Psalm 19 contains echoes of the many nights David took a moment of rest from watching the landscape vigilantly for predators, and looked up to study the stars. At first glance, surely the young shepherd only saw the same old stars scrolling slowly past, night after night, year by year.

But for God to make a shepherd into a king, one of the lessons He had to impart was to train the boy to look beyond first glance, to look beneath to find a revelation. As a fully formed artist, David, with the Spirit’s intuitional guidance, now knew that the flat scroll of the sky actually reveals something much deeper. He understood that if you penetrated the apparent flatness you then moved into three dimensions and the repetitive patterns of the skies actually hid an infinitude of wonders previously undreamt. Rather than the cold mathematical noun, infinity, David describes the same concept using a warmer, more aesthetic term, kabowd, glory.

As a boy, David heard the Torah read over and over. Probably, to the young boy, all he heard was the same old words, read from the same old scroll. But again, to train a boy to become an artist, God had to reveal to David how to look beyond the flat surface and peer deeper into the truth beneath. God wants to reveal, yechavveh (Ps. 19:2)

By the time David wrote this psalm he was already a mature artist, understanding not only the glory of the skies but that they were only a mere shadow of the glory of the Word. By this composition, David has spurred generations of hearers to look deeper to find what God reveals. Because just as the seemingly flat skies hide the glories of creation, the seemingly flat scrolls of the Word actually contains not only a glorious infinitude, but a revealing of the author of that infinity Himself.

Psalm 19:2 – ג יום ליום יביע אמר  ולילה ללילה יחוה-דעת