The Steadfast Love of the LORD

A slightly nerdy look at some structural elements of the Psalms

It was Jen Wilkin’s achingly beautiful essay—about her mother’s death—that got me thinking about biblical literary devices. The essay, “At My Mother’s Deathbed, I Discovered the Symmetry of a Long Life,” considers the chiastic structure of human life, that we are born a child—and die a child; that our mothers labor to deliver us into this world; then, witness to our labored breathing, our children see us beyond it. Chiasms, she explains, “are a kind of mirror-image parallelism, using repetition to trace an idea.”

A kind of nerd myself, I love noticing all kinds of literary elements in the biblical text that convey meaning beyond the words themselves. In my book A Habit Called Faith, I noticed, for example, the “inclusio” that frames the Pentateuch. An “inclusio” acts like a pair of literary bookends. In this case, we can see Abraham, in Genesis, receiving the promise of the land. Then, in Deuteronomy, we can see Moses poised on the summit of Mount Nebo, viewing that land of promise.

“Some would say that this literary inclusio highlights,” I wrote, “what really is the nature of faith, that it’s always forged in life’s liminal places—on the way, as it were, when God’s promises are still promissory notes. Faith requires us to take God at his word, even when the reality of our lives seems to suggest that such trust is misplaced. Faith is about hope for what’s unseen and confidence in what’s yet to come,” (120).

Chiasm and inclusio are two literary devices used in Scripture. And let me be honest that while I want to talk about a third, I’m not even sure if it has a name. It has to do with the editorial collecting and arranging of the book of Psalms, this book that teaches us to pray and to praise, to lament and to sing—this book that, as Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis has said, is both God’s word for us and God’s word in us.

Every reader knows that the words on a page have meaning. But writers and editors also know that even more meaning is conveyed through structure. I remember one of our MFA residency lecturers reminding us that narrative structure is meaning. For example, the narrative structure we all learned in middle school, where action rises, then climaxes, then falls before finally resolving: this assures us that all the tangles of the plot will finally get worked out. It reinforces the (perhaps illusory) idea that life is neatly linear.

I hope I’m making my point here. I’ll say it again: structure is meaning. Here, I want simply to draw out that the way the psalms were numbered and arranged, by a collection of editors, was never accidental. This has struck me more forcefully when, in recent months, I’ve been reading a psalm a day. Is it, for example, a matter of happenstance that Psalm 136, which repeats the line, “His steadfast love endures forever,” is then followed by the bitterly dark Psalm 137: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept.” No, I think the juxtaposition of these two psalms says something very consequential about the claims of biblical faith. To have faith is to insist that the steadfast love of the love endures forever, even when you’re in Babylon, surrounded by enemies and far from the land of promise.

Here's yet another structural element I couldn’t help but notice, especially when I finished Psalm 150, then started again with Psalm 1. (A psalm a day seems like a great habit, so I’m not giving up on it yet).

Psalm 150 is the climax to this entire book (especially the final five psalms) that’s been crescendoing to praise. The final phrase of this final psalm bursts with zeal: “Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!” It’s a reminder that human life is to be lived for the glory of God.

How do you recognize a Christian? One way is to notice their aptitude for praise.

All of this makes sense. We know that life doesn’t revolve around us. We know that the Lord is God, that it is he who made us. He has made us, and we are his. “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise,” Psalm 100 tells us, echoing that the God of the Bible is worthy of worship.

But then you arrive back at Psalm 1, you can’t help but see the kind of jarring juxtaposition that was apparent in the ordering of Psalm 136 and 137. The first verse of Psalm 1 is not, “The Lord is King; let the earth rejoice,” (Ps. 97:1). It is not, “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name,” (Ps. 103:1). Nor is it, “Not to us, O LORD, not to us but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!” (Ps. 115:1).

Here is the opening of our prayer book, God’s word in us and for us: “Blessed is the man! Blessed is the woman!” A blessing for humanity, right at the beginning of this book we’re meant to take on our lips as prayer? You can’t help but marvel at this! God deserves sole honor and praise and glory—and yet could he be so persistently devoted to the blessing of humanity?

You know that I’ve been working my way through Reading Genesis with Marilynne Robinson, and it’s this point that she drives home, over and over again. God blesses his people and can’t help from blessing them, though they show nothing to deserve it. In the ancient Babylonian myths, when the humans screw up, the gods disable them, diminish their powers in some way. But the God of the Bible doesn’t choose this justified response to human sin. Instead, he puts boundaries to human capacities. He limits their access to the tree of life, limits the length of their mortal days. “The obstacles God sets to His Adam’s strange grandeur,” Robinson writes, “are external. This is consistent with His unvarying loyalty to His creature” (78).

Blessed is the man. Blessed is the woman. Yes, this sounds like “unvarying loyalty” to me.

“God’s great constancy lies not in any one covenant,” Robinson writes elsewhere, “but in the unshakable will to be in covenant with willful, small-minded, homicidal humankind” (53). In other words, Psalm 150 and Psalm 1, side by side, both say something about God. They say that one reason he is worthy of our praise is that he persists in loving us, persists in wishing to bless us, persists in wooing us home though we are the wayward and prodigal son. His love, his compassion, his mercy: these are characteristics of God that illustrate his praiseworthiness.

What we know from the story as it continues from the Psalms and into the Gospels, is that God’s unvarying loyalty costs him greatly. He suffers for it, even dies for it. This is the good news we proclaim in Jesus, that God so loved the world that he gave of himself.

I don’t know about you, but I never seem to graduate from this most elemental truth. No weaning from the milk of the evangelion, no growing up into greater things. Only: Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.

Praise the LORD.