Psalm 19 Commentary

Law.  Decrees.  Statues.  Commands.  Precepts.   Once the writer of Psalm 19 switched his focus from the wonder of creation to the wonder of God’s law, he dug deep into his Hebrew thesaurus to use about every synonym for “law” as he could find.  But he used this variety of terms not merely because he did not want to sound repetitive.  It seems more likely that he wanted to convey his enthusiasm as broadly as he could while at the same time reminding us how very capacious the revelation of God is when it comes to showing us the blueprint for how to live well inside God’s good creation.

Of course it is true that even so the Bible is not a simple source that we can consult and then easily find God’s answer to every ethical question that we encounter in life.  You cannot prooftext your way out of every conundrum we all face from time to time.  Clearly there are issues we face today that were not known in biblical times and that God, therefore, could not specifically reveal as part of his law.  The Bible is not going to tell us, for instance, how we should regard the emerging technology of Artificial Intelligence.  We are not going to locate passages in Scripture that specifically tell us how to think about nuclear power or the ethics of creating weapons of mass destruction.

But perhaps what we could say given the expansive view of God’s laws that Psalm 19 represents is that the revelation of God in Scripture is complete enough that we can find guiding principles that can help us in assessing a wide range of issues, including modern and contemporary things that were wholly unknown (probably unimaginable) to biblical writers.  For certain what this psalm reflects is the idea that in all things we want to approach questions and practices of all kinds with what verse 9 calls “the fear of the Lord.”

And it seems that at minimum what such holy fear and reverence imply is that the wise person knows that in all of life we have to take God into account in some fashion.  To allude to a well-known (and possibly somewhat overused!) observation of the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper, there is not a single square inch of this creation about which Christ cannot say, “That is mine!”  So when it comes to wanting to discern the ways of God in Christ in our lives, we’re not going to bump into something that causes us to conclude, “Well, here’s something that has nothing to do with God or God’s design for creation.”

But, of course, it is one thing to suggest how wonderful it is to know the full scope of God’s laws, statutes, precepts, and decrees but quite another to be able consistently to live them out.  Sometimes we come to wrong conclusions as to what the will of God may be in such-and-such a situation.  And worse, sometimes we do have a pretty firm sense of the right thing and the wrong thing to do but we choose the wrong thing anyway.  We sin.  Psalm 19 and this psalmist recognize that sad fact.

So not surprisingly the longer this poet reflects on and even rhapsodizes on God’s laws, the more inevitable it becomes that he has to get into a penitential mode.  Thus the request for God to show him the error of his ways.  Thus the words about helping him to see his hidden faults, the stuff he thinks about wrongly or thinks about rightly but does the wrong thing anyway and yet he may be wholly unaware of this fact.  You have to admire the honesty and the candor behind those verses near the end of Psalm 19.

So far in this sermon commentary we have not touched on the first six verses that express wonder over the witness of the creation and the splendor and regularity of the sun running its course each day.  As has been noted in past commentaries on Psalm 19 here on the CEP website, there is always the temptation to preach on Psalm 19 almost as though it has two distinct parts that are not readily related to each other.  But that is a mistake.  Although it may look as though the psalmist all-but changes the subject between verses 6 and 7, in his mind the transition was very natural.  Creation fairly scream out the message that it was fashioned by a wonderful and almighty and glorious Creator God.  But that same God, having made this cosmos of splendors, did not then walk away from it.  No, this God stayed deeply invested in the creation and that is why Israel’s God can be trusted to reveal to human beings the ways of this same God.

Because it is such a wonderful world, we should want to live inside it in ways that promote delight and flourishing.  God wants that supremely for us and so despite the fact that we need to have God’s ways revealed to us since our sinfulness prevents us from perceiving them more readily and naturally, nonetheless God cares enough for us even in our fallen and broken state to reach out to us with exhortations designed to keep us safe and well.  And since God is the one who set up the whole universe, who knows better what leads to flourishing.

Thus we all press on in life discerning, praying, and looking for God’s illumination in all things.  And we pray that our thoughts and the meditations of our hearts are pleasing to God who is indeed our only Rock and Redeemer through Christ Jesus our Lord.

Illustration Idea

The well-known physicist Freeman Dyson was a long way from being a religious man.  Yet he famously once observed that the more he studied how this universe came into being and how human life in particular ever developed, the more convinced he became that “someone tinkered with the works.”  What Dyson was referring to is the fact that there were a small bevy of things that had to go exactly right in a fraction of a second following the Big Bang for life in the cosmos to emerge. Had one infinitesimally small factor gone a different way, the universe would never have seen the development of heavier elements like carbon and that in turn would have prevented the formation of stars and ultimately of carbon-based lifeforms like human beings.

Sometimes this is referred to as the Anthropic Principle.  As another scientist once put it, the data seems to say that somehow or another the universe knew that we’d be coming along eventually as humanity.  Indeed, the force of the Anthropic Principle (and frankly the suggestion that it points to a Designer) is so strong that about the only way atheists have found to get out from under the weight of it is to propose the theory of a multiverse.  Perhaps there has been an almost infinite number of Big Bang events creating mind-numbing numbers of universes perhaps almost all of which never yielded sentient life.  But if you let that scenario play out with enough universes getting created, sooner or later one of them would hit the jackpot and that just happens to be the one we’re in.

But the philosopher Alvin Plantinga once mused about this (in an amusing way at that!) when he proposed the following: Suppose in the Old West in a saloon somewhere a group of cowboys are playing cards.  But suppose that one player on every single hand somehow ends up with all four aces and the wild card.  Knowing something foul was up, one cowboy pulls his gun out.  But then the lucky cowboy says, “Now hold up there in the saddle a sec, Tex.  Did it ever occur to you that in an infinite number of possible universes eventually there would be one in which I would get all four aces and the wild card on every deal and that just happens to be the universe we’re in?  So put up that shootin’ iron and sit down, ya dumb galoot.”

That argument would no hold water in the Old West.  Probably it is just as strained in the theory of the multiverse.  As Psalm 19 says, the heavens declare the glory of God and every once in a while they declare it in surprising ways!  Just ask Freeman Dyson for instance.