Prof. Kenneth McMullen preaches on Psalm 19 at RTS Charlotte. The message is entitled "Presumptuous Sins." Could you turn in your Bibles to the 19th Psalm, one of the psalms of David? Before we read God’s Word together, let us seek his blessing in prayer. Our heavenly Father, even as you fed the children of Israel upon the manna day by day, so feed us now on your heavenly Word as your Holy Spirit applies it and also interprets our own hearts as well. Father, we ask that you would be lifted up and glorified and we ask through Christ, our Lord, amen. Psalm 19, beginning in verse 7:
The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightning the eyes; the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much find gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Moreover, by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward. Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me! Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.The Word of the Lord. There was a time when the state of North Carolina was pretty much synonymous in people’s minds with tobacco. It may be hard for some of you who are younger to put your mind around that, that that was the case, but it truly was. Now, imagine you’re a native Tarheel—also an increasingly rare find these days, at least in Charlotte—and perhaps both of your parents smoked heavily and maybe even died of lung cancer. Perhaps your grandparents also smoked—it just was a common thing—and maybe some of them also suffered with lung cancer. But in spite of that kind of family heritage, you decide to start smoking as well at a young age. Unfiltered camels even, just to make it a worse example. I guess they still sell those, I don’t know. Now a couple generations ago, some people might have thought, “Maybe smoking all these cigarettes is not the best thing for my health.” But amazingly, a lot of people just didn’t give it much thought. In fact, it was almost expected socially in many situations. But now you would have to be the hermit of all hermits to not understand that smoking is not good for you. There are dire warnings all over the packaging. There are endless ad campaigns telling people the obvious: it’s bad for you. And yet, I think there has been an uptick in incidents of cigarette smoking in some parts of the population, and some people still smoke a pack or more a day. That is what you might call the height of presumption. Presuming to know better than all of those doctors out there telling you that this is not a good thing, presuming that you’re going to be the person that beats the odds on cancer. But there’s another sort of presumption that is far, far more dangerous than being a heavy smoker, and we see that in this psalm this morning. Now, as is often the case with passages in Scripture, in the Psalms in particular, it would be helpful if, in addition to the inscription that says this is a psalm of David, it had told us, “David wrote this at x point in his life.” But that is not the case. So you wonder. Was it written before the events which he reacts to in Psalm 51 of his adultery with Bathsheba? If it was written before that, he at least had some inkling at that point of his own particular weakness in regard to sin. But if it was written afterwards, it would carry the sad but knowing confession of a man whose presumptuous sins had nearly destroyed him. We’ll be focusing on verse 13 this morning where his declarations about the law of God turn into a prayerful petition, but note first, briefly, the surrounding context of this psalm. By the way, I do think this is a unified psalm, though some critics disagree, but we’re only focusing on the last half this morning. David is extolling the glories of the law of God, his written, his explicit revelation. He does so as a redeemed child of God’s grace. He’s almost stumbling over himself to find adequate words to describe God’s law. He says it’s reviving the soul. It rejoices the heart. It is enlightening to the eyes. It is enduring. It is righteous. It is to be desired. It is sweeter than honey. And it brings great reward. The only people that can express that kind of delight in the law of God are believers. [00:06:59]Legalists may have a odd sort of delight in the law, but it is joyless legalism. [8.2s] But even as David celebrates God’s law, he also realized, as he looks at the perfect law, his own struggles to keep it, to obey it as God would desire. And thus the heart of his prayer.
