your word." All those years ago I was a young man (I was 26 at the time), and this verse struck a chord with me. I wanted to live well for God who had loved and saved me, and here I was being reminded of a vital means to godly living; I needed to read and pay attention to God's word, to understand the call of God upon my life and to put it into practice. I needed to be able to say with the psalmist, "I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you" (v. 11). I needed to delight in the things God had said in Scripture and make sure that I did not neglect his word (v. 16).
Another verse that made a lasting impression on me was verse 97 at the beginning of our reading this morning, "Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long." Perhaps one of the reasons it made a lasting impression on me is that as we were learning Psalm 119 we would sometimes sing a hymn – probably quite unknown to you – which had the rather catchy chorus based on this verse:
O how love I thy law! O how love I thy law!
It is my meditation all the day.
O how love I thy law! O how love I thy law!
It is my meditation all the day.
Psalm 119 is all about God's word, described variously as God's law, his statutes, his precepts and so on. It celebrates the fact that the Living God is a God who has spoken to us and has spoken so that we might know him.
God speaks to make himself known
How can you get to know someone? Only by speaking with them and they speaking to you. How often have you had a totally wrong impression of someone, but then you have met them and spoken with them and got to know what they are really like.
In 1 Corinthians 2:11 Paul makes this point with respect to God. He writes "For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God." If God had not made himself known we would be left guessing at what God is like and would come up with images and ideas as false as the idols we read of in the Scriptures – idols that have eyes but cannot see; that have hands but cannot aid their worshipers; that have legs but cannot move; that have mouths but cannot talk.
It is one of the glories of the Living God that he speaks, and that his word is powerful and life giving. God spoke at the beginning of time and at his word our universe sprang into being: light shone in the darkness; sun, moon and stars were created: the earth was formed and filled with teeming life. And it is this same God who created billions of galaxies and trillions of stars by the power of his word who then created us, men and women in his image, and who delighted to walk with these first human beings in his garden, the Garden of God, in the cool of the day. I don’t know what they talked about, but I am sure that they talked. God delighted to share himself and his life with our first parents as they walked and talked together.
That relationship was disrupted by human disobedience, but the whole of the Bible is the story of God’s determination to restore his relationship with those he created in his image. God wants to talk to us that we might know him and experience communion with him. By speaking to us he reveals his heart and his mind. He spoke to Abraham and owned him as his friend (Isaiah 41:8). God spoke to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend (Exodus 33:11). God spoke to David and made himself known to him as the shepherd of his life, the one who cared for him. God spoke to the prophets and gave them his word to declare to his people.
Now I want you to appreciate with me just how extraordinary and wonderful this is. David says in Psalm 8:3-4
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are
mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
When we contemplate the vast reaches of our universe, of which we learn more year by year and yet know so little; when we consider that God made it all and sustains it all, why should such a God be interested in us? But he is. He made us in his own image and wants us to know him and have fellowship with him. Does this not fill you with wonder and adoration?
The Bible is the record of God’s words to us and his longing for us to listen and respond to the overtures of his love.
God speaks to us through every page of Scripture, but …
God had spoken to us supremely in his Son
God has spoken to us finally and supremely in his Son. Addressing Jewish Christians who had grown with a deep knowledge of God’s self revelation in what we call the Old Testament, the author of the letter to the Hebrews, writes:
In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. (Hebrews 3:1-3)
He contrasts the many times and various ways in which God spoke to his people in the past with this one final and perfect way in which God has now made himself known; he has spoken to us in the Lord Jesus Christ. Here we see most clearly the character and heart of our God – his great heart of love for all that he has made.
There’s a great difference between speaking to someone on the phone or over an internet link like FaceTime or Zoom and being able to meet face-to-face. In Jesus, God has not remained far off, nor has he sent another messenger or prophet to speak to us, he has come to us in person. Immanuel, God with us, has stood where we stand and spoken to us as one who has shared our flesh and fully understands our condition. Jesus is the word incarnate, the word made flesh. And Jesus is the one in whom and through whom God still speaks to us by his Spirit.
Jesus told the Jewish leaders who were so proud of their Scriptural knowledge, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” (John 5:39-40). Jesus says that all Scriptures testifies to him; he is the focus of all the Scriptures because he is the one through whom God has spoken to us most clearly, most loudly, most fully and most wonderfully. He is the key to understanding all of Scripture, the one who enables us to read it aright.
How do you respond when someone speaks to you? I hope that you pay attention and listen to what they have to say.
