Psalm 119:119 – Scorn
You hold in scorn all the wicked of the land,
therefore I love your testimonies.
I will confess that the lasts several verses seem to have given me less elevated thoughts. Holding people in scorn often sounds like a pretty good idea. How can those idiots do such stupid things. Not just wicked, but stupid! God is right to be scornful of them!
At this point, I recall something I say all the time about teaching an preaching: Be sure to target the text at yourself before you target it at others.
There’s a second issue as well. Why is it that I read this text as one of the good guys? Now you might quickly say that the author is speaking as one of the good guys. I’m not so sure of that. He frequently invokes God’s aid, and as I’ve done a few times thus far, I can point to verse 176 – “I have gone astray like a lost sheep …”
Now I imagine there’s a sense in which the psalmist does regard himself as one of the good guys. He is, after all, one of God’s chosen people. He has God’s Torah with statutes, testimonies, commands, and yes, the stories of God working with the people. So he’s in the family. That’s one thing. At the same time, he has shown considerable awareness of shortcomings, and of his need for God to work with and on him in dealing with those.
So we could view this verse in a completely different way. Not a condemnation of “them” and a congratulation of self, but rather as an accurate observation. God doesn’t look well on the wicked. The very laws of nature tend to punish those who will not cooperate. But the way the psalmist is advocating for avoiding this is love for God’s testimonies.
I suspect this latter has a great deal to do with what the Psalmist is saying. And one of the elements I see in the use of “testimonies” here is that look at how God has acted.
To reference another Psalm I love, Psalm 78:
He established a decree in Jacob,
Psalm 78:5-8 (NRSV)
and appointed a law in Israel,
which he commanded our ancestors
to teach to their children;
that the next generation might know them,
the children yet unborn,
and rise up and tell them to their children,
so that they should set their hope in God,
and not forget the works of God,
but keep his commandments;
and that they should not be like their ancestors,
a stubborn and rebellious generation,
a generation whose heart was not steadfast,
whose spirit was not faithful to God.
I think Psalm 119 as a whole is doing precisely this.
What will you pass on to the next generation, whether biological or spiritual?
(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI and edited slightly by me.)
