The God Trap (Rewind)

You have enclosed me behind and before, and laid Your hand upon me.  Psalm 139:5  NASB 1995

Behind and before – Remember that interesting idea of engineered accidents (yesterday)?  Well, there’s another implication to the suggestion that God’s invisible hand is maneuvering your life into kairos moments.  We looked that this further implication several years ago.  Perhaps it’s worth thinking about it again.  It starts like this:

Do you want to be free?  Free to determine your own way?  Free from the expectations of others?  Free to explore who you really are?  Free to choose God?  Then get ready to be constrained!  Human freedom is not the clear path we expect.  Human freedom necessarily entails anxiety—and passion—and spontaneity—and structure—and fear—and hope.  There is no freedom without fences.  The “back and forth” mixture of human emotion is the twin sister of freedom.  And since there can be no knowledge without emotion (cf. Arnold Bennett), all human freedom is found within the dialectic of the emotional spectrum.

“But this dialectical mode of learning has the very texture of human freedom.  ‘You hedge me before and behind; You lay Your hand upon me’ (Psalms 139:5).  God’s hand laid on man in creation set him apart from all other creatures, according to Rashi (1:27); they were made ‘by His word,’ determined, made precisely according to His will, while man was formed out of the symbolic freedom of the unmediated creative process.  Rashi quotes this verse from Psalms, in his commentary on the creation of man, to sharpen the contrast between the human and the nonhuman, between freedom and determination.  The first part of the verse . . . evokes the peculiar process by which human beings are created.  Aḥor and kedem (‘Behind and before’): between delay, belatedness, anxiety, and structure, on the one hand, and spontaneity, courage, and passionate encounter, on the other, the human being is besieged, challenged, pressed by God’s hand.  The image conveys all the tension of a condition both constrained and—strangely—free.”[1]

David understood this.  God put fences behind him.  There was no retreat to the “good ol’ days.”  That path was closed.  But there were also fences before him.  Not all choices are possible.  Not all options work.  The path forward is constrained by the hedges along the way.

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now
It’s just a spring clean for the May queen
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on[2]

Those of us who have suffered prolonged emotional distress often wish to live free from residual trauma.  We think life without borders is the answer.  We want to erase the past and treat the future as a blank canvas.  But that’s fantasy.  We arethe product of our past, and the past we inherited from those before us.  This is our identity.  What we do with it is, in some respects, up to us, but we can never return to the blank slate, the innocent Garden.  And it seems as if this is the true intention of an unfinished world.  We are always in-between, fenced behind and before.  God made it that way.

If you are wishing for nirvana or some form of escape from tension and trauma, then you better get into the movies.  That’s where fantasies are resolved.  But life is quite different.  It’s messy—and there doesn’t seem to be any cleanup crew coming to the rescue.

Maybe that’s why we wait and hope for the Messiah.

Topical Index:  aḥor, kedem, behind and before, life, escape, freedom, Psalm 139:5

[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 242.

[2] Led Zeppelin – Stairway To Heaven Lyrics | MetroLyrics