What’s the longest chapter in the Bible? The longest Psalm? It’s that remarkable piece of textual cross stitch, Psalm 119. A 22 stanza acrostic going through the hebrew alphabet, each verse in each stanza beginning with the same letter – it is a tour de force of artificially structured thought, but to great and serious purpose. My own study of the Psalm goes back years – I once preached six sermons on it, touching on wisdom, guidance, spiritual longing, hard times, trustful learning and leaning, and so on. The Victorian pastoral theologian Charles Bridges wrote a devout commentary on it: Thomas Manton the Puritan a long series of sermons which dissected and examined it in exhaustive and exhausting detail; Calvin’s commentary on it is a masterclass in restrained, focused devotion; Spurgeon ransacked the expositional tradition to produce what is a vade mecum on Christian obedience to the Law of the Lord.
At at St Deiniol’s this Psalm was brought to my attention again by reading Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship. He quotes one verse that picqued my interest, and resulted in a careful rereading and rehearing of this Torah Concerto in 22 movements! It was then I came across verse 56: ‘This has been my practice; I obey your precepts’. None of us really know why certain phrases of Scripture trip us up, slow us down, make us listen – the Holy Spirit interrupts our reading, silences otherwise sound questions and puts on hold the discoveries that drive the intellectual quest. And for no reason other than unlooked for gift, words are transformed to Word, Bible study becomes personal address, and the Word of the Lord has finally been heard. Sitting in a sunlit Victorian library, mellow oak book shelves on three sides, aware of countless others who had sat in this place in pursuit of divine learning, my soul already stirred by the pointed and potent writing of Bonhoeffer, I sensed the passion and longing of the Psalm writer who so long ago tried to express the ordered purposes of God, in well ordered words, as a way of recreating a disordered world – through saintly practices in obedience to divine precepts.
The result is an outline of an essay on psalm 119 as theological education. More about this later. It’s time I took the psalmist’s advice:
I lie down and sleep; I wake again because the Lord sustains me.
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