Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology
It’s interesting how things converge in your brain. Impressions, ideas, and reflections on both stream through seeking to stick together before something else roots them out. Yesterday, I spent time working on a survey instrument for David Miller of Princeton University, who is a leader of the “faith at work” movement, an attempt to help men and women have more integrated lives. See his website at http://www.princeton.edu/faithandwork.
Then comes today’s self-appointed assignment, to reflect on Psalm 40, a thanksgiving hymn praising God for an integrated life. What have these two assignments in common? A lot, as it turns out.
The psalm has two basic parts: verses 1-11 (Hebrew 2-12) are a straightforward hymn of thanksgiving expressing trust and hope in God, and verses 12-17 (Hebrew 13-18) step backward to the time before God’s salvation and thus offer a retrospective petition, a flashback so to speak. Yet the two parts connect closely to each other, because salvation is never far away from the one seeking it from God, and the memory of trouble is never far away even from the most secure of us. Life, after all, hits us in this great stream of impressions, ideas, and reflections on both.
How, according to this psalm, does one praise God rightly? One way to answer the question is to track the verbs used for the psalmist and for God. The psalmist trusts, stands in awe, and invites others to do the same. God, meanwhile, turns to the pray-er, listens, lifts out of the clay pit, sets feet on firm ground, and puts a new song (the psalm itself!) in one’s mouth. The active God makes it possible for the formerly passive, overborne human to become active again and to resume a communal role.
Another way to track the pursuit of integration is to follow the structure of the psalm, which seems loose at first, but proves to be comprehensive in scope. The thanksgiving turns in verse 4 (Hebrew 5) to benediction: “blessed is anybody whose refuge/place of trust is Yhwh.” It then moves back to direct address to God, praising the Almighty for doing miracles (nifla’ot are often associated with the events of the exodus, though the concept is wider — the term means less suspension of the laws of nature, than simply actions that reorder the human world so that the righteous prosper as they should). The psalmist then considers, and rejects or at least relativizes, an alternative form of praise, namely, sacrifice. Yhwh does not need sacrifice. Words are enough when they bear fruit in life. Words and deeds, divine and human, all fit together somehow.
Among the most interesting lines are those in verses 7-8 (Hebrew 8-9): “Then I said, ‘Indeed I have come. In the book it is written about me to do what pleases you, O God. This is what I delight in. So your law is in my inner being’.” The lining out of the verses is a bit unclear, or rather, debatable, here, but you get the drift. Many commentators associate the scroll in which the psalmist reads with the one written for the king in Deuteronomy 17:14-20, and thus argue that the psalm as a whole is a royal psalm. This thesis is possible, though far from certain. It seems also possible to think of the psalm as fairly late and thus as a specimen of a type of piety that emphasized the importance of the Law of Moses. There is nothing obviously kingly about the psalmist (in contrast to the case with a number of other psalms), though we cannot rule out the possibility that we are supposed to imagine here a king delivered from national trials.
However you slice it, the ideal narrator of the psalm is someone who has experienced tragedy and deliverance and is now grateful for it. He (or she) has found an integrated life rather than one divided up into little pockets in which faith has no bearing on anything else or vice versa.
In times of stress such as ours, we need this psalm. Whatever my objective experience, it is easy to find life’s problems, to highlight disappointments, and to underscore tragedies. But this little poem describes someone who found another way by the simple expedient of trusting God and seeking guidance from Torah. What a concept! It is this extraordinary willingness to make a commitment that marks the person of faith off from the rest of the human race. Without such trust, we have no hope. With it, many things are possible.