Oh How I Love Your Law

Read at least the opening strophes of Psalm 119 (verses 1–32) before this session, and if you can, read the whole psalm slowly across the week. Notice how many different words it uses for God’s word, and how rarely it speaks of the law as a burden. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Your word is a lamp to walk by, and a light to illumine my path.

Psalm 119:105

We come now to the largest single thing in the Bible. Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in all of Scripture, one hundred and seventy-six verses, and it is built like a cathedral. It is an acrostic, but not the modest sort we met in Psalm 37, where the lines simply step down the alphabet. This one is enormous: twenty-two stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and within each stanza all eight verses begin with that same letter. Eight verses times twenty-two letters: one hundred and seventy-six. The whole alphabet, from end to end, eight times over, marshaled to do one thing: to praise the word of God.

And the form itself preaches before we read a line. To build an acrostic on this scale is an enormous labor of craft, and you do not undertake a labor like that about something you are indifferent to. The sheer architecture is an act of love. More than that, the alphabet is the stuff all language is made of (every word anyone has ever spoken is built from those letters), and the psalmist takes the whole of it, A to Z, and pours it out on the word of God, as if to say: there is no letter, no syllable, no scrap of human speech that is not fittingly spent in praise of what God has said. The form is the message. The whole of language, devoted entirely to the God who speaks.

Because that is the single, unwavering theme of all one hundred and seventy-six verses: the word of God, and the believer’s love for it. Almost every verse names it, and names it with a wonderful variety, cycling through some eight different words: God’s law, His word, His promise, His statutes, His precepts, His commands, His regulations, His rules. The psalm turns the word of God like a jewel in the light, catching a different facet in each verse. And over and over it does the thing that ought to stop a Lutheran reader in his tracks: it says, plainly and joyfully, I love it. O how I love your law! (v. 97). I find delight in your law (v. 174). I will find delight in your commands, which I love (v. 47).

And there is our difficulty, and we had better name it out loud at the start, because for a confessional Lutheran it is a real one. We have spent this whole series insisting on the distinction between law and gospel: the law is the word that commands what we cannot do, exposes our sin, and drives us to despair of ourselves so that the gospel can raise us. The law, in that sense, is not something a sinner can love; it is the word that accuses and kills. So how can a man write a hundred and seventy-six verses gushing love for the law? Is this not exactly the smiling, self-satisfied law-righteousness the gospel sets us free from, the religion of the man who is rather pleased with how well he keeps the rules?

It is the sharpest form of a danger we have been tracking since the genre map and met head-on in Psalm 37: the temptation to read the wisdom psalms as a program of self-made obedience. Psalm 119 is the hardest case of all, a whole psalm in love with the law, and if we can read it rightly we will have learned to read every wisdom psalm rightly. So we will give the difficulty its due, and then we will find that the psalm itself dismantles the legalistic reading from the inside. This is not the boast of a man proud of his obedience, but the love song of a needy heart for the God who speaks, a heart that by the last verse confesses it has wandered off like a lost sheep. And underneath it all we will find, as we always do, the One who is Himself the Word, in whom alone this psalm can finally be prayed.

Can a Lutheran Love the Law?

Three things have to be said, and the first changes almost everything. The word the psalm uses most often, the one our translations render law, is the Hebrew torah, and torah is a far bigger word than the narrow, accusing Law of the law-and-gospel distinction. Torah means instruction, teaching, direction: the whole of what the LORD has spoken to His people to make Himself known to them. It includes the commandments, yes; but it also includes the promises, the covenant of grace, the story of redemption, the entire self-disclosure of God to those He loves. When the psalmist says he loves God’s torah, he is not saying he is fond of a rulebook. He is saying he loves the word through which the living God has spoken to him, and the largest part of that word, by far, is sheer grace. To love the torah is to love the God who speaks, and most of what He speaks is gospel.

You can see it in the very vocabulary of the psalm. Alongside law and commands sit word and promise, and the psalmist loves the promise as warmly as anything: This is what comforts me in my trouble, for your promise revives me (v. 50). A promise does not command; it gives. The man of Psalm 119 is not curled up in delight over a list of demands; he is in love with the whole speaking of God to him, the demands and the promises and the testimonies together, because all of it is the voice of the God he loves, breaking the silence to tell him the truth and give him life.

