Psalms 119:139 Being Consumed With Being Right

This is the Truth Network. Which is, we've talked about many times, counsel is, you know, how do we get on the right road? In other words, that a counselor is going to put you on the right derrick, so to be the right path, the right way that we're going to make ourselves, or like in Pilgrim's Progress, get on the King's Highway so that we can end up those celestial cities.

There you go. When you read this next verse in the English, which is verse 139 in English, I think you're going to see this counsel. It's really beautiful. It says, my zeal hath consumed me, because mine enemies have forgotten thy words. And here we're going to see, in my opinion, some just phenomenal counsel about the whole idea of the letter Zadi.

I think one of the great forces in all the world is this idea of a Zadi. Someone who thinks they're right. That when you look at all the religious murder that's happened through the ages, all these people thought they were right. To this day, the Muslims are going to behead you because they think that they are right. They think that they have the right path. Or all the wars that that happened between the Spanish Inquisition and oh my goodness, the Crusades, and all these people that went out and killed people in God's name.

However that looked, it had to do with they thought they were right. Even Paul, when obviously he was on the road to Damascus, he was being a Zadi. He was taking this zeal, right, and he was using it based on his own righteousness. And so the really cool thing, as we look at this verse, is David's actually going to address this idea in so many different ways. Because the first thing he says is the zeal. Well that zeal, right, that has consumed him, well that word consume is the word in this verse that starts with a Zadi. And people that have this fervor, they are consumed.

Okay, and you could just see it. And it has everything to do with oh my goodness, you can see the force that's behind somebody that thinks they're right. And maybe you had this when you were a kid, that oh, you had to be right, you had to be right. Well, this is that idea of righteousness, of being right, right? And so my zeal hath consumed me. Well the zeal, right, is what happens as a result of being consumed with this idea of being right. And then it says because mine enemies have forgotten my words.

Well, the idea of enemies here is once again a Zadik and then a Rach. And the idea there is really his enemies are, and that word means narrow to some extent, you're gonna find it, but what it really means is the self-righteous, right? The people that have this, like I'm gonna make this right, not Jesus is gonna make this right, but I'm gonna make it right. You know, your behavior is this, and they're the judge, and they're gonna make the decision because their zeal, right, these people end up being our enemies because they are so narrow. And who was Jesus's enemies? Exactly these people, the self-righteous, the narrow.

And so it's really cool that he's talking about this. This, his consumption, right, he's being consumed with zeal for those that have forgotten the words. Those who have forgotten it, and the Hebrew for that letter word is debar, well we know that Jesus is the word.

And the word forgotten in Hebrew really may mean don't care, really means don't, like they don't care about Jesus, they don't care about what God thinks, because they're so consumed by their own rights of being right and what making things right or whatever, that unfortunately they've forgotten what the main thing is. And so, right, that here we have a just fascinating study of what is the psalmist going to do, because he's consumed with these folks that don't know, that they have lost a side of where righteousness really comes from. And so as we put this counsel into practicality, where does that look like?

What does that look like in your life? And I was thinking about this, is I remembered back to when God literally called me to do the Christian Car Guy show, I don't know if I've ever said this in these episodes, but one of the things he told me about the show, I want you to get on the air and talk about what breaks your heart every day in the car business. And at that time I really thought what he was talking about was all the people that were going into crazy amounts of debt to buy cars, because every day in the car business I saw all these people end up with these unbelievably high car payments, all this interest that they were paying. It was just, they were so worried about whether or not they paid a hundred or two hundred dollars more for the car, and then they'd have finance charges of ten thousand, twelve thousand dollars.

I'm like, oh my gosh, they don't see that they don't need this debt, they're traded in perfectly good cars. And so that originally was what had me thinking that God wanted me to speak on this, and where I originally went is I really felt like they were missing out on the best that God had for them. But of course as I've done the show more and more over seventeen years, I think what really breaks my heart, more than anything, is that people don't know what an amazing God he is. They don't, the actual part that the psalmist is talking about, these people don't care about, they don't think about God like they should. I don't think about God like I should. And so what a neat thing to take our zeal and our righteous, that consumption that happens when we want to make things right, well here's what we're really looking for, is a right relationship with Christ, right? A right relationship where we're in communion with him constantly, where we're in communion with his word, because that's where he, I mean, if you ever want to go hunting for God, just pick up the Bible and you begin to read, and there he is, and I can't tell you the times that I've just been searching, searching, searching in prayer in the morning, I'll pick up some scripture and I can find myself very quickly in his presence, and then I can begin to reason through some of the troubles that I have, you know, once I'm actually back in communion with him. And so I really feel like that's where the psalmist found himself, was he was consumed with these people that didn't care about God, like, Lord, show me how to make them care, show me how to get them in a right relationship with you, because really, that's where the rubber meets the road. That's the reason he gave us this consumption, is in order to be right, we've got to be right with you, God. Thanks for listening.