Psalm 119:72 Good Book

No matter what the topic of any given 8-verse stanza, in Psalm 119 David always steers back to the Word. The Good Book.

Meriam Webster says the first known use of the term "the good book" was in 1651. It was an obvious and inevitable phrase people would use to describe the Bible.

By the time I was growing up, from the late 50s through the 70s, the phrase had become a generic term used throughout American culture to describe the Bible, without wandering too much into discussions of God and faith.

People would reference "the Good Book" in conversation, whether or not they were particularly religious or faithful to the Good Book. Often as not, the quote from "the Good Book" might not actually be from the Bible at all, or it might be a corrupted version of an actual verse.

This clip from Fiddler on the Roof, a Broadway musical written and first performed in the 1960s, reflects this usage of the term:

The phrase continues to be used this way in the 21st century.

I think most people mean well when they reference "the Good Book", but too often they're actually downgrading the Bible by the way they use it. They seem to be giving it credit for being a book with some good stories and with plenty of good quotes. But that's not at all the same as David's description of it.

The law from your mouth is more precious to me than thousands of pieces of silver and gold.

Psalm 119:72

Collections of good quotes are plentiful. The internet is bursting with resources for good quotes, even good quotes from the Bible.

On the Goodreads.com page devoted to Holy Bible: New International Version, the author is listed as Anonymous. As with most other books, Goodreads members have posted their favorite quotes from The Bible. There are 299 quotes listed for this particular version, ranging from the ubiquitous John 3:16 to this one from Leviticus 19:16, which is certainly not from the NIV:

Thou shalt not stand idly by.

Whether believers or unbelievers, Christians or atheists, people do love to quote "the Good Book" to suit their own purposes and advance their own agendas. Few, though, use it in a way that shows they value the words from God's mouth more than a precious fortune in material wealth, as David did.

Many believers claim to value the Bible as the final authority on life and godliness. But by their handling of it they betray the true value they place on it, as a tool to defend and prop up their own theologies and way of life. And, for too many, it's a weapon to beat down anyone who believes or behaves differently.

David, the warrior, knew the power of God's Law as a weapon. A millenium before Paul wrote Ephesians 6:17 and Hebrews 4:12, David knew the Word of God is a sword, filled with divine power when used to do surgery on his own heart. He learned this by going through the bad times and struggling mightily to find the good in himself and the good in God's purposes.

Only when we use God's Word as a blazing scalpel on ourselves will we understand the true value of "the Good Book".

Psalm 119:71 Good Books

It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.

Psalm 119:71

Many people struggle with the idea that suffering and affliction is a good thing.

David: You know the shortest verse of the Bible, Jacob?

Jacob: No

David: Jesus wept.

Jacob: Jesus wept...

David: One of the biggest problems we have with people today is for some reason they have it in their head that they shouldn't have any troubles, that suffering is a mistake, or it's unfair, or it's God being ornery. But what if suffering is the point? So that we can learn to let go and be easy in the Spirit. 

This quote comes from the Paramount Network limited TV series Waco. It's a conversation between cult leader David Koresh and an ATF agent. It represents an extreme interpretation of scriptures about suffering.

Believing "suffering is the point" led Koresh to seek out suffering, not only for himself, but for the people who followed his cult.

The point is not to suffer, and not to "let go and be easy", but to follow God. His reasons and His methods aren't always easy to understand, but the key is to seek to understand Him though His Word.

There are no simple answers or easy explanations for affliction. To even try in a short blog post risks reducing it to platitudes and over-simplification.

So instead I'll quote some excellent books that I highly recommend. Ann Voskamp, Joni Eareckson-Tada and Frederick Buechner's all tell a long tale of a life lived and the long road to understanding the reasons for suffering.

The only way to learn about affliction is to learn from affliction. These books will help along your journey.

From Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are:

All these years, these angers, these hardenings, this desire to control, I had thought I had to snap the hand closed to shield joy’s fragile flame from the blasts. In a storm of struggles, I had tried to control the elements, clasp the fist tight so as to protect self and happiness. But palms curled into protective fists fill with darkness. I feel that sharply, even in this … and this realization in all its full emptiness: My own wild desire to protect my joy at all costs is the exact force that kills my joy.
. . .
Humbly let go. Let go of trying to do, let go of trying to control, let go of my own way, let go of my own fears. Let God blow His wind, His trials, oxygen for joy's fire. Leave the hand open and be. Be at peace. Bend the knee and be small and let God give what God chooses to give because He only gives love and whisper a surprised thanks. This is the fuel for joy's flame. Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will. And I can empty. I can empty because counting His graces has awakened me to how He cherishes me, holds me, passionately values me. I can empty because I am full of His love. I can trust. 

