No Man’s Land
Thus I have seen You in the sanctuary, to see Your power and Your glory. Psalm 63:2 NASB
Have seen You – David’s parallelism explains why he didn’t die from divine exposure. “I have seen You” isn’t a violation of “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” because what David really saw was power and glory, not God Himself. Just as Moses saw the “afterward” (God’s intention for Israel), David “sees” the manifestation of God’s presence. The verb is important (ḥāzâ), but before we examine the nuances, we must notice that the syntax of David’s poetry isn’t the way English expresses it. David writes “Thereupon in the sacred I have seen . . .” The word translated sanctuary is qōdeš. “The noun qōdeš connotes the concept of ‘holiness,’ i.e. the essential nature of that which belongs to the sphere of the sacred and which is thus distinct from the common or profane.”[1]
While it is true enough that the Temple is sacred, there was no Temple when David penned this line, so “sanctuary” really isn’t correct. It is the concept that David illuminates, not the place. The Hebrew for a holy place, a sanctuary, is miqdāš, not qōdeš. David experiences God’s power and glory in the realm of holiness, in the divine presence. “While the realm of the holy was conceptually distinct from the world with its imperfections, it could nevertheless operate within the world as long as its integrity was strictly maintained. The maintenance of the integrity of the ‘holy’ was a function of the Israelite cultus.” [2] We should pay attention to Mccomiskey’s comment, “The presence of God within the world delineated a sphere that was holy.”[3]
Read the line again, only this time read it as it was written: “My entire person is desperate for You. I am dying of thirst for You. kēn, in Your presence I have seen . . .” I left the Hebrew kēn in this rewrite because we must also reconsider its translation. Why? Most of the time, kēn expresses the conclusion of something already spoken (“thus”), but here this doesn’t make sense. In the first verse David expresses his intense longing, his yearning, for God. How can this yearning, this feeling of emptiness, be the reason for seeing God’s holiness? We don’t expect that. We expect something like “thus I have experienced Your absence.” But David jumps from the trauma of abandonment to a statement about God’s power and glory. How can we understand this transition? I suggest that David’s second line is reflection on past experience with God. Kēn needs to be understood like “It is true that” or “Before.” David remembers what it was like to be in God’s presence. He remembers the overwhelming security, the electrifying confidence. What he remembers is good—so good that it almost displaces his current state of emotional collapse. Almost—but not quite.
David reminds us that “to believe is to remember.” And if that were all that’s necessary, each of us could survive on memories alone. But we all know what David knows—it’s not quite enough. The memory of a loved one is not quite the same as the presence of a loved one. It might get us through the night, but in the morning we still need real contact.
I feel utterly abandoned, Lord. My heart cries out for You. My body withers because You are not here with me. I am empty, exhausted, expiring. Before in Your holiness I saw Your power and glory. I remember Your deeds, Your care. But now more than ever I need the touch of Your hand. Where will I go from here?
Topical Index: kēn, thus, miqdāš, sanctuary, qōdeš, holiness, Psalm 63:2
[1] Mccomiskey, T. E. (1999). 1990 קָדַשׁ. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 787). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
