Related Keys to Psalm 37:4-5 and Psalm 51:3-4

God's intention is that, as we take delight in him, he will put his desires within us. This will make us progressively more able to trust God, do good, and avoid sin. It will also make us increasingly able to discern when our guilt doesn't come from God.

Recently, I was given keys to understanding two short passages out of the Psalms that previously had puzzled me, even when read in context–Psalm 37:4-5 and Psalm 51:3-4. The two passages appear unrelated, on their faces, but the key to understanding them renders them related.

Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him, and He will do it.

Psalm 37:4-5 (NASB)

For I know my wrongdoings,
And my sin is constantly before me.
Against You, You only, I have sinned
And done what is evil in Your sight,
So that You are justified when You speak
And blameless when You judge.

Psalm 51:3-4 (NASB)

My Problem with Psalm 37:4-5

The problem I have long had with Psalm 37:4-5 is that it appears to promise me that, if I will only (sufficiently) delight myself in the Lord and “commit” my way to him, he will give me anything I want.

But I am well aware that I am NOT given most of the things I want. Indeed, the strength of my desire for something actually appears to be inversely related to the probability that I will ever have it.

My upbringing and subsequent affiliation has been in churches that follow the modern American Evangelical model that stresses ritual, in-church “decision” experiences as the operative events in which I “commit” myself to Christ (either initially in salvation, or subsequently in “re-commitment” or “decisions” about “service”). Therefore, it has long seemed that I have taken care of the “commit” prerequisite MANY times.

So the problem must be with me, right? I must not be sufficiently delighting myself in the Lord for him to honor his promise. Perhaps if I work harder at church, spend more time in devotions, or put more money in the offering, I will prove to him that I am delighting in him enough to be worthy of having what I want.

I also spent a period of years, now long past, associating with Charismatic churches that were close to the “name it, claim it” extreme. These churches openly interpreted Psalm 37:4 and some other similar-appearing verses scattered throughout Scripture as saying that if I simply had enough faith, God would give me anything I asked.

So is the problem with me–that I do not “measure up” in some quantitative way–sufficient delight or enough faith–to qualify to have what I want, so I am therefore “stuck” receiving things I don’t want?

Or is the problem with God, who never intended to keep this promise?

Or is something else going on here?

My Problems with Psalm 51:3-4

I have had two problems with Psalm 51:3-4. One problem pertains to verse 3, the other, somewhat contradictory problem pertains to verse 4.

As background, Psalm 51 records, or, perhaps, summarizes King David’s prayer of repentance after he committed adultery with Bathsheba and then had her husband Uriah murdered. (See 2 Samuel 11, and the article God Rejected King Saul, But Declared King David a Man After His Own Heart. Didn’t God Get this Backwards? on this blog).

My problem with Psalm 51:3 has been that it appears to say that any guilt I feel must be true guilt about a real, discrete sinful act condemned by God. “For I know my wrongdoings.” If I “know” a feeling of guilt, the thing I feel guilty about must have been a sin, right?

Yet I also know how other people manipulate my feelings. People around me frequently try to make me feel guilty about doing things they, for their own reasons unrelated to Scripture, do not want me to do. Even more frequently, people or organizations will try to make me feel so guilty that I will do the things they want me to do, or so that I will “generously” (and frequently!) give money to them or their organization, even though God isn’t telling me to do so. Fund-raising advertising for charities (even Christian ones) and political organizations always plays heavily on induced guilt. So, if someone succeeds in making me feel guilty for not doing what they want or not giving the money they are begging for, does verse 3 imply that God has endorsed their cause by making me feel guilty? Does it mean I must confess to God this “sin” of not doing what other people wanted and make amends by doing what they wanted, if it is still possible to do it?

I am also aware that society, its institutions, and the people around me, systematically use guilt’s near relative, shame, to enforce their behavioral expectations, which sometimes align with Scripture but are also often contrary to it. Again, the question that seems to be raised by verse 3 is, does God endorse my human environment’s determination that the whole list of acts and omissions it shames (and about which it has taught me to feel shame) are wrongs condemned by God as discrete sins?

In asking these questions, I am, of course, aware that, when he prayed, King David himself had no doubt about what his recent sin had been, because the prophet Nathan had directly confronted him with it.

The problem I have had with verse 4 is that, in it, David declares he had sinned against God “only.” But wait a minute! David had violated Bathsheba, who was pregnant as a result, and Uriah was dead! Hadn’t David also sinned against Bathsheba, her family, and Uriah?

Yet, in confessing his sin to God, David said God was the “only” person he had sinned against. How can that be?

