On your precepts will I meditate;I will look at your ways. There’s a big difference between meditation and biblical exegesis. I tend to use exegesis to refer to extracting the meaning from a text in the narrow sense of what a particular author meant by a particular statement or passage. Hermeneutics generally refers to the…
Blessed are you LORD.Teach me your statutes. Mark Twain said, “Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.” Or something like that. I’ve found a number of variations, all attributed to Twain. The prayer, “Teach me!” is one that is pretty much guaranteed an answer, positive at least in the sense that…
With my whole heart I have sought you.Don’t let me wander from your commands. The word here translated commands is mitsvot, which is often thought of as good deeds, but Jewish commentators use this primarily of the 613 commands in Torah. In this way, the mitsvot can be considered another way to refer to the…
As I’ve meditated on these first eight verses of Psalm 119, I’ve opened up a number of topics. Let’s put them together, sort of! I hope you’re enjoying this journey as I am. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be posting the first verse in the second section. (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)
I will praise you with an upright heartWhen I learn your righteous judgments. What does learning about God’s righteous (right) judgments have to do with praise? If we think of this Psalm as expressing joy over a list of rules, this might be a good question. If you haven’t yet, please read my earlier post…
Then I won’t be ashamed,When I keep my eyes on all your commands. I didn’t get the poetry in my translation. It’s hard to get everything into it at once. This verse strikes at one of our most serious problems. Our identity. Our ability to live with ourselves. You’ve surely heard stories of people going…
In my current series on Psalm 119, I’m doing a daily meditation on each verse. These are, by design, short. At the same time, it’s difficult to cover certain nuances effectively in individual posts. One of these is the question of why I would write this particular series. I’ve already included my video on the…
Oh that my ways were steady,Keeping your statutes. Any time we’re looking at a set of standards, it’s well to be realistic, especially with ourselves. As we go through this Psalm, we’ll be celebrating God’s law in many ways and places, but there are a number of instances where the author admits his limitations and…
About your precepts you commanded,“Keep them diligently!” Sometimes things are tough. You wonder what’s coming next. I’m meditating on these passages one at a time. I read the passage in the morning, and then I write these in the evening. During the day, I keep coming back to that verse. In deciding to do 176…
My Sunday School class just finished a several-week study on the Sermon on the Mount. We did not use any study guides as a class, though I consulted three books I publish, One World: The Lord’s Prayer from a Process Perspective, The Jesus Manifesto: A Participatory Study Guide to the Sermon on the Mount, and…
