The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential by Wright N. T

Author:Wright, N. T. [Wright, N. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

This kind of language belongs closely with the emphasis, in Psalm 50 and elsewhere, on the obedience of the heart.

Indeed, as we shall see in the next chapter, we have here a sense not only of the Torah as a new kind of “sacred space” but of the transformative effect of obedience. Wherever you travel, all this implies, the Torah will be like a moving tabernacle, a place of refuge: “Your statutes have been my songs,” says the next stanza, “wherever I make my home” (119.54).

So, if the Temple was a microcosm, a small version of the whole world, the same is true of the Torah—or, at least, the Temple and Torah between them point ahead to a new world, God’s new “place,” the renewed creation filled with God’s glory and purpose as the waters cover the sea.

Thus it is that in one of the best loved of all psalms—number 19, which C. S. Lewis hailed as the finest poem ever written—we find the Torah in parallel with the sun, suggesting that in God’s new world, already launched and waiting for worshipers to inhabit it, the Torah plays the role of the sun itself within the present creation. Once again it is hard not to quote the entire psalm:

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