- Psalm 119.11 KJV
- Thy word have I hid in mine heart,
- that I might not sin against thee.
When I was a kid I memorized this verse. Helped a lot that musician Dan Whittemore has a song about it, which he played at our church, and I still own a cassette of that album. Years later I discovered a hymn which also has it as its chorus; one of my professors loved to sing it in chapel for us, once a semester. (Brilliant guy, lovable character, but terrible singing voice. He sounded like Chewbacca from Star Wars. Still, God listens to the heart, not the vocal cords.)
In context this verse comes from Psalm 119, the longest psalm (and chapter) in the bible. It’s a massive acrostic. It starts with eight verses which each begin with א/alef, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet; then the next eight verses begin with the next letter, ב/bet, and so on through the whole alphabet. Only the 1949 Knox Bible (a Roman Catholic translation of the Vulgate, in which Psalm 119 is numbered 118), kept it an acrostic.
Psalm 119 is dedicated to the Law of Moses, and how great and useful it is. It’s a psalm Christians tend to skip. We quote this verse, and a few other memorable verses like it, and ignore the rest. It’s because this passion for the Law… honestly, bugs Christians a little. Too many dispensationalists among us think the Law was nullified by Jesus, so we can ignore it, except for maybe the 10 commandments, plus that one command against homosexuality. We figure grace cancels out the rest. So reading Psalm 119 weirds Christians out, because we look at the psalmist’s passionate love for the Law, and we don’t share that love, and think he’s being kinda gross about it.
But verse 19 is fine. It uses the synonym
אִמְרָה/imráh,
“utterance, speech, word.” And the bible is God’s word, right?—and we revere the bible. So we’re good… so long that we never read the verse in context and find out the psalmist really means the Law.
But we should love the Law.
See, the psalmist didn’t look at the Law at all the way today’s Christians do. He didn’t see it as a big ol’ list of rules to follow, and if he didn’t follow them God might smite him, or he’d have to throw an extra goat on the altar when it was time to do ritual sacrifices. He saw the Law as grace.
In his grace the LORD loved Israel, and rather than let them suffer away as Egyptian slaves, ignorant of how he wanted them to live and love one another, he freed them and gave them his commands.
In exactly the same way, the LORD loves humanity, and rather than let us suffer away as slaves to sin, ignorant of how he wants us to live and love one another, came down to earth and became Jesus, freed us from sin, and gave us his instructions. Which, when you read Jesus’s teachings, are constantly based on the Law. His law.
Both these acts are are form of God’s self-revelation. Both are works of love. So the psalmist figured the only appropriate response to this love was to put God’s teachings, his imrót, his “words,” into his heart. As the ancients understood hearts, this means he put ’em in his mind. He memorized them. He made them a part of him.
His goal, as the verse says, was so he wouldn’t
אֶֽחֱטָא/ekhetá,
“misstep, go wrong, sin.” He wanted God’s teachings to stay in the forefront of his mind.
Most bibles tend to translate the second line, “That I might not sin against thee”—and that’s right; it does mean that. But here’s the odd thing about Hebrew pronouns: Every “you” is gendered. There’s a masculine “you,” and when it appears as the suffix of a noun, it’s
ךָ/-kha.
You’ll see the -kha ending attached to imráh, because “thy word” is God’s word. And there’s a feminine “you,”
ךְ/-khe,
and this is the pronoun suffix we see attached to “against.” The psalmist doesn’t want to sin against a feminine “you.” Which isn’t God, of course; he takes the masculine pronoun. So… who’s the psalmist worried about sinning against?
Obviously it’d be the word—the feminine noun imráh. He doesn’t wanna sin against the word. He doesn’t wanna sin against God either, but properly “I might not sin against thee” means “I might not sin against thy word.” Not God; his Law.
True, the LORD’s saying reflects the LORD’s will. Technically going against God’s saying is the same as going against him. Even so: The psalmist wanted to make this very fine distinction clear. Our English translations make it muddy. We don’t have a gendered “you,” after all. But hopefully you can see the difference.
This is why we want to put God’s laws, and Jesus’s teachings, into our “hearts”—really, minds. We want them at the forefront of our thoughts so we won’t slip up and violate them. We don’t just want them buried in the back of our brains, left there so we can dig ’em out to win bible trivia competitions. We need to meditate upon them and follow them, and not slip away from them.
