The Psalms Have No Joy

¹Blessed are the undefiled in the way,
Who walk in the law of the Lord!
² Blessed are those who keep His testimonies,
Who seek Him with the whole heart!
³ They also do no iniquity;
They walk in His ways.
⁴ You have commanded us
To keep Your precepts diligently.
⁵ Oh, that my ways were directed
To keep Your statutes!
⁶ Then I would not be ashamed,
When I look into all Your commandments.
⁷ I will praise You with uprightness of heart,
When I learn Your righteous judgments.
⁸ I will keep Your statutes;
Oh, do not forsake me utterly!

Psalm 119:1-8 (NKJV)

When singing praises to God, we would all like to experience joy and excitement for what Christ has done. Some would argue that the Psalms simply do not convey joy as effectively as praise songs and hymns, and this type of thinking fueled the church at large to drift away from the singing of the Psalms during the 18^th century. Many Christians focus on the emotion evoked by the song rather than the meaning of the words sung to God; however, could it be that this thinking is backwards?

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

Colossians 3:16

Notice that in Colossians, the Psalms instruct and fill us with wisdom which leads to holy emotion, emotions set apart for the praise of God through singing. The Bible does not simply give instruction concerning our actions but also our thoughts and emotions, and these thoughts and emotions always tie into truths established by the Bible. In Psalm 51, God calls us to be contrite and completely dependent upon His mercy when repenting for our sin; God commands us to be forgiving and slow to quarrel, since He has forgiven us of our sins, in Proverbs and the Lord’s Prayer. Our lives in thought, word, and deed have been set apart as holy (1 Peter 2), and thus how much more should our worship of God be guided and set apart by His word! The Psalms have been set apart for the praise of God, and each Psalm contains both infallible truth and our response as Christians. David, in Psalm 119:1-8, starts by declaring the truths of God (vs. 1-3) and then continues by uttering his longing to obey and seek God with his whole heart (vs. 4-8). 

¹Blessed are the undefiled in the way,
Who walk in the law of the Lord!
² Blessed are those who keep His testimonies,
Who seek Him with the whole heart!
³ They also do no iniquity;

They walk in His ways.

In the first verses of Psalm 119, David proclaims who is truly blessed: the one who is not ruled by sin, walks in the law of God, and seeks Him with the whole heart. We can clearly see that this person is the one who puts his or her trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and diligently seeks to bring his or her own life into accordance with Christ’s teaching and example here on earth (Romans 12:1-2). Only through Christ can anyone reject sin and seek after God, and we can claim these truths for ourselves and look forward to heaven where we will be perfected and blessed in all fullness (Revelations 21:22-27). How wonderful are the truths of God!

⁴ You have commanded us
To keep Your precepts diligently.
⁵ Oh, that my ways were directed
To keep Your statutes!
⁶ Then I would not be ashamed,

When I look into all Your commandments.

          The truth of the blessed man permeates throughout the entire book of Psalms since it is our proper and intended relationship and standing with God. Psalm 1 reveals that the blessed man is like a tree well planted by water; the blessed man is the one who brings forth spiritual fruit and prospers in all he does. Yet after proclaiming the truth of such a desirable state, David then turns these truths unto himself with some amount of sorrow and longing, but not without hope.

The word in verse four that sticks to me the most is the word diligently. I can with reasonable confidence say that I pursue my academics diligently. I can with even more confidence confirm that I diligently seek sleep after a long day, yet often I find that I have not diligently sought to keep God’s precepts. At best I am often half-hearted and lax concerning God’s commandments. David also felt his own weakness and immediately cries out to God to aid him in his obedience.  “Oh, that my ways were directed to keep Your statutes!” is the prayer David lifted up, a prayer we should constantly lift up since we are yet weak here on earth. Notice that this is not a completely happy prayer; David admits to having felt shame when reading through the word of God. Many Christians today only want to sing about joy, but this is not a very accurate or realistic view of the Christian life. We often fail. We undergo trials. Enemies of God rise up, and for all of these, joy by itself is not always appropriate. Yet the Psalms provide a comprehensive selection of songs which covers the entirety of the Christian life. Psalms 119 gives me the words to voice the desires and frustrations that I undergo every day, and I am comforted that these prayers are founded in the truth of the scriptures and voiced in the Word of God, as opposed to being merely written by the hand of men.

⁷ I will praise You with uprightness of heart,
When I learn Your righteous judgments.
⁸ I will keep Your statutes;
Oh, do not forsake me utterly!

After meditating on the requirements for blessedness and the shortcomings in his life, David makes a resolution. He resolves in verse eight to keep God’s statues, and we must, as David did, set in our hearts to keep God’s commandments diligently and pray to God that this would be so. However, we must not have confidence in our own strength, but instead we must cry out to God to not forsake us and realize that “it is God who works in you both to will and do His own good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:13)  David could look back with sorrow at the times he ignored God and trusted in himself. An important distinction must also be made. David could not lose his salvation but could still displease God through his actions. An unbeliever on the other hand cannot please God and needs redemption through Jesus Christ. We must first be saved, and after that, God and His saving grace are our only source of personal obedience. The words of Psalm 119 are not to be sung or said lightly, yet the prayer for obedience is the proper response to the truths laid out in the beginning of the Psalm. The benefit of obedience is great: to be able to praise God joyfully with an upright heart.

