40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Live From HWSS 2022 (Episode 334)

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Chad and Daniel are joined by Erick Sorensen and Caleb Keith in this episode recorded live from the Here We Still Stand Conference. It's all about Psalm 19 and why nature is not enough. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

Okay, well, let's do this thing. Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament, live from here where you still stand. Are you guys feeling good? Does it feel good to be back out and about doing something? Yeah, it feels good. I like it. So, per usual, when we do these live things,

we don't just pick up wherever we end it because we know not everybody at this conference listens to 40 Minutes in the Old Testament, so we don't want to jump into a story or halfway through a narrative and stuff, so we pick some different text to go over. And this year, we have decided to go over Psalm 19. We told Caleb that, you know,

hey, you can be a guest on the show, and he was like, sweet. And then we said, we're gonna do Psalm 19, And he said, that's a pretty pronomian psalm. And I said, that's correct. That's correct. So we're going to see what we can do with it. Chad, this is the law of the Lord is perfect psalm of David.

Yeah, it is. And one of the first things that struck me about this, it's just worthy of comment. It's not directly related just to this psalm. But it's something I've thought about before with all 150 of these. We think of these as prayers, right? And they are. I mean, these are prayers. But when you're going through Psalm 19,

you go first, first, second, third, fourth. You know, you don't address God directly until you get to verse 11. You're talking about the law of the Lord. So you're talking third person, right? The heavens declare the glory of God and their expanse declares the work of his hands. Day to day pours forth speech.

Night to night reveals knowledge. And on and on it goes. And then you get down to about halfway through. The Torah of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. The precepts of the Lord are right. You know, we're still talking about the Lord, right? And then you finally get down here to verse 11. Moreover, by them, your servant is warned.

We finally talk to God. And Psalm 1 never addresses God directly. And it's a prayer. Now, I say that because I think it's a helpful way to think about our prayers. We're praying sometimes. We don't even know it. Katie talked about the Apostles' Creed this morning. When you say the creed, you're praying, even though you're not addressing God directly, right?

So there's a lot of times we pray to God or we sing hymns like the psalms are, and maybe it kind of shifts back and forth between talking about God's word, proclaiming God's word, to talking to God, to talking to God directly. All of which is to say,

if you get distracted in your own prayers and you're just talking, yeah, you're doing it in a very biblical sort of way. So there you go. This is a, it's a unique psalm in many, many different ways. One of the things that makes it unique

is it feels like you took two psalms and you glued them together and there's no real kind of binding agent between the two. It's like you have a psalm about creation, the sun and the firmament and all this creation stuff going on, kind of first article things. And then you go a few verses do that.

And then there's all of a sudden this talk about the law and the precepts and whatnot. There's like a really kind of radical shift that takes place between these two. It's actually some scholars who say that Psalm 19 is a combination of two different psalms. Somebody took a psalm about creation and then a psalm about the word of God

and they just kind of put these two together. I disagree. That's wrong. I disagree as well. Absolutely wrong. As we will demonstrate, beyond all doubt, this will be the definitive commentary on Psalm 19 henceforth. Now, really what's gonna be happening here,

as we'll show, is that you got a couple things going on. First of all, you have, there is overlap between the two parts of this psalm where some of the language in the second half that describes the word of God actually adopts language that's reflected in the first half,

such as enlightening. So the word of God enlightens us, just like that sun enlightens the world in the first half. And then there's a real fascinating thing going on here with the way the psalm talks about the sun, the S-U-N, sun, and how it's almost a polemic against the way the son was treated

and revered in a lot of ancient New Eastern cultures. So we'll kind of get into that as we go through it. Is that enough of an introduction? Yeah, let's do it. Do we actually have time to talk about it? Yeah, let's go. Okay. We can't stop in the middle of this.

We have to finish the song. I guess just for the sake of you guys, I'll read it in English instead of Hebrew. Now you're just showing off. Now you're just showing off. If you guys want to see something really funny, I could read it in Hebrew. So let's look at the first couple of verses.

So this is in ASV. I don't have a New American Standard in front of me. I'm in ASV in front of me. But this is a New American Standard. The heavens are telling of the glory of God and their expanse, that's the word from Genesis 1, the firmament, right? Expanse or firmament.

