Psalms 119: An alphabet of devotion that ends with a lost sheep

Psalm 119 takes the Hebrew alphabet and turns it into a sustained examination of life before God. Twenty-two stanzas move through law, testimony, precept, commandment, judgment, promise, word, and way, yet the vocabulary never becomes mechanical because each stanza places the same divine instruction inside a different human condition. The speaker delights, studies, remembers, waits, suffers, fears, speaks before kings, rises at midnight, faces lies and persecution, and repeatedly asks to be taught. The Book of Psalms lets confidence and dependence remain together throughout the chapter. The servant can claim that he has kept the word and, in the next breath, ask to be upheld, revived, protected, or given understanding. Affliction does not cancel delight, and delight does not cancel danger. The closing stanza finally reveals the deepest pattern of the whole alphabet: after all the vows of fidelity, the servant still says that he has gone astray like a lost sheep and asks God to seek him.