Psalms 37
Psalm 373 is an acrostic - its lines march down the Hebrew alphabet, one letter at a time, like a poem built to be memorised and carried - and it reads as the settled wisdom of someone who has lived a long time and watched a great deal. The problem it takes up is one of the oldest aches of the faithful heart: the wicked appear to prosper. Their schemes work, their wealth grows, their names are spoken with respect, while the people quietly trying to do right seem to gain nothing for it. The natural response is to fret - to chafe, to envy, to lie awake turning over the unfairness of it. To that worn-out soul David speaks the psalm's opening word and its steady refrain: Fret not thyself.
But this is not the empty comfort of someone who has never felt the sting. David names the unfairness squarely - he has seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree - and then he tells you what he has also seen: Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not. The whole psalm is a tutorial in seeing further than the eye naturally reaches. The prosperity of the wicked, it insists, is like grass: green for a morning, gone by evening, with no root to hold it. And in its place the psalm sets a string of better verbs to live by - trust… do good… delight… commit… rest… wait. These are not the postures of a passive man. They are the disciplines of someone who has decided to anchor his life in what endures rather than in what merely glitters.
At the heart of it sits one of the most famous promises in all of Scripture, a reversal so quiet the world never sees it coming: the meek shall inherit the earth. Not the loud, not the grasping, not the ones who seize and spoil - but the gentle, the lowly, the small. It is a line so important that the Lord Himself would one day take it up and place it near the front of His greatest sermon. And around that promise the psalm gathers tender assurances for the days when faithfulness feels like falling: The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD… Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down. Here is a song for everyone who is tired of wondering why evil prospers - and ready to learn the patience of a God who remembers what the wicked forget: that all things end, but His word endures for ever.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 37:1-11 · A Psalm of David.Fret Not Thyself
1Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. 2For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. 3Trust in the LORD, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. 4Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. 5Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass. 6And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday. 7Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass. 8Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil. 9For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth. 10For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be. 11But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.
The psalm opens with a command that is gentler than it sounds and stronger than it looks: Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. The word is not merely do not worry. To fret is to chafe, to heat oneself up, to wear away at one's own soul with agitation - the way a rope frays where it rubs. David has put his finger on something most of us know too well: the particular exhaustion of watching the wrong people win. It is not only grief; it is a slow, corrosive envy, the nagging question that robs sleep - why am I doing right when evil prospers? And the reason he gives for not fretting is not that the unfairness is imaginary. It is that you are measuring wrong. You are setting a single day - today, when the wicked flourish and the righteous ache - against what you think is the whole story, when in fact it is only the opening line. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass. The psalmist is asking you to lift your eyes past the length of an afternoon and see the length of eternity.
The image is grass, and it is one Scripture reaches for again and again to describe the wicked and, indeed, all merely human glory: For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Grass has its moment. In the spring rains it comes up green and quick and looks, for a few weeks, like the most alive thing in the field. But it has no depth, no root that can hold against drought or scythe, and when the heat comes it is gone almost overnight. So it is, the psalm says, with the prosperity of the wicked: it is real enough to see, real enough to envy, and utterly without future. The same picture echoes through the rest of the Bible - All flesh is as grass… The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the LORD endureth for ever (Isa. 40:6-8; 1 Pet. 1:24-25). The wicked have form, briefly; they seem to flourish; but they cannot endure the wind. To envy them is to envy the grass on the morning it is cut.
Against the corrosive fretting, the psalm hands the soul a string of better things to do, and the most surprising of them is this: Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. It is easy to misread that promise as a transaction - delight, and you will get whatever you happen to want. But the verse is doing something deeper. When you truly delight in the LORD - when He becomes your gladness and not merely your duty - your desires themselves begin to change. The heart that delights in God starts to want what God is already giving; its wants are reshaped until they line up with His. So the promise is not that God becomes a vending machine for your present cravings, but that He becomes your joy, and in becoming your joy He satisfies the deepest desire underneath all the others. And notice the verbs that surround it - Commit thy way unto the LORD… Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him. To commit is to roll your burden over onto another's shoulders; to rest is to stop striving; to wait patiently is to refuse to seize what only God can give in His time. These are not the moves of a passive man. They are the hard, deliberate disciplines of trust.