The firmament is declaring the work of his hands. day to day pours forth speech and night to night reveals knowledge so when the i'd say this one little i thought this was interesting just because i'm a language nerd but when the septuagint the greek translation translated day to day pours forth speech they use a greek word that could also be translated belch day to day just like the idea is like you know sometimes depending on what to eat, you can't, you got to let it out, right? You got to belch. Well, that's kind of the idea. Day to day, it's just like, it can't hold back. It's pouring forth the speech. It's belching forth the speech and night to night reveals knowledge. But I'm going to stop because we have three other

guys up here. So y'all jump in. Well, I mean, the only thing that sticks out to me initially as we read the first few verses here is just how much this reminds me of Romans chapter one, where Paul is making essentially the case for what you know we call in theology natural revelation uh you know this this idea that that we can know some things about god from just looking around at the universe um you know throughout most of history before we had some of the modern inventions that we have now with um you know microscopes and such where you know we could see you know the evidence of what's going on inside of our bodies the way that we could sort of tell something about the universe was by looking up into the sky looking out into space and you could see from the grandeur of

creation, that there must be a creator. You could deduce from that that there's a creator. And from that, you could deduce maybe a couple of attributes about the creator, that he was powerful, you know, as Paul says in Romans 1. And you could deduce some things. You're not going to deduce enough, though. And I think as we go through the psalm, you're going to see the need for special revelation, that general revelation or natural revelation is just not going to be enough. It's not going to cut it for us as human beings created in the image of this creator god yeah i think i think if the if this psalm stopped right around verse six if this psalm was six verses long we'd all be spiritual but not religious like yeah bro yes yeah the universe we talked a lot about the universe

yeah like oh the heavens bro there's a god out there somewhere i believe i believe in a vague spirituality and out in the ether and untethered something. That's what this is about. The heavens are declaring. You're like, it's saying something, but I'm not sure what it's saying. And it's super deep. It's like a very Instagram sort of

Bible verse, right? It's like a picture of somebody standing on the Grand Canyon on the sunrise. With a cup of coffee. Heavens are declaring the glory of God. You know, some generic way to really give praise to God. Which is nice. If you go

through this whole first part you have the heavens declare the glory of god and the sky above proclaim his handiwork day to day pour out speech and the night to night reveal knowledge there is no speech nor their words whose voice is not heard their voice goes out through all the earth and their words uh to the end of the world uh and he has set a tent for the sun which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber and like a strong man runs his course with joy it's rising from the ends of the heaven it's circuit to the ends of them and there is nothing hidden from its heat So he does all, like, this is all nature kind of stuff. And you're being told something unspecific,

but there's something there. It's like a voice that you can't discern the words or maybe a language you don't know, right? But you know that there's someone doing it. That's about as far as that'll take you. Also, is it just the case that we think David is probably outside burning up in the heat while he's writing this?

like it just seems like he's like i can feel it it really is hot out here i'm gonna write this down i know that i exist right now i've never correct yeah that's right that's right in fact in the fine print of the hebrew that is exactly what it says written by david at 12 noon on july yeah yeah there's a so i stopped reading a verse two verse three which you just read is interesting so listen to this contrast so there's the same hebrew word here where it says day-to-day pours forth speech okay very next verse there is no speech but you just said that day-to-day pours for speech you think that's so do you think that's why it's you have the same word here but you're trying to figure out what are you saying like speech but no speech that's speech but no words right so like

somebody's talking but it's like peanuts teacher of the front like there's word like there's speech But those aren't words. You can't pull a lot from it. Like someone's yelling at you at a volume that your ears can't, you're like, I don't know what you're saying. I just know you're saying something. It's an unpreached word. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, that's it. So they're speaking to us. They're declaring the glory of God, but it's like listening to a language that you don't understand, right? Or mumbling. What exactly is being communicated to us? Well, that God is glorious, yeah, and all this other stuff.

