Faith Rest Drill and Prayer; Psalm 37
Psalm 37:4, 5 “Delight
yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart.
Exactly what does it mean when
it says God is going to give us the desires of our heart? In fact this is a
very rich promise, one that believers should claim and understand, but
unfortunately to do so we can’t just go in and cut this passage out, memorise
it and claim it. There is a context surrounding this particular promise and
once we understand the context and the rationales that surround it we will
realise that this is a promise that has much broader significance and it more
profound in its application than perhaps we understood before.
In these verses we have
commands. They are all imperatives in the Hebrew: “Delight yourself
in the LORD … Trust also in Him.” The consequences are: a) God will
give you the desires of your heart; b) He will bring it to pass. There is a
parallelism here but in order to understand what is really happening in these
two verses we have to pick up the context, we have to look at the overall
psalm.
This is an acrostic psalm.
That is, a literary structure where each element begins with a different letter
of the alphabet. Here is Psalm 37 the verses are grouped. For example, verses one and two are grouped together and verse one begins
with the Hebrew letter aleph, the
first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Then the second stanza, verses 3 & 4,
begins with the word batach, the Hebrew letter beth which is the word for trust; and so
on down through this psalm. The reason they did that was because it provided an
easy way to memorise the psalm. Under the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit
some of these psalms were written in ways that would ease memory.
Why does the psalmist say
“Delight yourself in the Lord,” and “Commit your way to the Lord”? To answer
that question we have to go back to the first verse. It begins with a less than
accurate translation: “Do not fret because of evildoers, Be
not envious toward wrongdoers.” The beginning of this verse is the strongest
form of prohibition in the Hebrew. It is the strongest way you can state a
negative. All of the ten commandments are stated that
way. When God told Adam in the garden not to eat of the fruit of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil this same construction was used. The imperfect
of charah
means in its basic root form to be angry, to be upset. It had the idea of
something that is being kindled. When taken in the hithpael
stem in the Hebrew it has the idea of being excited or agitated, worked up,
overwrought. It is not really the idea of fretting, which is more the idea of
worrying, to brood about something. What is meant here is more the idea of
being incensed or overwrought about some kind of injustice. It is not that you are
worried about it, it is that you are getting angry and worked up about living
in a fallen world and are having to deal with some level of unrighteousness or
injustice. Usually it is because you or I are the victim of some kind of
injustice from someone.
Whenever we think about a
promise and are working through it in our thinking we need to go back and look
at the contexts of these promises and try to identify the historical problem or
situation. We don’t know precisely what it was here; all we know is that David
was the author of this psalm. This is David’s meditation and reflection on
something that had happened in his own life. The application is that this is
how we are to think through a situation when we face some real or perceived
unfair or unjust situation.
When we face injustice in
life, unfair situations or assaults or attacks, they come in two categories:
either overt of covert. They are either overt where somebody makes it clear
that they don’t like us and are hostile to us, or in other situations it is
covert such as the person who is always nice to us, very poised, seems to be friendly;
yet they are twisting the knife as they are stabbing it in your back and you
never know what is really going on in the situation. Perhaps we are dealing
with just a general situation. Because we live in the devil’s world there is
going to be injustice, unrighteousness, unfairness, and we are going to reap
the benefits of that. We live under a fallen government, fallen economic
systems where at times we may work hard, be diligent, and do everything that we
can possibly do to be successful, and something happens at a macro level,
something like a depression, and we lose our job and go through economic collapse
for a while. There are all kinds of things that can happen and one of the things
that really bothers us as believers is that when we
are working hard and are diligent and consistent, and the lazy no-good slob
living next door doesn’t lose his job, but we do. So what underlies the problem
is Psalm 37 isn’t simply matter of something real or perceived injustice, it is
the problem of the unbeliever who is successful while we are going through some
kind of adversity. Why is it that the unrighteous is successful and the godly
man, the believer who is positive to doctrine, seems to lose everything and to be
unsuccessful. This kind of thing really puts pressure on
people at different times and it is amazing how if you go through enough pressure
and adversity how many times you see people who ought to know better cave in
and compromise, and they will start picking up various procedures and policies
just in the hope that they can discover some level of success.
