Meditation on Psalm 24: Fullness
Reading 8: Psalm 24-26
Psalm 24
focal phrase: “… and all that is in it.”
focal word: fullness
Just when you’re tempted to over-personalize and over-spiritualize the Psalms (especially after reading the tender, first-person Psalm 23, though see pages 26-28 of John Witvliet’s book The Biblical Psalms), here comes Psalm 24 with its cry that echoes throughout the cosmos: “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it.”
Wycliffe’s translation of this Psalm, which was kept by the King James and RSV translations, gives us a helpful word for the phrase “all that is in it”: “fullness,” as in, “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof.”
Richard Mouw likes the connection here between the “fullness” of Psalm 24 and the “filling” of Genesis 1. After God created humans, he told them to “fill the earth.” Mouw says this command to “fill” meant much more than mere reproduction: “God placed human beings in his creation in order to introduce a cultural ‘filling’ in ways that conformed to his divine will,” Mouw writes in When the Kings Come Marching In. God created nature, and created us to fill the earth with cultural artifacts and cultural patterns: art, architecture, commerce, government, sports, philosophy, and on and on. Mouw says that the reason Isaiah’s vision of the New Jerusalem in chapter 60 includes so much culture, so many ships and goods and silver and gold, is because God is making his Psalm 24 claim on them, on these “fillings” or “fullness” of the earth, and purifying them to serve him in the holy city. (I reflected on this fascinating theme in my book Bringing Heaven Down to Earth.)
Psalm 24, then, shows us our mistake in restricting God, restricting faith, restricting pious or holy feelings, to certain places, like church buildings, or certain people, like nuns and ministers, in certain ways, like the odd modern idea that faith is only a private, personal thing. God’s kingdom extends throughout all the earth, and the fullness thereof—all that we have filled it with. Psalm 24 gives us faith as big as the equator, faith in a messiah “in whom all things hold together,” as Colossians 1 puts it.
Just yesterday I heard this concept put another way. John Witvliet looks at the broad range of things and people in the world that were prayed for in early church liturgies—other nations, other churches, the poor and the sick, travelers, enemies, new believers, and more—and wonders why we often shrink our prayer request list to contain mostly ourselves and our friends and acquaintances. Witvliet asks: what is your “implied range of divine activity”? Where does your God operate? Only in souls? Only in churches? Only nearby? Only faraway?
What if the “range of divine activity” were a Psalm 24 range—the whole earth, and the fullness thereof? How would that change our prayer? How would that change our idea of God’s kingdom, and our idea of our place in it?
Update: This Holy Week Prayer Walk prepared by worshipers in Blacksburg, Virginia, is a beautiful and meaningful example of praying with a Psalm 24 “range of divine activity” in your city. Read more about our relationship with churches in Blacksburg, and our prayers for that city in this time of tragedy.
More Meditations on the Psalms
References
Mouw, Richard. When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem (Revised edition) (Eerdmans, 2002).
Witvliet, John. “Embodying the Wisdom of Ancient Liturgical Patterns,” address at Wheaton College on April 13, 2007.
Resources for the Psalms
The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
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