Ps 63:1a O God (ĕlôhîym) you are my God (êl); Early will I seek (shakhar) You
[Reading Time: 11 minutes]
Review
In the opening two posts, we looked first at the method of kataphysic inquiry and the “epistemological inversion” required in any study of the Living Word. That is to say, we seek to apprehend the Word of God not on our own personal and cultural terms projected back onto the text, but rather on the grounds that God gives Himself to be revealed, namely in His revealed Word and the Word-made-flesh in Christ Jesus. With this background we next examined the superscription of the Psalm (“A Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah”) examining the term, wilderness (Miḏbār). This study took us from the desert of warring, pagan tribes to the affliction (anah) of Hagar in the wilderness through which she meets the “God-Who-sees” finally to the redemptive suffering of the patriarch Joseph who by his very own family was “cast into a pit in the wilderness” then into slavery and a “dungeon” in Egypt. Yet precisely there in such darkness, we found that Joseph, a prefiguration of Christ, learns the statutes of JHWH; and bearing the yoke of the Messiah, he is not only brought out of bondage himself, but moreover, becomes the person through whom his people would be delivered.
All this to say, the actual ex-periences of the flesh-and-blood realities of affliction “in the wilderness” with the 400 years of exile and bondage that follow reveal to God’s people in a way that nothing else can the unconditional mercies of the Covenant.
Again, they are experienced before they are articulated.
And the experience forms in their collective consciousness an archetype of salvation through the Passover Lamb, opening them to the life through and in
Christ our Passover Who is sacrificed for us.
Now we come to the opening verse, which will be the focus of this installment. And as before we will begin by quoting the Psalm in its entirety:
A Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah.
1 O God, You are my God;
Early will I seek You;
My soul thirsts for You;
My flesh longs for You
In a dry and thirsty land
Where there is no water.
2 So I have looked for You in the sanctuary,
To see Your power and Your glory.
3 Because Your lovingkindness is better than life,
My lips shall praise You.
4 Thus I will bless You while I live;
I will lift up my hands in Your name.
5 My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness,
And my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips.
6 When I remember You on my bed,
I meditate on You in the night watches.
7 Because You have been my help,
Therefore in the shadow of Your wings I will rejoice.
8 My soul follows close behind You;
Your right hand upholds me.
9 But those who seek my life, to destroy it,
Shall go into the lower parts of the earth.
10 They shall fall by the sword;
They shall be a portion for jackals.
11 But the king shall rejoice in God;
Everyone who swears by Him shall glory;
But the mouth of those who speak lies shall be stopped.
Summary Synthesis
O God (ĕlôhîym) You are my God (êl)
Early will I seek (shakhar) You.
This opening verse conveys the following meaning,
O God of all creation (ĕlôhîym),
Who is my personal God, the ram of my strength (êl),
Who has given Himself as an atoning sacrifice for me,
At the break of day at the dawning of the light (shakhar) will I seek You.
Detailed Analysis
O God (ĕlôhîym) You are my God (êl)
As we can immediately see, David utilizes two terms for “God”—ĕlôhîym and êl. Without becoming overly technical, we can simply note that God is addressed first as ĕlôhîym, which was the word used in Gen 1:1
In the beginning God (ĕlôhîym) created the heavens and the earth.
As has been commented on the use of this word in the opening of the Scriptures,
The profound truth expressed by this simple sentence is the source and meaning of every kind of reality. It is the basis of all theology; it is that which gives meaning to every aspect of life and the world; it is the potential illumination ‘of all things, visible and invisible.’ God’s existence is its own explanation (and the explanation of everything else); thus, it can have no explanation outside it or above it, as though His existence were dependent on some other kind of authority (1, 277).
In the words of Auguste Lecerf who meditates on the existential dimensions of this name for God,
When we say ‘God is’, we affirm a fact which is forced on us by the consciousness that we have of our own existence, of our own mind, and in fact of the meaning which we attach to such expressions as ‘to be’ and ‘to be true’. The existence of God and the affirmation of this existence can only be in the nature of a principle, a principle supreme in all orders of truth (Ibid, 278).
In short, all reality (small ‘r’) begins in and flows out of the Reality of God (capital ‘r’). Scripture, therefore, offers
no philosophical proof of God (beyond His reality itself), nor does it offer a philosophical discussion of God’s Being (beyond the inescapable fact that He is and that He acts sovereignly). But the God Who is does name Himself in various ways in His written Word (Ibid, 279).