The counsel deepens in verses 7 and 8 into something almost countercultural: Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him… Cease from anger, and forsake wrath. The psalm has noticed that fretting over the wicked does not stay a private ache; it curdles. It turns into anger, and anger into wrath, and wrath, left to itself, into the temptation to fight evil with evil - which is why the verse ends, fret not thyself in any wise to do evil. The danger is subtle and real: in our outrage at the wicked we can become a little wicked ourselves, repaying schemes with schemes, hardening into the very thing we hate. So David prescribes the opposite motion - rest, wait, cease, forsake. Lay the anger down. Stop chafing. Hand the whole matter, including the timing of justice, over to God and let Him keep the schedule. There is a promise tucked inside the patience: those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth (v. 9). The waiting is not wasted time; it is the very posture of the heirs. And the wicked, for all their present noise, are on the way out: yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be (v. 10) - you will look for his place, and it will be empty.
Psalm 37:12-22The Lord Shall Laugh
12The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with his teeth. 13The Lord shall laugh at him: for he seeth that his day is coming. 14The wicked have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow, to cast down the poor and needy, and to slay such as be of upright conversation. 15Their sword shall enter into their own heart, and their bows shall be broken. 16A little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of many wicked. 17For the arms of the wicked shall be broken: but the LORD upholdeth the righteous. 18The LORD knoweth the days of the upright: and their inheritance shall be for ever. 19They shall not be ashamed in the evil time: and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied. 20But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the LORD shall be as the fat of lambs: they shall consume; into smoke shall they consume away. 21The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again: but the righteous sheweth mercy, and giveth. 22For such as be blessed of him shall inherit the earth; and they that be cursed of him shall be cut off.
Now the psalm looks the wicked full in the face and refuses to flinch: The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with his teeth. This is not casual unfairness; it is active malice. The wicked man plots - he schemes against the righteous - and he gnasheth… with his teeth, an image of seething, animal hatred, the look of a predator who has marked his prey. Verse 14 makes the threat concrete and violent: The wicked have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow, to cast down the poor and needy, and to slay such as be of upright conversation. The weapons are out, the bow is bent, and the target is precisely the vulnerable - the poor, the needy, the upright. The psalm does not pretend the danger is small or the enemies are imaginary. It lets the menace stand at full strength. And it is exactly here, with the sword drawn and the teeth bared, that the psalm says the most startling thing in the whole chapter - not a counterthreat, not a call to arms, but a single sentence about how all of this looks from heaven.
The Lord shall laugh at him: for he seeth that his day is coming. It is a breathtaking line. The wicked has drawn his sword; the LORD laughs - not with cruelty, but with the serene, unshakable confidence of One who can see the end from the beginning. The threat that terrifies the righteous does not frighten God in the slightest, because He sees what the schemer cannot: his day is coming. The same divine laughter sounds in Psalm 2, where the nations rage and plot against the LORD and His Anointed, and He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh (Ps. 2:4). It is the laughter of absolute security. To us the wicked look formidable, their plots advanced, their weapons real; to God they look like men running hard toward a cliff edge they cannot see. And the psalm lets us watch the trap spring: Their sword shall enter into their own heart, and their bows shall be broken (v. 15). The very violence they prepared for the righteous recoils upon themselves. There is a moral physics at work in God's world, and the schemer, for all his cunning, has not reckoned with it. The day he does not see coming is already on its way.
After the violence and its recoil, the psalm pauses to make a quiet, almost proverbial comparison: A little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of many wicked. It is a verse that cuts directly against the grain of everything the fretting heart assumed. The whole problem, back at verse 1, was that the wicked seemed to have more - more wealth, more success, more security. Here the psalm reframes the entire accounting. A small amount held by a righteous person is better - worth more, weightier, more truly good - than the heaped-up riches of many wicked, because of what holds it up. The next line tells us: For the arms of the wicked shall be broken: but the LORD upholdeth the righteous. The wicked man's wealth rests on his own arm, his own strength - and that arm will break. The righteous man's little rests on the LORD, who upholdeth him - and that support does not fail. So the math the world does is exposed as false. It counts only the size of the pile and never asks what the pile is standing on. A little, upheld by God, outlasts a fortune propped on an arm that is about to snap.
