Psalm 119, and we are in the Gimel stanza. Gimel is the Hebrew letter that's roughly equivalent to the letter G in the English alphabet. And once again, that means that in Hebrew, all the lines in this stanza from verses 17 through 24 are going to begin with the letter G. So Psalm 119, verses 17 through 24. Listen carefully, this is the word of the living God. Psalms says, deal bountifully with your servant that I may live and keep your word. Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. I am a sojourner on the earth, hide not your commandments from me. My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times. You rebuke the insolent, accursed ones who wander from your commandments. Take away from me scorn and contempt, for I have kept your testimonies. Even though princes sit plotting against me, your servant will meditate on your statutes. Your testimonies are my delight, they are my counselors. That's part of the reading of God's word. Let's ask the Lord for help again tonight. Father God there are some of us here tonight that when we read things like my soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times there is a whisper and an echo of understanding there. We know what that means. We have something equivalent in our life, but there are others, Father, that have no idea what that means. And I pray for all of us tonight, that those who have whispers, that they would be loud, vibrant voices, and those who don't even have a category for this right now, whether that is because it is a season in their life where the Lord seems distant. that you would remind them, Father, of this consuming hunger for the Word of God, and how not only important it is, but also, Father, how necessary it is for them to draw close to you. And Father, we pray that you would give us help in everything that we hear tonight from your Word, and that as we go into a time of prayer, Father, that you would hear us, and we ask all these things in Christ's name. Amen. So this psalm highlights for us how the lover of God's word deals with things like hostility, things like criticism. Things like pressure and things like opposition. But it's dealing with all of those things in a foreign land. This text has Daniel written all over it. I mean, in verse 19 when it says, I am a soldier on the earth, hide not your commandments from me, certainly. as Daniel was an exile in Babylon, this can very easily be something that he would say. But I want you to put a thumb in Psalm 119, and I want you to go just real quickly to Jeremiah 29.7. We were in Jeremiah 29 and 30 this morning, and there's some really important information in here. particularly instruction for those who are in exile and instruction for those who are coming out of exile at a future date. But in Jeremiah 29.7, the prophet is answering a question that many of the exiles had. Now obviously when Jeremiah wrote this, this is before they were going to go into exile, and he really is speaking in a prophetic way. He's giving instructions for the exiles when they go into exile. And the question is basically something like this. we're gonna be taken out of our foreign land, or excuse me, we're gonna be taken out of our home land. And if you know anything about how ancient Near Eastern people thought about God and his connection to the land, you would know that it is sacred ground wherever Yahweh casts his name. And you want to be in that sacred ground. This is why, just as a little aside, Naaman, I talked about this some time back, Naaman the Syrian when he was converted, He asked the prophet if he could take a wagon full of dirt from Israel back to his land in Syria. Why? Because he knew that he was gonna have to go into the temple with his superior, and he knew that his superior was old, and he was gonna bow to Dagon, his false god, and Naaman was gonna have to hold on to him, and he would know that he would have to, in some sense, go into that circumflection. And he wanted Elijah to know, I'm not worshiping Dagon, but because I need to go there, I need some dirt from Israel to remind me of the sacredness of Yahweh, and to in some sense have his presence close to me. That's how ancient Near Eastern people thought. And so these exiles are now out of their homeland, they're out of that land that God has said, mine. Now we know theologically that all the land is the Lord's, but you have to think in a theocratic context here, where Israel and their hope in the God of Yahweh and the land were intricately connected. So the question is, I'm out of my land, I'm away from my temple, the temple is destroyed, I'm away from my people, I'm away from Torah, What am I supposed to do in this land? What am I supposed to do in Babylon? What am I, like, am I supposed to just revolt? I mean, are we supposed to start a revolution and set up a theocratic state in Babylon? And this is what Jeremiah says. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its peace," the ESV says welfare, but it's just the word shalom, in its peace, you will find your peace. So what is he saying? He's saying, look, there is this kind of common kingdom nature to where you're at, that there are neutral things that you can work together with Babylonians with for your mutual well-being, your mutual good. You want a strong economy. You want supply and demand to be good. You want viruses to be eradicated. Work for all those things. Work for the building up of society and the city. That's a good thing. And in its peace, You will have peace, but there's just a little dangling problem there. And the problem is this, as that peace increases and increases and increases, after a while the Israelite starts to look around and he's seeing all this prosperity in Babylon. And he's seeing that they are prosperous even though they don't worship Yahweh. And they are successful, even though they don't worship Yahweh. And they have normal problems