4 When You Don't Know What to Do (Psalm 25)
4
When You Don’t Know What to Do
Psalm 25
James MacDonald
When I was assigned Psalm 25 to preach on, I couldn’t decide honestly whether it was a gift or a gauntlet. I didn’t know if the challenge was “Let’s see you preach Christ from this kind of passage!” So I approached the opportunity with a trepidation factor. But as I’ve studied Psalm 25, I now really do think this assignment was a gift. And I’m grateful.
Since I’ve been asked to offer this message as part of a wider theme of “Preaching Christ from the Old Testament,” I want to make sure that we’re not assuming too much in our departure point. Before we can preach Christ from the Old Testament, we have to just preach. Second Timothy 4 is very instructive about our responsibility to preach the Word. Paul makes it clear to young Timothy that his personal life and his public pursuits must be saturated with the Scriptures. It’s probably worth noting that all who preached Christ in the New Testament pretty much preached him from the Old Testament. So when Paul tells Timothy, “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13),1 he is directing his envoy to deliver the content of the Old Testament to people, particularly as it applies to Christ.
The Second Helvetic Confession from the sixteenth century declares, praedicatio verbi dei est verbum dei, which means, “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” Calvin said, “God . . . deigns to consecrate . . . the tongues of men in order that his voice may resound in them.”2 Many pulpits today are not preaching the Word of God. They’re between red-faced sermonic rants and self-indulgent intellectual meanderings through the dark forest of “it seems to me.” Many are not actually heralding the Word that God has given. What our nation is hungry for, what our world is crying out for is “thus says the Lord.” We have to come back to faithfully proclaiming God’s Word.
So, yes, preach the Word. And then preach Christ from the Word. Preach Christ from all sixty-six books, from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21. Let’s preach Christ from the Word of God.
My mom went to heaven last summer. She died of ALS, and she suffered greatly. Going through that experience has caused me to treasure in a deeper way what it meant for my mother to get forty little elementary school kids down in the basement every Tuesday afternoon after school and teach the Word of God to us. And I treasure more than I ever could have as a child the chorus that she taught us: “The Bible is the written Word of God,” we used to sing.
The Bible is the written Word of God.
It tells about the living Word of God.
On every page, on every line you’ll find the Son of God divine.
If you want to learn to know the King of kings,
If you want to learn of all the heavenly things,
Read the Book; learn the Book, let the Book teach you.3
That was a great chorus. I love what it’s saying. And so I love the theme before us: preaching Christ from the Old Testament.
BACKGROUND
Open your Bibles to Psalm 25. We understand that you don’t just rip open the Bible and start reading it. You’ve got to understand what you have in your hands, and so I shall mention four things by way of background in regard to Psalm 25.
IT’S A PSALM
First, at the risk of stating the obvious but to acknowledge what we are about to explore, it’s a psalm. The Psalms are the most quoted Old Testament book in the New Testament. Isaiah is a distant second. The New Testament quotes Isaiah about 50 times and the Psalms over 400 times.
One of our authors on the Gospel Coalition website said recently that the Psalms are the songbook of Jesus. What a guiding perspective to have as we gaze into this great book. Psalm 25 is a song written over three thousand years ago. Of the 150 psalms, 100 name the author; of those, 75 are attributed to David. This is one of those Davidic psalms.
IT’S A POEM
Second, this psalm is a poem. The Psalms are ancient Hebrew poetry, not rhyming like we would think of poetry, but artistic structures. There are two main poetic features in Psalm 25. One visual artistic flair is that it’s an acrostic. Almost every verse begins with the successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
The other poetic feature is that the truths come in couplets, repeating the same message with different words. We learned in seminary this is called synonymous parallelism. Each truth is stated twice, the second time in a slightly altered way for emphasis and beauty. That’s what’s happening again and again as we go through this poetic song of David.
There’s a pattern in Psalm 25 that combines the typical language of prayer and creed. Back and forth: addressing God directly (vv. 1–7, 11, 16–22), then addressing a human audience (vv. 8–10, 12–15); prayer, creed, prayer. David is keenly aware of God’s attentiveness to his words but also acknowledges that others will hear and use his song.
IT’S ABOUT DESPAIR
Third, the subject of the psalm is crying out in desperation and despair. It’s David in pursuit of total trust upon God. And so the title I’ve given to this message is “When You Don’t Know What to Do.”
