Psalms 4

The psalm opens at full stretch: Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness. Three times in this single verse the psalmist presses in - hear me… have mercy… hear my prayer - the way a man knocks again on a door he is sure will open. And notice how he names the One he calls: not “God of power” or “God of the armies,” but God of my righteousness. He does not mean that his righteousness is his own achievement, a credit he is cashing in; he means that whatever right standing he has is God's doing and God's gift, and so it is to that same God he turns to be vindicated. Then comes the ground of his confidence - a memory: thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress. The Hebrew picture is spatial. Distress is a narrow place, a man hemmed in on every side with no room to breathe; and what God did was make room - He enlarged him, opened the walls, set his feet in a wide place. The psalmist prays out of history. He has been in the narrows before, and God brought him out before, and that remembered rescue is the floor he stands on to ask again.

Now the trouble surfaces, and it turns out not to be swords but words: O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? how long will ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? The old word leasing simply means lying - falsehood, deception. So the assault is on his name. People are taking his honor and dragging it down into disgrace, trading in rumor and emptiness, in love with what is hollow. The doubled how long is the cry of someone worn thin by a slow campaign rather than a single blow - the grinding fatigue of being misrepresented day after day. What is striking is what the psalmist does not do. He does not catalog the lies, or plot his counter-rumor, or demand his accusers be silenced. He turns from them almost at once, back to a steadier truth - because he knows that a heart can be ruined by what it broods on, and he refuses to let theirs set the weather of his.

Then comes the heart of the psalm, and one of the most pastoral lines in the Psalter: Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. The counsel is for exactly the moment we are worst at - lying awake at night with a grievance turning over and over. First, stand in awe: let the sheer greatness of God rise up larger than the people who have wronged you, until the fear of Him quietly crowds out the fear of them. Then, sin not: there is a way of nursing a wound that curdles into sin - the rehearsal of revenge, the feeding of bitterness - and the psalm draws a firm line there. Be stirred, but do not let the stirring make you act. Next, commune with your own heart upon your bed: instead of replaying the words of your accusers, talk to yourself, preach the truth back to your own soul in the dark. And finally, be still. Stop striving. Lay the case down. Let God be the judge you are tempted to be. Twice in this psalm falls the word Selah - a pause written into the music - as if the song itself is teaching the soul how to breathe.

The psalmist now turns to instruct the very people who have wronged him - and the instruction is mercy, not a curse: Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the LORD. In a world that handles a slight by demanding satisfaction, he points the offenders to the altar instead. A “sacrifice of righteousness” is not merely the right animal slain by the right rule; it is a sacrifice offered from a right heart - worship that is more than ritual, an offering that means it. And it is paired at once with the deeper thing the ritual was always meant to express: put your trust in the LORD. There is the hinge of the whole psalm. The cure for the restless grasping of verse 6, for the lies of verse 2, for the whole human scramble to secure ourselves, is trust - leaning the full weight of your life on God rather than on your own vindication or your own supply. The psalmist is not just defending himself; he is preaching to his enemies the very thing that has given him peace.

Now the psalm overhears the world talking to itself: There be many that say, Who will shew us any good? It is the restless, weary question of every age - eyes scanning the horizon for somewhere, anywhere, that security and satisfaction might come from. The many are not necessarily wicked; they are anxious, hungry, unsure where good is to be found, forever asking the question and never quite answering it. And against that whole anxious crowd the psalmist sets a single, different prayer: LORD, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us. While the many ask who will show them any good - vague, scattered, grasping at the next thing - he asks for one thing, by name. He does not want the good things so much as the face of the One from whom all good things come. It is the difference between a child crying for more toys and a child climbing into a parent's lap: the second has stopped asking who will show us good, because he has found where good actually lives.

And so the psalm lies down: I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety. It is the perfect close to an evening prayer, and everything in it is weighted. He will lay me down - the deliberate act of a soul that has decided to stop keeping watch over itself. He will do it in peace, the Hebrew shalom, that wholeness which is far more than the mere absence of conflict, for his conflict is not over; the liars have not been silenced and his name is not yet cleared. And he will sleep - which is its own quiet sermon, because sleep is the daily surrender we cannot avoid, the nightly admission that we are not the ones holding the world together. The reason is pressed into one small, decisive word: only. Thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety. Not his vigilance, not his innocence, not the collapse of his enemies, not even the sacrifices of righteousness he has urged - God alone. To know that is to be able to do the most ordinary and most trusting thing a body can do: close your eyes in the dark, and let the One who never slumbers keep the house.