Let us Bless the Lord - Study Version

www.stephendawes.com

"Let us BLESS THE LORD"

A study of Old Testament Theology in Psalm 103

Southleigh Publications 2000 ISBN 0 9520644 3 X

Acknowledgements

This booklet began life during sabbatical leave in the spring term of 1992 when I was teaching Old Testament and Hebrew at The Queen's College in Birmingham. I am grateful to the College Council for the opportunity of writing made available in that sabbatical. I am grateful too for the persistent encouragement of friends in the Cornwall District of the Methodist Church and students on a variety of courses who kept asking for "the next one" and so pressed me to prepare it for publication.

Biblical quotations which are not otherwise attributed are from the New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, published by Oxford University Press.

I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to quote from their publications as follows: Oxford University Press p87-88 and for the hymn by Brian A Wren (1936-) on pp 12 and 21, Collins Liturgical Publications on pp32-33, the Methodist Publishing House for use of the Catechism on p9, Macmillan on p23, the Reform Synagogue of Great Britain on p67, Kingsway Publications on pp65-66, Sheffield Academic Press on p56 and the General Synod of the Church of England on p65.

Abbreviations

ASB The Alternative Service Book of the Church of England
AV Authorised (or King James) Version
BCE/CE Before Common Era/Common Era (what we used to call BC and AD)
BCP Book of Common Prayer
GNB Good News Bible
HM The Psalms, introduced and newly translated for today's readers, by H Mowvley, Collins, 1989
JB Jerusalem Bible
NEB New English Bible
NIV New International Version
NJB New Jerusalem Bible
NJPS New Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible
NRSV New Revised Standard Version
p/pp page/pages
Ps/Pss Psalm/Psalms
REB Revised English Bible
RSV Revised Standard Version
v/vv verse/verses

Commentaries on the Psalms are referred to by the author's name only. Full details will be found in the Select Bibliography.

Contents

1		Reading the Bible and singing psalms
2		Psalm 103 - an introduction
3		Ps 103:1 - "Bless the LORD, O my soul"
4		Ps 103:2-5 - "Forget not all his benefits"
5		Ps 103:6-7 - "The LORD works vindication and justice"
6		Ps 103:8-10 - "The LORD is merciful and gracious"
7		Ps 103:11-14 - "So great is his steadfast love"
8		Ps 103:15-18 - "As for mortals..."
9		Ps 103:19-22 - "Bless the LORD"
10		Psalm 103 - an epilogue
11		Precis
12		Notes
13		Select Bibliography
14		Suggestions for Reading
15		Index of first lines of hymns
16		Index of writers or authorities quoted
17		Index of topics, themes and Biblical characters
18		Index of Biblical and other references

Preface

The Old Testament is a huge anthology of ancient religious literature. Since the days of St Paul and St Matthew bits of it have been hijacked by Christians and tweaked to support Christian theology. Since the days of Marcion lots of it has been dismissed as unreadable and barbaric. In our day it is a largely unopened book as far as the Church is concerned.

Be warned. This is a conviction booklet. It is written out of the conviction that although the Old Testament is an ancient library from an alien culture and despite the fact that it is long, complicated and at times both utterly tedious and downright nasty, it is actually an excellent place to start to think about "God" and "the meaning of life, the universe and everything". More than that, even, I am convinced that it is the essential place to start to understand Christianity and the New Testament, though we usually read the Old Testament in the light of the New. I am convinced that that is the wrong way round and that it results in a distorted Christianity. I read it as an "old, old story" – and I can’t stress the word "story" strongly enough – which has become "my story" and "my song" for faith and life.

This booklet is primarily offered to students, past, present and future (technically at level 1 in university studies) but I hope that many others, including ministers and preachers, will find it a straightforward and helpful way in to the fascinating, challenging and rewarding anthology which Christians call the "Old Testament".

Stephen B Dawes Autumn 2000

1 Reading the Bible and singing psalms

1.1 The Bible has a special place and authority in Christianity, which it inherits from the place of the Scriptures in Judaism. Most churches give it a unique status and an important place in their life and work, and all of them read it in worship. Many individual Christians value it, and read it for all sorts of reasons and use it in all kinds of ways. At the same time there is a widespread ignorance of the Bible in the church. Many Christians know that their church thinks that the Bible is important, and are often told that they should read it, but for different reasons do not. The Bible is a special book but often a closed one.

Part of the reason for this is that the Bible is a difficult book, and one that is obviously controversial. Those who seem to know their Bible keep arguing about it, a good enough reason for many others to keep their Bibles closed. The Bible is a large, daunting and difficult book, or library of books, many of which are themselves no less daunting and difficult. It is a very ancient book, and even though bright covers and modern language can disguise its real age and take away some of its strangeness much of it remains either weird and bewildering to us, or just plain dull. The Bible contains a great variety of different types of writing, and it takes much time and effort to learn why, and to be able to make sense of it.

Unlike most other books we read the Bible is divided into chapters and numbered verses, and particular verses are quoted in sermons or discussions, and books like this one, to make or illustrate particular points. This makes the Bible seem like an encyclopaedia or reference book, from which the Sunday readings are chosen because they are about the topic for that Sunday, and not many normal people read encyclopaedias for fun. In church, or in private Bible study if we use most of the guides that are available, we rarely read more than a dozen verses or so of the Bible at a time: but some books of the Bible are more like novels, biographies or historical fiction, in that they need to be read through from beginning to end. Then there are the hymns, the proverbs or the rules, all of which need to be handled in different ways. A confusing book indeed.

1.2 People are not sure about how to read the Bible. This is not only a question about where to start and how to go on, though that is difficult enough, but also one about how to treat such a special book as the Bible. After all it is called the "Holy Bible," which sets it apart from any other book, and when it is read in church the reader often says, "This is the word of the Lord." It looks as if the books of the Bible must be different sorts of books from those in our local library.

Accompanying all of this is a deep anxiety about the Bible and faith. Many in the churches are suspicious of "academic" study of the Bible, and feel that it undermines faith and encourages doubt. The result is a gap between the lecture room and the church, or between the pulpit and the pew. Ministers who are familiar with Bible study in colleges and universities preach as if they weren't, sometimes because they themselves cannot see any connection between the academic and the devotional use of the Bible, and regard them as somehow opposed to each other. Thus when "in honesty of preaching" someone does deal with issues about the Bible in ways which are commonplace in the classroom panic can descend and havoc be wrought among the faithful.[1]

This is all very sad. For taking the Bible seriously is something that the churches and the universities have in common. Both are founded upon the search for truth. The church's conviction of the importance and place of the Bible actually demands that we take the Bible very seriously, and do our best to read it and to understand it. And to do that Christians need all the help they can get. This is exactly what the universities have traditionally tried to do. In the old collect for Bible Sunday, now itself a disappearing if not defunct tradition in many churches, we used to pray for God's help to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest" the Holy Scriptures. That is the aim of this booklet, which is written out of the conviction that the Bible is important, and that it must be studied with full rigour so that its truths may be seen and then acted upon.[2]

1.3 There are many questions which can be asked about the Bible, but in this book we shall be asking only one kind of question - What does the Bible say about God, his will and his ways? What can we learn from it about the meaning of life, the universe and everything? What has this to say to us about God, life and ourselves? These are theological questions, for whatever else it is or whatever the different books look like, the Bible is a Library of Theology. It is not an easy read, nor does it speak with one voice, but what holds it together and makes it worth taking the trouble to read is its subject matter. It is about God.

"What is the Bible?

The Bible, comprising the Old and New Testaments, is the collection of books, gradually compiled, in which it is recorded how God has acted among, and spoken to and through, his people. The writers expressed themselves according to their own language, culture and point of view, and in their different ways were all bearing witness to their faith in God."

(A Catechism for the use of the people called Methodists

Methodist Publishing House, 1988, question 52)

This catechism neatly illustrates the divine and human origin of the Bible, and its central concerns. It was written out of the struggles of real people to believe in God, to discover him and to obey him. Jews and Christians would also say that it was written out of God's struggle to make himself known, to let himself be found, and to save his world. It was written that others might come to share a picture of God, his will and his ways. It comes to us "from faith and for faith," to use a phrase from Romans 1:17. It is a book of testimonies, a "Book of Witnesses." It is a collection of the testimonies of individuals or groups to what they believed God had done for them, to what they thought he was like, and to how they ought therefore to live as his people. It is an anthology of testimonies of faith, inviting us also to believe. The contemporary hymn-writer, Brian Wren, puts it like this,

"For all the writings that survived,

For leaders, long ago,

Who sifted, chose, and then preserved

The Bible that we know,

Give thanks, and find its promise yet

Our comfort, strength and call,

The working model of our faith,

Alive with hope for all."

("Deep in the shadows of the past" Hymns and Psalms 447, v4)

1.4 This book is a detailed look at Ps 103, one such testimony to God which is "alive with hope for all." We shall look at it in order to see its particular message about God and about life. In addition we shall try to see how this relates especially to the rest of the Old Testament but also to the Bible as a whole and to the Christian faith. Apart from the fact that this psalm is worth looking at in itself, there are three other reasons for focusing on it.

1.4.1 The first is that if for many Christian people the Bible is a closed book, then the Old Testament part of it is something which is largely unknown. In church we only hear snippets of the Old Testament read in services, if Old Testament readings are used at all. When they are they often sound odd and curiously out of step with the other readings. Many churchgoers receive little or no encouragement to read any more of the Old Testament for themselves. So we are left with memories of Sunday School stories from the Old Testament, with perhaps the vivid pictures in Children's Bibles to reinforce the impression that the Old Testament is no more than a glorified adventure story about a rather nasty sort of God. All this leaves some Christians thinking that the Old Testament has nothing to say to today's world. After all, are we not always being told that anything "new" is inevitably better than anything "old"? This book has been written to try to counteract this mistaken idea that the Old Testament has nothing good to say about God, or nothing much of any value to teach us about him, or about anything else. Ps 103 is a good place to begin to see how wrong these prejudices are.

1.4.2 The second reason for looking at Ps 103 is that students of the Old Testament have been repeatedly reminded in recent years that it is difficult if not impossible to write an "Old Testament theology," that one simply cannot sum up the teaching of the Old Testament about God and about life in any coherent way. It is certainly true that the Old Testament, like the New and the Bible as a whole, is a library of books, written over many centuries and containing many different types of literature which say all sorts of things about God and about life in our world and his. It is certainly true that the Old Testament does not speak with one voice, and it may well be impossible to sum it all up. But the Old Testament is a book about God, and if its teaching about God cannot be clarified or summarised, then there would seem little point in trying to read it any further. One of the interesting things about Ps 103 is that it is an explicit statement of faith, which also begins to look like a summary of what is believed about God in much of the Old Testament. One modern commentator on this psalm, L C Allen, goes so far as to say that it is one which "takes the reader into the heart of Old Testament theology." At the very least it is a wide-ranging hymn of faith.

1.4.3 The third reason is a very practical one. If people in the church today know any parts of the Old Testament it is the Book of Psalms, for psalms are still used in worship. If they are not being sung in their traditional form as much as they were, they are now increasingly being printed in hymn-books in such a way that they can be read responsively. Old favourite hymns like "The Lord's my shepherd" (Ps 23), "All people that on earth do dwell" (Ps 100) and "Let us with a gladsome mind" (Ps 136) are being joined by new songs like "Jubilate" (also Ps 100), "From the rising of the sun" (Ps 113) and "Hear my cry, O God" (Ps 61), as well as by numerous choruses which are simple repetitions of verses from the psalms which keep the Book of Psalms alive in our worship and our theology. Ps 103 itself is represented in most hymn books by Henry Francis Lyte's hymn of 1834, "Praise my soul, the King of heaven." But not only are we still vaguely familiar with the words, ideas and images of some of the psalms, we also know how to use them. We know that the psalms are hymns, and hymns are something we are familiar with. They are in fact one of the few kinds of literature in the Bible with which we are familiar in today's church.

1.5 Hymns and music are more important in some churches than others, but most have recognised that music and song are powerful media for worship and spirituality. To sing one's faith is to impress it in the memory and send it deep into our unconscious. Hymns are poetry and deal in images and allusions, symbols and pictures. They feed the soul and the imagination, engage the emotions and stir the will. They also join us to other singers past and present. They give a worshipping community the chance to express its faith, to be reminded of important parts of it and to be strengthened in it. Hymns bind people together with generations which have gone before, as they retell the "old, old story" of faith which gives meaning to lives. They focus theology for devotional use and give congregations words of faith for worship. In his preface to a new hymn-book for the Methodists in 1779 John Wesley called the book "a little body of experimental and practical divinity." In today's language he meant that it was a book which encapsulated Christian experience and theology. In many ways the Book of Psalms does exactly that for the theology of the Old Testament and for the faith of Israel. Arguably Ps 103 does it for the Book of Psalms as a whole. Here are words of worship and of faith, theology in poetry, inviting us to sing and respond.

So we shall look at Ps 103 and explore the questions: What can we learn about God? What can we learn about life?[3]

2 Psalm 103 - an introduction

Thanksgiving for God's Goodness

Of David

This is the NRSV translation of Ps 103, which is the one I shall normally use. When others are given I will indicate which they are.

2.1 It is sometimes said that the Book of Psalms was "the hymn book of the Second Temple," that is, the Temple which was built around 516 BCE in Jerusalem after the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon. In many ways this is a good description of the Psalter. Like our modern hymn-books it contains different sorts of hymns. Some are songs of praise, some are hymns of confession or anguished cries to God for help. Some are to be sung by the whole congregation in public worship, others are much more suited to private prayer. Some of these hymns were already ancient by 516 BCE, others were decidedly modern. As in our hymn-books these hymns were gathered from various times and places, and some give their author's or compiler's name while others are anonymous. Some come complete with musical directions or indications about which tune is to be used (for example, see the headings to Pss 75-77). In the Hebrew Bible the Book of Psalms is called "Praises," which sums up the essentials of the book: corporate songs, for use in worship, accompanied by lively music, and addressed to God.

The Book of Psalms has, of course, been used as much more than a hymn-book. In Judaism and Christianity alike it has been a rich source of personal prayer and private devotion, a book for study and meditation, a classic of spirituality and an anthology of religious poetry. However, those who come from traditions which value hymns and hymnody would say that this is exactly what being a good hymn-book means.

The hymn-book picture is also not quite enough in another respect, for some of the psalms are more like anthems sung by a choir, while others seem to contain the words said by the priests or prophets leading worship with the responses of the congregation. At times it is almost as if we have in the Book of Psalms all the words to be said or sung in worship without the instructions for saying or singing them, like one of our modern service books without the directions. We are not told, for example, which hymns are to be sung in which services. While we can see that there are some obvious ones like Harvest Festival songs (eg Pss 65 and 67), penitential hymns on days of national mourning (eg Pss 74 and 83), or anthems at a Coronation or a Royal Wedding (eg Pss 2, 110 and 45), we are just not told where most of the psalms fit in to the services of the Temple.

2.2 As far as Ps 103 is concerned we know nothing at all about its place in the worship life of the Temple. The psalm itself does not give us a single clue. It seems to be one of those hymns which in our hymn-books would be put in the "For general use" section. Where and when it was first used, and whether or not it had a regular place in any particular liturgy in the Temple we simply do not know. It is possible that it was composed at the end of the exile to celebrate the return to Jerusalem and the renewal of worship in the Temple, but this is no more than one possibility. It is obviously a hymn of praise and thanksgiving, as the title given to this psalm in the NRSV recognises, "Thanksgiving for God's Goodness." GNB sees the general character of the psalm when it gives it the title, "The Love of God," as do JB and NJB with theirs, "God is love." We can imagine it being sung at a service of thanksgiving of some kind, with a solo singer using this psalm to call the whole congregation to praise God. It is one of the most joyful psalms in the Psalter, expressing the

"solid joys and lasting treasure,

none but Zion's children know."

(John Newton, 1725-1807)

Psalm 103 follows the pattern of other hymns of praise in the Psalter. It begins with a call to praise God (vv1-2), goes on to give the reasons why God is to be praised (vv2b-19), and ends with a repeat of the call to praise (vv20-22). A difference in Ps 103 is that the psalmist first addresses the call to praise God to himself, and at the end extends it to all the company of heaven and the whole earth.

Most of our hymn-books have a Contents page, and from that we can see how the book has been arranged, and where to find hymns for particular occasions or hymns of a certain type. The Book of Psalms has no Contents page, and there does not appear to be much of a pattern to the collection. Ps 103 could be the first of a group of praise psalms in Pss 103-107. It has the same opening line as Ps 104, and both praise the God who cares for his people in his world. There is also a possible link with Ps 102. This is a very different type of psalm, a lament, a cry to God for help. It is painfully aware of the frailty of human life (vv3-11) but trusts in God to save his people and his holy city (vv12-17). Ps 103 is almost a response to this anguished cry, testifying to how God acts to deliver the oppressed, and saying how human sin and mortality are to be understood in the light of this love of God (vv6-18).

2.3 Some of the psalms have titles in the Hebrew Bible, which mostly don't help us much because nobody is very sure what most of them mean. In the Hebrew Bible Ps 103 has the short title, "Of/By/For David." Most English translations use "Of" (AV, RSV, NRSV, NIV, NJB, JB, NJPS) but GNB has "By" and REB has "For." We should almost certainly not think that King David was the actual author of this psalm.[4] This title is much more likely to mean that this psalm belonged to the collection of psalms used in the old Royal Temple at Jerusalem which King David's son Solomon had built, and which the Babylonians had razed to the ground in 586 BCE. That old Temple, much more splendid than the new one, had been the royal chapel of the House of David as well as the National Temple, and King David was seen as the great king who had founded the state and received God's blessing in a special way. Jerusalem was his city, the "City of David," and as its temple was his temple so its hymns were his hymns; so Ps 103 was headed, "(a psalm) of David." Exactly the same phrase is used about Solomon at the beginning of the Song of Songs (1:1), which GNB translates with "by Solomon:" but in a footnote it shows the wider range of possible meanings when it says, "by Solomon; or dedicated to Solomon, or about Solomon." Unfortunately it never gives such an explanation in any of its footnotes about this phrase in Psalms.

In a way it hardly matters who wrote Ps 103, for many great hymns and poems are anonymous, so from now on I will simply call its author, "the psalmist." Neither is it any great loss in the case of this particular psalm that we cannot see where and how it would originally have been used, for Ps 103 has a timeless and universal quality, even though it is earthed in the experience of one particular culture.

It testifies to many of ancient Israel's beliefs about God. It sees him as the King of Creation, who rules heaven and earth (v19), yet who is as loving as a father (v13). God has shown his love in calling his people Israel, and delivering them from their enemies in the exodus (vv6-7), showing himself to be a God of steadfast love and mercy (vv8, 17), who enters into a covenant with his people (v18). God has blessed them by giving them his commandments so that they can continue to live in his salvation and enjoy the fullness of life that he intends for them (vv17-18). He forgives their sin (vv10-11) and is their very present help in time of trouble (vv2-4), a help freely given and gratefully received (vv1, 20-22). Here are blended the creation themes of Genesis 1 and Psalm 8, the story of deliverance from Egypt through Moses and the giving of the Law on Mt Sinai (Exodus 1-24), and the mystery and majesty of God's eternal kingship celebrated in the Temple (Pss 93, 95-99). They come together in a hymn of thanksgiving which recognises the shadow side of life in human mortality (vv14-16), frailty (vv3b-5) and sin (vv3a, 9-12), but which sees all of this in the light of God's transcendent power and glory which shows itself in love and grace.

2.4 So Ps 103 speaks of God and of the human condition. Its theme is the love of God. This is surely one of the reasons why this psalm is often used today at funerals, for there we are brought face to face with the reality of the frailty and impermanence of our human life, and reminded in the psalm of the permanence of God and his eternal love. It also talks about our sin and God's forgiveness, reminding us that God's ways are not our ways when it comes to dealing with our experience of failure and our sense of guilt, and so the psalmist sings of God's generous love. Those who think that the Old Testament has nothing good to say about God and his loving care, or nothing to say to us in all the difficulties that affect our ordinary lives today, must simply have never read this beautiful psalm.

There will be, however, very few Christians who have never sung Ps 103, even if they did not recognise that that was what they were doing. Henry Francis Lyte's version of it is deservedly well-known and popular, though we can perhaps see why he put the fourth verse in brackets, to be omitted if desired.

1"Praise, my soul, the King of heaven;

To his feet thy tribute bring.

Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,

Who like thee his praise should sing?

Praise him! Praise him!

Praise the everlasting King!      (on vv1-4)

2 Praise him for his grace and favour

To our fathers in distress;

Praise him, still the same for ever,

Slow to chide, and swift to bless.

Praise him! Praise him!

Glorious in his faithfulness.         .(on vv7-10)

3 Father-like he tends and spares us;

Well our feeble frame he knows;

In his hand he gently bears us,

Rescues us from all our foes.

Praise him! Praise him!

Widely as his mercy flows.        (on vv6, 11-13)

4 Frail as summer's flower we flourish;

Blows the wind and it is gone;

But, while mortals rise and perish,

God endures unchanging on.

Praise him! Praise him!

Praise the high eternal One     (on vv14-17)

5 Angels in the height adore him

Ye behold him face to face;

Sun and moon, bow down before him,

Dwellers all in time and space

Praise him! Praise him!

Praise with us the God of grace!" (on vv20-22)

2.5 When you read the hymn and then look at the NRSV translation of Ps 103 one thing is immediately apparent, that English poetry is not the same as Hebrew poetry. English poetry has or perhaps we ought to say, used to have, stanzas or verses, rhyme, metre and rhythm, or at least some combination of these. Hebrew poetry really has none of these that we would recognise, except perhaps metre and rhythm. Basically Hebrew poetry is about ideas, and its characteristic feature is the way that it sets out these ideas side by side in pairs. This has two advantages for us, one is that if the meaning of one half of a verse is not clear we can usually get the drift of it from the other; the second is that this pairing makes the psalms come to us almost ready-made for using antiphonally in worship. We use the technical term "parallelism" for this setting of ideas in pairs. There are many different forms of parallelism, but the idea is essentially a simple and effective one, and Ps 103 uses parallelism throughout.

NRSV, NJPS, GNB, and REB put spaces between vv5 and 6, vv14 and 15, and vv18 and 19, whereas NJB puts in more spaces and NIV less, while some versions follow the Hebrew and have none at all.These spaces are put where they are in the English versions by the translator to mark what he or she sees as the end of a section of the poem, marking some change in mood or a break of some kind in the sense.

Compared with some other psalms and with many other places in the Old Testament the translation of Ps 103 is quite straightforward. The only difficulty is in v5, as is indicated by the note in the margin of the NRSV that the meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain. Even here it is only a small uncertainty concerning one Hebrew word.Most modern translations understand the difficult word to mean "your life" (GNB, RSV and NRSV, NEB and REB, NJPS, NJB), though NIV has "your desires" while the older "your mouth" of the AV and BCP is now completely discarded. Would that all textual and linguistic problems in both Old and New Testaments were so easy or so few.[5]

3 Ps 103:1 - "Bless the Lord, O my soul"

3.1 Ps 103 begins with a call to worship God,

"Bless the LORD, O my soul,

and all that is within me,

bless his holy name."

This NRSV translation is similar to most recent English versions, which tend to improve on the parallelism of the Hebrew poetry.They make the verse into an excellent example of parallelism in which the second half of the verse says exactly the same as the first, though of course in different words.This can be seen clearest of all in GNB which prints the verse in two parallel lines,

"Praise the LORD, my soul!

All my being, praise his holy name!"

The Hebrew is not quite so tidy, for there is no verb in the second half of the verse, as can be seen in the almost word for word rendering in NJPS,

"Bless the LORD, O my soul,

all my being, his holy name."

NRSV and GNB do capture the sense of the original, and in them v1 is a good example of the parallelism in the poetry which we find all through this psalm. A point is made in the first half of a verse and then repeated in different ways in the second half. We can also find parallelism between verses, with the second verse repeating and so confirming the ideas of the first (as in v1 parallel to v2, or v8 parallel to v9), or even between two pairs of verses (as in vv15-16 in parallel with vv17-18). In vv1-2 the first line of v1 is simply repeated as the first line of v2, and the second half of v2 repeats the idea of the second part of v1 in a different way which prepares for the poem to move on. So the words of v1, "all that is within me, bless his holy name," are paralleled by "forget not all his benefits." This emphasises that to bless God's holy name is to remember what he has done. The reference to "all his benefits" then introduces a list of them which follow in vv3-5 and which are then expanded in vv6-18.

The call to worship is in the words, "Bless the LORD," and we are then told who or what is to do that, "my soul." We have in this half of the verse a call to worship God, in which the psalmist addresses himself, or just possibly herself, and reminds himself about what he is setting out to do. The second half of the verse repeats it, only in the opposite order: first comes the identity of the one being addressed, "all that is within me," followed by the command, "bless his holy name." The two halves of the verse say the same thing, but say it in a different order and with different words. The result is that we get the message even if we didn't quite catch it first time, and we get a sense of the importance and urgency of the demand to worship God, and of its all-embracing nature.

3.2 What does it mean to "bless the LORD"?[6]

2 Bless the LORD, O my soul,
and do not forget all his benefits -
3 who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your diseases,
4 who redeems your life from the Pit,
who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,
5 who satisfies you with good as long as you live
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.

These verses spell out the reason for thanking the LORD in worship, and for acknowledging him as our God. According to the psalmist we are to give honour and worship to God because we live by his amazing generosity. God is "the Lord and Giver of Life", he is the one "from whom all blessings flow", "the giver of every good and perfect gift"; and we are to acknowledge that generosity in every part of our lives.

We can see from the way he puts it that the psalmist clearly knows what we are like. He says, "do not forget all his benefits", knowing that taking things for granted is a common human weakness, and that we are all prone to take great benefits with little thanks. "Take care that you do not forget what God has done for you" is one of the constant themes of Deuteronomy (eg 4:9, 6:12, 8:11-19), and what is meant in Deuteronomy and in this psalm is not only a slip of the memory, but also the way that we deliberately ignore God and leave him out of the credits for the good things of life.

The word translated "benefits" in the NRSV and most other versions does not often have this meaning in the Old Testament, but its meaning here is clear. It means "all that God has done for you" (HM), the sum total of his "acts of kindness" (NJB, see also JB and GNB), or his "bounties" (NJPS). From the list which follows we can see that the psalmist is speaking in a general way, much as we would talk about the "goodness" of God. The LORD is gracious in his blessings, doing for us "far more than we ask or think", and that is not to be forgotten. The Vulgate, the Latin version translated by Jerome and used from the fourth century until very recently in the Roman Catholic Church, follows the more usual meaning of the Hebrew word, saying that we must not forget God's "retributions". Commentators using this version have pointed out the beauty of this, that God does not give us what we deserve, but the opposite; he pays us back good for evil.

4.2 Verses 3-5 spell out God's goodness and give examples of it. The LORD is the one

"who forgives all your iniquity,

who heals all your diseases,

who redeems your life from the Pit,

who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,

who satisfies you with good as long as you live

so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's."

Five examples are given in the style of, "He is the one who....", which lead up to a sixth which serves as the conclusion to round off the list. The first three examples are taken from the negative parts of human experience, and God's goodness is seen in the way he rescues us from the shadow side of life, from "iniquity", disease and death. The other three examples are from positive aspects of life in which God's goodness is seen in the joys and strengths of life. Here we have six lines in parallel within and between the verses to reinforce our sense of God's goodness and our dependence on it, and to evoke our gratitude.

The psalmist tells in these six ways how God's love has entered into every part of his life: he has been forgiven, healed, redeemed, crowned, satisfied and renewed. "All" of these benefits from God are to be remembered, for "all" of his sins have been forgiven and "all" of his illnesses healed. This is why he knows he should praise God with "all" that is in him. It is not enough to praise God only with our lips, or with only an outward show, it has to come from within, from the depths of our being. God's goodness and generosity is total, so should be our gratitude and commitment.

The form of these verses in the Hebrew is very powerful, and this does not come over strongly enough in any of the translations we have. Here are three verses of two lines each, and five of the six lines all begin with the participle of the verb with the definite article ("the"). A more literal translation of these verses would be,

"and do not forget all his benefits -

the one who forgives all your iniquity,

the one who heals all your diseases...."

or

"the forgiver of all your iniquity,

the healer of all your diseases...."

The use of the definite article in Hebrew poetry is unusual anyway, and its repeated use five times here gives a very marked emphasis. It is being stressed that, "The LORD is the one who...". He and no other is the source of these real benefits.

4.3 Verse 3a: The LORD is the one who - forgives all your iniquity.

4.3.1 Here we have one of humanity's central problems and God's solution to it in a radical nutshell.The English word that is used most in religious circles for this problem is "sin" and the Bible is full of it. The Bible has many different words for sin, and sin provides one of the main story lines of the Bible as a whole as well as the theme for many of its stories.

A list of English words for sin would include: wickedness, evil, wrong-doing, transgression, iniquity, failure, error, vice, trespass and offence. Closely related are words like guilt, crime, immorality and impurity. Hebrew has a similarly wide range of terms to use in speaking about this condition. Each language can also make long lists of actions or attitudes which it calls "sins", which are symptoms of the underlying disorder itself. These lists are revised from time to time with new sins being added and some older ones dropping out because they are not thought to be wrong any more. Even if the word "sin" itself is used less than it was, the reality of which it speaks is as evident today as ever.

4.3.2 One of the better known stories of "iniquity" in the Old Testament is the sordid story of David's relationship with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11-12. Here is sex and violence, deceit and intrigue, and then tragedy that lasts for centuries. David, the great hero king, rapes the beautiful married woman, Bathsheba. Pregnancy follows. David tries to arrange to have the absent soldier husband killed in battle, and eventually he succeeds. The king marries the widow. The baby dies. But that is not the end of the story, for the next child by this woman is Solomon. David's palace and the whole country is torn by intrigue and feud as his sons by different queens struggle for the succession. Bathsheba proves better than the rest of the intriguers and Solomon becomes king. The consequences are dire, for with his splendour and power comes injustice and folly, and on his death the kingdom disintegrates. A lot comes from David seeing Bathsheba bathing on the roof.

A very different story about sin, with no hint of sex in it, is the story of Naboth's vineyard in 1 Kings 21. Naboth's vineyard was next door to King Ahab's palace in Samaria, and the king wanted to extend the royal gardens. Naboth refused to give up his ancestral inheritance. Calling her husband a weak fool, Queen Jezebel arranged for Naboth to be accused of blasphemy and treason and had him stoned. Ahab, who knows nothing of his wife's plans until it is all over, takes possession of the vacant vineyard. Here the issues are injustice and oppression and the rights of the poor in relation to the state. Here too the consequences are more than they at first appear, for this is one more piece in the saga of conflict between the foreigner Jezebel and the old ways of Israel which is to climax in the fall of the dynasty, and eventually of the city of Samaria and of the kingdom itself.

In both stories we see the terrifying power of wickedness to destroy and to mar. Sin is more than David's personal moral failing, as it is more than Ahab's greed, and it is certainly wrong simply to equate sin and sex. Sin is woven into the fabric of society and life itself. In one sense David and Ahab are just two more victims: but the damage from their wrong-doing is lasting and widespread.

These two stories give us examples of sin and sins: but sin also threads through the whole of the story line of the Old Testament. God creates the world, and it is good. He creates a man and a woman, loves them and entrusts them with power and responsibility. But very soon the man and the woman are estranged from each other, from God, and from the natural world. The original harmony is gone, and after that things get worse and violence spirals. God regrets what he has done and decides to wipe everything out with a flood and start again with a new nucleus: but no sooner has the water subsided than things start to go wrong again. This time God takes a different line, and decides on a long-term attempt to put matters right through one man and his descendants (Genesis 1-11). But the sorry story of sin repeats itself in Abraham's descendants: arrogant Joseph and his brothers who try to get rid of him (Genesis 29-50), their numerous descendants freed from Egypt by God who complain against Moses and turn to other gods (Exodus and Numbers), the tribes settling in Canaan and deserting the God who has given them their new land (Joshua and Judges), and then all through the history of the united kingdom and then the divided states until first the one and then the other is exiled (1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings). And why? According to the storyteller, it was because they had sinned and "done that which was evil in the sight of the Lord" (eg 2 Kings 23:37). This was the way it had been from beginning to end, from creation to exile, a story of sin.[10]

It is true that this is not the whole story, for the Old Testament story is also the "old, old story" of God and his love, of his work to save and deliver his people, to rescue them and keep them from sin. It is the story of salvation. But that sin is a real part of the story, and equally a real part of our story cannot be denied. Whether sin is defined as "missing the mark" and "falling-short" of what we ought to be, or whether it is deliberate rebellion against God, breaking his rules and going against him, or whether it is simply being wrong or doing wrong hardly matters, for it can be any or all of these, and more. It is not confined to human wrong-doing, it is woven into the whole fabric of the world's life. For the Bible sin is a fact of life; it is there, and life is marred and spoiled by it. This is fact; this is the way the world is and the way we are.

4.3.3 So what does God do about sin? The Old Testament story tells that God tries to prevent it, as we shall see in our discussion of v18, but failing that he attempts to destroy it or to disarm it. He does this in two ways, either by punishing sinners (v9) or by forgiving them (vv3, 8, 10-13). Either way he tries to eradicate the sin which has so badly infected his creation. The idea of God forgiving sin is a difficult one, and religious people differ considerably, as we shall see, about what they think this means and how they understand that it is done. We will look at the whole subject in more detail in our discussion of vv10-13, but at this point we must notice that the psalmist believes fervently that God forgives sins, and that God has forgiven his sin. He knows that "all of his iniquity" is forgiven. This is cause for joy and thanksgiving. It is the first of God's blessings which he enumerates; his first reason for blessing the LORD.

We see here the generous and forgiving nature of God, an idea we have not been encouraged to think of as being found in the Old Testament, yet here it is as clearly as anywhere in the New Testament. The psalmist knows of a God who is like the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15), running to greet his erring son with a generous forgiveness. And like the son in the parable, he also knows that his sins are forgiven.

4.4 Verse 3b: The LORD is the one who - heals all your diseases.

4.4.1 In a way each of the psalmist's six reasons for blessing the Lord are to do with health and healing. They are about God as the Lord and Giver of Life giving fullness of life and wholeness of life to the psalmist, an idea that was as important in the faith of Ancient Israel as it has been to all people everywhere and as it is to us. There are two main types of psalms in the Book of Psalms, Laments which are prayers to God for help, and Praises which are thanksgivings for help received. The subject of both types of psalms is very often that of health, either personal health in one way or another or the health and well-being of the nation. God is seen as the Lord of Life and Conqueror of Death, whose help is to be sought in maintaining wholeness and in combating disease.

There is no doubt about how important health is to us. As long as we've got our health, so we say, then that's the most important thing in life. We know when we think about it a bit further that that is not quite true, as when tragedy strikes and we lose a loved one we know what really matters most to us. Also we all know people who actually don't enjoy full good health for one reason or another yet whose lives are rich, complete and happy. Nevertheless the importance of our health is undeniable, exactly as it was to the people of Israel and the psalmist, and it is therefore natural that health is seen as one of God's gifts. God is the God of Life, and recovery from sickness is part of God's life-giving work in our lives, to be prayed for or given thanks about in worship.

We have very little idea about health in ancient Israel or about its health care services. We could make a list of illnesses mentioned in the Old Testament and other writings from the ancient Near East, but it would do little more than state the obvious fact that illness and sickness of one sort or another existed then as now. We know a little bit about some ancient doctors and also surgeons, but most healing seems to have been through what we today would call "folk-medicine", where cures and remedies based on long and careful observation was the order of the day. There was also a very close tie up between religion and medicine, and the role of the local sanctuary and its priest or holy man or woman was important.

4.4.2 We do know that many in Israel believed that suffering was the result of sin. It was widely held that people became ill because they had sinned, sometimes as a consequence of sinning, but always as a punishment from God. Ps 107 shows the different sorts of worshippers who have made vows in times of distress and are now coming to the Temple to bring offerings and give thanks, and among these are those who have recovered from illness, vv17-22. The section for these begins,

"Some were sick through their sinful ways,

and because of their iniquities endured affliction."

This link between sin and suffering is also seen in the parallels in Ps 103:3 which we are looking at, where "forgives all your iniquity" is paired with "heals all your diseases".

This way of understanding suffering is clearly expressed in Deuteronomy. In the theology of this book God offers his chosen people a choice: they may choose to honour him and walk in his ways, or they may choose to please themselves. If they choose to follow him they will be blessed, but if they choose to go their own way then they will suffer. Nowhere is this more starkly put than in Deuteronomy 30:15-20, especially in v19,

"I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live..."

So when Job loses his prosperity, his children die, and he is in agony with disease it is natural that his friends tell him that it is because he has sinned. What he must do is admit this, and ask for God's forgiveness; then he will be restored to full health and prosperity. The Book of Job goes on to object most strongly that it is not as simple as this, that at times the innocent suffer, and that illness is not necessarily the consequence of sin, a point made also in Habakkuk. Another alternative view was that suffering was not the will of God, but was caused by evil spirits, or by the power of evil, and so it was possible for innocent and good people to suffer. Nevertheless most of the Old Testament sees a clear link between sin and suffering.

This idea is still found today. The angry or painful question that every minister has heard, "What have I done to deserve this?" when illness, tragedy or suffering strikes, goes back in a straight line to the beliefs of many in ancient Israel that suffering is the result of sin. Those who say it usually share Job's defiance that in fact they have not done anything to deserve it at all, but the pervasive idea is still there that illness and sin are somehow related. There is of course sufficient truth in the idea for it to be credible, and in the right place it conveys a warning that needs to be heard. But in the wrong place, which is the vast majority of cases of personal illness and suffering, it is a very dangerous idea that has caused and still can cause considerable unnecessary anguish.

Two prayers for healing from the Psalter illustrate how God is appealed to for help in sickness, and the appeal is for both forgiveness and healing. Ps 6:1-3 says,

"O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger,

or discipline me in your wrath.

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing;

O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror.

My soul also is struck with terror,

while you, O Lord - how long?"

Here we see the psalmist's pain, his "body is racked with pain" and he is "utterly distraught" (v2 REB) and he cries out in anguished prayer to God. We also see the idea that he suffers somehow because of God's anger and wrath. A longer example is Ps 88.

In Ps 103:3 the psalmist praises God for forgiveness and for healing. Whatever the cause of his suffering may have been he recognises that every healing, every recovery, every victory over suffering comes from God and is part of his work. He is the Lord of Life.

4.5 Verse 4a: The LORD is the one who - redeems your life from the Pit.

4.5.1 Here the psalmist praises God for saving him from death, for "the Pit" is the Pit of Death, or Sheol as it is sometimes called in other psalms. The psalmist doesn't live in a Fool's Paradise, where everything in the garden is lovely. He knows that there is a shadow side to life, and that death belongs to it, even epitomises it.

4.5.2 There are two different ways of looking at death in the Old Testament. One is where death comes at its proper time, when someone dies peacefully in old age having lived out their seventy or eighty years. Here those who die are "gathered to their people", and their relatives though obviously grieving can rejoice over a life "faithfully lived and peacefully died". So in Genesis 25:8 it is said of Abraham, "Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people." His sons bury him and life goes on. St Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) can sing of death in a similar way,

"And thou, most kind and gentle death,

Waiting to hush our latest breath,

O praise him, alleluia!

Thou leadest home the child of God,

And Christ our Lord the way has trod:

O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!"

4.5.3 But there is another side to death which is vicious, terrifying and completely negative. Death is the great enemy. It leads those forces of evil which are always trying to destroy, hurt and deface what is beautiful, good and healthy. In a way the Old Testament pictures this side of death as a huge octopus living in a pit, who is always trying to reach out and catch passers-by with its tentacles and drag them down into darkness and destruction, drowning them in the watery cavern where it lives. In this way illness, disaster and suffering of any kind are symptoms of death trying to get its grip on the living, as can be seen in Ps 18:4-5,

"The cords of death encompassed me;

the torrents of perdition assailed me;

the cords of Sheol entangled me

the snares of death confronted me."

But the psalmist goes on to testify,

"In my distress I called upon the LORD;

to my God I cried for help.

From his temple he heard my voice,

and my cry to him reached his ears. (v6)

He reached down from on high, he took me;

he drew me out of the mighty waters." (v16)

Death is a terrible pit, with miry clay and deep water to kill the one who falls or is dragged into it. But God can save us from it,

"I waited patiently for the LORD;

he inclined to me and heard my cry.

