Psalms Lesson 24

Psalm 138:1-2

Psalm 138 is a declarative praise Psalm and this is the one we asked you to look at to see what you could do with it; some people handed in their material and generally did very well, particularly that this was a very difficult Psalm and I realized some of the difficulties. It looked, on first inspection like it fit pretty well, and then the more I worked with it the more I realized it didn’t. So don’t feel bad if you had trouble with it; this is a very difficult Psalm in fact, to work with.

Now just to orient to this thing, we’re going to take two nights working through it, it gets kind of difficult and involved. What are the categories of a declarative praise Psalm? The proclamation, introductory summary, and then after that the main section, and then looking back, the report of deliverance, and some form of praise that is a variable which depends on the Psalm. The Psalms are quite variable with respect to this problem of praise at the end of it.

So now we have the sections, let’s see how well we can do locating these sections. Keep in mind, and it will help you think through this thing, that there’s a difference between outlining and finding the form. In other words, what I’m saying is that the form is just a tool to help you on your way to outline. Your outline may not reflect the same divisions that you find with the form; the form is there to help you get the content out, to help you look for what you’re trying to look for. It tells you what you’re looking for.

Let’s start with the proclamation; in a declarative praise Psalm you have a man who is in trouble, he prays and God delivers and the declarative praise is a thankful report of God’s deliverance, what God has done for him. Now the first section is the proclamation and can anyone locate the proclamation of Psalm 138. [someone says something] Verses 1 and 2. This would be the proclamation; what are you looking for in the proclamation? The psalmist is declaring his intent, he’s saying I will do something. And what he is going to do is given in verses 1-2, “I will….” [someone says something] Okay, he would say that verse 1 is the proclamation and verse 2 is the introductory summary. Anyone else. This is the difficult part to this Psalm, right here. Most of you who handed stuff in put verse 3 as the introductory summary.

All right, so we have two candidates for the introductory summary, verse 2 and verse 3. So we have the main section beginning in verse 3 and anyone else on the sections; you have looking back, report of deliverance and some form of praise. Can any of you locate these; on the main section. [someone says something] All right, looking back is verse 3. Any of the other sections? [someone says something] Verse 3 is all he says about the past, you would include the report of deliverance in verse 3 then. But if verse 3 is the only thing that talks about the past, obviously if you have a looking back and you have a report of deliverance and the deliverance occurs in the past, then the report of deliverance must be in verse 3, if verse 3 is the only thing that’s looking to the past. [someone says something] 2b, the last part of verse 2 is also in the past. But the introductory summary, you remember, is always looking in the past.

Maybe this will help; what’s the difference between introductory summary and the main section, just a general working rule. When you have two statements here that appear to look backwards how can you sort one from the other; what criteria do you use to say well that’s over here in the introductory summary and this is over in the main section. [someone says something] All right, the summary is the summary, it’s general. And the looking back will deal with specifics. All right, some of you did that; you said verse 2 was the introductory summary, verse 3 was the first part of the main section, and then you took verses 4 and following as praise, that section, the variable section at the end. And that’s basically what you have to do here. So let’s look at it again.

Verse 1 is the proclamation. Now here is where the form, if you want to be legalistic the proclamation continues back down into verse 2; the first part of verse 2 is obviously proclamation, “I will worship toward Thy holy temple,” I will “praise Thy name for Thy loving-kindness and for thy truth.” But then when he justifies why he’s going to do it he starts bringing the past into it so that by the end of the sentence in verse 2 he’s already gone back to the past, he’s already told you something of what’s happened, and he’s giving you a basic to why he’s praising. So there we would say verse 2 is introductory summary.