The second thing is this: a believer set free by the gospel really can come to delight in the will of God, not as a terror anymore but as a delight, and that delight is the fruit of the gospel, not a return to law-righteousness. This is what our Confessions mean when they speak of a third use of the law: for the Christian, justified freely and given a new heart by the Spirit, God’s revealed will is no longer only the accuser that drives him to Christ; it becomes the welcome guide of a life he now gladly wants to live. The law still accuses the old man in him, and will until he dies. But the new man, the man reborn in Christ, can say with the psalmist, and mean it, O how I love your law, the way a rescued child loves the voice of the father who rescued him. The delight is not the root of his salvation. It is the flower of it.

And the third thing settles the matter, because it comes from the psalm’s own mouth: this is not, anywhere in its hundred and seventy-six verses, the boast of a man satisfied with his own obedience. Read it and the legalist vanishes. The psalm is a long chain of pleas: open my eyes (v. 18), teach me (v. 33), give me understanding (v. 34), give me a desire for your rules (v. 36), revive me (v. 25). It confesses straying: before I was afflicted I used to stray off (v. 67). It weeps over sin, its own and others’: tears stream down from my eyes, because people do not keep your law (v. 136). And it ends, in the very last verse of the longest psalm of love for God’s word, with the confession, I have wandered off like a lost sheep. Come looking for your servant (v. 176). That is not the voice of a man congratulating himself on his record. That is the voice of a needy believer who loves the word of God and knows he cannot keep himself in it for an hour without grace. The man who reads Psalm 119 as self-righteous boasting has not actually read Psalm 119.

It may help to picture what the freed believer’s delight actually looks like, because it is not what the legalist’s looks like at all. Imagine a child who has been adopted out of nothing into a good father’s house, fully a son already, with nothing left to earn. That child will still gladly do what the father asks; but he does not do it to become a son, for he is one, nor to keep from being thrown out, for he never will be. He does it because he loves the father and the father’s ways have become his own. That is the third use of the law in a single picture, and it is the only key that unlocks Psalm 119. The man who delights in God’s commands here is not earning anything and not afraid of anything; he is a ransomed child who has discovered that the will of the God who saved him is the very life he now most wants to live. The same commandment that terrifies a slave delights a son, and the gospel is what turns the slave into the son.

And watch how this man responds when he sees God’s law broken, because nothing exposes a legalist faster than that. The self-righteous man, secure in his own keeping, looks at the lawbreaker with contempt; he is rather glad to be better. The psalmist does the opposite: tears stream down from my eyes, because people do not keep your law (v. 136). He weeps. The breaking of God’s law grieves him, the way it grieves a man who loves the Lawgiver and loves his neighbors and knows where their road ends. That is not the reflex of a Pharisee counting his merits; it is the reflex of a heart that has been remade to love what God loves and grieve what grieves Him. The man of Psalm 119 does not look down on sinners from a height. He weeps over them from alongside, as one who knows he is a straying sheep himself, which is exactly how the psalm will end.

Open My Eyes

Let us linger on that neediness, because it is the gospel running underneath the whole psalm. The psalmist does not approach God’s word as a confident master who has it figured out. He approaches it as a beggar. Open my eyes so I can truly see the marvelous things in your law! (v. 18). Stop and feel what that request admits. The marvelous things are in the law already; they are objectively there. But the psalmist confesses that he cannot see them unless God opens his eyes. He does not say I have studied hard enough to see the wonders; he says open my eyes. The understanding of God’s word is itself a gift God must give, not an achievement the reader can manufacture by effort.

We have watched the Lord Jesus do exactly this. On the Emmaus road and in the upper room He opened the Scriptures to His disciples, and Luke tells us he opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures (Luke 24:45). The same word, the same gift: eyes and minds that cannot see the wonders until He opens them. Every believer who has ever read a passage he had read a hundred times and suddenly seen Christ in it, suddenly seen the wonder that was there all along, knows that this is no figure of speech. The eyes were opened. That is verse 18 answered, and it is pure grace.

