actually the mantras given go by the birth date really, they're not through any mystical assignment but they do enable the system to charge people you see in order to get the mantra and then they're introduced to it by a little ritual which involves actually idolatry It's put in the guise of honoring the original guru from which, from whom the Maharishi had learned the art. But it's really more than that. It involves the names of Hindu deities and Hindu deities are often used in mantras for that matter. And many unsuspecting Christians have gone through all this not realizing what they're involved in. It's pushed just as a relaxation response, but actually it's more than that. It's part of the whole system. The monistic philosophy of the Vedantas lies behind it, that you are on the way to becoming one with the Absolute, that what you're seeking is a transformation of consciousness. by which you experience absorption to all that is. Now, there is of course a basis for this physiologically. Dr. Herbert Brown of Harvard was at first welcomed by the TM people because he did measurements that showed that people with high blood pressure could reduce their blood pressure by meditation But he lost his popularity with him when he said you could do that by saying any syllable Whatever you didn't have to have any particular mantra that there was beneficial effect on deep relaxation the fight-or-flight syndrome that pumps adrenaline into our systems and can be quieted and not only that apparently there's some sort of reverse process that can happen in deep meditation that really does generate alpha waves in the brain and gives one a sense of well not only relaxation but the joy and satisfaction there are ways in which by meditation in the sense of relaxation, it's possible to gain certain physiological benefits. But of course, it's not just the physiological benefit of meditation that's being sought, it's being sought in terms of the monistic philosophy of Hinduism. If it were only the benefits, the physiological benefits then there's certainly one very common form of deep relaxation that brings notable physiological benefits, namely sleep. But I've never heard of anybody sacrificing his whole life to promote 20-minute naps in the afternoon for all and sundry. That too has a remarkable benefit. actually it's pretty evident that what is being pushed is not actually the physiological benefits that can come from relaxation but the the theosophical advantages that the practitioners would have us involved in and of course transcendental meditation is supposed to be only the first step that ultimately leads to the sense of deification. Agananda Bharati is a man who's a Californian who's written on this. He has a good background in Western philosophy and also because of an Indian parent and his studies in India, he also has a pretty thorough background in Indian philosophy. And he pushes this practice, although he scorns TM for its commercialization. And he says he's had the experience a number of times. But he brings out the important fact that no Christian and no pious Jew could really engage in the process, because you are not seeking to know God, you are seeking to be God. You're seeking to be one with the all, one with the infinite. Well, I suppose most of you have encountered this TM at one point or other. I wrote a little book one time called CM with an asterisk for Christian meditation. Of course nobody bought it because they didn't know what CM was. In England it was published under Christian meditation. Nobody bought that either. Maybe it's still in print in Chinese. I have a copy in Chinese. I think the publishers are sometimes interested in my books. It's just that nobody wants to read them when they're published. But here's an important issue for Christians, right? And it's important when we think of the Psalms and our study of the Psalms. If we see the dangers in Transcendental Meditation and some of these other techniques from Indian philosophy and religion, How do we promote Christian meditation? How do we promote it in our own lives? How do we promote it with our congregations? What is it? And the answers, of course, are not hard to come by. You look in the scriptures and some things are quite remarkable. One point is The Bible never gives you techniques of meditation. Now, Christian mystics have often developed what they call Jacob's Ladders. Systems, you know, structures, steps to go through. And in Christianity there's been a long tradition of developing ascetic and meditative practices. that would help one to enjoy the experience of mystical fellowship with the Lord. In the 14th century, the monks of Athos in Greece developed the mantra that they used, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us. And they would repeat that over and over and over and over again, thousands of times a day. Now that has been defended by scholars and by Christian mystics saying that really what they were seeking to do in that was not to bring about that transformation of consciousness that comes from the use of the mantra with relaxation, but rather it was a spiritual quest. they were trying to think more deeply each time into the meaning of that which they said. Now to the extent that they were doing that, to the extent that they were making that a prayer and seeking to understand more fully each time the sense of that prayer, to that extent that would surely be