Ps 119 (1: Creation and Torah)

How fortunate / are those / whose way is blameless

whose conduct / is based on Yhwh’s Torah

How fortunate / are those / who observe his terms

and seek him wholeheartedly

Who / moreover / do not practice wrong

but base their conduct / on his ways

You yourself / have commanded / that your charges

be carefully complied with 

Would that my ways / were firmly set

on complying / with your laws

Then I would not suffer humiliation

if i kept my eyes / on your commands

I give you thanks / out of an honest heart

as I learn your just rulings.

I will comply / with your laws

do not completely abandon me

The first part focuses on the fortune of those who “way is blameless”, and whose lives are based on Yhwh’s Torah and instruction. They do not, however, only follow Torah but seek Yhwh with all their heart. They do not practice wrong. For them, their lives are marked by fortune, by success. 

Yhwh takes a keen interest in his charges, his Torah. He commands that they not only be followed but carefully complied with. His people are to give careful attention to them. To regard them as precious. 

The psalmist wants to be like the fortunate ones. While their lives are blameless, his are not as ‘firmly set’. He ‘suffers humiliation’, which is the opposite of the “fortune” experienced by the blameless ones. While their eyes remain fixed, his tend to wander. Nevertheless, just as they seek him “wholeheartedly”, so too his his heart “honest” when it thanks Yhwh. The psalmist ends with a resolve to comply with Torah—as Yhwh has commanded—and with a petition that Yhwh not completely abandon him.

Here, Torah and fortune are wed. For those who live according to Yhwh’s instruction, creation itself responds. In Genesis, some of the first words spoken to Adam by his father are words of command and instruction. They continue the momentum of creation into the realm of his Adam, his son. They are, in other words, part of creation itself, now being completed in Adam’s obedience. It is crucial to see this as part of a continuum, to not see “creation” and then “morality”. Torah, Yhwh’s instruction, is Yhwh’s creative will. We should see it this way—when Yhwh reveals his commands to Adam he invites him into his own sphere of creation. Adam, when he obeys, becomes a co-creator with his Father. He looks at his father, sees what his father is doing, and does the same. 

This is why obedience to Torah and ‘fortune’ are, and must be, wed together. Fortune is the completion of creation because it is Adam’s participation within his Father’s creative act. Creation carries within it a potential, a pregnant ability to become “fortune”, to become prodigal, to become fruitful beyond all measure. It is ‘impregnated’ and actualized by Adam’s obedience. When Adam seeds creation with his obedience, his participation within his Father’s creative act, he unleashes creation’s potential. He makes the Cosmos both more than itself, and he makes it fully itself, because it was made to be more than itself. It was made to be ‘ecstatic’ at man’s obedience. 

This is why Yhwh’s Torah is such a prize, such an object of devotion, a thing to be “wholeheartedly” followed. And it is why, too, when it is not obeyed, it results in “humiliation” and “shame”. Recall how Adam was immediately humiliated and shamed when he did not obey Yhwh, hiding within creation and from his father. This psalmist knows that his life is marked by a constant act of free obedience, of willing into his father’s Torah and instruction or choosing a way that is against the grain of the cosmos and therefore results in Adam-like humiliation. He has two fathers—Yhwh and Adam. He can choose Yhwh and experience “fortune” as his instruction or he can follow Adam’s path of rebellion and experience shame and humiliation. 

This entire dynamic is carried forward in and through Christ, the second Adam, who is the only one to truly “see what the Father is doing”. Throughout his life (death and resurrection), he brings forth this ‘new creation’, because he participates within his Father’s will for creation. Each miracle he performs is the Cosmos response to its Adam, its finding the one in and through whom it can be brought to itself by being brought beyond itself into the divine sphere and activity. And the final vision of Revelation shows this completion. Throughout the book, there is an ambivalence and hostility toward man’s wealth and “fortune”. However, when death and the agents that seek the destruction of the Cosmos are themselves destroyed, then there is unveiled the Cosmos made perfect in the Presence of Christ and his martyrs and witnesses. This is the Cosmos as Fortune, as wealth without shadow, as fortune and wealth as truly representative of the participatory obedience of God’s children within his ongoing act of “creation”, which is now seen as festive, as a wedding, as the  wedding of the lamb to his bride.