The Hebrew word for God, ĕlôhîym
As to the nature of the Hebrew term, ĕlôhîym, it is generally accepted that this particular name is given to express the universal nature of God; whereas, the tetragrammaton, JHWH (I am that I am, cf. Ex 3:14}, speaks of God’s personal, covenantal presence with Israel.
The OT begins with reference to Elohim rather than Yahweh (Gen. 1:1); this may indicate that it more readily carried a universal sense for that audience than the personal name Yahweh. The addition of Yahweh to Elohim, ‘LORD God,’ in Gen. 2:4–3:23 may be meant to claim that this universal creator God is none other than Israel’s personal God. That the name Yahweh was invoked from earliest times (Gen. 4:26), and this by non-Israelites in a setting that has all of humankind in view, may reflect a comparable universal intention related to worship (Ibid, 291, 2 IV. 1295).
David, therefore, begins his prayer invoking the universal name of God (“O God [ĕlôhîym]”), then—and this is critical—draws the eternal reality of the universal creator-God down to the particular realities of his own life (“You are my God [êl]”).
A word on êl: The strength of a ram…of sacrifice
This name which is used for God over 200 times in the OT is derived from the noun, ayil. Though it ultimately comes to mean ‘strength’, its literal meaning is of a 'ram’. And we do not have to look very far in the OT to understand the significance of a ram. As noted in more detail here, the first occurrence of êl in the Scriptures speaks of a ram that is sacrificed in the first Covenantal ceremony with Abraham wherein God eternally pledges Himself to His people (Gen 15:9).
The next two occurrences, then, come in the all-important 22nd chapter of Genesis where the Lord, we are told, “tested Abraham” (22:1).
And how does He do this?
Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah,
And offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you (22:2).
When “on the third day” Abraham takes his son Isaac up the mountain and lays the “wood of the burnt offering” upon him, Isaac asks the question,
Look, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”
To which Abraham responds
My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering (22:7-8).
When Abraham comes with Isaac to the “place of which God had told him” he then “built an altar there and placed the wood in order; and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar upon the wood. Then without understanding yet in obedience with the inexpressible anguish of a father, Abraham
stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.
Yet—yet—
the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!”
So he said, “Here I am.”
And He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him;
For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me” (22:10-12).
The obedience of a father who does not even withhold to God his only son, the one promised to him 25 years before, for whom he had waited and waited and prayed and begged and who was finally given to him and Sarah.
And then was to be sacrificed.
Yet the Lord intervenes, as He always does for His people.
For He never calls them to take a step He Himself has not taken before them.
Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram (êl) caught in a thicket by its horns.
So Abraham went and took the ram (êl), and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son.
He then gives a new name:
And Abraham called the name of the place, The-Lord-Will-Provide (JHWH yireh); as it is said to this day, “In the Mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”
It is to this God that we look (shakhar)…at the dawning of the day
After his use of the terms, “ĕlôhîym You are my êl”, David declares his response to God’s Covenantal presence which has been revealed to him through the sacrificial love of a Father,
early will I seek (shakhar) You.
Without going into great detail, the verb he uses, shakhar, is only found 12 times in the OT. Derived from the denominative verb of the same Hebrew letters that means the ‘dawning of the day’, it occurs in Jacob’s wrestling with God until the “break of day” (shakhar, Gen 32:24, 26). Next it is seen in the children of Israel’s marching around Jericho seven times at the “dawning” (shakhar) of the seventh day (Josh 6:15).
And passing back to the Psalms, it appears in the Psalmist’s prayers to “awaken the dawn”:
My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast;
I will sing and give praise.
Awake, my glory!
Awake, lute and harp!
I will awaken the dawn (shakhar, Ps 58:7-8).
And in nearly the exact same language of a later Psalm,
O God, my heart is steadfast;
I will sing and give praise, even with my glory.
Awake, lute and harp!
I will awaken the dawn (shakhar).
I will praise You, O Lord, among the peoples,
And I will sing praises to You among the nations.
For Your mercy is great above the heavens,
And Your truth reaches to the clouds (Ps 108:1-4)
David has experienced the “mercy” and “truth” of God. It is no longer an abstract concept to him (as it still is to many of us). Rather, it is the basis of his very life.
Therefore, he will “seek God early”. For he knows that those who “love” God will experience his love (Prov 8:17a). And those who seek [Him] diligently will find [Him]” (Prov 8:17b).
And with that word we bring this study to a close.
Amen!
So may it be!