From Joni Eareckson Tada, When God Weeps: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty

Gut-wrenching questions honor God. Despair directed at God is a way of encountering him, opening ourselves up to the One and only Someone who can actually do something about our plight. And whether we, like Greg, collide with the Almighty or simply bump up against him, we cannot be the same. We never are when we experience God.

From Frederick Buechner, A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory:

The sad things that happened long ago will always remain part of who we are just as the glad and gracious things will too, but instead of being a burden of guilt, recrimination, and regret that make us constantly stumble as we go, even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead. It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later.

Psalm 119:70 The Good Life

The ability to see the good in the troubles of  life doesn't happen in isolation. It requires living intentionally for God in the good times, the bad times, and on the ordinary days.

Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies, I keep your precepts with all my heart.Their hearts are callous and unfeeling, but I delight in your law.

Psalm 119:70

In Ephesians 4, Paul describes the difference between the people who are calloused and unfeeling in the face of affliction vs. those who delight in the midst of troubles.

Pay attention to the connecting and transitioning words in his description of the calloused people.

So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. (Ephesians 4:17-19)

If you follow the trail of those underlined words, Paul lays out a progression from A to Z.  He describes people whose entire focus in life is on gratifying the desires of their five senses. They've trained their hearts to constantly be on the hunt for new kinds of impurity and new ways to satisfy their greed, doing their best to avoid negative experiences. With their hearts hardened in that pursuit, they become ignorant of what God is really trying to do in their lives. Because of ignorance, they're darkened in their understanding and also separated from the life of God, two things that go hand in hand.

It's all too easy to think, oh sure, I know people like that. Most of us, though, have toyed with pursuing desires to the point of dancing awfully close to the edge of that cliff.

Afflictions and troubles and disasters are a natural result when people pursue their passions over the precipice. To compound the problem, those trivial pursuits have ill prepared them to learn from the hard times. Instead, they respond with more poor choices.

It's going to be difficult for anyone trapped in that downward spiral to see the good in the mess they're in. They don't have the habits or the resources to recognize God's hand at work.

A new perspective only comes through a complete reversal of that lifestyle chain described by Paul. He lays out the return route in a step by step fashion.

That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:20-24)

The way out must begin with Christ. Sure, there are other philosophies that can help people deal with life in a constructive way, but only Christ provides the resources and power and purpose for true transformation. Life in Christ means learning about Christ, learning Christ's plan for put off and put on, and Christ's power to renew your mind and make you into a new person with a new purpose.

Becoming like God and pursuing His righteousness and holiness is the only way to move beyond making lemons out of lemonade toward intentionally turning a desire-centered life into a God-centered life.

Psalm 119:69 Goodness Wins

Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies, I keep your precepts with all my heart.

Psalm 119:69

It's personal

The Psalms are a textbook for prayer, but they're not a dry, theoretical treatment of the topic. It's the personal journal of one man's conversations with God on the the road of life.

Each traveler experiences their own troubles along the way.

For David, trouble frequently came in the form of personal attacks. His enemies, in their arrogance, have manufactured every sot of fake news they can piece together to slander him. They've invented creative ways of making their lies appear like truth, and even more clever ways of making their libel stick. David's reputation is in as much peril as his life.

As a shepherd who rose to be become king, David's reputation was precious to him. The temptation to fight liars with lies is great. Or with gossip, ridicule, and political spin.

I find it all too easy to be dispassionate when I read the many Psalms about David's struggles to be a king after God's own heart in the face of attacks and attempted coups. I've never experienced anything like that. I'm not a king. I'm not even a particularly ambitious man, not a career climber.

But while many of David's personal experiences don't match up to my own experiences, his response to those struggles do speak to my life.

When David is being hounded and hunted by Saul and his army (I Samuel 24), David refuses to to take advantage of an opportunity to kill the king, because God had anointed Saul as king.

When David is dealing with his rebellious son Absalom, who wants to take his father's crown (II Samuel 13-18), David repeatedly restrains himself and his soldiers from taking his son's life. Instead, as a man after God's own heart, he bends over backward to be a restorer and reconciler.

When Shimei, a man from Saul's clan, pelts David and his soldiers with stones and curses the king as a murderer (II Samuel 16), David refuses to let one of the guards kill the man. Instead, he takes it as an opportunity to learn a lesson in humility, to accept that he is indeed in need of God's mercy.


