As a kid, I grew up near Los Angeles in California. The beaches were spectacular and inviting. Every year, I got an equally spectacular sunburn since sunscreen was a fairly new fangled idea at the time.
But even more than the sunburns, I remember body surfing and getting pummeled by the pounding waves. There were times when I didn’t know which way was up — literally, not metaphorically. As I was tossed and turned, I could feel my lungs burning from want of oxygen. I thought, “Is this the end of me? Is this how I die?”
Years later, when my oldest child was three years old, we went to the beach during a family vacation in Hawaii. Without warning, a wave much larger than the previous ones slammed into him and pulled him under. He was only five feet from me at the time, but as the wave thinned out, my son was gone. I panicked. Having grown up near a beach, I knew all about the undertow and had learned to fear it. So with adrenaline coursing through my body, I scanned the shoreline. But I couldn’t find him. He was gone. Fear screamed inside of me. I had lost my son and nothing else in the world mattered. And then I saw him. I swept down on him, scooping him into my arms. I never found the hat he’d been wearing, but I was so relieved to have my son back and alive. I shivered from the adrenaline rush.
Seas and oceans were the terrors of the ancient world. Dark and malevolent, their chaos threatened the order of the world. Stories similar to the biblical Noah and the ark are echoed in every ancient culture. The fear of those waves crossing their shoreline boundaries and obliterating the firm and cultivated earth was a fear common to all peoples. Those dark and tumultuous deeps were filled not just with fish, but with bizarre oddities and monsters like the Jonah-swallowing fish and the many-headed Leviathan.
If anything might deny the goodness of God and his authority over creation, it would be the oceanic depths. Their violence seems to reject control. Like the darkness of night where dangerous creatures and thieves and cutthroats lurk, the seas represent the dangers of the physical world.
The psalmists readily turn these external sources of chaos into metaphors for inner chaos, as they are swallowed up in the darkness of despair and submerged to the neck in the waters of interpersonal strife. And again, the painful experiences they symbolize seem to point to God’s lack of care or inability to care for those he says he loves.
I hear this in my hospital work on a regular basis. When a family member suffers from crippling depression, I hear others in the family question the goodness of God. When cancer strikes, I hear, “Why would God allow this?”
The waters are round about us. As we flounder and flail, we question God.
But Psalm 93 does something unusual. It asserts the kingship of God not in spite of the chaotic waves, but in the midst of them. God’s rule isn’t just over the dry land and pleasant summer nights. It extends into the physical storms and the metaphorical hurricanes of life.
The psalm starts with an affirmation of God’s kingship.
The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty;
the LORD is robed in majesty and armed with strength;
indeed, the world is established, firm and secure.
Your throne was established long ago;
you are from all eternity (Ps. 93:1-2).
God’s throne is as established as the firm and secure ground beneath our feet. Both God and his throne reach back into the remotest ages. We know of no time when they didn’t exist.
The first verse of the psalm is a classic chiasm, a poetic device that uses an A B B A structure. It goes as such:
The LORD reigns (A)
He is robed in majesty (B)
The LORD is robed in majesty (B)
And armed with strength (A)
The B’s are obvious since they almost exactly the same. The A’s are less obvious which is the way this Hebrew poetic device works. Two similar things are paired and two not-so-similar things are paired, leading the reader to understand that those not-so-similar things should be tied together just like the similar things. In this case, for God to reign is for him to be “armed with strength.” And all of this is an expression of what it means for him to be “robed in majesty,” clothed in the royal garments of his kingship.
King Yahweh gets dressed in strength. His power is essential to his rule. Whatever we think of him, we cannot separate him from his power.
Because of that, what comes next is surprising.
The seas have lifted up, LORD,
the seas have lifted up their voice;
the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.
Mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea —
the LORD on high is mighty (Ps. 93:3-4).
These two verses follow a different chiastic pattern: A1, A2, A3, B3, B2, B1. The A’s all have the phrase “the seas have lifted up” and the B’s all have the word mighty/mightier. The A’s all build on each other to a crescendo. The B’s seem to recede. But the final line (B1) is the line with a punch (though not a punchline). It’s where the previous five lines have all been leading.
For five verses, we focus on the seas — their voice, their pounding waves, their thundering great waters, their mighty breakers. The awe piles up and piles up and piles up. But then we get an abrupt switch. The subject switches from the seas to God. As lifted up as the seas are and as mighty as they are, the Lord is higher and mightier.
The experience of chaos in our lives is significant. The tension builds and builds. It gets noisier and noisier, thundering and pounding. We get pummeled like my son, dragged under and tossed around. We lose our hats and scare our parents, swallowing salty water and crying salty tears as we do.
Even so, God is higher. God is mightier.
But a powerful God isn’t enough. A God who is only powerful is a scary God to deal with. The ancient Near East had plenty of those. And the way people talk about the economy often sounds like an all-powerful, capricious, unloving god. I definitely wouldn’t want to live at the mercy of the merciless economy!
No. Yahweh is powerful and yet more than powerful. He’s better than powerful.
Your statutes, LORD, stand firm;
holiness adorns your house
for endless days (Ps. 93:5).
The psalm ends with a unique word to describe the words God himself has spoken: statutes (Hebrew: choqim). These God-spoken words express the binding nature of the Torah, God’s “law.” They’re permanent. Inscribed. Tattooed. A statute is a boundary marker not to be crossed, just like the shoreline the ocean can’t cross.
After my son got tumbled in those Hawaiian waves, I picked him up and walked away from the ocean’s edge. And guess what? The noisy, crazy, chaotic waves couldn’t touch him. He was beyond their reach. There was a line they simply couldn’t cross.
God isn’t arbitrary. Isn’t capricious. He has a line in the sand that he has inscribed. He says, “This far and no further.” And one of these days, the chaos will be banned forever, eradicated. When Rev. 21:1 says “there will be no sea,” it’s not speaking of the end of big bodies of water. It’s speaking of the end of this chaotic element in God’s good creation. The source of so many sorrows will be snuffed. As the passage says just a few verses later, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4).
Pain has its place in the world for now. But it’s a temporary place, one ruled over and bounded by God, even if it seems overwhelming while we and our loved ones are tumbled by it.
And then this: “Holiness adorns your house for endless days.”
Holiness isn’t some sublime purity. That far too bland and boring. Holiness is something vastly different from our everyday experience. It’s good and true and beautiful. It’s everything about God that is different from the harsh realities of the world and the brutal politics of human posturing and posing. It is that integral difference to God that ends up with Jesus on the cross, battered by the pain that submerges us all.
This different way of living and loving decorates his home because it is who he is. Always. And the oceans can’t touch it. But we will live with him there, soaking in this loving holiness. Always.