I am a duplicitous man. While this world is full of both great beauty and dark ugliness it is not the source of either. Every bit of darkness we see in this world, the death and decay, the lawlessness and the evil, the lies and murder all originate within the heart of man. That is to say within my heart sit the seeds of all evil. This is true of me and this is true of you. In fact, every person on the face of the globe, past, present, and future have such capacity, every person save one.
I am reminded of that one person once again when reading this portion of Psalm 119. He is the only one who is able to say that in the midst of life’s many troubles he never forgot God’s statutes. Each of us has a breaking point. Each of us will, at some point when under the strains and stresses of life, forget the law of God and choose what we think at the time to be an easy way out. We will lie to get out of trouble. We will steal to help pay a bill or buy that thing we have lusted after. We will murder, either in reality or through the depths of hatred, to make ourselves feel better. We will choose easy sexuality instead of walking through the desert of loneliness. We will do all of these things and more because we are impure to the core.
I have heard it said before that the only person who really knows the full weight of temptation is the one who has never given into it. I, for one, do not know that full weight. I know the weight of shame and guilt, but I do not fully know the burden of temptation. I cannot say, as the psalmist says here, that I have not forgotten your statutes. I can not say that I have not forsaken God’s precepts. I cannot say either of those things because I have, at one time or another, turned my back on God.
But this is not to say there is no hope. I believe I can say, along with the psalmist, that my soul longs for God’s salvation. I believe I can say I hope in his word. I believe I can say my eyes long to see his promise. I believe I can say I am like a wineskin in the smoke. I believe I can say these things, because I have and I am. But that is where the similarities between myself and the one person who can fully and honestly sing this psalm ceases.
I long for all of those things, and I have been battered by the smoke of life: smoke coming from both my choice and the choices of others. My life has begun to crack and show extreme signs of wear, with no signs of the decay slowing. Given enough time, eventually my life will crack open and all the wicked, dark, evilness will spill out, fall through the smoke, and be consumed by life’s fire. And I am being foolish if I don’t acknowledge there are some people who are and have been waiting for just such a thing to happen. There are men who, in the words of Alfred in The Dark Knight, “just want to watch the world burn.” A bleak picture, I know, but thankfully, it is not totally bleak. In fact, if I read this psalm through the eyes of the only person who has ever lived without sin I find it actually becomes a song of hope.
Hope arrives when the perfect one asks “How long must your servant endure?” For no matter what I have laying in front of me, no matter what I am currently enduring, or what I have endured, he has endured more and he has confronted more. Even though he prayed in the garden that the cup of pain might pass, he still faced the coming trials with the knowledge he had the strength to endure. And when he expelled his last gasps on earth he was able to do so without ever having forsaken God’s precepts: he entered death knowing God’s steadfast love would give him life. He finished the course, allowing his life to become a cracked and broken wineskin so that when his wine spilled out onto life’s fires, it took their mortal sting. Because he lived and died, I can face my trials. Because he endured the full weight of temptation I can stand in the weight of my guilt and shame knowing I am held in his father’s steadfast love. And because his blood quenched life’s flames of death, I know I will one day be in his presence. My heart will be renewed and he will take from me the results of decay: no longer will I be a cracked wineskin in the smoke, but I will become a new wineskin in the light of his glory.