When I find myself being mistreated, do I make the choice to seek revenge? Or do I honor God by treating my enemies like I would want to be treated?

When I'm betrayed or abandoned by someone close to me, do I turn the cold shoulder to them? or do I nurture a heart of patience and reconciliation?

When someone dares point out my shortcomings, do I take offense? Or do I take note and seek guidance from God?

It's so easy to take everything too personally, to lash out at the people who dare trample on my dignity. It's much more difficult to turn the situation into an opportunity for God's goodness to change the situation.

Goodness is always the good choice.

Psalm 119:68 Doing Good

For some of the people I've met in the prison chapel, transformation seems nearly impossible.

Janie confessed one day that until the first time she went to prison, she had never in her young life been sure she would get to eat three meals in any one day and have a bed to sleep on at night. Born into the make-do culture of generational poverty, the only “meals” she’d ever known consisted of whatever food could be scratched together. Sleep happened wherever she happened to be when the time came. To her, the proverbial “three hots and a cot” of prison life is a luxury.

In prison she has found her niche. She's learned the institutional rules - both the official rules and the unwritten ones - and she knows how to get through her days without too many problems. She even has a circle of friends to make her life a little brighter.

Her outlook turns dismal whenever she finishes a prison sentence and is released back out onto the streets. On her best days she has difficulty seeing beyond the needs of the moment. Being out in the world only worsens her reasoning capabilities. Life on the streets offers too many choices. Before long, she shifts back into a poverty-level approach to life, crosses the wrong lines, and finds herself back inside the only place where she feels comfortable.  (Breaking the Link from Poverty to Prison, Christian Standard, December 2014)

Janie's grew up in the poverty class of America, where the "hidden rules" of every day life are different than the way most of us approach our days.

For the millions entrenched in generational poverty, "good" is a moving target. Survival trumps goodness in the real world where the only absolute virtue is making it though yet another day. Bringing your family and friends along with you might also be important, but when suffering and affliction arrive like a cyclone, personal survival wins out for many.

When people who have lost any objective sense of goodness land in prison, they'll grasp onto anything to survive. It might even be church and faith.

Teaching or counseling them can be frustrating. Basic truths fall on ears that can't even comprehend ideas like sacrificial love or humble obedience.

The only way to break through is to introduce them to God. As they come to know the heart of God and the heart of Jesus, they begin to understand.

God is good. His goodness is like nothing they've ever experienced. In fact, His goodness is so contrary to everything they've come to accept as truth, they're forced to make a choice: run from Him or run to Him. Retreat or change.

You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees. 

Psalm 119:68

That's why we teach them the Word and about how it applies in concrete ways to daily life decisions. That's what the Bible is for. Those decrees, laws, and principles help us understand the heart of God. Without the guidance of the scriptures, people like Janie are doomed to fall back into their old ways of thinking.

If you're starting to feel pity or compassion for these poor folks trapped in their warped way of life, that's great. Now look in the mirror.

Middle class people and wealthy people are just as much the victims of the society in which they live. Their sense of goodness is just as warped, but by a different set of "hidden rules". They've lived by those rules for so long, some start to equate there middle and upper class ways with godliness and faith.

It's just as hard to shake them out of their ingrained life habits as it is to change the mindset of a person in poverty.

Goodness is not found in any particular lifestyle or culture. Goodness is found in God. He is good and He does what is good. He's willing to teach you if you're willing to be taught.

Psalm 119:67 Learning Curve

I've heard it over and over again in the prison chapel.

"Getting sent to prison is the best thing that ever happened to me."

Most people who have never been inside a prison would consider that statement absurd. Surely no one would actually say such a thing.

Most of the people inside prison would agree. They hear one of their fellow inmates say this and they just shake their heads. Absurd.

But for some, it's true.

They were on a freeway to destruction. The road to perdition is paved with the freedom to follow your worst inclinations.

Prison is where that road ends. The highway patrol has chased you all over the backwoods of your life and finally pulled you over in a dark alley. There's no more freedom, nowhere else to go. Except rock bottom.

They've been brought low. They been humbled. Everything they've been relying on for life has failed them.

And they're ready to turn to God.

For many, it's a return to God. Every time I ask the question in the prison chapel, the majority raise their hands and say Yes, they went to church when they were kids. Someone, a parent, an aunt, a neighbor, a friend, invited them to church and introduced them to an ordinary volunteer Sunday School teacher who planted seeds of faith in their hearts.

