How to Dwell with God

How to Dwell with God
Psalms for Everyone
Part 1 Psalms 1-72
Psalm 15

A composition. David’s.

1 Yahweh, who may stay in your tent,
who may dwell on your holy mountain?

2 The person who walks with integrity, and acts
with faithfulness,
and speaks the truth in his heart.

3 He has not gone about talking,
has not done wrong to his fellow,
has not taken up reviling against his neighbor.

4 In his eyes a contemptible person is abhorrent,
but he honors people who are in awe of Yahweh;
he has sworn to bring trouble and not changed it.

5 He has not given his money on interest
and not accepted a bribe against the innocent—
one who does these things, who does not falter forever.


I have been in e-mail correspondence with an online student of mine in Kabul concerning the meaning of “holiness.” The context in which she lives raises an odd problem. The Western Christians with whom she works are people of truthfulness, faithfulness, mercy, and peaceableness. Yet when they articulate their faith to Afghanis, they stress God’s declaring us to be righteous even though we are sinners so much that they don’t set up an expectation that God’s forgiving grace will transform us. They make it sound as if living a moral life is optional, which is very confusing to a Muslim. “Our lives and our words are out of sync,” she says. In other parts of the world, too, our Christian instinct is to keep religion and morality in separate compartments; there can be strife and backbiting between the members of a congregation, but they feel no unease about continuing in worship (possibly separately). The people involved in high-profile corruption and fraud cases and acts of slaughter often turn out to be respected members of Christian churches.

The book of Psalms began with a reminder that people couldn’t separate their praise and prayer from the question of whether their lives were lived in accordance with the Torah. Its stress didn’t rest on our feelings about our relationship with God. Repeating the teaching of the Torah and living by it had to accompany worship. Now that we have read a few psalms since that expectation expressed in Psalm 1, the Psalter reminds us of the point again in case we have come to think that honoring God in praise or prayer is possible without honoring God in one’s relationships with other people and one’s life in society.

While the talk of Yahweh’s tent and Yahweh’s mountain might make us think of a concrete place such as Mount Sinai or Mount Zion, the talk of staying and dwelling suggests that the psalm has something broader in mind. “Staying” is the word for spending the night somewhere (in modern Hebrew, it generates the word for a hotel). Dwelling likewise suggests staying somewhere for a while. While people might sometimes have camped on Zion overnight, we have no indication that it was regular practice. But the Psalms also speak of God’s dwelling in a broader sense, a less focused reality, a presence of God that was a reality throughout the land of Israel.

Being in someone’s tent or staying with someone implies abiding in a place of security and provision. So what kind of person must you be to enjoy that security of living in God’s tent? The answer comes in a sequence of unusual three-part lines. Parallelism won’t work with three-part lines. They keep surprising us with their third part, and thus making us think some more.

First, enjoying security with God means being characterized by integrity. Literally, you are someone who “walks whole.” There is a moral consistency, constancy, and stability about you. It expresses itself in faithfulness in your actions; it also implies a uniformity between what you are outside and what you are inside. You speak the truth in your heart; your actions and your thinking match. You don’t do one thing and think another.

Second, you don’t go around talking about other people (literally, you don’t go around on your tongue). The point is spelled out by the rest of the line. You don’t use your tongue to wrong a fellow member of your village—for instance, by lying about someone in order to rob the family of its land or cattle. You don’t use your tongue to accuse your neighbor of things. Third, it means being discerning in the way you relate to other people in light of their own moral stances. If someone else has earned the community’s contempt for such action, you don’t turn a blind eye and you certainly don’t honor such people. The people you honor are those who revere Yahweh in word and deed. And when you commit yourself to ensuring that wrongdoers pay for their wrongdoing, you don’t go soft and let them off and thereby encourage people to assume they can get away with such wrongdoing.

Fourth, you watch what you do with your own possessions. On one hand, you are generous in lending without interest to people who (for instance) have had a bad harvest and have no seed to sew or no food to eat for the coming year. On the other hand, when you’re involved in some community dispute, you don’t use your wealth to get a favorable decision from the elders by bribing a witness. And you don’t just maintain that stance for the short haul. This last bit of definition belongs to the last of the four three-part lines, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the psalm assumes that it applies to all the psalm’s constraints.


Taken from Psalms for Everyone by John Goldingay