STUDIES IN THE PSALMS No. 5

Psalm 4

February 1, 2004

Last time we discussed the types of psalms found in the Psalter and, in particular, the petitionary psalms, also called the lament psalms. If you remember, we found them to have certain standard parts, divisions, or features: 1) direct address to God; 2) an account of the trouble the psalmist is facing; 3) an expression of his confidence in God; 4) the petition itself, and 5) some praise given to God. We have made a point of saying that many of these lament psalms are psalms in which it is the king who is at prayer and that fact explains many of the particular expressions we find in these psalms, such as the prominence of “enemies” and such particular expressions as the “tens of thousands drawn up against me on every side” in Psalm 3:6. Now we take up Psalm 4 which is another of these lament or petitionary psalms and, again, a psalm of the king at prayer.

Interestingly, these two psalms, 3 and 4, are also regarded by many scholars as a matched pair, in the same way 1 and 2 are a pair. Psalm 3 is David’s morning hymn – as v. 5 would indicate – Psalm 4 is David’s evening hymn as v. 8 would indicate. Other indications that the psalms belong together would be the occurrence of “glory” in 3:3 and 4:2; and the link between 3:2 “many are saying of me…” and 4:6 “many are asking…” These are the only psalms in all the Psalter in which the words of others are taken up directly into a prayer. [Alexander, 22; Delitzsch, 109]

Title As we said last week, “For the director of music. With stringed instruments” may, in fact, belong to Psalm 3 as a subscription. “A psalm of David” is certainly the title for Psalm 4. “For the director of music” which we also find in the title of Psalm 5, and so, one way or another, is a description of Psalm 4, -- that is, “For the director of music” belongs to Psalm 4 either as the NIV title indicates or as the NIV’s title to Psalm 5 would indicate if that statement really belongs to the end of Psalm 4 – indicates that the psalm has become a hymn for the church, a psalm not of private use only but for public worship. Luther said, in interpreting “director of music” that he is the one whom we call “Kapellenmeister.” By the fact that this became a psalm sung by the church we are reminded again of the layers of meaning we encounter in these psalms. They reflect David’s own experience and his piety, they may, and in this case they do, reflect the character of the Messiah’s faith and experience, and, as we imitate the Lord, they teach us the life of the follower of Christ, the man or woman of God.

v.1 Once again direct, plain-speaking to God, characteristic of the lament psalms.

v.2 Now comes the complaint, the account of the problem. Some scholars have taken the problem to be a continuation of that faced in Psalm 3, viz. the rebellion of Absalom and the civil war that resulted, and take the actual statements of the psalm as simply metaphors for trouble. There is something to be said for this view, especially if the two psalms are linked as we have suggested. The title does not indicate the historical circumstances of Psalm 4 as it does those of Psalm 3, but that could be because of the linking. However, it is also possible that the prayer of the psalm concerns a different set of circumstances altogether. As we learn later in v. 7 the problem seems not to be the king’s enemies, as in the previous psalm, but drought, a lack of rain. The crops are not growing. In some OT texts “good” or “bounty”, such as people are looking for in v. 6, means “rain” (Deut. 28:12; Jer. 5:25). [Dahood, i, 25] What is more, the king being responsible for the welfare of his people, people are calling into question his rule. The king and so his kingdom seem to be under a curse. In that part of the world the lack of rain is a curse indeed and rain is “bounty” or “good” par excellence. But here and now “Earth’s realities seem detached from heaven’s promises.” [Waltke] “How long will you love delusions…” suggests that these men, the king’s advisors no doubt, were turning to other deities as the Lord, Yahweh, had not intervened to send rain. Baal, remember, was the storm God and sending rain was his specialty.

v.3 Now comes the king’s assertion of his faith in vv. 3-5, an assertion also characteristic of the petitionary or lament psalms. He explicitly addresses and confronts the spiritual infidelity, the lack of real faith among these men that the crisis has exposed. (That is not surprising given what we are told about a number of the men who formed David’s inner circle of advisors.) David stands up and declares that the Lord will hear his prayer. He has no doubt about that.

v.4 It seems that two types of men are being addressed: those whose loyalties to God are weakening and are being influenced by the crisis to look to other deities and the more hot-headed loyalists of David who are too fierce in their judgments of and actions against those they take to be disloyal to the king. We find those men also in the narrative of Samuel. Remember the Lord’s disciples who wanted to call down fire from heaven upon the ungrateful citizens who did not appreciate the Messiah’s coming among them? The king has defeatists on one side of him and hotheads on the other.