like me, but they seem to get out of it, and they seem to be okay, and everything seems to be going fine. And their kids have straight teeth, and they get straight A's, and they go to college, and everything seems to be well. This is Psalm 73. And they don't have Yahweh. Maybe, maybe, just maybe, I don't need Yahweh. You see, peace can be a good thing, but it can also be a thing that can lure you away from the triune God. And so we see here, coming back now to Psalm 119. that the way that this psalmist keeps himself from the temptation of dabbling too much in the welfare and the peace and the prosperity of Babylon is to remind him of his pilgrim status. And yes, I'm just part two of the sermon this morning. Reminding himself of his pilgrim status. Verse 19, I am a sojourner on the earth. You know what I think he's doing there? He's not only declaring to God that he's a sojourner, but he's also preaching to himself. Josh, you are a sojourner here. Don't expect too much. Josh, you are an all-millennialist, not a post-millennialist. Don't expect the kingdom. Expect that you are going to suffer. Expect with Martin Luther that you should have a theology of the cross and that things are going to be hard. Expect the mark of the beast. Expect the deep to expand and to oppress you. Expect that and do not find your hope here. Josh, you are a sojourner in this land. You are a sojourner on this earth. And as much as the peace and prosperity comes, second half of verse 19, Lord, may not that peace and prosperity hide your commandments from me. Because the more comfortable I get, the more I want those commandments to be hidden from me, so I could do what my flesh really wants to do. And I have the evidence of Babylon doing what their flesh wants to do, and their God seems to be taking care of them. And in my flesh, I say, God, I do not need you. So remind me that I am a sojourner on this earth. My identity is the most important thing that's gonna keep my feet on the ground. and my arms raised to Yahweh in the heavens remind me that I am a sojourner." Daniel was a sojourner. He was a minority in Babylon, and his God wasn't accepted, his way of life wasn't accepted, his worship wasn't accepted, his praying wasn't accepted, and even his diet wasn't accepted. He was awash in a culture that was hostile and arrogant. So the second thing that he does in verses 17 through 19 is he orients the word as something of a compass. He sees the word of God, the commandments of God, the testimonies of God as a compass. Look at verses 17 through 19. Deal bountifully with your servant that I may live and keep your word. Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. I'm a sojourner on the earth. Hide not your commandments from me. In other words, verse 17, he's basically saying, God, deal with me in such a way that I want to keep your word. It's something that I desire. It's something that I long for. Open my eyes that I might behold wondrous things out of your law. You see, wondrous things are open to the child of God when he or she is looking for them. Let me ask you a question this evening. If you come to your Bible, okay, in your personal worship or whatever you want to call it, ask yourself the question, what am I looking for today? What am I looking for today? Am I looking for something with which I can rebuke somebody? Maybe there's a season for that. Am I looking for something that will make me feel good about my present state? There's a place for that. Am I looking for a way to justify my hard heart? We do that sometimes. Or am I looking for a way to get away from the Word of God altogether and so the cover of my Bible doesn't even open? Sometimes we don't find things and the reason why is because we don't know what we are looking for. So what are we looking for? Are we looking for a soft heart? Are we looking for the truth? Can we really say that we're looking for the truth? Do you believe that there is truth to be had? I am a sojourner. I am out of my element in this land. Let me not be out of the element of your word. Is that your prayer? Let me not be out of the element of your word. But then in verses 21 and 22, he sees the word as a source of comfort. It's interesting here. In verse 21, there's a different type of sojourning, isn't there? There's a sojourning not in a Godward direction, but there's a sojourning away from God and away from His commandments. It's a wandering. And the psalmist says in verse 21 that those are the types of people that the Lord rebukes. The ESV says the insolent. That's another word for arrogant. It's another word for arrogant. I want to charge you, beloved, tonight of a certain kind of arrogance. It's an arrogance that I fight against, and I hope it's an arrogance that you fight against. But it's an arrogance that presents itself as being a very pious thing. It's called biblicism. And Biblicism basically says God has spoken in his word, and unless you come to me with a book, chapter, and verse, I'm not gonna do what you say. And Biblicism has a very uncanny way of bending backwards and as far over as much as it can to dissect and distinguish the word of God as the word of God from the word of God in the mouth of God's people. It's a justification. It's a, well, it didn't say it exactly like that, so I can continue in my sin. Let me tell you something. God puts his word in the mouth of his people. No, it's not the exact words every single time, although we can do that. We can come to somebody just with the word of God and say, brother, sister, you're straying, okay? But when the word of God comes in the mouth of the people of God to you, let me tell you something, to the degree that you harden your heart to it, you are usurping the authority of God. You must remember that. Okay, now some of you are like, I don't know what you're talking about, and some of you do know what I'm talking about. It's that reflux that