“God, Our Righteous Judge (Psalm 7)" | 6/9/24
Psalm 7 | 6/9/24 | Thad Yessa
Where do you feel safe? Certainly, all of us have felt scared, nervous, or that life was out of control at one time or another. From a young age, we develop habits for safety, whether running, hopefully to our parents for nightmares, security blankets, comfort foods, endless scrolling…that thing that when life is hard, we run to. This morning, we are going to see where David turns to for safety and comfort when his very life is in danger: God’s righteousness.
A Shiggaion Of David, Which He Sang To The LORD Concerning The Words Of Cush, A Benjaminite.
O LORD my God, in you do I take refuge;
save me from all my pursuers and deliver me,
2 lest like a lion they tear my soul apart,
rending it in pieces, with none to deliver.
3 O LORD my God, if I have done this,
if there is wrong in my hands,
4 if I have repaid my friend with evil
or plundered my enemy without cause,
5 let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it,
and let him trample my life to the ground
and lay my glory in the dust.
Selah
6 Arise, O LORD, in your anger;
lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies;
awake for me; you have appointed a judgment.
7 Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you;
over it return on high.
8 The LORD judges the peoples;
judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness
and according to the integrity that is in me.
9 Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end,
and may you establish the righteous—
you who test the minds and hearts,
O righteous God!
10 My shield is with God,
who saves the upright in heart.
11 God is a righteous judge,
and a God who feels indignation every day.
12 If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword;
he has bent and readied his bow;
13 he has prepared for him his deadly weapons,
making his arrows fiery shafts.
14 Behold, the wicked man conceives evil
and is pregnant with mischief
and gives birth to lies.
15 He makes a pit, digging it out,
and falls into the hole that he has made.
16 His mischief returns upon his own head,
and on his own skull his violence descends.
17 I will give to the LORD the thanks due to his righteousness,
and I will sing praise to the name of the LORD, the Most High.
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The term shiggaion in the superscription of Ps 7 also appears in Hab 3:1.
And its meaning is unknown. But this superscription of Ps 7 contains historical information in the phrase "concerning the words of Cush, a Benjaminite." Still, the historical narratives concerning David do not tell us who Cush was or what he said. Given the accusations David addresses in 7:3-5, the words of Cush would seem to be along the lines of the words of Saul's kinsman, Saul, who was also a Benjamite, who cursed David as he fled Jerusalem after Absalom's revolt, charging that Yahweh was avenging the blood of Saul's house on David in 2 Samuel 16:5-8.
In light of all that is happening, David calls upon Yahweh to be a righteous judge. David desires for God to act according to His character.
How do you respond to false accusations?
Jesus - doing the works of Beelzebub
Stephen - stoned by a mob of falsehoods
Someone falsely stating your position
Because we are followers of Jesus we should expect that people, especially looking at our culture we will have others say something false about us. Perhaps it even looks like the word phobic getting put at the end of a word indicating that you hate a certain group.
In those moments where will we turn?
God’s Righteousness Produces Refuge. (7:1-5)
David finds himself facing two realities: the threat of his life due to a false accusation and his trust in God. You can almost feel the sense of desperation as David describes the circumstance that unless God intervenes on his behalf, his pursuers are going to destroy him like a pack of hungry lions.
In this moment of desperation, though, David turns to God and says, “In you, God, do I take refuge.” Not will I take refuge, but I am presently taking refuge. What does the word refuge make you think of? Maybe an imposing building with locks on the doors, a thick-walled fortress, or something as simple as a canopy to keep you dry in a rainstorm. Whatever picture comes to mind, it can be agreed that a refuge is a safe place. When the Bible describes God as our refuge, it is saying that God is our safe place, in fact God is our safest place.
We need not fear situations or people who threaten our physical or spiritual well-being. Because there is no situation we will ever face that is out of God’s control, so the best place to be, always, is right with Him. “The name of the LORD is a fortified tower; the righteous run to it and are safe” (Proverbs 18:10). David finds refuge in God because He knows that God is righteous and will act according to His character.
David isn’t only pleading with God to act righteously; he also indicates that he is innocent/righteous at this moment. David doesn’t just point his fingers at his enemies but searches his heart for wrongdoing. David introduces this If ... .then clause three times and says God, if I have done this, whatever the false accusations are, mostly likely the killing of Saul, let my enemies not only continue to pursue after me, but then overtake me, and destroy me.
David is not saying that he is as righteous as God and without any error in his life. In fact, David was very aware of when he had fallen short of upholding God’s standard of righteousness (see Psalm 51). In this moment of distress, David is searching his own heart for any wrongdoing.
God provides refuge to those in Him. While we were dead in our sin and deserving of judgment, God the Father graciously saved us from His wrath and offered us life through the work of God the Son (“made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.” Eph. 2:5).
Charles Spurgeon says: “Behold the divine justice gleaming [in the death of Jesus], for God wakens his sword that he may sheath it in the heart of the great Shepherd, and that the sheep may escape its keen edge. See there the love of God, who spared not his own Son. See all the divine attributes marvelously blended on the Cross in the bleeding person of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father.”
For those in Christ who are battered and bruised—who have been betrayed by the world and feel unprotected by God—I must tell you: God is safe. God is safe in the sense that He is trustworthy. He is safe in the sense that He is your protector. Your safety in God was secured when Christ bore the wrath of God on the cross in your place as Isaiah 53:4-6 says:
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
God is our refuge.
2. God’s Righteousness Produces Judgment (7:6-13)
After declaring his innocence and finding safety in God, David calls upon God to act upon his character and bring judgment/justice to the unrighteous. David uses language that we would associate with trying to wake someone up, as though God has fallen asleep and needs to be awakened.