Christian meditation. But the question has to be raised as to whether such ceaseless repetition can avoid the other effect. For you see that the effect of constant repetition of one word or one short phrase, the effect of that really is to shut down our analytical thought. so that the intuitive aspect of our mind can take over. Of course, there's been a lot of talk about the right and left hemispheres of the brain and their different functions, and there is a difference between discursive thought and intuitive perception. And it's true that by repeating one phrase endlessly, it has the effect of shutting down discursive thought, analytical thought. You see, you're repeating something that loses all meaning, and your mind therefore is no longer thinking in any discursive way. And because of this, the intuitive takes over. Now the intuitive does not discriminate The intuitive does not analyze and therefore does not even distinguish one's own personal identity. The intuitive is just more of an awareness of everything around in one act of perception. And so the idea of feeling to be at one with all that is is understandably associated with intuition drained of any analysis. See, in pure intuition, you're not even aware of your own individuality. The individuation isn't taking place. When you turn to the Bible, you see, you are not given mantras. You are not given terms to use over and over and over again ceaselessly. Now, that is not to say that the Bible opposes all repetition. Jesus warned his disciples not to pray in the repetitive way that the Gentiles used. And I think that warning of our Lord may well be applied to the techniques of repeating endlessly even so devout a prayer as Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us. But the way in which the Bible handles meditation does involve repetition, yes, but not repetition apart from reflection. You see, you have in the Psalms the repetition that the mercy of the Lord endures forever, but in between each statement of that chorus, as it were, there's also something to think about that helps you to apply the fact that the mercy of the Lord endures forever. So in the scriptures we are never given meaningless phrases to repeat. In the scriptures there is always discursive thought. There is always the revelation of what God is teaching us. Now the techniques that have been developed for meditation in a Christian way are sometimes very reverent. the Simeon the new theologian as he was called who lived in 1000 in the year 1000 AD at that time has meditations that he wrote poetic meditations that are beautifully written but you see they are thoughtful meditations that he isn't just trying to keep repeating a word until uh these strange sensations move over him You all know this, don't you? You can repeat any word and I just would say you repeat any word two thousand times and you get some funny sensations because your analytical mind is being shut down by that process, you see. But Simeon, the new theologian, wrote thoughtfully and reflectively Now he too spoke about Jacob's ladder of preparation to get ready to fling yourself, as he would say, at the gate of glory. And he would say you can't open heaven's gate, that's for God to do, but you can use the ladder to climb up and be available as it were. I think the use of the scriptural phrase of the ladder that Jacob saw is a complete misunderstanding of that passage. something else again. The ladder wasn't a ladder, it was a stairway. Jacob didn't go up, God came down. And when God came down, he spoke. So it's not an account of how to reach God by the path of mysticism. It's an account of how God redemptively came down to bring his presence. Well then, if the scripture doesn't give us formulas, And if the search for formulas or steps to meditation really are not derived from scripture, what is the scriptural approach to meditation? And I think really there are three aspects to it. The first is that scripture meditation is meditation in wisdom. And the second is that it's meditation in love, and the third is it's meditation in praise. Wisdom, love, and praise. It is wisdom, you see. You do not try to preempt the mind. You don't try to switch your analytical thinking off. Rather, you pursue the paths of God's revelation. looking for deeper understanding of that which the Lord has revealed. And the Lord has revealed to us wonders in his word. And as we reflect on them, we discover always new things that we hadn't previously understood. And this calls for repetition, yes. It calls for careful reflection, yes. in the second psalm, blessed is the man who meditates on the law of the Lord, you know, and his law that he meditate day and night. So meditation is commended in scripture and the word that's used there, the Hebrew word is on the metapoetic, it's the word hadah, so that sounds like muttering, you see, the word means to mutter. Now, ha-gah, ha-gah, ha-gah, ha-gah, ha-gah, ha-gah doesn't sound like muttering in English, but it does, I guess, in Hebrew. So, you are muttering, you're repeating over and over. Now, why? Why, obviously, to memorize, so you can learn it. The scriptures were written, of course, in a time when people didn't carry books around in their pockets or in their satchels or book bags. They had to memorize. And meditation does require memorization. If you don't believe that, give yourself a little exercise. Take a passage of scripture, read