Your Decrees Are My Heritage Forever

I hold my life in my hand continually,
    but I do not forget your law.
The wicked have laid a snare for me,
    but I do not stray from your precepts.
Your decrees are my heritage forever;
    they are the joy of my heart.
I incline my heart to perform your statutes
    forever, to the end…

Keep my steps steady according to your promise,
    and never let iniquity have dominion over me.
Redeem me from human oppression,
    that I may keep your precepts.
Make your face shine upon your servant,
    and teach me your statutes.
My eyes shed streams of tears
    because your law is not kept.
(Psalm 119:109-112, 133–136, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

“Your decrees are my heritage forever.”

In one of my first messages reflecting on how Friends might regard God’s covenant with the Israelites, I quoted a rabbi named Shai Held who described the Torah not as a strict rulebook, but as “a vision for how human beings ought to live together in pursuit of the right and the good.” I’d like to return to his thoughts as we reflect on two passages from the 119th psalm.

(In doing so, I’m not suggesting Quakers should appropriate Jewish faith and practices for themselves. For all I know, you might not believe in any sort of God! But I’ll bet you still believe people should live together in harmony.)

“The purpose of Torah is to bring love and kindness into the world,” Rabbi Held wrote in Judaism Is About Love. “At the heart of the Jewish religion is a God of love and kindness who summons God’s people to live lives of love and kindness.”

Empire does its best to lead us away from lives of love and kindness, encouraging us—with false promises of wealth and prestige and power—to dedicate ourselves to perpetuating its dominion over this world. It wants us to regard empathy as a weakness. If we show everyone our love, Empire says, others will walk all over us, and leave us with nothing. So we must give ourselves over to Empire, and Empire will provide for us and those like us, and too bad for everyone else. But we don’t need to think about that.

If we believe God’s promises, though, we apply ourselves to avoiding that wicked snare. We don’t see the core terms of the covenant—to love God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves—as an imposition, but as our heritage as members of the blessed community.

“Make your face shine upon your servant.”

The people who became known as Quakers didn’t call themselves the Religious Society of Friends because they became friends with each other. They took their inspiration from Jesus’s message to the apostles (John 15:14): “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” They also believed Jesus when he said he had come not to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill their promises (Matthew 5:17). And so Friends inclined their hearts, and asked God to keep their steps steady, as they sought to extricate themselves from, as James Nayler wrote in The Lamb’s War, “the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, [and] the pride of life.”

“These are not of God,” Nayler continued; “and whatever the god of this world hath begot in men’s hearts to practice or to plead for, which God did not place there, all this the Lamb and his followers wars against.” Their ultimate aim? “That God may wholly rule in the heart of man, and man wholly live in the work of God.”

As we strip away the trappings of Empire, and break through the mental and spiritual fog of this world, the more capable we become of perceiving what early Friends called “the Inward Light.” God’s invitation to abandon a life of sin always stands, available to everyone: “he gives his light into their hearts,” Nayler explained, “whereby he lets all see (who will mind it) what he is displeased with, what is with him, and what is against him.” A truth that heavy could shake you up, early Friends acknowledged, but you wanted that upheaval in your life, because with it came redemption from human oppression. You wanted that light to shine upon your soul, so your new life could truly begin.

“God’s grace,” Rabbi Held tells us, “makes us not debased and powerless slaves but dignified and creative agents.”

The covenant calls on each and every member of the blessed community to act as a force for good, “to love God so profoundly,” as Rabbi Held puts it, “that God’s desire for a just society becomes our desire as well.” The 119th Psalm embraces that ideal over and over again, from beginning (“Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord” to end (“…for I do not forget your commandments”).

The psalmist doesn’t find this task easy, but even when “trouble and anguish have come upon me,” he says (119:143), “your commandments are my delight.” They could become a source of delight for us, too—as long as we fulfill our promises with the testimony of concrete actions.