Have you ever had a time in your life when you didn’t know what to do? What do you do when you don’t know what to do? The answer to that question is to trust. David had to learn and practice the truth that when you don’t know what to do, you trust. And if it was a good enough lesson for David, you know it’s a good enough lesson for you and me. Sometimes we don’t know what to do, and we should trust! That’s what’s coming to us now in Psalm 25.
I have found it helpful to distinguish two main emphases in this psalm. On the one hand, there are “learning” themes—things we need to learn about God so we trust him better. But on the other hand, there are “leaning” themes in the psalm as well—ways of trusting God or things that we do that amount to trusting God. Some of what this psalm says teaches us what to learn; some of it teaches us how to lean. But all of it is about this matter of trusting God better, especially when you don’t know what to do.
IT’S A PLEA FROM A BROKENHEARTED MAN
Past the genre of the psalm, past the literary device of the poetry, past the pattern and structure, this learning exercise remains in essence the plea of a brokenhearted man. As you study God’s Word, don’t ever let your analysis cause paralysis. This psalm is a person’s life. This is a person’s relationship with God that is modeling under the inspiration of the Spirit something very important for us. And though we don’t know for certain the exact biographical setting of Psalm 25, this is a plea. This is a cry from a heartbroken man, a king.
While some debate the background for Psalm 25, the internal clues narrow the possible times in David’s life that could have produced this intense expression. The text certainly supports that David is in a very desperate place. He speaks of his enemies and his foes. He speaks of treachery as well as hate. He speaks of the threat of ambush and profound loneliness and sorrow. David has been betrayed. He’s crushed in his spirit. He’s devastated by what has happened to him.
In my twenties I probably thought that I had been crushed. I never had been. I’m sure I thought in my thirties that I had been crushed. But I was still fairly clueless. It wasn’t until my late forties that I began to understand what it is to be crushed, and I came to realize that a psalm like this can come only from a person who knows what it is to be crushed in a vise.
Some suggest that this psalm presupposes David’s experience with Saul, but in the text he says, “Remember not the sins of my youth” (v. 7). So he is not a young man when he is going through this, and that autobiographical note has generally led scholars to agree that the backdrop for this psalm is Absalom’s betrayal.
That story begins in 2 Samuel 3. Absalom was David’s third son by his second wife. David’s already in trouble in the marriage category. This is not God’s best plan. We have that in Genesis: one man and one woman for a lifetime. David is already off plan. And born to this second wife is this third son, Absalom.
Eventually David’s kids grow up, and by 2 Samuel 13, his first son, Amnon, rapes one of his daughters, Tamar. His third son, Absalom, is angry at his half-brother Amnon for what he did to his sister Tamar. But his rage is also directed at the father, who is so incredibly passive that he doesn’t deal with the sin of his firstborn son. So Absalom hates his brother and murders him. Then David banishes Absalom rather than confronting him. He doesn’t deal with the tragic escalating results of his own passivity. He just puts Absalom away from himself.
After a long period of time, Absalom begs his way back into Jerusalem and then maneuvers his way back into the palace. And finally at the end of chapter 14, the king kisses the murderous son but puts him out again. The seething conflict has not been settled—just placed out of sight.
By 2 Samuel 15:1, Absalom says, in effect, “Not me. Not this. No more.” So he gets in his chariot and starts rallying the people around, carrying out a calculated PR campaign. As the people come to David for counsel to solve problems, Absalom steps in and says, “Yeah, I know a little bit about that. Listen, the king’s kind of old and busy. You might want to talk to me about your situation.” So more and more, the hearts of the men go after Absalom (chaps. 15–16). The people follow him and look to him as the de facto king. It’s a bloodless coup, a mutiny. Absalom pulls off a betrayal of the highest order.
We can picture David writing Psalm 25 on the run. He has fled from the palace and taken with him the few friends and soldiers who have not betrayed him. The king of Israel is encamped outside the royal city, hiding in his old wilderness haunts. People have to bring him food so that he can survive while he tries to avoid a conflict that would kill his son.
If you’re imagining all this, the description is like a Jerry Springer episode. If you are watching, you say, “Why doesn’t David kill the kid? The boy’s a lost cause.” You say that—until it is your dearest friend or your closest ministry partner or your spouse or one of your kids. For if you are living it, those days are crushing, devastating, and despair-inducing.
