One of the interesting paradoxes of Christian theology is the God who is at once very near and also distant. Personal and accessible, yet so far above as to be incomprehensible.
Paul talks refers to this in calling us to “know the lover of Christ which surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19). We have many such paradoxes in Christianity, including what I consider the most critical one, the incarnation. Jesus is 100% human and 100% God, and yet is one person.
In Deuteronomy 30:11-14, the law is described as being near. It’s not in heaven, inaccessible, or beneath the sea, also inaccessible. It’s there. It’s available. It’s not too difficult or beyond our reach. And yet the story of scripture is, in many was, the story of people failing to keep the law, even in the most basic sense.
Yet again the Psalmist speaks of God having knowledge that is too wonderful for him, beyond his grasp (Psalm 139:6).
What I see here is God’s presence in our lives, working out divine purposes in and through us. It’s accessible, to the extent we can comprehend it, but one of the things we should comprehend is that we don’t comprehend fully. We comprehend enough for our lives. We comprehend enough to know there is much beyond our comprehension.
It’s not a bad idea to realize the limitations of our knowledge. In fact, it’s a very good idea.
Think today of things that you don’t understand. Then imagine a future in which you comprehend more, bit by bit.
What little bit will you add to your store of knowledge today?
My enemies have formed a conspiracy against me, they are far from your instruction!
Who is it that tends to get angry at what you are doing?
That may seem like a question with negative assumptions, but you can learn quite a lot about someone by looking at the nature of their enemies. You can learn a great deal about yourself by looking for the folks who don’t like you.
The problem with this approach is that it is often difficult to know just what it is about your actions that is making enemies. I have been aware of cases in which I made an enemy, not because of what I really intended to accomplish, but because of the abrasive way I went about accomplishing that. It would be easy for me to assume that the person(s) who became annoyed hated the good things I was trying to do, and thus became my enemies. In fact, it’s frequently the case that the way I’m going about trying to do good is stirring up opposition.
Psalm 119 doesn’t identify David as the author, but David is often viewed as “the Psalmist.” David himself could be an abrasive character and make suboptimal decisions in how he went about things. Read the story of Absalom’s rebellion and you’ll see any number of cases in which David managed to rub people the wrong way, but wasn’t really aiming at something good.
I’ve seen pastors come into a church with some very good ideas, and then see a wall of opposition built up against them because they are stepping on beloved traditions of that church, often without good preparation for necessary changes. “Machine-gunning the sacred cows,” is how one pastor of my acquaintance referred to this practice.
Our verse presents a very clear distinction. We have bad guys who are coming after the writer. These bad guys are far from God’s law. Good guys and bad guys. Clear boundary lines. If you’re a good guy you know who to support.
In reality, we rarely run into such a situation. We are rarely proposing perfect plans and our opponents are rarely opposing them because they are terrible people who know nothing of God’s law. Rather, things get tangled up in the gray area.
And this makes our verse all that much more important. We should examine our activities to see if we are, in fact, working in accordance with God’s laws. We should also look carefully at our enemies, as horrible as they may appear to us, and ask if they are really the kind of reprobates we imagine them to be.
If we can recognize the good and the bad in ourselves and others, we can often find much better ways to work together and accomplish God’s work.
How can you make your approach less abrasive today?
Hear my voice according to your lovingkindness (hesed). Oh LORD, give me life according to your judgments.
This is a very interesting verse. I think it is also challenging.
We see two aspects of God’s grace and mercy working together here. First, the psalmist asks for mercy from God, and so should we. Listen to us as one who is merciful.
But what is the result of this mercy? We often think mercy as the part where the authority cancels punishment or removes other negative effects of something one has done. But here mercy leads to the next part, giving life, and this life is according to God’s judgments. Those judgments call on us to be merciful. (See Hosea 6:6 in the Hebrew scriptures.) Jesus used this very concept in the beatitudes, with Matthew 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”
But this goes back to the call of Abraham in Genesis 12, where Abraham is told that God will bless him and others will be blessed through him.
It’s easy to get this in reverse. We like to feel that we earn things. But the starting point is receiving God’s mercy, and one of the results is that we will learn to become merciful ourselves. We can think of this as a special action by God, but I would suggest that it is built into the fabric of the universe God created. We find this as the law of sowing and reaping. If we sow mercy, we reap mercy. That is, we help create an atmosphere in which mercy rules.
Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that you be not judged,” should likely be read in a similar sense. Don’t sow judgment and condemnation. Sow grace and forgiveness. Do this because you have received grace, and do it because grace is a good thing, and you can spread it to others. One of the best ways for someone to learn of God’s grace is to see God’s grace working in one of God’s professed (and hopefully real) followers.
When we cry out to God, as this section of the Psalm has been describing, God doesn’t merely waive a penalty for things we have done. Yes, God does that. But God does much more. God begins to work, according to God’s judgment, on giving us life.
