I am a rule follower.
Unlike most kids who seemed to feel pinched and fenced in by rules and regulations, I liked rules and boundaries while I was growing up. I like them now. Rules, I learned early on, could bring about a strange kind of freedom. If you know what the expectations are in a classroom, a job, a city, a country, then you can move about with freedom and without fear. You’ve likely heard the story of the school children who huddled in the middle of an unfenced playground, fearful of what would happen if they strayed too far beyond the absent boundaries. When a fence was finally installed, the children ran freely about the entire playground, playing confidently along the perimeter of the fence because the boundary made them feel safer. Humans find freedom in rules and boundaries.
One of my favorite parts of the story of the Exodus of the Israelites is the way God rescues them from slavery but then loves them by giving them rules. His Law, which sometimes reads as severely restrictive to modern readers, was the path to real freedom. It was the fence around the playground, built to give them confidence to live as God’s people, not Egypt’s slaves. It might seem odd to an American in the twenty-first century to call it freedom to be enveloped in a long list of rules about worship and relationships, harvest and hygiene. But, the people of Israel wouldn’t have known how to function in their new identity. They needed the guidelines and laws about how to live as people who belonged to the one true living God. Their God was holy and just, faithful and true. Thus, as those who belonged to him, their lives needed to reflect that belonging. They also must live holy, just, faithful, and true.
The trouble was, they couldn’t live that way, which was also the point of the Law—to reveal how hard and how often they would scale the fence and venture out into the world of idolatry and pagan sacrifice. It never went well for them when they did this, and it always started with an amnesiac approach to the words of the Lord. Forgetting him, forgetting his Law, forgetting his wondrous works of rescue and his decisive defeat of their enemies—the act of forgetting led to their flight over the top of the fence and straight to the altars of their enemies’ gods and goddesses.
I didn’t really want to read my Bible this morning. My kids returned to school this week, and that 5:30 alarm was brutal after a long summer of slow mornings. My head felt fuzzy while I stood at the espresso machine in my kitchen and rubbed my eyes. The scent of strong coffee wafted in the air while I tried to remember what day it was. Americano in hand, I turned on the living room lamps and settled into my corner of our gray sectional and propped my open Bible in my lap. I sipped my coffee and tried to clear the cobwebs in my mind before reading over Isaiah 63-64, the chapters I’ll spend the next week digging into. I’ve been studying the old prophet for eleven months, and I’m nearly at the finish line. Some days, I can’t write fast enough, filling my spiral notebook so fast my arthritic hand can’t keep up. Other days, it’s been an absolute slog. Today was one of those days, my brain so foggy I had trouble registering the words on the page.
But I know that I need the words of the Lord more than I need that two-shot Americano with a dash of cream every morning. I need the internal shaping of the instructions of the Lord, the reminders of his past faithfulness, the promises of Christ’s return to make everything that’s wrong with this old world right again. I need the spotlight on my sin every day because somehow it always seems so small in my own estimation. Under the microscope of Scripture, my selfishness looms as large as it really is, and I am struck by how ugly pride can appear when you really see it. I need God’s Word for that. I need the fence around my heart so I know how to live as a new creature who says no to sin by saying yes to Jesus. I need the fence that frees me because I am not long for this world and while I am sojourning here as an alien, a stranger, a citizen of a better country, I want to make sure I don’t wander into a settledness that makes me forget where my true home is. If I climb the fence, I’ll run right back into slavery to the things I hate so much, the things God rescued me from, the things that felt like freedom but were really snares and traps with chains so heavy I couldn’t lift my head.
The fence is a delight, really. It keeps me where I need to be, helps me remember the safety in boundaries. The life of faith from beginning to end is grace, for no amount of rule-following was ever going to save anyone. But there is an element of obedience to God’s Word that cannot be ignored. Faithfulness to God’s commands brings a kind of joy we all desperately want. Jesus said it like this, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:10-11). We tend to think of obedience in terms of strangulating legalism, but Jesus didn’t. He knew obedience wasn’t a path to God’s love but a response to it, and that in that obedience, we’d find certainty of that love. In obedience to God’s commands and decrees, we remember God’s love. In his words, we remember who we are, whose we are.
I may not always feel inclined to open my Bible, but I do love it. So I open it anyway. God could have saved us and said, “Good luck—see you on Resurrection Day!” But instead he gave us his whole counsel so that we could run around the schoolyard with freedom and joy, knowing there was no fear when we knew who we belonged to.
Gimel
Deal bountifully with your servant,
that I may live and keep your word.
Open my eyes, that I may behold
wondrous things out of your law.
I am a sojourner on the earth;
hide not your commandments from me!
My soul is consumed with longing
for your rules at all times.
You rebuke the insolent, accursed ones,
who wander from your commandments.
Take away from me scorn and contempt,
for I have kept your testimonies.
Even though princes sit plotting against me,
your servant will meditate on your statutes.
Your testimonies are my delight;
they are my counselors.
Author’s note:
This is the third essay in a series of reflections on Psalm 119. Each article bears the title of the stanza of the psalm from which it draws inspiration. This is 3 of 22.
Photo by Sebastian Schuster on Unsplash