Maybe when singing to God we would like to feel a sense of peace or raw joy, or maybe we search for an experience while singing to boost our spiritual life. However, let not these emotions be stirred by any hand but by the hand of God. Psalm 119 leads me to self-reflection, dependence on God, and resolution to obey Him, and as the word of God itself, Psalm 119 does this through and only by the truths of God. I thank God that He reveals how we are to live through the Bible, and in particular, how we are to worship Him through the holy act of singing both through truth and emotion, hardship and joy.

“Prayer and praise and all sorts of devotional acts and feelings gleam through the verses like beams of sunlight through an olive grove. You are not only instructed, but influenced to holy emotion, and helped to express the same.”

Charles H. Spurgeon on Psalm 119 

A God Worthy to be Praised: an Exposition of Psalm 104:1-9

The topic of praise is one that seems to always be on the tongues of men. People praising others on their wonderful contributions to music, people praising a certain method of child rearing as the best way to raise a child, sports fanatics praising the player they feel to be the one who really makes the team great, health food advocates praising the avocado for its marvelous health benefits. The list goes on and on. The act of praise is central to the human soul, and without thinking, praise easily comes to our lips. However, there is one area where men seem to fail to praise. We neglect the praise of our God.

            Psalm 104 addresses that very problem. The entire song is about the greatness of God, and all of His deeds, attributes, and provisions which make Him worthy of our praises.

1 Praise the LORD, O my soul.

            The call to praise is one that is common in the Psalter, but here, the writer of the psalm, (who, from this point forward, is to be referred to as the Psalmist) declares that the entire soul is to praise God. Not just with your lips, not just on Sundays, not only when you are with your Christian friends, not only when you’re sure you will not be bullied, or picked on, or martyred. The praise of God is something that should be an all the time thing, full of genuine love and gratefulness to our LORD.     

O LORD my God, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty. 

            In the second half of this verse the psalmist tells us why God is so worthy of this unceasing praise and addresses God directly to His face, telling Him why the psalmist believes He is so beyond all our imagination. He is great, He is clothed with majesty.


           But not only is God a great God who is far beyond anything we lowly humans can fully comprehend, He is the psalmist’s God. Not only is He the most powerful and awesome creator of the world, but He is also the personal, loving Father of the psalmist. And as we sing, or read, or pray, or memorize this psalm, we are also able to call God ours; the psalmist was our praising predecessor, and through his words, we to are able to praise this great and glorious God.     

² He wraps himself in light as with a garment; He stretches out the heavens like a tent 

³ and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.

He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.

 ⁴ He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants. 

⁵ He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.

            Again the psalmist describes his God. He is so powerful, that the very light of the world obeys Him and surrounds Him like a cloak; the impossible task of creating the heavens is as simple to Him as is opening a curtain on a bright summer morning. The liquid sea becomes a firm foundation for His chamber, for at His command all things are made firm.

            The latter half of verse three may, at first read, seem rather odd. We are Americans living in the 21^st century. We don’t have chariots, and have no notion of the significance of riding on the wind. For the ancient world, when they would hear of something riding on the wind they would automatically think of Yahweh, or if it was a pagan nation, any one of them would think of any one of their gods. This same language is used in the New Testament when Matthew recounts Jesus speaking of His second coming.

Matthew 24: 30 At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of

the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and

great glory.     

            The end of verse five is a pledge to the feeble mortal who has no power whatsoever over any force of nature. This assurance is that the God who rides on the wind and who summons fire to do His bidding will not let the world be shaken by any. He is the one who established the world and will never let nefarious creatures of man utterly destroy it.

 ⁶ You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.   

⁷ But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;   

⁸ they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them. 

⁹ You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth. 

            Another testament to God’s power, (and again, the psalmist is directing these words to God Himself) these verses loosely follow the creation account and briefly speak of the flood of Noah. The waters of the sea are personified, and are rebuked for moving beyond the appointed places God had ordained for them and are set within boundaries that they may never cross. The ordering of nature can be translated to personal life and experience today. Not only are these four verses speaking of the actual fact of creation and the flood, they can also be seen as a testimony to God’s amazing providence. God will never allow the flood waters of persecution, suffering, and human sinfulness to completely cover the earth, to run free and unchecked. He has the power to sustain our lives, to give us food from His own hand, and to bring us through any trial or suffering.

Romans 8:37-39 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For

I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the

future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to

separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.        

While Reading, Singing or Praying this Psalm:

• Acknowledge the blessings God has given you in your own life.
• Examine your heart and root out any traces of self-entitlement or greed. God didn’t need to give us any of the blessings He has, such as beautiful spring flowers or magnificent summer sunsets, and be grateful for what He has provided.
• Give glory to God for blessing creation with beauty and wonder.
• Recognize that there are others who do not see God revealing Himself through the creation, and endeavor to explain it to them.

Ask Yourself:

• Am I praising God, or am I praising man?
• How do I see God’s providence working in my life?
• Does God’s creation bring me joy and wonder?
• Do I rest in God’s unfailing love?