The 40th offers the response of a converted will to what is found and recognised in the Law:
In the roll of the book it is written of me:
I delight to do Thy will, O my God.
(R.V.)
The 78th recounts the long history of rebellious Israel as in itself part of the "testimony" of God. The mingled record of deliverance and failure, of judgment and hope, is in itself "a parable," a "dark saying of old," which faith can read and make answer to. The 131st expresses the very fundamental spirit of faith, the essential temper and attitude of the Church, the spirit of humility, of intellectual submission, of obedience, which is the same under the Gospel Dispensation as under the Old Covenant.
Lord, I am not high-minded:
I have no proud looks.
I do not exercise myself in great matters:
Which are too high for me.
But the most remarkable illustration of this characteristic attitude of the believer is the 119th Psalm. It is like a piece of music, every verse a subtle and harmonious variation on one dominant theme. It is the voice of the converted soul, learning the one lesson which man must learn in this world's school, if he is to attain his true being—learning to be ever turning away from self, from one's own doubts, troubles, persecutions, sufferings, to rest on what God has revealed in His statutes, His judgments, His testimonies, His laws. Nor is it without a subtle propriety that this Psalm is arranged as an acrostic under the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These letters are, as it were, the rudiments out of which man is enabled to exercise his characteristic gift of articulate speech; and in the acrostic Psalms they are visibly consecrated to His service Who made the mouth of man. And each part of the 119th Psalm consists of eight verses, a significant Hebrew number, the symbol of the Resurrection and the restoration of all things in that eighth day, the octave of eternity, which is yet to come, and will complete the work of the seven days of the first creation.
This Psalm, which expresses the unchanging spirit of true religion, was most naturally appropriated by Christian devotion to form the services for the working part of each day, beginning at Prime, when "man goeth forth to his work and his labour" with that benediction which comes on labour done with a pure motive in God's Name:
Blessed are those that are undefiled in the way:
And walk in the law of the Lord,
and ending at None, the hour of the death of the Lord, when day visibly declines, with the confession that the worker, as he looks back, must always make:
I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost:
O seek Thy servant, for I do not forget Thy commandments.