NOTES for Psa 113:5-6

Many peoples of antiquity knew of the One who created heaven and earth: Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks, Indians. But none of them worshiped Him: He was too far from the earth and from people with their life and their problems. Such a distant God was practically inaccessible, and therefore He was as if He did not exist at all: what concern can a person have for a God who has no concern for man? His laws act in the world as an inexorable force, and addressing Him is useless: He will not hear anyway and will change nothing in His once-for-all created world, which lives according to once-for-all established, unshakable, and inexorable laws.

Many believed in the existence of such a God later as well, already in modern times, sometimes covering their practical atheism with this faith, and sometimes suffering from the thought that the world is ruled by an inexorable Lord whom it is useless to ask for anything. The uniqueness of the Bible does not lie in the fact that it tells us about the one God who created heaven and earth: this was not news either in Abraham's time or in Moses' time. The uniqueness of the Bible lies in the tradition it has preserved, a unique tradition based on the revelation of this one God and on the experience of living communion with Him.

God does not remain only some otherworldly Being; He stoops down to man. In the words of the hymnographer, He "stoops to look upon heaven and earth," stoops from His otherworldly eternity in order to meet face to face with man, with the very man whom He created, to whom He gave freedom, and whom He now wants to see as His son.

Here there are precisely living relationships, relationships in which all kinds of things happen: acceptance and rejection, "yes" and "no," rises and falls, which do not always bring joy not only to the person who has long forgotten God, but also to God Himself, who often receives from the person who has forgotten Him a very different answer from the one He would like to hear. But without these living relationships God's plan remains unfulfilled, and human life loses all meaning; therefore God enters into them no matter what. He does so in order to save man from sin and give him new life, the life of His Kingdom, which He has prepared for those whom He loves.