Psalm 119:130, 135, “The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple….Make your face shine upon your servant, and teach me your statutes.”
What catches my attention here is the repeated light imagery. In verse 130 the unfolding of God’s words gives light, and in v.135, the Psalmist’s desire is for the Lord’s face to shine upon him. It seems to me that these two might be linked. How does the face of YHWH shine upon His people? Is it not through the unfolding of His words? As His word—which reveals His will and therefore Himself—as His word us unfurled, expounded, exegeted and received, the hearer receives the light of the knowledge of who God is, the light of the knowledge of His glory, the light of the knowledge of His character and Name. And is that not—during this age, at least—God’s “face”? The light that shines on the hearers of God’s word, the light that imparts understanding to them, is the light that streams to them from the unveiled—as it were—face of God shining upon them through the word-mediated revelation of His character.
And, of course, this light shines most brightly in the incarnate Word of God. In Christ Jesus, the eternal Word (the radiance of God’s face, Heb.1:3) dwells in our midst, and through His life—and climactically in His death—He is perfectly “unfolded” to us so that the essence God the Father is “exegeted” to those who cannot see His face and live (Ex.33:20, John 1:18). THIS—the person and work of the slain and risen Christ—THIS is the definitive unfolding of the word of God and so the definitive shining of His face (2 Cor.4:6).
It is in that supreme exegesis of Calvary that the face of God shines upon His people and gives them life, shines upon them and gives them the saving knowledge of His glory in the face of His crucified Son. Hallowed be His Name!
We might even say that the Crucified Christ is the self-revelatory “sermon” of our God…on Calvary—from an exalted platform of wood, from the “pulpit” of the cross—the Word of God is perfectly, infinitely, and definitively exegeted for us, unfolded to us, proclaimed over us. Here we receive the climactic “thus sayeth YHWH;” here we sit under the perfect homily; here is delivered the sermon of the Triune God, wherein the Father is the main idea, the Son is both preacher and Word preached, and the Spirit Himself is the application…..May every Christian pulpit be an echo of Calvary’s.
