“O how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day.” (97)

If you have a hard time with this sentence, like I have at different points of my life, lean in. I found, the closer I am to the Word, the more time I am able to meditate on it, the more I am able to receive Biblical teaching about it, the more I am heart-eyes about it.

Whoever wrote this psalm dedicated his life to Scripture, specifically the Torah, in a major way. He spends all this day thinking about it. And it’s a good thing, because apparently he had some enemies and affliction to deal with. He discovered the Word as an anchor. 

“Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path.” (105)

Absolutely necessary, daily bread.

There have been many times, in my estimation, I have sharply disagreed with the Law. It seemed unreasonable, mean, unnecessary, ensnaring, impossible or crude. I don’t have it all figured out now. I don’t love the Law as much as this guy. But I realized, the Law is good, beautiful, lovely. The problem is that it’s brilliance casts a dirty shadow on me, pointing out all the ways I’m not good, beautiful or lovely. 

There are a few options, then, in relating too the Law: Stare at it, lovingly, keeping your eyes off your shadowed self (though maybe occasionally catching someone else’s shadows out of the corner of your eye). Run away from it, so that, in the darkness no one can tell you’re shadowed (which could subsequently cause you to forget what it said, allowing you to dislike your folklore version of it). Or embrace its goodness in light on Christ’s fulfillment of it, in which He offers His perfect application of it to us, making us brilliant as well, since He dwells in us. 

It is lovely, and He had made us lovely. Now don’t be tempted to cast it aside. It still has the power to make you wiser than you enemies, more insightful than your teachers and more understanding than the elderly. 

Lean in to God’s law and designs. Meditate on them today.

-Bethany