The pleas pile up, and every one of them is a confession that the love and the keeping of God’s word must be worked in us by God. Teach me, O LORD, the lifestyle prescribed by your statutes (v. 33). Give me understanding so that I might observe your law (v. 34). Give me a desire for your rules, rather than for wealth gained unjustly (v. 36). My heart will not even lean the right way unless You give it that desire. And the loveliest of them all: I run along the path of your commands, for you enable me to do so (v. 32), or, as the ESV renders the Hebrew picture, I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart. Notice the order, because it is the order of the whole gospel. The running comes second. First the heart must be enlarged (opened, freed, made wide), and then, out of the enlarged heart, comes the running. The psalmist does not grit his teeth and force himself down the narrow road; he asks God to enlarge his heart, knowing that obedience that does not flow from a freed and widened heart is just the old slavery wearing a religious face. Gospel first, enlarging the heart; then the glad running. That is not law-righteousness. That is the gospel producing the very delight the psalm is full of.

And the psalmist knows why he needs the word so badly: he is a stranger here. I am like a foreigner in this land. Do not hide your commands from me! (v. 19). A foreigner in the land is a traveler passing through a country not his own, with no map of the local roads and no claim on the land. To such a person the word of God is not optional enrichment; it is the only map he has through a foreign country toward a home he has not yet seen. The believer is exactly that, a pilgrim, as the Songs of Ascents will soon remind us, on a road through a world that is not finally his. And his prayer is the stranger’s prayer: do not hide the word from me, for without it I am lost in a strange land. Far from the confident master of the rules, the man of Psalm 119 is a traveler who knows he cannot find his way home without the word God gives him for the journey.

A Lamp to My Feet

Out of that loved and life-giving word, the psalm draws comfort, light, and life for the long walk of faith. Your word is a lamp to walk by, and a light to illumine my path (v. 105): the best-known verse of the whole psalm, and worth seeing clearly. A lamp to walk by is not a floodlight over the whole journey; it is the small, sufficient light that shows you the next step in the dark. The believer is rarely given the whole road at once. He is given enough light, from the word, for the step in front of him, and that, the psalm says, is enough. The word does not promise to show us everything. It promises to keep our feet from the ditch one step at a time, all the way home.

And the word gives more than direction; it gives life. The plea returns again and again: I collapse in the dirt. Revive me with your word! (v. 25); this is what comforts me in my trouble, for your promise revives me (v. 50). The word is not merely information about God; it is the means by which God revives a soul that has sunk to the dust. We Lutherans have a name for that: the means of grace, the conviction that God actually gives Himself and His life through His word and sacraments, not merely facts about Himself. Psalm 119 is steeped in it. The psalmist lies collapsed in the dirt and reaches for the word, not because the word will explain his affliction, but because the word will revive him in the middle of it.

Even the afflictions are folded into the word’s good work. Before I was afflicted I used to stray off, but now I keep your instructions (v. 67); it was good for me to suffer, so that I might learn your statutes (v. 71). The believer who has been through a hard season and come out clinging harder to God’s word than before knows this from the inside: the affliction was not the enemy of his faith but, in God’s hand, the schoolmaster that drove him back to the word he had been drifting from. And there is a word here for the lay reader in particular, for the one who fears he is too ordinary, too unlearned, to get much from the Scriptures. Your instructions are a doorway through which light shines. They give insight to the untrained (v. 130). Not to the clever. Not to the credentialed. To the untrained: the plain, the open, the unschooled. God’s word is not a locked vault that only scholars can open. It gives its light to the pew-sitter who comes to it simply, and the most learned reader who comes proud will get less from it than the simplest believer who comes hungry.

And the word the believer leans on does not shift under him with his moods, because it is not anchored in him at all. O LORD, your instructions endure; they stand secure in heaven (v. 89). The word stands secure in heaven whether the believer feels its truth on a given morning or not; its reliability rests on God, not on the strength of the reader’s faith or the weather of his heart. This is a great comfort, and a deeply Lutheran one. We are not thrown back on the quality of our own believing for our assurance; we are pointed outside ourselves to a word secure in heaven, spoken by a God who does not lie and does not change. On the days the lamp seems to give little light to our feet, the word has not dimmed; our eyes have. The word stands where it has always stood, secure, waiting for us to look up from the dust and find it still shining.

