Heads Up

The sum of Your word is truth, and every one of Your righteous judgments is everlasting.  Psalm 119:160

Sum – The head of the year.  The chief of the tribe.  The top of the mountain.  The corner stone.  The first of Mankind.  rōʾš, and all its derivatives, are found more than 750 times in Scripture, with a wide range of applications but always circulating around the idea of summit, total, or head.  When the psalmist uses rōʾš to describe God’s d^ebār, he brings to mind all these other uses.  God’s d^ebār is ʾĕmet; firm, reliable, trustworthy, not subject to fluctuation.  You can absolutely count on it!  Just to make sure you haven’t missed the point, he elaborates.  kōl mišpāṭ, that is, all of Your governance, instructions, ordinances, regulations, and precepts—all of them—are ʿôlām.  Not only are they ʾĕmet; they are also ṣedeq.  It’s not enough to have unwavering laws over the course of the ages.  It’s not enough to experience the stability of knowing the same laws that have governed past civilization will continue.  Those ordinances must also be righteous, ṣedeq.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in this kind of world.  Not only are our societal regulations subject to change, many of them are simply not righteous.  Not only do they undermine the stability of the society, they also demand evil actions of citizens.  They are not based in God’s word, and because they are not, they are subject to human intervention, alteration, and evil motivations.  Today is no different than all those civilizations that surrounded ancient Israel.  We might not burn our children alive in order to enlist the favor of pagan gods, but we practice the same murder of innocents in order to perpetuate our lifestyles.  We might not attack people with spears and arrows, but we destroy them with internet smears and false accusations.  We might not worship Ba’al, but we certainly don’t follow the instructions of YHVH.  If we truly believed that the total of all God’s d^ebārim were absolutely true and completely applicable throughout the ages, how could we then proceed to pick and choose what we wish to obey on the basis of convenience or cultural acceptability?

This verse, at the end of the resh section, is a significant slap in the  cultural face of “religious” society.  And not just Christian religious society.  Yes, of course, those regulations that made sense in the agrarian cultures of the ancient Middle East have to be carefully applied to the modern world, but they can’t be systematically ignored.  They are ʿôlām, and that means we are obligated to figure out how they apply today.  God didn’t change His mind just because we invented clocks and mother boards.  Perhaps the greatest challenge we face today is not exegesis but application, especially if God is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.  The psalmist reminds us that it is all about what is true, righteous, and everlasting—and there are no exceptions.  We live in a world where the culture motto seems to be “the one constant is that everything changes.”  But that’s not how the real world, the created world, works.  Everything doesn’t change, and those things that don’t change had better be at the heart of our cultures or we will experience the change of passing away.

Topical Index: rōʾš, head, total, chief, ʾĕmet, true,  ṣedeq, righteous, application, Psalm 119:160