Now the main section, we’ve got a problem here and what is the rule when you come across a Psalm and you’re working it along like this and no matter how hard you try it just seems to be categories jumbled around. What is that a signal for you to do in your analysis of your Psalm. What does that tell you? [someone says something] All right, when you come across a situation like this and you’re having trouble with the categories, they seem to be out of order or something, you should think to yourself, when I get through studying this Psalm I have to have some explanation as to why it’s this way. In other words, if the Psalm has an oddity about it, if it seems to be warped or bent, the man who wrote it wasn’t an idiot, he did it creatively so if he warped it out of its model form he did it to express something. All right, when he expresses something by this, we have to pick up the hint that he’s trying to give us and say all right, now I see that you warped this form, what are you trying to say by this adjustment.

So here when we deal with this, however we interpret Psalm 138 we’ve got to answer something as to what is going on with the Psalm, why do we get into praise so fast. Why do we get into descriptive praise so fast. See, when you get down to verse 6, in verses 4-5 he’s saying about what’s going to be a response in the future to the kings of the earth, then in verse 6, “The LORD is high, yet has He respect unto the lowly; but the proud He knows far off.” Now those are all presents, in other words, there’s just a principle there, it’s descriptive praise. Verse 7 is an application of verse 6, I’ll show that to you when we get down there. And verse 8 is a closing petition that we’ve seen oftentimes in these declarative praise Psalms.

But we’ve got a problem with this thing. Why does the psalmist hurry over the whole problem of the lament; he seems to just quickly race by in one or two verses and then move into the praise. Now why does he do this; we’ve got to come up with an answer for it. And that’s the major interpretive problem in this Psalm and it turns out if you can answer that question you’ve zeroed right in on the theme of the whole Psalm. So as we go through this Psalm we want to look, keep asking the question, what is happening in this Psalm, why is it that he’s so anxious to get over to praise without giving us all the details of what happened. As a matter of fact, can we find out what did happen? Now we don’t have anything in the heading, there’s nothing in the heading the Holy Spirit preserved to clue us, except that David wrote it. So therefore we can deduce that something happened in David’s life. We have nothing here, apparently so, that tells us what this is in David’s life. Except by the time we come to the end of the Psalm I think it’s going to be pretty clear as to what it was that’s going on here. By the way, did anybody in reading Psalm 138 can you guess what it is that has happened in David’s life here, just from looking at the Psalm what he’s talking about and knowing what you do of David’s life. Anybody come up with something?

[someone says something about he experienced forgiveness…] He’s experienced forgiveness? You would place it then in the days when David was King himself. What leads you to place this Psalm in the latter part of David’s life rather than in the former part of David’s life. What do you see in the Psalm that suggests that this is late in David’s life. [someone says something] All right, it looks like he’s had a lot of experiences. Something that would speak very positively to me is verse 5, verse 6, verse 7 that forces the Psalm at least after the Saul episode because he’s looking back upon the times of testing and trial. He was out of the times of testing and trial. [someone says something] All right, he’s got a holy temple in mind and this came later in David’s life. Remember he was concerned that he had to build a temple for God and he never did, Solomon did, but he had it on his mind. All right, that’s an evidence. “I turned and I worshiped toward Thy holy temple” in verse 2.

[someone says something] Okay, that’s it, the vocabulary in this Psalm will convince most of you, I hope, by the time we finish that really what’s on his mind is 2 Samuel 7, that he has just been given the Davidic Covenant and now he’s responding to God’s placing him in line for the throne. So this is not just that he has been promised to be on the throne, but 2 Samuel 7 was a promise for what? Not just that David would be on the throne because he had that earlier in his life. What was the unique promise of the Davidic Covenant? What did God promise David? That there would be an eternal Davidic dynasty. Now to catch the power of the promise, ask yourself, this is history exam time for some of you and you probably know the dynasties or the ruling families, and so on, how many centuries do the great ruling families average in European history? Just as a rough average? I don’t know myself, is it fair to say three or four centuries is the max for most of them. How many centuries is David up until the time of Jesus Christ, from the time of David till the time of Christ, how many centuries was that? What’s David’s date? 1000 BC. Ten centuries, there was always a man ready to sit on the throne and therefore Jesus Christ traces his lineage to David. Jesus Christ has to trace His lineage to David because Christ’s claim to Israel’s throne is because He possesses humanly the seed of David.

