Psalm 119: Pe

In today’s stanza, the psalmist begs God to teach him.  It’s a prayer of supplication, recognizing the goodness of God’s Word, its importance for life, and a petition for God to guide him.  It makes me pause and think: do I ask that of God regarding His Word?

This is a good prayer to start any bible study with!  Just a few stanzas ago, he said something similar in verse 109: your word is a lampstand unto my feet.  This is similar, but more than just talking about God’s Word guiding our path, he mentions how it gives light to the soul.  When we are in a dark place, where can we go to illuminate that darkness?  God’s Word!  This is where the challenge is for us today…

When you are having a bad day, rough week, or horrible month, is it natural for you to say, “You know what? I’m gonna read my bible more!”  I know I don’t.  In fact, when things bring me down, I tend to do the opposite.  I read the bible less.  Why is that?  It’s because the darkness avoids the light.  It runs away.  So, when our life feels dark, we tend to avoid the illumination of God’s Word.  The Apostle Paul also encourages us to get closer to The Word when darkness closes in.  Look at what he writes in Ephesians 5:

7 Therefore do not be sharers with them, 8 for you were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live like children of light 9 (for the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth), 10 trying to learn what is well-pleasing to the Lord. 11 And do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but rather even expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to speak about the things being done by them in secret, 13 but all things exposed by the light are made visible, 14 for everything made visible is light. Therefore it says, Wake up, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. 15 Therefore, consider carefully how you live, not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the most of the time because the days are evil.

The bolded line that Paul quotes saying, “therefore it says,” is actually an obscure reference.  It is close to some verses from Isaiah, although not identical.  So, it could be a book that has been lost in history or Paul’s own paraphrase.  The possible verses in Isaiah are the prophet’s calls to Israel to remember who they are in the Lord, to rise up, take their appropriate place as His children, and be who He made them to be.  The same applies to us!  If you would like to check out these verses, they can be found in Isaiah 26:19, 51:17, 52:1, 60:1.

So, let’s consider how all of these things are connected.  The enemy comes to kill our faith, steal our joy, and destroy our hope (John 10:10).  This is why the darkness surrounds and suppresses us.  Our spiritual battle is one of identity.  Satan does not want us to realize our full Godly potential because then his dominion on earth will end.  Until then, he still has reign. God gave us the keys to the Kingdom (Matthew 16:19), we surrendered it to the devil in our sinfulness, Jesus overcame the darkness and death on the cross, and then He gave the key back to us.  The struggle is that we have forgotten the power that the key holds.  Our lifelong journey of following Jesus is an apprenticeship, following Him as He teaches us how to wield the keys and retake the dominion of Earth that He gave us back in the Garden of Eden.  Yet, this isn’t about learning how the keys function, rather learning who we are in Christ.

Those truths are recorded in the Scriptures.  Therefore, when we seem to be mucking it up and the darkness begins to overtake us and seems to be winning, we have to go back to the guidebook and see what we are doing wrong, a.k.a. have lost sight of our identity in Christ in some area of our lives.  This is what the psalmist is writing about in today’s stanza!  Go back and read it again…

He wants to know more of who God is and who he is in God.  God’s testimonies are the revelation and teaching of what it all means.  So, when we don’t know what to do because things are going horribly wrong, if we turn to the Word, we will get more instruction on where to course correct!  Even more helpful is when we study God’s Word not just in the heat of the moment, but constantly.  This will help us already know what to do when things start going wrong.  It’s like a troubleshooting guide for living the Christian life.  It’s hard to figure it out when we are in the moment.  I have one last analogy for this before finishing today’s reflection.

When I was in the Marine Corps, we trained constantly.  This is because when the bullets start flying, it’s not really the best time to sit in a bunker, open a book, and figure out how to load and shoot your weapon!  We trained and trained and trained so that in moments of extreme stress (aka battle), it was muscle memory.  Even today, 20 years after leaving active military service I can operate a weapon without even thinking about it.  Sometimes when I am hunting or at the range and I take a shot, I reload and don’t even realize it.  My brain says, “did I reload?”  I have to check and see because it is muscle memory and automatic. 

To get to this point, we spent hours and hours of training.  First, we read the manual.  Then we had an instructor walk us through the process.  Once we understood the order of operations and how everything functioned, then we did it over and over and over and over again.  It was quite mind-numbing, to be honest.  We would sit or lie on the ground for hours, “dry firing” or using the gun without bullets just to build that muscle memory.  Then, we would do the same learning what to do when something goes wrong.  A bullet doesn’t fire, a new round doesn’t load from the magazine into the chamber, the magazine falls out of the rifle, the weapon jams, or you run out of bullets.  We prepared for all the possible scenarios that could go wrong.  Once we got all that down, we learned how to do the same on different types of weapons!  Same principles, different platforms.  We memorized the lingo like hang fire and remedial action.  We learned how to communicate with one another so we could work together as a team in the heat of battle and respond immediately instead of standing there pondering what the words meant.  We graduated to learning how to do maneuvers with loaded weapons so that we could work together without shooting each other and take down the enemy effectively.  In Ephesians 6:17, Paul calls the Word of God the Sword of the Spirit.  It is our main weapon in today’s spiritual battle.  If we don’t practice and drill with it, how then can we be efficient in defeating the enemy when he attacks? 1 Timothy 3:16 says,

16 All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, 17 in order that the person of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

When the psalmist wrote Psalm 119, he was talking about training in righteousness through God’s Word, our weapon in spiritual warfare.  The battle is already raging and we are behind in our training.  Are you ready for war? It’s time to get to work!

I found this song that some of you might not be too inclined to the style, but the message is clear!  At the very least, the video is entertaining…