Jesus often used the phrase “Whoever has ears, let them hear.” He calls us to hear what he has to say to us. He calls us to learn of him and to follow him. He calls us into a living relationship with him. That relationship is one that has been made possible through his shed blood. Jesus says:
I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me – just as the Father knows me and I know the Father – and I lay down my life for the sheep... My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. (John 10:14-15, 27-28).
We belong to him and he cares for us and nothing is ever going to break that relationship. But that relationship on our part it is characterised by hearing his voice and following him; by listening to him and learning of him.
This then is to be our passion: seeking to hear the voice of Christ our Saviour and Lord and Shepherd of our souls in all of Scripture; to hear his voice and follow him.
And so I want to return to where we began in Psalm 119 verse 97
Oh, how I love your law!
I meditate
on it all day long.
The measure of our love is seen in the attention we pay to the one we love. If we love God’s word we will want to spend time in reading it and meditating on it – attending to it. We want to hear God speak into our hearts through his word and by his Spirit and we want to respond to his voice with all of our being. One author, Chris Webb, expresses it like this:
When we truly understand and experience God’s delight in us, his extraordinary love for us, we find Scripture becomes a text that captivates us. From beginning to end it speaks to us of the deep yearning of God. We find it to be a book of love. It inspires in us a longing to be in the presence of God; it opens us to the transforming grace that heals our sin and makes us more able to experience the presence of God; it reveals the longing of God for us; it becomes holy ground on which we meet with God and consummate our love for him. It is wonderful, mysterious and beautiful – just like its wonderful, mysterious and beautiful Inspirer. (Chris Webb, The Fire of the Word, p. 53)
Chris Webb perfectly captures the reasons I love the Bible.
Wrestling with God’s word
But I wanted also to acknowledge that our love for the Bible, for these sacred Scriptures through which God speaks to us, can also be problematic. We will come across hard texts where we cannot understand what God is saying to us through them or may even feel that we do not recognise the God portrayed to us in a particular passage of Scripture.
Take, for instance, the incidents surrounding the Ark of the Covenant being brought us to Jerusalem recorded in 2 Samuel 6. The Ark was on a cart being pulled by oxen. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, were guiding the cart when it went over rough ground, the cart rocked from side to side and Uzzah, fearing that the Ark would topple off it, put out his hand to steady it. We read that for this irreverent act, God struck him down and he died, much to King David’s anger.
What are we to make of this? Here I want to quote from a contemporary writer, Miroslav Wolf who says:
In cases like these and other “texts of terror”, we have two limiting options… We can give up on the Bible and, with it, on Christian theology and Christian faith. Or, if we find Christian faith too compelling to reject, we can wrestle with and try to gain insight from the uncomfortable, paradoxical “non-sense” that stands right in the middle of the sacred text through which we make sense of everything. (Captive to the Word of God, p.35)
Here, Miroslav Wolf is making similar points to those made by Chris Wright in his book, The God I Don’t Understand. It is by no means always easy to understand the God we encounter in the Scriptures, neither does Scripture always make for comfortable reading. But because we love the God who has revealed himself in Scripture and supremely in the Lord Jesus Christ, we love Scripture and want to hear and understand what God has to say to us through it.
To take up Miroslav Wolf’s point, we are called to wrestle with Scripture.
Do you remember the mysterious incident recorded in Genesis 33 where Jacob is returning from years of exile in the land of his uncle Laban. He is returning to the land God had promised to give to him and his descendants, but he is also returning to his brother Esau who had sworn to kill him. Jacob sent his family and all his worldly goods ahead of him and then, alone and at night he set out to cross the brook Jabbok. And there a ‘man’ wrestled with him throughout the night, a man who turned out to be none other than God himself. Jacob’s name was changed through that encounter to ‘Israel’, one who ‘struggles with God’.
We too are to be those who in reading Scripture, wrestle with God. We are to wrestle with the God who has revealed himself supremely in the Lord Jesus Christ and, like Jacob, are to say, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me.’ In wrestling with Scripture we wrestle with Christ himself, the word incarnate. We wrestle with him not as our adversary but as our help, our hope and our guide. We wrestle in the confidence that he will reveal more of himself to us and that we will find in him unimagined blessings.
Love the Scriptures because you love the God of the Scriptures and especially because you love the Lord Jesus Christ who declared that all Scripture speaks of him. Wrestle with Scripture in the confidence that in these pages you will meet with God and he will bless you. Always have an ear open to hear what God is saying to you by his Spirit through this wonderful book.
Peter Misselbrook: Quakers Road – 19/10/2025