Archive for July, 2009
Psalm 17
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
The last few verses of this Psalm struck me just now as staggeringly beautiful – here they are in the King James:
13Arise, O LORD, disappoint him, cast him down: deliver my soul from the wicked, which is thy sword:
14From men which are thy hand, O LORD, from men of the world, which have their portion in this life, and whose belly thou fillest with thy hid treasure: they are full of children, and leave the rest of their substance to their babes.
15As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.
I found Psalm 17 looking up the concept of “reward,” to see what I could find to clear up some nagging issues. There are those who argue that the Old Testament isn’t as concerned with the afterlife as the New Testament is, or that we put too much pleasure in the hereafter rather than the here and now. They may be right or wrong to whatever degree.
But all the intellectual ponderings and struggles occasionally fade away in sheer bliss when you read a verse like 15 – no excess of words, beautifully balanced, loaded with layers of meaning, a perfect poetic expression of astonishing faith, contentment, and joy. Maybe I’ll just bask in it for a while.
Too sentimental?
I don’t care.
N.T. Wright on Heaven
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
There’s a series of very interesting videos of an interview with N. T. Wright over on YouTube. N. T. Wright is a problematic figure for me – sometimes he seems like the wise, believing public intellectual I’ve always longed for, and sometimes he seems to dwell too much in abstractions, or miss what I feel to be the actual, important point. On top of that, he can seem condescending to me. There will probably never be a human figure I can simply put all my trust in to help me understand things. Oh well.
My initial gut reaction to this heaven video was one of frustration – why argue about the nature of eternity, or “what’s going to happen” at the end times or when we die, if eternity is beyond our present ability to understand? However, I feel like it wouldn’t be fair to leave it at that, as the video doesn’t go into details as to why Wright feels any of this is important. So I’ve ordered Surprised by Hope to find out. Hopefully, my initial gut reaction will prove to have been premature.
I’ll let you know how it goes.