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Psalm 119 - Mem

It's time for a review.  The student has learned many wonderful lessons about God's Word.  He's found that it contains the promises he needs for every situation in life, and he's found that God's promises are always kept – that they're absolutely trustworthy!

So now it's time to go back, to think about these things he's learned, and to think what God's word now means to him.  That's what he does in this stanza, and he comes right to the point!  He sings out, at the top of his voice, "Oh how I love Your law!  It is my meditation all the day!"  He's found God's Word to be like the magic key that opens not one or two, but ALL life's mysteries!  He therefore thinks about it often, and he meditates on how its wisdom can be applied to EVERY circumstance!

He says it makes him "wiser than my enemies!"  It does so because it's Author is wiser, because His God knows every situation that can come into his life, knows every potential move his enemies can make, and knows how to bless them ALL to him in such a way that they can only do him good! And God's Word contains all the principles for living in the midst of that blessing!  He's learned the truth that Paul later expressed when he said, "All things work together for good to them that love God, that are the called according to His purpose."  Even though his enemies mean only harm to him, yet God is sovereignly able to turn it all to good!  Even though, as he says, "For they (his enemies) are ever with me" - yet God's blessed Word - and God Himself - are "ever with" him also!

He even says, "I have more understanding than all my teachers, for Your testimonies are my meditation."  His teachers have taught him many things, but God's Word teaches him the meaning of them all.  Only through God's Word can he see the purpose of things, the eternal significance of everything that happens to him.  His teachers can never teach him that!  Meditation on God's Word gives him wisdom for all events in all time, wisdom that far surpasses anything man can teach!

In fact, he says, "I understand more than the ancients, because I keep Your precepts!"  In other words, by understanding and keeping God's Word he has more wisdom even than the wisest of men, men who have lived long and absorbed much of the world's wisdom!

Knowing these things about God's Word, having learned how absolutely precious it is, he determines to live according to it, to make it his only guide in all of life.  He says, "I have restrained my feet from every evil way, that I may keep Your Word!"  In other words, he'll do whatever it takes to live according to such wisdom!  IT is right, even when all the world is wrong!  It's WORTH keeping!

But he must also give credit where it is due.  He says, "I have not departed from Your judgments, for You Yourself have taught me."  He recognizes that, even though he's been taught how precious God's Words are, yet, fallen and foolish as he naturally is, he would ignore and even disobey that Word unless God Himself had taught him inwardly.  But God HAS taught him, and God IS teaching him, and he will therefore return to that Word again and again, even after a thousand falls!

He sums it all up in a last word of praise to the Bible's Author: "How sweet are Your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!  Through Your precepts I get understanding - therefore I hate every false way!"

How about you?  What does God's Word mean to you?  Have you experienced its truth in your life?  Has it become so precious to you that you determine to learn it, to meditate upon it, and to depend upon it all day every day?  Try it.  You'll find it so!