Psalms 119:102 The Wisdom of The Fear of The Lord

Hidden Treasures of the 119th Psalm. Well, we are in the sixth verse today of the Mem section, which would be the fear of the Lord, would be the anointing from Isaiah 11, which would be the sixth anointing, and that face of Jesus is we're in this Mem section. And it's interesting that, you know, you may know from Proverbs and several other places that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And there's no doubt that the letter Mem is often acquainted with wisdom because, as you might imagine, since the Mem also has to do with the Torah, there's a lot of wisdom involved in that. And so, here we see in this fear of the Lord, again, since it's in the Mem section, it's going to start in Mem and you're going to see it that it's very clear the fear of the Lord in this particular verse and how beautiful the verse is. It reads in English, it's verse 102, I have not departed from thy judgments, for thou has taught me. And the way that it starts in Hebrew is talking about the judgments, which, you know, starts in this case, it's kind of cool.

He starts it with two Mems. So the regular Mem that would start the word mispat, which is the word judgment in Hebrew. And so it's cool that you add a little extra wisdom in the beginning of that, and the idea of wisdom and judgment is a really cool thing. And it also lines up with the idea of kingship, right?

Because we talked about yesterday that a king is a malak, it too starts with the letter Mem, and kings need to have good judgment, obviously. And you might even remember the wisdom of Solomon when he, you know, resided over the two women that were dividing the baby, or, you know, got in the fight over the baby and the wisdom that he used in that judgment. And the idea, again, between this judgment is it begins with a Mem, but it ends with a tet, meaning good.

And so the idea of essentially the judgment that's coming on is that it will result in good, like all things work together for good. But it comes through wisdom. And so the back part of this verse, it says, you know, I have not departed from thy judgment, thy wisdom. And clearly, you know, that's an extremely important thing if you're a king. It says, for thou has taught me.

And that's just absolutely amazing, isn't it? I mean, to think that God himself teaches us this type of judgment. But that's so true when you think about it, that, you know, if you had a situation in your own life, if you think about it, where God taught you judgment, where you were trying to decide between two things, trying to find the good in a situation, and quite often God shows up and shows us some good.

And so you might imagine I have a story and this idea of judgment and wisdom. But I'm really, really fortunate that for years, when I first moved to the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, my pastor was Pastor Mark Quartz. It was over at Calvary Baptist Church here in Winston-Salem and sort of a world-renowned pastor, at one point in time head of the Baptist Convention. Just phenomenal wisdom the man had. But more importantly from that was he had this phenomenal relationship with Jesus. And to know the man was just to be astounded by how much grace he had and how much he cared about you. He had a huge church, over 5,000 members, but he knew everybody by name. He definitely knew me by name, and it wasn't unlike a situation I can still remember. Occasionally he would just call me and say, Robbie, it's Mark. You know, he wouldn't say he was Dr. Quartz or Pastor Quartz. Hey, Robbie, it's Mark.

My man, really? And, you know, it was just one of the joys of my life was to be under his pastorship, however you want to put that, under his care as pastor. But anyway, the story I wanted to relate was that he had tremendous, tremendous respect of the congregation. And he wanted to, back in the 90s, build a Christian church, I mean a Christian school. Well, more importantly, they had a Christian school, but he wanted to add on a high school side to it, because they were only going through middle school. And, you know, as you might imagine, they have this deacon meeting, and I was not there, but I've had several witnesses tell me what happened, was the deacons break out into this big fight because they don't have the money to build the high school, and this whole big fight is going on.

And in the middle of this big discussion that you can imagine, heated discussion at church, if you've ever been in one of these type of things, you'll know what I'm talking about. Well, what happened was Pastor Quartz just simply put his head on the table and closed his eyes. Now, if you can imagine the scene, Pastor Quartz had jet white hair.

I mean, he looked very, very distinguished, and he looked very, very like who he was. You know, just a friend of Jesus on the first order. Can you imagine, you're sitting there with this saint of God. It's like sitting there with Billy Graham in this meeting, and all these people are yelling, and all of a sudden, this person puts his head down on the table and closes his eyes. What happens?

You know, I mean, the judgment that's involved in that is just unbelievable to me. I picture the scene often, and you can imagine that immediately the room went deathly quiet, like Pastor Quartz's head is on the table. And after what I understand was quite a pause, he finally lifted his head up and said, gentlemen, if God wants to have a high school, then he will provide the money to build the high school.

Right? And so why don't we ask the conversation, you know, that we begin to ask for the funds, and if we reach a certain amount that we can get from raising money for this school, then we can go ahead and start the school. And of course, you might imagine that with Pastor Quartz behind that, they raised the money, and there's a beautiful Calvary Baptist Day School that includes our high school to this day.

In fact, my son graduated from that high school. But what you think about is the judgment, like in that moment, and there's no doubt in my mind that that wasn't something that he had predetermined or whatever, but in that moment, who do you think taught Pastor Quartz to put his head on the table? You know, he was a wonderful man and all that, but there's no doubt in my mind that God just said, put your head on the table. And when he did, it made an impact that changed the whole situation.

Right? And maybe as you think about it, you've got a situation in your own life where God taught you in the spur of the moment what you were going to say, when you needed to say it. And the beautiful thing is if we will pause and we will wait on the Lord, when we're in situations like this where it seems like, you know, he will give us some phenomenal judgment. And the thing about that, that Mem is just telling you he's taken charge, right? Think about what he did.

When he put his head down, he completely took charge. Well, that's Jesus, because when he comes into the situation, we all know who's in charge, okay? And then we know that it's going to end up for good. And, you know, that idea of the fear of the Lord, right?

It works perfectly into that. Like when the Lord walks into the situation, number one, we know who's in charge, right? I love the scene.

I think about it all the time. The woman caught in adultery, woman, where are your accusers? These people, they quickly understood who's in charge here, and they all laughed.

Now, woman, where's your accusers, you know? That he's in charge, and when Jesus is there, there is not anybody that's going to stand against you. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And what a wonderful thing that the psalmist is telling us here. That I, you know, that I can be in his judgments. I can forsake not his judgments, right? Because he is going to teach us. Thank you so much for studying with me today in this verse in the 119, in the Mem section of the 119 Psalm.