Properly speaking, law is about the fact that God comes to his people with his own kind of merciful majesty, showing us what we must be if we are to be truly human, setting the law between us and our limitless capacity for self-destruction. God’s law is God interposing himself between us and our headlong rush into self-destruction, God nurturing us by educating us into the true form of human flourishing. If we would be, and if we would flourish, this is what it means to live joyfully from, with, and under God.

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Such a picture of human life is, I fear, scarcely conceivable for most of us, to say nothing of whether we think it livable. The idea that the psalm presupposes — that we live within a given order of reality, that God speaks to us and shapes our lives — is pretty remote to the way most of us go about our day-to-day affairs. Why is that? Largely, I think, because we’ve inherited a set of cultural conventions that tells us that what’s basic in human life is not hearing but willing. One of the deepest assumptions of our culture is that we’ve no given nature. We’re what we make of ourselves, not what God makes of us or intends for us. There’s no creator worth speaking of — no providence, no moral order, no structure to being human. What there is, is our will. We’re creatures of our own willing, and in morals and education and politics and medicine and friendship and everything else, what matters is technology, making, producing ourselves. As we make ourselves, so we are.

Within such a culture, the idea of God’s law is well outside our field of vision. At the very least, grasping what it’s about will involve some seismic shifts in the way we think about ourselves and our world. More than anything, taking this psalm seriously will involve the conversion of the imaginations of our hearts. People can only resist when what they have deep inside them is something so utterly good and true that resistance is worthwhile. The wisdom of the psalm is that God’s law is, indeed, utterly good and utterly true and that it can set us free to be and do more than our culture will allow. God’s law liberates. That is, once we come to see that there is a shape to our lives that is not what we invent but what God gives to us, we can lay down the burden of having to make ourselves and become what we are: the creatures of the mercy of God.