Stored Up in the Heart

Near the beginning of the psalm comes a verse worth carrying with you the rest of your life: In my heart I store up your words, so I might not sin against you (v. 11). The word is not meant to stay on the page or in the ear; it is meant to be stored up, treasured, hidden away inside, so that it is there in the heart when temptation comes and the Bible is nowhere in sight. This is more than memorizing verses, though it is not less. It is the word taking up residence in a person, becoming part of how he thinks and sees and reaches for help, so that in the hour of testing the word rises up from the inside to meet the temptation.

We have watched the Lord Jesus do precisely this. In the wilderness, hungry and assaulted, He met every temptation of the devil not with a fresh argument but with the word stored up in His heart: it is written … it is written … it is written (Matthew 4). He had the word treasured inside Him, and it was there, ready, when He needed it. That is verse 11 lived out perfectly: the word stored in the heart, so that He might not sin. And it is the model for every believer: the word hidden in the heart is the armory the Spirit reaches into when the old enemy comes whispering.

And this storing of the word in the heart is itself the fingerprint of the new covenant. The LORD promised through Jeremiah, I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds (Jeremiah 31:33); through Ezekiel, I will put my Spirit within you; I will take the initiative and you will obey my statutes (Ezekiel 36:27). The word stored in the heart is not finally the believer’s own achievement of memorization; it is God writing His word inside the people He has claimed, putting His Spirit within them so that they walk in His ways from the inside out. Psalm 119, with its hidden and treasured word, is the new covenant longed for and tasted ahead of time: the law not merely held over a man from outside, but written into a heart God Himself has made willing.

There is something quietly practical here for ordinary believers, and it is the heart of why our tradition has always pressed the catechism on young and old alike. To store the word in the heart, to learn the Commandments and the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer and the words of Christ until they live in us by memory, is not a relic of a sterner age; it is the laying up of an armory the Spirit can reach into when the Bible is closed and the hour is hard. The believer on a hospital bed, too weak to read, who can still pray the Twenty-third Psalm from memory; the tempted man who finds an old, half-forgotten verse rising up to meet the temptation; the dying saint whose failing mind still holds I am the resurrection and the life: these are Psalm 119:11 bearing its fruit. The word hidden in the heart in the easy days is the word that surfaces, of its own accord, in the days when we have nothing else left. It is worth the labor of treasuring it now.

I Have Gone Astray Like a Lost Sheep

And so we come to the last verse, which is the key to the whole psalm and the reason no one should ever read it as a legalist’s boast. After one hundred and seventy-five verses of loving, treasuring, pleading for, and delighting in the word of God, the longest psalm in the Bible ends like this: I have wandered off like a lost sheep. Come looking for your servant, for I do not forget your commands (v. 176). Sit with how strange that is, and then with how right it is. The man who has loved God’s word more eloquently than anyone who ever lived ends by confessing that he has wandered off like a sheep that cannot find its own way home, and asks to be sought. Not I have arrived. Not I have kept it all. I have wandered off; come and find me.

That ending is the gospel guarding the whole psalm. It tells us, in the psalmist’s own last breath, that all this love for the word never amounted to a record he could stand on, that even the most word-soaked believer remains a sheep prone to wander, dependent to the very end on a Shepherd who will come and seek him. And it hands us, almost aching for Him, the One who has not yet stepped onto the page but whose shape is unmistakable. For the Lord Jesus told a story about a shepherd who would leave the ninety-nine and go look for the one that is lost until he finds it (Luke 15), and He said of Himself, I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep (John 10:11). Psalm 119 ends as a lost sheep crying come looking for your servant, and the answer to that cry has a name and a face and a cross. The psalm that loves the word ends by needing the Shepherd, and the Shepherd is the Word made flesh, come to seek and to save the very sheep who wrote it.