Joab, the king’s general, just cannot understand why David responds as he does to the news of Absalom’s death. David weeps and says, “O my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you” (2 Sam. 18:33). The reason Joab cannot comprehend this is because he hasn’t been crushed as David has been. This is the most plausible circumstance that leads to the writing of Psalm 25.
EXPOSITION
Let’s go through this wonderful passage.
VERSES 1–3
Verse 1
The opening verse states the theme of the entire psalm:
To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.
O my God, in you I trust. (v. 1)
“Soul” commonly means “the seat of desire,” the internal, nonmaterial part of man, but it can mean the whole being. David comes in desperation, and he lifts up all that he is to God.
Verse 2
David then launches into the content of his prayer: “Let me not be put to shame” (v. 2). How clear is that prayer? “Put to shame” means “to fall into disgrace,” “to be shamed.” Don’t let this end badly, God. David is crying out in desperation. He’s afraid of being shamed. He saw how Saul died. He’s afraid that his enemies are going to gloat over him.
Have you ever been afraid—really scared that something was going to happen to you? I’ve been a Chicago Blackhawks fan all my life. In 2010, some friends and I went to their game in Philadelphia to see the Stanley Cup final. And you’ve heard about Philadelphia fans; they’re not like fans anywhere else. I was embarrassed and frightened, so although I put on my Chicago Blackhawks jersey, over it I wore a Philadelphia Flyers jersey. So when I was walking to the game, all my brothers were getting called out, but I sailed through.
But when I got inside the arena, I felt kind of bold. So when I ran into Mark Giangreco, the Channel 2 newscaster from Chicago, I did something that wasn’t very smart. I pulled off the Flyers jersey on camera! I revealed my true Blackhawk-fan self. That seemed like a great idea, but all the Flyers fans watched my sudden transformation. So now I’m looking around, and I would have been better off just to wear the Blackhawk jersey in. Now I was Enemy Number 1. I heard it! And I’m telling you, when the Hawks won, Blackhawk fans were getting punched and shoved; it was crazy. I said to myself, “This is not going to end well.” And all the guys I walked in with, they were hard to find at that point.
Take that and multiply the fear by a factor that’s unimaginable, and you will begin to glimpse what David is feeling when he says, “Let me not be put to shame.” God, don’t let this go where it looks like it’s going.
Verse 3
David is learning: “Wait a minute. What am I so stressed out about?” Verse 3:
Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame;
they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
It might not look good today. Your son may be pretty far out there. Your test results may look very bad. Your heart may be in a vise over some crushing reality. It may feel like shame is inevitable, but nothing is over yet. None who wait for the Lord will be put to shame; they won’t fall into disgrace. Not ultimately. Not in the end. Not when the Lord is done.
And so our first main thought here is part of the lesson we’ve got to learn in this passage: I don’t know where this is going. I don’t know how it ends exactly, but here I understand that in the end—“no shame.” Not when it’s over. Not when God is done.
But some are going to “be ashamed.” As I seek to trust God more and better, something that I desperately need to learn is wrapped up in that word “wantonly.” The NASB and NIV say “without cause.” But is there ever an excuse or a reason to be betrayed? No one deserves what David is experiencing. Pastors don’t deserve betrayal. Parents don’t deserve betrayal, and neither do children. How comforting to embrace and learn to trust the God who never betrays his people. There is no shame in suffering the shameful betrayals of others.
VERSES 4–5
Verse 4
Notice God’s way in verse 4:
Make me to know your ways, O LORD;
teach me your paths.
Lead me in your truth and teach me.
The beginning of verse 5 really could go with 4. There, I think, is the parallelism. Notice the plurals: “your ways . . . your paths.” This is not a prayer for specific guidance. This is a petition to understand God’s pattern. “Make me to learn your ways, God.” God has his ways.
Hosea 14:9 calls us to wisdom and understanding, “for the ways of the LORD are right.” Isaiah 55 tells us that the ways of the Lord are as high as the heavens are above the earth—high above our ways. God has different ways of doing things. He has some very different paths for us to travel.
In effect, David is saying:
April 2008 and April 2009 were the two worst months of my life. In God’s providence they were also the months of the Gospel Coalition meetings, and in those two years I was in the throes of finding out that I had prostate cancer. Our church was in major turmoil and upheaval at the leadership level, but I couldn’t talk about it. At home we were going through the best and worst of growing pains as our children faced all the challenges of adulthood. David’s words, “I am lonely and afflicted” (Ps. 25:16b) put what I was feeling into words.
