Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: righteousness

Psalm 119:143 – Trouble!

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.
²Deliver me in your righteousness, and rescue me.
    Turn your ear to me, and save me.
³Be 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.
⁴Rescue me, my God, from the hand of the wicked,
    from the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man.
⁵For you are my hope, Lord GOD,
    my confidence from my youth.
⁶I have relied on you from the womb.
    You are he who took me out of my mother’s womb.
    I will always praise you.
⁷I am a marvel to many,
    but you are my strong refuge.
⁸My mouth shall be filled with your praise,
    with your honor all day long.
⁹Don’t reject me in my old age.
    Don’t forsake me when my strength fails.
¹⁰For 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.”
¹²God, don’t be far from me.
    My God, hurry to help me.
¹³Let my accusers be disappointed and consumed.
    Let those who want to harm me be covered with disgrace and scorn.
¹⁴But I will always hope,
    and will add to all of your praise.
¹⁵My mouth will tell about your righteousness,
    and of your salvation all day,
    though I don’t know its full measure.
¹⁶I will come with the mighty acts of the Lord GOD
    I will make mention of your righteousness, even of yours alone.
¹⁷God, you have taught me from my youth.
    Until now, I have declared your wondrous works.
¹⁸Yes, 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.
¹⁹God, your righteousness also reaches to the heavens.
    You have done great things.
    God, who is like you?
²⁰You, 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.
²¹Increase my honor
    and comfort me again.
²²I will also praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, my God.
    I sing praises to you with the lyre, Holy One of Israel.
²³My lips shall shout for joy!
    My soul, which you have redeemed, sings praises to you!
²⁴My 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.

April 15, 2025
Psalm 119:137 – Right

You are righteous, Oh LORD,
and your judgments are correct.

Have you ever noticed all the things we say about God that might sound like value judgments?

Everything from God is love or God is good to God is just or God is righteous. Just how did we make that determination and is it ours to make? Come to think of it, what would we do about it if we happened to be wrong? If we quit worshiping or praising God, speaking of all these wonderful attributes, God would still be God and would still do precisely what God wants. Who could stop God?

Of course we don’t mean that we have evaluated God and decided that God passes all the God-tests. We really don’t! But at the same time, we’re right ready to complain if God doesn’t pass some of the God tests. In our superior opinion, of course.

So is there anything worthwhile going on here or are we just repeating stuff because other people have repeated it for how long we don’t know?

I’d suggest that these kinds of affirmations do serve a very real purpose. They help us remember that we are going somewhere, that there are options for things to be better, and that we do actually matter. If God is good, then there is goodness at the other end of our activities, our lives, and even our universe. It’s not all just a jumbled mess.

In fact, I have known people who don’t believe in God to make similar affirmations about the world we live in. Like various religious believers, they make these affirmations with various levels of assurance. Sometimes it’s a faint hope that things can get better. At other times it’s a determination.

Over may years I’ve seen this note after various national elections. I always say that God is in control. As affirmed in Daniel 4, God rules in the kingdoms of men. Sometimes God sets over them the basest of men. In the dialect of English I used there, “basest” is not a compliment.

Inevitably someone then asks me why I bother to vote if I think God rules it all. I think that gets it absolutely backwards. Because God rules, I believe there is a good goal to work toward. Because God rules, I feel I owe the situation the best that I can do. With Dr. Martin Luther King I affirm that ?the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I immediately want to bend it faster!

We really have our own choice of hope or despair, and it is a choice. If we choose despair, it will follow us all our days. If we choose hope, we will pursue that all our days.

Will you choose hope, and righteousness, today?

(Featured image generated by Adobe Express, which uses Adobe Firefly based on a prompt produced in a discussion with Gemini AI.)

April 9, 2025
Psalm 119:101 – Evil Paths

I have kept my feet away from every evil path
so that I might keep your word.

Too often we think of keeping from doing things that are wrong as a point-by-point effort. Make a list of things we shouldn’t do, and avoid those things.

This can be a dangerous trap if undertaken independently of other reforms. It leads to an a sort of “goodness accounting” in which we count deeds done correctly, and use this a sign posts on our road to being better people. One of the more humorous, and yet destructive things this can lead to is keeping count of sins not committed, and considering these great accomplishments.

This happens in dieting, a process with which I’m somewhat acquainting. It’s easy to tell yourself that you didn’t eat that dessert after lunch, and thus you can be excused for having an extra slice of cake at dinner. This kind of accounting results in forgetting the totals, and providing oneself an excuse for whatever one wishes to eat. Trust me, you’re not going to keep an accurate account. You don’t really want to.

If you want to get to a destination, you need to get on a path that goes there. About three years ago various lab tests informed me that I needed to make a serious change in lifestyle, eat less, eat better, and get more exercise. One possibility is to try to count the things I was doing better, and do those until better numbers resulted in my lab test. The alternative was to change paths, to choose a new lifestyle that involved healthier eating and more activity. Once you get on that path, details become easier, because you realize that everything has to be different and it needs to stay that way. There is no day coming when cakes, pies, and ice cream from a substantial part of the diet, and there is no time coming when you can afford to go back to couch potato ways.

Turning back to myself, I had to decide to change paths. I knew that, because I know myself well enough to know that any haphazard approach involving singular acts of self-sacrifice would end up with as many acts of self indulgence and no actual gain in health.

(Please here this in the context of God’s sanctifying grace and reliance on divine power. I’ve discussed that before while meditating on this psalm and that hasn’t changed.)

To look at another issue, and one on which I have had much less success, consider a balance in work and rest. Again, picking out this or that to change, drop,, or add to the schedule is likely to drive one crazy and increase tension. What is needed (I tell myself) is a change of approach overall. You see, I can’t say with the psalmist that I have kept away from every evil path.

And here we need to consider “evil.” Some may be thinking, “A little bit of overworking, or even lots of overworking isn’t evil.” You see, we want to think of overwork as diligence. Then we try to keep things manageable by dropping this or that task, or taking a moment here or there instead of looking for a balanced way to approach life and work.

Killing yourself by overeating or overworking is not really morally better than killing yourself more intentionally. It just looks better, feels better, and comes with a false sense of pride and self-justification.

But in the end that balance, and simply following the ideal path that God lays out is the one path that leads anywhere helpful.

What path are you on?

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

March 4, 2025
Psalm 119:40 – Grant Me Life

I long for your precepts.
By your righteousness give me life.

I spent a good deal of time thinking about the phrase “by your righteousness.” It could be understood in a number of different ways. Two of these would be “in your righteousness” and “with your righteousness.” The second of these might lead Christians into a discussion of imputed and imparted righteousness. I’m not going there.

It seems to me that we find it easy to deny God’s promises by using our theology. As we figure out how God works, we tend to add in many derived ideas about what God can and can’t do, or if we’re being more theologically orthodox, what God will or will not do. It’s very easy to reduce God to a manageable size as we figure out just how God accomplishes things.

The psalmist has the right idea here. Simply ask the righteous God for life, righteous life, produced by a righteous God.

I can’t understand the process. I have ideas. I prefer certain explanations to others. But I think this verse makes a pretty good prayer. “I want the life you offer Lord. Please give me that life.”

I’m making that my simple prayer for 2025.

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI, then modified slightly by me.)

January 2, 2025