but what actually are they instructing us about? What are they telling us about God? Because yeah, if we stop at verse six, we're not yet to Christianity at all. I mean, we're not even close, right? No, we're spiritual. We're spiritual, yeah. So there is no speech, nor the words,

the voice is not heard. Now, this is fun. Verse four says, Hebrew can be translated there like measuring line or it can be translated voice. Kind of ambiguous there. So their line or their voice has gone out through all the earth

and their utterance is to the end of the world. Now here's what's cool about that. You didn't know this. You didn't know this until Paul told you this. But this is about how the word of Christ, the gospel is going out into all the world. Here's what happens. You get to Romans 10

and we all know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, okay? Well, you go to Romans 10 when Paul is saying that, and the very next verse, he quotes Psalm 19, that verse, and says, yeah, in fact, we have proof here in the Psalms where it says their line has gone out, their voice has gone out through all the earth and their utterances

to the end of the world. It's pretty fascinating to me how Paul will take something that's at least contextually talking about this voice of creation, right? and he adapts that to talk about how the apostolic preaching is going out into the whole world. It's unexpected, right? And I think it's helpful in a good way

to show that the way that we might read this and the way that modern scholarship reads this is different than the way that the Apostle Paul reads this. So I think it's not like Paul is somehow twisting this to mean something else. He's adapting the language of the psalm that contextually he's talking about the voice of creation. He's saying, yeah, you know what?

Something even better is happening. The creator has come down. He's assumed our flesh. He's died and risen again. He's given us a great intelligible message to communicate to the world. And that voice has gone out into all the world. Utterances to the end of, in the earth.

So at the end of that verse, verse four, we have a shift and we start hearing about the sun i find this fascinating he says in them he's placed a tent for the sun so like creation is a is a big circus tent okay you get this big tent for for the sun and then it says he's like a bridegroom he comes out of his chamber and like a strong man, a gibor in Hebrew, he rejoices to run his course. His rising is from one end of the heavens and its circuit to the other end of them

and has nothing hidden from his heat. So this is where things get very interesting. So if you look in Egypt, for instance, in Egypt you have the god Re who has a lot of children, but Re is the sun god in Egypt. And one of Ray's children is Maat, which is representative of like order, structure, law in Egypt. So the sun god has an offspring that's connected with order, structure, laws, okay?

You go to Mesopotamia, you have the sun god Shemash. That rhymes with Hebrew. So in Hebrew, the word for sun is Shemesh, Shemesh, Shemosh. So the sun god is Shemesh. And Shemesh is the one who is often invoked like in the law of Hammurabi and other law codes as the one who's going to make sure that laws and order are enforced, okay? You following?

So you got the sun, Egypt to Mesopotamia, that's connected with law, order, rules, all those sorts of things. So the sun is divinized. The sun is not just a thing in the sky that God made. the Son is a God, is a deity. Now, you get all that in mind. And the Son is often described, by the way,

as like a runner. It's running from one end of the heavens to the other. I probably got my directions wrong here, but one end of the heavens to the other, and then it makes a circuit, and then it goes back, runs again, runs again. So if you're knowledgeable, if you're living, you know, whenever this psalm was written,

and you're knowledgeable about, you know, all these various beliefs about the Son, and you're reading along in this psalm, or you're singing along in the psalm, and then you get to the very end where we're about to transition, and no longer is it an abrupt transition. So all these other cultures believe

that the Son is a God that's ordering, structuring things, giving laws, upholding laws, blah, blah, blah, the Son is divinity. And then the psalmist pulls the rug completely out from underneath that by, as soon as he talks about the Son, shifts and says, the Torah of Yahweh is perfect restoring the soul. You get it? Yeah. He said, oh no, the Egyptians are wrong. The Mesopotamians are wrong. The Canaanites are wrong.

The son is a wonderful thing. The son God created. And it comes out of his, like a bridegroom out of his tent in the morning. And he's a long distance runner who runs the same course every day, declaring the glory of God, but it's not a divinity. He de-deifies the son, making it a creature that proclaims the glory of God. And then having done that says, oh yeah, this whole law, order, rule, ordering of things. Let me tell you what that's all about. It's about the Torah of the Lord. So it's a pretty cool shift here. And it's not the radical shift that we might perceive it to be when reading through the psalm between this talk of the Son

and talking about the law of the Lord. Now when you say Torah, now we're going to get to commandments as well, but we're not simply talking about the law as, when we hear law, we think Ten Commandments, we think do's and

don'ts, but this isn't what David is talking about here. Well, he is talking about that, but not only that. Yeah. Yeah, so So this is our hobby horse. This is our soapbox we jump on top of quite a bit. It is my highest pet peeve with regard to translation that Torah is consistently translated as law.

