NOTES for Psa 64

In every age people have asked the question: why is everything on earth arranged as it is? Why does everything happen as it does? And in every age there have been two different answers to this question, different not in details but in approach. Some reduced the question "why" to the question "how"; others tried to reach the first cause. So too the question of who moistens the earth and grows the harvest on it allows two fundamentally different answers.

A scientist would describe this process as purely natural, without resorting to any other explanations, and as a scientist he would be absolutely right. Science does not ask the question "why"; in the end it always reduces it to the question "how," to the question of secondary causes and secondary mechanisms.

In practical terms, knowledge of these mechanisms is absolutely necessary, but for a full spiritual life such knowledge alone is not enough. For spiritual life, the most important question is the question of the meaning of what is happening, the question "for what purpose."

Understanding the work of a mechanism, even the most complex one, gives no answer to this question. Even a complex mechanism still remains only a mechanism; the answer to the question of who made it, who started it and why, and for what it works, will remain open even if we know absolutely everything about its structure and the principles of its work.

The answer to the question "for what purpose" can be given not by nature, but by spirit; not by "something," but by "someone." And this "someone" must be in scale commensurate with nature as a whole, with the universe in all its fullness. The Bible offers precisely this answer, proceeding from the fact that the world is governed by Someone, the One who created it and who alone can give meaning to its existence.

But the Bible is foreign to the view of the Creator that spread widely among philosophers of the eighteenth century, many of whom were convinced that God, having once created the world, then left it alone and no longer intervenes in its life, so that everything happening in the world has no relation to Him.

The Bible sees in God not only the Creator, but also the Provider, that is, such a Creator who, having created the world, does not abandon it to fate, but continues to participate in its life and intervene in what happens in the world He created.

That is why the author of the psalm speaks of God who Himself sends rain on the earth in order to water it and grow an abundant harvest on it. The point here is not the means God uses for this, nor even that He is the first cause of everything, but that without Him everything will lose its meaning, and then neither rain nor harvest nor earth nor heaven will be needed anymore.

In the midst of disasters and anxieties, when it seems so natural to hear from someone crying out to God words of hope for help from above or expressions of gratitude for aid already received, a song of praise to the Creator rings out brightly for His works, so astonishingly manifested in the world He created. And this praise is not only for the crushing of enemies, but also for fertile fields, for the rains that nourish the earth—in short, for all His countless everyday gifts. It is significant that here the psalmist does not ask God to hear his prayer, for he is already certain that the Lord hears it.

Here, too, we hear contrite sorrow over the lawlessness that reigns in the world. We hear both lamentation over what is happening around us and a cry of repentance. It seems reasonable to suppose that the psalmist grieves both over his own transgressions and over what is taking place in the surrounding world. But there is no despair where there is firm confidence that the Lord is able to cleanse both us from our transgressions and the world we have disfigured.