As an aside let me mention some of the things that we are instructed to do “on our beds” in the psalms. Here we are told to “search our hearts and be silent.” That is, think carefully before you forsake the Lord. Consider well the tragedy of unbelief in the history of God’s people. Ponder what you are really saying and the implications of what you are about to do. In 6:6 David speaks of his weeping in bed, sorrowing for his sin and for his circumstances. True sorrow will be privately expressed before the Lord as well as publicly before others. In 16:7 “I will praise the Lord who counsels me; my heart instructs me even at night.” That is, one turns over in the mind the word of God. In 63:6: “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” It is a time for recollecting God’s works and taking them to heart. In 77:6: “I thought about the former days, the years of long ago. I remembered my songs in the night.” That is, in a time of trouble in the quiet of his bed he sustains himself with memories of God’s blessing in happier times. In 149:5: “Let the saints rejoice in this honor and sing for joy on their beds.” It is a time for praising God for his goodness to us. Some useful ways to spend your waking minutes in bed!

v.6 Now comes the petition itself. “Let the light of your face shine upon us, O Lord,” which means “show us your favor, bless us, and answer our prayer.”

v.8 A confession of faith and a concluding praise to God in the prospect of his intervention on David’s behalf. As in 3:5 he can lie down and sleep like a baby, even in the midst of his crisis, because he has handed the problem over to the Lord and knows he can count on his faithfulness. As one great scholar writes, “In the last line the evening hymn itself sinks to rest.” [Delitzsch]

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In the covenant God promised that as his people trusted in him they would have his blessing resting upon them. In the great covenant document, Deuteronomy, we read in 28:3-6:

“You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock – the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out.”

The problem David is facing in Psalm 4 appears to be that these promises do not seem to have been fulfilled. So far as the Psalm itself speaks to the matter, it does not seem to be the case that David has sinned or that he realizes that his sin is the reason for the absence of God’s blessing. There is no confession of sin in the psalm and no indication of any kind that such was the cause of the trouble here, though there is no doubt that David’s sin contributed to Absalom’s rebellion. But we know well enough, by the express witness of the Bible, that troubles can befall us for other reasons than as God’s judgment for our sin. In fact the psalms are going to be a rich source of reflection on precisely that reality of life – that even the righteous suffer the troubles of life, those who trust in the Lord find it difficult to know why their lives can seem to be bereft of the very blessing God has promised his children. And through the Psalter we will be shown different approaches to that problem and to the questions of faith that it raises in believing hearts, such as, for example, we find in Psalm 73. Some psalms offer no answer or explanation at all, such as Psalms 42-43 and such as Psalm 4, our text this evening, but still confess the psalmist’s confidence in God’s faithfulness to his Word and promise.

Now, like so many lament psalms, this is a psalm of faith and the assertion of faith in a time of trouble. I think many Christians do not appreciate how fully the religion taught in the OT is a religion of faith, every bit as much as that taught in the NT. The vocabulary isn’t precisely the same but faith in the Lord is as much the principle of life and eternal life in the Pentateuch and the Psalms as it is the Gospels or Romans.

It is important that we all understand how central this message is to the Bible. We had it in the introduction of the Psalter in Psalm 1 and we have it now again in Psalm 4. It is this: that there are two and only two types of people in the world and that there is a vast gulf fixed between them. There are those who believe in God and those who do not. We can describe the difference, and the Bible does describe the difference in many other ways. We can say that there are two human natures in the world, those who have the nature they were conceived with and those who have a new nature given to them by God himself. But in terms of human thought and action, the difference is seen here, in terms of faith. You are either a believer or you are not, you live by faith or you do not. That is what divides the world.

