Psalm 119 begins by saying…
Happy are those whose way is blameless,
who walk in the law of the Lord.
Happy are those who keep his decrees,
who seek him with their whole heart,
who also do no wrong,
but walk in his ways.
While this may be a true statement in a general
way, in an ideal world, it occurs to me, at first glance, that there is no such
person whose way is blameless, who keeps God’s decrees with his or her whole
heart, who does no wrong. Did such a thought occur to the psalmist, or did he
think that some human beings could be blameless? I am not sure. However, on second thought, I do
believe that there is at least one person this statement is true of, namely Jesus.
The psalmist quickly shows, after this introduction,
that he does not think himself blameless. He writes, “O that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes!”
I doubt that the psalmist would say this if he thought he was blameless. There
is a recognition here that he might fail and that he needs help from God.
The psalmist asks an important question,
“How can young people keep their way pure?” He says that the keys to keeping
one’s way pure include:
- Guarding one’s way according to God’s word.
- Seeking God with one’s whole heart.
- Treasuring God’s word in one’s heart.
Yet, I feel a sense of frustration here with the
psalmist. That is because after trying to live the Christian life for forty
years, and trying to follow the psalmist’s advice, I still find myself tripping
up and falling short.
The rest of the psalm reveals what I can only
regard as the psalmist’s obsession with God’s law. I can picture the psalmist
re-iterating each of these verses, like a Catholic saying the Rosary over and
over again, in order to try to keep evil out of his heart. But does it work?
I think the answer is simply “no”. At the end of
this long psalm the author admits, “I have gone
astray like a lost sheep.” The only solution to this problem is for God to seek
out his servant, for God to show mercy.
C. S. Lewis offers the following, more positive, reflection on this
psalm….
As everyone knows, the Psalm specially devoted to
the Law is 119, the longest in the whole collection. And everyone has probably
noticed that from the literary or technical point of view, it is the most
formal and elaborate of them all. The technique consists in taking a series of
words which are all, for purposes of this poem, more or less synonyms (word, statutes, commandments, testimonies, etc.), and ringing the
changes on them through each of its eight-verse sections—which themselves
correspond to the letters of the alphabet. (This may have given an ancient ear
something of the same sort of pleasure we get from the Italian metre called the
Sestina, where instead of rhymes we
have the same end words repeated in varying orders in each stanza.) In other
words, this poem is not, and does not pretend to be, a sudden outpouring of the
heart like, say, Psalm 18. It is a pattern, a thing done like embroidery,
stitch by stitch, through long, quiet hours, for love of the subject and for
the delight in leisurely, disciplined craftsmanship.
Now this, in itself, seems to me very important
because it lets us into the mind and mood of the poet. We can guess at once
that he felt about the Law somewhat as he felt about his poetry; both involved
exact and loving conformity to an intricate pattern. This at once suggests an
attitude from which the Pharisaic conception could later grow but which in
itself, though not necessarily religious, is quite innocent. It will look like
priggery or pedantry (or else like a neurotic fussiness) to those who cannot
sympathise with it, but it need not be any of these things. It may be the
delight in Order, the pleasure in getting a thing “just so”—as in dancing a
minuet. Of course the poet is well aware that something incomparably more
serious than a minuet is here in question. He is also aware that he is very
unlikely, himself, to achieve this perfection of discipline: “O that my ways were made so straight that I might keep thy statutes!” (5). At present they aren’t, and he
can’t. But his effort to do so does not spring from servile fear. The Order of
the Divine mind, embodied in the Divine Law, is beautiful. What should a man do
but try to reproduce it, so far as possible, in his daily life? His “delight”
is in those statutes (16); to study
them is like finding treasure (14);
they affect him like music, are his “songs” (54); they taste like honey (103);
they are better than silver and gold (72).
As one’s eyes are more and more opened, one sees more and more in them, and it
excites wonder (18). This is not
priggery nor even scrupulosity; it is the language of a man ravished by a moral
beauty. If we cannot at all share his experience, we shall be the losers. Yet I
cannot help fancying that a Chinese Christian—one whose own traditional culture
had been the “schoolmaster to bring him to Christ”—would appreciate this Psalm
more than most of us; for it is an old idea in that culture that life should
above all things be ordered and that its order should reproduce a Divine order.
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