GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
PSALM 119:116-118
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116 Sustain me according to your word, and I will live;
do not let my hopes be dashed.
117 Hold me up, and I will be delivered;
I will always have regard for your statutes.
These two verses say much the same thing with different kinds of poetic parallelism. In addition, the words here for the word of God (word and statutes) bookend the two verses. In verse 116, the poetry is antithetic since the second line repeats the idea of the verse using a negative “not,” “Do not let my hopes be dashed.” The poetry of verse 117 is synthetic, with the second line carrying the results of the first line to their earthly conclusion.
These verses are a prayer about help in this lifetime in the face of opposition from the devil and from the sinful world. The hopes of the speaker are his desires to serve the Lord. “Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God” (Psalm 146:5). Like the demon-possessed man in the Gerasenes, once healed of impurity and forgiven, the believer begs to stay with Jesus (Mark 5:18). But the Lord has plans for us in the world, and therefore he says, “I will stay with you; I will be with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). And so instead of bringing us home right away to heaven (which is our desire, Philippians 1:23), he sets us back down in the world to be his witnesses, his coaches, the parents and grandparents of his little ones. We are his tools, his representatives, and his ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20). He holds us up while we “have regard for his statutes.” And as Paul says, “You do not support the root, but the root supports you” (Romans 11:18).
118 You reject all who stray from your statutes,
for their deceitfulness is in vain.
It is vain, useless, to reject God. Those who look for some other path to heaven are deceived. They will be shocked on Judgment Day, betrayed by their own foolishness and sin. Nothing that they say before God’s Judgment Seat will make any difference at all (Matthew 25:44). “They will go away to eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46), and nothing will change that. They will also discover, if they have been misled by their religion about it, that there is no purgatory.
But let’s consider this doctrine of the Catholic church more closely.
I, The Lutheran Church and indeed the Christian Church rejects the doctrine of purgatory. The teaching that souls are delivered from purgatory by the power of the keys and through indulgences is “clearly false and foreign to the Holy Scriptures as well as the Church Fathers” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession XII:26; cp. 13-16).
II, The doctrine as presented by the Catholic Catechism is this: “That all who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven” (Catholic Catechism 1030).
III, This doctrine is misunderstood by a great many Catholics, who imagine that the damned or at least those who never heard the Gospel of Christ could somehow be purified by the torments of purgatory. This is not at all in keeping with their statement that purgatory only applies to those “who die in God’s grace and friendship.”
IV, Those who attempt to apply 2 Maccabees 12:39-45 have an impossible task. First, there is a difference between prescriptive and descriptive passages. The Roman Catholic Church agrees completely with us that a verse such as Matthew 3:6, that people “were baptized by John in the Jordan River,” is not prescriptive. That is, that verse does not command that we must baptize in a river or by immersion, but that it is simply descriptive of what John did. We baptize with water because the word means to wash with water (for example, Mark 7:4), but the command is only to use water and the formula given by Jesus in Matthew 28:19.
V, The apocryphal passage, 2 Maccabees 12:39-45, shows that Judas Maccabeus found, after a battle, that those soldiers of his who had died in battle, had been wearing “sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear. And it became clear to all that this was the reason these men had fallen. So they all blessed the ways of the Lord, the righteous Judge, who reveals the things that are hidden; and they turned to supplication, praying that the sin that had been committed might be wholly blotted out” ( 2 Maccabees 12:40-42a). But if there is a purgatory for the imperfect “who die in God’s grace and friendship,” it must be clear that such a thing does not apply to these men who died in battle near Adullam in the Judean highlands. Those men died in blatant unrepentance, showing secret worship of false gods. They died outside of God’s grace.
VI, The action of Judas Maccabeus after this discovery has nothing to do with purgatory, but with the doctrine of the resurrection. Judas collected, “man by man, the amount of two thousand drachmas of silver, and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering” (2 Maccabees 12:43). He was not thinking of any present suffering or that such suffering would atone for anything. He was only thinking about the doctrine of the Mosaic Covenant; he wanted to atone for their sin through temple sacrifices. “Therefore he made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin” (2 Maccabees 12:45). This is not a payment of an indulgence, but the sacrifice according to the word of God through Moses (Leviticus 1:3-9).
VII, Judas Maccabeus showed that he believed in a vicarious, substitutionary atonement for the sins of his fallen comrades. But the wishes of a good and pious general cannot wash away sins. Silver drachmas and indulgences cannot wash away sins. Peter himself writes: “You know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake” (1 Peter 1:18-20).
The account in 2 Maccabees (which I believe to probably be a true story) does not say anything about purgatory. In fact, it demonstrates that purgatory is not a Scriptural doctrine at all. But the Catholic Church does not get all of its doctrine from the Bible– indeed, the Bible comes in a distant fourth place, after the church councils and canons, and tradition, but most especially from the imaginations of the popes. But the church canons lead sinners only to despair, claiming that for a single mortal sin seven years of penance (that is, of punishment) would be required. This takes the sinner’s personal atonement for his sins (if he has to do it himself) into eternity. As the Psalm says: “No payment is ever enough” for a man to pay for his own sins (Psalm 49:8).
The ancient Church Fathers knew nothing about purgatory, since it is a relatively new doctrine. The first papal indulgence for the dead was offered in 1476, just seven years before the birth of Martin Luther. And the whole business of purgatory (I use the word “business” in the sense of making money) was and is based on uncertainty. The papal bulls about indulgences had no confidence or true forgiveness to offer: “Whoever wishes to benefit from the indulgence or jubilee year must be contrite, make confession, and pay money.” But the contrition and confession practiced by those poor people were uncertain and sometimes hypocritical. And more than that, nobody knew or knows which souls were in purgatory at all, and nobody knew or knows which of those in purgatory had truly repented and properly confessed their sins. So the pope took their money, consoled the people with his power and indulgences, and once again directed attention to uncertain human works and not to the power of God at all, nor to the certainty or the definite promises of the Gospel.
Let us set aside uncertainty. The law of God is clear and repeated often and in many ways, such as in the verse before us: “You reject all who stray for your statues.” But the Apostle says: “Christ himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you are healed” (1 Peter 2:24). We have strayed like sheep, but Christ has called us back, paying for our sins with his own body and blood, and bringing us into the flock of God, as the Shepherd and Overseer of our souls. Leave all uncertainty and deceitfulness behind, because it’s all in vain. Trust in Jesus alone.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Psalm 119:116-118 The crime of purgatory