This is what the psalmist is
crying out in this psalm: How is it that the righteous suffer but the wicked
appears to be successful? When we are in that situation that is the adversity
that is putting pressure on us and there are various ways that we try to
respond in human viewpoint. Remember, human viewpoint is always tantamount to
sin nature control of the soul; it is the thought system of the arrogant soul
that thinks that it can solve the problems in life apart from God. It is called
autonomy, self-law. Arrogance is the orientation of the sin nature and the
thought that it conforms to is always human viewpoint, what we sometimes call
paganism. The human viewpoint pagan response that we all have can fall under
several categories. First, when we face injustice what we are tempted to do is
to solve the problem or alleviate the pressure by compromising some doctrine or
philosophy of life rooted in doctrine. A second response to injustice is to
compromise on moral or ethical issues; we change the way we do things in order
to alleviate the pressure. Third, is to cave in to the outside pressure of
adversity and to give in to mental attitude sins. We get angry, we worry, and we
develop resentment and bitterness toward somebody. Fourth, we look at the
short-term solution instead of a long-term solution. We put blinders on and
look at this right-now situation and we forget about the overall plan and
purpose of God in the Christian life and what He is doing in human history.
So the psalmist says, “Do
not fret because of evildoers,” and this is the noun from the root ra, which is
evil. This is talking about those who do evil. It may be those who are
criminal, it may involve those who simply perform some injustice. The righteous
in the Old Testament should not be understood in the New Testament sense of imputed
righteousness because Christ had not died yet. The spiritual life in the Old
Testament was based on the faith-rest drill and obedience to the principles of
the Mosaic Law. If a person was disobedient it didn’t mean he wasn’t saved but
he was considered unrighteous, and whether a person was a believer or an
unbeliever he was classified as wicked or unrighteous. So the contrast here is
between the believer who is positive, who is trying to walk with God, apply
promises and divine viewpoint thinking to his life, live consistently with the
Mosaic Law, versus the person who is leaving God out of his life, the person who
really isn’t positive, the person who has just a superficial connection or
relationship to God. “…Be not envious toward wrongdoers.” Just because they
seem to be successful at what they do and seem to be getting all of the
blessings and all of the reward, don’t become envious. The reminder is in verse
2 NASB “For they will wither quickly like the grass And fade like the green herb.” They will not last. This
boils down to the fact that we look at the short-term solution and not the
long-term solution. This is a reminder of Isaiah 40:8 NASB “The
grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our
God stands forever.” We have to keep our perspective on the long-term
perspective, the eternal perspective. This reminds us of the sixth problem-solving
device, a personal sense of our eternal destiny. That means what we have to do
is put aside living in terms of the short-term and start living in terms of the
long-term and recognising both God’s plan for our life and what He is doing in
bringing us to spiritual maturity, and what God is doing in human history.
Our application is going
to be a little different from that which was in the original context of the Old
Testament. We have to apply this in terms of what God is doing for the
individual believer in the church age in terms of conforming us to the
character of Jesus Christ so that we are prepared to rule and reign with Him in
the Millennial kingdom. So we are reminded not to become distracted by the fact
that there are those who re becoming successful and who are getting all of the
rewards of this temporal age, because it is temporary. In the eternal
perspective it isn’t going to last. The advancing believer is the one who is
going to receive eternal rewards at the judgment seat of Christ.
The next section in this
acrostic is verses 3 and 4, the beth. Here we have in contrast a positive command. NASB
“Trust in the LORD and do good; Dwell in the land and cultivate
faithfulness.
Then he takes it is the
next level. “Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart.” The
word for delight is the Hebrew word anag, hithpael stem. It has the
root meaning of being soft, delicate or dainty, something that you would take
pleasure in, to take exclusive delight in. So in the hithpael,
the reflexive stem, it intensifies the meaning of the word and it came to mean
to take pleasure in, to take delight in, to become excited and stimulated about
something. In other words, make God the number one priority in your life. It is
making doctrine the number one priority, which isn’t just learning it but also
applying it. The result is, “He will give you the desires of your heart.” This
isn’t saying that He is going to give you what you want,
it is that He will provide the requests that you ask when you are asking in His
will. Because you are trusting in Him and delighting
in Him that which you want changes. You don’t want the things that are stimulated
by the desires of the sin nature, you want the things
that are stimulated from a mature spiritual life. The word translated “desires”
is the feminine construct plural of mishalah which means to ask or to enquire. It is talking
about giving the requests of our thinking. In other words, thought goes into
prayer and you have been praying and making petitions to God. This is a promise
that God is going to answer your prayer. Because you have made doctrine the
number one priority, you are walking in fellowship with Him, you will be asking
things according to His will and He will do it. We have the same kind of
promises in the New Testament. This reminds us that we need to make our
relationship with God the highest priority.
