Psalm 19:7-14 Commentary

We all recognize that rules and regulations are simply a part of life.  Mostly, however, we are only too happy to dispense with recitations of such things as quickly as possible.  Anyone who has ever flown on a commercial airline know that before the flight can begin, the flight attendants have to run through their safety presentation.  But almost everyone tunes it out.  And even the flight attendants move swiftly through it.  At amusement parks before the rollercoaster will move one inch, the operator has to run through rules like keeping hands and feet inside the car at all times, etc.  Before using certain websites we have to click “Accept” on the sometimes very long User Agreement but we generally read not one of the rules and policies to which we click our assent.

Sometimes we also chafe under certain rules or laws and we then blame it on the person whose job it is to enforce those regulations.  My wife has long been involved in the medical field and among her responsibilities has been to enforce training and continuing education requirements that are laid out by government agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services or the National Institutes of Health.  They make the rules but when certain doctors and nurses find those rules onerous, they don’t write the government but complain to my wife!  Easier to shoot the messenger and all that.

But now cue up the second half of Psalm 19 to see something totally opposite of all this chafing and eye-rolling and boredom where rules and rule recitations are concerned.  The Lectionary on this occasion has elected to skip the celebration of God’s creation in verses 1-6 to pick up at verse 7 where the psalm appears to be changing the subject almost completely.  But in truth Psalm 19 is a unified poem.  Throughout the psalm, the psalmist is celebrating the orderly nature of the cosmos.  God has created a universe of splendor and beauty but also of order and logic and predictability and stability.  The sun stands in for the rest of the created order as an entity that is as reliable on a daily basis as can be conceived.

And speaking of order, think of also God’s laws, regulations, statutes, commandments, decrees, precepts (Psalm 19 exhausts the thesaurus in this song!).  They too represent cosmic stability.  They are gifts from a God who desires our flourishing in the beautiful world God provided for us.  To keep us safe and healthy and whole, God has devised these laws and such like guardrails to keep us from skidding into any ditches or driving over any cliffs.

As such, the psalmist deems that adoring all those rules is itself a source of joy and delight and (believe it or not) refreshment for one’s soul.  The psalmist is the kind of person who would ask a flight attendant to slow down when giving the safety briefing!  Linger over it!  If God’s laws are the User Agreement for life in God’s creation, the psalmist would read and re-read the whole thing top to bottom with a smile on his face.  He would decorate his house with framed counted-cross-stitch renditions of various laws and rules from God’s Word in Scripture.  The law to this person is just that precious.

Let’s admit that for even many of the people who come to church each week and who might hear a sermon on Psalm 19, adopting this kind of mindset vis-à-vis God’s Law would require a pretty major shift in orientation and mindset.  Yet the ability to see that God has our best interests at heart—and that is why he gives us a kind of Owner’s Manual for life—is itself a gift of God’s grace to us.

And, of course, in a now Christian context it is also important were we to preach on Psalm 19 to make it clear that although we prize God’s Law as much as this psalmist, we recognize that keeping the Law is not how we get saved or curry favor with the Almighty.  Salvation is singularly the gift of God that comes to us by grace alone through faith alone.  John Calvin’s well-known “third use of the Law” as a guide to leading grateful lives is key here.  God has saved us despite our utter and abiding underserving.  Now we present our renewed resurrection lives to God as a kind of extended and lifelong “Thank You” note.  We strive to keep the Law that could never have been the path to salvation—because we were incapable of keeping the Law—on account of salvation’s having been handed to us gratis.  We could not have been saved through law-keeping but now that we are saved we say thank you through law-keeping and also to demonstrate the newness we receive in Christ.

Yes, it remains also true that as we live between the times in the already and the not yet, the Law can also reveal our sins to us and so can be a goad to confess those lapses from our better resurrection selves.  “But who can discern their own errors?” the psalmist asks in verse 12.  Well, sometimes we can and sometimes we can’t but the Law gives us a leg up on seeing how well (or not well) we are leaning into God’s creation intentions through our own behavior.  Thankfully for all of us, it is not our own self-generated righteousness that counts but the perfect righteousness of Christ Jesus that gets credited to our account.  But precisely because we have received this unmerited gift, we want by the power of the Holy Spirit to live in ways that are as consistent with the righteousness of Christ we can.

Illustration Idea

 This illustration idea has been used before here on the CEP website but some things bear repeating.  Frederick Buechner once observed that in life there are two kinds of laws.  One type of law can be somewhat arbitrary and could even be subject to change.  A property owner, for instance, may or may not decide to post a “No Trespassing” or “No Hunting” sign along the edges of his property.  A Department of Transportation may set a Speed Limit at 45 MPH (about 72 KPH) but one day could change it to 35 or 50.  Household rules sometimes vary from family to family.  But there is another kind of law that is not subject to change and one cannot resist or break these laws without consequences.  The Law of Gravity comes to mind.  You don’t have to like or dislike this rule but if you are standing on a precipice on a mountain or cliff, you had best respect gravity and conform your movements accordingly.

Note: the CEP website also has 2 commentaries on Psalm 124:

Leonard Vander Zee from 2018: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2018-09-24/psalm-124-2/

Doug Bratt from 2015: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2015-09-21/psalm-124-3/