I forced myself to go and sit in on some of the sessions, and at one of the breaks, a friend who has been a real pastor to me and a pastor in our area noticed me over in a corner. It was dark. He came over to me, and he put his hand on my shoulders, like he would. (Pastors need pastors too.) He said, “How are you, brother?” in his beautiful English accent. I just hung my head and started to sob. I said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”
If you’ve never been at the place where the trials are so significant that you don’t even know what to do, then you don’t understand Psalm 25. David is pleading, “God, I’m not seeing it. I know you have ways, but I have to learn them because everything that’s happening makes no sense to me at all.” A big part of trusting is learning this truth: trust must extend past understanding. “I just don’t get it Lord, but I’m trusting you.”
Verse 5
In August 2009, I taught Psalm 25 in my church. Ninety-eight percent of our people knew nothing about what I was facing and dealing with, but my circumstances sure caused me to understand verse 5, where David asks,
Lead me in your truth and teach me,
for you are the God of my salvation.
“Salvation” can have many meanings in Scripture. Here David is saying, You’re the God who gets me out. I wait for you. No one but you can get me out of this. You are the God of my salvation!
When you say that you are waiting, that means that you are accepting God’s wise timing. You are confessing, “I’m not fussing. I’m not fuming. I’m not fixing.” You’re not thinking in the back of your mind, “Oh, I could do a few things to get me out of this situation. I’ve got some insights. I might say some things. I could make some moves. I could get some balls rolling. I could take hold of this if I had to.”
I say this to my own shame. I’ve had to learn the meaning of the words: “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). We learn as pastors and we learn as parents that when you want righteousness for somebody more than you want to be righteous, that’s not going anywhere good. That lesson is what you are displaying when you say, “I’m waiting on God for my salvation. This is about his ways and his paths. He has to get me out of this narrow place.”
Three years ago today my world was just about as dark as it could possibly be. But today, praise God for his faithfulness, our church is flourishing. My health has returned. I have discovered the unspeakable joy of grandchildren and the fatherly pride in seeing my children following the Lord. And I can’t stop praising God.
But it was not like that then. I remember two years ago I was going out for dinner with some people I hadn’t met before. Another good pastor-friend in the city—it’s kind of cool how we pastor each other—was driving me over to the place where we were going to eat dinner, and I couldn’t even get out of the car. He asked, “What’s wrong?” And I sat there in the car and just poured out my heart to him. I told him everything. He listened quietly and intently. And then he prayed for me. Have you ever had someone really pray for you? I pray that you have someone pray for you like that! He sat there with his hands on the steering wheel, and he opened his heart to God; he poured out a prayer on my behalf that I couldn’t put into words at the time. While he was saying the things that he was asking God to do, I’m telling you, it was darkness. I was thinking, “That will never happen. Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” And yet two years later, all that he prayed has happened and beyond—things that God did, way more than my friend could think or ask.
That’s why David is writing this: “I’m waiting for the God of my salvation. That’s part of leaning. I’m going to wait. I’m going to be still. I’m not going to take hold of this myself. Instead, God is the one I’m waiting on.” I love that. Wait for your salvation.
VERSES 6–7
Verse 6
Psalm 25:6 begins a little section I’m going to call “seek mercy.” Verses 6–7 use the word “remember” three times. David says, “Remember your mercy, O LORD, and your steadfast love.”
This is not a plea for God to review his nature as if David is saying, “God, don’t forget that you are a merciful God.” David is actually asking God to review their personal experience together: “Haven’t you done some merciful things for me? Remember your mercies, God. While I wait, I’m remembering your mercies to me, Lord. Remember your hesed love, your covenant love, your unimpeachable loyalty, God. Remember what you are like.” David calls upon God to do that. He is saying in effect, “You know what you are like, God. And I do too! Your character is what I’m counting on!”
Verse 7
Then David says, “Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions.” The NIV says “rebellious ways” instead of “transgressions.” It’s the casting off of allegiance. “I know better than God does. I’m going to do what I want to do my way. I’ll do what I want.” When you get to a place where you don’t know what to do, what is the first thing that can derail your trust in God? The memory of your rebellious ways! Now there’s something we’re all familiar with: rebellious ways. We may be reluctant to admit it in public, but each of us has a streak of rebellion that is not hidden from God.
