{"id":356,"date":"2010-11-08T18:15:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T00:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=356"},"modified":"2010-11-22T11:39:50","modified_gmt":"2010-11-22T17:39:50","slug":"the-grace-of-declaration-the-psalms-in-our-worship-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/the-grace-of-declaration-the-psalms-in-our-worship-13\/","title":{"rendered":"The Grace of Declaration: The Psalms in Our Worship 13"},"content":{"rendered":"

The core claim, or at least a core claim, of Judaism and Christianity is that the One God loves and cares for all the creation.\u00a0 Unlike Gnosticism, which believed that the world was a big mess from which God must rescue the few worthy humans in whom specks of cosmic light had somehow become embedded, the faiths that came from Israel believed that God created a universe, pronounced it “good,” and filled it with all sorts of splendid beings, including one species made in the divine image (you and me, as it happens).\u00a0 From this central cluster of ideas a great many others hang.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In such a world, divine grace is pervasive.\u00a0 Mercy is an ever-present reality giving color and meaning to all existence. Divine justice is the good news that mercy will prevail over the corruption and self-serving behavior of some of the creatures.<\/p>\n

Psalm 19 celebrates such a world.\u00a0 The psalmist gives two basic sets of reflections, which turn out to be one.\u00a0 Verses 1-6 (2-7 in Hebrew) announce the universe’s announcement of the splendor of God.\u00a0 All the cosmos seems to be joining in the party, which is much like a wedding in its all-out exuberance.\u00a0 The psalmist knows that this idea is highly metaphorical (no one hears the voices of the celestial bodies, literally speaking), but their celebration is evident nevertheless.<\/p>\n

Verses 7-9 offer a series of propositions that turn out to be essentially equivalent.\u00a0 Six manifestations of wisdom exist: the law of the Lord, the testimony of the Lord, the instructions of the Lord, the command of the Lord, awe before the Lord, the judgments of the Lord.\u00a0 They have six results: restoring life; enlightening the naive; gladdening the heart; giving light to the eyes (i.e., giving insight — even our English word helps us here!); offering permanence; and constituting total rightness.\u00a0 It would make just as much sense, I think, to rearrange the results, matching them to the manifestations of wisdom in all possible permutations.\u00a0 So, for example, all six things can restore life or gladden the heart.\u00a0 The order is somewhat arbitrary.\u00a0 Admittedly, v. 9a’s “awe before God” is more about what we do, while the other five are about what God does, but the distinction isn’t hard and fast.\u00a0 Justice is both a divine and a human activity, for example.<\/p>\n

The end of the psalm talks about both how wonderful these qualities of God’s world are, and how wonderful it is for human beings to participate in them, that is, to join the rest of creation in its celebratory dance around the divine throne.<\/p>\n

Frankly, I like thinking of the ways of God in this way.\u00a0 We have, for some odd reason, come to think of divine command as a burden, and joyless duty imposed for reasons not always easily discernible.\u00a0 What a wrongheaded understanding!\u00a0 Wouldn’t it make more sense to celebrate the sort of meaningful order imagined by Torah, or in more Christian terms, of Christ’s pattern of life that we imitate as disciples?\u00a0 The freedom from anarchy and the phony pursuits of the worldly achievement surely should be sources of joy.<\/p>\n

The point to remember, of course, is that not everything we have imposed on ourselves over the years were really either wise or connected in any way to the divine.\u00a0 We often make laws on topics that God seems quite uninterested in.\u00a0 We worry about who says what in church, for example, forgetting the fact that for any of us to say anything is a miracle, and that we reduce God to a petty being indeed who cannot listen to all human beings equally.\u00a0 How badly we’ve squeezed the joy out of our life as community by our obsession with rules that Scripture doesn’t really make!<\/p>\n

There is much more to say.\u00a0 Psalm 19 is rightly one of the most famous.\u00a0 But for now, we will pass to others.\u00a0 Just don’t forget to come back.\u00a0 The dance will go on with or without us!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The core claim, or at least a core claim, of Judaism and Christianity is that the One God loves and cares for all the creation.\u00a0 Unlike Gnosticism, which believed that the world was a big mess from which God must rescue the few worthy humans in whom specks of cosmic light had somehow become embedded, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Grace of Declaration: The Psalms in Our Worship 13 - ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/the-grace-of-declaration-the-psalms-in-our-worship-13\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Grace of Declaration: The Psalms in Our Worship 13 - 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