Be Still and Know That I Am God - What Does it Really Mean?

For as long as I can remember I've heard this verse cited with the encouragement that God is telling us to be still and make ourselves aware of who he really is.  In that time of "stillness" we will experience God in ways that could not be done apart from being still.  I came across this again in something I read recently so I thought I would look up what John Goldingay had to say in his commentary on the Psalms in the Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms.  I found part of it surprising and part of it alarming. I put in italics what surprised me and in bold what alarmed me. 

"'Be still and know that I am God' is a common invitation in Christian spirituality.  This involves a reinterpretation of the psalm.  Nowhere do the psalms have an ideal of silence.  Their assumption is that one finds God not in silence but in noise.  In noisy Western cultures, we may need to cultivate silence, and the use of the psalm to this end may be inspired by the Holy Spirit, even though it does make the words mean something that the psalmist did not say and would not have dreamed of saying.  Spirit-inspired interpretation often works by making the words of Scripture mean something quite different from what they actually meant, because new situations make it necessary for God to say new things.  At the same time, we have to be wary of missing what the text actually did say.  Here it issues an important challenge to the superpower to stand still and recognize that God is God and that the superpower is not."  (vol. 2, p. 73)

I was surprised, though not terribly so, to see that the verse taken from its context had acquired a life of its own and had taken on meanings not found in the text.  But then Goldingay goes on to offer a justification for this very practice.  As it turns out "spirit-inspired interpretation" can make "the words of Scripture mean something quite different from what they actually meant."  Now he is not writing a book on hermeneutics so I understand him not going into much detail on this point but this seems to open a pandora's box for subjective interpretations under the guise of "spirit-inspired interpretation."  I appreciate his caution that we should "be wary of missing what the text actually did say" but couldn't some one say "What does it matter what it originally said since I have a spirit-inspired interpretation that is not confined to the original meaning?"  At the end of the day what is there to be wary of?  I suppose if you're trying to say what it originally meant then the caution is applicable but with that out of the way the door is open to just about any thing that fits my fancy since a new situation may be making it necessary for God to say something new.

Psalm 19:12-13a: A Plea for Forgiveness or Strength?

Today’s readings are Neh. 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; Luke 4:14-21 and 1 Cor. 12:12-31a.

It’s been a while since I’ve read Psalm 19 and reading it again was like seeing an old friend. That may sound corny but it’s how I felt. I read through it a couple of times and decided to look at a few commentaries. It was while reading John Goldingay that I discovered a different interpretation of vv. 12-13a. Here’s how the passage reads in the ESV:

Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me!

Every other translation I consulted had the same thought. It was a plea for forgiveness and a request not to be dominated by sin. Here’s the commentary from Goldingay with his translation first:

Who can understand wanderings?—free me from secret acts,
Yes, withhold your servant from the willful.

“EVV [abbreviation for {many} translations] add a pronoun to suggest that v. 12 asks who can understand one’s own individual wrongdoing, but this is not the psalm’s point. It rather begins from a more general sense of puzzlement at the human inclination to go off the rails. The mystery of human sin is the fact that we all go astray even though we can see that God’s expectations make sense, in the way vv. 7-11 have described.

LXX and Jerome assume that v. 12 then asks God to cleanse the suppliant from hidden or secret wrongdoings, but this obscures an issue in the Hebrew. The verb is not one meaning ‘cleanse’ but naqa (piel), ‘acquit.’ The OT makes a number of references to acquitting the guilty, but always in order to affirm that God does not do so and that human beings should not (Exod. 34:7; Job 9:28; 10:14). One person can certainly forgive another, and kings can pardon wrongdoers, and God can both forgive and pardon, but the OT does not use the law-court image in this connection because acquitting the guilty is an immoral act and one destructive of the community’s foundations. It is therefore unlikely that the psalm is asking for cleansing in the sense of acquitting existing wrongdoing, even (or especially) secret or hidden wrongdoing.

But naqa (niphal) can denote being free or empty, and the piel verb here seems to have an equivalent meaning. The cleansing for which the psalm is asking is not forgiveness but the removing of the inclination to wrongdoing. That makes for a good link with the verse’s opening question and a good lead-in to the parallel colon. Further, without the plea for acquittal for past sin, vv. 12-14 have more coherence. Their concern throughout is with a life of obedience that issues from the right attitude to God’s expectations that vv. 7-11 have lauded. They are asking for strength, not forgiveness.”

In explaining “secret acts” Goldingay says there may be two things in mind. It could be the “secret plots that precede actual wrong deeds; hiding is involved when people are planning acts of deception or malice (cf. the cognate nouns in 10:8-9; 101:5).” But it can also involve people who are “seeking help from other deities”. He mentions the secret rites in Ezek. 8 where people are bowing down to the sun. This would tie in nicely with vv. 1-6. “The challenge of vv. 7-11 then concerns a religious life lived by Yhwh’s word rather than one that follows the religious practices of other peoples.”

The “willful” are not sins but rather the “kind of people who are involved in secret plans to do wrong to someone or who secretly worship other deities” and “who do not feel any obligation to take any notice of Yhwh’s instructions. . . The plea constitutes another recognition that the person who sees the wisdom in Yhwh’s teaching (vv. 7-11) is not thereby immune from the pressure to join people who walk another way. The masculine ‘willful’ complements the feminine ‘hidden,’ the ‘hidden things’ being the deeds and the ‘willful people’ those who do them. In another context ‘sparing me from the willful’ could imply protecting me from their attacks (cf. LXX?), but in this context it will signify a plea that I not be sucked into their willfulness (cf. Ps. 1). Yet these two needs may overlap. The willful lean on people to join them—or else.”

Psalms, Volume 1: Psalms 1-41, 294-296.