He drew me up from the desolate pit,

out of the miry bog,

and set my feet upon a rock,

making my steps secure." (Ps 40:1-2)

4.5.4 God is love, goodness and life in permanent opposition to this malice, evil and death. He is the one who "redeems" people from these things. "Redeems" is an old-fashioned sort of word, and people might dismiss it on that score. In the Old Testament the word means to "protect". If hard times fell on a family, and they faced eviction from their land, or were forced to sell themselves into slavery in order to survive, then the next of kin had the responsibility of coming to their aid. He was their "redeemer", their "protector" and it was his responsibility to help them, if necessary by taking over their debts, buying back their land, or, if the worse had come to the worst, buying them out of slavery. A good example is in the story of Naomi and Ruth. Naomi and her husband had gone to live as economic refugees in Moab because of famine in Judah, then she had been widowed and so she decides to return home. Back at Bethlehem she encourages her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth to make herself known to their wealthy kinsman Boaz. There is a nearer relative but he is not prepared to take on his proper responsibility, so Boaz "redeems" Naomi and also marries Ruth (see especially Ruth 4). In that story the NRSV uses the phrase "next-of-kin" to translates the common Hebrew word, go'el, "redeemer" or "protector". The meaning of the verb at Ps 103:4 is plain: God saves, rescues, delivers us from all this shadow side of life. He is our protector, saviour, deliverer, liberator. The various modern translations all find it hard to pick a more modern word to express what is meant. NEB and REB are perhaps best with, "He rescues me from the pit of death." ("death's pit" REB)". GNB, usually very good, is a bit weak and all it says is, "He keeps me from the grave."

4.5.5 The psalmist recognises the shadow side of life, and sees it as an enemy: but at the same time he knows it to be a defeated enemy. Every recovery from illness, every problem faced and solved, and every trouble lived through is a victory of life over death. God is on the side of life, he is supremely the "Lord of Life and Conqueror of Death", or "our help in every time of trouble" as we say in Funeral services.

This positive and confident attitude is seen in the popular Jewish toast and greeting, "leChaim", "To Life". In that word with its hope and defiance of death, there is a whole creed and celebration of the victory of God over death, no matter how strong, terrifying and real the forces of death seem to be.

4.6 Verse 4b: The LORD is the one who - crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.

4.6.1 Notice again the parallel within v4. God does not simply save from death and restore to life, great though that is; he gives abundant life, full and rich, so that the restored person is like a king or queen, "crowned" with God's goodness. The psalmist is not talking only about being "surrounded" by God's love (NEB, also NJPS) or "blessed" by it (GNB), he uses the powerful verb "crowned" to show the magnificence of God's care. God the king (v19) crowns the psalmist!

This metaphor of human beings being "crowned" by God is also found in Ps 8. This is a hymn which celebrates the majesty and glory of God and the special place he has given to the human race. Compared to the heavens which are the work of God's "fingers" (not even his hands), mortals are utterly insignificant, yet amazingly God has given them a place in the scheme of things second only to his own, and he has "crowned them with glory and honour" (v5).

Human beings have been made the kings and queens of creation by the God who created them. Great and wonderful gifts have been given to them, and they occupy a very privileged place in creation. They have been given "dominion" over all the animals and over everything else that God has made (Ps 8:6). This is exactly what is said in the story of creation in Genesis 1:26-31, where the act of creating human beings is the last thing God does before he rests and rounds of his creation by giving to it the supreme gift of a Day of Rest. The Sabbath Day is the crown of God's creation in the Creation Story in Genesis 1-2:4, but as the last of his acts before he rests God creates human beings. Theirs is a position of great responsibility, and God trusts them to act responsibly and lovingly as his agents in the created world. This is what is meant by the saying that men and women are made "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:26-7), that God has created them to act as his representatives and agents, to continue his work of creation and to take responsibility for guiding and shaping the ongoing life of the world. This is the honour and privilege with which human beings are "crowned" in Ps 8.

4.6.2 There is no denying that in many ways humanity has abused the trust that God has placed in it, and that we have been very bad stewards of creation, exploiting and spoiling what was ours to cherish and develop. The psalmist in Ps 103 has already admitted his "iniquity", and shown that he is aware that he is far from the person that God intended him to be. No doubt we all have to confess to a God who is undoubtedly a very "green" God, that we have failed him very often, that we have misruled the world instead of taking the opportunity which he gave us to rule it properly. Yet the psalmist knows that after all his failure God has "crowned" him, not only forgiven and restored him but blessed him with good things, encouraged and enabled him to set his failures aside and to start again, and given back to him his royal place. Thus in v4b the psalmist praises God for "crowning" him with "steadfast love and mercy". He stands amazed at God's generosity.

4.6.3 "Steadfast love" is one of the great Old Testament words, and comes up all through Ps 103, appearing again in vv8, 11 and 17. "Steadfast love" translates the wonderfully warm and rich Hebrew word "hesed". The great wealth of meaning in this evocative word can be seen from the variety of ways it has been translated into English in our Bibles over the years: "mercy," "kindness," "loving-kindness," "steadfast love," "covenant devotion," "loyalty," "tenderness," "faithful love," "constant love," or just that overworked but basic, "love." There is a lot to be said for the NRSV's phrase, "steadfast love," for this captures an important aspect of God's love in the Old Testament, where his love is often seen in terms of his covenant with Israel. God calls Israel to be his people, and pledges his loyalty and love to them in the covenant with Moses on Mt Sinai (Exodus 20-24, Deuteronomy 5). In response the people are obliged to honour God and obey him in all that they do. The Old Testament story tells of God's reliability, he keeps his promises and honours his covenant. His love is reliable, and this reliability is what is emphasised in the phrase used by NRSV, "steadfast love." NEB tries to put this across with "constant love" and NJB with "faithful love." So the psalmist wants to honour, thank and praise God because he has experienced for himself the same continually faithful and loyal kindness, care and love which God has consistently shown towards the people of Israel. He testifies that God's feelings towards us are both lovingly warm and consistently reliable: unfortunately, as much of the Old Testament so frequently complains, ours towards him are often neither.

hesed is a rich technical term from the theological vocabulary of the Old Testament, but the other word used in this verse is not technical at all. It is an equally warm word but an everyday one. It is a word for the love of parents towards their children, for family love or love between friends, an ordinary word for kindness or compassion, for affection and tenderness, especially towards the weak or those in need. It too is found later in Ps 103 at vv8 and twice in v13, where it is used of the love a father has for his children. It speaks of the warmth of the affectation in which God has held his people, and which the psalmist has known. The translations give us a variety of choice in v4: "mercy," "tender affection," "tenderness" and "tender mercies," "loving kindness" and "compassion."

The "amazing grace" of God shines through each of the words in this half of v4. The psalmist testifies to his sense of being treated like a king or queen, receiving a crown from God "the King of heaven". We are not told what incident or experience lies behind this verse, or even if there was anything in particular, but the psalmist follows his witness to God's forgiveness and healing with this general statement. He has been richly blessed by God's steadfast love and mercy, and this blessing crowns them all.

4.7 Verse 5a: The LORD is the one who - satisfies you with good as long as you live.

4.7.1 This is the phrase that contains a word that we do not understand. Most translations are content that "your life" or something like that captures the general sense of the sentence. The psalmist is continuing to speak to his "soul," and if we cannot be sure what particular aspect of his life he says has been "satisfied with good" by God, we can take the testimony as a general one as most of the translations do. The psalmist affirms that God "fills his life with good things" (GNB).

What are these "good things" with which God has filled the psalmist's life? When Christians read this verse many of them say that the good things that the psalmist praises God for are forgiveness and new life, with all the spiritual blessings of knowing the love of God. No doubt that is part of what the psalmist means, but GNB shows that it is more than that when it talks about the "good things" with which God has filled the psalmist's life. Here we see the Old Testament's very positive approach to life, it is not ashamed of things, for life is good in every way. The Old Testament celebrates the goodness of life and of the material world. It is a great thing to be alive and to be human. The world is good, and its blessings are to be enjoyed, as we saw in the toast, "leChaim", "To Life."

4.7.2 We see this first of all in the Creation Story in Genesis 1-2:4. At some point in the account of every day's work except for Day 2 the story says that God "saw that it was good", and when he looks back at the end of all of his work he sees that it was "very good" (Genesis 1:31). We have already seen how Ps 8 praises God as the King of Creation, and the Harvest Psalm, Ps 104, fills out the picture. Human life is good, and God is to be thanked because he causes the grass to grow,

"to bring forth food from the earth,

and wine to gladden the human heart,

oil to make the face shine,

and bread to strengthen the human heart." (Ps 104:15)

4.7.3 The Old Testament celebrates life and the world. Even the Book of Ecclesiastes, with its dreary beginning "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" and the pessimism that runs through many of its pages, can still say that the meaning of life is to be found in taking its pleasures when they come, "Eat, drink and be merry" (8:15 AV, and also 2:24, 3:13, 5:18 and 9:7), or as NRSV puts it, "So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go well with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun." Then there is the Song of Songs (which NRSV calls the Song of Solomon) which is a vibrant and explicit celebration of human sexuality, sensual and unashamed. This is all part of the Old Testament's positive attitude to life and to the world in general, including material things. Life is the gift of God, and he is a very bounteous giver. Life is good, sex is good, food and drink are good: they are given to be enjoyed.

Of course the Old Testament is aware of the dangers and the shortcomings of life. Feasting can become gluttony, and my feasting can mean that others starve. Enjoyment of the good things of life can encourage greed or covetousness, theft and murder. Irresponsible sex can lead to misery, and natural drives unchecked to rape. Life is good, but the world needs to be safeguarded from extremes and dangers, and its most dangerous creature is the human one. Hence the rules and guidelines that the Old Testament contains. The second Creation Story in Genesis 2-3 illustrates our real world, in which God's good creation is marred by conflict, terror and pain. There are tensions between humans and animals, men and women, humans and the earth itself and between humans and their God. All is not right in the good world that God has made. The Old Testament also knows the reality of sin and evil.

The Old Testament also believes that God will eventually put all things right, but here and on this earth. One of the pictures it uses for this good time that is to come is found in Isaiah 25:6,

"On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear."

Here is recognition of the good things of life, of feasting and laughter, joy and delight, to be celebrated and enjoyed. This is where the picture of "the heavenly banquet prepared for all people" comes from which is used at the end of some modern Communion Services. It comes from the Old Testament's deep appreciation of the material things of life. The Old Testament appreciates the sensual and the physical, as well as the spiritual: the one God made them all. The psalmist appreciates everything that God has given to him and done for him; he has satisfied him, filled him, contented him with so much.

4.7.4 One thing that all the translations of this verse have in common is that they recognise that God's good things have been given to the psalmist here and now, and that the psalmist thanks God for the gifts he has received in this life. NRSV and RSV talk about God's goodness "as long as you live". NJB talks about the way that God "contents you with good things all your life". In JB we read of this blessing which has been seen "in filling your years with prosperity", while others talk about being satisfied with good "in the prime of life" (NEB, REB and NJPS). There is nothing here at all about any life after death. The psalmist is content with his life on earth, and if it is long and happy that is everything he can wish for. At the end of such a life he can die content and happy. There is no clear idea of any real life after death in the Old Testament, other than a gradual fading into oblivion in Sheol, until we read in its last book to be written, Daniel,

"Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." (Daniel 12:2)

This bold statement of a belief in life after death can be dated to around 165 BCE in the course of the Maccabean War. At the time of Jesus over one hundred and fifty years later the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead was a contentious one. The conservative Sadducees refused to believe in this piece of new-fangled theology, which the Pharisees, followed by the Christians, firmly believed (Mark 12:18-27, Acts 23:6-10). Our psalmist's horizon is death. For him this life is all. He knows that it will inevitably, and all too quickly come to an end (vv14-16): but for the life that he has been given and all its good things he is grateful.

4.8 Verse 5b: So that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.

NRSV (also RSV, NIV, ASB, BCP, AV, GNB and NJPS) links this line directly to the fifth benefit for which God is to be blessed. God fills the psalmist's life with good things, and as a result his "youth is renewed like the eagle's." The Hebrew does not make such a direct connection between the two halves of v5, and so some other translations (NEB and REB, JB and NJB) regard this line as talking about a sixth and last benefit.

The picture painted is a vivid one. The words speak about vitality, vigour and strength. What in particular this expression about "youth being renewed like an eagle's" might mean few of the translations try to spell out. HM and GNB talk about being "strong" as an eagle, while Coverdale's old English translation in BCP has "making thee young and lusty as an eagle." Most translations leave us with the metaphor and our imagination.

The Hebrew word covers both eagles and vultures, but every English translation follows the first Greek translation and opts for eagles at Ps 103:4. The metaphor of eagles is also found at 2 Samuel 1:23, where in a lament over the death of King Saul and Prince Jonathan, father and son were described as being, "swifter than eagles, stronger than lions." There is another picture in Isaiah 40:30-1,

"Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint."

Here Isaiah of Babylon sees the exiles returning from Babylon to Jerusalem, "strong in the strength that God supplies". The eagle is a symbol for speed, effortless stamina, soaring freedom.

Some commentators talk about a possible belief in Israel that the eagle was reborn like the Phoenix, or that its annual moult was like a new birth, or that it was supposed to live to a great age, or even that every ten years it flew up so high that its feathers were scorched off by the sun, then it plummeted into the sea and came up out of it with a new set! The metaphor is plain enough without recourse to this kind of thing. The great Victorian preacher C H Spurgeon gathers things together in a very picturesque way,

""So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's." Renewal of strength, amounting to a grant of a new lease of life, was granted to the psalmist; he was so restored to his former self that he grew young again, and looked as vigorous as an eagle, whose eye can gaze upon the sun, and whose wing can mount above the storm. Our version refers to the annual moulting of the eagle, after which it looks fresh and young; but the original does not appear to allude to any such fact of natural history, but simply to describe the diseased one as so healed and strengthened, that he became as full of energy as the bird which is strongest of the feathered race, most fearless, most majestic, and most soaring. He who sat moping with the owl in the last psalm (Ps 102:6 AV), here flies on high with the eagle; the Lord works marvellous changes in us, and we learn by such experiences to bless his holy name. To grow from a sparrow (Ps 102:7 AV) to an eagle, and leave the wilderness of the pelican (Ps 102:6 AV) to mount among the stars, is enough to make any man cry, "Bless the Lord, O my soul"".

(The Treasury of David, vol IV, p450)

4.9 With this vivid picture the psalmist rounds off his list of the benefits for which God is to be blessed. The LORD is the "Lord of Life", who has given him health, strength and vitality. For that he is to be acknowledged as God, praised and thanked.

So the psalmist asks us to "bless God", and he gives us the reasons why we should. God has been amazingly generous, and our praise is our response to that generosity. The psalmist knows that life is not all roses, but insists that there is more than enough that is good to evoke our gratitude. He doesn't want to bribe us into praising God in order that God may bless us, he invites us to praise God as we look back on God's goodness towards us.

There is in this psalm, as there is in much of the Old Testament a considerable element of "good news", of "gospel", about God's gracious love and care demonstrated in all kinds of ways. We do not need to wait until the first chapter of St Matthew's gospel to read about the acts of a caring God in helping his people, and "saving" them from their sins and themselves. Ps 103 demonstrates that the Old Testament is well aware of a God who takes initiatives of love, and that all religion, all worship, all good behaviour is a response to what he has already done. At the beginning of the Ten Commandments, the Israelites are addressed by the God who has already freed them from Egypt, who gives them these commandments so that they can continue to enjoy the freedom and new life which he has given them (Exodus 20:2). We see this too in the way that the Old Testament begins with stories of creation, that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and that he has given humanity a life and a home as part of his creation. God is therefore to be blessed for what he has done.

4.10 So far I have assumed that the psalmist is writing about his own personal experiences of forgiveness, or healing or of the help and love of God filling his life in some way or another. It is impossible to say if the psalmist had particular events or moments of his life in mind, or whether he was generalising about his life history as a whole: but I have assumed, as many commentators on these verses assume, that personal experiences lie behind these verses, and that in them the psalmist is giving a personal testimony to God's steadfast love. There is however, another possibility which some other commentators prefer, that these verses are not referring to the psalmist's personal experiences at all, but that they are talking about the experience of the community, of the nation of Israel, of the forgiveness of Israel, or the restoration of the people to their own land, or the renewal of peace and prosperity in the nation. It is the sickness of the nation that has been healed, Israel which has been saved from death and forgiven, and God's people who have been crowned with his love and mercy. One particular suggestion is that this psalm celebrates the return of the people from exile in Babylon around 540 BCE together with the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the resurrection of the nation. That is the setting of Isaiah of Babylon's promise in Isaiah 40, and that chapter has a lot in common with Ps 103. Both picture God as a king enthroned above the earth (Isaiah 40:12-23, 25-26 and 28 compared with Ps 103:19-20); both say that human life is "like grass" (Isaiah 40:6-8 and 24 compared with Ps 103:15), and both use the metaphor of the "eagle" (Isaiah 40:29-31 compared with Ps 103:5). It is possible that Isaiah is weaving words and ideas from the older hymn which he had sung into his promises to the exiles in Babylon. It is equally possible that the psalmist is using some of Isaiah's words of promise in the new hymn that he is composing to celebrate the return home. It is also quite possible that they have nothing to do with each other, for we do not know when, where or by whom Ps 103 was composed.

One thing is certain, and it is that Ps 103:2-5 became, whatever the original author may have written or intended, part of a hymn which was and is used in public worship. If vv2-5 are about the psalmist's personal experience, then his personal praise in these verses was taken up and used by the worshipping community of Israel. The psalmist's very personal testimony was valued and used by others and this must have been because it struck chords with their personal experience of God's love. If these verses are about God's deliverance of the people from exile and their restoration in their own land, then the community would use them not only to celebrate that deliverance, but also to sing God's praises for all the other ways in which he had delivered them through their long history. Ps 103 became popular and was sung and then included in the Official Hymnbook. Hymns are only sung when other people choose to sing them, and only put in hymnbooks either because they have become popular in this way or because those who compile hymnbooks feel that the hymn has something real to say. So these verses became a vehicle for others to use in worship, saying what they wanted and needed to say, and the words the psalmist wrote take on ever new meanings. When this hymn was and is used in public worship the psalmist's own experience, the personal experience of each singer and the experience of the community blend together. God is to be praised and in each different situation he will be praised for different things, as by each different person who sings the hymn. The psalmist gives the words, the congregation fills them with their own meanings: but the two join together in blessing God for his "benefits."

4.11 Somebody might object at this point. What happens when people have not been satisfied with good for as long as they live? Or when their strength and vitality is far from that of a soaring eagle? What happens when the experience of a community or a country has been one of invasion or oppression, chaos or disintegration, poverty or ruin? What do those people say whose life has not been full of steadfast love and mercy? Those who have known the pain of life and the absence of God? How are they to sing this psalm? hey might say that it's all very well thanking God for flowers and holidays and sunshine, or for good health and friends and little happy babies: but what about all the tragedies of life, the disasters, the starvation, the inhumanity, the disease, suffering and death which have been and still are the experience of most people on our little planet? They might suggest that these terrible realities make the psalmist's gratitude seem a mockery. And they might go on to say that it just shows that he must have been living in a very cosy and self-centred little world. T W Davies in his Century Bible commentary written about 1900 says sharply about the author of this psalm, "The writer is too comfortably situated to think or feel deeply."

There is certainly some strength in this objection, and it can be raised also about the very trivial and self-centred prayers of thanksgiving which we sometimes hear in our church services today. But it is not the whole truth, either for the psalmist or for today. We do indeed live in a world where all kinds of terrible things happen to people, but so did the psalmist. In many ways his world was even worse, and life in it has been described as "nasty, brutal and short".Yet in the middle of all the troubles he would without any doubt have experienced, he still finds a voice to praise God. He refuses to allow life's curses to blind him to its blessings, and he still insists on counting those blessings and giving God the credit for them. There are many psalms in the Psalter which focus on life's agonies, and make urgent appeals to God for his help and deliverance: but the Psalter gives place for hymns of praise as well. It is in fact not really fair to dismiss Ps 103 as a "fair-weather psalm" at all. It is not a psalm that is just for those for whom life is good and bright and happy. It is a psalm which is well aware of the other side of life which, with full knowledge of the shadows, insists that in the end God is there, reliable and to be trusted. It expresses a faith that the author does not necessarily see working out in practice, that in the end God's will, will be done and his justice, love and kindness will be seen. This psalmist, who knows nothing of any life beyond death, and who knows about the difficulties of life this side of it, is yet prepared to praise God for the love that he has shown in the creation of the world, in the gift of life, and in all of the varied circumstances of his own life. So the Dean of Wells, G H S Johnson, could write in a commentary of 1880, that Ps 103 was "composed with a pathos that evidences a soul tried by real sin, sorrow and suffering,"[11] and A Weiser in his commentary of 1962 can say that, "The man who speaks in this psalm is able to talk from personal experience which has led him through adversity and suffering...".

