Psalm 112 – if you dare!

My bank balance forbids me from indulging various personal dreams, none more so than purchasing my ideal property portfolio.

Property number one is a ramshackle house overlooking a beach, veranda, wooden floorboards, random furniture, large fireplace. Property number two is an apartment high above the road in Chelsea with a grand piano…modelled on one of my favourite films, 101 Dalmatians. Number three….and so on. There are five in all.

In my imagination, I live in all five; they are the places I call home. I actually do live in one of these five!

If the bible can be equated to all the houses on earth, Psalm 112 would be one of my ‘homes’ I often return to, and one that I discovered at a time of particular pressure.

I don’t know how many of these posts it will take to show you around my Ps112 house, but that’s the spirit in which these posts are written. Like all properties, each room requires different types of work or decoration…we’re all in the process of dealing with timetables of neglect and action.

Verse 1.

Praise the Lord! Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who delights greatly in His commandments

You may well be thinking ‘This is one of your favourite Psalms, John?’ even if, out of politeness, British reserve, or puzzlement, you say nowt. For one thing, it’s countercultural. We invest so much of our inner philosophical resources striving for ‘freedom’, or ‘individual autonomy’: Brontë’s Jane Eyre famously exclaims, ‘I am an independent woman!’, Martin Luther King intoned ‘Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty we are free at last!’ In the banishment of slavery, and with gadgetry all but replacing household servants, the concept of living within the confines of another’s command has shrunk to smaller domains such as the military. In general, we shudder at the thought of putting ourselves under the command of anyone else so schooled are we in the virtues of freedom.

So verse 1 is a stumbling block. And an issue that we have to confront.

Whilst it is true that Paul in Galatians wrote ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set you free!’ and Jesus Himself said ‘…the truth will set you free…’, the freedom that the bible speaks about is about freedom from sin and freedom from man’s traditions…not freedom from God’s commands. As many have said before, Jesus is not just my Saviour, He is my Lord.

From the outset, as believers, we wear the clothes of a servant, and we know something of the fear of the Lord and yet we also find something else which perhaps we didn’t anticipate: a strange delight in His commands.

There are clues to this unlikely pairing of fear and delight. Look at the dogs you pass in the street or on a country lane. The ones who are happiest are the ones who have learnt obedience! The tale’s wagging, the love for the owner is in their eyes, and seemingly in contradiction to ‘obedience’, they are the dogs that spend most of the time off the leash!

I fear I still struggle against the leash at times. Battles rage.

Many commandments are written, of course, that is the Old Testament way of doing things, obedience to written legislation. In the New Covenant, the Spirit writes the law on our hearts, so we obey from the heart. It can be in relation to a written command e.g. ‘love your neighbour…’, but it can also be in real time, ‘go and speak to that person now!’

The more I obey written commands in the Law of Moses from the heart and the nudges of the Spirit, the more I find that the fear of the Lord and delight go hand in hand.

The key is realising the truth that Paul wrote in Galatians: ‘I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who lives but Christ lives in me. The life I now live I live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave His life for me’ Gal 2v20

As Christ lives out His life through me, in my form, my soul and body are discipled, or apprenticed, and I learn His way of living in the fear and delight of His Father’s commands.

Jesus, of course, did this perfectly: He expressed this by saying, ‘I only do what I see My Father doing’. That constriction turns out to be perfect freedom.

So, I hope you enjoyed the first room on this tour. It’s delightful…but there’s work still to be done.