Now when you have a promise of an eternal dynasty, there’s two ways that promise can be fulfilled. An eternal number of men, an infinite number of men constantly succeeding themselves or you have a dynasty that terminates in a man who sits for all eternity. And so 2 Samuel 7, the way it’s so set up, can only be answered one of two ways. Either you’ve got to have a king that keeps on replacing himself or you’ve got to have a king that sits forever, the line stops on an eternal king. And here you have the suggestion and the hint that obviously the greater son of David must be something fantastic, because He must carry the weight of the Davidic Covenant.

Now in the outline of this I have given you a mimeographed sheet because in this Psalm, as I say we’ll only get into it tonight a little bit, it has a lot of interpretative problems, so that you may follow this, let’s again look at the sheet. Under “form analysis,” to recall why this is a declarative praise Psalm at all; this Psalm is a declarative praise Psalm because it refers to one specific event of deliverance. If it refers to deliverances, plural, it must be a descriptive praise Psalm because you’re getting a principle, an attribute of God’s character. If it refers to one point historic act it must be a declarative praise Psalm. Question? [someone says something] Yes, these categories are not water tight, it’s like a see-saw, it’s when the weight of the evidence weighs one way or the other. The thing that forces us to keep this from becoming a wholesale descriptive praise Psalm is because of what he’s going to say in verses 2-3, that eliminates it out of the descriptive praise category but it still… this Psalm has an awful lot of descriptive praise and as I said, it’s the central problem of the Psalm, what’s happening here.

However, this specific event, continuing the form analysis, whatever it was, and Delitzsch, who was a great student of the Psalms, thinks it’s the giving of the Davidic Covenant and the vocabulary as well as the idea supports this inference. It has so much to do with the character or essence of Yahweh to David’s mind that the Psalm tends to go very far into descriptive praise. In other words, the whole revelation, whatever this point revelation was in David’s life it was such a fantastic opening of the curtain, so that the full glory of Jehovah shown out. It was such a fantastic revelation of God that it automatically caused David to respond almost as he would in a descriptive praise. In fact there’s one verb here that we’re going to study that would lead us to believe that this is one of the most emotional points in David’s life. David was a naturally emotionally person and this was a tremendous period in his life when he was given this honor.

The proclamation we said is verse 1 and to be nitpicky I’ll just point out the difference between the form and the outline. I’ll just say verses 1 and 2a. The introductory summary is basically verse 2b. And the main section, verses 3 to the end. The looking back, verse 3a; the report of deliverance, verse 3b; and the descriptive praise, verses 4-8.

Now the outline. David vows to praise Yahweh before the world’s false religion because Yahweh has revealed His name through His Word and works. And then divided at verse 1, David vows to praise Yahweh with his whole heart before the world’s false religions; b, David vows to praise Yahweh’s name because He had revealed it through His Word and works. And then, all the kings of the earth will hear thereby, and then they too will praise Yahweh because of His revelation and His name. Verse 4, “all the kings of the earth shall praise Yahweh,” because they will hear His words, verse 5, they will praise Yahweh because of His revealed name. Then part 3, because Yahweh is such a God, David has confidence that Yahweh can deliver him from danger. And finally, David prays that Yahweh’s plan for him continues.