So Torah is, you've all heard me say this probably in one context or another, but Torah is from the verb yara, and yara means to teach. So the Torah is the teaching. Now we can sometimes use it to refer to the five books of Moses, or to just even the Old Testament in general. But Torah just simply means teaching. And teaching, of course, is not just do this, don't do that, or else. Torah is promise and

narrative. It's really just another word for God's word as it teaches us about God, about ourselves, about Christ, about everything. So the Torah of the Lord, the teaching of the Lord is perfect. The word used there for perfect is pretty fascinating because it's the ritual word used in Leviticus to talk about an unblemished sacrifice. So you bring a perfect animal. Well, there really are no perfect animals, except my dog.

Besides that, most animals have flaws. But unblemished, in other words, you can't bring a lamb in that's missing an ear or something like that. You need a perfect, unblemished animal. That's the word you should describe the Torah. it's unblemished well that's how we know it's not just the law right nature revealed just the law and nature is good but not perfect yeah and the torah is complete it's perfect and so it has to

contain god two two words god's two words yeah and it's not just kind of the the mumbling of creation right it's that clarity uh it's god giving us speech that we can understand and not just speech saying, do this, don't do that, but this is who I am. I'm the Lord God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. I'm the God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness. I'm the God of promise. I'm the God who gives you the promise of myself, of my son, of salvation. Yeah, it seems that what David's doing here is saying, if you want to know or hear from God, don't go out into a field somewhere and get real quiet. Don't do what i'm doing now don't yeah don't do that yeah right down the heat yeah don't don't uh don't go out into

nature and like you know and get in a certain stance and and see if you can receive something also don't uh don't look at nature and then create that into god and be like oh this is i hear this voice this thing is screaming at me i can't understand what he's saying it must be god but instead if you want to hear from god or if you want to know what god has to say you go to his clear words that he has given through the testimony of his prophets and in those words are contained in the torah like in the teaching of god yeah i think another thing about to to kind of go back to some of the creation stuff uh you know people are always treating romanticizing creation too as if it's sort of you know a gospel-y kind of thing oh yeah yeah creation

is out to kill you. This is correct. Pretty much. I mean, we live such easy lives. You know, we're protected. We've got air conditioning. I never worry about whether I'm going to starve to death. That like never crosses my mind. I never worry about I'm going to run out of water or am I going to survive this winter? Never crosses my mind. I don't know if you guys have watched Alone. I know that Dan and I have watched Alone. Any of you? I have. Yeah, yeah. All those people would die. I know a couple of them make it about 100 days. They would not survive the winter. They would all die. And these are advanced survivalists who are living in this very harsh climate. Because nature doesn't care about you. Nature will kill you and not think about you for

a second afterward. So yeah, nature's not gospel-y. It's not at all gospel-y, dude. it's brutal when you when you have uh we'll have tornadoes where i live and like sometimes you have tornadoes sometimes you lose power you go like 48 hours without without electricity and you're like i don't know if we're gonna make it like i don't know after 48 hours will nature possibly kill you but your neighbor may kill you yeah yeah that's correct your neighbor is like you have a generator because i'm taking it yes yeah it's bad it's bad it's hot you're like man wasn't made for this and and that's that's you know it's still like i'm still in a house and i've and i've got all the all the stuff i mean you look at uh you know look at a hurricane if we

just had in florida that's telling you something about god but it's not good yeah it's not or at least it's not comforting no no if all we knew about god was nature he was he pretty mean guy trying to trying to get you you know thankfully it's not real real quick getting back to the the idea of the law of the Lord or Torah being sort of descriptive of the writing of God or the revealed word of God, I think it's so helpful because I remember when I was first wrestling with the concept of law and gospel and I had heard and I had sort of owned this idea that the law, part of what it was doing, it functioned to kill the sinner, you know, it functioned to convict us to the core about who we were. And so this was confusing to me initially when I read it as law,