4.12 Somebody else might raise another objection. They might point out that it is easy to praise God when all is going well and everything is working out right, but that there is more to religion than that. They might go on to argue that this psalm encourages people to turn to God for the wrong reasons. There are and no doubt always have been the "fair-weather faithful," for whom religion is either a guarantee of good things or an insurance policy against bad. So there are and always have been those who have turned away from God when he did not give them what they were looking for, when he failed to deliver the goods. They had looked to him for help and happiness, and none came, so he was discarded so that a more effective happiness-dispenser could be looked for. Apart from the fact that it is not easy to praise God when things are going well, for then he is easily forgotten about altogether, one of the points that is made by the Book of Job is that true religion does more than praise God for what he has done for us or given to us in any case. To praise God only for what he has given to us or done for us is little more than selfishness. True religion praises, worships and serves God because he is what he is, and that is the only right thing to do. We do not praise God only because he has blessed us, or in order that he will do more in the same sort of way for us. Ps 103 may not make that explicit, but there are enough other psalms in the Psalter which do to counter such mistaken ideas. The hymn by Nahum Tate (1652-1715) and Nicholas Brady (1639-1726) based on Ps 34, captures the spirit of this kind of praise perfectly,

"Through all the changing scenes of life,

In trouble and in joy,

The praises of my God shall still,

My heart and tongue employ".

5 Ps 103:6-7 "The LORD works vindication and justice"

5.1 After the very personal introduction in which the psalmist calls on his own very being to praise the LORD for all the benefits he has received, the psalm moves in vv6-14 into a more general and public area. In a series of statements the hymn now sets out what the LORD has done for the nation of Israel (vv6-7) and then what he has done for "those who fear him" in the nation (vv10-14). The "steadfast love" and "mercy" which the psalmist had testified to in his own life and experience (v4), has also been God's attitude to the nation as a whole (v8). As the psalmist had felt that he had been treated like royalty ("crowned" and "satisfied" vv4-5), so he is equally amazed that God has so generously blessed all those sinners in the nation who have looked for his help (vv11-13). As the hymn called on each singer to affirm that the LORD was God and to worship him with all their heart and soul and mind and strength, so in these verses the hymn calls on each worshipper to join in recognising that it is the LORD who is to be praised for what he has done for Israel, and for all of "those who fear him" among his people (vv6, 8 and 13). Here is wider testimony to what God is like. He can be seen in what he has done. This central part of the hymn opens with two verses which state what the LORD has done for Israel.

6 The LORD works vindication
and justice for all who are oppressed.

7 He made known his ways to Moses,
his acts to the people of Israel .

5.3 6 The LORD works vindication
and justice for all who are oppressed.
7 He made known his ways to Moses,
his acts to the people of Israel .

These four lines continue the theme of vv2-5, stressing that the LORD is to be blessed for the ways that he has acted in Israel's history. As the psalm opens with a call for the LORD to be blessed for his benefits to the psalmist, that he is to be given the credit because he has forgiven, healed and crowned the psalmist, so the psalm continues in these verses to assert that it is the LORD who is to be blessed for his benefits to Israel. Both v6 and v7 begin in the same way as the first five items in the psalmist's personal list, the LORD "is the one who..." Here we have a list of four "benefits," set out in parallel again, which the LORD has given to Israel. v6 talks in general terms, while v7 gives a specific example.

5.4 Verse 6: The LORD works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed.

This verse makes three points:

first, that the LORD is a God who acts, who does something,

second, about the way he works, that he acts for or in "vindication" and "justice," and,

third, about who he acts for, that he does what he does for the "oppressed."

5.5 The idea that the gods act in history is, as we have seen, an idea found in the theology of other nations in the Near East of three thousand years ago. It is also, as we have seen, an idea that is found throughout the Old Testament. It has passed into Christian theology. Christians have traditionally believed that God was acting in the world in the life of Jesus, in special ways in his miracles and throughout his life; guiding and shaping events in general with a plan in mind. The cross and resurrection were the work of God; he caused the crucifixion to take place, and he raised Jesus from the dead. God was at work in these mighty acts, and continued to be at work in building the Church and making it spread throughout the world. Some Christians have gone so far as to believe that nothing at all happens without God being at work; he has planned everything, and life unfolds according to his planning. Most Christians do not accept that our lives are predetermined and planned in this way, nor do many accept the ideas of predestination which often go with this view, but it is not only insurance companies which talk about "acts of God." Ordinary Christians will give thanks to God for what he has done for them, or will pray for him to act for their benefit in one way or another. They pray for God to give them their "daily bread," understanding this to mean that God can and does work in the world in practical ways, though most recognise that God's arm cannot be twisted, and that they must have the humility to ask in a spirit of "your will, not mine, be done." Churches share the same view, and Thanksgiving Services are held on all kinds of occasions to give thanks to God for what he has done. He has been involved. He has acted. He has changed things.

5.5.1 A classic example of this belief in a God who acts is the Magnificat, the Song of Mary from Luke 1:46-55, based on the Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:1-10,

My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,

for he has looked with favour

on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and his descendants for ever."

5.5.2 Two modern examples which show the way this idea is understood in some popular Christianity can be seen in songs from the combined words edition of Mission Praise:

"Healing God, almighty Father,

active throughout history:

ever saving, guiding, working

for Your children to be free..." (no 226 by John Richards)

"Show your power, O Lord,

demonstrate the justice of Your kingdom;

prove Your mighty word,

vindicate your name

before a watching world.

Awesome are Your deeds, O Lord -

renew them for this hour.

Show Your power, O Lord -

among the people now." (no 596 by Graham Kendrick)

5.5.3 There are, however, some very serious problems with these ideas, which can be best seen if we use the example of healing. In Ps 103:3 the psalmist spoke about God working to heal him, and prayers for healing then and now are all made on the assumption that God can and does heal. But we know that not every sick person who prays for healing is healed, and that not all prayers for healing result in healing. If we ask why not, then two sorts of answers are given. One set of answers suggests that the reasons lie with us, especially that the person who prayed did not have enough faith or the right kind of faith and so on. The other line suggests that the answer lies with God, that he knows best and for some reason he chose not to act this time. But then we want to ask, Why not? So we hear it said that God answers prayers for healing in three ways, Yes, No or Not Yet. In many Christian circles it would be considered lack of faith if not heresy to say that God didn't answer this or that prayer for healing for the simple reason that he couldn't. Such is the grip that the idea of a God who acts in the world has on our understanding. Indeed many would argue that a God who doesn't act is no God at all, as a modern scholar says, "The God who no longer plays an active role in the world is in the final analysis a dead God."[12] An ordinary Christian might simply say, "If God can't do anything about it, why should I bother to pray or to believe in him at all?"

There is no doubt that our psalmist would have said much the same. He would have believed, as most people in his part of the ancient world believed, that God could do things. But where he might disagree with those songs from Mission Praise and with some Christian theology would be on how God acts in the world. We have already seen that he knew full well about illness and suffering, and in addition he would have been familiar with many other psalms which cry out to a God who seems absent or helpless (eg Pss 38, 44 and 74). The Old Testament is bold enough to include in its pages not only these psalms and other places where the writers scream out to a God who seems not to want to or be able to help any more, but also writings where the writers voice serious doubts about God's ability to act in his world, or even if he exists (see The Courage to Doubt by R Davidson, SCM, 1983). Here in Ps 103 the psalmist qualifies the general statement that God does things, not only by saying what he does and who he does these things for, but also by hinting about how he acts with a reference to Moses. We will return to this important qualification after we have looked at the other two points made in v6.

5.6 The second point made in v6 is about the way God works, that he acts for or in "vindication" and "justice." The translations vary a little bit here and all sound stilted: NIV and ASB have, "The LORD works righteousness and justice," NJB has "Yahweh acts with uprightness, with justice," REB has "The LORD is righteous in all he does" and NJPS has "the LORD executes righteous acts and judgements." Harry Mowvley cuts through some of the jargon with, "The LORD puts things right, giving justice to the oppressed."

5.6.1 Behind these difficulties lie two important Old Testament theological technical terms, which are also used in the New Testament. A major problem for us is that in Christian theology these two terms have taken on a rather different meaning than they have in the Old Testament. It could also be argued that the New Testament uses these ideas in exactly the same way as the Old Testament does, and that where these ideas are concerned much Christian theology has misunderstood and abused the New Testament as well as the Old. The first word is the word that used to be translated by "righteousness," and finding an English equivalent for this word which conveys the real sense of the Hebrew is very difficult. The second is the one that used to be translated by "judgement" or "justice." Here there is no problem in finding an equivalent word in English, for "justice" will do quite satisfactorily, but the problem here is that Old Testament justice and English justice are not quite the same thing, as we shall see. The final complication in Ps 103:6 is that both words are in the plural, and translating them literally gives us the very un-English words, "righteousnesses" for the first and "justices" for the second.

5.6.2 So in recent translations the Hebrew sentence that "The LORD is the one who does (or "works," "makes" or "acts with") righteousnesses" is given as "The LORD works vindication," "The LORD works righteousness," "Yahweh acts with uprightness," "The LORD is righteous...," "The LORD executes righteous acts" and "The LORD puts things right." The last of these gives us a place to begin to explore the meaning of this important word, it is all to do with being right or putting right.

Weights and measures need to be "right," so there are rules and regulations in the Old Testament, as there are for every society, to ensure that all weights and measures are accurate. If weights and measures are not correct then people can be cheated in the market, or roofs will not fit on houses if the bricklayer building the walls has a slightly different measuring stick than the carpenter preparing the roof joists. Human beings need to be "right" for much the same reasons. To function properly their health needs to be right, their attitude needs to be right, and so do their morals. Examples of people who are not right would include those who are sick, selfish, victimised, anti-social, exploited, immoral, sinful or neglected. Some of these are not right because they have done wrong themselves, others are not right because other people have done wrong to them. Personal relationships need to be "right," with husbands and wives living together in harmony, with honesty and integrity in friendships, and with neighbours getting on with each other. Society needs to "right," and this might involve law and order, proper provision for the care of the weak and vulnerable, and freedom and encouragement for all to reach their full potential. The nation needs to be "right," and this might mean that its borders are safely marked and defended and that there are good relationships with surrounding countries so that all its citizens can live in peace. It will also mean that the nation is faithfully honouring its God, that king and government are "walking in his ways" so that everyone can enjoy his blessings.

As there are rules and regulations for keeping weights and measures right, and for correcting them when they have gone wrong, so there are rules and regulations for almost everything else. "The laws, the statutes and the ordinances" of the Old Testament are there so that everything can be kept right, or can be put right again when they go wrong. When everything and everybody is "right" they are living as God intended them to live. He wants harmony, prosperity and peace (shalom) for all people, and when that is happening everything is "right."

5.6.3 The facts of life are that the world and its people are not very often "right" like this. The Old Testament is well aware of "sin," "iniquity" and "evil," as the psalmist is in v3. We have to aim to get things "right," and safeguard things when they are right for they go wrong so easily. There are right ways and wrong ways. When things go wrong, then everyone suffers in one way or another. According to the Old Testament God is concerned above everything else to try to make things right, to keep things right when they are right and to put things right when they have gone wrong. We have already seen in v3 that the psalmist thanks God for putting him right again when he had gone wrong, restoring him to health and forgiving his sin. That is what God is concerned to do for society and for the world as well as for individuals, and it is a mammoth task. This is what the Old Testament means when it says that God is "righteous," which is one of its main ideas about God. To say that God is "righteous" is to talk about his great concern and untiring effort to put things right and keep things right. He is doing this because he loves his creation and wants only the best for it. He hates to see it go wrong and he hates to see the misery caused by people going wrong and doing wrong. He is a God of love (the "steadfast love" and "mercy" of v4) who wants to "save" the world and its people from this evil and folly. "Salvation" is just this, it is putting things "right" again, and keeping them that way. In other places in the Old Testament the plural word found here, "righteousnesses," is translated as "the triumphs of the LORD" (Judges 5:11, about a victory in battle), "the saving acts of the LORD" (Micah 6:5 about events surrounding the exodus) and "the saving deeds of the LORD" (1 Samuel 12:7, also about the exodus). Mowvley's translation of the first part of v6 is simple and exact as far as it goes, "The LORD puts things right." Where it falls short is to convey the deep sense of joy and celebration which fills the psalmist when he thinks about God's "righteousness."

5.6.4 However, the old words "righteous" and "righteousness" do not have a warm or happy feel for us. When we hear that "God is righteous," or when someone talks about "the righteousness of God," if anyone does any more, then we get a very different impression from that which the psalmist would have had. For him these ideas spoke powerfully about God's loving and generous kindness towards his world, his benevolence which leads him to act to save it. The psalmist knew that at times this meant that God would have to punish individuals or nations, just as a loving parent would have to discipline a misbehaving child at times. He also knew that this care would involve rules and regulations, just as caring parents make clear the rules and regulations for life in a family. He would have fully understood the need for laws to curb human selfishness and sin, for what the old prayer called "the restraining of wickedness and vice." But he would have seen all of this as something very positive, that it was all for our good because God was interested in making life as full and rich as possible for all of us. So when he heard the preachers say that he himself should be "righteous" and practice "righteousness" (eg Amos 5:24, Proverbs 12:28, Isaiah 5:7) he would not have reacted against this, he would have agreed with it wholeheartedly, for it was something he would have wanted to be and it was a promise about what he could be. It was a call to be right and do right, to be blessed and be a blessing to others, to enjoy and to share in God's fullness of life, his salvation.

But it is very different for us, because for us "righteous" and "righteousness" are cold and hard words. To say that someone is "self-righteous" is to say something very uncomplimentary about them, to say that they are proud and sure that they have got it right and that they look down on everyone else. We wouldn't want much to do with a self-righteous person, and as far as popular usage is concerned "righteous" and "self-righteous" amount to much the same thing. This is no new idea, and it is a sad fact of all religion that it does produce good people who know that they are good and are proud of it, the sort of people who give goodness and religion a bad name. We can see that "righteous" was getting a bad name even by the time of St Paul by these verses from his Letter to the Romans,

"For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." (5:6-8)

Paul knows that people feel differently about a "good" person and a "righteous" one, no-one would sacrifice their life to save a righteous person, though they just might for a good person. Perhaps the difference in popular perception is that the "good" person is one who is "righteous but nice with it." So even by Paul's time "righteous" was becoming a hard and cold idea in the minds of some people at least, and it certainly feels like that for us if we use the words at all. When we do read, especially in the Old Testament, that God is "righteous" the impression we have is that he is hard and cold, demanding and judgmental. When we read that we are to be "righteous," the impression is that we are to try very hard to keep all kinds of rules and regulations. All of this is a far cry from the meanings of these words in the Old Testament. This cold, hard and unfeeling picture of God is the very opposite of the sense of "righteous" in the Old Testament, the very opposite.

5.7 We can also make the same mistake when we talk of God's justice or his "judgements," the second point that the psalmist wants to thank God for in v6, "The LORD ... brings justice to all who have been wronged" (REB). The Hebrew word translated "justice" here belongs to the legal language of the Old Testament. In the singular it is used for a particular law or for a legal ruling, a judgement given by a judge, and so it is translated as "ordinance" or "judgement" in many places. It can also be used to mean "justice" in the abstract. It occurs here closely linked with "righteousness" as it often does elsewhere (for example in Isaiah 5:7 and Amos 5:24 which were mentioned above). Other psalms picture God as the king, who "judges the world with righteousness" seen (9:8) or unseen (96:13, 97:2, 98:8). The king in Jerusalem is God's anointed son, who needs God's justice and righteousness in order to promote the welfare of the people and protect the poor (Ps 72:1-2).

5.7.1 These days we hear a lot of talk about justice. It is one of the "in" words of the church and very often we hear statements about the church needing to be on the side of justice or work for justice. Most of us would nod our approval if someone was saying that God is a God of justice. But if someone was to say that God is a God of judgement, then our feelings might be different. If God is a God of judgement, or if he is judge, we might begin to see pictures of the Last Judgement, of heaven and hell, of punishment meted out by an angry God. So "Judgement" or "justice"? For us these ideas are quite different, but for the Old Testament they are the same, and the Old Testament meaning is much more like the positive meaning we give to "justice" than the negative one we give to "judgement."

5.7.2 What then is justice? There is, as we have just seen, an ambiguity about words like "justice" or "judge." I would guess that most of us think immediately of the law and the courtroom. There justice is an abstract, impartial norm. In the courtroom the judge must "impartially and indifferently minister justice" in the quaint phraseology of the Book of Common Prayer. The judge does not allow personal feelings to intrude, everyone has to be treated equally under the law and it is the judge's job to ensure that the scales of justice are evenly balanced. If the accused is found guilty, the punishment must fit the crime, so that the balance of justice is restored. When we apply that idea to God, as we are accustomed to do from all the images in the Bible of the Last Judgement and so on, we see a stern and forbidding figure carefully reckoning up our deeds and our misdeeds. The New Testament makes the picture even worse by talking about Jesus as the one who "intercedes" for us, pleading for clemency and trying to convince the judge that there are mitigating circumstances. The Bible does talk about God as judge and about Jesus interceding for us, but the picture I have just sketched out is not what the Bible means when it talks about judges and justice. We picture it in this way from our western view of justice, which comes ultimately from Roman law, and apply our ideas to God. The Old Testament does not at all understand justice in this way.

5.7.3 The best way to understand what the Old Testament means by justice, whether it is the justice of God or the justice expected to be seen in personal and social life, is to take the cue from the Book of Judges. Who or what were the "Judges" after which that book is named? They were certainly not impartial courtroom administrators or lawyers, though some of them did sometimes preside over village courts and make rulings (eg Deborah, Judges 4:4-5). Rather they were freedom fighters raised up and empowered by God's spirit to deliver his people in times of oppression and crisis, the prophetess Deborah no less than the others. In fact a better title for the book which talks about them would be "The Book of the Deliverers" or "the Book of the Saviours." These mighty men, and in one case a mighty woman, were those who saved and delivered God's people from their enemies, restoring the harmony and peace which was God's will for his people. In a nutshell that is what the Old Testament means by justice: the restoration and then the maintenance of harmony and well-being, of righteousness, of peace (shalom). Therefore to say that God is "just," or to picture him as a "judge," is to say that he is a saving God, active in seeking, restoring and promoting the total well-being of his people. He is the one who puts his people right. That is "justice" in its wider sense.

5.7.4 In ancient Israel, as with us, justice has a narrower sense as well. The narrower sense is the legal one, in that justice is a term from the legal vocabulary and refers to the ideals for which the whole legal system exists. The courts exist to promote the health of society, restoring its equilibrium by punishing wrongdoing, and providing the opportunity for individuals to have their rights restored when they had been somehow or another violated. In Israel there were simple family "courts," in that the head of the family or clan was held to be responsible for the behaviour of his family, and had to arbitrate in family disputes. There were local courts, "in the gate," which was their equivalent to our town squares or village greens, where the elders of the town or village met to set things to rights. There were courts of appeal in the presence of the local prophet or priest, like Deborah, and if the worse came to the worst before the king himself, where disputants who could not otherwise agree submitted to an independent arbitration. We know from frequent references that all of this was easily abused and open to corruption. Their rules of evidence were very different from ours, and so were their sanctions. There was no real prison system: for there seems to have been the unwritten but accurate assumption that prison usually helps neither offender, victim, nor society. For justice to be done the victims were to be compensated for their losses or injuries, the offenders were to be made to see the errors of their ways and to mend them, paying compensation to their victims, and society was to have its harmony restored so that everyone could play their proper useful role. The system was designed to restore right relationships all round, and the word "justice" even in the narrower setting of the legal system means the restoring of right relationships.