We all have rebellious ways. Even the people that we esteem most highly have them. The next person you see has them. The person who faces you in the mirror definitely has them. But when God gets you in a place where you don’t know what to do, you’re not doing a surface makeover anymore. You’re cleaning into the corners. You’re saying, “Anything that would hinder the answer to these petitions now has to go.” The convenience of secret sins and petty offenses and the nonsense that separates brothers and sisters in Christ all has to go now. “I can have no sin in my life, God, because I have to have the answer from you.” When you get to a difficult place under God’s providence, you will scour every corner of your soul to remind yourself that God’s mercies have surrounded you and that the cleansing river of his grace has flowed into those dry corners.
David adds,
according to your steadfast love remember me,
for the sake of your goodness, O LORD! (v. 7)
When God gets you to the place where you say, “I don’t know what to do,” this is part of leaning: leaning into God with the kind of trust that is so often neglected even by people in ministry. Flat-out trust him when there is nothing else you can do except not trust him, which is the bad plan we follow too often!
VERSES 8–10
Verses 8–9
David transitions in verse 8 a little bit and begins to talk to the congregation. Genuine confession leads to effectively encouraging others. What David wants for himself he wants for others, so he writes,
Good and upright is the LORD;
therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
He leads the humble in what is right,
and he teaches the humble his way. (vv. 8–9)
He’s repeating some of the themes we’ve already seen.
When I used to sit in seminary, I felt like the teachers intentionally laid it out there and instructed you. You could get it if you wanted it. If you were lazy, you didn’t get much. But David refers to more than just-take-it-if-you-want-it instruction. This is God moving toward us and casting us into the way, placing upon us the pressure to get the things that we must get. Like oil down a funnel, like a bowling ball down an alley, like an arrow through a bull’s-eye—that’s what it feels like in this moment when he casts sinners in the way.
He leads the humble in what is right,
and teaches the humble his way. (v. 9)
Verse 10
Well, does that happen for everybody? No. There is a clause here that creates an exception: “All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness” (v. 10a). All the paths—sweet! But then who experiences this steadfast love and faithfulness?
All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness,
for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies. (v. 10)
But sometimes we fail to keep his covenant and testimonies. So implicitly this becomes a renewed determination to be faithful: when I don’t know what to do, this is what I’ll do. I’m going to receive the discipline that God has given to me. I’m going to obey the correction. I’m going to learn the lesson. I’m going to get to a better place with God’s help and commit myself to trust him.
God displays “his steadfast love and faithfulness.” We believe that there is a covenant God who, even when he has to step toward me in correction, knows what he is doing. When he steps toward me in that covenant relationship, the way for me to lean is into his approach and to obey his correction. How critical it is to lean in and embrace what God is doing. To actually trust and obey, for there’s no other way or path worth going down!
VERSES 11–15
Verse 11
David returns to a theme we’ve already noticed. Verse 11 is about the hand of God when it is heavy upon you and you cannot carry any extra burdens:
For your name’s sake, O LORD,
pardon my guilt, for it is great.
It is as if he is saying, “I cannot carry this sin anymore, God. I cannot carry this sin and your correction. The weight of my sin and the weight of your correction are too heavy.”
But what should you drop? If you were my counselor and I said, “I can’t carry the weight of all my sin and God’s correction. I’m kind of new to this Christian thing. What should I drop?” you would probably answer that dropping my sin sounds like a good and godly plan! That is what David is saying here when he writes,
For your name’s sake, O LORD,
pardon my guilt.
All this for your name’s sake, for the fame of your great name, for your reputation. We know what you’re like and what you’ve said about yourself, and we’ve experienced it. For your name’s sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt. Pardon my guilt for it is great.
Thank God for correction! I am not the person I was five years ago, and I do not want to be that person ever again. Thank God for the correction that brings us to the place where we see the pride and the self-centeredness and the things in our life that injure others and alienate us from the One whom we serve.
For your name’s sake, O LORD,
pardon my guilt, for it is great.
Amen. We need forgiveness. We desperately need God’s forgiveness. We need to say, in effect, “I am laying down my sin unreservedly, before you have to pry it from my cold, lifeless hands, God. I’m going to lay it down willingly.”
