The friendship of the Lord is
for those who fear him,
and he makes known to them
his covenant.
Psalm 25: 14
Reflection – For the Monday Psalter this
week, I just want to focus on this one verse from Psalm 25. Not because the
rest of the psalm is uninteresting or unimportant, but because this particular
psalm does mostly contain themes that we have well covered in this column;
meanwhile, this particular verse has one word that I would like to reflect on.
That is the
word translated here as ‘friendship’. In other translations, it is rendered
‘the secret’ of the Lord. The Hebrew word is sod, (rhymes with toad), and is one of the genuinely beautiful
words of the Bible. It refers to being part of the intimate inner circle of
something, being in the confidence of a person, being part of their closest and
most trusted group of friends. You could translate it ‘the intimacy of the
Lord,’ along with the other translations that have been chosen.
This is such
a beautiful word, and a beautiful reality to meditate on. The sod YHWH, the intimate confidence,
trusted friendship of God is offered to us. God is not ‘up there’, somehow, in
the sense of being far, far away. God is not at a distance from us. He is above
and beyond us, but He draws very close.
Furthermore,
this intimacy with God is given to those who ‘fear’ Him. This is counter to
what we might expect in our modern sensibility. Fear, as we understand it,
leads us to distance ourselves from the one who is feared. Fear makes you keep
your distance. People who are afraid of God may pray to Him (so as not to be
struck down by Him, I guess) but are not going to count Him as an intimate
companion. So we think, but we think wrongly.
The fear of
the Lord is not, biblically, ‘being afraid of God’. It is, rather, the fear
that comes from loving God. Any lover understands this. Fear enters into our
lives when we love. When you love, you fear losing the beloved. When you love,
suddenly your world is not only about yourself and your narrow sphere of
concern—there is this whole other person whose happiness is important to you,
who you are afraid of displeasing, of disappointing, of alienating. Once you
fall in love, or genuinely begin to love another person, your life is not your
own any longer.
The fear of
the Lord is that which enters our hearts when we actually begin to love the
Lord. And loving Him, begin to conform our hearts to Him, to seek to live and
love and choose in a way that is pleasing to Him. And what comes from this love
and this choice is genuine intimacy with Him, friendship with God, knowing His
secrets.
I don’t want
to harp on about euthanasia over and over on this blog, but it does strike me
powerfully that the decision we have just made in Canada to reject the fifth
commandment, to decide that we can indeed ‘kill’ if and when we please,
indicates a great loss of fear of the Lord in our society. We simply think that
we know better, and so we will do as we please in this matter and in all
matters. We know that God said ‘thou shalt not kill’. We don’t care.
And in this,
we lose the friendship of God. We lose our closeness to Him. We become, alas
for us, enemies of God. And this is a great tragedy, of course, for us
personally and for our nation. Between our choice to kill the unwanted unborn
and now the burdensome elderly, I don’t think Canada has much of a future,
really, barring some great communal act of repentance.
God offers
us something that is so far beyond what we can achieve ourselves or imagine to
be possible. I don’t think we really understand what this sod YHWH is, you know. To be intimate with God, to be friends with
God, to be in the inner circle of the life of the Trinity—this is astounding.
This is the
answer to death and to suffering, to sorrow and loss, to pain and grief. This
is the way through this world of ours, so marked by beauty and marred by ugly
affliction. To fear the Lord, to know that the love of God is the first good,
the greatest goal, the ‘one thing necessary’ in life, and that all other loves
and goods are to be ordered by that first good. And in that, to enter this
mysterious beautiful intimacy with God. And in that, ultimately, to triumph
over death and evil, and come to the place of light and life forever.
And this is
what is at stake, ultimately, in these great and tragic questions of our time,
in Canada and elsewhere. ‘The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear Him,
and he makes known to them his covenant.’
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