I have been doing one verse readings in the Psalms. Brings to mind Dallas Willard's comment regarding Scripture: "Not so important to get through the Scripture as to let the Scripture get through you."
Meditation should do this, letting ideas enter deeply in the soul; just as food, well-prepared and carefully eaten permeates the body.
How to hear a text like this without undue analysis, like hearing a friend's words for what they are rather than extruding them into something else. Requires quiet. Requires -- can it be? -- setting aside thought.
One cannot really set aside thought of course, but I've struggled to understand this, much as with the text, "Lean not on thine own understanding." Isn't that impossible? Of course not! But it is hard and we resist it.
If I hear this text, not as a sort of Talisman or secret code, yet with due consideration of divine inspiration, I see God as subject. And the Bible ever does bring Him to the fore: background, periphery, forefront, everywhere. As Chesterton says in his remarkable introduction to a commentary on Job: "God is almost the only subject of the Old Testament."
A lesser note here, perhaps, is observing that God is large in the consciousness of a nation, and of his people. How to understand this without making it too religious? It is a mere observation.
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