Verse of the day · September 28

Who are the simple in Psalm 19:7?

David, minding his father's sheep, had two books and no others: the world around him, and what God said.

The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.
Psalm 19:7

The psalm opens outdoors, and it stays there for six verses. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day after day and night after night it keeps saying so, in no words at all, in a voice every language hears. God set a tent for the sun, and it runs its course like a strong man in a race. The sky is a schoolteacher to all the nations, no matter how wild, and it writes in great capital letters.

That was the first of David's two books. He knew both well enough to set them side by side and compare them, and this psalm is where he does it.

Then, at the verse for today, the subject changes with no warning at all. The law of the LORD is perfect. The psalm has turned to the second book, and there is a reason it could not stop at the first. The works of God teach his power and his wisdom; what they cannot show is his mercy — men saved by Christ, their sins pardoned by his blood, their bodies raised, everlasting life given them. None of that can be read off the sky: it has to be told, and the telling of it is the gospel. The works might have served a man who had kept his integrity; but Adam did not keep it, and cast the rest of us into the state he fell into — and to recover a man out of that state takes another course, and that course is the word of God.

Law is the first of the two names the verse gives it, and the one that misleads, because law in English sounds like a code of rules, and the word underneath is wider. Torah comes from a verb meaning to teach, and it takes in everything God has revealed to instruct and guide a man — his commands among the rest, but not his commands only. So it is not merely the law of Moses, and not merely the ten commandments, but the whole of what he has said.

Which matters, because narrowed down to the commandments by themselves it does nothing but convince a man of his sin and hold him over for death. Swallowed alone the commandments would be a poison; stirred into the medicine of the gospel they are a valuable ingredient, and they do real work — they wake a man up and convince him he is guilty. But what pulls the heart in is the gospel, and the gospel may well be what this verse has chiefly in view when it calls the law perfect — the whole word, gospel and all.

Perfect, the quality paired with that name, means the book lacks nothing it needs to be complete: complete as a revelation of the truth, and complete as a rule for how to live. And David, who called it perfect, had only a very small part of the Scriptures — mostly history, and the part of it with the least light in it. If that much of it is perfect, what must the whole book be, the one that shows God's love plainly and opens redeeming grace to view?

Then the effect: converting the soul. The verse does not say the book does this by its own power, and it does not shut out God's own work on a soul. What it says is that when the word is brought to bear on a man's heart, he turns from the way he was going. The word is the means of it; it is God's Spirit that makes a soul give way. Conviction of sin is not conversion, and often falls short of it; and the Spirit that makes a man new does not come to him through the preaching of the commandments, but through the gospel.

Converting means a bringing-back — restoring, just as well. It is the word for a spirit that has gone down under hard trouble and is brought back up, like a man gone faint for want of food and fetched back by a meal. What is brought back here is a soul: the man turned back to himself, to his God and to his duty, restored to the place sin had driven him from. The place is communion with God — his own company — and sin makes a man unfit for it. And not on the outside only. The soul itself is moved and made new.

Then the other name in the verse. A testimony is something witnessed to, and God has put his own truthfulness behind this one. What it witnesses to is Christ — who he is, what he was sent to do, and what his grace does. Sure means established and firm, so well founded it cannot be shaken. Each effect answers its own quality: being perfect, the word converts a man; being sure, it builds him up. He is not meant to stop at being a convert, and a man can only go on learning from something he is certain of. What he doubts cannot make him wise; what he is sure of will steady him.

Which brings the verse to the man it is for, and the name it gives him is not an insult. What simple means here is inexperienced: untaught, needing to be shown, with a mind still open to being convinced. The old versions put it babes or children, not in years but in understanding, and the ones God lets in on his truth are the ones aware of their own folly and willing to be taught. The persuadable grow wise; the ones who argue for the sake of arguing stay fools. He is worried about his soul, and he is asking what he has to do to be saved. He has cause to be worried: every man is under God's anger, and his one security against what his sins deserve is God's mercy. The law's own types and the rites it appointed refer to something beyond themselves, and what they point forward to is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And what a testimony asks of the man it is given to is that he believe it. That is how a simple-hearted man is made wise about being saved.

Being made wise here is not a matter of the head. A man can have all the head-knowledge there is and finish a fool. It is wisdom getting into the heart and drawing all the affections after it, until knowledge is something he likes the taste of — and that happens when God breaks the heart open and lets the wisdom fall in.

The psalm goes on, and it warns the man who reads it: his duty, his danger, his remedy. Then the praise stops, and David turns on himself with a question. Who can understand his errors? The clearer a man's view of the law, the more obvious his own sins become. Its straightness has taught him to call them errors — departures from the rule he was meant to live by — and there are more of them than he can count. So he asks to be cleansed from secret faults. Not secret from God, since nothing is. Not only the ones the neighbours never saw. The ones hidden from his own watch on himself. Left on him they would be his ruin, if God dealt with him as they deserve. Nothing in all those verses of sky is credited with bringing him to that. And the psalm ends by calling God his redeemer: the kinsman whose right it was, under the old law, to buy back what a man had sinned away — and the kinsman is Christ, who took our nature to do it and bought the man himself with his own blood. The man who wrote that the word makes the simple wise had been made wise enough to find out that he was simple.

Drawn from Albert Barnes, Matthew Henry, John Gill, Charles Spurgeon, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes and the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary. How these teachings are made

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