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With all my heart I have sought You; do not let me wander from Your commandments.  Psalm 119:10  NASB

Let me wander – “The loving care of the Father in heaven is shown by the fact that he hears all prayers, that there is no seeking without finding and no knocking without opening.”[1]  Is Lohmeyer right?  Is it impossible to seek and not find?  The poet seems to imply this.  If he seeks God with all his heart (bekol libbe), why does he plead not to be left to wander?  Isn’t such dedication guaranteed to result in perfect obedience?

Perhaps Lohmeyer’s point demonstrates God’s commitment while the psalmist is concerned about man’s predicament.  Maybe the psalmist is being phenomenological while the theologian waxed ontologically.  Isn’t the psalmist illustrating precisely how we feel when the fear of God’s displeasure creeps into our souls?  We might indeed cry that we are seeking Him with all our hearts, and yet, at the same time, we are savagely aware of the ease of falling away.  We have plenty of experience with detours from the straight and narrow, enough that we’re terrified of our fragility, our duplicitous agency.  Even if we’re absolutely committed, the yetzer ha’ra is quick to remind us of our past promised failures.  Maybe the psalmist is much closer to our human reality than the theologian who focuses on the immutability of God’s constancy.

There is another subtle suggestion worth exploring.  The poet’s plea shifts the decision-making from the self to the divine.  “Do not let me wander” seems to imply that it is finally God who is in charge of our fate.  He is the one who sets our course, whether for good or ill.  I plead with Him to remain faithful, not because I am prone to wander (as the Christian hymn suggests) but because I embrace the (later) rabbinic teaching that all the “choices” of my life are really in God’s hands anyway, and it is God who sets the course of my journey from start to finish.  If God should let me wander, it is not because I choose to fall away.  It is because in His infinite purposes, all my seeking must inevitably lead to the path He has prescribed—a path which includes my wandering.  The verb adds to this view.  Šāgâ is about inadvertent sin, making an unintentional mistake, and not realizing it until afterward.  Who but God could prevent this?

So, which is it?  When I seek Him with all my heart, am I still subject to the powerful influences of my own willfulness to have it my way, to be derailed by my own yetzer?  Or is it the case that no matter how diligently I seek Him, if His plans for me follows a crooked path, then I will experience regret, remorse, and rejection as the consequences of His divine will?  How should we read this enigmatic verse?

Perhaps there is no “right” answer here.  Perhaps it’s more likely that the poet captures his feelings rather than his logical conclusions.  And if that’s the case, doesn’t poetry express what we all feel?  Perhaps the greatest theologians are, in fact, poets.

Topical Index: wander, šāgâ, go astray, unintentional sin, Psalm 119:10

[1] Ernst Lohmeyer, “Our Father”: An Introduction To The Lord’s Prayer (Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 45-46.