Zayin
49Remember(A) your word to your servant,
in which you have made me(B) hope.
50This is(C) my comfort in my affliction,
that your promise(D) gives me life.
51(E) The insolent utterly deride me,
but I do not(F) turn away from your law.
52When I think of your rules from of old,
I take comfort, O LORD.
53(G) Hot indignation seizes me because of the wicked,
who forsake your law.
54Your statutes have been my songs
in the house of my(H) sojourning.
55I(I) remember your name in the night, O LORD,
and keep your law.
56This blessing has fallen to me,
that(J) I have kept your precepts. (Psalm 119:49-56)
Here the psalmist affirms that our mortal bodes merely make of the “house of our sojourning.” Similarly did King David declare:
12(A) “Hear my prayer, O LORD,
and give ear to my cry;
hold not your peace at my tears!
For I am(B) a sojourner with you,
a guest, like all my fathers. (Psalm 39:12)
And years before David sang his songs the LORD revealed through Moses:
23“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for(A) the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me. (Leviticus 25:23)
And as God completes his written revelation to men the Book of Hebrews declares,
13These all died in faith,(A) not having received the things promised, but(B) having seen them and greeted them from afar, and(C) having acknowledged that they were(D)strangers and exiles on the earth. (Hebrews 11:13)
These verses show us that the man of faith agrees and acknowledges that the earth in its present form is not his eternal home. We wait for a new heaven and new earth wherein righteousness dwells. See 2 Peter 3:13. Our hope looks to this new heaven and earth. This is the “word” and “hope” to God’s servants of which the writer speaks in verse 49 above. The “affliction” he mourns is his inability to keep God’s Law. He knows his mortality by which he constantly sins. Yet, he still “takes comfort” in God’s rules.
The world today, including most Christians, no longer takes comfort in God’s rules of righteousness. Instead they take false comfort in a false religion that teaches them grace in their lawlessness. Verse 56 declares the keeping of God’s precepts a blessing and yet his ministers have today turned it into a curse!
I do not teach that a man must obey the Old Testament law to be accepted by God. Neither do I teach that God expects men to obey all of that law revealed to Moses in order to walk rightly before him. The New Testament specifically did away with many of the old laws, including all of the sacrificial and food laws. (The food laws do reveal wisdom concerning healthy foods to eat, but do not establish righteousness before God) I teach that men must endeavor to understand what his Law, the Royal Law of which James speaks, really means, that he must repent when he misses the high mark of that calling and accept God’s gracious forgiveness and reconciliation in Jesus Christ, and then get up and go on toward the perfection that God will continually reveal to him. I also teach that we dwell in a mortal body, the house of our sojourning, and that we will never achieve perfection in this flesh. But, I also teach that God expects us to keep these temporary vessels pure of defilement. When we stumble and fail to do so we must repent. We must learn to call good “good” and evil “evil,” yearn for the good and mourn for the evil that continually besets us. If we accept the evil as “good” then we have blasphemed the Holy Spirit and until we learn otherwise we shall never be able to repent and shall forever be cut off from the Kingdom God.
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; Having your conduct honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold,glorify God in the day of visitation. (1 Peter 2:11-12 KJ2000)
