Ps. 66.5-7 (creation: redemption without destruction)

Come and see / the works of God
his awesome dealings / with mankind.
He turned the sea / into dry land
they crossed the river / on foot
so / let us rejoice / in him. 
While he rules forever / in his might / his eyes / watch the nations
let not / the rebellious / rise in defiance. 

As we indicated yesterday, there is a vast world-wide scope to this psalm. Verse 1 calls for “all the earth” to raise a joyful shout, and that section ends, in vs. 4, with the observation that “all the earth should bow before you”. There is very much the sense that the “awesome deeds/works” (vs. 3, 5) are world-displaying deeds. They are not for the private enjoyment of a select. This sense is now transformed into a joyful urgency when the psalmist says, “Come and see…”. He has now turned to the ‘world’ and is inviting them into the Temple wherein he will re-tell (participate in) the world-displaying “awesome dealings with mankind.” This, it seems, is interesting, as what he is about to relate is the story of the Exodus. Yet, the psalmist sees this story as God’s dealings not with just Israel but with “all mankind”. And, after relating this particular moment of God’s dealings, he returns to the global perspective of God whose “eyes watch the nations” and concludes with an instruction: “let not the rebellious rise in defiance.” What I think is so important in this is that the Exodus is not here portrayed a private, particularized moment of God’s action. It is both one that is to be a story for “all mankind” and one that operates as a lesson against the “rebellious” who, Pharaoh-like, attempt to defy God’s initiative. And yet—this world-wide story is one that you must travel to Zion to hear (“Come and see…”); you must, magi-like, come to Jerusalem. It is in the Temple and in the liturgical participation within the story of the Exodus that this global story is relayed. This points to something we have emphasized in other psalms: that the more God’s sovereignty over all creation and the nations is perceived, the greater is the complete centrality of the Temple (and Zion/Jerusalem) grasped. Indeed, if we have been correct as to the relation of Exodus and creation, they mutually infuse each other. It does not work in the reverse; it does not, in other words, mean that the more global and “all mankind” one comes to perceive of God’s authority, the more that tends to relativize Zion/Jerusalem and the Temple. It is a principle that applies in nearly every situation: the more one comes to grasp the particular modes in which God has acted in the Scripture, the more one comes to engage with his sovereignty. The particular modes of God’s action do not compete with his global, world-wide dominion. The Exodus reveals creation—just as the waters of chaos are dried up for them to pass through on dry-ground, so too, in creation, is the water separated from the dry ground to prepare the stage for life.  In this we come to a crucial point that I’m only now being able to really formulate: that the massive displays of God’s redemptive power (his ‘resurrection power’) are the source of one’s vision of creation. Creation, in other words, can be revealed just as much (if not more…) by contemplating the “awesome works of God” (which refer to his displays of redemptive power). By coming to perceive how astoundingly “for us” God is in his redemptive power, we come to catch a glimpse of how that power must be the primal power of creation, the great and beginning “for us”. And, by displaying how supremely and utterly in control he is in the Exodus, we come to realize that creation itself must have been….how to say it….redemption without destruction.