Psalm 37

What, then, of the righteous and the wicked?

I was never worried for a second about a man like Hitler. It was enough for me to read the thirty-seventh Psalm.

So wrote D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in Romans: an Exposition of Chapter 1. What a startling quote to read in these days. (Christopher) Ash cites them in his opening words on Ps 37, which I was reading this last week. I was not thinking, thankfully, of Hitler or more contemporary fascists as I read it, but I was (as I am often) struck by some of its very challenging lines. In today's post I want to focus in on those lines in particular.

4 Take delight in the LORD,

and he will give you the desires of your heart.

I think it's very easy to read these lines and think that it's something transactional, i.e. "if you delight in God, God gives you the things you want". Obviously that should strike us as deeply problematic, and patently false. Putting God first doesn't result in God going down your Santa-list and ticking off your wishes. In the context and contrast of v3, the first half of v4 is an exhortation and command to not look at others' or others' things but to look at and feed on the Lord. It is trust taken to the affective level, the orientation of our hearts. And that setting our hearts on God shapes the second half here, which is better expressed as a purpose, because as our hearts find their satiety in God, so the requests of our hearts are reshaped by the object of their delight. Our deepest longings are fulfilled by God, provided that our deepest longing first is God, and all our other longings are reshaped by our experience of him.

10 A little while, and the wicked will be no more;

though you look for them, they will not be found.

11 But the meek will inherit the land

and enjoy peace and prosperity.

The whole psalm, which is an acrostic, has as its main theme the problem that the righteous do not always prosper, and the wicked do prosper. v10-11 are part of its answer. "A little while" echoes v2, and invites us to a change of temporal perspective - however long it seems that the wicked flourish, it is in reality 'a short time', and their life, ascendancy, wickedness, and evil come to nothing. They have no place, are not found.

Who are the meek? The word refers to those who are vulnerable, powerless, often the afflicted. This is not about inner humility. We shouldn't rush to spiritualise the word. It is not that the weak/meek are especially the faithful ones, but that the faithful ones are often the weak, because fidelity to truth and righteousness comes with a cost, and gives up the seeking of power. The powerful, quite often, are the faithless.

There is, then, a promise here, as too in Matthew 5:5, that the reward for the faithful weak is to inherit the land, to enjoy shalom, because the wicked are removed. It, ultimately, is a promise that looks to a long time-frame.

25 I was young and now I am old,

yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken

or their children begging bread.

26 They are always generous and lend freely;

their children will be a blessing.

What does one do when the righteous are begging for bread? That's the conundrum this verse throws up for me. I feel, too, that many of the commentaries duck this question. Because while I agree that we shouldn't interpret the psalm as providing a blanket promise, it is after all framed as the psalmist's experiential observation and so proverbial wisdom, neither should we be quick to 'spiritualise' anything that we don't like on a literal level. It's too easy a way out to say, "oh well, of course you have to take it metaphorically, not about God always providing food".

The reality is, many of the faithful righteous over the centuries have died horrible, sometimes excruciating deaths, and some of those I am sure have included starvation; and yet I think the help we need is just one line back, "I have never seen the righteous forsaken". It is God's unbreakable faithfulness and presence that is the first reference point here (cf v28). When we understand that, then we can consider how to see that faithful presence of God in circumstances that seem to spite the verse. In Jesus, and in Paul's life, we see suffering and material deprivation, even to extreme lengths, and yet they are not forsaken.

I like the way Goldingay points out that one of the points of the psalm is not to tell people to trust in the moral order, and it will all work out. The whole point of the psalm is the breakdown of the supposed moral order.

the homily urges trust in Yhwh, not in a moral order. Yhwh is faithful. Yhwh is the subject of a sequence of active verbs—give, act, bring out, support, acknowledge, exalt, help, rescue, deliver. The moral order is the way Yhwh works things out.¹

To meditate on this psalm is to meditate on the world as we see it - the wicked often prospering, with no end of it in sight, but to know that it is God himself who delivers on his promises, and that in a little while they will be no more.

Photo by Md. Hasanuzzaman Himel on Unsplash

1. John Goldingay, BCOT: Psalms 1–41, ed. Tremper Longman III (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 534.