Reminders of Hope

Psalm 119:49–56 NIV

49 Remember your word to your servant, for you have given me hope. 50 My comfort in my suffering is this: Your promise preserves my life. 51 The arrogant mock me unmercifully, but I do not turn from your law. 52 I remember, Lord, your ancient laws, and I find comfort in them. 53 Indignation grips me because of the wicked, who have forsaken your law. 54 Your decrees are the theme of my song wherever I lodge. 55 In the night, Lord, I remember your name, that I may keep your law. 56 This has been my practice: I obey your precepts.

Traditions are powerful pieces of our identity. Disneyworld counts on that. I must admit that I do not quite understand Disneyworld. I have had the chance to go there a few times over the years. But honestly, once was enough because I just didn’t think it was that great. It seemed to me that I spent most of my day walking around and standing in lines for a few moments of cheap animatronics.

So I have a hard time understanding why some families keep going back there again and again. Except that traditions are powerful pieces of our identity. Every one of us has some kind of list of repeated rituals that we go back to again and again mostly because it brings back fond memories; these are memories that have become pretty important to who we are. And when that happens, we are drawn into going back and reliving those events because they ground us in some kind of cherished identity.

Those repeated memories take many forms: a favorite family vacation spot, grandma’s house for Christmas, an annual gettogether with old college friends, autumn deer camp, or weekend fishing up north. It happens here in church too. When Christmas comes around there is a list of Christmas carols you expect to be in the lineup and sing every year. And Easter morning you know you can count on a few of those hymns that only ever get sung on Easter—and every Easter. Without those cherished repeated moments, you feel like something is missing. It is a list of traditions that have become powerful reminders of something cherished in who we are—it is a part of our identity.

And so we rehearse those memories year after year. We live them out again and again as a way of keeping our identity strong. Indeed, we rehearse these moments again and again as a way of keeping our hope alive.

This is what we will see in the section of Psalm 119 for today. Verses 49-56 are the seventh section of the Psalm. This is the section of Psalm 119 that canters around the Hebrew letter zayin. I have mentioned in past weeks about the way in which Psalm 119 uses the Hebrew alphabet a separate the sections. And so there are 22 sections corresponding to the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. And each section has eight verses.

The Hebrew culture back then was an oral tradition. Many people could not read. And even if they could, what good would it do them because very few people had access to anything written down. And so the way that people knew their scriptures was to hear it spoken out loud and to memorize it. Could you imagine memorizing a passage as long as Psalm 119? The author helps out by breaking it down in 22 sections according to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Now you might be thinking, what good does that do? Most of the people are only hearing it out loud, not reading it from a scroll, and many of those people hearing it don’t really know their own alphabet anyway.

The answer is that all of Psalm 119 is alliterated according to the Hebrew alphabet. It is what we call an acrostic poem. So, we are looking at verses 49-56 today under the section of the Hebrew letter zayin. But what this actually means is that the first word of every verse is a word that begins with the letter zayin. This is true for each section throughout the entire Psalm. So, the first word in each of the first eight verses all begin with the Hebrew letter aleph. The next eight verses all begin with the Hebrew letter beth and so on.

We lose that in English. You have no way in English of seeing that—originally—each eight-verse set begins with the same letter. That makes it poetic to hear out loud, and much easier to memorize for those who did not know how to read.

Fast forward back to the verses for today—all verses that begin with the Hebrew letter zayin. When having to come up with words that all begin with the same letter, it is not surprising that the poet repeats himself when some of those words happen to be rather important. And it happens that in this eight-verse section the Hebrew word zacar is rather prominent. Zacar translates into English as ‘remember.’ These are eight verses tucked into Psalm 119 that all have to deal with the importance of our memory.

It broke it down for you in your outline so that you can see it. Three times the author repeats the word remember. One time it is an appeal for God to remember, and the other two times it is a reference to the remembering of the Psalmist. The other word that is repeated three times in connection to remembering is the torah – the law, the Word of God.

Walk through these verses with me again and let’s see how this works itself out as this week’s message of reflections.

Verses 49-51 – God’s Memory

The first appeal to God in verse 49 sets up a picture that perhaps life is not always great for poet writing these verses. He is looking to strengthen his hope in God. And he jumps into this by sort of pointing his finger up to God and reminding God of the promises of his word. It is not that God actually needs reminding, as though he has forgotten his covenant. It more of a call to action. Don’t just remember your covenant, show up and fulfil the promises of your covenant.

The Psalmist puts his hope in this. He trusts in God to make this happen. Where specifically does this hope and this trust come from? It is from the promises of God’s word. Memory is in some sense about rehearsing and reliving cherished traditions that are foundational to who we are. Look at what is happening in these few verses. The Psalmist is declaring his hope and his trust in God because he is declaring that faithfulness is foundational to who God is. Faithfulness to his promises, faithfulness to his covenant, faithfulness to his Word. God will rehearse, repeat, relive his actions according to these characteristics of his identity. In other words, the psalmist is declaring this is who God is and this is what God does.

Now here is the part that makes this hope and this trust so remarkable. It’s easy to be a fair-weather fan. It’s easy to walk in step with God’s Word when everything seems to go my way all the time. But what happens when God starts fulfilling his faithfulness and his promise and his covenant in ways that I don’t understand and in ways that I don’t agree with? Now that’s the true test of trust. And this is where the psalmist is coming from. He is in a moment of life in which the fulfilment of God’s faithfulness does not appear to be clearly evident in front of him. He is facing some adversity.

But it is precisely in adversity where rehearsing the memory of God’s promises is most important. And this is the memory to which he returns and connects himself to God’s promise through God’s faithful rehearsing of his covenant.

