This portion of Psalm 119 holds some truths I believe are necessary to know as we travel this road we call life. The first truth is that we have been both made and fashioned by God. God has created each of us, individually, according to his design from the foundations of eternity: this work is a completed work. But the work of fashioning us is not, it is an ongoing process whereby we are continuously molded into the sort of person he wants us to be. In “New Testament” terms we would say that we are being sanctified, purified, and set apart for his holy work.
But this is not merely a work that acts upon us as we sit passively by, we have a role to play in the process. We must seek to know him and this means, at the very least, we seek to know his word and his commands. At the time this psalm was written, God’s only revelation was his word carved on tablets of stone and penned parchments, but that was not the completion of God’s revelation. He revealed his word to us again in a more complex, yet freeing manner for us in the person of Jesus Christ. As such, when we, today, read this first truth we must not only give ourselves over to learning and hoping in the written word of God but also the living word of God, Jesus. If we do this, as the psalmist says in verse 74, others will look at us and rejoice, for we have placed our hope in God. But remember, at this point, such a hope is an untested hope: this leads us to the second truth.
Not only has God made us and not only is he in the process of forming us, but he also afflicts us. I’m sure we could have a debate regarding the form and nature of God’s affliction, but there is one thing we can easily settle on: from the Hebrew language used in this verse we know that his affliction is something that was completed and designed even before we were born. As such, it seems that our affliction by God’s hand is for a specific purpose: to help fashion us into the person he wants us to be. What I mean is that when God created us, part of that creation took the form of an affliction of some sort which God uses as a means to form us into the sort of person he wants us to be. The affliction and the sanctification are essentially two sides of the same coin.
It is told that Michelangelo once said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” This quote helps me understand the two previous truths. God, as the artist (but unlike Michelangelo), created the block of marble, a creation occurring only once. When he created the block of marble he had a final product in mind, but that final product was only going to be revealed by the swinging of his hammer as he breaks away the unwanted pieces of stone. His hammer must afflict the stone revealing the final product so others might see and be taken by and enthralled with the glory of the artist, in this case, God.
But unlike the block of marble, we can respond to the constant hammering of God’s affliction. And our response can take two basic forms: we can choose to allow the pain to produce in us a deeper love for God and thus a more constant reliance upon his love, or we can writhe and struggle against his hand seeking solace in devices of our own choosing. But being the sort of people we are, these forms are not a once-for-all choice, for we can jump between the two, at one time relying upon God but then in a hot minute we can switch, rebel, and create our own gods to worship and with whom to seek comfort. We are a fickle creation, are we not? I’m sure God is not pleased with our constant infidelity. But there is still hope that we will be fashioned into the person God wants us to be, but it does not lie with us.
I’ve recently been reading Christopher Ash’s book Teaching the Psalms, Vol. 1 where he states that the best way to understand the Psalms is to see them as being completed, or fulfilled, in the person of Christ. In the case of this psalm, it means we need to realize we are not the ones that people look at to see the truth of God’s words, it is Christ in us, and ultimately Christ that others will see. It is because he has lived a perfect life under the hammer of affliction that we can stand before God in all of our infidelity, no matter how immoral or illegal it may have been, and know we are redeemed and loved by God eternally. This is the final truth we need to know about life: because of Christ’s fulfillment of the steep demands of the law, we can stand before God blameless and without shame.
May we learn to live this truth in our lives as well as in how we view others.
