Introduction

We are blessed by God to live in one of the most beautiful parts of His world. Each day we have abundant opportunities to take in its wonders and delights. In Psalm 19, David sings of how God reveals Himself in His Creation, and even better, in His powerful Word.

Author

God named the author of this psalm “a man after My own heart.” This is the man who started as a shepherd of sheep, but became the shepherd of God’s people. He was a warrior, a poet, a prophet and a king. He stands in Scripture as one of main prefigures of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the man whom God prepared and appointed to write most of our psalms, which are at the heart of His holy worship.

Structure

Psalm 19 has the usual parallel structure of Hebrew poetry used in the liturgy of temple worship — the worship leader speaks and the people respond. The purpose of this form is to enables God’s people to “teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” employing the responsive rhythm of the psalm.

I greatly longed to understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, “the justice of God,” because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant.

Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that “the just shall live by his faith.” Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open door into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the “justice of God” had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven….

~ Martin Luther 1545 (for full text, go here)

Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.
~ Augustine