Psalm 119 – Mem: Just an Old-Fashioned Love Song

Listen to most any love song on the radio – past, present, or future – and you will most likely find lyrics expressing an undying devotion to another person. You will find the singer saying they can’t live without the other person and how their life is somehow more meaningful because they have found them. The same is true for many movies.

Most of us can, without doing any research, think of a number of well known lines from movies expressing this deep love: “You complete me,” “you are my destiny,” “you make me want to be a better man,” “as you wish,” “people call those imperfections, but no, that’s the good stuff,” and possibly the most unique and famous, “I know.” (Bonus points for those who know each movie!)

Love is a major theme of art and, as such, a major theme of our lives. As Mr. Keating says in The Dead Poets Society, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion…and medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life…but poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

I think there are many reasons we pursue love but (I believe) chief of them all is that through love we believe we are enabled to touch something transcendent and eternal; we are able to attach ourselves to something unchanging which will help guide our lives and fill in the deep emptiness felt by each of us. We all know when we have found it because we can’t stop thinking about that person, that thing, that idea, or cause all the time. We consider its nature and allow it to overtake our soul. And, most telling, it begins to change the direction of our lives. We follow it wherever it may lead us, and if and when we should lose it, we take drastic measures, such as quitting our jobs, moving, or cutting off our ears (thank you Vincent) to find it again. But for all this talk of love, one object of love that is conspicuously missing from even the most religious of people and their poetry, music, and movies, is the law of God.

Psalm 119:97-104 is, in my estimation, a love song about God’s laws. The psalmist thinks about God’s laws all day, they are ever present to him, and they guide his very footsteps. And when confronted by someone or something contrary to the laws of God, it is this love for God’s word that keeps him from venturing into evil or turning away from good. But the law of God is not merely a guide to him, the psalmist finds them to be sweetest. Imagine that on Valentine’s Day, the day well known for giving sweets to your sweetest: even the laws of God are sweeter than the sweetest thing!

Yet there is one thing that the love of God’s laws does for the lover of the laws that any no other love can do: the laws of God make us wiser than our enemies, our teachers, and the elders in our society. Try that test on your love of pizza, environmentalism, or your most beloved: they all come up short by this metric.

But, just as nearly all love songs speak of an ideal love, the psalmist’s love song is no different. Many of us express a love for the laws of God, even for God himself, but we also turn from him and his laws and seek out evil more than we are willing to admit. We can even feel that God’s laws are behind the times and think we can find wisdom in other sources. Even though we might sing powerful worship songs on Sunday about God and his ways, come Monday we return to our own ways, abandoning his. And we do this, all of us because we are flawed and fallen. There are days we don’t want pizza, days when we dump trash out the window, days when we long for the arms of another, and days when we decide to choose our own path, ignoring God’s.

In the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the main character asks his teacher why nice people choose the wrong sort of people to date, essentially asking why we settle for less than what is possible. The teacher’s response is that “we accept the love we think we deserve.” While this is true of human relationships, I believe it is also true of our relationship to God and his ways. When we choose to go our own way, we often do this because deep inside we truly think we are not worthy of God’s love. With this sense of unworthiness filling our souls, we search for a cheap substitute which offers a temporary sort of love.

Thankfully, for all of our failings in this area, if we read this love song about God’s ways objectively, we should realize two things. First, while we can’t sing this song perfectly, there is one who can, and secondly, it is his image into which we are being molded. We may not be able to perfectly sing this song now, but we know that as we allow God to do his work in our lives this song will eventually become the only and true love song of our heart. Thus, this psalm is not merely a love song about God’s ways, it is a prayer that someday we would be able to sing this song without reserve.