Blameless

DEVOTION

PSALMS

BLAMELESS

Ps 119:73-80

73 Yodh

Your hands made me and formed me; give me understanding to learn your commands. 74 May those who fear you rejoice when they see me, for I have put my hope in your word. 75 I know, O LORD, that your laws are righteous, and in faithfulness you have afflicted me. 76 May your unfailing love be my comfort, according to your promise to your servant. 77 Let your compassion come to me that I may live, for your law is my delight. 78 May the arrogant be put to shame for wronging me without cause; but I will meditate on your precepts. 79 May those who fear you turn to me, those who understand your statutes. 80 May my heart be blameless toward your decrees, that I may not be put to shame.

NIV

Day  ten in the longest psalm. Again we find the psalmist wanting to know more about the Lord and being concerned that God will comfort him in his times of distress. He is aware the Lord is the one who humbles him, but is also righteous and faithful in dealing with him. We can always be assured that God will demonstrate his compassion and his unfailing love toward us as well. There are so many promises of God and we can be confident he never fails to keep his promises. As the psalmist remembers God is the one who formed him, so we also should remember. We are not part of some theory of evolution, but the form God designed and formed from the dust of the earth. God formed or fashioned man in his own image, after he spoke all other living creatures into existence. We are a hand created form in the image of God and in addition he breathed his own breath into man. Nothing is said in any way about any other living thing. Not a single animal was given the ability to understand and learn the commands of God. No other being has the ability to learn and comprehend who God is and what he desires. But we do, we have that mind of Christ within us, and we can learn his commands. Anyone who knows the Lord, who fears, reveres him, rejoices whenever they see us, for our hope is in the Lord, in his word, Jesus. That is if we are actually living as through our hope in the Lord. There is a sense in which the psalmist is seeing his role as some sort of leader as he asks the Lord for those who fear God to turn to him, the psalmist. It appears he is asking the Lord to bring those who understand the statutes of the Lord to come to the psalmist and at the same time seeking the Lord for a blameless heart toward his decrees. This might well serve us to understand we who fear the Lord have been declared to be holy and blameless in his sight and that we all have a responsibility to live in a manner that others can see the love of Jesus in us and they can turn to us and find God. How often we fail. Even within our own families. Yet we also know we will not be put to shame for we still are a child of God, saved, sanctified, justified, made righteous in Christ. But how we fail to live up to who we are. The battle that wages within between the old self and our new self, the old and new natures. The old self keeps wanting to be resurrected from the dead. How can we keep it dead? Is that how God designed us? That is the singular reason we need Jesus. We have no ability to be perfect in this flesh. Left to our self, either the old or new, we are still in need of Jesus. We still need the compassion of God, his mercy, his forgiveness, and his love. There is nothing of self, even the new improved, born again self that will get us to heaven, to eternal life. Only by our faith, which is even a gift of God, are we saved. Let us never wander from that faith. Let our heart always be blameless in his sight. We might try to blame ourselves or blame others for mistakes, but then we are mere humans, with all our imperfections. God does not blame us, for he has declared us blameless.