it very carefully, and then put the Bible away and write down on a sheet of paper everything that the passage says. And then when you've done that, go back and look at the passage again. Well, unless you're a rather remarkable student, which I realize some of you are, you'll find that there were some things you missed. So, you see, there's an advantage in memorizing the passage so that you won't be missing anything, so that you can reflect on it, so you can think about it. And, you know, meditation leaves the knower in the picture. You don't just look at the scriptures as data. You look at the scriptures as the Word of God to be thought about in God's presence. And the key to Christian meditation on scripture is exactly there. To pay attention to what it says, to think about what it says, to ask yourselves questions about what it says, but to stay with it, to memorize it, to review it, to think about it again. You know, it's amazing when we do that. It's amazing how often during the day a wholly new insight will emerge from the scripture passage that we've kept with us. As the rabbis used to say, you put the passage in your pocketbook, in your purse, you know, and carry it around with you and reflect on the experiences of the day. I'm sure you've all had this experience as you've been preparing a message or a sermon and then you find you're brought into some encounter with some other people and you suddenly realize how apposite, how appropriate that scripture is for the situation that you're in and you use it, you know. and then maybe you have some diaconal work to do or you're visiting in the hospital or something and then you discover here again there's an appropriateness to that scripture that you hadn't visualized. So that we not see meditation isn't something that you do only in lonely isolation. Now there are advantages to being alone to meditate so that you're not distracted, but there are also advantages to doing your meditation in the midst of your service because you keep finding new insights and new applicability, new understanding, new sense of the power of the Word of God in the new situations in which you find yourself. So remember that it does pay to meditate and to repeat, to memorize the scriptures so that you can recite them to yourself. And to do that out loud, as I mentioned before, the Puritans were always in favor of praying out loud and also of reciting the scriptures out loud. And of course, as we see with the Psalms, We are given the means not only for saying it out loud, but also for singing it out loud, to meditate as we sing, singing over the thoughts and meanings of the revealed scripture. Now, I know that muttering is not socially acceptable. I know if you walk around muttering, people are going to think that this is strange behavior. But, oh well, we live in a world with a lot of strange behavior, don't we? And you may be a little idiosyncratic in some other ways, too. But, well, a friend of mine has an answer if you have a problem with muttering. Just go into any public phone booth. Pick up the phone. Don't put any quarter in. but just hold the receiver, and you can mutter away, and that's perfectly acceptable, you see, unless somebody's waiting for the phone, of course, it wouldn't be recommended, but seriously, do take stock of this, begin to use scripture this way, begin to memorize the Psalms this way, and reflect on what they mean. Now, further, in our meditation, We're not seeking, first of all, to escape from this world. Well, you heard J. Adams in chapel, many of you, about the peace of God. And he had an interesting little expression there, didn't he? He talked about not only casting all our cares on him, but beginning to think the things that are true and right and so on. and then acting in that way and then he said all of a sudden peace will steal up behind you and hit you behind the left ear or something like that well there's point to that you see we don't we've all known experience of absolute ecstasy in the presence of God. I think we've all had experiences when everything looked different, when the whole world looked different because of the presence of the Lord in our lives. So we all cherish devotional experiences that we've had, but you see it's a trap to try to induce them. You see, if you seek to induce the experience, you've pointed yourself in the wrong direction. Because what are you doing when you meditate? You're not seeking the experience of ecstasy. You're seeking to understand better what it is that God says. You're seeking to be gripped more by the truth of his word. You're seeking a deeper understanding of the meaning of the glory of God's revelation. Now, as you do that, you can't help but start thinking about how to apply it to your lives. How are you going to serve God acceptably in terms of this passage of scripture? This muttering man, this man who meditates in God's law day and night, You see, he wants to direct his life according to that. How shall a young man direct his way? By taking heed to it through the law of the Lord. So our meditation is a meditation in action. It's not just in a remote abstraction. It's an actual service that we meditate and see how the Word of God applies to our lives. That means, you see, that in our devotional times, we need to be planning. We need to be asking, how can I serve the Lord? What's an opportunity that's before me today? What would open