the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul, like revivifying, like bringing to life the soul. Well, I thought this seems to be in contradiction to what my good Lutheran pastor was telling me, that the law kills and the gospel brings life. So how do we do this? Well, that's how we do this. That's how we understand this, that the law here has a much broader meaning. And also, not for nothing, I mean, the word for reviving here also can be understood as like returning the soul. That's the way it's translated a whole lot of the time. And so it is what the scriptures do. The scriptures do have this ability through the application of law and gospel to, in fact, revive the soul. Yeah, the verb in Hebrew is shuv. It's

the word for return, return, bring back. You could translate this reviving, returning, restoring, repenting. It's the whole idea that it's the Torah of the Lord that brings us back. That's right. Brings us back. And therefore, it must be more than just the law. This is the whole counsel of God that brings us back, that restores us to himself. And then, so that's just the beginning of the Torah. It follows, there's six different, they're all structured exactly the same in the Hebrew. So the blank of the Lord, the blank of the Lord. So we have the Torah of the Lord, the testimony of the Lord, the precepts of the Lord, the commandment of the Lord, the fear of the Lord, the judgments of the Lord. So six different ways in which, the way I think of

all of these is, yeah, we can talk about these in maybe kind of specific ways, but the whole overall thrust of this is basically different ways of saying the Word of God. So the Word of God, whether you call it precepts or a pact or the judgments or the Torah, all of this is just talking about how you characterize the Word of God. So it's perfect, it's sure, it's right, it's pure, it's clean, it's true. He just, you could even, you could choose other adjectives if you want to, but the whole idea is that there's a perfection here. Everything that God wants us to know and needs us to know is in, is in his word. Whether you call it right or clean or pure or anything else, it's all there. So we don't need to go looking somewhere else for what God has to say

to us. And then each of these is followed. So you have the blank of the Lord and you have this word that describes it. And then also it's followed by, what does it do? It repents the soul, restores, revives the soul. It makes wise the simple, rejoices the heart, enlightens the eyes. There's your sun connection, by the way. Enlightens the eyes, just like the sun enlightens creation. So in a much better way, the word of the Lord enlightens the eyes or endures forever. It's righteous altogether. So those verses, those one, two, three verses, it's like Psalm 119 in miniature. Everybody's favorite Psalm 119. Y'all have it memorized as infants. You're like, you knew Psalm 119. 176 verses, you knew it all. So those three verses are like the Psalm 119 in

miniature, which is all about, of course, just the word of God, just going on and on and on about how great the word, the word of God is. Do you have any insights on anything you want to add there? I don't have any adjectives, no. I think you did a good job. You did a good job. Thanks, thanks. And you know what? God's word is

so great. You know what it's better than? Well, the psalm tells us. It's more desirable than gold. In fact, it's more desirable than fine gold. You know what the difference is between those two? One's fine and one's not.

One's finer than the other. Pretty major difference between those two kinds of gold. It's like 14 karat and 24 karat. Gold and fine gold. Nobody else really knows. That's the one thing. And it's also sweeter. Sweeter than

honey. And the drippings of the honeycomb. Which is also honey. He's going super redundant here. Drippings of the honeycomb are honey. Gold, nice gold. yeah honey and also what you know with the stuff off the honeycomb which is also honey yes that i hope everybody's following this it's complicated but yeah of course this is just

setting i mean this is actually pretty common in fact you'll find both those comparisons in psalm 119 uh between the word of god and gold or any kind of material possessions and then the word of god and and the sweetness of honey and sometimes in the prophets you'll actually have the word of God described as sweet like honey, right? Like when the prophets, God hands a prophet a Bible, a page in the Bible, a scroll, and says, I want you to eat this. I always think to myself, if I were that prophet, I'd be like, I don't know. It doesn't look very appetizing. But they eat it, and it's sweet. It's sweet when they consume it. When they taste it, yeah. Yeah, because, you know this is this it's the idea of course of uh of taking the word of god and internalizing it

that's that's a whole idea that it's an external word that's meant to be internalized so it comes to us from the outside and then we we consume it and it becomes part of who we are so that on the inside we are then affected by that word of god as it as it comes within us yeah a lot of this reminds me of just what you know when we think about again going to the apostle paul you know romans 7 and the way he describes the law of the lord the way he describes it being good that the problem the problem is not the word of god ever whether it be the law or the gospel the problem is never with the words the problem is always with us it's always with the sinner. It's with the human being. And this is what he spells out in Romans chapter seven.