And now we’ll begin with verse 1 and I will refer you to some of those notes as we go along, but not in verse 1. Let’s look first at the first verse here with the gods. “I will praise Thee with my whole heart; before the gods will I sing praise unto Thee.” When you read a Psalm look for poetic parallelism, so the first part should bear some resemblance to the second part. There are actually two lines in the Hebrew that are called verse 1 in your Bible. You can see that, just read it, they’re separated there by a semicolon or colon usually. “I will praise Thee with my whole heart,” that’s one sentence; then the next one, “I will sing praise unto Thee before the gods.” So obviously the thing that’s difference between the two is “heart” and “gods,” or God. So we have to ask ourselves in verse 1, what is the advance, is there a contrast between the first part of verse 1 or is there a parallelism, or does one part of verse 1 build on the rest of verse 1. Well, “I will praise Thee with my whole heart,” this obviously, it’s clear that he is praising God out of his entire being; keep track of the word “whole,” it’s the word for “all,” and that’s going to involve us in a big problem in verse 2. Then in the last part the central problem is the word “gods.” “Gods is a Hebrew word, Elohim, and Elohim is a word, common noun or a popular name. The Hebrew doesn’t have capital letters so you have to judge by the context what Elohim is. Elohim is “im” ending, “im” ending in the Hebrew is plural and so it is either the name of God, the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in one package, or it is “gods,” individual gods of the nation.

Now with this we have three possible interpretations and I’ll give these to you and then we’ll test to see which one is the correct one. One interpretation would be that Elohim means Elohim and what he’s saying is “I will praise Thee with my whole heart; before God will I sing praise unto Thee.” Lexically that’s a possibility, Elohim can mean God. That’s one possible interpretation, way to take it.

A second way to take it is that the gods are angels; the Septuagint which looks like this, this is the Roman numeral seventy for supposedly seventy men got together and translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek in the city of Alexandria around 200 BC. And the reason why we always check the Septuagint is that it shows you how the Jews thought in 200 BC. And they were trying to get kind of a living Old Testament together so that the people could read in the popular language of the time. And as we will see, they did about a good job in places. “Before the gods” means before the angels and the Jews in Alexandria in 200 BC took it to mean angels here. They rejected the first possible interpretation, they said this is not God, it can’t be God. They are right in this and why? Just common sense, looking at that sentence, why can’t we interpret Elohim here to mean the proper name of our One God. What happens when you do that? [someone says something] In the same clause, right. See what’s going to happen; suppose we interpret it as God, “before God I’m going to sing praise to You,” see, it’s shifting from the third to second. Now the Psalms shift from third to second but not in the same clause. So we can safely cross off the first interpretation, and we say what about that, maybe the people in Alexandria in 200 BC were right, the “gods” being angels.

But a rule of Bible study always is t check in the immediate context so that, for example, to use a more familiar expression, suppose you’re studying Ephesians and you come to some word, X, Y and Z and Paul is writing this word and you want to catch the nuance of it; you start a word study in the first circle of data that you study is the book of Ephesians, if you can find the word occurring elsewhere in the same epistle because it’s packed in there with what Paul’s thinking. If you can’t find enough word occurrences or you can’t find a word occurrence what’s your next biggest circle of material to look at to see if you can find how that word is used? All of Paul’s letters, and if you can’t find it in Paul’s letters then obviously you have to go back to the whole New Testament itself. If you can’t find it in the New Testament corpus the next thing you do is go to the papyri of the ancient world and the Septuagint and if you can’t find it there you’re in trouble because you have no way of knowing what the word means.

Now here what we’re going to do is we don’t have this word occurring like this in this Psalm but we can go to the rest of the Psalms and see if we can notice similar occurrences. Remember we’re testing, is it or is it not correct that when Elohim doesn’t mean God it always means angels. All right, let’s turn to two Psalms, first Psalm 95:3, they both are in the back part of the book of Psalms. You can do this with a concordance, this is why one of your most valuable tool is not some 35 cent paperback on the secret to living the Christian life, it is a book called a concordance. And it will be the best investment of your Christian life because it will enable you to do your own independent study and don’t get some $5.00 edition because they’re abridged editions and you always find words that you don’t need and never can find words that you do need. They conveniently abridge those out. Get a comprehensive concordance, Young’s or Strong’s.

