Psalm 119:1-8 Commentary

The Aleph section of Psalm 119 is a little all over the place in some ways.  As many of us know, the longest of all the Psalms is divided up into 8-verse units that follow the ordering of the Hebrew alphabet with each line of each segment beginning with the same letter of the alphabet.  Each line in this week’s lection starts with Aleph, basically the Hebrew letter A.  This is something that to my knowledge no translator has tried to replicate as it would be difficult if not impossible to translate the Hebrew into first words of each line into English words (or Dutch words or Spanish words) that likewise all start with the same letter.  But this is how it is laid out in Hebrew and this may have been designed to help to memorize the psalm.

In terms of content, these eight verses are curious.  They start with a beatitude.  A blessing is pronounced on all those who perfectly follow God’s laws and commands and precepts.  We are told that these blessed folks are quite remarkable: they seek God with their whole heart and are said to do absolutely no wrong.  Naturally this prompts the average reader to say, “Really?  Is there actually a group of people in this fallen world who never do anything wrong but are perfect in every dimension of their lives?”

And long about the time you start to wonder about that, we switch from the beatitude on the perfectly obedient to an admission that even for this psalmist, that just does not happen to be the case.  Verse 5 has the psalmist saying, “Oh, I sure wish I were in that blessed group.  But I’m not!”  This poet even admits to feeling a keen sense of shame whenever he looks at the commands of God because, alack and alas, it is most decidedly not like looking into a mirror!  But the psalmist says he will try.  He will keep learning and keep trying hard as he learns.  And then finally in verse 8 we get the sense that things on this front are sufficiently dodgy that this person more or less pleads with God not to forsake him—not utterly at least.

All in all, there is a lot packed into these verses that more or less set the agenda for the whopping 168 verses still to come.  Psalm 119 is an extended meditation on the purity of God’s laws.  Every synonym for “command” is used along the way: Commands, Laws, Statutes, Precepts, Decrees, Ways.  The psalmist is positively rhapsodic about all such things.  We may not typically think of rules as the kind of thing one might swoon over but swoon this writer does over and over.  And yet also weaving through the larger psalm is the same thing packed into the opening eight verses: we know that the sum of God’s commands are the right way to live in this world but most of us struggle to achieve anything akin to perfect obedience.

Although as Christians we may not find anything to disagree with overall in this psalm, we do have to admit that preaching on and studying or meditating on Psalm 119 does provide some measure of theological challenges.  After all, the Gospel declares that no one can keep the law perfectly.  If the only path to salvation is the one requiring strict adherence to God’s every statute, then we are all in a lot of trouble.  The classic New Testament example of a person who was sure eternal life was earned via perfect obedience to the laws of God is the so-called Rich Young Ruler.  As we encounter him in Mark 10, Matthew 19, and Luke 18, we meet a man who is sure that all he needs from Jesus is to punch his self-generated ticket to heaven.  Jesus has to find a way to teach this man that that’s not how it works and as a result, the man walks away sad.

The gob smacked disciples are merely stunned.  “Who then can be saved?” they sputter in disbelief.  In essence Jesus replies, “No one.  Well, not that way.  That kind of perfect obedience is impossible for all people.  But God will take care of it for you.”  We are, as Paul wrote repeatedly, saved by grace alone.  The kind of perfect righteousness that Rich Young Man thought he had already achieved is actually achievable only by the Son of God who gives all of us who believe the transfer credit of his own perfect righteousness.  That’s what justification is all about.

But given that and now getting back to Psalm 119, we want to teach and preach on this psalm with all that in mind so that we don’t end up doing an end run around being saved by grace after all.  But if Jesus himself admitted that no human beings ever actually can find themselves within the beatitude category with which Psalm 119 begins, how are we to take this extended celebration of God’s commands?  The answer for some of us who are heirs of the Protestant Reformation is what John Calvin called the third use of the law.  Yes, God’s Law can be used as a constraint against evil behavior.  And also yes, God’s Law convicts us of our wrongdoing and so leads us properly to confess our breaches of that Law.  But once we are saved by grace alone through faith alone, following God’s Law, according to Calvin, becomes our way to say “Thank you” to God for his grace in Christ Jesus our Lord.

When the authors of the Reformed confession The Heidelberg Catechism did a series of reflections on the Ten Commandments, they located them not in the Misery part that convicts us of our need for salvation and certainly not in the Deliverance part that details how we are saved through Christ alone.  Instead they put the specifics of the Ten Commandments in the Gratitude section that details how we express our thanksgiving to God for so great a salvation.

That, then, may suggest how we can properly appropriate and appreciate Psalm 119’s long celebration of God’s commands and our attempted obedience to them.  This fits within our larger Christian life and identity as the exercise of saying thanks to God every day.  No, we will in this life never keep it perfectly.  But how wonderful to know that this does not imperil our very salvation.  No, we don’t use this fact as a reason to be casual about our behavior and we certainly don’t go to the extreme reflected in Romans 6 when Paul dismisses out of hand the idea that we can sin boldly and without qualm since God will forgive us anyway.  As such, Psalm 119 reminds us to be sober minded about how we live as disciples and that even on the other side of our salvation the laws of God are to be celebrated.  They are a gift that can lead to delightful lives of flourishing—the very kind of life God desires for each one of us.

Illustration Idea

In what I think was a New Yorker cartoon I saw years back, two rough-looking fellows are seen exiting a church after a worship service.  One of them says to the other as they descend the church’s front steps, “Well, on the bright side at least I didn’t make any graven images this past week.”  The humor aside, the underlying idea of the cartoon is the caricature that church is where to go to be told everything that is wrong about you.  Church is a place of finger wagging and finger pointing, of the bad news that we are all corrupt sinners.  And though we cannot deny that theologically we do need to know about our sin and misery as part of the process of being hungry for the salvation God brings through Christ Jesus, hopefully the bottom line of our worship is hope and joy.  And one hopes that even insofar as we encounter God’s Law in worship, we even so see in that Law not merely condemnation but the path to grateful living for all the gifts lavished on us by the God of all grace.

Note: the CEP website also has commentaries on Psalm 146:

2015: from Doug Bratt: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2015-10-26/psalm-146-3/

2018: from Leonard Vander Zee: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2018-10-29/psalm-146/