The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.
Joy in God’s statutes
Not content with celebrating the eternal fitness and rectitude of the Divine statutes, the Psalmist recommends them by an argument of a less abstract nature, more closely adapted to our feelings and interests, by adding that in consequence of their inherent rectitude they tend to rejoice the heart. The word “statutes” includes the whole system of Divine precepts contained in the Scriptures. Such is the goodness and condescension of God, that with our duty He has strictly connected not only our happiness in general, but even our present pleasure. Two things are necessary ill order to produce true and rational joy in the human mind, namely, objects suited to its faculties, and faculties in proper disposition to receive impressions from them. In each of these views the Holy Scriptures, as they contain the Divine laws, are calculated to produce this happy temper. What has here been asserted of all the discoveries and demands of God’s revealed will is particularly applicable to its perceptive part, which has a tendency to rejoice the heart of the sincerely pious, in theory, in practice, and on reflection. What further evinces the excellence of the Divine statutes is, that the joy they inspire is pure and unmixed. The religious joy which arises immediately from reflection on a virtuous practice increases the sublime pleasure which springs up in the mind of a good man when he contemplates his relation to his God and Saviour. (P. C. Sowden.)
The Bible right.
Old books go out of date. Whatever they were about, men no longer care for them. Books are human; they have a time to be born, they grow in strength, they have a middle life of usefulness, then comes old age, they totter and they die. Many of the national libraries are merely the cemeteries of dead books. Some were virtuous, and accomplished a glorious mission. Some went into the ashes through inquisitorial fires. Not so with one old book. It started in the world’s infancy. It grew under theocracy and monarchy. It withstood the storms of fire. It grew under the prophet’s mantle and under the fisherman’s coat of the apostles. In Rome, and Ephesus, and Jerusalem, and Patmos tyranny issued edicts against it, and infidelity put out the tongue, and the papacy from its monasteries, and Mohammedanism from its mosques, hurled their anathemas; but the old Bible lived. It came across the British Channel and was greeted by Wycliff and James
I. It came across the Atlantic and struck Plymouth Rock, until, like that of Horeb, it gushed with blessedness. Churches and asylums have gathered all along its way, ringing their bells, and stretching out their hands of blessing. But it will not have accomplished its mission until it has climbed the icy mountains of Greenland, until it has gone over the granite cliffs of China, until it has thrown its glow amid the Australian mines, until it has scattered its gems among the diamond districts of Brazil, and all thrones shall be gathered into one throne, and all crowns by the fires of revolution shall be melted into one crown, and this Book shall at the very gate of heaven have waved in the ransomed empires--not until then will that glorious Bible have accomplished its mission. (T. De Witt Talmage.)
The Bible right
I. The Bible is right in its authentication. I say, if the Bible had been an imposition; if it had not been written by the men who said they wrote it; if it had been a mere collection of falsehoods, it would have been scouted by everybody. If that book has come down through the centuries without a scar, it is because there is nothing in it disturbable. When men began their opposition to it there were two or three thousand copies; now there are two hundred millions, so far as I can calculate. Would that have been so had it been an imposture? Further, suppose there was a great pestilence, and hundreds of thousands of men were dying of that pestilence, and someone should find a medicine that in one day cured ten thousand people, would not all men say that was a good medicine? But just so it has been with the Bible. It has cured men of the worst leprosy, the leprosy of sin. Modern discoveries in Petra, Nineveh, Palestine have all gone to prove its truth.
II. The Bible is right in style. I know there are a great many people who think it is merely a collection of genealogical tables and dry facts. That is because they do not know how to read the Book. You take up the most interesting novel that was ever written, and if you commence at the four hundredth page today, and tomorrow at the three hundredth, and She next day at the first page, how much sense or interest would you gather from it? Yet that is the very process to which the Bible is subjected every day. An angel from heaven reading the Bible in that way could not understand it. The Bible, like all other palaces, has a door by which to enter and a door by which to go out. Genesis is the door to go in, and Revelation the door to go out. These Epistles of Paul the Apostle are merely letters written, folded up, and sent by postmen to the different Churches. Do you read other letters the way you read Paul’s letters? Suppose you get a business letter, and you know that in it there are important financial propositions, do you read the last page first and then one line of the third page, and another of the second, and another of the first? Besides that, people read the Bible when they cannot do anything else. It is a dark day and they do not feel well, and they do not go to business, and after lounging about awhile they pick up the Bible--their mind refuses to enjoy the truth. Or they come home weary from the store or shop, and they feel, if they do not say, it is a dull book. While the Bible is to be read on stormy days, and while your head aches, it is also to be read in the sunshine and when your nerves, like harp strings, thrum the song of health. While your vision is clear, walk in this paradise of truth; and while your mental appetite is good, pluck these clusters of grace. Note its conciseness. Every word is packed full of truth. Nine-tenths of all the good literature of this age is merely the Bible diluted. See also its variety; not contradiction or collision, but variety. Just as in the song, you have the basso and alto, and soprano and tenor--they are not in collision with each other, but come in to make up the harmony--so it is in this book, there are different parts of this great song of redemption. The prophet comes and takes one part, and the patriarch another, and the evangelist another, and the apostles another, and yet they all come into the grand harmony--the song of “Moses and the Lamb.” God prepared it for all zones--arctic and tropics, as well as the temperate zone. The Arabian would read it on his dromedary, and the Laplander seated on the swift sledge, and the herdsman of Holland, guarding the cattle in the grass, and the Swiss girl, reclining amid Alpine crags. Thus suited to all is it, and hence I cannot help saying, The statutes of the Lord are right.
