“They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb. ”
We humans want to get our hands on what’s precious. Take the cryptocurrency Bitcoin for example. The Winklevoss twins of Facebook fame bought $1.4 million worth of Bitcoin when it was trading at $7. By the time it was trading at $10,000, they had made $2 billion off of it. A lot of people are kicking themselves for not buying Bitcoin when it was worth $7. We humans want to get our hands on what’s precious.
We also want what’s sweet. According to The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition our national consumption of high fructose corn syrup increased over 1,000% between 1970 and 1990. Maybe you have a sweet tooth for pop or maybe for you it’s candy, but my guess is that you enjoy something that’s sweet.
It’s not bad to enjoy what’s sweet. It’s not bad to enjoy what’s precious. David doesn’t chide us in this Psalm for wanting what is precious and sweet. He assumes that you value what is precious and he tells you that the word of God is even more precious than gold. He assumes that you desire what is sweet and he tells you that the word of God is sweeter than honey.
This is pro-pleasure language. We need to embrace this. Would you rather come into possession of something that has sentimental value to a stranger or something that is more precious than gold? Nobody is going to want to read God’s word with you simply because it has sentimental value to you. They will want to hear it if they think it might actually be more precious than gold. Would you rather eat a dessert that has been in a family for generations but no one knows why or a desert that you find delicious? Nobody is going to read God’s word simply because it’s been in the family for generations; they will want to check it out if they think it might be sweeter than honey.
If you believe that hearing Jesus’ voice which you find in Scripture is more precious than gold, you will make a rational choice and choose to hear his voice in Scripture. If you believe that hearing Jesus’ voice is sweeter than honey, you will make a rational choice and choose to hear his voice in Scripture. You have a choice to make. Make the rational choice; choose what is more precious than gold and sweeter than honey. That’s the claim of this sermon: make the rational choice; choose what is more precious than gold and sweeter than honey.
We will study this in two points. First: more precious than gold. Second: sweeter than honey. In the first half of the verse we will see that God’s word is more precious than gold. In the second half of the verse we will see that God’s word is sweeter than honey.
First: more precious than gold. This is our third study on Psalm 19. In our first study, we saw what can and cannot be known about God through creation and reason. In our second study, we studied what can be known about God only through revelation—that is Scripture. We studied the law of the Lord, the statutes of the Lord, the precepts of the Lord, the commands of the Lord, the fear of the Lord, the ordinances of the Lord. We studied God’s word. We studied what God expects of us. We studied what God has said about who He is, what He has done, and what He promises that He will do. We saw that all of this is perfect, trustworthy, right, radiant, pure, enduring forever, sure, and altogether righteous. We saw that God uses it to bring souls to life, to give light to eyes, and to give joy to hearts. That’s why it is precious; verse 10, “They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold.”
Gold was valuable in David’s day. It is still valuable. It recently hit an all-time high of nearly $2,000 per ounce. People have been selling stock to buy gold. People have been draining their savings to buy gold. They have been doing so because they think that gold will hold its value better than the dollar. Why do investors believe this? Why do they consider gold to be so precious?
Gold is rare. We don’t use feathers as a medium of exchange because birds are everywhere. We value gold as a medium of exchange because it is rare. It is scarce.
The word of God is more precious than gold because it is even rarer. Think of it this way: given the state of the media, I imagine that you see trustworthy, sure, pure, and altogether righteous sources of information to be rare. The Bible gives you that. This book is rare. There is only so much gold, but there is only one word from God. It is rarer than gold and so more it is more precious than gold.
Gold is rare. It is also irreplaceable. We’ve got what we’ve got and whatever gold is destroyed or lost stays destroyed or lost. Theoretically we could create more but that would take a nuclear reactor and a whole lot of mercury, which means it is nowhere near cost effective. We aren’t making any more of it.
The same is true with the word of God. Nobody has added to Scripture since the book of Revelation. Those who have tried have fallen under a curse as Revelation promised. Nothing new has been or will be added that can give this sort of life to the soul, light to the eyes, and joy to the heart.
That makes each of these books of Scripture precious. Imagine what would be lost if you simply pulled one of the books, Deuteronomy, out of circulation. You don’t have to imagine. You have a picture of it in 2 Kings. During a renovation of the temple, the priests found a scroll that was most likely Deuteronomy. In its absence, the people had stopped following its ways. They had begun worshipping using cult prostitutes. They had begun sacrificing their children to foreign gods. Why? Well, why not? They knew of no word from God telling them to do otherwise. That word was collecting dust in a side room of the temple. Nothing else rose up to do what only the word of God could do. Nothing will. It was and is irreplaceable. That’s what makes it so valuable.
