Modern Western man surely sees the beauty in nature and could perhaps reason from it to a glimpse of some divine hand in the vista. Ancient Hebrew man, along with men of every nation within a years’ travel, would have seen an additional level within that vista. Those Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) minds would assume a distinct moral significance to all things visible. This moral significance eclipsed any sensory data in importance. There was a fundamental distrust of sensory data long before any sort of modern cynicism about mirages, smoke and mirrors, and a much deeper level of distrust. It was not simply a matter that ANE minds ever expected to find the physical facts behind delusion, but regarded our human existence itself as delusion on some level.
This regard was deeply embedded in the assumptions about reality. Thus, our visible world was at best a mere manifestation of something more real and just beyond the reach of intellect. Could a man bring his mind into subjection to this higher reality, all the things he could see would take on a different meaning, would be ruled by a significance not obvious to human talent alone. This is what’s behind this hymn of David.
Because David knows the Creator, he doesn’t merely see the sun, moon and stars in the sky, but symbols of God’s divine character. The sound of the wind is more than mere air moving across his auditory organs, but the song of angels glorifying the Lord. Thus, it’s not a matter of literal communication, but a significance only perceptible to those who embrace His revelation. All the beauty and sorrow in Creation together testify to the truth of those who recognize the Creator.
So David unleashes the lyrical imagination of how words can be called upon to serve up a banquet of truth that only a higher awareness can taste. He offers a vision of how, once you allow the revelation of God to touch you, everything you encounter serves merely to confirm it. And how many songs in how many modern languages today are taken from this one psalm?
In the process of recognizing how Creation merely confirms the Lord’s Word of Truth, David carves out an image of how the written revelation of Scripture brings to us far more than the words themselves can convey. Hebrew language did not convey truth; it posted markers of the path your soul could follow to the Living Truth. Thus, the Scriptures are all the more valuable for what they cannot actually say to us. This is what David had in mind when he praised the Scriptures. There is no conflict here between what the Law of Moses required and what Creation itself confirmed by fulfilling that Law’s promises.
And in David’s mind, sin wasn’t some eternal mark in Heaven’s registry against his redemption, but a failure to lay hold of the full depth and richness of those promises. The image of purity wasn’t something artificial and objective, but a matter of harmonizing with Creation and God’s moral character. The man who can lay hold of that has nothing to fear in this world.
