Psalm 119:32 – Enlargement

The way of your commands I will run,
As you broaden my understanding.

A young man once commented to me that he thought that perhaps we were trespassing on God’s sphere with scientific discoveries, that we were approaching knowledge that God had kept to himself alone. I asked him this: Do you believe that God is so fragile that he can be threatened by what little we can learn of the incredible amount there is to learn about this amazing universe. And what we know as the universe may not truly be the universe, or all that there is.

There’s a much more likely reaction. There’s an episode in Life, the Universe, and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series. The Krikkiters have lived for ages on a planet enclosed in a dust cloud and thus have not known that there were any other stars or galaxies. For reasons explained in the book, they build a spaceship and travel past the edge of the dust cloud that encases their galaxy, and come upon the incredible site of the galaxies and starts that surround them. Seeing this, they immediately determine two things. First, it’s very beautiful. Second, it’s got to go!

We often act very much like that. Push our horizon a bit too far out and we want to settle back into things that are already well known. “We ain’t never done it that way before” becomes “we ain’t never thought of anything like that before.”

We like a small and easily imagined universe, and with that we want a carefully delimited god suitable to our imagined universe. When we see something bigger, we may think it’s beautiful, but it’s got to go.

In turn, we read scripture in such a way as to fit it into our limited universe, and so as to imagine it produced by a similarly limited god. If someone goes beyond those boundaries we are quick to yell “heretic” and “corrupter.”

And we read the Psalms in this way. I have heard material from Psalm 119 and other Psalms used simply to explain why we ought to be so thankful to God for making up some very good rules. Many of these rules could be deduced from just looking around our little corner of the universe.

The keepers of the acceptable often complain that those who speak of the power of God’s grace, and do not see the value of a path of holiness that is just about doing certain stuff and not doing certain other stuff as being against God’s law. Antinomian is the word.

I teach a principle in Bible study that I call the hammer and saw principle. “Don’t criticize your hammer because it won’t saw boards.” Don’t criticize the law, conceived as a set of rules, because it won’t make people holy or even good. That’s not what it’s there for.

Psalm 119 turns into a boring and trite piece of propaganda when read as high praise of a list of rules. But when read as the high praise of the God who stands behind those rules and invites people to ever greater things, it sounds very different.

I used “broaden” in our verse today as a translation. In other translations you’ll find many ways of translating this Hebrew word. But it comes to the word party with a sense of widening and making something bigger. Combining various senses of a word can be dangerous, but I think it’s also dangerous to ignore where a word came from. We can lose the broader sense that the word brings to us when we totally ignore its origins.

“Make my mind bigger.” This is what will bring on running in the way depicted by God’s commands. It doesn’t bring on checklist managing. It doesn’t bring on a life restricted from greatness by a list of petty limitations. It’s a life made possible by the broadening power of the God of the commandments.

The law can be a most horrifying and destructive force when it is allowed to replace the Lawgiver. It is God who broadens. It is God who acts first. And it is a God of enlargement that is involved in it all. A giving God, a gracious God, is One who opens doors onto broad vistas of life now and in the future.

I believe the Psalmist sees this as he praises God as revealed in the instructions, the Word that God has given.

As a Christian reader of the Psalms, I have come to this particular verse on Christmas Eve, writing something that will be published Christmas morning. For me, the incarnation is the central doctrine of my faith. It’s one I won’t let go of. But more importantly it’s one I want to understand more and more.

The incarnation is not just an historical event. Yes, I see it as something that happened in history. There was a time and place at which God became present (was revealed) in a human infant. But that moment also represents the timeless fact that God has always been and will always be with us.

Glory came into a stable. Something that could not be contained was represented in the small, the ordinary, the limited. We try to make this seem better in so many ways. We want it to seem more dignified. But there is nothing more undignified that pure Glory contained in a human body. Philippians 2:5-11 gives a bit of the sense of that.

But in the same mode, what is human, what is small, what is limited, was called to something greater by the touch of infinity. The incarnation in that place had/has/will have impact and meaning at all times and in all places. It says fundamentally who God is. It says that Infinity chooses to connect with the finite, indeed that Infinity created the finite and calls it to greatness.

When we note that we cannot keep the law, or be worthy of God’s glory as noted in scripture, it’s not merely that we’re going to screw up and do stupid and destructive things, though we will. It is that we can’t even conceive of the glory to which we are constantly called by the same Infinity that showed up in a manger and showed us that yes, it could happen.

Creation, redemption, first and second coming all combine into the ultimate reality of the God whose nature is such that God appears in a stable.

To what glory is God calling you from your stable?

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)