You-biquitous

As a child, I enjoyed a storybook fable about three men with stupendous eyesight. They could see for miles — and even through solid objects.

These men arrogantly challenged all comers to try to slip anything by them, and for quite some time no one succeeded in doing so.

Each day, however, a young boy arrived among the mix of people trying to fool these three men. And each day the three sharp-sighted men spotted and counted every bricks the child had laid in his wheelbarrow.

The story ends with the surprising revelation that the child had, after all, outwitted the three men. He had slipped a large number of wheelbarrows under their noses, all of them quite unnoticed.

I was reminded of that story when I read a thoughtful review of Psalm 119 which remarks on its many references to God's law.

That Psalm 119 expresses affection for God's law was not news to me.

How often it does this, however, was indeed news. The reviewer notes that (out of 176 verses) there are only four verses that do not contain a specific reference to God's law by means of one of eight Hebrew words.

These eight words are all present at least once in the first 11 verses.

Psalm 119:1-11
1 Blessed are those whose ways are blameless,
    who walk according to the law of the Lord.
2 Blessed are those who keep his statutes
    and seek him with all their heart—
3 they do no wrong
    but follow his ways.
4 You have laid down precepts
    that are to be fully obeyed.
5 Oh, that my ways were steadfast
    in obeying your decrees!
6 Then I would not be put to shame
    when I consider all your commands.
7 I will praise you with an upright heart
    as I learn your righteous laws.
8 I will obey your decrees;
    do not utterly forsake me.
9 How can a young person stay on the path of purity?
    By living according to your word.
10 I seek you with all my heart;
    do not let me stray from your commands.
11 I have hidden your word in my heart
    that I might not sin against you.

(Yes, verse 3 is one of those four verses that lack a "law" reference, though I wonder if the Psalmist intended the word "ways" to serve this purpose.)

After reading this review I went through Psalm 119 and underlined, in each verse, the reference to God's law. Holy cow! They were everywhere!

You might think that I am now going to compare the many references to God's law as the wheelbarrow that had been slipped under my eye.

Not so. We cannot help but notice the bricks in this Psalm, and more than a few of us are prone to tiring of the repetition.

No, I might not have realized how very many bricks there were, but only the blind could have missed this Psalmist's affection for God's law. References to God's law are not the wheelbarrow, but rather the bricks.

The wheelbarrow? Here's where things got interesting for me. Upon reflection, we find that this Psalmist quite trumps the little boy's feat.

How? Well, let's do a little bit of math, starting with the boy.

The boy slipped 100 wheelbarrows by while the three men were counting the thousands of bricks inside them.

Psalm 119 does this trick one better. Yes, it does have 172 references to God's law, however Psalm 119 also slips in an even greater number of wheelbarrows — Some 240 of them!

It's as if the psalmist slipped in three wheelbarrows for every two bricks.

Did you miss those wheelbarrows too?

Enough suspense! What are we talking about? What wheelbarrows?

Here's what our reviewer notes:

But there is something else that occurs even more often.
...more than 225 times in the 176 verses.
The suffix cha – the 2nd person masculine singular pronoun.
In English, “you.”
And in every instance, [it] refers to Yahweh.
In English, “you” refers to Yahweh 240 times in this Psalm.

So the psalmist loves God's law to an extreme, but (if word-counts were the measure) he loves God even more.

For this psalmist, God's law is a means to an end. And that end is Yahweh.

This is a wonderful reminder. Let us not tire of Psalm 119's repetition. Rather, let us emulate the psalmist's tireless affection for God himself.

And this brings us to one final, pleasant, thought. In Jesus we find both the bricks and the wheelbarrows. He is both the final, perfected, fulfillment of God's law and, as St. Paul notes, "the image of the invisible God."

Jesus represents both God's law and God himself.

If we were to replace all references to God or God's law in Psalm 119 with Jesus? It wouldn't read as well, but he'd show up more than 400 times.

Not bad for one Psalm.