NOTES for Psa 143

Psalm 144 is a typical example of the genre of a "new song," or "song of renewal." This was a special, prophetic genre: after all, prophets were usually both poets and singers, and improvisers at that, able to deliver a poetic sermon or a new hymn composed on the spot right in the Temple courtyard during some great feast. Their inspired performances were received by their listeners as divinely revealed, confirming the status of the authors as prophets, people of God. Here it was not always easy to distinguish simple inspiration from genuine revelation; there were always more ecstatic prophesiers in Israel, and later in Judah, than true prophets. A true prophet was distinguished above all by a special vision of reality, by perceiving it as God's world and God's Kingdom.

So it is here: the author of the psalm understands perfectly well what a human being is not only before God, but even before the universe, that he is only a grain of sand, and before God no more than a light breath. The matter here is not only that fallen humanity is mortal and that its span, by the measure of the universe, is not long at all, but that after the fall a person ceased to have a direct and immediate relationship to God's reality, to the reality of the world created by God and to the reality of God's presence in the world He created. Meanwhile, only God is fully and truly real, and everything else receives its being and becomes real as a consequence of the action of His will.

After the fall, however, the human being fell out of the sphere of the action of God's will; this, in fact, is the spiritual meaning of the fall. Now a person can participate in authentic reality only if he returns again to the realm of God's will and God's providence. When something like this happens to a person, he usually experiences what is happening as a kind of eschatological experience, during which the world disappears for him and the person remains alone with God, who "bows the heavens and comes down," drawing near to the person and opening to him the reality of His own, God's world.

It is then that both the surrounding world and the person's own life are renewed for him. Then there will be no place in his life for anything accidental or for anything that happens contrary to God's will, while in the fallen world there is much that God does not want but permits, allowing it to exist out of respect for the fallen person's choice. The "new song," the "song of renewal," is witness to this newly opened reality, to the reality of the Kingdom that God gave him to see, even though the time of the Kingdom's active entry into the world had not yet come.