Have you read Psalm 119 lately? I don’t know why not. After all, it’s only a hundred and seventy six verses long! Of course, I’m speaking a little with “tongue in cheek” here, but I’m also serious about my question. Psalm 119 is one of the greatest psalms of all the psalms in the Book of Psalms. It’s a psalm that speaks over and over again about the riches of God’s Word and the very purpose of it. And the wonderful thing about this psalm is that it’s broken up into passages of eight verses each, which helps us to read and understand it without trying to digest all one hundred and seventy six verses in one reading. You might say it’s “chopped up into bite size parts” and each part is nourishing to our soul. Let me just share a few verses with you so you can see what I mean.
“Happy are those whose way is blameless, who live according to the law of the Lord,” Psalm 119:1. “Remember Your word to Your servant; You have given me hope through it,” Psalm 119:49. “Consider my affliction and rescue me, for I have not forgotten Your instruction,” Psalm 119:153. “The revelation of Your words brings light and gives understanding to the inexperienced,” Psalm 119:130. But one of my favorite verses is found in Psalm 119:105, “Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”
I had a boyhood friend who shared one time with a group of us young people in the early days of my high school years, how he had been on a camping trip with the Boy Scout Troop he was a part of. They had gone out camping in a campsite with tents at a state park to learn about nature and how to get along with one another. When it became dark and all the campers had gone to sleep, for some reason sleep would not come to him. So he got up and quietly put on his shoes and took his flashlight and started out on a short hike. He should have alerted the Scout Master, but he didn’t. As he struck out, he didn’t turn on his flashlight so as not to alert anyone, and made his way through the woods guided by only the stars above. But for some reason, he felt uneasy about the next step he was about to take, so he turned on his flashlight, and to his horror, he found himself standing at the precipice of a fifteen foot cliff! Had he not turned on his flashlight, his next step could have been his last.
That’s what the Psalmist is trying to tell us here. The Word of God, the Bible, acts like a lamp and a light to our path. You know, a lamp gives light to a dark room and shows us the obstacles that might be in our way, and a light, like a flashlight, shows us the ground immediately before us so we can avoid tripping over some object and fall headlong to the floor. That’s what the Word of God does for us. It acts like a lamp and guides us to avoid certain circumstances or certain people who would otherwise trip us up and cause us to fall to selfwill and sin, or like a flashlight, it shows us the way in which we should go in order to walk safely through life. Read Psalms 119 sometime. It’s a psalm that touches every aspect of our life, in fact, the whole Book of Psalms speaks to every issue of the human emotion that we all face and draws us to cry out unto God for His guidance and direction. If you will read this book, like my friend, you will find that God is already there, waiting to help us along our way.