5.8 In Ps 103:6, the psalmist celebrates that the LORD is Israel's great example of putting things right and doing justice. It was a common theme in the rest of the hymn-book that the LORD acts to put things right, that he "judges the world with righteousness" (Ps 9:8). One important aspect of this is that God works to give back to the "oppressed" their proper place in life. "To do justice" or "to be righteous" is to live in such a way that the well-being of society is promoted, good relationships all round are enhanced, and, very practically, the poor, the needy, the victimised and the abused are looked after.

5.8.1 In the Old Testament there is considerable concern for the "less fortunate" members of society. God is seen as the special help of the "the poor and needy" in many of the psalms. They cry out to him in urgent appeal for help (eg Pss 10, 12, 34 and 86), and he comes to their aid (Pss 9, 20, 27). Special provisions are made in law for the widow, the poor, the orphan and the "resident alien", phrases which are used to speak of those who are particularly vulnerable and liable to be exploited or neglected (eg Exodus 22:21-24, Deuteronomy 14:29). These people are God's special care (Deuteronomy 10:18-19). God is the "Father of orphans and protector of widows" (Ps 68:5). His care and concern for these people is channelled through the king, who is to be the defender of the weak and the friend of the poor. This is seen clearly in Ps 72:1-4, a prayer for the king to receive God's "justice and righteousness" so that he can carry out God's will,

"Give the king your justice, O God,

and your righteousness to a king's son.

May he judge your people with righteousness,

and your poor with justice.

May the mountains yield prosperity for the people,

and the hills, in righteousness.

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

give deliverance to the needy,

and crush the oppressor."

Jeremiah was sent to the king with this same message,

"Hear the word of the LORD, O King of Judah sitting on the throne of David - you, and your servants, and your people who enter these gates. Thus says the LORD: Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place." (Jeremiah 22:2-3)

The irony is that Ps 72 is headed "Of Solomon," and in many ways he was little more than a tyrant whose reign was marked by a high degree of exploitation of his people. The worst was the way that people were forced to work on his grandiose building schemes, so much so that when he died and his son refused to listen to their complaints there was a rebellion and the united kingdom fell apart (1 Kings 12). The theory and the facts were different, and few kings, it seems, and few of their subjects who had wealth or power appear to have taken the care of the poor and needy very seriously. The prophets, especially Amos, Hosea and Isaiah of Jerusalem protest loudly and frequently against the injustice which they see all around them. These verses from Amos about goings-on in the Northern kingdom about 760 BCE will stand for many,

"they sell the righteous for silver,

and the needy for a pair of sandals" (2:6)

"they trample the head of the poor into the dust of the

earth, and push the afflicted out of the way" (2:7)

"they oppress the poor, and crush the needy" (4:1)

"they trample on the poor,

and take from them levies of grain" (5:11)

"they afflict the righteous, take a bribe, and push the

needy aside in the gate (ie in the courtroom)" (5:12)

"they make the weight small and the price high, and

practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor

for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals" (8:5-6)

Amos, and those prophets who followed him, preached that God would destroy the nation because of its injustice and oppression of the poor and needy. God cares for the oppressed, let the oppressor beware!

5.8.2 No doubt people can be oppressed in many ways, and people can be "rich in things and poor in soul" (Harry Emerson Fosdick), but the "oppressed" in Ps 103:6 cannot mean anything other than the physically and materially oppressed. The psalmist, at one with prophets like Amos, believes that God cares for the victimised and abused, the exploited and the marginalised, the poor and the weak. He knows that God demands social justice and hates every form of oppression, but the psalmist does not stab that into the minds of those who sing his hymn. Instead he reminds them of who they are and which God they are worshipping. They are worshipping the LORD, who brought them up out of Egypt; they are the ones who were brought up out of Egypt, set free from oppression (v7). They know therefore that God is concerned about social justice and that he is against oppression and for the oppressed. Those who sing the psalmist's words and think about them will see immediately how wrong such oppression is in whatever form it appears, for they themselves were oppressed, he reminds them, and God saved them! How tragic that the oppressed so easily become the oppressors! How quickly people forget! Time and again the Old Testament says that the Israelites, of all people, should know what an evil oppression is, for they themselves had been the victims of oppression in Egypt!

"You shall also love the stranger (the "alien" REB etc, the "sojourner", the immigrant), for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Deuteronomy 10:19)

"Observe the seventh day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you... you shall not do any work - you, or your son, or your daughter... or the resident alien (the "stranger", same word) in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm..." (Deuteronomy 5:12-15)

God is on the side of the oppressed, as he showed above all in delivering the oppressed Israelites from their bondage in Egypt by the exodus. There is no doubt that there is a "bias to the poor" in the Old Testament, or to put it more accurately, a "bias to the oppressed." All oppression is evil, an un-natural state of affairs which should be ended. Doing justice and practising righteousness is to live and work for the elimination of oppression. Why? Because the LORD is God. He set his people free from bondage, and he sets the example which his people are to follow.

5.9 Verse 7: He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.

5.9.1 For the Old Testament the exodus was, as we have seen, the great sign of God acting to save his people. What the cross and resurrection of Jesus are to the New Testament the exodus is to the Old. But in v7 the psalmist does not simply point to the exodus, instead he draws attention to Moses. At this mention of Moses those who sang the hymn would have immediately thought of the exodus, because Moses was the one through whom God had brought Israel out of Egypt. But the mention of Moses would have rung other bells as well. The singers would think not only about the escape from Egypt and the miracle at the Sea of Reeds, but also about the Great Covenant with God at Mt Sinai. Both of these were the "ways of God" that he had made known to Moses. Moses was liberator and lawgiver. His name calls to mind exodus and Sinai. God saved Israel, they became his people, and that involved obligations as well as benefits, and the psalmist will have more to say about the obligations later in the psalm (vv17-18). Israel has seen God's ways, and must walk in them.

The explicit mention of Moses here also prompts me to return to the question of how God acts. I said in 5.5.3 that the mention of Moses might give us a clue to help us out of some of the difficulties about thinking of a "God who acts." How does God work in the world of human history and in the lives of men and women? We have already seen that the Old Testament can talk about the exodus as a mighty act of God,

"The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders..." (Deuteronomy 26:8)

5.9.2 And it is true that all through the stories of the exodus there are miracles large and small, nice and nasty, from the parting of the waters of the Sea of Reeds, through the daily gift of the manna to eat, to the causing of earthquakes to swallow those who grumbled at Moses. But for all of this it is still absolutely basic to the story that God called Moses, and that with Aaron and Miriam, Moses negotiated with Pharaoh and led the people out of Egypt and through the desert. There on Mt Sinai God made the covenant with and through Moses. Even the waters of the sea did not part until Moses raised his staff and held out his arm over the sea (Exodus 14:21)! According to the story, crucial roles in the drama were played by human actors, especially the all-too-human Moses. God did not just appear to the Israelites and lead them out of Egypt. He used Moses as his agent, as he used him also as the go-between to set up the covenant on Mt Sinai. The Old Testament tells the story in this way, suggesting that God needed Moses, or somebody, to make it all possible. He did not do it all by himself, because he couldn't. He could only do this work through a human agent, so God called Moses and used Moses, that is an undeniable part of the exodus story. The exodus story therefore suggests that there would be considerable truth in the words of the prayer of St Teresa and of the old Sunday School ditty, provided we took out the word "Christ" and put in the word "God,"

"Christ has no body now on earth but yours;

no hands but yours, no feet but yours.

Yours are the eyes through which must look out

Christ's compassion on the world.

Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good.

Yours are the hands with which He is to bless men now."

"Christ has no hands but our hands

to do his work today."[13]

This is not all that the Old Testament says or that can be said about how God acts in history, but it is an essential part of the discussion. The Old Testament tells story after story of how God calls, equips, guides and encourages people to see his purposes and to share in working them out. These may be great tasks or small, and in them God uses all kinds of people from the likely to the unlikely, from the religious professional to the total amateur, and from the great and powerful to the small and seemingly insignificant. Some he uses only once, while for others the commitment is for life. In the New Testament Hebrews 11 contains a long list of those in the Old Testament who have had "faith", that is, those who have heard the call of God in one way or another, and responded to it. And what is the New Testament itself if it is not a story of God coming to live and work among us, calling and enlisting men and women to share in his ongoing work? God works in our world through faithful people, as he did in the exodus through Moses.

5.9.3 The psalmist says that the LORD "made his ways known to Moses," and then in the second line that he "made his acts known to the people of Israel." God revealed himself first to Moses, and then through Moses to the people, a process which depended on Moses listening carefully and then faithfully doing as he had been asked. Like so much of the Bible, the psalmist takes it absolutely for granted that God had made himself known." God did not leave it to Moses to find out. The Bible is built on the assumption that God, in a whole variety of ways, makes himself known; that God reveals himself. This assumption was shared, as we have seen, by other religions in the ancient world, and is shared by most religions in today's world. If we ask how God first made his ways known to Moses, then the answer is in the story of the Burning Bush in Exodus 3. Moses had a vision and heard voices. This story was told by those who believed that God communicated with special people, and that visions and voices were two of the ways he had of doing it. Not many had or would want to have these often terrifying experiences, but some did, and those who had visions or heard voices the Old Testament calls "prophets." Often prophets disagreed and said different things, and then the community had the problem of deciding which message was "from God," which prophet was "true" and which was "false." If their words were matched by miracles or mighty deeds, or if what they said was a prediction which came true, then that would confirm that God had indeed spoken to them. Because of what they believed had happened in the exodus the Old Testament calls Moses the greatest of the prophets, "Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face" (Deuteronomy 34:10). As Christianity is based on belief that God has made himself known in Jesus, both in what he said and what he did, so the faith of Israel and of the psalmist is based on the belief that God had made himself known to Moses, and that God's will and his ways were to be seen in what Moses said and what he did.

5.9.4 As Moses heard the call of God and then went on to learn what God's ways were, so too did the people of Israel. God made himself known first to Moses, and then to all the people. They saw and learned what Moses saw. The psalmist composed his hymn as a member of that people, and he wrote it for other members of that nation to use in their worship. But the phrase, "the people of Israel," here and almost everywhere in the Old Testament is a loaded one. The people of Israel are not just any people, like the people of Edom or the people of Syria. They are those who believe in the LORD, those who he rescued from Egypt, those who see him at work in that great event and who are his special people because of the Great Covenant on Mt Sinai. There, so the exodus story continues, God became their God and they became God's people in a unique and special way. Israel, and Israel alone, is the people of God, the Chosen People,

"I will be your God, and you shall be my people. I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt..." (Leviticus 26:12-13, see also Exodus 6:7, 29:45-46)

"For you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession."

(Deuteronomy 7:6 and 14:2, see also 10:15, 26:18, 28:9)

5.10 The idea of Israel as God's Chosen People is central to the story line of the Old Testament. In the beginning God calls Abraham, and promises him a land of his own and many descendants. He will bless Abraham, and through Abraham "all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:2-3). Here it looks as if the people of Israel, Abraham's descendants, are to be God's special servants and agents so that his blessings can reach out to all humanity. But as the story of Abraham's descendants unfolds in the pages of the Old Testament this promise seems to get lost. After the exodus the Israelites occupy Canaan and soon become a nation. The nation erects barriers to safeguard its security, as nations do. There is a continuous struggle to maintain religious purity. After the return from exile the much smaller nation deliberately creates a system of apartheid to guarantee its racial purity. By the time of the New Testament there is a very firm line drawn between Jews and Gentiles. The Jews are God's Chosen People, and the best that the Gentiles can hope for is to be permitted to worship the One True God in Jerusalem as a sign of their submission (Zechariah 14). That very human and sad story of racial and religious bigotry is not the only one in the Old Testament, but it is the main one. There is a sub-plot and another subversive viewpoint, which tells of faithful gentiles like Ruth and Job, of repenting foreign nations like Assyria in the Book of Jonah, and there are even reminders that Israel was called to be a "light to lighten the gentiles" (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6), but these remain a minority view. Just in case Christians should be tempted to condemn at this point, the story of the Church has been no better. Who does the Church exist for? "Those outside of itself," is the answer that we are expected to give. "Those inside" has been the real answer for most churches down through the history of Christianity.[14]

5.11 Finally, how does what Israel believed about the exodus square up with the facts? According to the Old Testament story it was a great and dramatic event, involving huge numbers of people, played out on the stage of world history and leaving a terrible legacy of loss and destruction in Egypt. If anything of the history of Israel was going to leave its mark on world history, then one would expect it to be the exodus. Even if the great kings David and Solomon were hardly noticed outside of Israel, one would expect Moses and the exodus to be mentioned somewhere. In fact there is no mention of Moses, Israelites, plagues or anything from the story of the exodus in any of the historical records of the time. Some scholars say that the silence of the Egyptian records on the subject can be explained by the fact that nobody in the ancient world mentioned their defeats anyway. Much more likely is the explanation that the Bible stories themselves make much more of the events than were really there. The stories contain all the drama and tension, magic and miracle, exaggerated numbers and divine interventions that characterise lively storytelling and the tendency of all religious reporters to exaggerate. Examined carefully it is impossible to discover the route taken by the fleeing Israelites, or to locate many of the sites mentioned. Some parts of the Old Testament call God's holy mountain Mt Sinai while others call it Mt Horeb, but we have no idea where it is, even if we assume that these are just different names for the same hill. One of the few certainties about the story is that the waters that parted when Moses raised his hand were not those of "the mighty Red Sea," but of the Sea of Reeds (only NJB and NJPS dare to use this proper translation of the Hebrew), but where that was no one is certain either. There is no agreement among scholars as to the date of the event or the name of the Pharaoh concerned, most think in terms of around 1250 BCE but there are still those who support a date around 1450 BCE which fits better with other dates in the Bible. In a word, we do not have any reliable information about what actually happened. There may have been no more than a few hundred escaping slaves who gave their pursuers the slip by struggling through a windy marsh: but whatever it was, they saw it as a mighty act of God.

The story of the exodus in the Old Testament is not history in our sense of the word. It is not plain fact. The story does not tell us what actually happened. When we think about it we know that there is no such thing as "plain fact," nor any such thing as plain history. Everything that we know from the past we know because somebody told us, one way or another, and all we know is what they told us. They told us what they wanted to tell us. They told us what they thought we ought to know. They told us as they saw it. Someone else who saw it differently would tell it in a different way. There are facts in what we call history, but they are embedded in interpretation, so much so that they can hardly be disentangled. That applies to the history of the exodus as to anything else.

What we have in the story of the exodus is testimony. It may have begun when those who had escaped from Egypt told their story, and invited others to join in their way of looking at things, to believe in a God who is on the side of the oppressed and who sets the prisoners free. Those who heard the story could believe it and could join in, making it their story too. The story invited people to join in, and making it one's own story is an act of faith. The testimony was given; it was not believed because its details could be proved, but taken on trust and made the basis for a different way of living. The story was told and retold, and the story lasted because it told of the way things are and of how God is. A community of faith grew, made up of those who said that this was the story they wanted to live by, and in worship and song through the generations they told the story and handed it on.

If this all sounds odd, think of the story of Jesus, told to us by St John and others "so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah" (John 20:31), and of the community of faith which says, "This is my story, this is my song." As the cross and the resurrection of Jesus are at the heart of the Christian story, so the exodus is at the heart of the Old Testament story. Both are told in faith and from faith and both are heard by faith.

6 Ps 103:8-10 - "The LORD is merciful and gracious"

8 The LORD is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

9 He will not always accuse,
nor will he keep his anger for ever.

10 He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.

6.2 Verse 8: The LORD is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

8.3

Verse 15 As for mortals, their days are like grass;

they flourish like a flower of the field;

Verse 16 for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,

and its place knows it no more.

How brief human life is! From dust to quickly fading flowers, and then it is gone "and its place knows it no more." Our days "flower like the flower of the field," to translate the line more literally. According to Matthew, Jesus picked up this image and used it in the Sermon on the Mount,

"And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you - you of little faith?" (Matthew 6:28-30)

Matthew's "thrown into the oven" is usually thought to be an idiom for the hot wind and burning sun of the summer drought which turns the vegetation brown. But contrast the optimism of Jesus with the pessimism of Job 14:1-2,

"A mortal (not the same Hebrew word as in Ps 103), born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last."

In a country with a climate like Israel 's "grass" and "flowers" are obvious metaphors for how quickly something can come and then go. At the end of the summer drought the land is brown, hard and barren. Hours after the first rain has fallen in October the grass is springing up, and it continues to grow until the summer drought starts in June then, quickly, it withers and dies. There is also a hot desert wind that can blow in late spring and early autumn, especially devastating to the flowers and plants blossoming in the spring. The yearly pattern is almost repeated in miniature each day, and another observant psalmist uses that picture: the grass is strong and green in the morning but after a day in the sun it is faded and withered (Ps 90:5-6).

Another psalm uses the metaphor of grass to say how short-lived the success of the wicked is,

"Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like the grass, and wither like the green herb." (Ps 37:1-2)

Isaiah of Babylon uses the picture of grass and flowers almost exactly as they are used in Ps 103 to talk about people's unreliability in contrast to God's reliability,

"All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever." (Isaiah 40:6-7, see also 51:12-13)

So by the metaphors of grass and wild flowers the writer of Ps 103 acknowledges that our lives are short and brief, "here today and gone tomorrow" as Jesus put it. Even our flowering, bright and beautiful though that might be, is short and not always sweet. After all we are only that "dust" which the wind blows away, the same wind which scorches the wild flowers.

8.4 The picture of the wind is another obvious one for the psalmist to choose. He probably means the hot east wind which damages the blossoming crops, but everyone knows how quickly the wind can blow up and die down, or how it can gust past our faces. This might be the wind that is used to separate the chaff from the wheat, or the wind that blows the welcome rain clouds in from the west, or the one that drives the sandstorms. But what every one of these winds has in common is movement, they come and they go, felt but unseen, and they do not last. Not only does the psalm say that human life is as transient as grass and flowers, but also in speaking of the fleeting wind which withers them it adds another reminder of how fleeting human life is.

At the end is an empty space. But no sooner is it emptied than other flowers fill it for their brief turn to occupy that little spot in the soil. The place soon forgets the flower before the last one. That is the way it is, regret it though we might. So the psalmist concludes, plainly and bluntly, "Its place knows it no more." The psalm accepts the finitude of human life with its "threescore years and ten" and possibly a little extra for someone who is particularly strong. We might be remembered for a while after we have died, but this psalm is not interested in such sentimentality: "Its place knows it no more." Out of sight, soon out of mind. Human life is short. Human life is transient. We are as frail as dust, and as short-lived as grass. Here today and gone tomorrow. That is the way it is.

There is no doubt that some of us at least need to be reminded from time to time of the transience of life. Some need to be told this so that they can keep everything in proportion. We do not live for ever, and nothing that I or any reader of this book is likely to do will last for long. The present is littered with the crumbling monuments of those who thought they were building something to last for ever. Even if traces of their buildings remain, the builders are forgotten and their bones are dust. But this is not the point that the psalm is making. v14 about the dust and vv15-16 about the grass are not the end of the poem, or even the end of a section. They lead up to the emphatic "But!!" which begins v17. Derek Kidner captures the contrast in these verses very nicely in the heading he gives to his commentary on this section, "Fading flower - Eternal love."

8.5

Verse 17 But the steadfast love of the LORD

                is from everlasting to everlasting

                on those who fear him,

                and his righteousness to children's children,

Verse 18 to those who keep his covenant

                and remember to do his commandments.

Here we see what the psalmist is really doing. After all he knows that seventy or eighty years is quite a long time really, and that human beings are capable of doing an awful lot of things in that time and of making quite an impression on the world. His point is that even the longest of human lives and the greatest of human achievements are as nothing compared to the steadfast love of the LORD. If the longest and the greatest human life is like dust and a flower, what then must God's steadfast love be like, which the psalm has already compared to the towering sky and the widest horizons?

