II Samuel 22:21-31 – Praise for God’s Perfect Way
The Living Word With Chuck Davis
II Samuel 22:21-31 – Praise for God’s Perfect Way
"Welcome to the Living Word with Chuck Davis." [Music] 2 Samuel 22, 21 to 31, "Praise for God's perfect way. The Lord dealt with me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands He rewarded me, for I have kept the ways of the Lord and have not wickedly departed from my God. For all His rules were before me, and from His statutes I did not turn aside. I was blameless before Him, and I kept myself from guilt, and the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanness and His sight. With the merciful you show yourself merciful, with the blameless man you show yourself blameless. With the purified you deal purely, with the crooked you make yourself seem torturous. You save a humble people, but your eyes are on the haughty to bring them down. For you are my lamp-o-lord, and my God lightens my darkness. For by you I can run against a troop, and by my God I can leap over a wall. This God, His way is perfect. The Word of the Lord proves true. He is a shield for all those who take refuge in Him." There's a remarkable change of mood in the midst of this psalm. Remember yesterday it was all about Yahweh and His action. He confesses that He is lost without Yahweh. Yahweh hadn't come up. He would be left in destruction at the foundations of destruction. Somehow this section feels a bit self-gradulatory. The Lord has dealt with me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands. I have kept the ways of the Lord. Really hard to get our minds around this for a moment. Seems contrary to David. Walter Bruggemann has helped me kind of think through it. He says at worst the speaker is talking as if he deserves this, kind of like a shameless royal ideology that's placed in the middle that would explain David's success. But to make this claim is odd, it doesn't make sense because Israel knows better. The writer of the story has already been telling us of David's actions that have not been perfect. Maybe the better way to think of it is that obedience to God is aspirational. It's the only way to overcome death. And so this section forms somewhat of a didactic teaching. It's an invitation to moral seriousness. It's hard to deal with. By the end of this section the text gets more lyrical and God-focused as the psalmist will say, "For by you I can run against a troop and by my God I can leap over a wall." Finally verse 31, "This God, his way is perfect." It does seem somewhat like the writer saying this would have been my aspirational way because certainly he knows that he has not been perfect. I think the cohesion of this passage, which might be the so-what of this passage, is that it needs to remain didactic. And now what for me is to remember that I am to live without a sense of performance with grace-filled life. I can't get to the point though of thinking that there's no expectation upon me to live in a certain way. That's just contrary to Hebrew covenant. Really it's contrary to New Testament covenant where we're told to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. At the opposite side, a pendulum to swing is not to allow the law to keep me in bondage that if I'm not performing somehow I need to shrink away from God. I came across this quote from Alexander McLaren, an ancient preacher, recently. What I need to do in my life quote is seek to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindness of God in my daily life. Seek to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindness of God in my daily life. When I do that, it won't be about performing to earn his response, it would be the overflow of what he has already put within me. So Lord, we bring no righteousness to our praise except the righteousness of Jesus, and we choose to live aspirationally unto your righteousness flowing through us. Let me pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.