The contrast widens into permanence: The LORD knoweth the days of the upright: and their inheritance shall be for ever… They shall not be ashamed in the evil time: and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied (vv. 18-19). Notice the two promises folded together. First, that the LORD knoweth the days of His people - their whole life is held in His attention, every day of it accounted for and cared about; nothing of theirs is overlooked. And second, that their security is durable in exactly the moments when everyone else's collapses: in the evil time, in the days of famine, when scarcity and trouble strip away every false support, they are satisfied. Then the psalm sets the wicked's end beside it in unsparing terms: the wicked shall perish… into smoke shall they consume away (v. 20). The picture is of something burning up and rising as smoke - here, then gone, then not even a trace on the air. And a small moral portrait sharpens the difference: The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again: but the righteous sheweth mercy, and giveth (v. 21). The one who trusts God can afford to be generous, open-handed, merciful - because he is not clutching at a security that depends on himself. The grasping life takes and does not repay; the trusting life gives.
Psalm 37:23-40The Steps of a Good Man
23The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way. 24Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. 25I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. 26He is ever merciful, and lendeth; and his seed is blessed. 27Depart from evil, and do good; and dwell for evermore. 28For the LORD loveth judgment, and forsaketh not his saints; they are preserved for ever: but the seed of the wicked shall be cut off. 29The righteous shall inherit the land, and dwell therein for ever. 30The mouth of the righteous speaketh wisdom, and his tongue talketh of judgment. 31The law of his God is in his heart; none of his steps shall slide. 32The wicked watcheth the righteous, and seeketh to slay him. 33The LORD will not leave him in his hand, nor condemn him when he is judged. 34Wait on the LORD, and keep his way, and he shall exalt thee to inherit the land: when the wicked are cut off, thou shalt see it. 35I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree. 36Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found. 37Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace. 38But the transgressors shall be destroyed together: the end of the wicked shall be cut off. 39But the salvation of the righteous is of the LORD: he is their strength in the time of trouble. 40And the LORD shall help them, and deliver them: he shall deliver them from the wicked, and save them, because they trust in him.
The final movement opens with one of the tenderest assurances in the Psalter: The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way. The righteous do not wander aimlessly; their very footsteps are ordered - steadied, established, set firm - by God, who is not a distant overseer but One who delighteth in the path His servant walks. And then comes the line that keeps this from being a brittle promise: Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. Mark the honesty of it. The psalm does not say the good man never stumbles. It says though he fall - when he falls, for fall he will - he shall not be utterly cast down. There is a hand beneath him. To be upheld is not to be spared every fall; it is to be caught in the falling, to find that you do not hit bottom because Someone has hold of you. This is the difference between the believer's stumble and the wicked man's collapse. The wicked, when he falls, falls all the way; the righteous, when he falls, is held. The same hand that orders the steps catches the one who trips on them.
Here the psalm shifts into the voice of personal testimony, and it carries the weight of a long life: I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. This is not a tidy proof-text handed down from a distance; it is a witness given by someone who has watched for decades. David has seen righteous people in real hardship - in poverty, in illness, in trouble; the psalm is far too honest to claim otherwise. What he has not seen, across all those years, is the righteous finally forsaken - abandoned by God, left utterly without recourse, their children reduced to begging. He has watched God sustain His people through the lean times again and again, and from that long vantage he can say: I have never once seen Him let go. We should hear the verse as testimony, not as a promise that the faithful will be exempt from need - the psalm has already insisted there will be days of famine (v. 19). It is the difference between being tested and being abandoned. The righteous are often tested; they are never, in the end, forsaken. And the generosity that flows from such security shows again: He is ever merciful, and lendeth; and his seed is blessed.
The portrait of the righteous deepens from his steps to his speech and his heart: The mouth of the righteous speaketh wisdom, and his tongue talketh of judgment. The law of his God is in his heart; none of his steps shall slide (vv. 30-31). Notice how the inside and the outside match. The law of God is in his heart - not merely in a book on a shelf or a rule kept under protest, but written within, loved, internalised - and because it lives in the heart, it comes out of the mouth as wisdom. Speech, the psalm knows, reveals what we are made of; the righteous person talks of what is right because what is right has taken up residence inside him. And the result is steadiness: none of his steps shall slide. We are back to the ordered steps of verse 23 - the man whose heart is anchored in God's law walks without slipping, not because the road is smooth but because his footing is sure. Then the danger returns: The wicked watcheth the righteous, and seeketh to slay him (v. 32). The malice has not gone away. But neither has the Keeper: The LORD will not leave him in his hand, nor condemn him when he is judged (v. 33). Even when the righteous is dragged before an unjust court, the verdict that finally matters is not the one his enemies hand down. The LORD will not abandon him to the schemer's grasp.
