Psalm 119:12-14 God in the Grooves

When I'm on the Mizzou campus I see legions of collegians walking to and from class, listening to the music coming from their electronic appendages. Their heads bob and their stride synchronizes with the digitized rhythms.

In the "old days", when I was considerably younger, we would have called this "grooving" to the music. I suspect that may have been partly because we weren't listening to data bits but to the sound of actual grooves, cut into a vinyl (later a polycarbonate) disc.

Don't expect me to explain how a tiny spiral pathway of cut grooves and pits produces music. The science of such things has always been beyond my grasp.

What I do know is that the grooves and pits do not actually produce music. Musicians make music, with their voices, hands, and other instruments. The record or disc delivers a representation of how the sound waves from the original performance engraved physical grooves into a physical format.

That's why thousands of music-lovers will pay exorbitant prices to attend live concerts, when they can buy the record albums for considerably less. With one format, they're experiencing the actual performance, with countless variations, both rehearsed and impromptu. With the other, they're experiencing a static representation of a past performance.


The Hebrew word hok or hukka originally meant to engrave, to inscribe, to hew, to cut in. The ancient Hebrews, of course, weren't engraving vinyl or polycarbonate, but on stone.

Those words then came to also be used for a statute or decree,  no doubt because of the physical cutting required to record those decrees. The word occurs 22 times in Psalm 119.

Praise be to you, Lord; teach me your decrees (hukka). With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth. I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches.

Psalm 119:12-14

Few people today will ever read the Lord's statutes in an actual engraved form, except for archaeologists or antiquities scholars. Most will read those decrees as written in ink on paper, or digitized as part of a website or app.

Whatever the format, the image of words on a page are not actually the decrees of the Lord.

God makes decrees. He establishes statutes, the verbalized expressions of His divine nature and His intentions for the people he created.

Consider the vinyl record album again. If you're old enough - or enough of an audioophile - to have experience listening to vinyl records, you know they are not perfect. There are pops and clicks among the reproduced music, caused by tiny imperfections in the cut grooves and by dust. All those carefully engraved grooves are no longer conveying the pure sounds of the original performance.

For those of you who have never heard the pops and clicks of a vinyl phonograph record, check out Vinyl Crackle FX on YouTube (you'll want to turn up the volume) or Scratched Vinyl Before & After Restoration. There are people who greatly prefer vinyl records to more modern

Now consider again the written Bible. It can also develop pops and clicks that alter the original intent of the Lord's decrees and statutes.

Some of those clicks come when good-hearted people become too focused on organizing the words and verses into a framework of teachings and doctrines to suit their own way of thinking. The result is similar to what happens when a hip-hop DJ moves a vinyl record quickly back and forth to produce rhythmic sound effects. This scratching and sampling can sound fantastic when done by a skilled DJ, but the resulting music only vaguely resembles the original performance.

Other pops and clicks occur when we study the Bible if we're not diligent to keep our minds clear of the dust of the ideas and philosophies of the world we live in. It's easy for our hearts to become so clogged with extraneous bits of post-modern culture that our spiritual ears can no longer hear the clear voice of God as represented by the words on the page.

The best reproduction of the Lord's decrees and statutes happens when we open our minds to allow Him to teach us, allow him to engrave those decrees and statutes on our hearts, and then become - through our own words and deeds - the best representation of His character.

Like the vinyl records, like the printed page, we will bear a flawed version of his statutes. We travel the one road of life from dust to dust, accumulating pops and static, quirks and defects. But if we focus on His perfection, our imperfect lives will glorify Him.