And in all this we become partners with God in creating this life and this atmosphere of mercy and caring. We’re not God’s partners because we came with something new to contribute. Rather, we can give because we received.
I want to add something the Psalm is not addressing. Mercy and caring are not economic goods. That means they are not scarce. You can care about additional people without running out. Caring about one person doesn’t mean you have to despise another. All people, not just the ones you or I happen to like, can receive God’s mercy and God’s care. And all people should receive our care.
Who can you have mercy on today as God has had mercy on you?
(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI. First try, too!)
My eyes stay open during the night to meditate on your word.
It’s nice on the 148th day of a series of meditations to have a verse (really another verse) about meditating.
I will mention again what I said yesterday regarding the time and circumstances. Look for the time and place you can meditate. Don’t expect that you have to duplicate what is working for someone else. If you are getting a good night’s sleep, don’t imagine that your spirituality is substandard, and hope for sleep loss in order to be more holy.
There are some things that are important about meditating on God’s word. We often start and unfortunately also often stop with exegesis, with getting a historical understanding of the data. Knowing what various prophets or kings did in the far past is important, but it is most important as a foundation for understanding your present relationship with God and your present calling. That involves more than historical data.
For me the time reading the Bible is important to most other aspects of my life. It is a time when I can receive new light, when I pray, when I find strength for my next task, when I can feel God’s presence.
The history is important. We should always be anchored in what the text actually says and what it meant when first spoken. But as believers today, we need to understand the application to the moment. That often goes well beyond that historical study.
Here are some of those things I find are important:
There is no shortcut. It takes time. This is not just time to read reference works, but time to let the text sink in.
It takes both extensive and intensive reading. Don’t look down on the fast reader or on the one involved with nit-picky details. Both extremes have value. Try to incorporate different ways of approaching the text.
It is part of worship. Meditating on God’s word brings you closer to God.
It should be corporate, i.e., the study of the Bible should not be just about your individual time and your individual view. Test your results against what others learn.
It should be individual. While working with others is important, learning to hear from God yourself is also critical. Be tested by the crowd. Don’t be led by the crowd.
The Bible itself is more important than commentary. Put some emphasis on reading the Bible.
There is value in those who have studied before. Let them help expand your vision and understanding, but don’t let their views replace learning from the text yourself.
Have time for action. When you read about helping those less fortunate or about testifying to your faith in Jesus, you need to also pause to take action.
I love this Psalm. I’m enjoying every verse. But this set of meditations is just one approach.
I got up before dawn and cried out. I put my hope in your words.
I’ve said in some of these posts that there were many ways I could go, but, of course, I choose one. With today’s text, though there are doubtless a number of ways I could go, I really kept thinking of one thing: What’s with the early morning thing?
Many people talk about their morning devotions, and emphasize prayer before you get up, and the importance of meeting God as you begin your day. This is supposed to make your day better. One of the side effects of this emphasis on morning devotions is that many who are not morning people simply decide devotions are not for them.
Let me start with the procedure that I have used in producing these meditations. It starts in the evening, generally shortly after I go to bed. I read and begin thinking about the text I’ll write on the next evening. Then I look back at it through the day, especially if, as has happened multiple times, I actually forget which verse I’m meditating on while I’m working. In the evening I write my post on the text and schedule it to be published the next day at 7 am, at which point I will be meditating on the next one.
Any number of times, this procedure has failed me. I’ve been so tired some evenings that I went to sleep without looking at the text first. A couple of times, I’ve forgotten until after work, and started meditating around dinner time. Once I completely failed in following my procedure, and sat down to write about the text and read it at the same time. Oddly enough, I still found a meditation, even though it was “speed meditation”!
While I like a morning prayer time, that time is infrequently the most important time of prayer for me in the day. For me there will be various times during work. Lunch time is one of the better times for reading scripture. Prayer is more likely to come multiple times during the work day at my desk. I’m pretty sure a strong majority of my prayer time over the last 30 years has occurred at my desk at work.
I believe the psalmist when he said he got up before dawn and cried out. I believe that was a good thing for him. But everyone approaches their day differently. The pattern we impose on our meditations can be itself a work, and a dead tradition.
I would suggest spending some time in prayer and meditation at any time that strikes you as valuable. Then watch what happens. I have found that if I don’t take breaks during the day and do something to keep my spirit in shape, the day will go badly. I have found it doesn’t matter if I pray right at the moment I get up. Now sometimes I do, because I feel called to pray about something specific.
No matter when you call out to God, you can apply the second half of this verse and hope in the divine words, whether on the pages of scripture or spoken to you in your heart.
I have called out to you! Save me! that I may keep your testimonies.
