Psalm 119:8

We now come to the last verse of the first section of Psalm 119 entitled Aleph.

Psalms 119:8 I will keep thy statutes: O forsake me not utterly.

Zero in on those first two words: “I will.” In order to truly keep God’s statutes, you must exercise your will. If obedience to God is something you do on a wave of emotion, you will not stick with it. As soon as the emotion dies down, and it will, you will be on to something else. Rather, obedience to God must arise from an act of will, a determination to do it, a determination that will transcend all the ups and downs of your emotions through all the changing circumstances of life. It behooves each of us to adopt this resolve as the driving impulse of our life, the single most important goal we seek to attain. Whatever else we may do or not do, whatever of life we may experience or not experience, this one thing we will do, we will keep God’s statutes. And firmly resolving to do this will provide a grid for sorting out everything that comes into our lives demanding our time and attention.

But having made this firm resolution, the psalmist immediately follows up with the request that God not forsake him utterly. Commenting on this prayer, Charles Bridges wrote: “Firm in his purpose, but distrustful of his strength, instantly upon forming his resolution, he recollects that the performance is beyond his power.” How true! We cannot keep God’s statutes without Him. Hence, we beg God to not forsake us utterly. Now guess what comes next. You got it! To fully grasp what the psalmist is requesting, we must define our terms.

Forsake – To abandon, leave entirely, withdraw from; esp. to withdraw one’s presence and help or companionship from; to desert.

Utterly – In a complete or utter manner; to an absolute or extreme degree; altogether, entirely, absolutely; fully, thoroughly, out and out.

The psalmist is asking God not to withdraw His presence and help, at least not completely and entirely. That the prayer begins with the interjection O indicates that the psalmist was in earnest in his request. He realized how desperately he needed God’s presence and help.

Now God does indeed forsake His people at times for various reasons. The Lord may forsake us because we have forsaken Him.

2 Chronicles 15:1 And the Spirit of God came upon Azariah the son of Oded:
2 And he went out to meet Asa, and said unto him, Hear ye me, Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin; The LORD is with you, while ye be with him; and if ye seek him, he will be found of you; but if ye forsake him, he will forsake you.

God might forsake us if we become overconfident in our prosperity. David experienced this.

Psalms 30:6 And in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved.
7 LORD, by thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong: thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.

Or the Lord might forsake us to try us, to bring to light some corruption lurking in our hearts. This happened to Hezekiah after God healed him of a life-threatening sickness.

2 Chronicles 32:24 In those days Hezekiah was sick to the death, and prayed unto the LORD: and he spake unto him, and he gave him a sign.
25 But Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit done unto him; for his heart was lifted up: therefore there was wrath upon him, and upon Judah and Jerusalem.

Hezekiah’s heart was lifted up and he behaved unwisely in showing off the riches of his kingdom to the ambassadors of Babylon. Babylon later proved to be a formidable enemy. The Lord forsook Hezekiah for a time; He left him so as to expose this pride in his heart.

2 Chronicles 32:31 Howbeit in the business of the ambassadors of the princes of Babylon, who sent unto him to enquire of the wonder that was done in the land, God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart.

In such cases God forsakes us to correct us, to get us back on the track of keeping His statutes. But if God should forsake us utterly, we would fail utterly. We would never be able to find our way back. Hence we pray: “O forsake me not utterly.” In dealing with my own personal weaknesses I have sometimes said to the Lord in my prayer: “Keep working with me, Lord. Do what You need to, but don’t give up on me.” In essence I was saying to the Lord, “O forsake me not utterly.”

Now the wonderful thing about it is that we have a promise from God that He will not forsake His children utterly even though they disobey Him.

Psalms 89:30 If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments;
31 If they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments;
32 Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes.
33 Nevertheless my lovingkindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail.

We are actually pleading this promise when we pray to God to not forsake us utterly. Thanks be to God that though He may at times forsake His children, He only forsakes them for a little while rather than completely and forever.

Isaiah 54:7 For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee.
8 In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the LORD thy Redeemer.

