Ps. 68.9-10 (transgressing the boundary of necessity)

You spread abroad / a good rain / O God
when your domain / is weary / you sustain it
Your community dwells / in your domain
which you prepare / in your goodness / for the poor / O God. 

Here, we begin to move more deeply into the nature of this ‘domain’ that God has prepared for his people when he “goes forth” in front of them. We saw in our previous reflection how God takes the position that had previously been relegated to everyone else; whereas before everyone/everything was ‘before him’, now he moves ‘before Israel’ as they move into the Promised Land. It is important to note that his change in position to this almost ‘servant-like’ stance is initiated and continues based upon the goal—the land. Here, we come to see that God is, in fact, engaging in a type of homecoming—he is taking them not to their domain, but to his. God is ‘coming home’. When many commentators stress the fact that Israel is understood to be merely a tenant in these lines (the land isn’t theirs to ‘own’ but merely to dwell in) they miss the profoundly important point that this is God’s domain. To dwell in this land is infinitely greater than to become a ‘land-owner’! One has entered into a domain that not only would this God act to protect, because it is his, but is one saturated with “good rain” (vs. 9) and is “prepared in your goodness for the poor” (vs. 10). Indeed, I don’t think it a stretch to say that this refrain of ‘goodness’ should call to mine the ‘goodness’ of creation as we see in Genesis 1. And, hence, that God’s ‘preparation’ of the land for Israel only deepened its perception of the nature of creation itself—that through God’s mastery of those powers in his ‘domain’ reflected (or, revealed) his mastery over the darkness and chaos waters of creation. Their perception of creation, thus, worked from the historical back to the origin (or, we might say, their origins were leavened by the “going before” of God; it is the Exodus that they are commanded to recite every year, not Genesis). It is also significant to note the “poor” in these verses as it picks upon the “binding up” nature of God in verses 5-6. The Promised Land is the ‘domain’ that is provided to the ‘homeless’ in verse 6, except for, again, we now come to the astonishingly positive declaration that this is God’s domain that they are moving into. Again, the prodigality of God’s action is always present. It is always transgressing the boundaries of necessity and displaying the realm of goodness.  And, it is preemptively acting on their behalf to create a space that, in their poverty, they would be hard-pressed to create. Meaning, a nation that “had fathers” and “no widows”, was full of equity and the strong (the reverse of vs. 5-6), would not be as in need as this “community”.  To Israel, the Promised Land (the ‘domain of God’; and hence, all of creation) bore this mark on it—that it is not only good and prodigal, but it is prepared in anticipation and in light of their corporate, and various, need. Isaiah would later pick upon this when he proclaimed the new exodus: that the lame and the poor would be carried, the hungry fed, etc…, just as Israel was in the original exodus.