Either David Was a Lunatic, or You Were Handed a Lie About the Torah

The longest chapter in your Bible is one hundred and seventy-six verses of love for the thing you were taught to escape. Read it slowly. One of the two readings is wrong.

Open Psalm 119. Do not skim it. Read it slowly, the way you would read a letter from someone who loved you and knew he was running out of time.

It is the longest chapter in your Bible. One hundred and seventy-six verses. And it says one thing, over and over, from the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet to the last: I love your Torah. I ache for it. Teach me to keep it. Do not let me wander from it. Incline my heart toward it. My soul is consumed with longing for it.

Now hold that against what you were taught.

Most of us were handed a Torah that was a burden. A yoke nobody could bear. A dead letter God could not wait to be rid of, retired at the cross, replaced by grace. If that is true, then read Psalm 119 again and tell me what you are looking at. Because a man sat down and poured out one hundred and seventy-six verses of love for the very thing you were told was a curse. He called it sweeter than honey. More precious than gold. His meditation all the day.

There are only two ways to read that.

Either David was a lunatic, writing love songs to his chains, calling his own prison sweet.

Or the thing he loved was never what you were told it was.

You cannot have both. You cannot hold a Bible that calls the Torah a burden God abolished, and a Bible where its most devoted lover spends its longest chapter adoring it, and never feel the two grinding against each other. One of those readings is wrong. And it is worth knowing which.

So do the honest thing. Read the psalm slowly, and this time watch the verbs. He does not say I keep it. He says teach me. Incline me. Keep me from wandering. Give me understanding. Revive me. Those are not the words of a man reporting his obedience. They are the words of a man begging for it. He loved the instruction of God with everything in him, and he still could not keep it from the inside. He had the scroll in front of him and the ache within him, and no power to close the gap between them.

That gap is the whole psalm. And it is the same gap you feel, if you are honest, every time you love something in Scripture that you cannot seem to live.

Here is what I want you to sit with. David was not a lunatic. He was the most honest man in the Tanakh about the one thing most of us hide. And the longing he could not satisfy was not a dead end. It was a prayer, and it had an answer coming, an answer that runs straight through the New Testament you were told had left the Torah behind. Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah) named it. Yeshua (Jesus) enacted it. Sha’ul (Paul) lived inside it. Yochanan (John) said outright that the commandments are not a burden. Every one of them is standing exactly where Psalm 119 stood.

But do not take my word for it. Take the text.

I have laid the whole thing out, David’s cry, the covenant that answers it, and the unbroken line of witnesses from Yeshua’s own mouth to the last letter of Yochanan, in a new piece on The Berean Table. It is long, because it is the longest chapter in the Bible and it deserves a slow walk. If you have ever loved something in Scripture that you could not keep, this one is for you.

Read Psalm 119 first. Slowly. Then come and read this, and ask yourself, honestly, whether what you were handed aligns with the man singing on the page, or makes a lunatic of him.

→ The Torah David Longed to Keep

Shalom v’shalvah,

Sergio