We can miss the point of God saving us in two very different ways. First, we can see God’s salvation as a simple ticket out of our current situation. This applies whether we are being saved from a potentially deadly accident or ultimately from our sins. Second, we can see God’s salvation as setting us on our feet so that we can move forward and get it right ourselves.
Neither of these gets the message. God’s call opens to us the possibility of being holy. There is no possibility outside of that. Further, God’s call puts God in the driver’s seat, making us into the people we were designed to be.
We read about this in Romans 8:29-30:
For those whom he foreknew, he also determined to be the same in form as the image of his son, so that he could be the firstborn of many brethren. And those he determined, he also called, and those he called, he also make righteous, and those he made righteous, he also glorified.
As a note to those who may see my translation “determined,” rather than predestined as a more Wesleyan translation here, I think the verse itself makes it clear that we’re talking about God’s action, and by grammar, “determined” comes before “called.” Dealing with this theological detail is not within the cope of this post.
What is within the scope is that the initial call invites entrance into a process, all of which is accomplished by God, all the way to final glory. In other words when we cry out “Save me!” we’re inviting God to take us on a complete journey. That call is the one opening to actually observe God’s law. That too comes as God’s gift.
It’s also outside the scope of this post to discuss why we actually come to cry out in the first place. Suffice it to say I believe that even that is God’s gift, right along with our very life.
Crying out to God is a serious thing. You’re entering a one way street, heading out on a ride to eternity.
I cried out with all my heart. Answer me, LORD! I will observe your statutes.
If you have spent any time in prayer, you have likely spent time wondering if an answer was coming, and if it was coming, when would that be.
This is not just our experience in prayer, but our experience in almost any relationship. The time between a request and response seems very long.
I suspect this is inevitable. Everything takes time, but we like to see results immediately. Waiting in line is difficult for us. We wonder why the line doesn’t move faster, or why the store doesn’t take action to open more checkout stations.
Near my home there is a railroad track that leads into a nearby chemical factory. Frequently we have trains going in and out of the plant, often adding more loaded cars over a period of time. As a result, one can wait quite a long time for these trains to get out of the way. Traffic can line up for a long ways down the road on either side.
I am not so patient. I’ll frequently take a detour around the train, crossing the track some ways away. Sometimes this gets me to my destination faster, but frequently by the time I’ve completed my detour, I find that the traffic has dissipated, and I took longer getting around the delay than I would have taken just living through it.
There’s this natural desire to make things happen if they aren’t happening. We’d like everything to work on our timetable. But when we’re waiting on God and going on our own detour it’s possible that, like I do with the train, we might miss what’s going on because we’re so busy working our way around. We are seeming to accomplish things when we’re just occupying time on detours.
With the psalmist, we cry out with our whole heart. We ask for an answer. We promise God our obedience, our observance, our careful attention. But it’s easy to play busy, rather than to wait.
There are times to be busy. We don’t want to miss those. But there are also times to watch and wait, to look to the Lord for the answer. Like Habakkuk (2:1), we need to climb up on the watchtower, stand guard, and wait to see what the Lord says.
Your testimonies are righteous forever. Give me understanding that I may live.
This verse illustrates a point I’ve made a few times during this series. The psalmist does not draw clear distinctions between the various terms he uses for God’s law. There’s the overarching “Torah” or “instruction,” but it’s very difficult to differentiate functions for the different aspects of this instruction in the text. This is why I believer the psalmist is using a variety of terms both for literary value (imagine this whole psalm with one word for “law”!) but also to emphasize the broad nature of God’s law.
This runs from historical narrative, personal experience, and instructions for specific circumstances, all the way to general ethical principles, all wound together. It’s important to understand this. Logically, we distinguish law, as such, from other things in scripture, but this Psalm is not attempting to make careful literary or logical distinctions. He’s praising God for the whole.
In the law as conceived here we learn that God creates, judges, calls, rescues, guides, blesses, and curses. God interacts with people in many and varied ways. Much of this interaction, in fact, I would argue, the vast majority of the interaction comes in what we would call the natural order of the universe.
We sometimes look for God in action, and when we fail to find spectacular things happening, we think God is no longer active. I recall in a class I was teaching someone asking me why God is no longer so active as in the Bible. My first reaction is to look around the room and note that we are still here. The laws of nature are still functioning. That’s God in action.
Someone did something wonderful for me and for my family this week. It was a complete surprise. There was no apparent violation of the laws of nature, but I still believe it was a miracle, and I say this without intending to take anything away from the person who did it.
So when we get to this verse and we see the prayer, “Give me understanding that I may live,” we see God in action, always and everywhere. “Except the LORD build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” God is, by nature, involved with everything.
Some people wonder why we should be totally dependent on God’s grace for salvation. Let’s go back further. We’re totally dependent on God’s grace for existence. I like to call this creating grace, the realization that our very existence is a gift. So any other dependence on God is simply derivative of that initial complete dependence. You can’t pay God, because you’d be paying God out of the Divine bank account.