Psalm 95:3, here is an occurrence of the word “Elohim.” “For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” What does it mean in this context do you think? Can you say that the man that is writing Psalm 95 really has angels on his mind when he’s thinking this? What does he have on his mind? The pagan deities. Now in Psalm 96:4-5 we have one of the key phrases, you should write this down in the front of your Bible because someday somebody is going to come up to you and say oh, the people of the Old Testament believed in many gods and they worshiped Jehovah among one of the many. This Psalm will destroy that; just remember the verse, Psalm 96:4-5, very critical. “For the LORD is great, and greatly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods. [5] For all the gods of the nations are idols; but the LORD made the heavens.”

Now did the Jews believe in the existence of many Gods? Obviously not. The Jews wrote 96 and I would say that the man who wrote this was more of an authority on what the Jews believed than a modern day professor lecturing in a classroom. So therefore Psalm 96:5 tells you what the Jews believed, they did not believe in many gods, they talked about the pagan deities with the same noun. The trouble is, “Elohim,” and this is why the Jehovah’s Witness are all fouled up, Elohim is a common noun as well as a proper noun. You all know the difference between common nouns and proper nouns; proper nouns are the name of somebody, commons nouns are for a class. And so they will say Jesus is a god, the Bible says Jesus is a god. Sure it says He is a god, He falls in the class here. It also says He’s God, proper use of the word. But some people unfortunately never learn grammar.

Psalm 96:4-5 are proof that “gods” refers to pagan deities. And they had the idol forms on their minds. That’s how it’s used. Now if that’s the case, turn back to Psalm 138 and see what’s on David’s mind when he says, “I will praise Thee with my whole heart; before the gods will I said praise unto Thee.” Now obviously there is a connection between angels and idols. What is the connection? We’ve mentioned it several times. [someone says something] All right, 1 Cor., fallen angels are the ones who motivate the idol design; every church father who talks about this for the first 200 years of the church inevitably said that the ancient pagan idols, the things that you see in books on archeology, those idols were carved images of dreams and in the dreams of the pagan priests the demons would show themselves to their minds in those forms, and the reason that there’s such a vehemence against the idols of the ancient world in the Bible, almost a fanatical reaction to them, is because the design of the idol is demonic, it’s not just the fact that it’s made of wood, and it’s made of stone, that’s part of it, but it is a picture, a communication direct from Satan to the mind of the priest, to the mind of the craftsman who built the idol. So these idols that you see in the ancient world, parts of men and parts of animals put together, they were actually, according to the church fathers, dreams by the men who described them and by the craftsmen. They would lie in the temples at night until they would get a dream of one of these weird pictures and then they would draw it and … [tape turns] … demon behind it and when people therefore worshiped the physical image of the idol they worshiped the demons who had inspired it in the dream. And that is why the church was so fanatical against idols.

So therefore the Septuagint, if the Septuagint people had that on their mind they were correct, but rather than translate it “angels” we best just leave it “before the gods,” or before the false religion. Now this is a missionary verse and here again you see the tremendous John 14:6 kind of thing here. In the New Testament what is it? It’s that offensive verse, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes unto the Father but by Me,” the most bigoted anti-democratic verse in all the Word of God. Except for the fact it’s not just in the New Testament. You take your razor blade and cut it out and get it out of the New Testament and then you come over to the Old Testament and lo and behold, it pops up again. And here is one of those places it pops up.

David, as it were, is saying this, I will praise you with all my heart, and I will wave my fists in the face of all the deities of the world. You can’t appreciate the power of what David says until you visualize what it must have been for a national leader of a people in a mythological world to hold his fists up like this to the gods. Leaders just didn’t do that in that day; the leaders, the Pharaoh of Egypt might not have wanted to worship the Assyrian deities but he would never have shaken his fist in their face. And that’s what David’s saying here, I have the audacity to speak of Jehovah as I walk by their deity, these other gods. Now that is the aggressiveness of David. Applied today that means that if you are a believer you should not be satisfied until you have the aggressive spirit of David and you go and you hold with the Word of God in front of those who would attack the Word, and as it were, you go by and you shake your fist, Jesus is the way, the only way, your way is wrong, we have the only right way. And this is the hardest thing for Americans to do because from childhood part of our whole American culture is to give every religion a chance. Yes, we give every religion a chance but that doesn’t mean every religion is true, only one is true, it’s ours! This is why you have to break out of the American human viewpoint, it’s just part of our culture and this is where we as Americans have our Achilles heel, right here, we’re too willing to give the other person the benefit of the truth in this sense.

