To Encourage You

Psalm 119:165 “Great peace have those who love your law; nothing can make them stumble.”

Are there any laws that you absolutely love?  How about the speed limit? Don’t you just “love” it, especially when you’re late for work?  How about the tax laws? Aren’t they fun?  Or maybe it’s the fishing laws?  Don’t you love to throw back one fish after another that is just 1/2 inch under the size limit, especially when you were hoping to fill your freezer for the next fish fry?  Pretty strange language, then, isn’t it, when the Bible talks about “loving your law” in the verse above.  So why on earth would anyone love a law? 

Well, if you don’t love God, you certainly won’t love His law.  To you, the Bible is nothing more than a book filled with dos and don’ts, and often those dos and don’ts do nothing more than threaten to rob your fun in life.  So much of what’s said just doesn’t make sense, especially in this day and age when the popular trends in society are in the opposite direction of God’s law.  So, to begin to understand the verse above, one has to first realize that God’s law is inseparable from His being.  It is an expression of Who He is, for it expresses what He loves and what He hates.  Therefore, for anyone that truly loves God, to know those things is one of the main ways we have to know Him more intimately. 

God’s “law” is nothing more than a synonym for God’s Word, and God’s Word is a very precious thing.  In fact, it is “more precious than gold (Psalm 19:10)” to the believer.   Any person who truly loves God will love anything about God, including everything He has said to us.  The believer acknowledges that God is perfect and everything that comes from Him, including His law, is perfect.  As believers peer into God’s Word, they know that it is “the perfect law that gives freedom.” They know that if they “continue in it–not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it–they will be blessed in what they do (James 1:25).” 

Our Creator knows what’s best for us and what will harm us. He knows that as a result of the Fall, the world is in opposition to Him, and the “Prince of this world” is bent only on a mission to kill, steal, and destroy.  He knows that as men and women unwittingly follow him and his ungodly systems the inevitable result is inner turmoil and a conflicted life. 

The God Who loved us enough to send His Son to die for us has not only given us His law in black and white on the pages of the Bible, but He has also “written His Law on our hearts (Romans 2:15).”   The evidence of this is the conscience, that checks us whenever we violate that law.  The written Word of God reinforces that sense of right and wrong.  It informs the conscience, training it more and more to be sensitive to God’s ways. That’s why the unbeliever wants nothing to do with God’s law.  It convicts him or her, for it “is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4:12).” So, the unbeliever fights against the perfect law that gives liberty. He hates it because he is bound in sin.  And in so doing he forfeits “he peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” and that “guards (our) hearts and (our) minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7).”  For the believer, however, who loves God’s perfect law, there is peace. There is peace with God, and there is inner peace, because he or she knows that the law is guiding him on the “narrow way that leads to life (Matthew 7:14).” 

So, what about you? Do you love God’s law that gives great peace, or could you care less about what God has to say, and therefore are a law unto yourself because you think that that way is better?  If so, according to the Bible (the Law God has given us to give life and peace), you are a fool, and the path you are on will inevitably lead to inner turmoil in this life, and eternal separation from the God Who loved you and gave Himself for you, in the next. 

May God open our eyes to the glory of His Word, the perfect law that gives peace and liberty to those who all their lives have been bound in sin.