up? Don't think that devotional meditation is just, you know, stepping out of your life to take a quick trip to heaven. Devotional meditation is beginning to get the light of heaven on the life you're leading. Now I know you've done this often, but it doesn't hurt to remind you. How often has it happened that you've been praying for someone in your own personal prayer And then it suddenly come to you, well, here's something you could have done for that person that you hadn't thought of. And so your praying turns into planning as to how you... Well now, that isn't separate from fellowship with the Lord. You see, you're in the Lord's presence as you do that. You're applying his word to life. And living in wisdom means, Paul says, that we discern the things that are different. We understand the differing things and in that way we lay hold of the things that are excellent and you don't do that without taking time. So that time is spent before the Lord in that meditation. May I also commend to you that you write out your meditation. Don't only speak them, but write them. And it may be easier for you to write it than to speak it, actually. A literate bunch here. But write out, write out your meditation. Keep a diary and let it be brief, perhaps, but don't forget to take time to reflect and to think and to write down the thoughts that have come to you from the Word of God. Do that as you look at the Psalms, as you study the Psalms. And you might decide to be pretty legalistic about that, to make it a law of the Medes and the Persians that you're going to write some devotional material every day of your life. You can do it, you know, if you determine that it's going to have a certain priority. I didn't do this regularly in most of my life, I'm ashamed to say. Oh, I had devotions, but I didn't write it out every day. I only started doing that 11 years ago, and I'm so glad I did. You know, you can do it with Oh, you might miss once a year, maybe, maybe not. You just make up your mind that that's what you're going to do. You know, at first you have to wake up at about three o'clock in the morning and realize you forgot it the day before, so you get up and do it. I mean, that's what you've got to do if you want to be legalistic about it. But anyway, I'm I'm teasing a little bit, I'm not sure that my own legalism is any model for you. But it was very necessary for me, because if I didn't do it that way, I soon wouldn't be doing it at all. So that's why I have to do it that way. But think about, then, the wisdom aspect of meditation. And look, friends, Why are we looking at the Psalms anyway? See, isn't it because they're meditation of this kind? Isn't it because the psalmist is looking at his life in fellowship with God? Isn't it because he's crying out to the Lord in the midst of all his troubles? And as we preach the Psalms, we need to be encouraging people to begin to do that. You know, it isn't just that you look at the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, and say, here is a marvelous statement of the provision that God makes for his people. Here is the covenantal provider. Well, you're not just getting a theological truth drawn from it. I say you're not just getting that. You are getting that, but not just that. You're also getting the realization of what it means to say that. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. of what it means to pray that, of what it means to live in the light of that verse. And see, as you're preaching it to your people, that's what you need to be doing, to be drawing them in to use that verse, to live that verse, to meditate on that verse. Not just to say, there's a theological truth I can nail down, but to say, Lord, you are my shepherd. I will not want anything that I need when you care for me. Well, think about that, because, you know, it's as you meditate yourself, and as you think on it yourself, before the Lord, that that will begin to come through to people. that you're not just giving them five simple facts about the 23rd psalm, but you're inviting them to live and walk in the light of this psalm, in the light of the Lord of this psalm, whom David knew. Well, okay, wisdom, meditation and wisdom. the understanding that develops in our lives as we walk in the law of the Lord. That's meditation. But also, meditation in love. And there again, you see, our love is always responsive to His love, isn't it? We love because He first loved us. Paul says in Romans 5, "...of the love that God has for us." And that love that God has for us is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. He gives us the taste of that love. Now that's experiential, isn't it? That's not just saying there's truth to be known, that God loves us. That means that the Lord by the Spirit does himself certify that love, give us the realization of that love. Realization is a devotional experience. It's the work of the Spirit, who testifies with our spirits that we are children of God. It gives us an awareness of the presence of God. Jean-Paul Sartre has a marvellous book called Nausea. I don't know if you've read it. It's French existentialism at its peak. That is to say, it's about as far down as you can get. Here's Rocotin, the hero of the piece, and he picks up a stone by the beach and he looks at the stone and he's filled with nausea. He's ready to throw up as he looks at the stone. Well, why is he so disgusted by the