Gold is rare. It is irreplaceable. It has no substitutes. Fool’s gold pretends to be a substitute for gold but only fools treat it like gold. It is worthless. In the same way, the substitutes for the word of God are worthless. About ten years ago, Oprah was promoting a book on spirituality entitled The Secret. It promised to change lives. It sold 30 million copies. I don’t think anyone is reading it now. It has been dismissed—in the words of one author—as, a “playbook for entitlement and self-absorption,” and “anybody who reads it and implements its advice… will likely make themselves worse off in the long run.” That’s fool’s gold. However, people have been gathering to study the word of God which gives life to the soul, light to the eyes, and joy to the heart on a weekly basis and a daily basis in their homes for thousands of years because it is perfect, trustworthy, right, radiant, pure, enduring forever, sure, and altogether righteous. There is no substitute. “It is more precious than gold, than much pure gold.”
Gold is rare. It is irreplaceable. It has no substitutes. It also lasts. It doesn’t rust. It doesn’t tarnish. You can put gold in a safe and it will be unchanged when you pull it out thirty years later. That is part of what qualifies it to be a precious metal. The word of God shares this enduring quality. It doesn’t change. Honoring your father and mother is just as relevant today as it was when Moses received the Ten Commandments. Fornication is just as wrong today as it was before the sexual revolution. There is nothing that has somehow become right or become wrong with the passing of time. The word of God doesn’t change.
The passing of time doesn’t weaken the word of God any more than the passage of time weakens gold. The power of the word of God isn’t somehow lessened by the passing of two thousand years. It isn’t as if it is less able to bring souls to life today than it was at the time of the Reformation or during the age of the apostles. It isn’t as if its promises are somehow less true for us than they were for Abraham or for David or for the early church. Jesus was very clear, “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” The word doesn’t lose its power. That makes it exceedingly precious.
Do you think the word of God is more precious than gold? Given the choice between gold and the word of God, what would you choose? I don’t have gold here this evening, but I do have cash. I’ve got $1,000 in five-dollar bills and $1,000 in one-dollar bills. This is for my upcoming quarterly taxes in case anyone is that curious about my finances. What could you do with $2,000? Could you get your hands on anything perfect? Anything trustworthy? Anything pure? Could you get your hands on anything that could bring life to your soul? What about anything that could give everlasting joy to your heart? You couldn’t. You couldn’t get any of that with this money. You can get that from the word of God.
Now imagine that I boosted a post on Facebook saying that on the evening of September 13 in Inwood CRC’s sanctuary we would be giving away $2,000. Would our turnout be any different? Imagine that the council decided to give away $2,000 at the end of a random worship service once a month. That’s $24,000 a year to boost attendance. Would our attendance increase?
Now the fact is that people do have a chance to get their hands on something perfect, trustworthy, right, radiant, pure, enduring forever, sure, and altogether righteous, which can give life to their soul, light to their eyes, and joy to their hearts and they have that chance multiple times a week. You would think that would increase attendance more than giving away $2,000 a month would. It seems that we are not very rationale creatures.
We tend to think that the church has a supply problem. We see the decline of church involvement over the past generation and we assume there is something wrong with what we are offering. We might not offer it perfectly but what we do have to offer is perfect, trustworthy, right, radiant, pure, enduring forever, sure, and altogether righteous, can give life to the soul, light to the eyes, and joy to the heart.
It seems that we humans don’t have a very good eye for worth. We don’t have a very good eye for what is precious, and you can see that if you consider how many people want this cash and how many people want to hear from God even though the word of God is, “more precious than gold, than much pure gold.”
We don’t have a good eye for what’s precious and you can see that when you consider our reception to the word made flesh. He made his dwelling among us and by and large we didn’t accept him. Even those who did accept him didn’t how very precious he was. Think about the response of the disciples when one woman recognized Jesus’ worth. She broke a jar of perfume costing what you and I would make in a year and poured it on Jesus’ feet, and rubbed it in with her hair. She recognized that Jesus was more precious than the gold that bought that perfume. The disciples thought it was a waste. They didn’t seem to think that this act of honor for Jesus was more precious than gold. Left to ourselves we don’t have a good track record for knowing what’s precious. If you do have any sense that the word of God is more precious than gold and that Jesus is more precious than much fine gold, praise God because that’s who you got that from.
