Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 4

 

“Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness”

 Charles Spurgeon says this particular descriptive phrase (“God of my righteousness”) doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Psalms, or in the Bible itself, for that matter. The KJV has it, of course, as do plenty of contemporary translations, but the NIV translates the phrase into a single adjective and then gives it to God (“righteous God”), a rendition that seems to me to suggest a significantly different idea.

 I was born and reared in the Calvinist tradition of the Christian faith, and for better or for worse I’ve stayed—stubbornly, perhaps—within that fold.  Maybe that’s why I like the KJV’s phrasing better.  The psalmist isn’t mincing words; instead, he’s giving total credit for his righteousness to the author thereof. I’m not interested in polemics, but it seems to me he’s doing the Calvinist thing.

I once knew an old man named Harry, perfectly bald, only a quarter of a lung left in his ribs. He’d lost the rest to cancer, been a smoker all his life. He was very much alone in Arizona. His wife was gone, but then she hadn’t been at his side since he’d treated her in the same, sad way he’d treated anything else in his life of real value, including his kids.

He wore a beret and drove an ancient VW beetle, looked for all the world like the eccentric he was.  In his spare time, which he had plenty of after his retirement, he loved to spin poems, little aphoristic lines that rose in his mind and soul from all kinds of varied sources—some of them devotional, some of them sort of wild, like John Donne. Maybe that’s a stretch.

I’ll never forget him crying, something he used to do at the drop of a hat—well, beret.  In a restaurant, outside of church, inside church, just about anywhere, if he was given to consider the shadowy mistakes of his eighty-some years, he’d shed tears profusely.  I used to worry about his being able to get his breath, in fact.

And then he’d look at me, a young man at the time, and raise a crooked finger.  “Jim,” he’d say, “if I had one lousy thing to do with my salvation, I’d burn in hell.”  Amazing line.

The poet in Psalm 4 is not pointing. He’s not trying to convince you and me to curb our appetites or line up back on the straight and narrow. Neither is he driven half-mad by the sin of his early life. I’m not sure he’s crying at all.

But the intent of the line—“God of my righteousness”—seems pretty much the same as my old friend Harry’s appraisal of his life’s destiny. It seems to me that what the Psalmist is suggesting is that without God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, he’d be at ground zero when it comes to righteousness and salvation. 

It’s difficult for me to understand how any believing earthling could say anything different. But then, I’m a Calvinist, I guess. And retired as I am, looking back over a life that has some miles on it, I find it impossible not to say, with the poet of Psalm 4, that this God I worship, this God who loves me, is anything less than the “God of my righteousness.”

 It's all on Him.