Ps. 84.1 (beautiful dwelling)

How beautiful / is your dwelling place
O Yhwh Sabaoth. 

One thing we will sense throughout the psalm is that of rest and momentum, dwelling and pilgrimage. The dynamic, however, will be one founded on the utter centrality of Yhwh’s restful dwelling in the Temple. Unlike petition psalms, Yhwh will not be envisioned as ‘moving’ in this psalm; rather, he will be that which will causes movement in everything around him. More particularly, he will cause movement toward himself-in-the-Temple. ‘Cause’ is perhaps not entirely accurate, though. We see in this opening line of the psalm why the Temple is the gravitational pull of the psalm: its beauty. As the ‘dwelling of God’, it is the object of desire. To those who are far from it, it implants a yearning described as a ‘wasting away’; to those who actually dwell in it, they are “continually” singing his praises. It is not the case, in other words, that the Temple, as God’s dwelling, creates stasis or immobility. In fact, it is precisely the opposite: God’s ‘dwelling’ creates a perpetual activity toward him. The closer one is to God’s house the more active one becomes. The reason, as we have said, is that God’s Temple is and remains an object of beauty and desire; its beauty is not exhausted in the attainment, but only increased. For the psalmist, the closer one gets to the Temple the greater is the gravitational pull of its beauty. God’s glory in the Temple is a perpetual font of beauty and, as we will see, it makes of those who are closest to it to participate this ‘perpetuity’. 

One final note on this: it is often said that Yhwh is, unlike other ‘local’ deities, a God of a place but a god of a people. He identifies himself as the “God of Abraham, Jacob…” and not, for example, as the ‘God of Egypt’. In this regard he is a personal god who covenants in contrast to other gods whose primary role is of location. As deeply true as these statements are, psalms such as this (and so much more in the Scriptures) has to provide a balance to such assertions. Here, it is God’s ‘wedding’ to the Temple that makes of it the central object of beauty in the world, the ‘house of glory’ toward which the entire world will stream. Indeed, we might cautiously say that, it is in the Temple that God as Beautiful is most fully revealed; God as Good is most fully revealed (perhaps) in the covenant (I’m aware of the limitations of such broad statements but there is, I think, something very important in this). The fact that God does elect-a-dwelling reveals him to be not simply the God of the people but also the God of creation (the Temple being the model of creation in Genesis, and vice versa).