Delighting in the Law of the Lord?

 

 Psalm 1

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked

or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.

But his delight is in the law of the LORD and on his law he meditates day and night.

 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not

wither. Whatever he does prospers.

 Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away.

 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,

nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.

 For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wicked will perish.

 

       Delight, we love to be delighted. The Bible talks about being delighted, too, but in ways that don't seem quite so delightful. Psalm 37:4 says, "Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart." How often do we think that if we study Scripture and pray and 'delight ourselves in the Lord,' that He will give us wealth, and health, and make our lives easy? If we take another look at the verse, we'll see the truth. If we delight ourselves in the Lord, He will give us Himself because in delighting ourselves in Him, HE is the desire of our hearts. Oh, He may or may not add other benefits, but the focus is on Him, not those things.

       Somehow, in our twisted thinking, delighting in the Lord, which might be OK, is not the same thing as delighting in the law of the Lord. The Lord is a living being who forgives. The law does not forgive. What's more, it's boring. It's an ancient set of rules and is set in a culture we don't understand. Does it still apply that we should delight in it? Aren't we a "New Testament" community? To be honest, I used to struggle with the idea of delighting in the law of the Lord. The thing that changed my mind was Lex Talionis.

        Lex Talionis? It is the "law of retaliation" and there could hardly be anything more at the core of all that we tend to despise about the law of the Lord. The foundational expression of it is in Exodus 21:23-27.

But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life,eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.“If a man hits a manservant or maidservant in the eye and destroys it, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the eye. And if he knocks out the tooth of a manservant or maidservant, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the tooth

 

     What? Are we to delight in such brutality? Haven't we come a long way since this? I think someone must have challenged me with regard to this because I can't imagine why else I would have spent time thinking about it. As I thought, however, "day" began to dawn in my mind. Yes, the law required that measures we might think brutal be employed, but what is the likely alternative? It is not that someone forgives the life, eye, tooth, hand, foot or other injury, but that for a slap on the face, a life is forfeit and for a life, the lives of everyone in the village is the payment. Lex Talionis required equity, or justice in equal measure with the injury.

      As for the question of our having come a long way past this, consider our own system of  "justice" in which what amounts to an insult results in a penalty that destroys the livelihood of the offending party. I have heard hopes for the death of anyone who does business with a company whose owners believe differently. If someone happens to be inconvenient, unapproved or imperfect, the death penalty can be enacted with the aggrieved party as the judge and jury (but only if the aggrieved party is female.) Today, the descendants of injured parties and their supporters are calling for reparations to be made not only by those whose ancestors caused the injury, but by anyone who can be guilty by an association so tenuous as the color of their skin or a genetic heritage that places their ancestors within a thousand miles of the ancestors of the guilty parties.

     As I began to realize this, I found that other boring, ancient laws with which I have no cultural context began to make more sense. I can delight in the law of the Lord because it is just and reasonable, far more than our justice tends to be.
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Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.