The world always objects to this notion that there is an essential difference between the Christian and the non-Christian or that the difference between believers and unbelievers is so consequential. They tend to think that the difference between Christians and non-Christians is one of degree, not one of kind. They do not accept that the difference is so profound and radical. Christians, they think, do more of this and less of that than other people, but there is no essential difference. But it is not so as the Bible everywhere teaches and emphasizes. The difference between faith and unbelief is the difference between light and darkness, life and death, heaven and hell. [Lloyd-Jones, True Happiness: An Exposition of Psalm One, 32-34]

I have commonplaced my Bible on faith at Nahum 1:7. There we read:

“The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him.”

I have a great many references from all parts of the OT written in the margin of my Bible there, texts that confirm in one way or another that the means by which human beings receive the blessing of God and the salvation of God is by trusting themselves to him – believing his Word, counting on his promises, resting on the faithfulness he has pledged to them in his covenant. That is why faith or the absence of faith creates such a profound separation between human beings. Faith connects a person to God; unbelief leaves that person unconnected.

I have also written on that first page of Nahum this citation from a 19th century work of OT theology [H. Schultz, Old Testament Theology, ii, 34]:

“The Israelite finds himself placed, by birth and circumcision, in a circle well- pleasing to God. He has not to win for himself, by a sinlessness which the law nowhere requires of him, a relation to God void of reproach, or to merit salvation by earnest efforts of self-denial and deeds of high endeavor…. All that is required, and all that the ‘righteous’ among this people ever show, is in truth an active faith. To surrender himself wholly and unreservedly to the Redeemer of Israel as his God, to accept the salvation embodied in the covenant as his salvation, to acknowledge and love the ordinances of life revealed in it as the ordinances of redemption…. All this is what makes a true Israelite.”

Well, that is the plain message of this psalm as well, a reminder that we do not get a different message in the Psalms than we get in the Law or in the Prophets, nor do we get a different message in the OT than we do in the NT. And so in v. 5 we have David’s simple exhortation to his fellows: “Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord.” Or, as the old gospel song has it, trust and obey. The two are the sides of a single coin, faith in its outward and inward expressions.

The psalm shows us David trusting the Lord in just this way. It begins with David confessing the Lord as “my righteous God.” Think of all the faith in those three words. He is my God. It takes faith to say that and really mean it. Anyone can say that the Lord is a shepherd, but it is faith to say and mean that the Lord is my shepherd. There are vast multitudes of people in the world who believe that God exists, but comparatively few people who believe that God is their God, who would refer to him and think of him as my God. My suggests a personal relationship, knowledge, love, confidence, intimacy. That is what God offers to us in the gospel, the personal knowledge of himself and that is what faith grasps and holds fast to. It is a good question to put to yourself from time to time: is it obvious in my life, am I living as if God is my God?

But there is more. He is David’s righteous God. In that use of the adjective “righteous” David is saying that God is his protector and that he will see to vindication for David because he is trusting in the Lord. God will be faithful to his covenant. That is what it means to appeal to “my righteous God.”

In the middle of the psalm David’s faith takes precisely that form: confidence that God will prove true to his word and his insistence that those around him believe and act accordingly. And then, at the very end of the psalm we have the same thing. David has turned his troubles over to God, committed his way and his future to the Lord, and lain back in his bed and fallen asleep. He has peace with God. As Henry Lyte has it,

My trials may deepen, my comforts may flee!

I’m rich amid ruin with heaven and Thee.

So Psalm 4 is a psalm of faith based on God’s character, his Word, and his past conduct toward David. In John Newton’s clumsy verse:

His love in time past forbids me to think

He’ll leave me at last in trouble to sink;

Though painful at present, ‘Twill cease before long,

And then, oh! how pleasant

The conqueror’s song.

And because this is a psalm of the king at prayer, we can immediately lift our eyes from David’s horizon to that of Jesus Christ and apply his faith in God, and his triumph through faith, to our own case. As Newton has it in another verse of the same poem,

Though dark be my way, since he is my guide,

‘Tis mine to obey, ‘Tis his to provide;

His way was much rougher and darker than mine;

Did Jesus thus suffer, and shall I repine?