stone? Well, it's the fact that it's there. It's the there-ness of reality and that he really has nothing to do with it, you see. The world is there. He didn't make it, and he's not, he feels he's no part of it, really. It's just out there, and it's a threat to him, and it becomes like a horrible thing to him. and a similar experience when he reflects on the roots of a chestnut tree as he's sitting down into the chestnut tree. These are those roots that go way down into the darkness of the ground and nobody's ever seen them and they're down there but they're there and there's nothing that you can do about it but they're there. Well now, you really need, you can't explain that book you really have to kind of experience it but it's a wonderful book in this sense that it shows us the horror of life without God. It shows what it means when God is missing. And the converse is this wonderful reality of the presence of God's love through the gift of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. When You look at the world, not with horror, but with joy. You've had that experience, haven't you? Maybe soon after your conversion, when you first walked out and saw a tree. I never saw a tree like that before. I live in God's world. You know, when that alienation is removed by the Spirit of God and replaced by the love of God in our hearts, that changes everything, you know. And yet, In the love that we have for God, the love that He gives us and we respond, it's also a love of obedience. It isn't just a love of emotional feeling, it's a love that comes from obeying the word of the Lord. J. Adams has emphasized that very strongly and very properly. But it's also a delight that we have in the Lord. And there again we must remember that as we come to the Lord to praise Him, which is the third point, the wisdom, the love, and the praise. When we come to the Lord to praise Him, to praise Him for what He's done in the world, to praise Him for who He is, we remember that ultimately we seek to bring joy to His heart. It's so important, you know? Sometimes even the delight that comes from salvation, the delight that comes from the presence of the Lord, sometimes even that becomes, well, people look for it the way they look for another kick, you know? Get turned on by Jesus. get a spiritual thrill and sometimes a wonderful sense of delight in the presence of God in the past. is carried along in people's memories and they try to replicate it. They want to put themselves in the same situation or go to the same place or sit on the same rock out by the lakeside where it once happened. Try to recreate that experience from the past, you see. Because what one is then searching for is spiritual fulfillment. Well now, to be sure, we can be satisfied with God, and only with God can we be satisfied. The psalmist says that. But nevertheless, friends, remember that in our fellowship with God, what we're concerned about, what worship is concerned about, is not achieving an experience for us. It's giving delight to Him. So, you know, from a service of worship, the question that you ask afterwards is not, what did it do for me? You know, a lot of people say that. Oh, well, why go to church? It doesn't do anything for me anymore. You see, really, we should be saying, what can we do for the Lord? What can we do for the people of the Lord? But above all, how can we bring delight to his heart? That's the question that we really need to ask. You know, there's a beautiful hymn by Gerhard Gerstagen, who did a lot of meditating. I don't have a copy of the whole hymn here, but the hymn talks about being with Christ in the desert, going through our lives, journeying with Christ. And then the last verse of it is, he who in his hour of sorrow bore the curse alone, I who through the lonely desert trod where he had gone, he and I in that bright glory, one deep joy shall share, mine to be forever with him, his that I am there." There is a real understanding, you see, of the marvelous truth of grace, that God does that he's delighted to have us with him and that we can praise him knowing the joy of fellowship with him. Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon the earth that I desire beside thee. That's the cry of the psalmist. Well, I wanted to invite you to think a little bit about meditation, Christian meditation, in wisdom, in love, in praise. and develop more of the art of meditation. Not in the sense of working out techniques that will assure you of devotional ecstasy, but in the sense of following through more and more all the wonder of what God has said to you, and all the wonder of what God does for you, and all the wonder of who God is. for you and for all of his creation, and particularly for all those that are your brothers and sisters in Christ. All right, now a couple more things we want to do today, and one I want you to think about for just a moment is the structure of biblical poetry. Just a few little thoughts about this structure of biblical poetry, and I want to distribute a page from Alter's book that I've duplicated, where he analyzes 2 Samuel 22, the Psalm in 2 Samuel 22. And of course that's the same as Psalm 18. Thank you very much. Now this is just a page from Walter's book, but it's a page in which he uses the symbols that he's developed to describe the different ways in which what we often call parallelism the different ways in which parallelism works. This is something