Verse 12
That’s a big part of leaning. “I need forgiveness, God. I can’t go forward the way I am. If I have to go through another trial like this, I at least want it to be about something different. I want to learn these things.” In verses 12–14, David talks about what might be called “choosing covenant.” “Who is the man who fears the LORD?” (v. 12a). Fear, of course, is the attitude that seeks a right relationship to the source of fear. If I fear the fire, I don’t put my hand in. If I fear the police, I drive the speed limit. The problem in ministry is that we fear the wrong stuff. We fear the loss of our reputation. We dread the failure of our ministry. We dodge the disapproval of others. But all along the One we ought to fear is God! Paul had this nailed: “With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court” (1 Cor. 4:3).
“Why, Paul? You don’t care what people think?”
“Well, sort of. But here’s the deal: he who judges me is the Lord.”
Maximizing your focus on what God thinks of you will defeat the fear of man quickly.
Who is this man who fears the LORD?
Him will he instruct in the way that he should choose.
His soul shall abide in well-being. (Ps. 25:12–13a)
Verse 13
“His offspring shall inherit the land” (v. 13b) further states the blessings. Cast in terms of the old covenant, the righteous man who turns from sin establishes his family and heritage, inheriting the land. That’s the pattern of how God works.
Verse 14
“The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him” (v. 14a). Some translations say, “the secret of the LORD” (KJV, NASB). There’s an intimacy that comes to those who choose that covenant relationship of fearing God, and “he makes known to them his covenant” (v. 14b). How phenomenal!
Choose covenant. This is covenant theology in the best sense of the word: a person makes the covenant relationship that God offers the great study of their life. That is what God is calling us to, and that is something we have to learn when God takes us through a time when we don’t know what to do. How’s that going with you? Is God’s covenant becoming dearer and deeper to you along the way?
When you go through trials, you learn that the same sun that melts the ice also hardens the clay. You get better or you get bitter when you choose how you will lean into God’s ways. It’s true with my wife, Kathy, and me with these trials that we’ve been through. I’m closer to my wife than I’ve ever been before. Married twenty-seven years, I’m so thankful for her. But there were critical junctures in the difficult times when we were going to either come together or go apart. Either these events were going to force us into a deeper relationship, or they were going to cause us to separate and be distant from one another.
Thank God that we pursued relationship. And what’s true in the horizontal is true in the vertical. So many people who have gone through ministry trials haven’t got better. They’ve become bitter. I remember one of my best friends in college who was so much more gifted than I. He was so capable of serving God. He had a bad first experience in ministry, and he hasn’t walked with the Lord for more than two decades. I asked him, “Why don’t you want to be a pastor anymore?”
He replied, “Crap treatment for crap pay.”
That was his assessment of serving Jesus Christ. How sad that that should happen. But people get bitter, and maybe you’re one of those with a big dose of bitter. You need to allow what’s happened in ministry to force you deeper into relationship with your covenant-keeping God, not away from it.
Verse 15
The next phrase affirms an expectant outlook:
My eyes are ever toward the LORD,
for he will pluck my feet out of the net. (v. 15)
What a fantastic truth and promise.
My mandate is to show how this passage points toward Jesus, and I do not want to shortchange that task. I have prepared comments on the rest of Psalm 25, but I want to give most of the remainder of the space to my main task. So let me briefly refer to the remaining verses and comment in very speedy fashion before I turn to my main task.
VERSES 16–19
What David says in verses 16–19 is really, “Do you feel me, God? Do you feel what I’m feeling? I need to know, God. You’ve got me here, and I need to know you feel what I’m feeling.”
I’ll just read the verses:
Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am lonely and afflicted.
The troubles of my heart are enlarged;
bring me out of my distresses.
Consider my affliction and my trouble,
and forgive all my sins.
Consider how many are my foes,
and with what violent hatred they hate me.
It’s all there. “I need to know that you understand what I’m feeling, God. I need to have you connect with me there.”
VERSES 20–21
Finally, in verses 20–21, David prays,
I take refuge in you.
May integrity and uprightness preserve me
for I wait for you.
In other words, “I guard my soul. Deliver me. I don’t know how long this is going to go on, God, but I’m not going to be able to go another day if you don’t keep me.”
IS JESUS IN PSALM 25?