Psalm 119:7

It is right that when we ask something of God, that we resolve to praise Him for it when we have received it. And it is good that we tell Him that we shall do so. This is what we find happening in our verse for today’s meditation.

Psalms 119:7 I will praise thee with uprightness of heart, when I shall have learned thy righteous judgments.

I can think of three reasons why the psalmist would praise God when he had learned His righteous judgments. First, he will praise God because those righteous judgments would not be there to learn if God did not give them to us. Secondly, he will praise God for this because we would never learn God’s judgments if God did not incline our hearts to want to learn them. Thirdly, God is to be praised for this because we cannot learn His righteous judgments except He teach us. We can read them and hear them taught, but without the enabling of the Holy Spirit, we will not learn. The book we read and the teacher we hear are the instruments, but God the Holy Spirit is the teacher. No matter how good a Biblical scholar you may be, always recognize that you can only learn the Scriptures if God teaches you. Were God to withhold the enabling of His Spirit, your learning would cease. So you do well every time you seek to learn to ask God to teach you. And we shall find the psalmist doing just that repeatedly in this psalm.

Notice that when speaking of learning God’s righteous judgments, the psalmist speaks in the future perfect tense. This tense shows that learning God’s judgments is something that will occur in the future. Now to be sure, other verses in this psalm show that the psalmist already knew God’s righteous judgments. Yet the fact remains that so long as we live in this world no matter how much of God’s word we know, there is always more to learn. God’s righteous judgments are an inexhaustible treasure. This writer has been studying the Scriptures for 44 years, and preaching for 41 years. Yet he feels he is but skimming the surface of all there is to know about God’s righteous judgments. It is as though he is just beginning to grasp them. There is so much more to learn!

As for praising God with uprightness of heart, let’s begin by defining the word uprightness.

Uprightness - The state or condition of being sincere, honest, or just; equity or justness in respect of principle or practice; moral integrity or rectitude.

First, God must be praised “with…heart.” To worship with the lips but without the heart is an act of hypocrisy. It is pretence. It is not true worship.

Mark 7:6 He (Jesus) answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

Secondly, God must be praised “with uprightness of heart.” For God to accept our worship, it must proceed from a heart that is sincere, and true, and clean.

Joshua 24:14 Now therefore fear the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the LORD.

Well might we cry with the psalmist David:

Psalm 51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

And lastly, if we would praise God with uprightness of heart, we need to learn His righteous judgments. God will not accept just anything that calls itself worship. His worship must be according to His righteous judgments, in the way and manner He has prescribed in His word.

God grant us to learn His righteous judgments that we may render to Him the praise that is His due in the way that pleases Him.

Psalm 119:6

Before you read this meditation make sure you have reread the meditation from last week on Psalm 119:5, as that one is of prime importance. And now we turn to our verse for this week.

Psalms 119:6 Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect unto all thy commandments.

I shall not define the word ashamed as I think all of my readers know altogether too well what that word means. The way to avoid being ashamed is to have respect unto all of God’s commandments. To have respect unto God’s commandments is to have regard to them, to give them attention and consideration, to have them in view. To avoid shame, our attention and consideration must be given to all of God’s commandments. We should keep all of them before us to inform our decisions and to direct our course. To not have respect to so much as one of God’s commandments, to consider any commandment as unimportant or unnecessary, is to open the door to shame. To be sure, some commandments are weightier than others, but none are to be disrespected as the following passages make expressly clear.

Deuteronomy 4:2 Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.

Matthew 5:19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 23:23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

James 2:10 For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.

You only have to break one commandment of the law to be a lawbreaker.

The following excellent comments of Charles Bridges on this verse are well worth quoting. These comments are taken from his book entitled Psalm 119.

“The Lord expects our obedience to be not only ‘diligent,’ but universal. Willing to dispense with the least of the commandments, proves that we have yet to learn the spirit of acceptable obedience. (Matt. v.19.) Grace is given and suited for all, no less than for one of them, ‘that we might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.” (Col. 1.10.) One lust ‘regarded in the heart’ is sufficient to keep possession for the tyrant, however others may be restrained.”