we need to be aware of as we work with the psalms and study the psalms. Maybe you better turn out one of those. One will be all right, I guess. Yeah, that's good. Can you see that now? Is it visible? This is just a little key to the symbols that he uses in that sheet that was distributed. If you look at the sheet, you see between the two cola of each line, he's put a symbol. and either an equal sign or a greater than or less than sign or an arrow or a parenthesis. He's put in those different symbols. And this is the key to those symbols. the equals sign he uses for a synonym as in God my rock where I shelter, my shield, my saving horn. Now there it's synonymous. He's saying the same thing over again in slightly different words. And then he puts a circle around the equals sign if it's not only synonymous, but has verbatim repetition. Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem, praise your God, O Zion. where the term for praise is repeated, and you just have different names for God, Yahweh and Elohim, and different names for the city, Jerusalem, Zion. And then he has what he calls complementarity, where he has the brackets. The earth heaved and shuddered, heaven's foundation shook. When he says complementarity, he's talking about those things that are complementary to one another, like earth and heaven, or land and sea, or the people and the nations, or fathers and children. See, where things come in pairs, that's often the basis for this complementary sort of relationship. Then he talks about focusing. how something that is more general can be made more specific, focusing. From his abode he heard my voice, my cry in his ears. Now, you see, to hear one's voice is general, but a cry in the ears is more specific. And very often you have this in the Psalms, a more specific statement in the second member, the second verset or cola or whatever you want to call it. And then this one got kind of erased by my thumb, but the last word is consequentiality. I don't have the right pen to write that on, but I wonder if this one will work. I can try. No, it doesn't. Consequentiality. Here's a movement of really of development. And as the altar points out, this is used sometimes in the narrative song. This is the next thing that happens. This is what is a result of what has happened. They overtook me in the day of my disaster, but God was my support. So it's a way of developing the idea. Now, the reason I gave you that sheet is that it's very helpful to see how Alter applies this little scheme to all the verses of this particular song. And my reason for wanting to remind you of that is simply this. Not that you're going to become a literary critic of the songs, but that you'd be more attentive to them. See, sometimes we just think, oh, well, there's parallelism and some of it is synthetic and some of it is antithetic and some of it is synonymous. And then we just sort of breeze over it and don't look carefully at what the relation of the two members are. But Alter offers a lot of help in that. to look carefully at the parts of the psalm and see exactly what's being said. And what I would, this isn't an assignment, but what I would urge you to do is to take a psalm and go through it, and you do yourself what Alter did here. Try to see what the relationship is. Because Alter's main thesis is that you have very little sheer repetition in the Psalms. Very infrequently do you have a direct synonymity. The psalmist doesn't do that very much. He doesn't just say the same thing over again. There's some kind of new twist added, and very often a focusing kind of thing. And as you get more sensitive to this, it helps you understand the What what is being said in the songs now? Let's see, I get somebody else this time. You gave them out last time. I have you do it this time. This is another handout. This is from Watson's book on classical Hebrew poetry. This book goes through every imaginable aspect, at least more than I wonder sometimes if some of them are. really there, but he does so much. For example, he traces in the structure of Psalms even the gender of the nouns that are used. And so he'll look at the two kola and he'll find in the first verset it's masculine masculine and the second one it's feminine feminine. So then he'll go through a whole psalm to see what structure is there of masculine and feminine nouns. At that point you may begin to wonder if the psalmist ever had that in mind. But what he's doing is challenging us to see how intricately the Psalms are organized in the way in which they are written. I didn't maybe make quite enough of those. I'm not sure. Did some people? Everybody? Just one short? Okay. Well, we can have another one made in the copier. I put the Hebrew in there because you can't go directly from the English translation, because the English translation often changes the order of the Hebrew words, and the Hebrew order is important here. Now, let me explain what these terms mean. He has four categories. And what he's trying to show is that in the Psalms, you do not have simply parallelism. And again, it's somewhat like what Alter is saying, that you don't have direct synonymity very often. But he takes the elements here of the two kola, the two versets of the psalm, and on the one side you see under the first A1 and A2, and then A2 and A1. Now to help you understand that, actually in his book he draws pictures of cats. which is certainly imaginative, but two cats in a mirror, see? And he gets the cat's tails. And here are the two cats. And now there's a mirror image of the two cats. He set up a mirror beside them. And in the mirror, you see the two cats again. And so what he's trying to get at is that In the Psalms, you often have a reversal of the two, so you have a kind of mirror image. The first element becomes the last element. Now, another term that's used for that around here all the time is chiasm. You've split them, you've reversed them, all right? So you get the first element, and then the second, and then the second, and the first, when it's repeated. And I've given an example of that. He doesn't give any examples there, but I've picked up a few examples. Here's one of Psalm 36. 