Psalm 119: Aleph

This psalm is the longest in the bible!  Containing 176 verses, it walks through the Hebrew alphabet.  Translated into English, we can’t see it, but each section also starts with the corresponding letter as the first word in the stanza.  The focus of this psalm is the wisdom of God’s law, hinting that His Word is all we need to know.  Let’s dig into this poetic acrostic and see what we can learn…

As it should, the first stanza sets the tone.  In many psalms, David talks about the righteous (versus the wicked) and how blessed the righteous are! On “this side” of the cross, it is easy for us to water down what this means.  I believe we even distort what it means to be righteous and often confuse God’s righteousness with self righteousness.  As we have seen previously in my writings on the psalms, there is no one righteous on their own standing.  So how then, do we reconcile David’s claim to those who uphold God’s statutes?  How is it possible for one to be righteous?  Even more confusing is that when this psalm was written, Jesus had not yet died for our sins!  Therein lies the key to understanding righteousness, right in front of us, although we seldom understand it.

David himself sinned.  Whether or not he wrote this psalm before or after the encounter with Bathsheba and the plot to kill Uriah is inconsequential.  Righteousness was established through sacrifice.  This too is part of God’s law and statues.  When David writes about walking in God’s ways, part of that includes recognizing the need for sacrifice and the acceptance of it.  Movies like The Passion of the Christ help us to visualize the brutality of the sacrifice necessary to make us righteous in God’s eyes, but the Jews were faced with it every day!  Whenever they would journey to the temple carrying a live animal…picture a sheep bleating or a pigeon cooing…on the way to the slaughter for what the person had done.  The animal itself had done nothing wrong, in fact, a “perfect” animal was the only acceptable sacrifice!  One without blemish or injury was required to cover the sins of the human.  Then they stood there as the priest ended its life by slitting its throat, watching it bleed out until it breathed its last.  Life was considered sacred, a gift from God, and they understood the weight of ending a life on behalf of themselves.  It makes us face the reality of sin.  Is it really worth it?  Yet it was these sacrifices that took the place of the sinner, that they might walk righteously in God’s eyes again.  Unfortunately for us, the cost of sin isn’t always in our faces, so we don’t always consider the gravity of what it costs.

That said, once the sacrifice is complete and accepted by God, we are not only cleansed of the spiritual ramifications of sin, but we are also empowered to do what Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery and brought before Him in judgement, “go and sin no more.”  This stanza ends with the proclamation of this realization that David sees.  He gives thanks for God’s judgements because it reminds us of the importance of remaining holy, God’s chosen people.  He is right and true.  His commandments are for our own good because straying from them results in death!  How gracious a God we have that He literally outlines for us how to live a blessed life!