And so what is the summons: very simple. “Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord.” That is, serve the Lord faithfully in worship and in your living – for sacrifice covers both things in the Bible – and in all your ways acknowledge him and look to him for the help you need. This is what believers do; this is what they want to do. It is this looking to and concentration on the Lord that marks them out. Other men, as we see in v. 6 want the good things, but David wants the Lord, he wants the Lord to show himself, to act, to vindicate him for his confidence and trust in him. And there is the difference that faith makes. It causes a man to see his life in terms of God, in terms of his relationship to God, in terms of God’s word and will, in terms of God’s promises. These became the great things, the decisive things of his life. For the unbeliever, no matter how religious he may be, it is not so. God is not in his life in this way and does not define his life in this way.

Do you see how these things go together: faith and faithful living, faith and vindication, faith and an utterly different life? Do you remember that scene that is described in 2 Kings 6. Elisha, the Lord’s prophet, is being hounded by the Syrian king. The king’s henchmen learn that Elisha is at Dothan and so he sends a military force to seize him. Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, wakes up early in the morning and discovers that Dothan is surrounded by Syrian troops. He is predictably terrified. He can see death staring him in the face. But then Elisha asks God to open his servant’s eyes to that he could see. And when Gehazi next looked he saw the hills around Dothan swarming with the Lord’s chariots of fire. The angels were there, God was there, he just could not be seen with the eye of the body. And suddenly, the knowledge of the Lord’s presence, his power to save, his faithfulness to his prophet, calmed all of Gehazi’s fears and made him careless of the Syrian soldiers round about. And, as it happened, the Lord delivered Elisha and Gehazi and made a fool out of the Syrians. That is what faith is – knowing that what God has said and shown you is true and living accordingly – and that is what faith does – delivers you from all your enemies. And David is a wonderful exemplar of that faith here in Psalm 4.

In the months following his conversion in August of 386, the great Augustine spent time with a few friends in contemplation and spiritual retirement at a villa, lent by a friend, in Cassiciacum, north of Milan, near Lake Como in the beautiful foothills of the Italian Alps. He tells us in his Confessions [IX, iv] that it was a particularly fruitful time of meditation and study for him. And the psalms played a great role in the deepening of his faith.

“My God, how I cried to you when I read the Psalms of David, songs of faith, utterances of devotion which allow no pride of spirit to enter in! I was but a beginner in authentic love of you, a catechumen [i.e. a convert awaiting baptism –Augustine would not be baptized by Ambrose until March of 387] resting at a country villa with another catechumen, Alypius. My mother stayed close by us …with a virile faith, an older woman’s serenity, a mother’s love, and a Christian devotion. How I cried to you in those Psalms, and how they kindled my love for you! I was fired by an enthusiasm to recite them, were it possible, to the entire world in protest against the pride of the human race.”

As he continues he makes mention of the Manichees, the followers of a popular dualistic philosophy of the time and one to which he had been devoted for some years before becoming a Christian. The Manichees, he says to God, “were madly hostile to the antidote that would have cured them.” They had no sympathy for the Christian faith. He imagines the Manichees that he knew somehow observing him secretly as he read Psalm 4.

“As I read the fourth Psalm during that period of contemplation, I would have liked them to be somewhere nearby without me knowing they were there, watching my face and hearing my cries, to see what that Psalm had done to me: 'When I called upon you, you heard me, God of my righteousness; in tribulation you gave me enlargement. Have mercy on me, Lord, and hear my prayer.” [That is a translation of Psalm 4 from the Old Latin version which would have been Augustine’s Bible. Think of the Old Latin as the KJV of the patristic church.] Without me knowing that they were listening, lest they should think I was saying things just for their sake, I wish they could have heard what comments I made on those words. [Henry Chadwick ed., 160]

Psalm 4, he is saying is an index of my new faith, it reveals the difference that Christ has made in my life. It expresses the mind of a follower of the Lord. If my old Manichee friends could only hear me in meditation on that psalm they would see not only what faith in God is, but what a difference, what a wonderful difference, faith makes in a man’s life. And as crises show up the issues of life more clearly, a psalm, a prayer of faith in a time of crisis is the best illustration of faith there is!

It was so in David’s life, it was so in Christ’s life, and it will always be so in ours!