Deceitful ways turn aside from meand graciously give me your instruction [Torah]. It’s hard to read this verse when we use “law” as the English gloss for Torah. Graciously give me your rules? Graciously let me live in your rules? But that none of those are actually bad translations. Law or instruction, and the Torah…
My soul weeps from grief,Strengthen me according to your word. There are, as always, a number of directions I could go, and that I’d like to go, starting from this verse. I just want to mention one I’m not going to pursue. Recently I had occasion to discuss grief and suffering as discussed in the…
Explain to me the way of your preceptsand I will tell of your wonderful acts. We tend to think of particular rules or principles for living as fairly boring, somewhat annoying, and often unreasonably restrictive. We seem to live in a debate between what we ought to do and what we actually do. Even the…
I tell you my stuff and you answer me.Teach me your statutes. I frequently comment that “always and everywhere there is stuff.” There is stuff to do, stuff not to do, stuff that I did, and stuff that I didn’t do. Not to mention the physical stuff to keep, stuff to get rid of, and…
My soul is down in the dust.Give me life according to your word. Psalm 119 is an interesting–and biblical–combination of human action and dependence on Divine action. Verse 25, the first verse of the third section, is on the dependence side of the scale. If you’re trying to formulate theology, the variety here might be…
Your testimonies are also my delight,My counselors [the men of my counsel]. I like to say that we tend to go to the Bible for information, while God is there for conversation. I don’t mean that there is no information there. We tend to think in binary terms: Either the Bible is a source of…
Prince sit around and plot against me,Your servant meditates on your statutes. To be honest, my first reaction to this verse was a laugh. Yeah, right, I thought. He really can sit meditating on God’s statutes while he knows people are plotting against him. That thought isn’t entirely wrong. This really is a high-minded, and…
Remove from me reproach and contemptfor I have guarded your testimonies. Meditating on a single verse each day means I often get somewhat out of context. But while context is important, literature can easily suggest other lines of thinking. Folks in various classes I’ve taught have called me the king of the rabbit trail because…
You rebuke the proud, accursed ones,Who stagger away from your commands. As with each verses, there are lots of directions my mind goes with this, for example, what it means to be “accursed” and what, in particular, one might be proud of. But the direction my mind went was simply this: Pride goes before destruction…
I [my soul] languish for longingfor your judgments. What do you really want? What is your deepest desire? What is missing that makes you weary? As I write this, I’m very tired. I’ve been busy with many things and am only writing because I committed myself to write as a spiritual discipline. This is the…
