Ps. 77.19 (dramatic holiness)

O God / your way / is in holiness
Who / is a god / like Yhwh? 

As the psalmist now begins to move, more pointedly, into the actual content of his memory, he prefaces it with this verse. In a sense, everything that follows will be an outworking of this “way of holiness”. This observation deserves note: the actual drama that will unfold is a drama of enacted holiness. This is what it looks like when God’s “way” is made in the earth. Specifically, the exodus is the ‘way of holiness’ par excellence. As we will see, this ‘way of holiness’ is, as it is in the exodus, a militaristic domination. The only other time the psalm will refer to God’s “way” is when it says: “your way went through the sea…”. The levels of meaning here are too complex to contemplate here. What we need to point out, however, is that this militaristic image is in service to a ‘higher’ meaning: that of redemption. The ‘way of God’ (the ‘way of holiness’) is the ‘way of the shepherd’, leading his flock from Pharaoh to his own rule. That will become clear as we proceed. But we can detect it even now in the second line: “Who is a god like Yhwh?” This question has a specific referent. It refers to the question posed by Israel to the nations, asking whether there is any God who has actually pursued his people into a foreign land in order to deliver them. God’s incomparable nature moves along these twin paths of domination and deliverance. His power is clearly seen in subduing the pinnacle of worldly power. And yet, as Exodus makes clear, this is only in service to a greater display of power: his act of kinship-redemption. He subdues in order to redeem. In a sense, his display of sovereign mastery over Pharaoh is actually penultimate to his deliverance. In other words, it is God’s covenantal power, his ‘being-for’ Israel, that is the real ‘interpretation’ of his militaristic display. It is precisely the absence of this power that the psalmist is so acutely aware of