Left to ourselves we don’t have a good track record for knowing what’s precious. Left to ourselves we don’t have a good track record for knowing what’s sweet. That’s our second point: sweeter than honey. David used a comparison with gold to convey the value of the word of God; now he uses a comparison with honey to convey the sweetness of the word of God. Our study of this second comparison will be much shorter than the first because of the way Hebrew poetry works. Hebrew poetry tends to restate. The first line makes the point and the second line restates and slightly expands the point. The comparison with gold makes the point that the word of God is superior; the comparison with honey restates and slightly expands the point that the word of God is superior; that’s the two lines of verse 10, “They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb.”
You see increased worth within each of those lines. Pure gold, 24 karat gold, is more precious than alloyed gold, but neither are as precious as the word of God. Honey from the comb is sweeter than regular honey that came from dates, but neither are as sweet as the word of God. I had some honey right from the comb last week. A friend of mine just started at a church in Sheldon and he keeps bees here in Inwood. I told him about this sermon, and he brought me a honeycomb to try. David knows what he is talking about with this language of sweetness.
Honey was the sweetest substance around in David’s day. There was no cultivation of sugar cane in Israel. David used the sweetest substance available to say that the word of God was even sweeter.
Now honey is sweet because of its content. It is composed of mostly glucose and sucrose. Those are sweet and so honey is sweet. The word of God is sweeter than honey because its content is sweeter. It is composed of Christ. The content of the word of God is Christ. His birth isn’t just the dividing line between the two testaments; he is the center of the whole book. It all points to him so it shouldn’t surprise us that he is sweeter than honey. Paul made that point by saying that compared with Christ, everything else was like manure. A good name is sweet but compared with knowing Jesus it is like manure. Family and friends are sweet but compared with knowing Jesus they are like manure. Considering how sweet those are, Jesus must be much sweeter than honey to make those smell like dung in comparison.
We experience honey as sweet because of its content. We experience honey as sweet because our tastebuds are receptive to its sweetness. People with damaged taste buds don’t enjoy honey. People with dead souls don’t enjoy the word of God. If you don’t consider what is perfect, trustworthy, right, radiant, pure, enduring forever, sure, and altogether righteous to be sweet, then you have a dead soul. If you don’t consider what gives life to the soul, light to the eyes, and joy to the heart to be sweet, then you have a dead soul.
To see the contrast, listen to a soul who was very much alive. This soul is receptive to the sweetness of God and God’s word. The soul was David Brainerd; he was a missionary to the Native Americans in the 18th century and this is an excerpt from his diary, “[today I] had the most ardent longings after God that ever I felt in my life: at noon, in my [devotions], I could do nothing but tell my dear Lord, in a sweet calm, that He knew I longed for nothing but Himself, nothing but holiness; that He had given me these desires, and He only could give me these desires. I never seemed to be so unhinged from myself, and to be so wholly devoted to God. My heart was swallowed up in God most of the day.” That’s a soul enjoying the sweetness of God. That’s a soul enjoying the sweetness of God’s word. Now that was an exceptional moment in Brainerd’s life; he wrote that those were the most ardent longings he ever had for God, but the presence on some level of those longings is a non-negotiable part of the born-again experience. Finding sweetness in the word of God is a non-negotiable part of the born-again experience.
Now I can’t implant a sense of the sweetness of God’s word upon your soul. That’s a gift of the Spirit. What I can do is give you a sense of the sweetness of honey and tell you that the word of God is sweeter. I’ve got honey candy and only honey candy in this jar this evening. Show me your sermon notes and you can experience the sweetness of honey. Taste it and know that God’s word is sweeter. Pray that your soul might find it sweeter than your tastebuds find this honey. Pray that you would be properly receptive to God’s word. If you ask for that, you will receive that.
The challenge of church is not on the supply side when it comes to sweetness. It is on the demand side. We have what is sweeter than honey, but by nature souls don’t experience it as sweeter than honey. That should drive us to our knees in prayer because only the Spirit can change the tastebuds of the soul. If we are rational we will find his word to be sweeter than honey. We will find it more precious than gold or a pile of $2,000. In many ways the question that faces us as a church is are we rational? Do we consider this word to be more precious than gold? Do we consider it to be sweeter than honey? Amen.