The Psalms 5a: Lead Me In Your Righteousness

5a - holiness.jpg

Oh man, we’re back to doing another psalm that has more than 8 verses. I know what you’re thinking…

How long is it gonna take to get through these 12 verses… We’re going to try to not get too bogged down, but we’ll go where it looks like we should go. In any case, let’s get started and just read through the whole psalm once, and then we’ll dig in!

O LORD, Consider my groaning. Heed the sound of my cry for help, my King and my God, For to You I pray. In the morning, O LORD, You will hear my voice; In the morning I will order my prayer to You and eagerly watch. For You are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness; No evil dwells with You. The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes; You hate all who do iniquity. You destroy those who speak falsehood; The LORD abhors the man of bloodshed and deceit. But as for me, by Your abundant lovingkindness I will enter Your house, At Your holy temple I will bow in reverence for You. O LORD, lead me in Your righteousness because of my foes; Make Your way straight before me. There is nothing reliable in what they say; Their inward part is destruction itself. Their throat is an open grave; They flatter with their tongue. Hold them guilty, O God; By their own devices let them fall! In the multitude of their transgressions thrust them out, For they are rebellious against You. But let all who take refuge in You be glad, Let them ever sing for joy; And may You shelter them, That those who love Your name may exult in You. For it is You who blesses the righteous man, O LORD, You surround him with favor as with a shield. (NASB)

The overall feel of the psalm is speaking of God’s detest of unrighteousness and the enemies of David speaking lies and all other sorts of unrighteousness. This is going to be a psalm to come back to, again and again, when people are coming against you. When people are disparaging you, or lying about you. This psalm will help you feel better about sticking to the truth, and about remaining strong in your convictions. But it should also keep you on the straight and narrow by showing you that, if you’re the one on the other side of the psalm, then you have the Creator of the universe lining up against you.

Let’s look a little bit closer…

To the choirmaster: for the flutes. A Psalm of David.
1 Give ear to my words, O LORD; consider my groaning.

We start out, right off the bat, with grave words. This is going to be a bit of a lament. Is it just me that finds it a bit weird that this psalm was supposed to be sung with the instrumentation being flutes? When I think of flutes I think of happy music. Is it possible that David wanted to let us know that this was supposed to be accompanied by flutes so that, while we’re reading it, we’re not getting all depressed but are hearing a happy tune in our heads, even though the subject matter may be a bit of a lament?

2 Give attention to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to you do I pray.

I think that it’s important to point out here that the dude who wrote this psalm was King David. It’s no small thing that he refers to God as his King. As is implied by the instructions before the psalm, this psalm was written for use in Temple ceremony and so this wasn’t just some private thing that David wrote in a notebook and then hid away so none of his friends in his high school class would see. He was king over all of Israel and he was stating publicly that he wasn’t the top rung of the ladder. In calling God his King he was doing the same thing that Jesus did.

Though in our heads we have the tendency to solely view Jesus as a part of the Godhead, His time on this earth where He became our Messiah was spent pointing toward the Father. In John 5:19 we see Jesus say, "Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.” In John 6:38 we read Jesus’s words where He said, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.” There are numerous other occasions where Jesus tells us that all of His words are meant to point directly to the words of the Father. I say this not to diminish the deity of the Son (He did, afterall, claim in Matthew 26:64 to be the cloud riding Son of Man referred to in Daniel 7:13) but to show that while Jesus was on the earth, showing us how to walk according to the word of God, he was always in submission to the rightful King of the Universe. This is a lesson that all of us (me as much as anyone else) could stand to learn. Always live in submission to the Creator of the universe.

3 O LORD, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.

Living in todays society we may not really get the full context of this line. People used to interact with God in a totally different way. We have to remember that at this time there was central hub for those worshipping God. Many today would still say that Jerusalem is the seat of the Judeo-Christian religions, but this meant a totally different thing at the time. There was not only a Temple (or, a tabernacle, throughout the life of David), sanctioned by God Himself, but God also physically resided inside the Temple/Tabernacle at the time this psalm was written. Can you even imagine what that would be like?

The closest we could come to understanding this is our understanding that we’re the Temple and the Holy Spirit lives inside of us. But that, to most people, doesn’t mean all that much. At the time of David (and for a thousand years after) there were specific rites and rituals which were in place solely to express the holiness of God and the place which He resides. And if we’re talking about the actual Temple Mount, there were purification actions each person needed to take in order to even come within 500 feet. God is so holy that if you got too close to him while you were in a state of ritual uncleanness (note: this does not necessarily mean ‘sin’, just that you may have had a nocturnal emission the night before, even) you were not allowed within so many feet of Him. Today, we treat grace like it’s a something to be tossed around and we don’t even realize how unclean we really are. All the while we claim to be Temple. It should bring us to tears, the way we think of the house of the Living God. If we truly think of ourselves as the Temple of the Holy Spirit, why do we treat it like a dump?

OK, that was a bit of a rabbit trail…

The point I wanted to make was that there were different things that worshippers did at different times of the day. It was customary to pray at different times, among many other things. This isn’t the only time in the Bible that we read about prayers at different times, either. In fact, I believe that Daniel got in a little bit of trouble because of this whole thing… (Daniel 6). Most of our prayer lives leave a bit to be desired. I’m speaking of myself more than anyone else. But most of us would also say that we pray when the Spirit leads us to pray. I feel like if this were a true statement, though, we’d be praying a lot more than we do…

4 For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you.
5 The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers.
6 You destroy those who speak lies; the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.

Are you starting to get just how holy God is? Evil may not dwell with Him. The boastful can’t stand before Him. He destroys those who speak lies. I want to go into something here which may be a bit controversial. We are often told that God hates the sin but not the sinner. In verse five we read that God hates the evildoers. Yes, He hates the evil but He also hates the evildoers. If that comes as a shock to you, it happens a couple other times throughout the Bible (Psalms 11:5, Proverbs 6:16-19 are just a couple times that the Bible says that God hates actual people, and not just the sin).

Alright, we’re not half way through this fifth psalm and I think we’re at a good stopping point. When we pick up next time we’ll have the opportunity look a little bit more closely at the holiness of Beit Hamikdash, the Holy Temple of our God. Until then I pray that everyone has a blessed day!

Shalom!

This was originally posted at my personal blog which is linked below

http://thepoiema.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-psalms-5a-lead-me-in-your.html