Is Jesus in this passage? Is Jesus ever in this passage! He owns this passage. Jesus is everywhere here. Three thoughts tie this together:
JESUS EMBODIES MY TRUST
Note the frequent repetition in the psalm: “O LORD” (v. 1), “O LORD” (v. 4), “O LORD” (vv. 6, 7, and 11); “is the LORD” (v. 8); “of the LORD” (vv. 10 and 14); “fears the LORD” (v. 12); “toward the LORD” (v. 15). The “LORD,” here capitalized ten times, translates Yahweh. It is God’s covenant name. It was revealed to Moses by the burning bush: “God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel, “I AM has sent me to you” ’ ” (Ex. 3:14). The proper noun is very closely related to the verb “to be”: God’s name is: I AM WHO I AM. Yahweh is I AM.
Undoubtedly there are limits to what we can understand of the Trinity. But we can see the triune God in Scripture. And in this framework we learn that Jesus is the “I AM.” Jesus is Yahweh.
Sometimes the text clearly refers to the Father as Yahweh. For example, Paul says,
Come out from among them
and be separate, says the Lord. . . .
And . . .
I will be a Father to you. (2 Cor. 6:17–18, NKJV)
Sometimes Yahweh is the Father.
Sometimes Yahweh is the Holy Spirit: “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).
And every Gospel writer agrees that Jesus himself is also the Lord of the Bible, of the Old Testament. For example:
JESUS EXEMPLIFIES MY TRUST
Jesus is my perfect example of trusting God in the midst of betrayal. Jesus embodies the kind of trust we need in the absence of obvious certainties. Jesus exemplifies that kind of trust because his pain was deeper. He experienced fully what we can know only in part.
Can you believe that we worship a God who was betrayed? If we wonder about the impact the betrayal had upon him, we only need to gaze into the flow of the upper room discourse (John 13–17). Not only was Jesus sold cheaply for thirty pieces of silver by “my close friend in whom I trusted” (Ps. 41:9), but while sitting at the table, he knows what is about to happen.
Jesus breaks into the conversation, “One of you will betray me” (Matt. 26:21). It’s the one who’s dipping his bread with me right now. Behold my betrayer’s hand is on the table. Woe to him by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. One of you will surely betray me. Do it quickly. How many people, knowing what Jesus knows, do you think would be distracted at the dinner? Jesus is already feeling the crushing weight of the betrayal. Jesus isn’t just the one in whom I trust, but he’s also the one who exemplifies how to trust because his pain is deeper than David’s ever was, because his passion is fuller than David’s.
Jesus is alone. He pleads for the cup to pass: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matt. 26:39). What an example of how he processed what God providentially brought him.
One of the verses my mom taught me early was John 18:11. When Jesus is about to leave the garden under arrest after Peter has used his sword, Jesus turns to him and says, “The cup which my Father has given to me, shall I not drink it?” In other words, “What else am I going to do?” Jesus, taking the theme of David’s prayer in Psalm 25, takes it to its greatest conclusion of total submission to God the Father.
Jesus embodies my trust. He exemplifies my trust. Finally, he enables my trust.
JESUS ENABLES MY TRUST
Jesus is the one not only upon whom I lean and from whom I learn how to lean. He is also the one at work in me, giving me the desire to lean. I’m “prone to wonder, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love,” but Christ in me is the hope of glory. I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless, I live. He gives me the desire to go through a trial. He keeps my soul so that I’m not lost in bitterness or end up upside-down in the ditch in despair. He enables me to trust.
CONCLUSION
Let me add this pastoral note in closing. We’re learning a lot from Psalm 25 and the rest of Scripture. We’re exposed to teaching from God’s Word. I hope you’re being stretched and ministered to. The best way I know how to conclude a message like this is to encourage you to think about it very personally. And the way that I know how to do that is just to invite you to bow your head with me. It is time to lean into what God’s Spirit has been speaking to your heart, making David’s words your own:
To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.
O my God, in you I trust. (vv. 1–2a)
So if you are carrying a very heavy burden, I want to encourage you right now. Let your humility declare, “I’m not afraid to acknowledge that I’m at a hard place right now. I need the Lord to help me.” Jesus himself is here. He is here now, and by his Spirit he can do for you what no one else can do. He can lift that burden that you are carrying. He can give you the oil of gladness for your sorrow. He can give you the capacity to wait upon him for another day, another week. He can carry that burden from you.
1 Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in this chapter are from the English Standard Version.
2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 4.1.5.
3 A chorus written by Ruth H. Munce (daughter of Grace Livingstone Hill) and widely used in Bible clubs under the permission of Percy and Don Crawford.