Who are we to think that any commandment of God is unimportant or unworthy of our careful observance? To disregard or slight anything God commanded is to put your opinion against His wisdom. The commandment you are not respecting may be a little one in relation to others, but the contempt you are showing for God’s authority is huge! You may be sure that God does not take kindly to that and He will put you to shame for it. Maybe you don’t feel it today, but you will! Our first parents became ashamed after they broke the one commandment to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Saul bore the shame of losing his kingdom because he disobeyed a single commandment of God to utterly destroy all the Amalekites and their possessions (1 Samuel 15). Moses suffered the shame of not being allowed to enter the promised land because he disobeyed a single commandment regarding the rock (Numbers 20:7-13). God told him to speak to the rock and he smote it instead. Having respect unto all God’s commandment appears to be extremely important.

Yet how many think that because they keep many or even most of the commandments of God, it is no big deal if they overlook a few. The man who faithfully attends church every Sunday and gives, and yet fails to teach his children the way of the Lord will be ashamed. The same goes for the man who gives every appearance of being a devout Christian and yet does not love and cherish his wife as he ought. What of the person who professes faith in Christ who has never been properly baptized and is not a member of a true New Testament local church? Or how about the person who continues to celebrate Christmas thus violating the clear commandment to not observe pagan rites unto the Lord God (Deuteronomy 12:29-31)? Is washing of the saints’ feet something that we can take or leave with no consequence when the Saviour plainly commanded it in John 13:13-16? No amount of faithful obedience to most of the commandments will excuse disobedience to even one of the commandments.

Once we disregard one commandment, what is to keep us from disregarding others when they interfere with our agenda? Scripture clearly teaches that one act of disobedience will lead to another. As Paul put it in Romans 6:19 when speaking of the Romans before their conversion: “Ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity.” One iniquity will eventuate in another and so goes the downward spiral into a life of shame.

The way to reverse this downward spiral is to have respect unto all of God’s commandments. Give diligence to do anything and everything that God requires of you, no matter how small it may be. By this means you shall live an honourable life that will be a shining testimony before this evil world. Our goal should be to keep all the commandments of God so that we need never be shamed by a rebuke from God for disregarding any of them.

Philippians 2:14 Do all things without murmurings and disputings:
15 That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world.

Psalm 119:5

Today we continue this series of meditations on Psalm 119 by considering verse 5. This is a meditation that I suggest you read more than once and ponder very carefully.

Psalms 119:5 O that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes!

In this verse the psalmist expresses a desire to God. We know that it was expressed to God from the second person singular possessive pronoun thy in “thy statutes.” We noted in the last meditation that we use pronouns in the second person when we are talking to someone. The Psalmist is saying to God that he desires that his ways were directed to keep God’s statutes.

Let us next consider the definition of the word direct so that we may know precisely what the psalmist desired.

Direct – To cause (a thing or person) to move or point straight to or towards a place; to aim (a missile); to make straight (a course or way) to any point; to turn (the eyes, attention, mind) straight to an object, (a person or thing) to an aim, purpose, etc.

The psalmist longed that his ways would be aimed straightly at keeping God’s statutes without any diversion or misdirection. He wanted his ways, the train of his thoughts and desires, his actions, and the events of his life to be directed to keep God’s statutes. And as we saw from the definition of the word keep used in verse two, to keep God’s statutes means to pay attention to them, to dutifully believe and practice them.

That the psalmist earnestly desired this can be seen from that simple one-letter interjection o at the beginning of the verse. So back to the dictionary we go for the definition of this word. I’ll be done with the grammar and definitions in a minute. So just hang with me and I’ll get cranking into how this all fits together.

O – In other connexions, or without construction, expressing, according to intonation, various emotions, as appeal, entreaty, surprise, pain, lament, etc.

The psalmist’s desire to have his ways directed to keep God’s statutes was so strong that it stirred his emotions. It is, therefore, quite fitting that this sentence ends with an exclamation point further stressing the emotion of the writer. Since the psalmist is addressing this desire to God, we discern an earnest appeal in the word o. We can also detect a grief that his ways were not more directed to keeping God’s statutes. These are emotions we would all do well to cultivate.

