I’m not trying to start an argument with a dead psalmist. I was just listening to the song “Better is One Day” in Sunday worship service a few weeks ago and I noticed how much Gnosticism that song has produced in me over the years.
{Gnosticism is despising / rejecting the material world and embracing the spiritual world. Gnosticism necessarily segregates those two worlds, treating them as distinct and interpreting one’s life as such in the safe and tidy categories of material and spiritual.}
I think you know the song I mean:
How lovely is Your dwelling place, oh Lord Almighty.
For my soul longs and even faints for You
Here my heart is satisfied within Your presence
I see beneath the shadow of Your wings
Better is one day in Your courts
Better is one day in Your house
Better is one day in Your courts
Than thousands elsewhere
My heart and flesh cry out for You, the Living God
Your Spirit’s water to my soul
I’ve tasted, and I’ve seen
Come once again to me
I will draw near to You
(It is based on Psalm 84, if you want to see the original text.)
The Gnostic in me thinks, “Better is one day in a church building – especially a beautiful sanctuary as is ours – than a thousand cruddy days in my house and at the dentist’s office and chauffeuring my kid to elementary school.”
The Gnostic in me hears, “Here on Sunday mornings at 9am my heart is satisfied within Your presence.”
The Gnostic in me says, “I will draw near to You by never skipping small group or a quiet time again.”
But, you know the Biblical evolution of the Temple, right?
In a nutshell,
- the Temple began as the tabernacle: an actual moveable tent – the sign of the dwelling of God by a daytime pillar of cloud and a nighttime pillar of fire (Exodus 13-14) among the people of Israel
- the Temple became an immoveable building: grandiose, albeit ruined and rebuilt – the sign of the dwelling of God (particularly within a small inner room called the Holiest of Holies) among the Jews
- Jesus came on the scene and said that something greater than the Temple was here (Matthew 12:6)
- at His death, the Temple’s privacy curtain of God’s presence was torn in two from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51)
- Paul taught something that sounded heretical in its time: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands (Acts 17:24).”
- Paul went even further: He said that the Spirit of God dwells in human hearts – he called humans the temple of God (1 Corinthians 3:16, 6:19; Ephesians 2:21)!
Our dear 84th psalmist probably wrote this psalm during the time when the Temple was a permanent building (the sparrows and swallows building nests near God’s altar in Psalm 84:3 infer this). Let’s not adopt his limited, outdated understanding of the ‘courts of our God’ and use it to affirm our own hearts’ Gnosticism.
So, here’s my re-write. It won’t work if you try to sing it to the same tune. 😉 But maybe it’ll kill the Gnostics in us the next time we sing the regular old version.
How lovely is Your dwelling place (the whole world!), oh Lord Almighty.
For my soul longs and even faints for You
Here (wherever I am) my heart is satisfied within Your presence
I see beneath the shadow of Your wings (that cover the entire earth)
Better is one day in Your world
Better is one day in Your kingdom (wherever Your will is done)
Better is one day in Your world
Than thousands anywhere else
My heart and flesh cry out for You, the Living God
Your Spirit’s water to my soul
I’ve tasted, and I’ve seen
Come once again to me
I will draw near to You (in my very heart)