There is a whole doctrine folded into that last verse, and it guards us against a lie that ruins many earnest Christians: the lie that says a real believer ought, by now, to have left the straying behind. Psalm 119 says otherwise, in the voice of the most word-soaked believer imaginable: to the very last line he is at once a man who loves and does not forget God’s commands and a sheep gone astray who must be sought. He is both at once. This is what our tradition means when it says the Christian is simul justus et peccator, at the same time righteous and a sinner: righteous and beloved in Christ, and still, in himself, a wanderer to the end. The believer who expects to outgrow his need for the Shepherd has misunderstood the whole Christian life. He will need seeking on his last day as surely as on his first, and the good news is not that he will stop being a sheep but that he has a Shepherd who never stops seeking, and who has already laid down His life to bring this particular straying one home.

The Word and the Word Made Flesh

Step back now and see the whole psalm for what it is. Psalm 119 is the one-hundred-and-seventy-six-verse unfolding of a single line we read at the very start of this volume. Psalm 1 said of the blessed man that he finds pleasure in obeying the LORD’s commands; he meditates on his commands day and night. Psalm 119 is what the inside of that man’s life sounds like: the whole interior world of the one who finds his pleasure in the LORD’s word and turns it over, day and night, all his days. And we said back in Psalm 1 who the blessed Man finally is. He is the Lord Jesus Christ, the only one who ever delighted in the Father’s word perfectly and meditated on it without ceasing and never once strayed, the One of whom the Fortieth Psalm says, I want to do what pleases you, my God. Your law dominates my thoughts (Psalm 40:8). So Psalm 119, before it is anyone else’s, is the portrait of Christ’s own love for the Father’s word: His eyes already open to its wonders, His heart already enlarged, the word already stored within Him, ready in the wilderness.

And then it becomes ours, prayed in Him. We do not love God’s word the way Christ loved it: purely, perfectly, without a wandering step. We love it the way the last verse confesses: really, but as straying sheep who must keep being sought. Yet because the blessed Man delighted in the word for us, and because His Spirit now writes that word on our hearts and opens our eyes to its wonders, we are given a true and growing love for it, a love that is the gift of the gospel and not the achievement of the old self. And here is the deepest reason a Christian loves the Scriptures at all: not because the rules are lovely, but because the word shows forth Christ, because every page of it, rightly read, is carrying Him to us. To love God’s word is, in the end, to love the One it is about; and the One it is about is the Word Himself, who became flesh and took up residence among us (John 1:14). The psalmist loved the word of God on the page. We have seen the Word made flesh. We love the Scriptures because, like the disciples whose hearts burned on the Emmaus road, we have found Him in them. And finding Him, we cannot help but say, with a meaning the psalmist could only reach toward, O how I love your law.

Luther gave us the image that keeps this love from curdling into something it must never become. The Scriptures, he said, are the swaddling cloths and the manger in which the Christ child lies. We do not love the swaddling cloths for their own sake, as if the cloth were the treasure; we love them because of the One they hold. So with the word. A Christian can drift into loving his Bible the way a collector loves a rare book (its knowledge, its mastery, its familiarity) and miss the Child in the manger entirely; that is not the love of Psalm 119 but a subtle counterfeit of it. The psalmist’s love, read in the light of the gospel, is love for the word because of the Christ it carries to him. We open the Scriptures the way the shepherds came to the manger: not to admire the straw, but to find the Lord lying in it. And when we find Him there, the word becomes what it was always meant to be: not a rulebook to master, nor a relic to revere, but the manger that holds our Savior, and therefore the dearest thing on the shelf.

Gathering the Threads

We took up the longest chapter in the Bible, with its towering acrostic, the whole alphabet spent eight times over on the word of God, the form itself an act of love. And we faced its hardest question head-on: how can a Lutheran, who knows the law accuses and kills, sing a hundred and seventy-six verses of love for it? We gave three answers. The word the psalm loves is torah, God’s whole instruction, most of it grace and promise, not a mere rulebook. The believer freed by the gospel really can delight in God’s will, as a flower of his salvation and not a root of it. And the psalm itself is no legalist’s boast; it is a chain of pleas, a confession of straying, ending as a lost sheep begging to be sought.

