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Before we begin today's episode of Renewing youg Mind, we invite you to stay with us through the end of the program to hear how you can request today's featured teaching series from Ligonier Ministries.
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Do we hear people today in the church celebrate the depths of their affection for the law of God? Obviously we don't. And my question, not only today, but for this whole series is why not? Have we moved to such a place in our understanding of Christianity that the law of God no longer provokes sighs of joy within our souls?
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Hello and welcome to Renewing youg mind. Today, Dr. Sproul turns to Psalm 119, verse 97, as he addresses the role of God's law in the life of a Christian. Psalm 119 may be the Bible's most extensive meditation on the law of God, demonstrating how the law sparks joy and reveals the character of God to us. Here's RC
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as we begin our study now on the Ten Commandments and the role of the law in the life of the Christian, I want to begin by looking briefly at a portion of Psalm 119. You may be familiar with this psalm. It's one of the longest psalms in this altar, and it is the one where each section begins with a different letter of the Hebrew Alphabet. And the whole of this psalm is a celebration of the law of God. And that may seem completely archaic to us in this day because we, living on the side of the New Testament, are familiar with the teachings of the New Testament that we have been redeemed from the law, that the law came from Moses and grace and peace came from Jesus. And we have a tendency in our day, it's more than a tendency, it's an epidemic to consider the Old Testament law as completely irrelevant to our lives. But I'd like to read a portion of the psalm to begin this study, beginning at verse 97. This is Psalm 100:1997. There aren't too many books or chapters in the Bible that have verse 97s in them. This is one of them. It reads as oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. You, through your commandments, make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. And I understand more than the ancients, because I keep your precepts. I have restrained my feet from every evil way that I may keep your word. I have not departed from your judgments. For you yourself have taught me how sweet are your words to My taste sweeter than honey to my mouth. And through your precepts I get understanding. Therefore I hate every false way. Now, when I read this brief section of the Psalms, I read it in a certain style on purpose. What I did was kind of downplay the actual passion that is communicated in a portion of this psalm, particularly in the first verse that I read somewhat insipidly, where I said, oh, how I love your law. That's not an expression that's adequate for these words and the way they are being communicated. The very beginning word O expresses not some particular content of information. The word O is an exclamation. It expresses a sigh. It expresses a communication of profoundly deep feeling. And in this case, it is not a feeling of pain, but it is a feeling of affection, where the psalmist is saying, oh, how I love your law. I've asked my seminary students, have they ever had somebody in their congregation come up to them and say, pastor, the thing I love the most about my Christian experience is the law of God. Do we hear people today in the church celebrate the depths of their affection for the Law of God? Obviously, we don't. And my question, not only today, but for this whole series, is why not? Have we moved to such a place in our understanding of Christianity that the law of God no longer provokes sighs of joy within our souls? What is it about Christ and His work that would cause us now to despise or ignore something that was the focal point of delight in the lives of the Old Testament saints? Perhaps it's the assumption that the Old Testament law is no longer relevant to the New Testament Christian and has no bearing upon our Christian growth. The commandments were something for then, not for now. Because now the Christian life is Christ, not Moses. It's gospel, not law. And so we may find Christians exuding a depth of passion in their own expressions. We might hear them saying, oh, how I love you, Jesus, or, oh, how I love you, Lord. And if we say that, can we not hear Jesus response? The response that he gave to his nascent church, I'm convinced, would be the same response he would give to the church today. If you love me, keep my commandments. So to say, I once loved the law, but now I love Christ and despise the law is simply not to love Christ because Christ loved the law. And Christ said, if you love me, keep my law, keep my commandments. His meat and his drink, the Scriptures tell us, was to do the will of the Father. He saw his whole life as a mission to fulfill every single Point of the law to be perfectly obedient to the commandments of God, not simply so that he could keep a list of rules, but because he wanted to do the will of the Father. And the clearest expression of the will of the Father was the expression revealed to his people through the law. Now let's look some more at this passage. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. And then he goes on to say later on verse 101, I have restrained my feet from every evil way that I may keep your word. Now you notice the shift in language here. And if we go through this whole psalm, we will see this constant interplay, this constant interchange of two words. And the two words are law and word. Now I do hear Christians today speak in glowing terms of their affection for the Scriptures, of their affection for the Word of God. But we've now, in our times, tend to divorce the Word of God from the law of God. But that divorce is not evident in this text of the Psalms, is it? Throughout that Psalm we see the psalmist reciting his affection both for the law and for the Word of God. Well, why? Well, in the first place, the law was delivered to the people by the Word of God. And the law that came by the Word of God expressed his commandment. Now we've spoken at times of kings or of leaders or of bosses or of people who sit in seats of high authority that when they utter some directive, their authority is not to be challenged. They are the final court of appeals. And so there's no room for discussion. And we use this expression, his Word is what? Law? What has changed about God? Is His Word still law? Is he still as sovereign as he was in the Old Testament? Is the God of Israel and the God of the New Testament church a commandment giving God his word is law, and his law is his word, because his law expresses his will. Now, there are some other striking things in this passage that I read. One is quite reminiscent of the prophets of a later time. Verse 103. How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth. For through your precepts I get understanding. The metaphor that is used here is one that is drawn from an agrarian society whose culinary delights were far more limited than ours are today. If a Jew a thousand years before Christ wanted to have dessert, he couldn't go to Baskin Robbins and select from 33 flavors of ice cream to indulge his sweet tooth, probably the sweetest thing in his environment in terms of sweetness. To the taste was honey. And so whenever the Jew wanted to express something that was delicious, that was absolutely delightful, he would speak in terms of honey. We remember, for example, Ezekiel, when God came to him and told him that he must eat the scroll on which were written the words of God's judgment and impending wrath upon the nation. And when he put the scroll into his mouth and began to chew and eat this distasteful message, that suddenly it became as honey in his mouth and sweetness to his taste. Now again, we don't hear people say today, oh, how I love your law. And nor do we have people standing in line to say to God, oh, God, your law is. Is as sweet to me as honey. In fact, we look at the law as some bitter thing, something that is utterly distasteful. Now, there's something wrong with this picture. Because remember, the law of God, if it does nothing else, reveals the character of God. And if there is anything that should be sweet to our taste, it is the very character of God himself. We remember how the Psalms begin with a benediction from on high that says, blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. Now, let's just stop right there. The benediction of God is pronounced upon a person. Blessed is the man who. Who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly. Now what does that mean? That means who does not live according to the patterns, to the customs, to the general wisdom of ungodly people. If we would translate that into our day, we would hear God saying this. Blessed is the man who does not walk according to the course of this world, who doesn't follow the popular wisdom of our day. He might even go so far as to say, blessed is the man who's out of it. Blessed are the man who is not a conformist to the cultural customs and patterns of our own society. He doesn't follow the counsel of the ungodly. He doesn't stand in the way or on the road of the sinner. He doesn't sit in the seat of the scornful. That is, he is not given to cynicism and ridicule of sacred things. Blessed is the person who is not a cynic. But you see at the beginning of Psalm 1, what we have here is a blessing pronounced upon people who don't do certain things. That's the negative side, but what's the positive side but his delight. Not just his discipline, his delight is in the law of the Lord. And in his law does he meditate day and night. Now, today we would rewrite the psalm and say, foolish is the man who delights in the law of the Lord and wastes his time meditating in it day and night. Or we may say, legalist is the Christian who takes delight in the law and spends more than five minutes a year meditating upon it. But God said, blessed is the man. And then what does he go on to say? He will be like a tree planted by rivers of living water, bringing forth his fruit in his season. You've heard that psalm before. Think of that image. Think of Palestine. Think of the Judean wilderness. Think of the dry shoot that comes up out of the ground in that arid, barren wasteland where any foliage that lives has to fight to survive against the beating sun and the parched earth every hour of every day. Think of Jericho, where you come through the Judean wilderness and you approach the city of Jericho and you notice in the distance that you're coming to something different, different in the landscape that you're coming to what every Arab loves to approach, an oasis. And you're afraid it's a mirage, because suddenly you see trees that are lush and full and plentiful with fruit, and you see where they're planted. They're planted by the stream. Or go to the mouth of the Jordan river and see the trees that grow right next to the Jordan, whose roots go deep into the ground and whose roots absorb the moisture and the nutrients that are there. So these trees are robust and plentiful in the fruit that they produce. And God says, blessed is the man who meditates in my law day and night. He'll be like a tree not that's planted in the middle of the desert that has one tiny little root aching to survive, but rather the tree planted by the rivers of living water, bringing forth his fruit in his season. But the psalmist says, the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. If there's a secret that lies hidden from the view of the modern Christian, the secret is found in the Old Testament, not just in the law, but in the