And now, when they've wandered from their faith and hit bottom, those seeds sprout.

"Getting sent to prison is the best thing that ever happened to me."

They turn back to God, they praise Him, and they glory in the very idea of grace and forgiveness. Their hearts leap with the joy of promised transformation.

They're ready to listen, to learn.

I tell them, you're right. This is the best thing that ever happened to you. But it won't last.

If they don't grab hold of that joy and combine it with the training of spiritual disciplines, it won't last.

Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word.

Psalm 119:67

Affliction can be the beginning of a new life, the trigger that prompts transformation, the turning point in the journey.

But only though the discipline of the Word will that transformation find its true, sustainable form. And only by talking to God about the new road you're on will the traveler maintain focus on Him.

Suffering alone will either crush a person or motivate them. Suffering + God's Word + Relationship with the Lord will transform them.

And it will be good.

Psalm 119:65-66 Good Training for Good Judgment

A young man grew up learning about the Bible and about faith in God. When he was twelve he surrendered to the Lord and was baptized. But during his teen years he drifted away from faith and from the church.

Now, in his thirties, he and his wife have returned to church and are growing rapidly in their faith.

He texted me the other day, asking a question about a scripture passage he was reading. They generally work hard to try to understand difficult verses, but when they can't quite put it all together, they've learned to ask questions from people who have been studying longer than they have.

In the midst of our conversation, he mentioned to me that a week or so earlier a random stranger had approached him at the store and asked him a question about the nature of God.

As we talked about this experience, I assured him he had responded well and gave him some suggestions for future situations.

I also assured Him there would likely be similar encounters in the future. It's clear to me that God recognizes his faith and knowledge are developing to the point where he's ready to handle opportunities to stretch his faith in a missional way.

I went away from the conversation overjoyed, knowing God is actively working to teach this young man wisdom.

The standard definitions for wisdom include the idea of knowledge, instructed and challenged by experience, resulting in good judgment and discretion. Those are the very things David talks about in these verses:

Do good to your servant according to your word, LORD.Teach me knowledge and good judgment, for I trust your commands.

Psalm 119:65-66

Wisdom comes from learning God's Word and trusting His commands to be both relevant to daily life and reliable for guidance in the good life.

Devoting himself to increasing his knowledge of the scriptures is vital to my young friend's growth. But merely storing up facts and meditating on the ways of the Lord are not enough to produce wisdom.

He'll also need to rely on God's good will in assisting his good efforts. The Lord's divine appointments can be challenging, even frightening at times. But there's no better training ground for wisdom.

If only we trust Him.

Psalm 119:65-72 Teth

Do good to your servant according to your word, LORD.
Teach me knowledge and good judgment, for I trust your commands.
Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word.
You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees.
Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies, I keep your precepts with all my heart.
Their hearts are callous and unfeeling, but I delight in your law.
It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.
The law from your mouth is more precious to me than thousands of pieces of silver and gold.

Psalm 119:65-72

The acrostic nature of the Psalm presents a paradox in this stanza.

David, constrained by his own poetic scheme to begin each verse with the Hebrew teth, chooses to begin many of the verses with tub or towb, meaning good or beautiful.

65 Good you did to your servant according to your word, Lord

66 Goodness of discretion and knowledge teach me, for I trust your commands.

67 Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word.

68 Good you are, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees.

69 Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies, I keep your precepts with all my heart.

70 Their hearts are callous and unfeeling, but I delight in your law.

71 Good for me that I was afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.

72 Good to me is the law from your mouth, more precious than thousands of pieces of silver and gold.

The paradox is in the words that come between all those good feelings and good actions and good results. This stanza is not about how everything is good and great, all sunshine and rainbows for people of faith.

No, David's topic here is affliction. The kind of suffering that comes from living in a world full of people who are decidedly not good, the kind of people who treat believers badly.

And David saw that it was good.

Probably not at first. It likely took  a lifetime of affliction to learn to see it as good. I turned 61 years old this year and I've only really started embracing the goodness of suffering over the past decade or so.

The ability to see affliction the way God sees it -- that only comes through a lifetime of trusting His commands even when they seem to be failing you. It grows out of coming back from going astray, over and over again. Perspective comes from letting God soften your heart in the hardest of ways.

But there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended. Kirby died of cancer in 2008 when she was seventy-six. I survive into my eighties, writing, and oddly cheerful, although disabled and largely alone. There is only one road.

Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

We all travel the same road, and it is rocky road. But we walk it together and we walk it with God.

And it is good.