8.5.1 Verse 17 has a strong claim to be the crescendo of the psalm. We have already seen how v4 begins the theme and first mentions God's steadfast love. Verse 6 opens the central movement of the psalm and v8 introduces the full development of the theme, building it up through negative and positive variations and rich images, with another mention of the word at v11 making a crescendo and diminuendo leading into the last movement which climaxes at v17. If you are not convinced by the musical analogy just look at v17 itself, it is half as long again as every other verse in the poem: in the Hebrew it has three lines to the two lines of every other verse. Pictures of the transience of human life - dust, quickly fading grass and flowers and wind which blows and is gone - are replaced in this verse by statements of the durability and continuity of the LORD's steadfast love. The immortality of God's constant work to put things right (his "righteousness") is contrasted with our mortality. The infinity of God's love is "from everlasting to everlasting;" it stretches "to children's children," to the “thousandth generation”[23]

"From everlasting to everlasting" is translated by "for ever" in some of the modern versions. This is not quite strong enough and fails to catch the power of the word "everlasting." Perhaps we can begin to get inside its meaning by looking at Isaiah of Babylon's promises to his contemporaries. He sees Cyrus the Persian advancing on Babylon , and sees the end of their exile. They will soon return home,

"So the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting-joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." (Isaiah 51:11)

Of course they will rejoice and be glad, who wouldn't in their circumstances: but Isaiah is saying that their joy is far deeper than that. It is "everlasting" joy, because they will be sharing in the same sort of experience of God's power that the "generations of long ago" experienced (v9 - literally "the everlasting generations") - at the creation of the world and at the deliverance from Egypt, for these are what Isaiah has in mind in these verses. In that moment, brief and passing though it will inevitably be, they will be in touch with something ultimate, with what is real. They will experience the great creative force which is behind the universe. So the Old Testament talks of the "everlasting hills," the "everlasting doors" of the Temple and the "everlasting covenant" of God with his people not only because these things will last for ever but also because they are especially filled with the mystery and power of the cosmic God's eternity. This is put beautifully in Deuteronomy 33:27,

"The eternal God is your dwelling place,

and underneath are the everlasting arms."

(RSV. Both NRSV and REB have something very different here.)

Of course God's arms last for ever, and are around us for all time: but by using the word "everlasting" this verse invites us to feel the strength of God's arms, to feel secure in their grip, to take comfort in their warmth, and to be reassured by the way they hold us up. These are God's arms and there is nothing to fear, for he is creator of the world and its mighty saviour. He is the cosmic Lord, beyond time and beyond all creation. All of that comes over in the word "everlasting." So when Ps 103 says that,

"the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him"

those who sing the psalm are not only reminded that God's love lasts for ever, but they also invited to feel the strength of this mighty love around them and upon them. They are eternally valued by the King of Creation, "Eternally held in (God's) heart" (Charles Wesley).

8.5.2 The second picture in v17 is much more homely. God is like a grandparent! It was one of life's crowning joys to live to see one's grandchildren. Ps 128:6 contains this blessing, "May you live to see your children's children," and an old proverb in Proverbs 17:6 says, "Grandchildren are the crown of the aged... ". In v17 the psalmist uses this picture. The LORD feels the same joy over us as grandparents feel over their grandchildren. As grandparents delight in grandchildren so God delights in us. As grandparents try to do their best for their grandchildren so that all may go well with them as they start out in life, so God does his best for us. He works to put things right and keep them right for us so that we might live life to the full, for that is what the psalm means when it says that God's "righteousness" is "to" us, as we saw in our discussion of "righteousness" in v6.

We have also already come across the expression "to children's children" in Exodus 34:7 (and Deuteronomy 5:9). There it was part of a solemn warning that sin can spoil human life, and that its punishment and its damaging effects can spread down the generations even to great-grandchildren. We also noted, however, that in those verses this punishment is very limited when compared with the scope of God's forgiveness and his blessing. His blessings last for thousands of generations, his punishment for three or four. In Ps 103:17 no limit is put on God's desire and work to put things right. God puts things right "to children's children" on and on through the generations

In vv11-12 the psalm used the dimensions of height and breadth to describe God's steadfast love, it is as high as the sky and as wide as the world. v17 now adds the other dimensions of time and space to that picture. It is as enduring as the time-span from before creation to after the end of world, and as real as this world and the one beyond it. It has no more limits than the limits of grandparents' love for their grandchildren. We might be "Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail" but the LORD's steadfast love is infinite compared with our transience and mighty compared with our frailty,

"In Thee do we trust,

Nor find Thee to fail;

Thy mercies how tender,

How firm to the end,

Our Maker, Defender,

Redeemer and Friend." (Robert Grant 1785-1838)

8.5.3 Verse 17 then goes on to stress the second point made already in v11, that this amazing love is "on" those who fear him, and that God's concern to do or make things right and keep them that way is "to" or "for" "those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments."

8.6 Before we look at the two important words "covenant" and "commandments" it is worth our while to pause to admire the shape of the poem now that the end of its central section is in sight. Although NRSV and some other translations put in a space between v14 and v15, the core of the psalm is vv6-18. vv1-2 form a call to worship which is expanded by three verses giving reasons why the LORD is to be blessed, and vv20-22 are a closing ascription of praise to the LORD with v19 giving another reason why we should do this. The body of the psalm consists of vv6-18 celebrating the LORD's "steadfast love." The first word of this core in v6 is the verb "to do," and translated word for word the first line of v6 reads,

"One who does (or "A doer of") righteousnesses is the LORD."

The unit is rounded off in v18 where the last word is also the verb "to do,"

"and to those who remember his commandments to do them."

The theme word, "steadfast love," hesed, occurs in the solemn pronouncement of the old formula in v8. This is found after two verses which have prepared the way for this announcement by showing how we know that God is like this. Through Moses and the exodus God has been seen to act (the verb "to do") for the good of his people. The theme is explored to v17 where the crescendo is reached and the full extent of God's incredible love is declared. This verse is then followed, in the same sentence in Hebrew, by one which spells out the implication of this love for those who call themselves his people. If they became his people through Moses and the exodus, then as his exodus people they keep the commandments (the verb "to do") which God gave them through Moses. What the LORD does, his people are expected to do. What he is, they are expected to be.

8.7 If we set out vv17-18 so that the parallelism of the Hebrew poetry can be seen, it becomes immediately obvious that there is an extra line in the poem. The last point is repeated. "Those who fear him" is paralleled not only by "those who keep his covenant" but by the extra line "(those who) remember to do his commandments,"

"The steadfast love of the LORD,

is from everlasting to everlasting, on those who fear him

his righteousness is to children's children

to those who keep his covenant

and remember to do his commandments."

For much of the last hundred years it has been common for scholars to change verses like this, on the grounds that because they were longer or shorter than other verses in the same psalm then somebody must have added something to the original or missed something out. More recently there has been a growing tendency to leave well alone, on the grounds that what we see is what we have got. In the case of this verse it could be longer because the psalmist is skilfully using a longer verse to round-off the main part of his psalm and to emphasise what the love of God implies for our behaviour and our living.

"Those who fear the LORD," that is his sincere worshippers, those who take God seriously in their thinking and living, are here also referred to as "those who keep his covenant" and those who "do his commandments." These are the ones who experience the full joy and delight of God's steadfast love. God has loved his people. This verse stresses the obligation on those whom God has loved and who believe in him to keep his laws, as a grateful response to the love and care that they have already received from God. God's sincere worshippers show their sincerity by loving him who first loved them, honouring him by walking in his ways and by doing what he has told them to do, much of which is for their own good in any case.

8.8 The Covenant, and there is good reason to begin the word with a capital letter here, which the psalmist has in mind is the Covenant made between God and the People of Israel, with Moses as the go-between, on Mt Sinai after Moses had brought the people out of Egypt. They believed that in the exodus God was acting in a very special way to save his people, and that in the Covenant on Mt Sinai God had committed himself to them and they had committed themselves to him in a unique way. There they had become God's Covenant People.

8.8.1 The word "covenant" is not much used in English these days, though the Income Tax system of "covenanting" one's giving to charity points to what covenants were in ancient Israel and elsewhere in the ancient Near East. They were agreements or contracts, and these covenants ranged from the marriage contract, to trade agreements to international treaties. Two parties entered into an agreement, they "made a covenant." These agreements might be between two equal parties, like the kings Solomon of Israel and Hiram of Tyre (1 Kings 5:12), or they might be between two very unequal ones, like God and the people. Sometimes there might be few if any conditions, and the covenant might look like an unconditional promise, at other times the list of terms and conditions might be a long one. So in the Old Testament we find that God is pictured as getting involved with people and making covenants with them. He makes a covenant with Noah and all the living things on earth after the flood, that never again will he try to destroy the world in that way (Genesis 9:8-17). This is a solemn and simple promise or pledge, and Noah has to do nothing but listen to it and be grateful. God makes two covenants with Abraham. In the first he simply promises Abraham that the land which he is travelling through will one day belong to his descendants (Genesis 15:17-19). In the second he repeats that promise and emphasises that the old man and his barren wife will have a child, and that through this child his descendants will become a great and mighty nation (Genesis 17:1-14). This time he asks Abraham to show his commitment by undergoing circumcision, which from then on will be the distinguishing mark of all of Abraham's descendants. It was believed that God had made a covenant with the royal house of David that a king of David's line would reign for ever in Jerusalem (Ps 89:28-35). During the exile the prophet Jeremiah looks forward to a new covenant between God and his people, because the people had broken the old one (Jeremiah 31:31-34). The old covenant which had been broken is the covenant referred to in Ps 103:18, the one made with the people through Moses on Mt Sinai after God had brought them out of Egypt .

8.8.2 The story of the Covenant on Mt Sinai begins in Exodus 19 and fills the rest of Exodus as far as chapter 33. It is a long and fascinating story. Moses shuttles back and forward, up and down the mountain, negotiating and renegotiating between God and the people. The scene shifts constantly between mountain top and plain, between Moses terrified by God's power and the Israelites bored with waiting around. Long lists of rules interrupt moments of high drama. The heart of the matter is captured in the introduction in Exodus 19:1-6,

"On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone out of the land of Egypt , on that very day, they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They had journeyed from Rephidim, entered the wilderness of Sinai, and camped in the wilderness; Israel camped there in front of the mountain. Then Moses went up to God; the LORD called to him from the mountain, saying, "Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the Israelites: You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings (does Ps 103:5 have an echo of this?) and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.""

The LORD has rescued the Israelites from Egypt , and on Mt Sinai he promises them that they will be his special people if they are obedient to him and do what he requires, if they "obey his voice and keep his covenant." The terms of the covenant are the Ten Commandments and the other rules and regulations which go with them, and the people commit themselves to keeping these laws (Exodus 24:7). In a ceremony at the foot of the mountain there is sacrifice and the splashing of the altar and the people with the blood of the sacrificed animals, the "blood of the covenant" (Exodus 24:8). So the LORD and the people of Israel are united; he is their God, they are his people. He has saved them from Egypt , and has offered them an ongoing blessing as his special people, they have accepted this offer and they are now God-and-people, so from now on they must keep to the contract. In Ps 103 the psalmist sings of this covenant with joy. He belongs to this covenant-people and invites all those who share that blessing to join in witnessing to the way that those who have kept to the contract have enjoyed what was promised, that they have continued to experience the LORD's steadfast love.

8.8.3 There was nothing unusual in the world of ancient Israel about the idea of a god making a covenant with a nation or with a group of people. And it was a matter of common sense that worship of a god involved the worshipper in doing what that god required. Every nation had its own god or gods, and different gods expected to be worshipped in different ways; each one had his or her own terms and conditions for their worshippers to follow and keep. The key idea of the Old Testament as we have it is that it is the LORD who has made a covenant with Israel . Israel are the LORD's people, they are contracted to him and to no other God. The first five books of the Old Testament, which to the Jews are the core of their Scriptures (the Torah, the "Law"), revolve around the events of the exodus from Egypt and the covenant on Mt Sinai, which are seen as the mighty acts of the LORD. This is followed by Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which originally was put together into one long story to show what happened to the covenant-people after Moses' death. When they kept the LORD's covenant they prospered; when they failed to keep it misfortune came their way. This was the explanation for the great disaster of the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon , it was because the people had not kept the LORD's covenant, his particular set of terms and conditions. This was the view of the people we call the "Deuteronomists" (we call them that because these views are most clearly seen in the Book of Deuteronomy), and it was this way of thinking which won out and became the orthodox view in Israel during and after the exile. It was these people who created the Old Testament. Reading between the lines it is obvious that there were many in Israel who did not agree with the terms and conditions of the Deuteronomists, as well as others who made no attempt to live by religious laws of any sort. The Old Testament as we have it insists that Israel owes the LORD a debt of gratitude for saving them from Egypt , and that his particular terms and conditions should be seen in that light, and then carried out. Ps 103 was written by someone who shared both of those views, that of the Deuteronomist's that Israel owed a debt of gratitude to the LORD, and the common sense one that Israelite worshippers had a duty to the LORD their God. A god's covenant needs to be kept by those who worship that god; Israel needs to keep the LORD's covenant. A god's commandments need to be "done" by those who worship that god; Israel needs to "do" the LORD's commandments.

8.9 So in v18 the psalmist follows the promise of the LORD's steadfast love to "those who keep his covenant" with the parallel that this is to those who "remember to do his commandments." In the story of the making of the Covenant on Mt Sinai in Exodus the giving of the Ten Commandments has a prominent place, but the number of the commandments does not end at ten. In the chapters that follow many others are found, and in the "Law of Moses" the Rabbis counted 613 altogether. To us they seem a very odd mixture. Some are to do with how God is to be worshipped: what festivals are to be observed, when sacrifices are to be offered and how, or who are to be priests and what they have to do. Others are to do with crimes, not only with criminal acts like theft or murder, but with such things as slander or negligence. Others are rules to regulate such social practices as divorce, banking or slavery. Then there are all kinds of rules to do with diet and cooking, what sort of animals can be eaten, and how they are to be prepared. The purpose of some of these laws is obvious, any civilised society needs laws about murder, and any religion needs rules about worship: but the Old Testament makes no distinctions at all between criminal law, ritual rules, civil law or morals. God has given all the commandments, and they are all to be kept. God's covenant people are to be marked by the way they live and what they do, and what it is important to note here is that the Old Testament does not distinguish between religion and the rest of life. These commandments cover all of life. Belief and behaviour go together, and faithfulness to God is to be seen just as much in the kitchen as in the temple. Another verse of the hymn by Horatius Bonar that I quoted in chapter 3 sums up the Old Testament view and the aim of the commandments,

"So shall no part of day or night

From sacredness be free;

But all my life, in every step,

Be fellowship with Thee."

8.9.1 In Ps 103 the psalmist is not saying that God will love us if we keep his commandments. Nor is that quite what God says in the passage from Exodus 19 that we have quoted, although that is often how we understand the commandments. We sometimes work on the assumption that if we keep the commandments then God will love us. So the commandments become a way of earning God's love, obtaining his goodwill and winning his favour. One common example of Christian anti-semitism is the view that the Jews have a religion of law, in which they think that by keeping the commandments they can earn God's love and forgiveness, and by their good works they can put themselves right in his sight. That used to be called "salvation by works" and it used to be a very common understanding of what the Old Testament, Judaism and even some forms of Christianity were about, in contrast to real Christianity which was about "salvation by faith." That is a travesty of Judaism and of the Old Testament. On the question of laws and commandments there is no difference between the Old Testament and the New. What Ps 103:17-18 actually says is that the LORD's steadfast love is already "on" those who sincerely worship him and already "to" those who keep the covenant and the commandments. The extract from Exodus 19 shows that God has already saved Israel from Egypt , but that if they wish to be his people from now onwards, then they must keep the commandments and obey him. In the New Testament Jesus says exactly the same thing (eg Matthew 7:12-29), as does St Paul (eg Romans 12) and whoever wrote the Letters of John (eg 1 John 2:1-11). Both Testaments agree that God loves us, and both agree that this has implications for the way that we are to behave. Both Testaments contain "commandments."

8.9.2 If commandments are not things that we have to observe in order that God will love us, what are they? The introduction to the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:1-2 and Deuteronomy 5:6 gives us the clue,

"Then God spoke all these words: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt , out of the house of slavery; you shall... you shall not..."

The Ten Commandments and the Covenant which they are part of comes after God has brought the Israelites out of Egypt . He does not say, "If you will... and providing you do not... then I will rescue you from Egypt ." He has already delivered them, and they have already seen his love and care, his generous grace. The commandments come after, not before, his grace. It is as if God loves us first and then, when we have learned that, he gives us commandments as guidelines which we are to follow in order to carry on enjoying the good things which he wants us to have. It is as if God has created us, saved us and brought us into newness of life and then in the commandments he shows us how to stay there and how to continue to enjoy life to the full. Biblical commandments, laws, rules and regulations, call them what we like, are like manufacturer's instructions. They enable us to use a product properly and get the maximum benefit from it; failure to take notice of such instructions leads to damaged goods. So Moses is given the commandments to pass on to the people. The message is that if we wish to continue to enjoy the new life which God has given, and to experience through it his steadfast love, the way to do it is to follow the guidelines that God has provided. Those who ignore the guidelines damage themselves and others. The "commandments" are God's guidance to us as to how we continue to enjoy the fullness of life that is his purpose for us. Exodus 20:2 puts the Ten Commandments and the other laws which follow them into proper perspective, and gives the lie to mistaken ideas about the Law which have been very common in some Christian circles.

8.9.3 In the Old Testament there are a number of words for God's instructions to Israel . The key one is Torah, which is usually translated as "law", and although this word does not occur in Ps 103 it is so important in the Old Testament and so relevant to v18 that something must be said about it. The Law, for a Jew, is neither a burden to be doggedly borne nor a means of earning God's favour. Instead it is a grateful response to what God has done, it is "gospel," the good news of how a saved people can joyfully sing to their Saviour. Yet for Christians it is very difficult to see things in this way. For Christians the word "law" in the Bible has had a bad press. We think of "the law" as the opposite of "the gospel." The Old Testament is about "law," but the New Testament is about "grace." Law is bad and negative. It is opposed to faith, which is good and positive. We accuse the Scribes and the Pharisees of a loveless legalism, in contrast to the loving kindness of Jesus, forgetting entirely that almost everything we know of the Pharisees is what their opponents say about them. Normally we make allowances for the bias of one group against another, but when the opponents of the Pharisees are our forebears, the early Christians, and when it is in the Bible, then our usual common-sense fairness ceases to operate. Law... legalism... Pharisees, there is nothing good in any of this. But to see what the Old Testament, the Pharisees and Judaism mean by Torah we should read Ps 119, the longest psalm by far. It is all about the psalmist's delight in God's Torah and his grateful thanks for God's gift of it. Time and time again in that psalm the psalmist says that God's Torah is his delight, as in v97, "O, how I love your law! It is my meditation all day long."

The Jewish celebration of Simhat Torah, "Rejoicing for the Torah," is another good way of seeing what the "Law" means to a Jew and in the Old Testament.[24] In fact it is better not to translate Torah as "law" at all. Much better would be words like "revelation", "teaching" or "guidance." God's commandments are part of his teaching, and they with all his teaching are for our good.

8.9.4 Some of this ought to be obvious, for apart from the anarchist most people would agree that rules and regulations are necessary for life. Not everyone will agree about every rule or even keep every law: but even the thief is certain to complain to the police if his wife gets knocked over by a car driving on the wrong side of the road, and to get angry if he can't phone for an ambulance because the phone-box has been vandalised. The alternative to living in a society where people obey the law is anarchy. If there is no law and everybody pleases themselves about what they do and when they do it, making their own decisions and their own rules, then we soon arrive at a place where only the strong and powerful are safe. God's commandments exist so that everyone may enjoy a full and happy life, so that everybody may share in God's gift of life. In this way lies fullness of life for everyone.