prophets, in the Hebrew wisdom, all of which together reveals the character of God. And if we wonder why God seems foreign to us, an alien, an intruder into our lives, and if we are stumbling and groping in darkness, trying to know how we should live in a relativistic age, and if we feel like pieces of shaft which the wind drives away with the slightest Zephyr or Breeze, then we need to go back and consider the law of God. Now, what I'm going to be doing in the days to come is that I'm going to be looking at the nature of the law in the Bible. I'm going to be looking at the nature of the law and particularly the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, how it functions in the life of Israel in the Old Testament. But then also I'm going to be addressing this. What is the relevance of all of that law that took place under the Old Covenant? Now that we're in the New Covenant, is there any application of the Old Testament law to our day? I've told the story of being invited to speak in New York several years ago, more than two decades ago, speaking at a very large church. And I was doing a series on the holiness of God, and the sponsoring group from the church asked me to come to a private prayer meeting for about 20 of the members of this church that was to be held after the first service in this series that I was speaking. And so after this evening service, we went to this person's home, and it was a mansion. Priceless works of art adorned the walls, and even the front yard had a Henry Moore piece of sculpture in it. We came inside and they said we were going to pray. And they turned out all the lights and that was fine. And these people started to pray, and they started to pray to their dead relatives. And I said, wait, whoa, wait a minute. Time out. What's going on here? And they said, oh, we're being led by the Holy Spirit to contact our departed relatives who are in heaven. I said, we're not allowed to do that. I said, why not? And I explained to them what the Old Testament law was, that in Israel this was a capital offense, that this was an abomination to God. And their glib reply to me was simply this. That's the Old Testament. It doesn't have any bearing on us. And so I asked the question, what has changed in redemptive history? What has changed in the character of God and of his relationship to his people that makes a practice that once was utterly odious to him, now something in which he takes delight? These people had fallen into this dreadful practice because they had no concept of the relationship of law and gospel of the Old Testament to the New Testament. And that's what we'll be looking at in the days to come. Had we stayed in Psalm 119 after reading beginning at verse 97 and gone to the next letter of the Hebrew Alphabet, the nun in verse 105, we would have found a verse that I think every Christian is familiar with. It goes like this. Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. I have sworn and confirmed that I will keep your righteous judgments. Again, this image of a path, of a person walking down a path at night. I was in a place once where at night snakes would come out and they would be all over the place and I hated to go out in the dark. I never wanted to put my foot down in front of me because I never knew when I was going to be stepping on a snake.
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Snake.
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It's a scary thing to walk a dangerous path when you have no light for your feet. And that's where we are when we are ignorant of the law of God.
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The law is a lamp unto our feet, and it's good that we remind ourselves of that each day. Thank you for joining us today here on Renewing youg Mind. When you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800.435.4343, we will be glad to send you Dr. Sproul's series God's Law and the Christian. There are 15 messages and you'll receive lifetime digital access to the messages as well as the study guide in the free Ligonier app. Ligonier teaching fellow Dr. Sinclair Ferguson recently offered a helpful reflection on the Ten Commandments in his podcast Things Unseen. Here's a brief clip.
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There's a kind of atmosphere that surrounds the expression the Ten Commandments, and rightly so, because when we read the account of God giving them at Mount Sinai, Moses experience is even more spectacular than it was at the burning bush. The event was surrounded by thunder and lightning and a thick cloud. At the foot of Sinai, the people trembled. Truly, God revealed himself as a God of power and might and holiness and righteousness. But we should notice something here, something from the get go. When we think about the Ten Commandments, it's this. They were given by the God of infinite holiness and righteousness, but they were also given in a context of grace. I think perhaps this is the single most important thing to remember. God's law is given in the context of God's grace. How so? Well, his first words are, I am Yahweh, your God. Your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. This is the same great I am who told Moses that he had heard the groaning of the people of Israel, remembered his covenant and added, I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm. I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God. And you shall know that I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. If that isn't grace, I'm not sure what is. It's amazing grace.
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What an encouragement. Tomorrow, Dr. Sproul will begin exploring why so many Christians today struggle to understand the role of God's law in the Christian life. We hope you'll join us again tomorrow as we continue his series, God's Law and the Christian. Here on Renewing your mind.