Psalm 119:167 – Keeping
I keep your testimonies,
I love them greatly.
The first line here is formally “my soul keeps,” which is a way to refer to oneself. I does have the added connotation of keeping them from the heart out. That goes with the second line that says this comes from the love that the Psalmist has for God’s law.
I couldn’t help today thinking about the difference in the way the various laws are presented here by the Psalmist. In Christian churches you rarely have positive references to the law as something to love and appreciate. We’ve taken pieces of Paul and used them to build the attitude that the law is very negative, so we want to avoid it.
We have a major problem, however, in that we want to trot the law out to make other people behave the way we want them to. That again presents the law in a negative way, as we keep saying that salvation is by grace, meaning that “getting into heaven” is by grace, and then detaching that from Christian life.
As a result we act as though God will take you to heaven, but we still need something to control things on earth before we get to heaven, so we have laws, and we enforce them. That tends to result in a loose and capricious application of standards of behavior, and soon the fires of hell will start sneaking in the other way.
But both the law and grace come from a loving God. It’s not that grace is a way around the law. It’s more of a way through it. Ultimately, sanctifying grace says that God is going to get you in the end, which does not mean that God is going to discipline you into formal good behavior, but rather God is going to make you holy, and that “holy, just, and good” law will be part of you as well.
Grace is the gift that keeps on giving. Even in Romans 7, which is often viewed as a “downer” chapter, Paul notes that he’d like to do God’s law, but he finds himself in a battle with the flesh which definitely does not want to keep the law.
The answer is to live by the Spirit, at which point you do, in fact, love God’s law. You may (and should) still realize how much you fall short, and how much your flesh (to use Paul’s term) is at war with it, but it’s something that tells you where God is going to take you.
As even the very next verse, which we’ll discuss tomorrow, the only reason anyone goes anywhere with any of this is that God is at work.
Having trouble with keeping God’s law? Let God’s Spirit do the work.
(Featured image from Adobe Stock. Licensed, not public domain.)
