Before You Read a Word
Psalm 119:18 (ESV)
The prayer is one sentence. Eight syllables in Hebrew. It appears at the top of the text, before the long work of reading begins, and it can seem like liturgical throat-clearing or a moment of piety before the real work starts.
I have come to think it is the real work.
Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. (Ps. 119:18)
The verb is paqach meaning to open — but it carries a particular history in the Old Testament that gives the prayer its weight. It appears in Genesis 21:19, when Hagar is dying of thirst in the wilderness and cannot see what is directly in front of her: Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. The well was there all along. The water was real. She simply lacked the eyes to see it until God gave her eyes that could.
It appears again, more dramatically, in 2 Kings 6:17. Elisha’s servant wakes to find the city surrounded by the Syrian army and begins to panic. Elisha prays: O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see. The servant looks up and sees the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire, an army of angels already encamped around them. They were there the whole time. He simply could not see them until God acted on his eyes.
The psalmist uses this same verb, paqach, when he sits down to read the Torah. He is not asking for help with a difficult passage or a sharper memory. He is asking for a miracle of perception. The text, he is confessing, contains things that are invisible to the unassisted eye. Left to himself, he will read and miss what is really there.
The things he wants to see he calls niplāʾôt — wonders, marvels, things extraordinary. This is the word family used for the plagues of Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, the deeds that generation after generation sang about because they had no ordinary category for them. Niplāʾôt are events that exceed what human strength or wisdom can produce. The psalmist is not praying to find the Scriptures interesting. He is praying to see the same order of thing in the text that Israel saw at the Red Sea.
This should stop us cold. We come to the Bible with our reading plans and our commentaries and treat the text as a document that yields to the right method. The psalmist’s grammar will not allow this. He does not pray teach me to study your law. He prays open my eyes. The request is directed upward, not inward. The instrument he is asking for is not a lexicon but a miracle. There are wonders in this text, he is saying, and I cannot see them on my own.
Every piece of writing I put on this site is, in the end, an attempt to point at something in a text that I may have been given eyes to see — not by intelligence or years of study alone, but by the grace of a God who opens eyes. I claim only what every minister of the Word must claim: that the Spirit sometimes enables a man who has sat long enough with a passage to say, There — do you see it?
The prayer is not preamble. It is the method.
Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things. Pray it before you open your Bible tomorrow morning. Pray it and mean it — then see what has been there all along, waiting to be seen.
