The beauty of control and the comfort of limitations

 This week's verses are on Psalm 119:129-136:

Your rules are marvelous.
Therefore I observe them.
Your instructions are a doorway through which light shines.
They give insight to the untrained.
I open my mouth and pant,
because I long for your commands.
Turn toward me and extend mercy to me,
as you typically do to your loyal followers.
Direct my steps by your word.
Do not let any sin dominate me.
Deliver me from oppressive men,
so that I can keep your precepts.
Smile on your servant.
Teach me your statutes!
Tears stream down from my eyes,
because people do not keep your law.

 These verses are from Psalm 119, "the megapsalm," the one seemingly endless section in the middle of the book of Psalms, where you regret telling yourself "I'm just going to read one Psalm and then go to bed." This section is entitled "Pe," after the letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

The whole Psalm is worth reading, if you have a babysitter for the kids, and enough food and water stored away to last till the end. Each section is full of praise to God for being in charge, and for giving us some rules to live by. Unlike our modern perspective which measures the quality of life by how few limitations we have, the Psalmist thanks God for not just letting us do anything we want.

In a way, it's a message from an older, wiser civilization, which understands the need for boundaries. We want the freedom to do anything we want, but we secretly want to be protected from making poor choices with unwanted consequences. We rebel against boundaries without realizing they're there to keep us safe and happy.

I read an essay awhile back about the relationship between creativity and constraints. If you give someone infinite choices, it's usually difficult for them to produce something creative. But if you limit things to a theme, or a medium, or establish time limits, or require certain elements to be included, or for things to be kept to a certain budget, people often produce exceptional work. Logically it makes no sense, unless you consider that we are designed to be governed.

You also see evidence of that with certain kinds of mental illness. Some people, for instance, are happy in prison, but when they are free to run their own lives, they are overwhelmed and miserable. Or in abusive relationships, one person often establishes no boundaries and the other finds themselves engaging in increasingly extreme behavior in order to end the torment of limitless power. ("What is wrong with you? Please, make me stop!") You also see it with people who are unable to control their emotions, who are calmed down by being held tightly.

If you had a notebook, and you wrote down these facts about us, as humans, you'd find that we actually like a certain amount of limitation. Paradise is a walled garden, right? And yet we seek unlimited freedom, even though it's proven to make us miserable. How many truly happy rich people do you see, compared to people who talk about how much happier they were when they were poor and living day to day?

And that's the beauty of section "Pe" of this limitless Psalm. This guy gets it. He is not afraid to admit the embarrassing fact that sometimes we need to be told what to do, that the best option is to have fewer options. And who better to build that cage than God himself? Or maybe it's better to think of it as a wall for the garden he has placed us into.

He says "your rules are marvelous, therefore I observe them." I can't think of a better reason to do what God wants of us. People have plenty of silly reasons for doing the right thing. "I want to feel like a good person." "I have to, or I will get punished." "I want to be better than other people." But none of those reasons are as good as "those rules are great!" His obedience is true devotion, true faith in the value of what he is asked to do. It's the difference between loving someone because they're rich or pretty, and loving them because they're just amazing.

He calls the rules a doorway through which light shines. There's two meanings there. One is the imagery of a prison cell door being opened. It's liberating not to have to make every choice ourselves, or to not have to face the consequences of our own ignorance and stupidity for choosing wrongly. 

But the other meaning is revelation. If you look at a recipe, it's a set of rules for making something. If you pay attention, you can learn a lot about cooking all sorts of things, just by paying attention to the rules in the recipes you cook. When the rules are broken, you learn why they were there in the first place. And when you learn to understand the reasoning behind them, you can make other awesome things in the same theme. In the same way, by paying attention to God's laws for us, you can understand how the universe works, or at least how we are designed to function. And that can make your whole life better.

Later the Psalmist says "do not let any sin dominate me." It's kind of a paradox, isn't it? If we do well with limitations, it seems like being dominated by something as limiting as sin would be great, right? But there are good boundaries and bad boundaries. God sets good ones for us, and sin by its nature causes us to end up on the wrong side of them. If paradise is a walled garden, sin is being trapped outside of it with the wild animals, and no source of drinking water. Maybe it's edgy and fun at first, but when you realize where you are, and the implications of it, it can be terrifying.

But what does it mean to not let any sin dominate us? He's not asking "don't let me sin at all," which would be the religiously-correct thing to ask. The thing he's afraid of isn't making the occasional bad mistake. The nightmare for him is to be swept out to sea when you only planned to take a quick dip. 

You hear about that experience over and over from people who have become addicted to things, or who have gotten into conflicts that have spiraled out of control. It always starts harmless, until suddenly it isn't, and they find themselves weak and in tatters, surrounded by the wolves of whatever it is, unable to regain entry to the world they used to take for granted.

People in that case, or in the case of things like war atrocities, or rapists, or serial killers, are literally dominated by their sin. This thing they toyed with at first sweeps them up and throws them around like a doll. Now they're the embodiment of evil, a war criminal, or a registered sex offender, or the town drunk, or "some crackhead." So what the Psalmist is asking is for the mercy of never having to become *that guy*.

He also asked to be delivered from oppressive men. Again, you'd think the limitations would be healthy, but he clears that up in the next half of the sentence: "so that I may keep your precepts." Just like the way that sin takes us away from the optimal boundaries that God defines for us, human oppression prevents us from living the way God has ideally designed us to live.

And both that and the bit about not being dominated by sin are a form of praise for God. The Psalmist is saying "I know I need to be controlled, but I only want to be controlled by You." It's a crystal-pure attestation of God's righteousness and love for us. It's a recognition that God is special. It's another way of saying the same thing he says in the beginning, that God's rules are marvelous. They're marvelous because God is marvelous.

We can see what is truly valuable in that statement too. He doesn't ask to be freed from oppression so that he can watch his Netflix in peace or smoke cigarettes without being hassled by the man. He wants to be free to live in the cage-garden God has designed for him. He doesn't want limitless options, or full autonomy, or multiple masters with checks and balances amongst them. He wants paradise.

He says that tears stream from his eyes because people don't keep God's law. These aren't self-righteous, virtue-signalling, Pharisee tears he is talking about. He's not kissing up to God with that statement in order to seem more religious. The tears are because he knows how good God's rules are, and it breaks his heart to see them live unsatisfying or ruinous lives by forsaking them.

Have you ever had to watch someone you love ruin their life? Maybe it's drugs, maybe it's untreated mental illness, maybe it's poor health choices, poor life choices, or whatever. It's awful, isn't it? It's infuriating that they can't see what you can see. The morality of the situation often doesn't even appear on your radar. It's all about the tragedy of missing the mark and getting swept away, outside the wall, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

 So if you've ever wondered what the point is of living the way God wants you to, these verses are a good thing to meditate on. Why repent from sin and unbelief? Why live a life that artificially limits your options compared to what a faithless person might have? Because those things are the path to paradise. 

If you're trapped on the outside, trying to find the door to get back in before it's too late, Jesus has made it possible. Knock and it will be opened for you. And you'll learn why his yoke is easy and his burden is light.