Psalms 119:119 Eternal vs Infernal

Hidden treasures of the 119th Psalm. Well, I hope you're ready to delight in the fear of the Lord with me today as we're in the 119th verse of the 119th Psalm.

Isn't that cool? So the 119th verse is the seventh verse in the Psalmic section, so that anointing of the Holy Spirit from Isaiah 11 would be the delight in the fear of the Lord. And I'm sure you're going to delight with me in this verse because it is pretty delightful. So it reads in English, Thou putst away all the wicked of the earth like dross.

Therefore, I love thy testimonies. And as we've talked about, every verse starts with the letter that the section is on. And so, as you might imagine, this verse starts with the word dross as the beginning of the actual verse. And the idea of dross obviously has something to do with the letter Psalmic.

Well, here's what it is. It's absolutely amazing that if you were to look at them actually refining silver and look at it in the crucible, you would see that it is round. And as we know that the letter Psalmic is round, that the silver itself becomes round and everything else is dross. And just like the last verse we were talking about that had to do with gold and that kind of thing, here again we have this idea of this purifying that's sort of refining. And when you think about it, our whole life is about refining. Every time you take a bite of food, your mouth begins the process of digestion by the saliva itself starts to break down the food.

And what's it doing? It's refining it and the dross is going to be pushed out of your body while all the good stuff gets to go into each cell to continue your life. Well, in so many different ways, God uses the refining process from the day we're born to be made into the image of Christ. And the Psalmic is a big, big part of that. And that's why a delight in the fear of the Lord is so close to this letter, as you're going to see when we get down to the miracle verse next time. But as we got this idea of he's going to put away all the wicked of the earth like dross, just like we talk about these broken off branches yesterday. Here we have that and the wicked. The word that that that the psalmist used for wicked right there. And it's interesting they did was the first time you can find that is in the book of Genesis, when God rained down fire and sulfur on the wicked of Sodom and Gomorrah. And so I'm sure that when he says, therefore, I love thy testimonies. This is one of those testimonies that he loves.

Right. That in this case, God took care of all these wicked that wanted to abuse the angel and all that happened there in Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet it was that heat, that refining process that that made Abraham's nephew Lot become more like Jesus. And all these things, you know, are and unfortunately, his wife got made into a pillar of salt.

And it's interesting that you see all these same components that we talked about in the last episode, salt and broken off branches and all these things come together. And so when you look at this verse and you think about, you know, when did this happen in your life where you had a chance that God turned up the heat to the point that your wickedness left you like dross, literally giving you the eternal versus the infernal idea. So for me, apparently God knew that the car business was literally tearing my heart out. And so it was going to take a pretty hot amount of fire since I'd spent 40 years in the car business to extract me or extract me like dross out of that situation. And so when I go back and I think of all the evil that I saw every day in the car business, the evil of putting people into crazy amounts of debt, it went on day after day after day. The banks, you know, doing crazy things, Chrysler Financial doing crazy things. And so all this that I dealt with in my soul just was tore up by these things.

I had nightmares for years and years and years after I left the car business because it was just part of my everyday life that that wow, that that I was experiencing. But God was using all that to bring out the things in me that were evil so that that he would get rid of them like dross. And so as therefore, I love my own testimony.

Well, I love all the testimonies of the Bible. But when you think about when I, you know, your own story, how did God turn up the heat to use this concept of the Islamic on you and delight in the fear of the Lord? In other words, he knows, you know, where he needs to turn up the heat and he knows what he's doing in order to make us into the likeness of his son. We have the Holy Spirit praying for us that that's going to be going on and we have Jesus up there interceding for us forever. I mean, we are just all set here to go through this refining process. And when you think about it, the whole earth is being refined into what God is doing in the kingdom and he's doing it one individual at a time. So as we have a chance, right, to bring people to faith, to saving faith, to discipleship, all these different things lead towards this refining process. And we're all being refined and being refined and being refined. And so I love, love, love this idea that delight in the fear of the Lord as things turn up, whether it's it's it's covid or or some type of craziness that's going on in the world, even unfortunately, as horrible as.

You know what the Nazis did in World War Two, Auschwitz to the Jews and just unbelievable horribleness. God was using it to turn up the heat like Corey Tim Boone became think what what what God did through her as a result of the horrible things, the heat that he turned up in her life to to get rid of the dross that then you see this unbelievable, this tremendous looking. Person that that had gone through all these different things. And so, you know, you've heard the old saying that that God turns up the heat on the silver until he can see his reflection in it. And I love that picture because that's what he's doing. He's refining just like our bodies are refining. And so much of life is has to do with refining. The good news is we are being made into the image of his son. Thank you so much for listening today and for enjoying and delighting with me in the fear of the Lord.