8.9.5 Jeremiah looks forward to a "new covenant" in which no one has to teach others these laws any longer because each one will know what is required from them (Jeremiah 31:33-34). But even then everyone will still have to keep the rules. So when Christians see this new covenant as fulfilled in Jesus it does not mean that commandments are abolished. When we look at Jesus he quite emphatically said that the two great summary commandments of the Old Testament about loving God and loving our neighbour are essential, and then added a "new commandment" specifically for Christians about loving their fellow-Christians (Mark 12:29-31, John 13:34-35). The First Letter of John puts it unambiguously,

"Now by this we may be sure that we know (God), if we obey his commandments. Whoever says, "I have come to know (God)," but does not obey his commandments, is a liar." (1 John 2:3-4)

Here again we see how loyal Jesus was to the faith which had nurtured him, and how much the teaching of the New Testament depends on that of the Old. Belief and behaviour are to go together. But here we have a major problem for contemporary Christianity, what is the place of the commandments of either of the Testaments, even of Jesus himself, in making ethical decisions today? How do ancient rules and regulations, ancient guidelines and instructions, however positive, good and useful they may have been fit into our struggles to work out what it means to live as God's people of faith in today's world?[25]

8.9.6 The Covenant with God on Mt Sinai brought blessings on Israel and it brought obligations. The love of God that Christians see in Jesus does the same, it brings blessings and obligations. The love of two people for each other does the same, it brings blessings and obligations. Some Christians tend to look at the Old Testament and see only the obligations, as some tend to look at the New Testament and see only the blessings. Modern human nature seems particularly good at forgetting obligations in general, and emphasising people's rights rather than their responsibilities. "Duty" and "discipline" are not in-words at the moment. Both Testaments of the Bible agree that blessings and obligations are the two sides of the same coin. Or to put it another way, that privileges bring responsibilities, or that God's demands and his offers are intertwined. For the Old Testament this means that the people of Israel who have known God's deliverance from Egypt and his gifts of their land and their national identity are required to live in certain ways and to follow his teaching. For the New Testament this means that Christians who experience the love and forgiveness of God are called to lives of commitment and discipleship. There have always been those in both communities who have taken the blessings without fulfilling the obligations, and who have looked for the benefits of religion without a glance at duty to God. No doubt there always will be. What the psalmist says in this hymn is not just that such people are doing something wrong, but that they are missing out on really experiencing the love of God. He insists that the LORD's steadfast love is only fully known by those who are committed to doing his will in every part of life. People of faith might not be able to agree on the details of what this commitment involves, but they agree unanimously that without commitment there is no real religion or real faith, and no deep experience of God. The psalmist insists that commitment to God involves the whole of life, that belief and behaviour go together. While people of faith may never agree over every detail about belief or behaviour, the psalmist would insist that where the two are separated something is seriously missing. This point is emphasised in the saying from Luke 10:25-28 which sums up God's requirements in a way that Christians and Jews of the first century agreed about entirely, Lk 25 [26]

"Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" The lawyer answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself." And Jesus said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.""

8.10 The psalmist has no doubt about the importance of keeping God's covenant and of obeying the commandments. For him and for his people belief and behaviour go together. The covenant and the commandments remind him of what God has done for his people, bringing them out of Egypt and providing them with guidance for living as free people in a new world. The LORD's covenant and his commandments are more gifts of his steadfast love, which gives life to the world and hope for the psalmist. And for this he is deeply grateful. Yet his eyes are open, and he knows what human beings are like. Not only are they short-lived and frail. They are also weak and "prone to sin." The last line of the main part of his psalm sounds clumsy. He could much more easily have said "(those who) obey his commandments" instead of "(those who) remember his commandments to do them," as the Hebrew puts it. Perhaps he uses two verbs in this last line, "remember" and "do," because he knows that as human beings those who sing his psalm are ever ready to forget God's goodness and their obligations to him and to leave undone those things which they ought to have done?

9 Ps 103:19-22 - "Bless the LORD"

19        The LORD has established his throne in the heavens,

            and his kingdom rules over all.

20        Bless the LORD, O you his angels,

            you mighty ones who do his bidding,

            obedient to his spoken word.

21        Bless the LORD, all his hosts,

            his ministers that do his will.

22        Bless the LORD, all his works,

            in all places of his dominion.

            Bless the LORD, O my soul.

9.1 As the hymn draws to an end the psalmist draws the threads together and again focuses the attention of the worshippers on God. The singers are exhorted, with all the company of heaven and all of creation, to acknowledge the LORD as God over all, the King of the Universe. In singing the psalm they have recognised the feebleness and failings of their human condition, but they have also celebrated its greatness and goodness which comes from the generosity of God's steadfast love. They have been given a chance to express their joys and their sorrows, to sing of their hopes, to face up to their fears and to affirm the love of God for each person in all the details of their personal lives. A worshipping congregation has sung its faith, remembered its past and renewed its hope in God. That is how it should be in worship, when worshippers bring their whole life to God in an offering of themselves, their experiences, thoughts and feelings to him. In that experience faith is renewed and life affirmed. But the psalm does not end on that note, nor does worship consist of that alone. The ending of the psalm reminds the singers that the God who is interested in the details of their lives, the one who is the LORD their God, is the God of the whole universe who has the whole world in his hands. While the hymn recognises that human lives are important it also recognises that human lives are not at the centre of the universe's agenda. Human life with all its ups and downs is lived in the light of eternity and of the universe, and the last part of the psalm focuses on the God of the universe and the God of eternity. This God is transcendent. He is magnificent beyond what human minds can grasp or human words express: but he can be worshipped and adored. So the psalm ends with a renewal of the call to worship with which it began, a call to each singer, the whole congregation and all the company of heaven to join in praise to the LORD and in acknowledging that he, alone, is the God of heaven, the King of the Universe.

9.2

Verse 19: The LORD has established his throne in the heavens,

and his kingdom rules over all.

9.2.1 This verse pictures God as exalted as king in heaven and over all the earth. His throne is set firm in the heavens. It is "established," and unlike earthly dynasties which are liable to be overthrown or changed God's throne is firmly established; it is everlasting and unchangeable. Isaiah of Jerusalem had seen a vision of God's throne towering over the Temple (Isaiah 6:1). In his visions Ezekiel had seen something like a magnificent throne mounted on what looked like a chariot (Ezekiel 1:26), with God in glory shining over it. The picture of God as king is an important one in the Old Testament, and it is, of course from there that Jesus takes his picture of the " Kingdom of Heaven " as Matthew calls it, or the " Kingdom of God " as Mark and Luke call it. God's "kingdom" in this psalm is his "sovereign rule" (NJPS), "sovereign power" (NJB), or "kingly power" (REB).

9.2.2 "The LORD is king" is the opening phrase of Pss 93, 97 and 99, and God is seen as king also in Pss 95, 96 and 98. This group of psalms are often called the "Enthronement Psalms" because they seem to picture God being enthroned as king. It is not clear what sort of service in the Temple these psalms might have been used in: but some scholars envisage a great annual New Year Festival in which the King of David's line was reconsecrated, and the LORD was enthroned as God of Earth and Heaven after defeating his enemies. Other scholars say that there is little evidence for such an act of worship. Whatever liturgy they might or might not have been used in, these psalms are very powerful in their language and imagery, and vividly speak of God as a king:

"The LORD is king, he is robed in majesty;

the LORD is robed, he is girded with strength.

He has established the world; it shall never be moved;

your throne is established from of old;

you are from everlasting. (Ps 93:1-2)

Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;

let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!

For the LORD is a great God,

and a great King above all gods. (Ps 95:2-3)

Say among the nations, "The LORD is king!

The world is firmly established: it shall never be moved.

He will judge the peoples with equity." (Ps 96:10)

The LORD is king! Let the earth rejoice:

let the many coastlands be glad!

Clouds and thick darkness are all around him;

righteousness and justice are the

foundations of his throne. (Ps 97:1-2)

Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth;

break forth into joyous song and sing praises.

Sing praises to the LORD with the lyre,

with the lyre and the sound of melody.

With trumpets and the sound of the horn

make a joyful noise before the King, the LORD. (Ps 98:4-6)

The LORD is king; let the peoples tremble!

He sits enthroned upon the cherubim;

let the earth quake!

The LORD is great in Zion ;

he is exalted over all the peoples.

Let them praise your great and awesome name.

Holy is he!

Mighty King, lover of justice,

you have established equity;

you have executed justice

and righteousness in Jacob.

Extol the LORD our God;

worship at his footstool.

Holy is he!" (Ps 99:1-5)

In powerful words, originally accompanied by music and probably drama, these psalms celebrate the LORD as King of Creation, King of the gods and of the nations and King of Israel . The LORD is the king who defeats the forces of chaos and death, pictured as mighty floods and surging "waters" (Ps 93:3-4). The LORD has imposed his rule on this chaos so the earth has been made firm and secure so that "it shall never be moved" (also Ps 96:10). He is God of the whole earth, even to the farthest coastlands (Ps 97:1) and the God of all nations (Ps 96:10). He is king over all the gods (Pss 95:3, 97:9). "All the earth" is called to worship him (Pss 96:1, 97:1, 98:4). His throne is set in heaven, surrounded by clouds, thick darkness, fire and lightning (Ps 97:2-5). His royal will is to be obeyed (Ps 93:5), and past disobedience is quoted as a warning (Ps 95:8-9). Like a true king he has been the saviour and helper of his people in the past (Ps 98:1-3, 99:4-9) and the psalmists rejoice because he is coming again "to judge" (ie to save!) the earth and its people (Pss 96:10-13, 97:10-12, 98:7-9).

9.2.3 Behind these pictures of God as the King of Creation lies an old creation story, glimpsed elsewhere in the Old Testament, which Israel adapted from a widespread ancient Near Eastern picture of creation as the outcome of a battle between the gods and the monsters of chaos. Before the earth was formed there was God and his great enemy, a monster with various names, such as Rahab or Leviathan, the great monster of chaos and evil. They had fought. God had won. Out of the dead body of his defeated enemy God had made the heavens and the earth: life out of death, order out of chaos, good out of evil. Traces of this story remain in the Old Testament at Ps 89:5-18, Isaiah 51:9-11 and in Job (7:12, 26:12 and 38:8-11), but it is best seen in Ps 74:12-17. In the middle of a psalm which is lamenting over the destruction of the Temple and what seems to be the LORD's helplessness or reluctance to do anything about it, the psalmist remembers God's power,

"Yet God my king is from of old,

working salvation in the earth.

You divided the sea by your might;

you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters.

You crushed the heads of Leviathan;

you gave him as food

for the creatures of the wilderness.

You cut openings for springs and torrents;

you dried up ever-flowing streams.

Yours is the day, yours also the night;

you established the luminaries and the sun.

You have fixed all the bounds of the earth;

you made summer and winter." (Ps 74:12-17)

God is King, the King of Creation, who has defeated his enemies before and who can be expected to do it again. Ps 95:3 speaks of the LORD as a "great God, and a great king above all gods."

This idea of the LORD as King of the gods is seen clearly in Ps 82 which pictures the God of Israel as the President of the Heavenly Council, taking the chair in the assembly of the gods, and calling the rest of the gods to account for the way they have handled their responsibilities, especially towards the vulnerable and the needy, "God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgement" (Ps 82:1)

9.2.4 The Old Testament does not speak with one voice on the question of the existence of other gods beside the God of Israel. This psalm sees the God of Israel as the chief of the gods, and not as the only one there is, as does the opening scene in Job. This is in line with Deuteronomy 32:43 and 32:8-9,

"When the Most High apportioned the nations,

when he divided humankind,

he fixed the boundaries of the peoples

according to the number of the gods;

the LORD's own portion was his people,

Jacob his allotted share."

Other nations have other gods, but the God of Israel is supreme over these gods and their nations (Ps 47:2-3). Other parts of the Old Testament disagree strongly and dismiss these other gods as idols. They are no gods at all, for the LORD is the only God there is. Isaiah of Babylon states this powerfully (eg Isaiah 44:6-8, 45:5-6, 18-22, 46:8-11), and words very like his are found at Deuteronomy 32:39, "See now that I, even I, am he: there is no god beside me."

The Hebrew of Deuteronomy 32:8 and 32:43 has been censored, and now contains no reference to other gods at all. The official Hebrew version has "according to the number of the sons of Israel," but NRSV and those other translations which recognise this find their reading in the first Greek translation of the Old Testament (which has "according to the number of the angels of God" here) and in a Hebrew manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls (which has "according to the number of the sons of God"). That the LORD is the One and Only God became the orthodox belief of Judaism which Christianity and Islam inherited: but it would not have been agreed by every writer whose words or ideas have been preserved in the Old Testament.

9.2.5 Finally there is also the picture of the LORD as the King of Israel. This can be seen in the stories in 1 Samuel 8 where the people negotiate with the prophet Samuel. They want a king "like other nations" instead of their increasingly unsatisfactory tribal system which managed without a single ruler. Samuel is not happy with the idea, nor is the storyteller. According to the storyteller the LORD sadly says to Samuel,

"Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them." (1 Samuel 8:7. see also 12:12)

9.2.6 Thus the traditions of the Old Testament picture God as a king, a picture taken up and used by the psalmist in Ps 103:19, "The LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all."

9.2.7 The psalm speaks about a "throne in the heavens" and a "kingdom." An obvious question is, Where is God king of? Where is his kingdom? The Lord's Prayer encourages us to make a distinction between heaven and earth. God is in heaven ("Our father who art in heaven") and his kingdom is established there ("as it is in heaven") but not here, for in that prayer we pray that his kingdom will come here, "on earth." That is the way that the psalmist probably thought as well. He would have thought of a "three-decker universe." There was "heaven" or "the heavens" above, the flat world in the middle and the underworld or "the depths" underneath. God ruled over it all from heaven and there was nothing and nowhere over which he was not king. But his kingship and reign were not always acknowledged, not even always in heaven and certainly not on earth. He could and did exercise power, but not everyone lived as one of his subjects or were obedient to him. God is king, but he does not have total power. It is obvious to everyone that God's kingdom has not come and his will is not done here on earth, and that there are many things here that do not conform to his will and purpose. The psalmist was as aware as we are of our human freedom to follow God or to ignore him, to obey or to disobey. Yet in this verse he sounds a note of hope, that one day God will reign as king over all; as he does now in the heavens, and in the Temple , so he will on earth. The obedience of the worshippers in the Temple and their peace and blessing is a foretaste of what it will be like for all on earth when God is finally acknowledged as king. In the end, he asserts, goodness will triumph over evil, light over darkness and life over death, for God is king and will be king. Generation after generation of Jews have not lived to see this and yet the belief that this will one day be so has sustained them in their faith through the most terrible of persecutions over many centuries. Likewise generation after generation of Christians have not lived to see the final triumph of good over evil, which they believe was promised in the cross of Jesus. These verses at the end of this psalm are powerful encouragements to faith at times when faith is difficult. They urge us to endure to the end in the conviction that goodness will triumph. They express the certainty of God's ultimate victory.

9.2.8 The psalmist insists that it is the LORD who is king, and that the LORD is king over all, that there are no final limits to his dominion or his authority. Those who sang the psalm might think of the King of Creation's victory over chaos and death, and link this with their personal recovery from illness or their experience of forgiveness as in vv3-4 earlier in the psalm. Or they might meditate on how the King of Israel delivered their ancestors through the exodus, and gave them his law, and so remember with joy that they are now his people, or with confession that they have forsaken his covenant and neglected his commandments. Those who were oppressed, or afraid, or despondent might find hope and comfort in the psalmist's assurance that the LORD is indeed king. The ending of the psalm begins with a pointed reminder of the seriousness and joy of worship, of the obligations and the privileges of religion and of its hope and challenge. The worshippers are in the presence of their God and King, the King of the Universe, whose name is the LORD. In the Temple and singing this psalm the worshippers glimpse the situation as it really is, that the LORD's throne is "established," set firm and immovable, and by their worship are strengthened to live as the people of God, the loyal and loved subjects of the King of Heaven.

9.3

Verse 20   Bless the LORD, O you his angels,

                 you mighty ones who do his bidding,

                 obedient to his spoken word.

Verse 21   Bless the LORD, all his hosts,

                 his ministers that do his will.

9.3.1 Here the psalm fills out the picture it has just begun to paint of the LORD enthroned as king in the heavens. Not only does the Heavenly King sit on a throne but he is also surrounded, as earthly kings are, by courtiers and royal officials. The first of these to be mentioned are the "angels" (v20) and then the "hosts" (v21), who are waiting around to do whatever the king requires to be done. GNB and HM offer clearer translations here:

"Praise the LORD, you strong and mighty angels,

who obey his commands, who listen to what he says.

Praise the LORD, all you heavenly powers,

you servants of his, who do his will!" (GNB)

"Kneel and adore the LORD, his heavenly messengers,

strong warriors who do what he says, listening to the words he speaks.

Kneel and adore the LORD, all his heavenly court,

his royal servants who do what pleases him." (HM)

What are we to make of angels and "all the company of heaven," to use the phrase from the old Communion service? What are we to make of God sitting on a throne, surrounded by these strange creatures? What is the sense of this sort of picture which obviously meant a lot in the Old Testament and in the New?

9.3.2 The Old Testament and its world had no problem at all in believing in God, gods or spirits, or in Heaven, heavens or underworlds. There was obviously the world in which they lived, the world of their senses, the world that they could see. Even this world was full of wonders and strange things that defied the imagination and evoked awe and wonder. But there was also the unseen world, which was in many ways more real and certainly far more powerful than the world that could be seen. This was the world of God and the gods, of spirits and demons, of strange powers and forces. Religion took this unseen world seriously. It was the world of magic, the paranormal and the occult: the world of the beyond which was also present everywhere in this world. The Old Testament shared this way of looking at things, and so had no problem with envisaging God, gods, a heavenly court, angels, cherubim and seraphim, spirits or ghosts, though the official Old Testament which we have is remarkably restrained about some of these. It knows about the unseen world, but it doesn't pry too much into some parts of it. It knows that some people are admitted into the unseen world by dreams and visions, but that sort of thing is not to be encouraged, and dabbling with the occult is expressly forbidden to those who worship the LORD. But a preoccupation with the occult is one thing, a healthy imagination about all the company of heaven is something else. A sense of the mysterious and the beyond is the mark of a whole and sensible person, who knows that life is not confined to our senses and that much of what is real is far beyond the power of our minds to conceive. This ancient world view knew that although humanity was important in the earthly scheme of things there were dimensions way above and far below those of human experience and imagination. So at times the Old Testament pictures God in heaven hidden by fire and smoke, in indescribable power and splendour. Occasionally this is seen on earth, as on Mt Sinai or in the Temple , by those to whom a vision is granted. That world is the real world, compared to which our world is one of passing shadows. There is a story about the prophet Elisha which captures this perspective beautifully. The king of Aram had sent his army to Dothan to capture the prophet because he kept seeing visions of their plans and telling the Israelite king what his enemies were planning,

"When an attendant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, an army with horses and chariots was all around the city. His servant said, "Alas, master! What shall we do?" Elisha replied, "Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them." Then he prayed, "O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see." So the LORD opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw: the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha." (2 Kings 6:15-17)

In the story the servant saw things only as they appeared to be, but Elisha saw them as they really were because he could see the unseen world. It is this unseen world of ultimate reality that the psalmist is talking about in these verses in Ps 103. In worship the congregation is entering into this reality as it gathers in front of the very throne of heaven, and is caught up with all the company of heaven in worship. In these verses those who are singing the psalm in the Temple in Jerusalem or wherever else it may be that they are worshipping audaciously call all that company of heaven to do as they are doing, to "bless the LORD," to acknowledge that the LORD is God, and to worship him.

9.3.3 The "angels" are referred to in v20 as "mighty ones" who do God's will. The word translated "angel" here means "messenger" and is always translated as "messenger" when these agents are sent by human beings. When it is God who is sending a message the messengers are called "angels." So angels crop up from time to time in Old Testament stories as God's messengers, often in pairs. Only very occasionally, and only in the Book of Psalms, do they appear as anything other than messengers. Here we find "guardian angels" who protect God's faithful people (Pss 34:7, 91:11, compare 35:5), and the "destroying angels" who punished the Egyptians before they would let the Israelites go (Ps 78:49). Later on in Jewish literature angels become more common and more complicated, as such other Old Testament creatures as the cherubim and seraphim, or the "sons of God," are drawn into the picture and also called "angels." There we find "fallen angels" who wreak havoc on the earth after being expelled from heaven, and among the good angels there are different grades with different job descriptions and more and more of them are named, such as Gabriel in the New Testament. The picture of angels as white singers with wings comes from Christian art of later centuries and not direct from the Bible.

9.3.4 In Ps 103:20 these heavenly messengers are also called "strong warriors" who do what the LORD says (HM), or "mighty warriors" (NJB). This powerful expression uses a common word "mighty ones" or "heroes," which is used for anything or anyone which is particularly important or powerful, especially for great soldiers, plus the Hebrew word for strength. NRSV's "mighty ones" is therefore not quite strong enough. Even God's runabout messengers are terrifyingly great warriors.

9.4 Two features to notice about this verse are that it is another of those slightly longer verses, which some scholars want to shorten, and that there is a point of the Hebrew which is hidden in the English translations. We can set out the Hebrew rather literally as follows,

"Bless the LORD his messengers,

his mighty warriors, those who do his word,

to hearken to the sound of his word."