5, it's verse 6 in the Hebrew, and you notice there, you have first, Yahweh, Behashemayim, the Lord in the heavens, your chesed. And then when the second member of it starts, the last element is picked up, and that which is parallel to the last element is found, your faithfulness. It's Amunah, again with the Ka at the end. Amunah to Ka. Your faithfulness in the skies. Lord in the heavens, your Chesed, your faithfulness in the skies. And he calls that reflexive congruence. Reflexive meaning that it's reversed. Congruence meaning that there are simple similar elements that are found in it. The next one, reflexive anti-congruence. There you have the same ordering one, two, two, one. But you have a change made in that the second elements are not synonymous, but opposite. See, the sign has changed from a plus to a minus. Do you see that in his scheme? And an example of that is, I've just translated it completely literally so that you see the order of the words. Preserves Yahweh all who love him, and all the wicked will he destroy. So you have the verb of preserving, then the character of the people, those who love him, and it's reversed, the character of the people, all the wicked, and then instead of preserving, he will destroy. So there's this anti-congruence, not congruent, but reflexive. And then the sheer parallelism. where you get A1, A2, and then A1, A2, and they're both, they're not reversed, and they are congruent, they're the same sort of thing. I will praise you among the peoples, Yahweh, I will sing praises to you among the nations. See, they're straight out black parallelism. Psalm 108, verse 3, Hebrew 4. And then the last one, what he calls proper anti congruence here. He's saying that they're in the same order. They're not reversed. but they're reversed in meaning. So you get first one, then two each time, but they're reversed in meaning. Psalm 126, verse 6, He that goes forth weeping, bearing the measure of seed, shall come again with joy, bringing his sheaves. See, the same operation exactly. He goes forth weeping, bearing seed, He comes with joy or with really shouts of joy, bringing his sheath. I mean, it's a word for joy. That means to cry aloud with joy. OK. Now, why? Why do I bother you with this? Well, again, I just want you to be more sensitive to some of the structure. Now this has become, as some of you know who have been studying here, this has become a great area of scholarly inquiry, the literary structure of the Psalms. And I don't think we need to be experts in the literary theory of the Psalms to be noticing some of these things. And what I want you to do is to be a little more, I'm proposing that you do, is to be a little more aware as you read the Psalms of the exact relationship. What's going on here? Is there a reversal? Now, there are many, many, many more other little devices that are used. There's one that's called a staircase, where you get an element tied in with one feature, and then you go back, but the feature becomes like a linchpin, often the name of the person, the name of the Lord, becomes a center point. And then there are many other ways of layering and interweaving the ideas. But the main point, I think, that we need for our own exposition of the Psalms is to pay careful attention to the fact that the Psalms have this intricate structure, that the psalmist has done this, that there are all these interplays, and often assonances where you get the same sound being repeated sometimes almost like a rhyme structure and perhaps even sometimes a sense of beat although that's much debated as to how much there's any actual scanning to be done of the beat and the measure of the psalms But certainly you do get this very intricate system of reflection and repetition. And may I again remind you how much this ties in with meditation itself. You see, these psalms weren't just dashed off. They're carefully crafted. And yet they're crafted in a way to invite our use of them. our memorization of them. And now, obviously, there's a loss when they're translated out of the Hebrew, but much less loss than there would be in other forms of poetry. See, if you translate out of English poetry, you lose both the meter and the rhyme, if it's a rhymed verse. And so if you try to recreate that in another language, you have a very difficult time. the kind of structure in Hebrew poetry carries over in translation much more readily, so that you can often see the structure just looking at the English without having to consult the Hebrew. We'll call a halt at this point. I went over just a bit, but we got started a little late today. And then we'll come back after a quick break this time.