David wouldn’t do that, I’m going to go before the gods and I’ll praise my God in front of them, I’ll stand right there eyeball to eyeball and still praise Jehovah. There’s the aggressiveness that David’s showing. Now we come to the problem verse, verse 2.

Verse 2, first of all, let’s dispose of the problem of the first part of it. “I will worship toward Thy holy temple, and praise Thy name,” let’s stop there and look at your mimeographed sheet and you’ll see under 2a, “the temple of Your holiness” is identical to “your name.” Put the worksheet on one knee and the Bible on the other and turn back to Deuteronomy 12:11, “Then there shall be a place,” now God is predicting what He is going to do, “there shall be a place which the LORD your God shall choose” and look at this statement, a tremendous statement, He will “choose to cause His name to dwell there; and to that place you will bring all that I command you….” Now that is a prediction back in the days of Moses that God would pick out a place in space, it would be located and a point and to that point would all worship be focused. And He said “I will cause My name to dwell there.”

Now if God is omnipresent how do you explain the fact that the Old Testament looked forward to a point in space where God would cause His omnipresent name to dwell? Doesn’t that contradict the doctrine of omnipresence, that God is everywhere located? Why is it, then, that we can have such a statement made. Can anyone think of why, theologically what’s happening here? Why does God choose a place, why can’t it be any place. [someone says something] Very good, he pointed out that this is a covenant, a covenant is an agreement, a written agreement, and the covenant has to be focused at a particular point for its administration, therefore, there’s got to be a place, a meeting place. Now this shouldn’t be too hard to visualize, why you have to have a point in space to meet an omnipresent God. The reason is it would be analogous to the fact that where do we meet the federal government? In designated places, the federal courtroom, federal offices, they are the meeting place. Don’t we all live in the United States but there are only certain places where you actually meet federal power; federal power is localized at certain points. We have one whole building downtown where the federal agencies are. So you meet the federal power at a point but are we going to say that the federal power doesn’t apply to every square foot of the city of Lubbock, obviously not. You have a meeting point, and this is the meeting point where God says I cause My name to dwell there.

Turn back to Psalm 138, “I will worship toward thy holy temple,” that’s the place where the name was, so the temple of your holiness or “Your holy temple,” is identical to your name. Now here is a little application that will give you insight into the Apostle John. If you notice on your worksheet where I say confer with John 1:14, this is the verse that says, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” and the word “dwelt” is the same Greek word that was used to set up the Tabernacle. And what John is claiming, in John 1 of his Gospel is that the omnipresent deity, the Logos, that had always existed for eternity, took up a point in time and space and resided there in a tent, and we saw His glory. It’s a titanic claim that John is making but you can never understand John 1 if you don’t have the Old Testament mentality to see what he’s saying. John is saying that Jesus Christ is THE temple, that’s his claim. Now think of how that must have gone over with the Jews who thought that Herod’s temple was the temple of God. And John says no, the temple has two legs and was walking abound. Can you imagine how this must have gone over, especially since the people donated so generously 30% of their taxes to pay for Herod’s temple and the temple that walked around on two legs was free. So here you have imagery in the New Testament built off the Old Testament.

Now we come to the problem, which is a difficult one and we’ll try to finish with this. “For Thou hast magnified thy Word above all Thy name.” Now oftentimes believers read that and say oh boy, that’s great, because what that means is that He’s taken the canon of Scripture and He’s elevated it above His name. Of course, they never realize that this phrase is a meaningless one because the phrase to magnify above something means to magnify against something. In every other place you see this in the Old Testament, where you have the verb “magnify” or “exalt” it is always magnify against and the Hebrew word is [sounds like: ow] and that’s the preposition, against such and such, and it’s always hostile. And if this was read the way it usually reads in the Old Testament it would be a contradiction for it would be saying in verse 2, “for You, oh God, have magnified Your word against Your name.” Now that doesn’t make sense, so obviously whatever we interpret, either we’ve got a contradiction in the text or we’ve got to find some way of legitimately interpreting this phrase so we bring some sense out of it.