Verses 52-54 – Our Memory

Let’s move to the center section. Verse 52 begins, “I remember, LORD, your ancient laws.” The Hebrew words for ancient laws needs some explanation. The word we have translated here into English as ancient carries the meaning of something that has stood the test of time and yet remains. It is ancient, not in the sense of something old, but in the sense of something that is everlasting. And the Hebrew word for laws here is not torah as we see in verses 51, 53, and 55. It is a Hebrew word that has more a sense of judgements. Perhaps another way we could translate verse 52 is to say, “I remember, LORD, your eternal and everlasting judgements.”

This is not a reference to judgements in the sense of punishments. This is judgement in the sense of upholding justice. This is a declaration of God’s eternal and everlasting dedication to be right and to do the right things because he alone is righteous. And he is eternally consistent in his justice.

Maybe this seems odd because the very next thing he says in verse 53 is that indignation grips him when he sees how the wicked have turned away from God. The gripping of indignation—it puts a pit in the bottom of his stomach. When he looks around and sees the evil that takes place in the world, he is emotional with a righteous anger.

But with an equally compelling show of emotion, he turns around in verse 54 and places the righteous and eternal decrees of God as a song. It is music from his heart. It is the theme of his life. And then he turns to another odd line, “wherever I lodge.” This comes from a Hebrew word that refers to temporary dwelling. It creates a comparison of opposites. The judgements and decrees of God through his Word are eternal and everlasting. The turning and rebellion of the wicked, and the evil which is inflicted upon the world through sin is momentary.

Track this with me then. The Psalmist is inviting us to rehearse a memory of God through his Word which grounds our identity—grounds our being—in the eternal and everlasting promises of God. Here is where it gets real. You and I live in a world in which we are constantly being pulled down and torn apart by momentary brokenness. Satan is an enemy of God in this world who does everything he can to throw as much trouble in our lives as he can. But hear this. The damage of evil in this world is not everlasting. And in times when you feel stuck and in times when the stresses anxieties you face feel like they are eternal, these are the times when we most need to embrace the Word of God which brings us back again to the covenant of God’s love which is truly eternal and everlasting. In times when it feels like my identity is all tangled up in these moments of brokenness which have crashed into my life, it is then that I most need to let God untangle my identity from those moments of brokenness and remind me that my eternal identity is rooted in the promises of God revealed to us in this Word.

Verses 55-56 – Joining Memories

Let’s wrap it up. The third reference to remembering comes as a joining of the first two. It is a connection between God’s remembering and our remembering. It is a joining between God’s rehearsing his identity of who he is, and our rehearsing of our identity of who we are.

Look at these lines. “In the night, LORD, I remember your name.” The night; the temporary and momentary darkness; the time when the light of dawn will soon overtake the darkness. It is in those times that we come back again and again to remember who we are in God. He says this, “I remember your name.” The LORD. We remember the name of God. Whenever you see a reference to the LORD in your English Bible and the word LORD is spelled with all capital letters, it is the divine name of God revealed to Moses from the burning bush back in Exodus 3. It is the Holy name of God that is mostly pronounced as Yahweh. The King James version of the Bible pronounces it as Jehovah. It is really an unpronounceable name because as it is written in Hebrew there are no vowels. English Bibles translate the name of God from Exodus 3 as meaning “I am.” But the Hebrew word Yahweh without any vowels makes it a verb without any verb-tense. In other words, it is a verb that is past tense, present tense, and future tense all at the same time. Yahweh—the name of God—means I am who I always was who I always will be. Past, present, future; always one and the same. Constant, eternal, everlasting.

Pull that one line from verse 55 altogether. In the momentary darkness of the night, my being is firmly rooted and joined together with the God who is eternal and never-changing.

And look at how it ends in verse 56. “This has been my practice.” Some other English translations put it this way, “Your blessing has fallen upon me.” It’s an incredibly difficult verse to take from Hebrew into English because the original Hebrew contains only two pronouns and a generic verb. Literal English would be, “This has been to me.” I like what John Calvin writes about the difficulty of this verse. Calvin chooses to translate it this way, “This has been done to me.”

On the one hand, this sounds very Calvinistic. I cannot on my own choose to obey God’s precepts, unless God himself predestines it to be so. As much as there are those who would like to drill that kind of militant Calvinism into every word Calvin ever wrote, I don’t think that was the intention of Calvin’s rendition of this verse. Rather, I think the way Calvin about this passage lends more towards comfort and assurance. God joins my will with his will. God steers my heart into his heart. God brings my story into his story. God grafts my eternity into his eternal being. And all the ways I have of practicing and remembering and rehearsing this identity I have, every one of those traditions and rituals reinforce all the ways that my being is grafted into God’s grace and love. We practice that. We rehearse that. Every time we gather here on a Sunday morning and go through all the motions of a worship service, we are practicing and rehearsing our eternal story.

We are remembering our hope. This is a way of living in which our hope takes shape with a living practice, an active rehearsal, an enduring tradition. We actively participate in our hope by constantly returning to the remembering traditions of God’s people.

When I was a young boy, I had a series of traditions that I did every year on Christmas Eve. As many small children do, I hoped Santa would come and bring me presents. In that hope, I did these things every year as a boy. I would write a note for Santa and leave it out. And I put together a small plate of cookies and a glass of milk. I rehearsed this same tradition one year after the next when I was young. It is a hope that endures in the routine traditions of what small children do to join their activities with the activities of the one who brings presents. They don’t just hold onto that hope somewhere inside, they rehearse that hope, they act upon that hope, they go through the motions of remembering what joins them to that hope.

Today we look into the reflection of the cross of Jesus and we remember—we rehearse—our place in the eternal and everlasting hope we have in Jesus.