My First Bible #6: Psalm 27:4

 

I have asked the Lord for one thing;
   one thing only do I want:
to live in the Lord's house all my life,
   to marvel there at his goodness,
   and to ask for his guidance.
In times of trouble he will shelter me;
   he will keep me safe in his Temple
   and make me secure on a high rock.
Psalm 27:4-5

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him.  She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said.  But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, ‘Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!’

‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed – or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.’

Luke 10:38-42

I'm not the only one who spends a lot of life chasing after the wind - the 'hebel' of Ecclesiastes.

At the time in my life when I noted this verse down, I had spent the majority of my life chasing a dream that was never to be.  My coming to Christ had lead me to lay down that dream.  

I come to this verse as I as just so happen to thinking about radically un-hurrying and simplifying my life (as I write, I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to do this - it's more that I've identified the problem and the fact that something needs to change, and God has providentially lead me to a few writers who have illuminated certain things to me).   The truth is, I'm more 'Martha' than I've ever been.  And it's not about having a lot to do and hard work - work is God-ordained and we should approach it with joy, however menial the task (easier said than done!).  My 'Martha-ness' is in the multitude of worries that fight for attention in every decision I make.

But in this Psalm, David says there is 'one thing' he seeks - 'to live in the Lord's house all my life'.  David would have had in mind the temple - the place where God dwelt on earth and met with his people (it's the same Hebrew word, and could have easily been translated as 'temple').  The original 'temple' was the Garden of Eden itself, where humanity was called to serve God as 'priests'.  The temple of Jewish worship life (first as a tent, and then built into a grander, permanent building by David's son Solomon) was a representation of God's presence - the means by which God, although the all-present God of the universe, demonstrated how he met with his otherwise estranged people.  

We learn from the New Testament that all of these things are fulfilled in Jesus.  He is temple (John 2:18-22), priest (e.g. Hebrews 7:24-25), and sacrifice (e.g. John 1:29), and through him we can come to the Father (John 14:6).   We come to Jesus' conversation with aforementioned Martha: "you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed – or indeed only one" (Luke 10:41). The one thing? What her sister Mary is doing - sitting at Jesus' feet, in his presence.  Mary could have been considering this very verse of scripture as she made her decision to sit and listen to Jesus.  And before his crucifixion Jesus urged his disciples to remain in him - to abide in him (John 15) - we come full circle back to the image of the temple, of God's house - somewhere to live.

But what does it actually mean to 'live in the Lord's house' - to abide in Jesus?

Well surely prayer and meditation on scripture (the closest we can get to Mary's experience of actually sitting there listening to the teaching first-hand) have got to form part of that.  But the Psalmist doesn't just say: 'dwell in the house of the Lord'.  Its: 'all my life' - not just a quiet time or a retreat, but when doing the housework, answering the emails, taking the children to school, cooking dinner, writing an essay, or updating a serving rota or a risk assessment [insert your daily activities here!].  And if Jesus is with us always through the work of the Holy Spirit (John 14:17-18), his temple being built out of the very lives of believers (Ephesians 2:21-22), and he himself interceding for us constantly in Heaven (Hebrews 7:25), then the presence of God is not a place or time to which we need to go - separate to 'ordinary life'.  

But it's still hard to know what that looks like - which is why its great that this particular passage gives us a few more lines of description.

Firstly there are two activities described that we do: marvelling at God's goodness, and asking for his guidance.  So, basically, two of the major parts of that two-way conversation, the breathing-in-and-out of scriptural meditation and prayer.  We do both when we bury the truth revealed in scripture deep in our hearts (by whatever means - from 'study', to song, to liturgy), and we do both when we respond in prayer by laying our thoughts and responses before God.   But this encounter does not leave us unchanged - but ripples out into all of life in the way we live, igniting a perpetual cycle of listening, prayer and praise.

In less lofty terms, as I cook the dinner, I can marvel at God's glory in the creation of food.  I can offer up my prayers for help as I struggle to balance all the competing demands on me (produce an overall diet that's healthy and yet with meals that everyone will enjoy that won't end in arguments - a seemingly impossible task) whilst, formed by my times studying and learning scripture, meditating on the fact that it is God who provides, that there is more to life than food, that a dinner of chicken nuggets/jam sandwiches/coco pops with peace is better than feasting where there is strife (Proverbs 17:1), and that the Israelites lived on manna for 40 years and had just enough.

Finally, although I hadn't written it down originally, the next verse gives us more.  This is not just about delight and worship, but about safety. My previous post about being along a straight or safe path was also from this Psalm (which comes later in the Psalm but the subject of my previous post - some of my little strips of paper ended up in the wrong place!).  Dwelling in the house of the Lord is that mîšôr path of verse 11- the path we take - something we follow throughout the journey of life.

The summer I was 17 years old I read my Bible cover to cover for the first time.  I was captivated and completed the whole thing in 4 months.  Although I clearly read it at quite a pace, I still jotted down passages that sprang out to me in my still relatively new faith.  I still have that Bible, and the scraps of paper are still there, bookmarking each verse.  So I decided to go through, 18 years later, and visit each of them.  They are from the Good News Bible.