we have to kick away and deflect accountability simply because we don't want to give up our sin. And beloved, I have seen people make shipwreck of their faith by doing that. It is called Biblicism and you need to run away from it, okay? The Word of God is, that's why we have so many different translations. If you think that the Word of God is so mechanical that only one translation has it, and yes, there are people out there, you're missing the point, okay? If you want the best translation, go to the Hebrew and the Greek, and even then, in transmission history, we may have lost a vowel here or a consonant there. But God's message has been preserved. And when that message comes to you and it says, repent of your adultery, repent of your stealing, repent of your idolatry, I don't care if it's in the mouth of a four-year-old, you better believe God is speaking to you through that four-year-old. Do you believe that? Do you believe that tonight? We will not grow in holiness as a people unless we believe that. And we will not grow in holiness as a people unless we have people in this congregation who when people do come to them and confront their sin, they say, thank you for caring enough. Thank you for caring enough to come to me and seek to get out that splinter in my eye or that telephone pole in my eye or whatever the case may be because not only do I not want to stray away from God, but I don't want my sin to spread like gangrene in this congregation. So you rebuke the insolent. We need to be reminded the Lord rebukes the arrogant who assume to themselves an authority to dislodge the authority of God from the mouth of the people of God when they come to them. Spurgeon said that the arrogant looks of the proud are too high to observe their own feet and to keep the Lord's way. I think that that's spot on. But finally tonight, verses 23 and 24, the psalmist looks at the word as a counselor. Even though princes sit plotting against me, your servant will meditate on your statutes. Your testimonies are my delight. They are my counselors. In the midst of criticism, as Daniel did often throughout his ministry, in the midst of criticism, there is a refuge. There is a harbor where you can go. And that harbor is the Word of God. You know, the elders have been talking about different things recently, and sometimes we come across shepherding issues where It's hard to know where to go. There's wisdom issues that are more complicated and less complicated. But you know, sometimes, sometimes, we find after long discussion that it's actually not that difficult. What's happened is we've complexified it, if I can make up a word. We've complexified it. We've made it more complicated than it really is. And it's because we are, because we're human too, we're being swayed by popular opinion. We're being swayed by what everybody else is doing. We're being swayed by, whether we're gonna be liked if we pull the trigger on this decision, and it starts to cloud what the Word of God is saying. And these clouds gather over the Word of God, and now it's overcast, and I can't see the hand in front of my face. But the Lord gives us a harbor from criticism, the criticism of man. And at the end of the day, what you need to ask yourself when you are being criticized is not, How many noses are in this camp, and how many noses are in this camp, and if there's more noses in this camp, then I'm gonna go with them, and if there's less in this camp, then I'm gonna throw rocks over there. No, you ask yourself the question, what does God call me to do? What does God call me to do? And then you can go to sleep at night with a good conscience. So the psalmist, echoing, well, if I could put it this way, in the context of what Jeremiah is saying, to seek the welfare of the city, seek the peace of the city, finds a peace that is not so much in the city, but in the word of God. And I just want to end tonight on what Paul says in Philippians 4, 5. He says, let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. If there's ever been a time, beloved, and maybe you're going through this right now, when you feel like you're on the brink of losing it, you're gonna lose it, You're so overwhelmed with stress, you're so overwhelmed with despair, you're so overwhelmed with grief, you're so overwhelmed with maybe a conglomeration of all these things, and you just don't think you can make it. Can I tell you something? I don't know that logic is necessarily what you need. I think you need the peace of God that surpasses all understanding, all logic. But God, you... You want me to trust you, but I don't know what you're gonna do. That's kind of the point, my child. That's kind of the point. If you knew what I was gonna do, it wouldn't be trust, would it? Okay? Sometimes I don't tell you what I'm gonna do because I want you to trust me, and I want you to press into me, and I want you to see me. If all you ever had in this world was just me and the eschaton, it would be enough. The peace of God that surpasses all understanding. Who was the ultimate sojourner, beloved? The ultimate sojourner was the man who did not have a home, he did not have a pillow, he did not have a place to lay his head, and his name was Jesus Christ. And Paul tells us in Ephesians 2.14, he is our peace. So tonight, as we consider peace, you go to Jesus Christ, he is your peace. and whatever it is you're wrestling with, you go to Him, you go to the foot of the cross, and you just let Him envelop you, and you cling to that cross with faith, and He will lift your countenance, and He will carry you, and He will preserve you, and He will get you through. Let's pray. Father God, give us grace to actually do this and not just be religious people spitting platitudes and sayings, may our hearts cry, really be in our heart, and may you envelop us with the peace that surpasses all understanding, we pray in Christ's name, amen.