David is calling on God to rise up in His righteous steady anger that despises evil, wickedness, injustice. David is not calling upon God to act rashly or out of character, or bursting with sudden rage as perhaps you and I do at times when we don’t get our way.
vv 7- 8, “ Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you; over it return on high. The Lord judges the peoples”
David is asking God to convene the cosmic courtroom. God rightly can judge because God is the Creator who sits on high.
C.S. Lewis in his Reflections on the Psalms distinguished two types of justice—ultimate or heavenly justice is the first, while limited or earthly justice is the second. As Christians, we often think about the first, the justice that will come from heaven to every person when Christ returns. But Jewish believers often thought about the second, justice for people living in obedience to God today. Christians might even have a bit of dread about the ultimate accounting of our lives to God, but the Jewish believer sought and desired God's earthly justice.
Though David’s words likely point to God’s ultimate judgment in the last days, he was surely (and mostly) thinking about justice in his day. There is a difference between these two types of judgment. In one, an assessment is made of one's overall righteousness, while in the other, an assessment is made about a specific incident. David again is asking for judgment upon himself, because he knows there is a certain security that is found in God, he is feeling rather insecure.
“Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end,
and may you establish the righteous.” - 7:9
Is not this the universal longing of all people? Is this not the specific prayer of the Church? We long to see wickedness put to an end, in fact we pray this every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come…”
That is also a source of comfort to us who believe in Jesus, “My shield is with God” our God is my protector from judgment. We who see all the unpunished evil in this world can take comfort from the fact that God is not unjust. He will repay each person according to his deeds. When the psalmist “discerned” the end of the wicked, all the evil he observed made sense; he could glory in having God.
Paul makes clear that God’s just judgment will surely come:
The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. (Acts 17:30–31)
The righteous God is also a warrior God and He does not wink at sin or fail to judge it in the most severe manner. Unrepentant sins will be dealt with and ultimately it will be destroyed. Of this truth we should have no doubt.
1) “He will sharpen his sword” (v. 12).
2) “He has strung his bow and made it ready” (v. 12).
3) “He has prepared his deadly weapons” (v. 13).
4) “He tips his arrows with fire.” (v. 13).
Without repentance God is at odds with the evildoer, and he readies himself for war with them (12-13). Unless they repent, they will experience his deadly weapons (13).
David said, "If a man does not repent," then all these things will happen. What this hints at is the possibility of repentance, which means an acknowledgment of guilt and a commitment to turn from it to follow God.
“God's silence is the patience of longsuffering, and if wearisome to the saints, they should bear it cheerfully in the hope that sinners may thereby be led to repentance.” - Spurgeon.
Repent is a gospel word because it gives us hope that God will receive the guilty, and the gospel of Jesus Christ shows us how. Jesus came to live the life we never could, died in our place on his cross, and rose from the dead so that all who trust him will be made just in God's eyes.
3. God’s Righteousness Produces Praise. (7:14-17)
Verses 14-16, in language similar to James 1:14-15, paints a chilling picture of how sin works and how it ends. Two images are used: 1) conception and birth; 2) digging a pit and falling into it. A wicked person is described as being “pregnant with evil” (v. 14). Because evil has filled him up on the inside he eventually “conceives trouble, and gives birth to lies or some translations deceit.” One commentator notes, “Jesus warned against having a heart from which comes “evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly (Matt. 7:21-22)”. Sin works its way from the inside out!
The second image in verses 15-16 is equally vivid in showing us that sin does not produce the desired and intended results that we want. It is like a man who “dug a pit and hollowed it out” only to “fall into the hole he had made.” All his “mischief comes back on his head.” Reinforcing the point and putting it in its proper moral context David writes, “His own violence comes down on top of his head” (v. 16). Eugene Peterson said it well, “mischief backfires; violence boomerangs.”
A righteous God will act righteously.
God judges sin because He is holy, and His decrees are just (v.6). God gave His Son to die for the sins of the world so that He might uphold His holy law and offer His mercy and grace to all who will believe.
The fact of God’s justice and the certainty of its execution extends some comfort when we are so grieved by the wickedness of man in this world or when we are falsely accused. Indeed, because justice remains essential to God, we are to love him as much for his justice as for any other attribute. The reason we can love God for His justice, is because we have an understanding of our own sinfulness and the judgment we deserve, and yet God shows us unfathomable mercy.
Tim Keller often says, "We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time, we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
One fascinating aspect of his decision to give God praise is that David’s circumstances have no discernable change. Cush has not even had time to end his accusations, and the parallel narratives of 1-2 Samuel tell us that Saul's advisors never let up. They continued telling lies about David (1 Samuel 24:9, 26:19).
And this praise is the very deliverance David wanted. He opened this psalm by praying, "Save me from all my pursuers and deliver me" (1). Now David is delivered. God is his refuge.
And this praise is the very deliverance we need as well. When injustice or unrighteousness abounds, it can have an imprisoning effect on your soul. Soon, all you can see is evil. Praise is what can deliver them.
Christians always have a reason to praise because we always have the cross of Christ. We always have the beauty of the great exchange that Jesus made for us, trading out our sins for his righteousness. Because Christ substituted himself for us on the cross, because he is the Savior who loves a broken world and sends us into it as missionaries, we always have a reason to praise.
Oh, what a glorious day that will be! When “night will be no more” and we “will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be [our] light,” radiating glory for all eternity (Rev. 22:5). What once would have undone us will, in Christ, become our light and dwelling place. We will dwell in eternal and complete safety, united with Jesus forevermore.
And we can give praise now, because despite our present circumstances, our future is incredibly bright because we have been delivered by Jesus.