Anyone who sincerely tries to keep God’s statutes can relate to the longing of this verse. Try as we may, there are a thousand things pulling us in all kinds of directions away from keeping God’s statutes. First of all, there is the pull of our own fleshly lusts warring against the soul.

Romans 7:23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

1 Peter 2:11 Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul;

You become keenly aware of the pull of your fleshly lusts when you discover God’s statutes aiming directly at the correction of some of your greatest weaknesses, weaknesses such as pride, anger, envy, hatred, evil sexual desires, evil surmisings, gluttony, slothfulness, covetousness, and backbiting, to name a few. In fact, the more you try to keep God’s statutes the more you will experience resistance against it. In his excellent work Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis wrote:

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all…you find out the strength of the wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.”

I could not have said it better. It stands to reason that the adversary has to put up his toughest fight against those who mount the toughest resistance.

And then there is the pull of a thousand distractions all vying to so occupy our minds and emotions that the focus on keeping God’s commandments gets shoved aside. There is the glut of media sounding everywhere calling for our attention: news clips; advertisements; campaign ads from more candidates than we can keep up with; scores of television channels to choose from; preachers and televangelists of all kinds; a barrage of movies released to the public for consumption; the internet with its offer and allure of endless information; email; facebook, twitter, and the like; two or three telephones ringing; athletes, teams, and events in more kinds of sports than you can count at all levels from elementary school through college to the professional level; entertainments galore; a vast myriad of ideas on how to stay healthy, and how to best manage your money, your time, and your relationships; not to mention well-intentioned friends who insist that you have to read this book, see this movie, hear this speaker, etc. All these are so many siren sounds beckoning for your attention. And add to all of this the cares of daily life that must be attended to. If you are a person who finds most everything fascinating and interesting, you do have your work cut out for you to come through this maze and still keep your focus where it belongs. Those with fewer and more focused interests will find it easier to sort through this pile and disregard a lot of these distractions. But even they will have to work at maintaining balance in the limited things they allow themselves to become involved with. So that in the end we must all cry: “O that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes!”

What might we want and expect from God in response to this longing expressed to Him? First of all, we pray that He so order the events of our lives that we not be tempted above our ability to resist. We want Him to close doors to opportunities that would too much distract us from keeping His statutes. Secondly, we earnestly desire that He would give us strength to resist the evil lusts of our flesh that we might keep His statutes. Third, we pray that God would give us good judgment so as to weigh the cost in time and energy of every thing that beckons for our attention. Never forget, every interest you choose to pursue comes with a price and if the payment of that price takes away time and energy better spent on those things most important to God, then you had best let that opportunity pass you by. Never forget this commandment given through our beloved apostle Paul:

Ephesians 5:16 Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

To redeem the time you are going to have to make the choice to let some things go that you might otherwise like to pursue. You are just going to have to settle for going through this world without experiencing everything it has to offer. And that is no great loss when you consider what our Lord Jesus Christ said:

Matthew 16:26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

Bishop Fulten J. Sheen wrote the following about the son of Confucius that fits so well what I am talking about:

“The son of Confucius once said to him: ‘I apply myself with diligence to every kind of study, neglect nothing that could render me clever and brilliant; but I do not advance.’ ‘Omit some of your pursuits,’ replied Confucius, ‘and you will get on better.’”

How true! Try to do everything and you won’t be that good at anything.

Speaking for myself personally, I am a very curious person. There are so many things I would like to learn and learn well, but I know that if I devote time to all of that, I will suffer loss in that one thing most needful for me to know as a man of God, and that is God’s statutes. And as time fast passes by me and age eats away at my mental and physical energy leaving me with less than I had before, how much more must I weigh the cost of everything that beckons for that time and energy. So I just have to choose to remain ignorant and inexperienced about a lot of things so as to be more directed toward and more focused on what I need to know and to do in order to be the best that I can be at what God calls me to be. God grant me wisdom to never lose sight of this and strength to apply that wisdom in every choice that I must make. But, oh, the powerful allurement of so many other things coupled together with my own personal weaknesses forces this lamentable cry from my heart: “O that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes!” Is it thus with you, dear reader?