III. And the Bible is right in its doctrines. Man, a sinner; Christ, a Saviour--the two doctrines. All the mountains of the Bible bow down to Calvary.
IV. And in its effects. I do not care where you put the Bible, it just suits the place. Whether in the hands of a man seeking salvation, or one discouraged, or one in trouble, or one bereaved--it is the grand catholicon for them all. Father and mother, take down that long-neglected Bible. Where is it now? Is it in the trunk, or on the upper shelf, or is it in the room in the house where you seldom go save when you have company, and then not to read the Bible? In the name of the God who will judge the quick and the dead, and by the interests of your immortal soul and the souls of your children, I charge you today to take up that old Bible, open it, read for your own life, and read for the life of your children. How can you go out on the dark mountains of death, and take your children along with you, when you have such a glorious lamp to guide you? Put that Bible on every rail train, until all the dark places of our land are illuminated by it. Put it on every ship that crosses the sea, until the dark homes of heathenism get the light. While I speak, there comes to us the horrid yell of heathen worship, and in the face of this day’s sun gushed the blood of human sacrifice. Give them the Bible. Tell them, “God so loved the world that He gave,” etc. (T. De Witt Talmage.)
The Word of God rejoicing the heart
I. The statutes of God are the first principles of religious duty, or the means of grace. They are rules of life and action relating, first, to our communion with God, our religious service; and then, to our intercourse with one another. And they are “right” in many different senses--counteracting the tendency of man’s sinful heart, supplying a stimulant to duty; right, too, in their operation and in their consequences, both as to this world and the next. What they engage to do they accomplish. Infidelity can make no such boast.
II. They rejoice the heart.
1. What is rejoicing, the joy of the heart? We should base it upon natural affection, mutual harmony and confidence, rendering and receiving to and from all what is due. It operates in the home, and amongst our neighbours, and throughout society. Such are a happy people.
2. And the statutes of the Lord do effect this; hence God’s statutes have been our songs in the house of our pilgrimage. (Thomas Dale, M. A.)
The Bible always right
If my compass always points to the north I know how to use it; but if it veers to other points of the compass, and I am to judge out of my own mind whether it is right or not, I may as well be without the thing as with it. If my Bible is right always, it will lead me right; and as I believe it is, so I shall follow it and find the truth.
A wrong and a right standard
It is stated that when the United States Government’s dock at Brooklyn was finished, on inspecting it, it was found to be two feet too short to take in the vessels which needed repairs. This involved a reconstruction of the work at great expense. How it occurred was a mystery, but it appeared on investigation that the contractor, in making his measurements, used a tape line which was a fraction of an inch too short. Either it had shrunk, or it was imperfectly made at first; in some way the tape was too short, and so the dock was too short also. The importance of a correct standard can hardly be exaggerated. Whether it be a standard of weights, measures, values, or moral qualities, a slight variation from that which is right and true produces disastrous results.
The Bible right, the reader may be wrong
As a mirage is mistaken for a reality, because of the effect of the sun’s rays upon the organs of vision; so with those that are detecting flaws in the Bible. It is because the eye is diseased, and sees double where the object is single. The fault is in the eye, not in the Bible.
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.
The spiritual nature and enlightening efficacy of the moral law
The purity of the law, if there were no other evidence, is sufficient to establish the fact, that it is the commandment of the Lord. We wish to set before you the moral law in its essential and Divine purity. During the patriarchal ages there was no written document bearing the sanction of a Divine moral law. Tradition, so long as man is eider fallible or fallacious, cannot possibly, for any length of time, from a channel for truth. By and by it pleased God to inscribe with His own finger upon tablets of stone the substance of those floating intimations which He had made from time to time to His servants of old. The law was ordained for something beyond the mere curbing of transgressions; its further object was to detect, expose, and condemn the transgressing principle; in other words, by the purity which it developed and enforced to enlighten man’s eyes upon the character of God, the extent of his own moral ruin, and the absolute necessity of the restoration of the moral principle. The human soul never was suffered to lose an intuitive sense of the simple fact that there is a God; but having assented to this simple fact, the human mind, by its own light, made no further progress towards the discovery of the Divine character. We attribute this failure to moral rather than physical causes. The intellect was not so much in fault as the heart. Man’s favourite sins were thought by him not only to experience the Divine toleration, but even to form no insignificant elements in the Divine character, so that he had nothing to do but to turn over the records of the pagan theology, whensoever he wished to place some act of crime under the protection and the patronage of the god of lust, or fraud, or violence. It was in order to afford some remedy for this dreadful evil--in order to vindicate His own character as well as to elevate that of His creatures, that God published His moral law. The tenor of the law proclaimed at once the high strain of moral perfection belonging by right of nature to the God with whom we have to do. But does man like these ordinances? Do these definitions of duty suit his feelings? If he confess the truth he will confess that he hates such instruction. Many, however, even with the law of God in their hands, are never brought to this confession. They have not been led to see the mighty moral difference between the mind that originated and the minds that received the law. This comes of carelessness and prejudice. Upon the careless generalising of human with Divine systems of law the whole mistake hinges about Christian morals. But human laws only touch actions. Divine laws touch morals, that is, touch motive and action in conjunction. Therefore I am a transgressor of Divine laws if motive as well as action do not tender homage and obedience. Bring human perfection, of whatever nature, side by side with the perfection of the moral law, and of the first the end appears at once. The law shows us our moral ruin, our spiritual death But “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth.” (T. E. Hankinson M. A.)