Month: May 2026

“Go, inspect the city of Jerusalem. Walk around and count the many towers. Take note of the fortified walls, and tour all the citadels, that you may describe them to future generations. For that is what God is like. He is our God forever and ever, and he will guide us until we die.” (Psalm 48:12–14, NLT)

The Psalmist is reflecting on the greatness of God even as he focuses our attention on the walls of Jerusalem. Set on Mt. Zion, the walls protect the inhabitants from invaders. He invites the reader to walk around, count the towers, the palace, the glory of this place, and the security of this place.

He uses these images of the walls of Jerusalem as a metaphor for God. The Lord surrounds His people, protects His people, and embraces His people. The walls will one day crumble and fall. An invader will overthrow the city. But the Lord’s embrace will continue to hold His people.

We read, “He is our God forever and ever.” The word “forever” connotes age after age. We can look back in history to former ages and see His hand of grace. We can look forward to ages to come. Some scholars suggest that this word forever (ʿôlām) can also connote the horizon boundary. Look as far as you can see, and He is still beyond every boundary on the horizon. God’s love cannot be contained by time or space.

While this psalm was written by ancient Hebrews, many cultures have found comfort in this promise of God’s unfailing love. As St. Paul writes, “And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38–39, NLT)

I said to the Lord, “You are my Master! Every good thing I have comes from you.”  (Psalm 16:2, NLT)

We are surrounded by gifts. Breath. Light. Embrace. Music. Laughter. Even pain and suffering. I realize my suffering cannot compare with what some have endured. But for me, those times when I struggled in the dark or when I was close to death became times when I eventually experienced a greater depth of God’s love. 

The Psalmist rejoices in God as His provider and even trusts his body in the grave to God’s faithful love. Years ago, I felt God’s absence in a tangible way. I felt like I was falling into a hole of darkness. These words of the Psalmist became a prayer on my lips and a hope that I was not forsaken.

“No wonder my heart is glad, and I rejoice. My body rests in safety. For you will not leave my soul among the dead or allow your holy one* to rot in the grave. You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of your presence and the pleasures of living with you forever” (Psalm 16:9–11, NLT)

In On Christian Theology, Rowan Williams writes, “Language about God is kept honest in the degree to which it turns on itself in the name of God, and so surrenders itself to God: it is in this way that it becomes possible to see how it is still God that is being spoken of, that which makes the human world a moral unity. Speaking of God is speaking to God and opening our speech to God’s; and it is speaking of those who have spoken to God and who have thus begun to form the human community, the unrestricted fellowship of holiness, that is the only kind of universal meaning possible without the tyranny of a ‘total perspective’.”[1]

We must have a certain humility of speech that always turns our words back to God’s Word. We must be open to hearing the word of others in the community of faith who also speak their word back to God. This humility of speech might be understood as repentance. We keep turning back to Christ. We recognize the limitations of our speech and simultaneously offer this speech back to God in worship and prayer.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar sees our experience of God in a similar light. We offer our experiences of the divine back to God in the community of faith. Balthasar puts it this way, “all subjective evidence must remain exhaustively open to this freedom of the objective evidence of revelation.”[2] This also sounds like a form of repentance. This not repenting from sin but turning from our understanding, our experience, our speech, and looking to God.

This looks similar to the back and forth of ancient Israel and God in the Psalms. Again Balthasar writes of the Psalms, “This is a dialogue of mutual blessing: man sends God’s blessing back to him.”^[3]

This turning and returning to God can be understood as repentance. Rowan Williams writes, “The repentance of theological discourse can be shown in the readiness of any particular version of it to put in question not only this or that specific conclusion within its own workings, but the adequacy or appropriateness of its whole idiom. This is again, perhaps, to look to the plurality of style and genre in Scripture as a model of the collaborative enterprise that speaking of God can be.”[4]

[1] Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2001) p. 8.

[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco; New York: Ignatius Press; Crossroads Publications, 2009), 409. He continues, “To be a recipient of revelation means more and more the act of renunciation which gives God the space in which to become incarnate and to offer himself as he will. Only in this way is the sphere of the ‘spiritual senses’ given its proper place, and only thus does the integration of the archetypal Biblical experience and the ‘ordinary’ experience of faith become possible”

^[3] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, a Theological Aesthetics VI: Theology: The Old Covenant, trans. Brian McNeil and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco; New York: Ignatius Press; Crossroads Publications, 1991), 207.

[4] Williams, p. 9.