THE BENEFITS OF CHASTENING

Psalm 119:65–72 NKJV
65 You have dealt well with Your servant, O Lord, according to Your word.
66 Teach me good judgment and knowledge, For I believe Your commandments.
67 Before I was afflicted I went astray, But now I keep Your word.
68 You are good, and do good; Teach me Your statutes.
69 The proud have forged a lie against me, But I will keep Your precepts with my whole heart.
70 Their heart is as fat as grease, But I delight in Your law.
71 It is good for me that I have been afflicted, That I may learn Your statutes.
72 The law of Your mouth is better to me Than thousands of coins of gold and silver.

It´s been more than seven weeks since I started this blog to try to offer some encouragement to all of us who want to walk with God as we walk through the difficult days of dealing with the Coronavirus.  Thank you for being a reader.  I hope this has been helpful in some way to you.
I began our walk together by offering eight Scriptural reasons why God sends or allows trouble to fall upon us.  The third of those reasons was

• To demonstrate His love by chastening us to bring us closer to Himself.

 
This stanza of David´s hymn about the wonderful way God uses His Word in our lives was obviously written after the Lord chastened David.  We know this happened after David´s adultery with Bathsheba, resulting in the murder of Uriah, Bathsheba´s husband.
However, we do not know that this is the occasion he is talking about.  Certainly David´s sin with Bathsheba was not his only sin.
 
What David´s sin was does not really matter to us.  The Lord loved David enough to not allow him to continue down that disastrous path.  The Lord chastened David as we see in verse 67.
 
67 Before I was afflicted I went astray,
And David responded.  Look at the rest of that same verse.
67 Before I was afflicted I went astray, But now I keep Your word.
And David´s conclusion about what the Lord did was this:
68 You are good, and do good;

Whatever happens during this trying time, whether God allowed each of us to experience this great difficulty we are going through because of our need for chastisement, or because of one of the other seven reasons, David´s conclusion is apt!

God, You are good!  God, You always do good!

Next, David makes a very interesting comment in verses 69 and 70.
69 The proud have forged a lie against me, But I will keep Your precepts with my whole heart.
70 Their heart is as fat as grease, But I delight in Your law.

Who is lord of the proud one?  None other than fallen Lucifer, the proud angel in heaven who wanted to be worshipped in place of the Almighty, Satan himself!  And what is his chief weapon?  The lie!  David acknowledges that all the reasons he harbored for doing, continuing, and trying to cover up his sin had their origin with the lord of the proud, the evil one.  Satan no doubt, along the way, used his human servants to speak his words, but he himself was the source.

In verse 70, David says of these who follow the devil´s ways and would delight to take him with them, “They delight in fatness.”  Thus we have the translation “as grease.”  Fatness means all types of carnality or fleshly sins.

But David now rejects their enticements.  He declares, “I will keep Your precepts and delight in Your law!”
The first two verses of this stanza and the last two are probably the most important to us.  They are summary statements of David´s experience with the chastening of the Lord.  If you have experienced God´s chastening, or if you are experiencing it now, be comforted and strengthened by David´s analysis of what God did when he looked back upon it in retrospect.

​65 You have dealt well with Your servant, O Lord, according to Your word.
66 Teach me good judgment and knowledge, For I believe Your commandments.
71 It is good for me that I have been afflicted, That I may learn Your statutes.
72 The law of Your mouth is better to me Than thousands of coins of gold and silver.

Whenever you next experience the chastening of the Lord, remember that it comes because He loves you.  It is a testimony that you are His child.  Let the chastening produce God´s intended work to bring you back to delighting in the Lord and His Word!

EMAIL BRO. MIKE