We watched the neediness that runs beneath it all (open my eyes, teach me, give me a desire for your rules) and saw that the love and the keeping of the word are gifts God must work in us, gospel before obedience, the heart enlarged before the feet can run. We saw the word as a lamp for the next step, as life given to a soul collapsed in the dirt, as light handed freely to the untrained and not hoarded for the learned. We saw it stored up in the heart, as the Lord Jesus stored it in His and wielded it in the wilderness, and as the new covenant promised God Himself would write it within His people. And we saw the psalm end as a lost sheep, and heard, in that cry, the approach of the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep. Psalm 119 is the long love song of a heart for the God who speaks; read with Lutheran eyes, it is the gospel teaching us to love the very word through which it comes to us, the word that shows forth Christ, who is Himself the Word made flesh. With it, the wisdom psalms are behind us, and we have learned to love the law without ever making it our savior.

For Discussion

1. To a Lutheran ear, a psalm crying O how I love your law can sound like the very law-righteousness the gospel frees us from. The session gave three reasons it is not. Restate them: what does the Hebrew word torah actually cover, how can a believer freed by the gospel delight in God’s will, and what does the psalm’s own neediness show?

2. Psalm 119 is full of pleas (open my eyes, teach me, give me understanding, give me a desire for your rules), and it confesses that the psalmist runs only because God enables him, enlarging his heart (v. 32). What do these requests reveal about whether the psalmist thinks he can love or keep God’s word by his own power? Read verse 18 alongside Luke 24:45.

3. The psalm that loves the law for one hundred and seventy-five verses ends, in verse 176, I have wandered off like a lost sheep. Come looking for your servant. Why is that an essential ending rather than a strange one, and how does it point past the psalmist to the Shepherd who seeks the lost (Luke 15; John 10:11)?

4. Psalm 119 is the long unfolding of a single line from Psalm 1: he finds pleasure in obeying the LORD’s commands; he meditates on his commands day and night. Who, this series has argued, is the blessed Man of Psalm 1, and how does that shape who is finally speaking in Psalm 119?

5. Verse 130 says, Your instructions are a doorway through which light shines. They give insight to the untrained. Why does it matter that God’s word gives light to the untrained rather than only to the learned, and what does that say to an ordinary believer who is not a scholar?

6. Verse 11 says, In my heart I store up your words, so I might not sin against you, and the Lord Jesus answered every temptation in the wilderness with it is written (Matthew 4). How does storing up God’s word in the heart serve the believer, and how is it more than memorization?

Looking Ahead

With Psalm 119 the wisdom psalms are behind us, and we turn into a new room of the prayer book: the royal psalms, the throne room, where the language strains past every earthly king toward the true King. We begin where the New Testament itself begins when it wants to prove who the Lord Jesus is: with Psalm 110, the single most-quoted Old Testament psalm in the entire New Testament. The LORD says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool” (Psalm 110:1 ESV).

It is a small psalm with an enormous reach. The Lord Jesus used its opening line to silence His opponents with a riddle they could not answer: how can the Messiah be David’s son if David calls Him Lord? Peter preached it at Pentecost the moment he had finished with Psalm 16. And it does something no other royal psalm dares: it seats the King not only on a throne but at an altar, declaring Him an eternal priest after the pattern of Melchizedek (Psalm 110:4), a line the Letter to the Hebrews will build whole chapters upon. King and priest in one psalm, at God’s right hand: we will take it up next.

Read Psalm 110 in full before the next session (it is only seven verses), and read it twice. Then read Matthew 22:41–46 and Hebrews 7, where the New Testament shows you how to read it.

Closing Prayer

O God, who has not left us in silence but has spoken, who has given us Your word as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path: we confess that we are too dull to love it as we ought and too weak to keep ourselves in it. Open our eyes, that we may behold wondrous things out of Your word; enlarge our hearts, that we may run in the way of Your commandments with gladness and not with grudging; and store up Your word within us, that we might not sin against You. Let us not come to Your Scriptures as the proud and the learned, but as the simple to whom You have promised light.

And teach us to love Your word for the sake of the One it carries, for every page of it shows forth Your Son, the Word made flesh, in whom alone we can pray this psalm. We have gone astray like lost sheep; seek us, and keep us. Write Your word on our hearts by Your Spirit, that the law we could never love as accused sinners we may delight in as ransomed children. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, our Good Shepherd, who laid down His life for the sheep and lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.