Visible Goodness
Day 276 – 3 October
Snap It Anywhere
“You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees.” (Psalm 119:68, NIV)
Two Faces in the Car Park
Most of us have met someone who was charming in the meeting and quite another person in the car park afterwards. Most of us, if we are candid, have been that someone, gracious with the visitor and short with our own family, generous in public and grudging behind a closed door. The distance between what we seem and what we are is one of the oldest troubles in the human story, and it is exactly what a stick of seaside rock has never had.
Morecambe was the first town to make rock with letters running through it, back in the 1830s, and the whole craft is still done by hand. The letters are built from strips of coloured and white toffee while the great boiling is still soft, the square letters first and the round ones last, and each letter is laid in its place with a strip of white between them. Then the whole mass is rolled and stretched on a slab until a fat cylinder becomes many long, thin sticks. The result is something children at the seaside discover with delight: the name reads at both ends, and it is still there after every bite, so you can snap the stick anywhere and find the same word waiting.
That is a sweet shop’s version of integrity, and it opens one line of Psalm 119 more clearly than many sermons. The image is sugar and the subject is God, so the comparison holds at one point only, yet that point matters: what runs through the middle is what shows at every break.
Good, and Doing Good
The line itself is five words long in Hebrew, and its first half carries the whole of this morning: “You are good, and what you do is good.” The psalmist set two words side by side. The first is tov (good), the plain adjective for what God is. The second is umetiv (and doing good), a participle from yatab (to be good), a verb that shares its consonants with tov (good) and that, in this form, means to do good or to deal well with someone. The participle describes ongoing action, the way a person is characteristically and continually doing something, so the NIV’s “what you do is good” catches it well: this is the One who is good and who goes on doing good.
Nothing stands between the two halves. The psalmist found no gap in God between being and doing, no public goodness covering a private harshness, no goodness that holds on bright days and thins out on dark ones. Snap any moment of God’s dealing with the world and the same word runs through it, because His doing is simply His being in motion. That is why the good He does never needs to begin, as though He were stepping out of some other mood into kindness; the participle describes a goodness already flowing, and whoever turns towards it finds it flowing still. When people in hard seasons wonder whether God has become something other than good towards them, this line answers in His own nature. What He is, He does, and what He does, He is.
Where the Lettering Goes In
What He is, He also shares, and the rock-maker can show how. The lettering in a stick of rock is never printed on the outside afterwards. It goes in at the making, while the toffee is soft, which is why it survives the stretching and the snapping.
Human goodness works the same way. A goodness painted on the surface lasts until the first sharp bite of a bad day, and most of us know the cracks well. The goodness Scripture describes goes in at the making, first when God shaped humanity in His own image, and again when a person comes to Christ and becomes, in Paul’s words, a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). Nobody letters themselves. The word that runs through a believer’s life was written in by the One who is good, and the visible goodness of this month is that inner lettering showing at the break.
Teach Me
The psalmist knew that the lettering in him was still being finished, so he ended his line with a request. The verb is lammedeni (teach me), and he asked the One who is good to teach him His decrees, as if to say, “You are good all through; show me how to be.” The order reads naturally, with the confession of God’s goodness first and the request second, since the psalmist learned to do good by sitting at the feet of the One who does nothing else.
That request is good news for anyone who sees a gap between their own being and doing. The gap is the very place where the psalmist prayed, and nothing in the line suggests God was disappointed to be asked. A teacher who is good all through is the safest teacher there could be, since He has no hidden side and teaches no lesson He leaves unlived.
Saturday, Snapped
Weekends have a way of snapping us open. With the office closed and the uniform off, the queue at the supermarket, the long afternoon with family and the message typed late at night show what runs through the middle of a life. Today, take one place where your Saturday self and your Sunday self tend to part company, perhaps the tone you keep for the people closest to you or the patience that runs out in traffic, and bring it to the One who is good with the psalmist’s own words: teach me.
Then go into the day expecting to be snapped, because you will be. Someone will interrupt you, a plan will collapse, a child will test the limits of your calm, and each of those moments is a small break in the stick. Let them find the same word there that they would find in your best moment at church, the word written into you by the One whose goodness runs right through everything He does.
Declaration
Wherever today breaks me open, I want the same word to show. I have been gracious in public and short at home, and I am finished pretending that the difference is small. I bring the gap to the One whose being and doing never part, and I ask Him to teach me, because nothing in Him contradicts anything He does. The lettering in me was put there at the making, and I let it run from one end of my day to the other. If anyone bites into my Saturday, I want them to taste what I was made of.
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