Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord
April 24, 2023 - Monday, Third Week of Easter
Psalm 119:23-24, 26-27, 29-30
Psalm 119 is the longest in the Bible and it presents God’s Law as the source of happiness, wisdom, and life (Ps. 119:1, 93, 98). It begins with the same proclamation as Psalm 1, namely that “blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord” (Ps 119:1; see Ps 1:1-2). In Hebrew, the word used here is “torah”, which means instruction and in Jewish tradition it is associated with the five books ascribed to Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
The Torah of the Lord begins with the story of creation and ends with Moses’ death at the border with the promised land. There are two main characters in that story: God and people. God creates people in His image and likeness and places them in the garden in Eden. But, they disobey God’s commands, lose their place in the garden in Eden, and access to the Tree of Life, and are destined to die. God, however, does not abandon them but through Abraham and his offspring calls them back to himself and leads them to the promised land. Thus, the Torah of the Lord portrays our journey from the garden in Eden to the promised land.
“Blessed are they who follow the [Torah] of the Lord!”. We can participate in that journey by reading and reflecting upon those five books. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we will discover many truths about God and ourselves. We can see ourselves in the characters described in that story with their positive and negative traits. We realise how obedience leads to life and disobedience leads to death.
According to the Psalmist a meaningful and fulfilled life springs from obedience to God’s instructions. From meditating upon the Scriptures, the psalmist gained an insight that there is “the way of falsehood” and “the way of faithfulness” (see Ps 119:29-30). The way of falsehood is the way of unrighteousness evident in such characters as Cain, his great-grandson Lamech, the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, or Esau, for example. The paramount example of the way of faithfulness is Abraham.
By choosing to follow the way of faithfulness, the psalmist wants to join the hall of the people of faith, those who believed in God and their faith was credited to them as their righteousness (see Gen 15:6; Rom 4:1-12; Heb. 11). That should also be our decision. Our Torah is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. By making the Gospel our way of life, we are assured of a meaningful life and reaching our heavenly homeland.