And actually that's where David is going to go pretty soon too, as he meditates on the power of the word. Yeah. So he's talking about creation and now he's talked about the word of God and you could divide this Psalm into three different parts, really two or three. So if you divide into three, we're about to transition into that third part about, so yeah, what, so what is this word of God, like, what impact does it have on us? How do we respond to it? And verse 11 says, moreover, by them, that is talking about all these different ways of talking about the word of God, your servant is warned. Is that the ESV too? Yeah, it's warned. Yeah, warned. Yeah. Keeping them there is a great reward. I mean, which I know because, I mean, God has rewarded me a lot

because I've kept his commandments so much. My reward. I was going to point that out too, Chad, for you off the roof yes so you know what to do with them i'm building storehouses for my rewards because i've kept so many of the commandments of god there's obviously this is conditional language i mean this is conditionality right up front that's the law right servants warned yeah on the one hand like you don't do this it's not going to go well for you that's you know you see that all over the you know in the first five books and then of course there's also a great reward promise to the nation of israel you know and and your land flowing with milk and honey, if you do these things, it's going to go well for you. And it's, but what I find

fascinating is David's response immediately after talking about what the law actually does. It's like, you can just see it like all of a sudden in his mind, like he's like, who knows how long he's meditating on this, but suddenly it doesn't seem to be quite as comforting and quite as sweet as honey in his mind. No, I mean, he's, he's sort of set himself up for this, right? The word of God is great it's you know more desirable than gold it's sweeter than honey and you know it warns you and if you keep it it's great reward and then all of a sudden he's like yeah but here's my problem he's like who can discern his errors acquit me of of my my hidden faults my secret faults immediately the law of god does this work yeah well what he does here is he said like there's

a great reward in keeping the commandments but he's like yeah i'm i'm not even aware of all the ways that i am not going to obtain this reward like i have so many hidden problems yeah that aren't that i don't even i cannot discern myself there's no chance i'm getting this reward so you're i'm gonna need you to declare me innocent from not just sins that i know about but from all those ones that I don't even perceive? Yeah, that's the thing about sin. You know, I can think of today and think of, you know, the sins that I remember committing, which I'll spell out for you. You're not my father confessors. No, I, and I can think back, you know, yesterday, last week, my life, you know, the things that I really remember, you know, well, that's like the tip

of the iceberg because there's so many sins that first of all, I forgotten, right? I just totally forgotten about them. And there's a vast number that I never even knew that I committed. And we never want to bring ourselves to confess original sin either, right? That one we just get away from. It's like, I'm mostly good, and I'm making mistakes, and I'll confess the ones I remember. But that part of me that's just sinful, we'll just forget about that. You definitely think that you don't have to confess the thing that you didn't do, what you really wanted to. Yeah.

Mistakes. Which is like... Wait, is that a sin? Yeah, that's the one. Oh, man. That's... You know, like where you're like,

I almost sinned there. Almost. So close. That didn't work out the way I wanted it to. Yeah. Yeah, so the secret sins were the ones we don't even,

not even aware of. Yeah, the law works on those too. They call my good works? Yeah. What I love about this, though, is that David knows that he has to be declared innocent. Yeah, yeah.

Like, it's not something, he doesn't use any urn language here. Like, it has to be a declaration from on high. Yeah. It just, it has to be. Yeah. Or an acquittal. Yeah, there's no other option.

Especially if you're going to get this reward. Like, I'm going to need it. Like, he's already knows that this reward is out of the question and apart from an acquittal. I'm going to need an absolution if I have any chance at this whole reward you get

for keeping the commandments. Yeah, that part reminds me of Psalm 119 in the sense that, you know, you have 175 verses where you're extolling, praising the word of God. You know, it's great. It's wonderful.

All of this stuff. And then you get to the very last, the first half of the very last verse, verse 176. And he says, I have gone astray like a lost sheep. I just love that. Seek your servant for I do not forget your commandments. So he goes through this whole thing. And at the very end, he's like, I've just done all of this praising of the word of God. But the whole time I'm like, just like that lost sheep, just wandering away. And I need you to restore me. Come after me and then bring me, bring me back to yourself.

