Belt and suspenders true

Poetry has both a good side and a bad side. The good side is that it can say a lot of things prose cannot say. The bad side is that it can say a lot of things prose cannot say.

For example, almost everybody would agree that this is a poetic statement: “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” The passage is part of an extended blessing Moses gave to the twelve tribes of Israel. These Hebrew blessings are clearly poetic, and many of our English translations print them not as prose but as verse (NIV, NASB, even my copy of the Darby).

Here is the problem. In our scientific, post-Cartesian worldview, we have a tendency to think of prose as just a little closer to “the truth” than poetry is. “The truth,” on this view, is what can be measured, banked, or captured by formulas (or sentences) that have predictive value. For all of these, prose is better at conveying “the truth.”

As for poetry, well, poetry makes you feel good. It is floral. It is art and not science. It is aesthetic rather than scientific. And ever since the Enlightenment, aesthetic considerations are secondary, not primary, factors.

Poetry may add spice to life. But the life itself … well, that takes prose! This is the bad side to poetry – as we regard it through our scientific way of defining “truth.”

And so when the Scripture says “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms,” it has no more than an aesthetic affect on us – aesthetics here meant in its degraded sense of things that are non-essential, things that are merely decorative.

The verse becomes wallpaper (or a screen saver) to make you feel good when you want to be made to feel good. Its actual force is erased.

What is its actual force? Here it is, let me put it in prose:

1. Our eternal refuge is God himself.
2. Even if that fails, which it won’t, you still have his everlasting arms to both protect you and to embrace you.

The statement is not only true, it is doubly true. It is belt and suspenders true. And it is very beautifully stated.

Logos2Go

Deuteronomy 33.27 The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.