Sunday Morning Meds -- God of my Righteousness

 

“Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness” Psalm 4:1

Charles Spurgeon says this particular descriptive phrase (“God of my righteousness”) doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Psalms, or in the entire Bible, for that matter. The KJV has it, 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, and for better or for worse I’ve stayed—not always joyfully—within that fold. My Calvinism may be why I like the KJV’s phrasing. The psalmist is doing something total here, giving full credit for his righteousness to the author thereof. I’m not interested in polemics, but he’s doing the Calvinist thing.

I once knew an old guy named Harry, perfectly bald, with only a quarter of a lung. He’d lost the rest to cancer, been a smoker all his life. He was very much alone in the world. His wife was gone, but she hadn’t been at his side since he’d treated her the 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. He loved to spin poems, little aphoristic lines that rose in his mind and soul from all kinds of varied sources—some of them deeply devotional, some of them a bit randy, even ribald. Sort of like John Donne. That’s pushing it.

I’ll never forget him crying, something he used to do at the drop of a hat—well, beret. In a restaurant, outside church, inside church, just about anywhere, if he was given to consider what he claimed to be the unrighteousness of his eighty-some years, he’d shed tears profusely—and he only had so much breath.

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

That sort of statement tends to end conversation.

The poet in Psalm 4 is not pointing a crooked finger or trying to convince you and me to curb our appetites. Neither is he driven half-mad by the sin of his youth. I’m not sure he’s crying at all.

But the intent of the line—“God of my righteousness”—is exactly the same as my old friend Harry’s appraisal of his life’s destiny. What the Psalmist is suggesting is that without God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, he’d register pretty much zilch on the righteousness reader.

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