Now you notice, just before “name” at the end of verse 2, is a little word “all.” Now the people, the Septuagint people that translated the Hebrew into the Greek saw that, and they said aha, we know what happened, the text got corrupt and it’s all fouled up and what they originally wanted to say was, see because these people lived in 200 BC and the Psalm was written around 1000 BC, so by the time the Septuagint people had written already 800 years had transpired, so these translators are looking back eight centuries and they’re saying I know what those people eight centuries ago meant; what they really meant to say was “for You have magnified Your Word above every name,” and they dropped “Thy,” the pronoun “Thy” they said was just added somewhere in the transmission of the text it just got stuck in there, and that’s the cause of our problem, that we’ve got the pronoun stuck in there where it shouldn’t belong, and if you read that then it sounds very nice, fits in very nice, Philippians says the same thing, “Every knee shall bow” and this would fit beautifully theologically, “Thou hast magnified Thy Word above every name,” and it would fit beautifully with the gods in verse 1, I’ll go before the gods.

But, when you work with God’s Word you have no right to start jockeying around the text unless you have manuscript support for it, unless you can find some Hebrew manuscripts, abbreviated mss., that’s an abbreviation for manuscript, and if you can find some manuscripts that justify that there was indeed in the Hebrew a reading that says, “above every” which is the same thing as “all name,” then you’ve got it made; then we can accept the Septuagint and say yes, probably this is an error that crept in. But we don’t have any Hebrew manuscripts. So we have to at this point reject the Septuagint reading and say that can’t be it either.

So now we’ve rejected two things; we’ve rejected the possibility that “Thou hast magnified Thy word against Thy name,” and we’ve rejected the possibility of changing the text to read “Thou hast magnified Thy Word above every name.” So now what have we got? We’ve got to go to the concordance and if you look on page 2 of your worksheet, we discover two things when we go to the concordance. A concordance is like a camel, it’s not intended for all people. A concordance is intended for those who can have discipline enough to do some study and look and work. And when you do this, and it’s hard, but if you trace these things down you discover two things. First, the little word “ow” can have a meaning on account of. In fact, that very word is used back, if you look above in verse 2, about the middle line you’ll see “for thy loving-kindness and for thy truth.” See “for,” that’s a translation of the Hebrew “ow” so right, just a few words before ow carries the meaning “on account of.” So the middle part of verse 2 is reading “I will worship toward Thy holy temple, and praise Thy name on account of Thy loving-kindness and on account of Thy truth.” That’s one possibility.

But then we also have to check whether ow is ever used with shem, which is the Hebrew word for name, “upon a name,” and then when we start looking for that we find something else interesting and I gave you several verses there but turn to Esther 9:26 and here is where that expression occurs. The rest of verses are the same but because of time limitations I can’t take you to those. “Wherefore they call they called these days Purim after the name of Pur.” By the way, a Purim is a festival the Jewish people just got through celebrating last week. Purim means ow and then the Hebrew word for name, and it’s used right here, so therefore the word translated “after” means they called these days the Pure days, see the “im” on the end of Purim, it means the Purs and the Purs and the Purs is the Aramaic word for lots, the time they cast the lots. So these are the “days of Purim after” or “according to the name,” they labeled it with a name.