Notice the repetition of God's "word." The psalm talks about "doing" as well as "hearkening to" God's "word," paying attention to it and putting it into practice. It may be no coincidence that this was exactly the theme of the previous unusually long verse in vv17-18. There is probably nothing technical meant by God's "word" here. The psalmist believed that God made his will and purpose known, for example that he "spoke" to Moses on Mt Sinai when he gave the commandments, and that he speaks through prophets and preachers. For the psalmist the main problem lies not with how or where to "hear the word of the LORD" but with how to "do" it.

9.4.1 Verse 21 continues this theme. The psalm calls on God's "hosts" to join in and "bless the LORD." These are the ones who "do his will," his "ministers" or "servants," a word used for servants like Elisha's servant at Dothan , for royal officials, and for priests. But who or what are the LORD's "hosts" who carry out his instructions or do his bidding like loyal servants or officials? Are we still in heaven or is the psalm now addressing human beings?

9.4.2 One of the titles for God in the Old Testament is "the LORD of Hosts." NJB gives this as "Yahweh Sabaoth," which Christians are slightly familiar with from the phrase "Lord God of Sabaoth" in the old version of the Te Deum; and NIV and GNB quite misleadingly translate this as the "LORD Almighty." Opinions differ as to what these hosts originally were. One view is that the hosts in question are the "heavenly hosts" of the sun, moon and stars. So to refer to the LORD as "the LORD of Hosts" would be a way of saying that he was the God of the Heaven, who created the hosts of the stars and controlled their movements (eg Pss 8:3, 147:4). This could be part of an ancient put-down directed at those who worshipped the sun, moon and stars as gods. This title would be a statement that these beautiful and mysterious heavenly bodies were not gods, just creatures that the great God, the LORD, had made. Another view is that the hosts in the title are the armies of Israel, his fighting host, and that the title refers to the LORD as the God of the Hosts of Israel, "Lord of armies, God of battles,"[27] or as young David is said to have answered back to Goliath,

"You come to me with sword and spear and javelin: but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel , whom you have defied." (1 Samuel 17:45)

The other suggestion notes that this title seems to have belonged especially to the Temple and to be used in the Old Testament particularly where God is pictured as a king, which is exactly where we find it in Ps 103. This view sees the "hosts" of God as those numberless heavenly beings including the angels which surround God's throne, as in the vision of the prophet Micaiah ben Imlah in 1 Kings 22:19, “I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him to the right and to the left of him."

The psalmist calls on this heavenly host of God's "servants" or "ministers" who "do his will" to "bless the LORD." They are God's faithful and obedient servants, the king's loyal ministers, ready to do his work. Calvin notes that they are "not idly beholding God's glory but... always ready for their work," and the puritan commentator Matthew Poole says that they execute God's commands "with all cheerfulness and readiness." But the psalmist seems to know that loyalty and obedience are not enough. They are essential, but they are not sufficient. The heavenly host still needs to worship God, to acknowledge the LORD as God, not only as master or employer, and to give themselves to him in worship and praise, as well as in service and obedience. So the psalm calls on them to "bless the LORD."

9.5

Verse 22 Bless the LORD, all his works,

in all places of his dominion.

Bless the LORD, O my soul.

From heaven the psalm comes down to earth, from the unseen world to the world we see, but not simply to the human world. It calls on everything that the LORD has made, which is everything that there is, in every place where he "rules," which is everywhere, to "bless the LORD." This appeal is worldwide, and to all creation. The psalm belongs in the worship of the people of Israel , in the Temple in Jerusalem , but it recognises that the LORD is the God of the whole world. He is the King of the Universe, to be worshipped by all creation and all people. Each part of creation in its own way is to acknowledge the LORD, an idea found in other hymns of the Temple such as Ps 148.

The Old Testament talks about God as creator in a number of different ways, from the picture of the battle with the dragon to the solemn and orderly beauty of Genesis chapter 1. At least four different creation stories or creation pictures can be found, and they are brought together in Ps 104, a psalm in praise of God the Creator and Provider[28]. In Ps 103 the psalmist knows that his life is in the LORD's hands (vv2-5), not least because the LORD has formed him (v14) and given him life like a father (v13). He knows too that the LORD has been at work to save and help his people (vv6-7). The LORD is the active, creating and saving God of all creation, though as yet not everyone recognises him or acknowledges him. In the closing verse of the psalm there is a note of hope that the day will come when God's kingdom will come "on earth as it is in heaven," for "The earth is the LORD's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it" (Ps 24:1).

9.6 Finally the psalm ends where it began with "Bless the LORD, O my soul." The one who sings the psalm must worship too. It is not enough to be present while others are worshipping God, or to lead others in worship, or even to write psalms for them to sing. The psalm blends personal thanksgiving with praise for what God has done for his own nation, the people of Israel . It celebrates God's love for the whole of creation and for each person. It calls God father and king. In singing it the worshipper is not alone, he or she is joined to the other worshippers in the congregation and to "all the company of heaven." In end the psalmist knows that worship means participation in a community of faith and that religion means personal commitment, so his last word is to himself, "Bless the LORD, O my soul."

10 Psalm 103 - an epilogue

10.1 First here is what some twentieth century commentators have said in appreciation of this psalm,

"The Psalm is one of singular beauty. Its tenderness, its trustfulness, its hopefulness, anticipate the spirit of the New Testament. It does not contain one jarring note, and it furnishes fit language of thanksgiving for the greater blessings of a more marvellous redemption than that of Israel from Babylon ."                          (A F Kirkpatrick - 1906)

"We have in this poem one of the most joyful compositions in the Psalter."   (A Cohen - 1945)

"The religious teaching of this psalm, with its beautiful witness to the love of God, is so fully expressed all through that a further section on this could add nothing. Let the psalm be re-read, which will more than suffice."                                                            (W O E Oesterley - 1953)

"(The psalmist) has been granted an insight into the heart of God, and what he has found there is grace."                                                                         (Artur Weiser - 1962)

"Admiring gratitude shines through every line of this hymn to the God of all grace, for which the next psalm, 104, seems to have been written as a companion... Together the two psalms praise God as Saviour and Creator, Father and Sustainer, "merciful and mighty." In the galaxy of the Psalter, these are twin stars of the first magnitude."                  (Derek Kidner - 1975)

"The psalm has become so familiar and has meant so much to so many people that it would be superfluous to try to draw lessons from it or to show its relevance for today. It is timeless."                                                                                    (Harry Mowvley - 1989)

Harry Mowvley says that any comment on this great psalm is superfluous, and W O E Oesterley says that all we need to do is to read it again. We will do as Oesterley says, but as we have already gone against Harry Mowvley by writing a book trying to do exactly what he says is not necessary, I shall go against him even further by drawing up a list and making a few comments after we have re-read the psalm.

10.2

1          Bless the LORD, O my soul,

              and all that is within me, bless his holy name.

2          Bless the LORD, O my soul,

              and do not forget all his benefits -

3          who forgives all your iniquity,

              who heals all your diseases,

4          who redeems your life from the Pit,

              who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,

5          who satisfies you with good as long as you live

              so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.

6          The LORD works vindication

              and justice for all who are oppressed.

7          He made known his ways to Moses,

              his acts to the people of Israel .

8          The LORD is merciful and gracious,

              slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

9          He will not always accuse,

              nor will he keep his anger for ever.

10        He does not deal with us according to our sins,

              nor repay us according to our iniquities.

11        For as the heavens are high above the earth,

              so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;

12        as far as the east is from the west,

              so far he removes our transgressions from us.

13        As a father has compassion for his children,

              so the LORD has compassion for those who fear him.

14        For he knows how we were made;

              he remembers that we are dust.

15        As for mortals, their days are like grass;

              they flourish like a flower of the field;

16        for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,

              and its place knows it no more.

17        But the steadfast love of the LORD

              is from everlasting to everlasting

              on those who fear him,

              and his righteousness to children's children,

18        to those who keep his covenant

            and remember to do his commandments.

19        The LORD has established his throne in the heavens,

              and his kingdom rules over all.

20        Bless the LORD, O you his angels,

              you mighty ones who do his bidding,

              obedient to his spoken word.

21        Bless the LORD, all his hosts,

              his ministers that do his will.

22        Bless the LORD, all his works,

            in all places of his dominion.

            Bless the LORD, O my soul.

10.3 We set out to explore this psalm with one intention, to answer the question, "What does this psalm say to us about God, his will and his ways? What can we learn from it about God? What can we learn from it about life? The psalm has given us answers,

1          that God exists and that he is a God of love and grace.

2          that God has made himself known, and can be given a name, the LORD, even though this name is mysterious and hides as much as it reveals.

3          that the LORD is good, and that the keynote word about him is hesed, for his characteristic feature is "steadfast love."

4          that LORD's will for the world and ways of doing things are seen in the stories of Moses and the exodus.

5          that although the exodus from Egypt show us what God is like, his ways can also be seen in nature and in human relationships. He is creator of the world, and like a father to us.

6          that human life is brief and fleeting, feeble and frail: but God values us.

7          that we can have confidence in God, and gratitude to him for his goodness seen in life's joys and its beauties, as well as in the forgiveness of sins and the renewal of hope.

8          that there is a shadow side to life, but we can believe in God despite the shadows as well as because of the sun.

9          that religion is about personal commitment, but that it is a shared pilgrimage. The psalm is a congregational hymn, not a solo. God calls people into a community.

10        that God is experienced and learned about in worship.

11        that God has given guidance to his people about how to live.

12        that we are not alone and that this world is not all there is, for the seen world is surrounded by the unseen world where God is all in all.

13        that God is the King of the Universe, of the seen and the unseen, and that is our sure ground for hope and confidence to live in the present with all its ambiguities, joys and sorrows.

10.4 You may want to add more to this list, but the beauty of a faith which expresses itself in hymns, and not in bare lists of theological statements, is that it is an invitation to explore and to celebrate what is beyond our minds to conceive. Words or ideas alone cannot express the mystery that lies at the heart of religion, but by using "hearts and minds and hands and voices" in worship we can come to know and experience that mystery, which the Bible simply calls, "God." You are not, of course, compelled to believe any of this, either of my list of statements or of the pictures in the psalm. You can deny that God exists or that he cares. Many do. You can believe that he exists but prefer other pictures, or no pictures at all. No one is compelled to sing Ps 103, and the psalm does not try to argue its case. Instead it offers a testimony. It is the psalmist's testimony to the way he sees things, to his experience of God and to what makes sense for him. Those who compiled the hymn book for the temple saw something valuable in the psalm, perhaps because it was already well-known and a bit of a favourite, so they included it in their book as a hymn which expressed their faith as well. Those who do not believe it or cannot accept it don't have to sing it: but as a hymn of faith it makes sense, presents a coherent picture, and draws together many threads of the religious ideas of the Old Testament, binding them into a song for worship. It is a hymn, not a theological essay, but it is full of theology. The congregation which sings this hymn in worship is singing its beliefs about God, nurturing its understanding of him, deepening its experience of his power and love and expressing its commitment to him.

10.5 As for me, I want to add an Amen to this Psalm, and this eighteenth century hymn gives me the words to use,

"This, this is the God we adore,

Our faithful, unchangeable Friend;

Whose love is as great as His power,

And neither knows measure nor end.

We'll praise Him for all that is past,

And trust Him for all that's to come."

(Joseph Hart 1712-1768)

11 Precis

From September 1997 to August 1998 I wrote a monthly column on Psalms for the Methodist Recorder. The following is the piece I wrote on Psalm 103 which appeared on 4th June 1998. I reproduce it here because it summarises the argument and approach of this booklet.[29]

“Psalm 103 is my desert-island psalm. If I was allowed only one chapter from the Old Testament this would be it. If I was allowed only two chapters from the whole Bible this would be one of them. This ancient hymn is, to this reader at least, a summary of everything that is best in the whole Bible, not just the Old Testament. Almost everything that needs to be said about God is here. The only bit missing is that everything said here is lived out in Jesus of Nazareth.

The psalm begins and ends on that note of "blessing the LORD" which we saw in Psalm 100. It begins with the acknowledgement that of all the gods on offer it is the LORD alone who is God and who is the source of life and blessing (verses 1-4). It ends with a call to the whole universe to give the LORD the acknowledgement which is his due. In fact, the psalm begins and ends in much the same way that the Lord's Prayer begins and ends. The only difference is that in the first and last words of the psalm everyone who sings or prays the psalm is invited to make that acknowledgement their own - "Bless the LORD, my soul".

The kernel of the psalm, verses 6-18, is an expanded commentary on that mini-creed which cropped up in Psalm 100:5 and of which Exodus 34:6-7 is the key passage. The great words are steadfast love (verses 4, 8, 11 and 17) and mercy (verses 4, 8 and twice in 13) with righteousness (verses 6 and 17) and justice (verse 6) not far behind. These are lovely, warm words. They speak of a love which will not let us go but which seeks us out with kindness and embraces us with generosity. They speak of a new-every-morning sort of love, which takes our sins, our mistakes and all the sad and sorry failures of our lives and puts them behind us. Righteousness, in this psalm and in the Old Testament generally, means a love which yearns and works to put things right. Justice, likewise, is love in action to restore things to how they ought to be. So, crucially, when the Old Testament describes God as our judge it doesn't picture him as the impartial and unbending judge of a Roman court but as the one who springs to our aid to sort everything out and make it right again. Confuse the meaning of the Hebrew word with the meaning of the Latin one, as much theology does, and you get things seriously wrong. Stay with these verses in this psalm and you'll avoid that pitfall.

Distinctions between these words can't be drawn too rigidly. We see that from the way the different terms are used in parallel to each other (eg righteousness and justice in verse 6 and righteousness and steadfast love in verse 17). Added together, they paint a picture of a God who is generously kind and utterly reliable. They point to our "Covenant God" who wants to be involved with us and who stays by us despite our failings. Anyone wanting an alternative Old Testament reading for the Covenant Service can find one here. Another is Exodus 34:6-7 in the NRSV. This translation follows ancient Jewish tradition in reading "thousands of generations" rather than simply "thousands", and in so doing opens up the meaning of the passage much better. It emphasises God's amazing generosity in a typically Jewish and over the top way: his love lasts for thousands of generations, his anger for a mere three or four.

Those who have problems with the picture of God getting angry at all need to stop for a moment and think about it. The clue to understanding God's anger is found in verse 13 which pictures God as a father. We wouldn't think much of a parent who didn't get angry when their children fouled up their own lives or the lives of other people, would we? We might even say that anger, frustration and the tears in which they show themselves are a mark of love. In the Old Testament, God's anger is a sign that he actually cares. And we wouldn't think much of a parent who didn't get angry when someone else was hurting their child, would we? In the Old Testament, God's anger is sometimes the only defence the weak and helpless have against the strong and vicious.

Some Christian theology, on the other hand, has taught us that God's anger is his normal emotion towards us. We are sinners and we deserve it. We have offended against God's justice and so he has no alternative but to be angry and punish us. This is becoming the standard presentation of the death of Christ in much modern preaching and evangelism. Jesus had to die to pay the price for our sins and he died as a substitute for us to satisfy the demands of God's justice. Am I wrong to think that verses 10-14 of this psalm show that all of that theory is at best unnecessary and at worst misguided or even pernicious? These verses must not be read as if they minimise sin or deny its horrible effects. They take sin seriously. But they also show how God deals with it. How? He forgives it. Why? Because he's like that. And if that's what normal and loving parents do, can you really expect God to do or to be anything less (see Matthew 7:9-11)?

This is my Old Testament in a nutshell, desert island, psalm. It is simple, sane and humane. Thanks be to God for it”.

12 Notes

[1] "In honesty of preaching" - this phrase comes from F Pratt Green's hymn, "God is here!" (Hymns and Psalms 653, v2). In its April 2000 issue The Expository Times began a series on this topic using this phrase as a title – the article in the June issue was mine with the subheading “Mind the Gap”

[2] A series of Bible reading notes which expressly aims to reflect current trends in the academic study of the Bible in such a way that serious Christian readers will be moved to thought, prayer and action is the Guidelines series produced by The Bible Reading Fellowship. Their new People’s Bible Commentary series of commentaries on the different books of the Bible similarly aims to “link head and heart”. I commend both – though as a contributor to both I would, wouldn’t I?

normal">Introduction to the Bible, Penguin, 1999, the new 2000 editions of Introducing the Old Testament and Introducing the New Testament by John Drane, published by Lion and John Barton, What is the Bible? London , SPCK, 1991. There is also Robert Davidson, A Beginner’s Guide to the Old Testament, St Andrew Press, 1992. My conviction is that before we can ask what the Bible means we need to appreciate what it is and how it came to us, see my Why Bible-believing Methodists shouldn’t eat Black Pudding, now available free on the internet. See also John Goldingay, How to Read the Bible, Triangle 1997 and William Strange, The Authority of the Bible and Robert Evans, Using the Bible: studying the text, both in the Exploring Faith series from Darton, Longman and Todd.

[4] In case you think that this means that I am one more modern Methodist who “doesn’t believe the Bible”, please note that Rev Dr Adam Clarke, thrice President of the Methodist Conference in the generation after Wesley’s death lists this psalm in Volume IV of his Bible Commentary published in 1822 as one of the psalms written after the return from Exile in Babylon, saying that this is what “many of the ancients believed”.

[5] For a detailed introduction to the Psalms see the commentary by A A Anderson. Less detailed but very helpful are the introduction in H Mowvley's, The Psalms, and chapter 12 by Roger Tomes in Creating the Old Testament, edited by S Bigger. Details of these are given in the Select Bibliography or the Suggestions for Reading

[6] See my “’Bless the Lord’. An invitation to affirm the living God” in The Expository Times, vol 106 no 10, July 1995, pp293-296.

[7] Deuteronomy 6:4 is called, the "Shema" because this is the Hebrew word for "hear" which introduces the mini-creed, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone."

[8] Scholars have long recognised that the Book of Isaiah is made up of writings from different centuries. Much of chapters 1-35 comes from the eighth century BCE and reflects the message of the prophet Isaiah who lived in Jerusalem . Chapters 40-55 come from Babylon around 540 BCE and are anonymous, but instead of calling this prophet by a number, "Second Isaiah," I join those who prefer to give him a name "Isaiah of Babylon." Chapters 56-66 come from a few years later in Jerusalem again, and scholars disagree about whether these are from another prophet or from "Isaiah of Babylon."

[9] The Rabbis assumed that David wrote all the psalms in the Psalter. Not only did the Rabbis refuse to pronounce God's special name, they also preferred not to use the words "Lord" or "God" at all. Out of respect they used titles like, "The Holy One: blessed be He" and "The Shekhinah," which is translated in this passage as "The Presence."

[10] The Old Testament tells a story from the creation of the world down to the time of Ezra, around 400 BCE. The story of Israel begins with Abraham and tells how his descendants found themselves as slaves in Egypt . Moses led them out of Egypt , through the desert via Mt Sinai, where God appeared to them, to the border of the Promised Land. Joshua took them over the River Jordan and the tribes settled in Canaan , eventually becoming a nation under successive kings Saul, David and Solomon. From here on the story-line of the Bible can probably be tied in to "real history" but whether the Old Testament story is true to many facts that would satisfy a historian is a very controversial question. On Solomon's death the kingdom divided, the northern tribes calling themselves " Israel " and the southern ones " Judah ." Israel ceased to exist in 722 BCE when the Assyrians destroyed the capital, Samaria , and exiled the population. Judah was destroyed in 586 BCE when the Babylonians attacked its capital, Jerusalem , and exiled the leaders to Babylon . Cyrus of Persia overthrew the Babylonian empire around 540 BCE and some of the Jews returned to Jerusalem . The Temple was rebuilt around 516 BCE, and later Nehemiah and Ezra came from Babylon to supervise affairs in Judah . With them the story ends. Control of Judah passed from the Persians to the Greeks after the conquests of Alexander the Great around 330 BCE, and the last Old Testament book can be dated around 165 BCE when the Book of Daniel was written against the background of the Maccabean Revolt against the Greeks.

[11] In Holy Bible with Commentary by Bishops and Other Clergy, vol 4, John Murray, London , 1880

[12] Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, SCM, 1984, quoted in M Wiles, God's Action in the World, SCM, 1986, p2.

[13] The complete verse of the children's hymn is,

"I know, O Lord, that Thou art merciful and compassionate,
long-suffering and rich in grace and truth, pardoning transgression and sin.
Thou repentest of evil against them that love Thee, and keep Thy commandments,
that return to thee with faith and wholeness of heart...."
Taken from The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, G Vermes, JSOT Press, 1987, p204.: A Beginner’s Guide to the Old Testament, St Andrew Press, 1992.