When I was younger, and for many of my adult years, I was told that the Bible was God’s rulebook for life. I was told the Bible would teach me what to do and not do so as to live a good life and gain entrance into heaven. I was told, in fact I believed, that the Bible was God’s instruction manual for us explaining how to navigate the few days we have upon this earth before our eternal destiny is encountered.
With this view permeating my thought life, I saw the Bible essentially as a list on paper by which to guide my steps. It brought to me a fear of falling out of line; it helped me gauge how good of a person I was, or how much of a failure; it enabled me to judge whether others were successes or failures as well; and it provoked pride when I was succeeding and extreme guilt when I failed. This sort of thinking turned me into a Pharisee of sorts, getting angry at others when they sinned, jealous of them when they got away with it, and prideful when I did one right thing no matter how bad I had been in other areas of my life. However, this way of processing God’s word has not at all been helpful to me, my relationship to God, or my relationship to others. I felt trapped in a set of manacles upon which read the (in)famous letters WWJD.
Although acting as Jesus acted is not necessarily a bad thing. Note, if you will, that the psalmist’s point of emphasis in Psalm 119:121 is upon doing the righteous thing in the eyes of the Lord. We are called to live righteous and holy lives; we are to choose for the good and against that which is evil; we are to try, as best we can, to live the way in which Jesus did. But, there is more to the Christian life than just doing the right thing. In Psalm 119:129 we find a clarification to this point which, sadly, a few translations of scripture seem to pass over. The psalmist declares that the words of God are so lovely that even his soul obeys them, not just his hands and feet. His soul finds so much joy in God’s commandments that his inner being obeys them, not merely his hands, feet, and lips. Instead of being motivated by pride or a fear of failure, the psalmist is drawn to God’s word for its beauty. This is a far cry from seeing the Bible as a list of rules to obey.
Furthermore, the psalmist tells us in the next two verses (130 and 131) his longing for the commands of God is always increasing. Essentially, he claims that a first reading of God’s word is just the beginning of seeing light and gaining knowledge; it whets our finite appetite for God’s infinite nature. This is quite a different approach to the Bible than merely hoping I don’t evoke God’s wrath, or the anger of a teacher, administrator, boss, or pastor. I don’t hear many people speak these days about how God’s beauty is what has drawn them into a world where they long solely for him and his words. But in those times when I do, I find it is someone who has fallen completely in love with God’s infinite beauty and wisdom, forsaking all else.
Given this, the psalmist’s plea found in verses 132 – 135 that God would keep him from falling makes a lot of sense. At first blush, it may seem like he has backtracked into moralism by asking that sin not overtake him, but I think this cry for safety comes from one who doesn’t want to lose his wonderful connection with the infinite glory and wisdom of God, not from one who merely fears judgment.
I have been fascinated for quite some time with fractal geometry and the images that it can produce, in particular, the fractals titled Mandelbrot sets. To be honest, the mathematics of these things is beyond me but I know enough to be able to describe them as infinitely recursive and amazingly beautiful functions when visualized. (Watch a you-tube video here for a visualization of what I mean.) Simply put, as you zoom into the image of a Mandelbrot set greater and greater detail emerges; it never stops expanding as it brings more and more depth, beauty, and detail. This is much like scripture ought to be for us. The more we study it the more depth we find, but find that the depth is not in the text itself, rather it helps bring about a real encounter with God and his infinite nature.
Jesus said to the Pharisees in John 5:39-40 “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” The Bible itself is not a book which brings us life, it is a book that points to Jesus, the only one who can bring us life. It is a book revealing God’s nature through the person of Jesus. But if we merely see Jesus as a person by whom we should model our behavior, we see a very flat picture. But when we see the Bible as a window through which we can see the very heart and mind of God, we find infinite and ever increasing beauty.
This is why, I believe, the psalmist ends 119-Pe not by saying how angry he is when he sees others who do not obey God’s law but by declaring how streams of tears flow from his eyes. For when he sees the infinite beauty of God set before others who are unwilling to open their eyes to see it themselves, he, and we, can only cry for what they are missing.