The next couplet, verses 5
& 6, build on this idea. “Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also
in Him, and He will do it.” One of the problems we have in modern Christianity
is we think that the word commit is a synonym for trust. But actually “commit”
is not a very good way to translate this Hebrew word galal. It is a qal imperative, which means it is a mandate. It actually
means to roll something over, to roll something away. The picture here is
rolling our worry, our concerns, and our problems on to the Lord. That is not
the idea of commit. This has the idea of rolling or giving something completely
to the Lord and galal
is a synonym for trust but it does not mean commit. The word “way” is the
Hebrew derek
which means a road or path, a whole way of life. So we are to entrust our life,
our path, everything, to the Lord. This idea is picked up again in v. 34 of
this psalm: “Wait for the LORD and keep His way. And He will exalt you to inherit
the land…”
What we run into in this psalm
is several words for faith. The first is batach which has the idea of having
complete confidence in God, to put our security in Him. This is the idea that
we have in Isaiah 26:3, 4 KJV “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace,
whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth [batach] in thee. Trust
[batach] ye
in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD
JEHOVAH is everlasting strength.” So by
having our confidence in God it is not our strength but His strength. The
second word is galal
which means to entrust, the idea of rolling something on to the Lord. What we
are entrusting to the Lord there is our way, and in v. 34 our way becomes His
way. We are walking along the path of obedience to God and that expressed with
the word qabah,
the word we saw in Isaiah 40:31, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew
their strength.” The idea there really isn’t wait, it
is the idea of hope, of confident expectation. We are looking forward to what
God is doing, and this brings in the idea of a personal sense of our eternal
destiny. Now we are beginning to move from looking at the promise to looking at
the rationale underneath the promise. What really undergirds
this promise are two facets, the essence of God and the plan of God, and what
we are pointing out so far is the plan of God and thinking in terms of the
long-range picture of what our destiny is. When we do this we will notice
something else when we read through this psalm. It is that the idea of destiny
for the believer is focusing on our future inheritance at the judgment seat of
Christ.
Look at what we find
throughout this psalm. Verse 9 NASB “For evildoers will be cut off,
But those who wait [qabah]
for the LORD, they will inherit the land. …
[11] But the humble will inherit the land.” The humble/meek are those who are
authority-oriented to the plan of God. True humility is submission to
authority. [18] “The LORD knows the days of the blameless, And
their inheritance will be forever.” In contrast, v. 20 “But the wicked will
perish…” Then again [22] “For those blessed by Him will inherit the land, But
those cursed by Him will be cut off… [29] The righteous will inherit the land And dwell in it forever… [34] And He will exalt you to
inherit the land…” Six times we have this emphasis on inheritance, so what does
that tell us? That to understand the dynamics of our promises we have to understand
that the plan of God isn’t something restricted to time but is focusing on
preparing the believer for eternity.
There is the rationale of
the plan of God here but that is not it alone, there is the rationale of the
essence of God that undergirds this promise. From verse
25 we start seeing an emphasis on the character of God. Psalm 37:25 NASB
“I have been young and now I am old, Yet I have not
seen the righteous forsaken Or his descendants begging bread.” What he means
here is that God doesn’t desert us as believers. So the attribute that is
emphasised in vv. 25, 26 is His faithfulness. He is not going to desert us in
the midst of adversity. In v. 26 we see His grace. “All day long he is gracious
[chanan] …”
He is a gracious God, He is not going top deal with us on the basis of what we
deserve but on the basis of His own character. “… and lends, And
his descendants are a blessing.”
Psalm 37:28 NASB
“For the LORD loves justice And does not
forsake His godly ones....” He doesn’t forsake us because of His own integrity.
His justice is His righteousness in action. Therefore the integrity of God undergirds this promise.
So we see that in terms of
the rationale for delighting in Him and rolling our way over to the Lord is
first of all that He is faithful, therefore we can entrust this to Him and He
will take care of us. Second, because of His integrity He will deal with us in
justice and He will deal with the unrighteous, the wicked who reject us and
persecute us, and their injustice, and they will reap retribution from God. We
need to turn it over to the Supreme Court of heaven. Third,
His grace. He deals with us not on the basis of who
and what we are but on the basis of who He is, so therefore He is eminently
trustworthy.