Equip me, right? Declare me innocent of all these things. And while you're at it, verse 13, keep me back from, you could translate this, presumptuous sins or arrogant sins, things like that. So not just the secret stuff, but also that real, you know, out there blatant. I know I'm doing it.

I know I'm doing wrong and I'm still going to do it anyway. I like the sin, yes. That's how weird, it's an interesting contrast, isn't it? uncover the hidden stuff and put the brakes on the presumptuous stuff. I like that he's saying that I'm going to need you

to help me with this high-handed junk that I'm doing, right? Because it turns out I like it. Well, yeah. So keep me from it. You would think that you could just be like, well, this is the presumptuous stuff. This is the arrogant sin.

So surely I could I know what that is. so I just won't. Yeah, you need whatever action from God goes against your nature in the particular ones, right? Yes. There's sins you're gonna hide, and so you need the law of God to uncover them.

And then there's sins you're gonna really do. That everyone's gonna know. Yeah, and so you need action there, too. You need the opposite of whatever you have the power to do. Well, what it does, though, is it tells you that sometimes when you, you know, those times when you don't sin sometimes every once in a while,

like when you don't do it, like when you don't. That makes very sense. I remember that time. Like, have you ever had those times where maybe you didn't sin, that means God gets a credit for it. Like, oh, God saved me from that one.

That's good, right? That's what David is asking for, is that, hey, I need to be saved from my sins. Acquitted, yes, but also I would like to not commit some sins sometimes, and so you help me out with that. Every time that happens, though, I just, I ended up messing it up

because I'll be like, man, I sure did well in avoiding that sumptuous sin. But I have to repent of my righteousness, my self-righteousness. It's a vicious cycle. Don't live by the law because if you do, you will never win. I guarantee you. The law will always, will always win. So keep me back from those presumptuous sins.

Don't let them rule over me. And then I shall be blameless. And I shall be acquitted, right? Acquitted of great transgression. I really appreciate the fact that he calls a thing what it is. Whether it's hidden sins or presumptuous sins, All of it, he just wraps up as great transgression. Because that is, in fact, what it is.

It is treason against a holy king of kings. And it doesn't do us any good to pretend otherwise. It doesn't do us any good to minimize. What we need to say is what it is. And we need to be forgiven for what it is. And the good news that David celebrates here is it is. yeah well this is the thing that's great is that he says nature's awesome but it speaks an unintelligible word the torah comes in you have god in long gospel that speaks a word that you

can hear that goes into your ear that you can discern then you find out that oh oh dang uh like what what i've discerned from this word is that i'm in a bad position and so then you ask God to acquit you and make you blameless and absolve you from all transgression. This is the order of things. And I'd like that then he says, let the words of my mouth and meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, my

Lord, my rock, and my redeemer. So he ends with redeemer. So this is where he goes from nature to word to confession of sins to, okay, I got a redeemer. So we've gone from nature all the way to, I need a savior. Yes.

That's good. And what better way to end? I mean, it doesn't matter what you say in the psalm. If you end with praising God for being your redeemer, that says everything. Well, if you want the words of your mouth and the, I mean, the words of your mouth, but you want the meditation of your heart

to be acceptable in the sight of God, it's great that he's your Lord and it's great that he's your rock, but you really need him to be your redeemer if those things are gonna be acceptable to him. And the good news is that you can say to God, as you're talking about not praying well or whatever, and that's a good prayer to say,

hey, hear these words I'm saying, see my heart, make them acceptable in your sight, you're my redeemer. That's a great way to pray. Yeah, yeah. And in this way, he has become religious instead of just spiritual and I love it. In that way, with this understanding,

I mean, Psalm 19 kind of sums up what we're all about. I mean, you got, this is a doctrinal kind of psalm And doctrinally, in a very broad sense, I mean, you've got first article, God the creator stuff. I mean, you've got the word of God. You've got sin. You've got confession.

You've got prayer. You've got finally accenting the fact that the one who has created and the one who's given us his word and the one who forgives us, he is our redeemer. He's the one who saves us from our sins. That redeemer is Jesus, in case you were asking.

I don't know. That's who it is. We can't end without that. And that is the end, though. That's it. We're out of time. So thank you guys for hanging out with us. Thank you.