Psalm 119:33-40 Commentary

A few weeks back, for the last Sunday in July, the RCL took us to a snippet of Psalm 119 (verses 129-136), and now here we are again – but this time verses 33-40.  So to review all the basics: Psalm 119 is the longest of all the psalms clocking in at 176 verses.  Those verses are broken down into 8-verse units with each successive unit corresponding to successive letters in the Hebrew alphabet (and so 22 units in all) and with each sentence within each 8-verse block starting with the Hebrew letter of that section.  That makes the whole psalm an acrostic with 22 more mini-acrostics inside of it.  For what it’s worth, verses 33-40 are the section of the fifth letter in the Hebrew alphabet: He.  Each line’s first word starts with He.

But getting back into Psalm 119 has other challenges since really the entire poem has a singular bottom line: God’s Law is precious and life-giving and the psalmist clearly cannot get enough of savoring that Law (and all its synonym words of command, statute, precept, rules, decree, ways, etc.)  And if he’s not gushing over the beauty and wonder of the Law, he’s asking God to make him even more excited about it, while also asking for God’s help in actually keeping and following God’s ways at all times and in all places.

Really, that is pretty much the message in every one of this song’s 22 stanzas and so finding fresh things to say this week after having just been in this psalm 5 weeks ago is a little challenging.  So the question becomes: is there anything in verses 33-40 that stand out a little bit from other sections?  Well, perhaps there is something in this stanza’s 2 middle verses of 36 and 37 where the psalmist asks God to help him embrace God’s statutes instead of “selfish gain” and a focus on God’s ways rather than on “worthless things.”

Here is a word for our modern world and our contemporary society, especially in a place like the U.S.  We live in a moment where glamour is prized, where people sign up for lessons on how to take really slick Instagram photos to make themselves look good.  We live in a moment when for certain people with political power it’s all about personal image, glitz, and bravado with everything in sight getting gilded quite literally with gold.  A few years ago, the Oxford Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” was “rizz.”  This seems to be a word that got lifted out of the middle of the word “charisma” and it has to do with being charming, seductive, slick.  Being rizz is all about appearances and making an impact and impression.

Years ago on the Sunday when I made my Profession of Faith (what some traditions might call “Confirmation”), we sang the song “O Jesus, I Have Promised.”  Whenever I think of that song, the one line that always comes back to me is, “O let me feel Thee near me, the world is ever near.  I see the sights that dazzle, the tempting sounds I hear.”  Dazzling sights and tempting sounds: we know what those things are when we see them and hear them I suspect.  Fame, glory, vainglory, achievement, money, success, status.  McMansions to live in, sleek cars to drive (think of all those Matthew McConaughey Lincoln MKZ ads on TV!) and big boats for weekends on the lake sipping martinis and snapping pictures to upload to social media to make less fortunate mortals feel pangs of envy.

And of course the media is all-but designed to make us all long for such things.  Some years back we heard sociologists talk about “designer dissatisfaction” whereby ads on TV and the algorithms that rule social media platforms try to make us forever dissatisfied with whatever we currently have in favor of the next, newest, and better thing.  Still using your iPhone 10?  Pathetic.  Upgrade.  Now!

But as the writer of Psalm 119 knew, that is all temporary and ephemeral.  It cannot last.  It’s all for selfish gain and in the end, it is all actually quite worthless.  Only by leaning into God’s ways as they get revealed to us in God’s Law can we tap into that which is eternal and everlasting.  “You can’t take it with you”, the old bromide tells us, where money and possessions are concerned.  But the things of God can and will be taken with you when life on this planet draws to a close for any one of us.

The Bible can be a curious book on this front.  On the one hand, we know we can be saved only by grace alone.  Our deeds and good works have no role to play in redemption.  They are not part of the divine calculus.  It’s all grace given to very undeserving people.  On the other hand, though, God takes our deeds into account in some way.  We even have the curious line in Revelation 14 that after saints die and rest from their labors, even so “their deeds will follow them.”  And then there’s the whole Paul vs. James matter in the New Testament, where it appears James takes issue with Paul’s “grace alone, faith alone” approach by saying that a person cannot be saved without good works.  Maybe a person cannot be saved by good works but somehow neither can you be truly saved without good works.

But the main idea is clear in both the Old and New Testaments: if you have been truly saved by God by grace alone, that is supposed to change you, transform you, re-set your appetites and desires such that you want to follow God’s ways.  What’s more, by the Spirit’s help in what we call the process of sanctification, we are enabled to follow God too.  Living in those ways does lead to true life, to the possession of things that are not selfish gain but self-giving gain, not worthless things but things that are eternally valuable as part of what the Apostle Peter once called our imperishable inheritance kept for us in the heavenly Kingdom of God.

Psalm 119 really is pretty much a very long one-note song.  And yet in this week’s lection we do find this perspective on what is a royal waste of time (pursuing objects for fleeting fame and glory) and what is a royal gift from our great God (being shown through the Law the true path to Life).  That, then, is something always worth pondering and in the end also celebrating.

Illustration Idea

There are two equal but opposite errors when it comes to how we become saved from our sins.  One error is believing we are saved by good works.  The opposite error is believing we get saved by possessing pristine right doctrine.  But I recently heard that someone once wrote that if you had a choice of which group to hang out with, you’d want to choose the good works folks because they at least go out of their way to be kind and nice and actually do perform helpful actions and works.  But the right doctrine crowd tends to be rather cold and aloof, judgmental and harsh even as they don’t typically seem to pay much attention to their own behavior.

That may be painting with too wide a brush in both directions but still, we all probably would rather associate with someone like the psalmist who is so passionately in love with God’s laws and decrees as opposed to someone who seems in love with their own doctrinal rectitude even if it means treating those deemed to have less correct theological ideas rather shabbily.