There’s one other special aspect of this prayer. It’s a prayer that will be fulfilled. For Christians, I would point to James 1:5: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all generously and willingly, and it will be given.” The understanding or the wisdom is a gift that will be given.
What might change for you today if you relied on God to answer this prayer?
Trouble and anguish have found me, Still I delight in your commands.
I’m going to let a Psalm take over commentary for today.
1 In you, LORD, I take refuge. Never let me be disappointed. 2 Deliver me in your righteousness, and rescue me. Turn your ear to me, and save me. 3 Be to me a rock of refuge to which I may always go. Give the command to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress. 4 Rescue me, my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man. 5 For you are my hope, Lord GOD, my confidence from my youth. 6 I have relied on you from the womb. You are he who took me out of my mother’s womb. I will always praise you. 7 I am a marvel to many, but you are my strong refuge. 8 My mouth shall be filled with your praise, with your honor all day long. 9 Don’t reject me in my old age. Don’t forsake me when my strength fails. 10 For my enemies talk about me. Those who watch for my soul conspire together, 11 saying, “God has forsaken him. Pursue and take him, for no one will rescue him.” 12 God, don’t be far from me. My God, hurry to help me. 13 Let my accusers be disappointed and consumed. Let those who want to harm me be covered with disgrace and scorn. 14 But I will always hope, and will add to all of your praise. 15 My mouth will tell about your righteousness, and of your salvation all day, though I don’t know its full measure. 16 I will come with the mighty acts of the Lord GOD I will make mention of your righteousness, even of yours alone. 17 God, you have taught me from my youth. Until now, I have declared your wondrous works. 18 Yes, even when I am old and gray-haired, God, don’t forsake me, until I have declared your strength to the next generation, your might to everyone who is to come. 19 God, your righteousness also reaches to the heavens. You have done great things. God, who is like you? 20 You, who have shown us many and bitter troubles, you will let me live. You will bring us up again from the depths of the earth. 21 Increase my honor and comfort me again. 22 I will also praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, my God. I sing praises to you with the lyre, Holy One of Israel. 23 My lips shall shout for joy! My soul, which you have redeemed, sings praises to you! 24 My tongue will also talk about your righteousness all day long, for they are disappointed, and they are confounded, who want to harm me.
Psalm 71, World English Bible, slightly modified by me.
Your righteousness is right forever, and your instruction is reliable.
I commonly use the phrase “God’s eternal law” in discussing the absolute, eternal, immutable law of God. This is what defines who God is and the purpose of the universe, and is not subject to our perspective. That is to say, objective law. God’s law which is forever, in the words of this verse.
Our problem is that we cannot really comprehend eternal things, nor can we truly comprehend things objectively. There is always an element of our own experience in what we do. It is a statement of faith when we claim that God’s law is, in fact eternal.
Each individual law contained in scripture, or expressed in any other way is a derivative of God’s eternal law. A particular expression of God’s law is never the same as God’s eternal law, though it derives its authority from that eternal law. Just as I understand God as without beginning or end, and as trinity, things which are not empirically observable, so I understand God’s law as eternal, again something which cannot be objectively demonstrated.
Growing up, I regularly heard the ten commandments described as God’s eternal law. This was to be distinguished from various other laws, largely ceremonial, in Torah, which are temporary. (Note that this is growing up in a Christian, Seventh-day Adventist home. This is not the understanding of Judaism.)
The problem here is that Torah itself does not make this particular distinction. All of the laws given by God are binding. They may be binding at different times, on different people, and under different circumstances, but they remain divine law.
I maintain that all expressions of law that we can receive an understand relate to particular times and circumstances. Some are much more eternal and broadly applicable than others. All derive from God’s eternal law. None are, themselves, eternal in form and expression.
I’m going to embed two videos here that come from my series on Paul from some years ago. The first begins a discussion of reading about law in scripture.
The second follows up with more detail.
Now there are a few sessions between these two, so if you are very determined, you can view the playlist.
But now we jump to the second half of the verse. “Eternal” is daunting and impossible to reach. Sometimes we have a tendency to dismiss the things we cannot fully understand. But with this statement we get the other side. We can rely on God’s instruction. We may not be able to fully comprehend the source, but we can rely on what we have.
In real life we learn to accept what works. We get on airplanes and travel without having a full conception of how that aircraft works. We don’t often think about it, but that aircraft is also not perfectly made. It would be hard to even conceive of what perfect means. Every part is tested, not to some absolute perfection, but rather to certain tolerances. We live with this sort of thing every day.
One way to discover that you can rely on certain things as a way to live is simply to try them. Taste and see that God is good. Try it. Don’t get shaken by what you can’t understand. You can understand enough.
Take the challenge to adventure with an incomprehensibly great God!