David returns one last time to the thing that started the whole psalm - the spectacle of the wicked flourishing - and now he tells us how the story ends, because he has lived long enough to watch it finish: I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found (vv. 35-36). The image is vivid - a great, leafy tree, native and luxuriant, throwing its branches wide as if it owned the whole hillside. That is how the wicked looked at the height of his power: rooted, permanent, impossible to imagine gone. And then, almost without transition, the turn: Yet he passed away… lo, he was not. David went looking for him - I sought him - and the place that had seemed so dominated by him was simply empty. He could not be found. This is the long view the whole psalm has been pleading for, now confirmed by experience. The flourishing was real but not lasting; the tree that seemed to own the hill is gone, and the hill remains. Set against it is the verse that gathers up the destiny of the faithful in a single word: Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace (v. 37). Watch where he ends up. Not conquest, not accumulation - peace.
The psalm draws to its close with an invitation to look hard at two endings and choose which one you are walking toward: Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace. But the transgressors shall be destroyed together: the end of the wicked shall be cut off (vv. 37-38). The word perfect here does not mean flawless or sinless; it carries the sense of whole, complete, undivided - a person whose outer life and inner devotion are of one piece, who is not playing two games at once. And the psalm says: mark him, behold him, study where such a life ends up. Its destination is peace. Not the peace of having conquered everyone, nor the restless ease of having accumulated enough - but a deep, settled peace that belongs to the one who has nothing left to defend because he has given everything to God. The wicked can never know it, for they are always grasping, always guarding the pile, always anxious that the scheme will unravel. The whole psalm has been quietly drawing this line. Two ways, two ends. One flourishes like grass and a great bay tree and then cannot be found; the other walks with ordered steps, falls and is upheld, and arrives, at the last, at peace. Fret not thyself, the psalm said at the start - and now you see why. The end of the upright is peace, and that peace is kept by the LORD who saves them because they trust in Him.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 37 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the acrostic structure, for the verb batach (v. 3, “to trust, to lean one's weight upon”), for 'anaw / 'anawim (v. 11, “the meek, the lowly”), and for kun (v. 23, the steps “ordered,” made firm and established).
- Psalm 37 ↔ Matthew 5 · the Sermon on the MountIntertextual BibleTraces the verbal thread tying Psalm 37's the meek shall inherit the earth (v. 11) to Jesus' third Beatitude, Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5), and the psalm's counsel to commit thy way unto the LORD (v. 5) to the New Testament's call to entrust oneself wholly to God.
- Psalm 37 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 37 - the acrostic arrangement letter by letter, the force of the verb behind fret not, the wisdom-saying shape of the promises, and the recurring refrain of inheriting the land that frames the whole poem.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Fret Not Thyself
- Matthew 5:5Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.Jesus lifts verse 11 into the Beatitudes - the meek made the true heirs of the earth.
- Isaiah 40:6-8All flesh is as grass... The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.The withering grass of verse 2 - human glory that fades while God’s word endures.
- Psalm 20:7Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.The choice behind verses 3 and 5 - leaning one’s weight on God rather than on what withers.
- 1 Peter 5:7Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.The committing of verse 5 in the New Testament - rolling the whole burden onto God.
The Lord Shall Laugh
- Psalm 2:4He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.The same divine laughter as verse 13 - God unshaken by the raging of the wicked.
- Galatians 3:14That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ.The blessing of verse 22 carried to its fulfillment - the inheritance opened through Christ.
- Romans 8:17And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.The inheritance promised the blessed in verse 22 - shared with all who belong to Christ.
- Luke 12:15A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.The reckoning of verse 16 - a little held with God worth more than the riches of the wicked.
The Steps of a Good Man
- John 10:27-28And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.The upholding hand of verse 24 named - the hand of Christ from which no one is plucked.
- Psalm 145:14The LORD upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.The same promise as verse 24 - God catching and raising the one who stumbles.
- Proverbs 24:16For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.The honesty of verse 24 - the righteous fall, but they rise, while the wicked’s fall is final.
- Acts 4:12Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven... whereby we must be saved.The salvation that is of the LORD (vv. 39-40) given its name in Christ.