GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
PSALM 119:55-56
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55 I remember your name in the night, O LORD,
and I will keep your law.
56 This I have,
for I keep your precepts.
It is good to remember God’s name, of course. But the name of God is everything that Scripture tells us about God. Therefore “Master” and “Maker” and “Savior,” although titles, are as much names for God as “Jesus,” “Holy Spirit,” and “Lord.” So to remember God’s name is to ponder all of God’s attributes; all of the blessings that God gives along with the many ways that God gives them. To know that my children are blessed by God and that I– to my shame and embarrassment– I am one of the blessings and channels of blessings that God provides for them, makes me understand that under the Fourth Commandment God works through me, and this, too, is to the glory of his holy name. Not that I have any value at all. When I was a boy and worked for my father as a painter, I spent many hours and days crawling on my hands and knees on sheep farms, scraping, sanding and priming the bottom rows of the siding of sheep barns. It was a miserable, foul, stinking, dirty, back-breaking job, and it taught me humility. For what worth have I as a sinful man? None at all. In my sinful condition, I am still crawling on my hands and knees through sheep manure in God’s sight, even today. I am still dirty, foul, stinking, and miserable before the Judge of all mankind, but thanks be to God that I also know my Savior. His name is my greatest treasure. His grace lifts me up from all that and lifts my sons up, because like me they know his holy name; they remember everything he has done, and they are treasures I will take with me into Paradise.
But this remembering is not always a simple thing. David adds, “in the night.” The night is a time for meditation, since it is a time where there are fewer distractions and demands on our time. But the night is also a time of torment as the devil attacks many people with worries, with loneliness, and with many other troubles, and the godly Christian profits from prayer and meditation on God’s holy word. We should be prepared even when all alone to pray out loud, so that Satan hears the name of God and the name of Jesus our Savior, for he hates those names and they send him running.
There is another way to consider the night, based on Scripture and following the language of the Psalms. “Night after night,” Psalm 19 teaches, “the skies display knowledge” (19:2). It is a fool who worships the skies or the heavens apart from God. The beauty, majesty, and precise orderliness of the sun, moon, stars and planets and all of the other things in the heavens speak silent condemnation on everyone who follows astrology or the myth of evolutionism (Romans 1:18-24). The power and wisdom of God is silently proclaimed by the stately movements of the bodies that God has placed in motion in the skies.
Verse 56 begins with a quick, three-word sentence: “This – is – for me.” The translator (in this case, myself) is glad that he was forced (in Middle school) to memorize all 23 standard forms of the helping verb “to be / is.” But which one fits best? Many translations add a word, such as the NIV’s “practice” or the RSV’s “blessing.” These are good attempts to make sence of the line.
I seriously considered the translation “This I have have done,” since in the immediate context, here in verse 56, “This I have done” refers to both “keeping your law” (verse 55b) and “keeping your precepts” (verse 56b). The “doing” is not the keeping, but the remembering of God’s name. For we fail at keeping the laws and statutes of God, but we are blessed by God’s grace through faith, remembering what Christ has done in our place.
So then again, the simpler “This I have” is also a reference to the blessings described as “songs” in verse 54. For what do I do that is essential? “It does does not depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy” (Romans 9:16). Jesus our Lord is the one who made restitution for what I have failed to do, “not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace” (2 Timothy 1:9).
An ancient Father wrote, “We must never rest as if it were our call to doze in our sins, so that the wicked ruler cannot gain control over us and throw us out of the kingdom of our Lord” (Barnabas 4:13). Not that the devil has any authority to throw anyone out of God’s kingdom, but he coaxes people away, he steers them aside from the path of righteousness, and he lies and sows doubt in Christian hearts. But no matter what each of us seeks to do, and even the law of God that each of us wants and tries to keep, and is done imperfectly, is still pleasing to God.We are preserved from God’s wrath over our failures and sins by the blood of Christ. And “it is possible for God alone to give healing, for all power is his.” And so this I have: The forgiveness of my sins through Jesus my Savior.
We meditate about this by day, and again by night. And this is all of our motivation for living, behaving, and striving to be God’s Christian children. “All a man’s ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the LORD” (Proverbs 16:2). The Lord our God motivates his people with his holy word, with the work of Jesus our Savior who was “truly nailed up for us in the flesh under Pontius Pilate,” and with the work of the Holy Spirit who lives in our hearts and who testifies to us about our dear Savior Jesus (Hebrews 10:15).
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 119:55-56 Worthless but for Christ