Now taking these two meanings together, if you’ll follow in the worksheet and back to Psalm 138:2 and I’ll read the worksheet: Therefore two solutions are possible without fudging the text. Number one, [not sure of words, sounds like: to Thee] means God magnified His Word on account of His name, that is, to preserve His Word as required by His essence, because God is what He is, on the basis of what He is He magnified His Word. That’s one possibility. A second possibility is that God magnified His Word with His name. That is He preserved His Word with the intervention of His own essence into history. In other words, He labeled His Word with His own name. It’s like He says I give you this promise and after you see this promise work out you’re going to know it’s My promise; My name is on that promise. And I’m going to show you My name is on the promise by fulfilling that promise in front of your eyes in a supernatural way so you’ll know I am the supernatural God and therefore that is a supernatural promise that belongs to me, My name My promise.

I see no reason why both these solutions cannot be correct; in other words, they’re not antithetical. I think both ideas come in here and this is why David uses such odd construction. In the Hebrew verse 2 is sectioned off in the following way, please notice the semicolons are not used the way you usually use them in English, I’m using these as accent marks in the Hebrew. I show this because I want you to watch how the phrase is constructed. The Jew would have read these phrases in one breath, this is how he reads his poetry; one verse, the next one, then the next one, it’s read rhythmatically, it has a meter to it. “I will worship toward the temple of Your holiness; I will praise Your name on account of your chesed and truth; because You have magnified Your saying with Your name.”

Now obviously the last line is not a complete sentence. The last line is hanging. Now in that situation it’s hanging because it’s emphasizing something. For the first part of verse 2, “I will worship toward the temple of Your holiness,” complete sentence. “I will praise Your name on account of your chesed and truth,” a complete sentence. But so far we’ve had generalities, we’ve had everything in a general sense, here’s a vow of praise, but now when we come… he’s going to say “I will praise Your name on account of your chesed and truth” and now he’s going to say here’s what I mean because of your chesed and truth, “Because You magnified Your saying with Your name.” That last line, the third line, which is not a sentence, is to amplify in the previous line chesed and truth. It’s to give greater meaning to that, it’s an extension of it.

Thus we would learn from David that Yahweh had promised something to David, that is “the saying,” whatever “the saying” was, and that because of who God is and through His mighty power, see the two ideas coming together, “because of who God is,” that would be “Thou hast magnified Thy word because of Thy name,” see, that is because God’s essence, which is immutability, requires Him to keep His promises. Now that in itself is a tremendous spiritual lesson, that those promise that you have, like 1 Cor. 10:13, Romans 8:28 and other promises have a backing of God’s essence, and God because He is God can’t undo them. It is, as it were, God is pinned down and limited by what He’s told us that He’s going to do, He can’t change His mind, He’s stuck. He’s revealed Himself in His Word and now even God Himself can’t change it, like the law of the Medes and the Persians, God’s eternal decrees will not be changed. That’s one way.

The second way is to take it “with Thy name,” and there God’s essence comes into the picture and the essence is the thing that fulfills the promise. So I see you can combine the two meanings. The essence is behind the promise forcing God to have the answer to it, and the essence is the means He uses to answer the promise; He dresses it up with His essence. So we would tie the two together, and therefore whatever this was, we have to get into next week, whatever this was that God did. Now we haven’t finished with the worksheet so keep them.

Now Ken Taylor, in The Living Psalms, takes one of these meanings; he sees the meaning for what it is because in The Living Psalms in verse 2 it says: I face Your temple as I worship, giving Thanks to You for all Your loving-kindness and Your faithfulness; for Your promises are backed by all the honor of Your name.” “….Your promises are backed by all the honor of Your name,” that is one legitimate way but I would say that’s only part of the richness that is there. So when you see the end of verse 2, don’t just say it sounds nice, “God magnifies His Word above His name,” think what you’re talking about. What does that mean, “God magnifies His Word?” Magnifies His Word with His name and on account of His name.

Application to Christians: what is it that stands behind the promise, what is it that brings the promise to pass. The God who made the promise, His name. And therefore we can worship and praise His name because we see how His word comes to fulfillment. You see it’s always like this, the Word of God is here, we see the Word and obviously the Word is not God, the Book isn’t God, we see through the Book the God whose Book it is, His Word.

Father, we thank Thee….