The Key to Psalm 37:4-5

The key to this passage–and the rest of Psalm 37–is to note precisely what God is promising in verse 4. He is not promising to give me whatever I want, if I will only do something for him. Instead, he is promising that, whenever I delight in him–that is, if I make myself sensitive to him and enjoy his presence, take exquisite delight in being with him (the related meanings of the Hebrew verb ‘anog)–he will give my heart his desire. I will want what he wants, and he will do it.

It’s not a quantitative matter of simply delighting in God enough. It’s a matter of valuing our relationship in such a manner that I become sensitive to what he wants, delighting in the experience of letting him change what I want.

This reading is inferentially confirmed by the construction of the verse. The verb that applies to God’s action is the simple verb “to give” (nathan) but in the “qal conjunctive imperfect” form (wə·yit·ten) which can imply either incomplete or continuous future or present action (” he gives” or “will keep on giving”) as opposed to an action which will happen once and then be completed or contingent voluntary action (e.g., “he may give…”). The verb at the beginning of the verse–the verb that applies to me, is also a “conjunctive imperfect,” but instead of using the common qal stem, it uses the hitpael stem, which is reflexive, i.e., it describes something I do to myself. Both of the matching conjunctive imperfect verbs in this verse could imply either reading–continuing future/present action or contingent voluntary action–and both readings reach the same conclusion: if I continually delight myself in God (something I do to myself), he will continually give my heart his desires. What he promises to give is something he will give “to you” (prepositional prefix l-), that is “to your heart” (again, prepositional prefix l-). What he will give to my heart is “desires”–not the things desired, the desires themselves.

This reading is confirmed by the surrounding verses:

Trust in the Lord and do good;
Live in the land and cultivate faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
He will bring out your righteousness as the light,
And your judgment as the noonday.

Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him;
Do not get upset because of one who is successful in his way,
Because of the person who carries out wicked schemes.

Psalm 37:3-7 (NASB).

The theme of the first two verses of Psalm 37, repeated in verse 7 (quoted above) is that I should not become upset or envious when I see evildoers appearing to succeed in the short-term–getting what they desire from their wicked schemes–because they will soon fade away. Instead, I should trust in the Lord, rest in him, and wait patiently for him. If I trust in him, I will do will do what is good, which is the same thing as–and poetically parallel to–cultivating faithfulness to him in the same way a farmer cultivates a crop. (It takes work and weed removal!) And this is where verses 4 and 5 come in: cultivating faithfulness to God requires that I spend time with him and delight in spending time with him. If I commit to that as the way of my life he promises to put his “desires” in my heart. He then explains the visible outcome of those inward “desires” as the thing he will do in verse 6: he will make my righteousness and my justice as obvious to the world around me as sunlight.

God fully intends to keep this promise. It is simply not a promise that I will have the things I want. It is a promise that I will become the person he wants.

The Key to Psalm 51:3-4

The answer to my persistent questions about the application of Psalm 51:3-4 appears to to be as follows: The answer to the second question, the one raised by verse 4, logically must come first. The answer to that question is that my “sin”–the thing within me which sets my attitude toward God, and which drives my outward actions–is in rebellion against God only. Therefore, even though others may be offended or injured by my outward wrongdoings, the heart of those wrongdoings is sin against God only.

This leads to the answer to the first question: not all of my guilt arises from wrongs against God. Some of it does, and God can be asked to wipe away the record of guilt of those discrete acts or omissions as a component of cleansing me from the singular inner motivation of sin which caused them to occur. But, with respect to guilt for discrete acts or omissions that are merely considered offensive by other people or human institutions, God makes no direct provision for that guilt–those “offenses” are not offenses against him. He cannot wipe away his record of those “offenses,” because he made no record of them in the first place. The way to tell which guilt is true guilt before God is to look at my own motivation for an act. On the strictly human plane, I may need to pay human social or legal penalties for “offenses” which are not offenses against God, and I may need to seek reconciliation of the offense these strictly human transgressions caused others as a condition for my own worship of God (see Matthew 5:22-24). But God neither originates nor endorses every expectation other people have of me nor causes the guilt with which they manipulate me.

This clearly implies that, in order to know how to approach my sin and my guilt in my relationship with God, I must learn to distinguish guilt that comes from sin against God from guilt laid on me by others or by my fear that I by nature offend (shame), or by actions have offended (false guilt), others.

The key to understanding this lies in first opening up to a somewhat longer context, then observing the exact “sin” words that are used and noting which are of them are singular and which are plural:

Be gracious to me, God, according to Your faithfulness;
According to the greatness of Your compassion, wipe out my wrongdoings [plural of pesha] .
Wash me thoroughly from my guilt [‘avon, singular]
And cleanse me from my sin [chatta’ah, singular].
For I know my wrongdoings [plural of pesha],
And my sin [chatta’ah, singular] is constantly before me.
Against You, You only, I have sinned [verb chata, qal perfect]
And done [verb ‘asah, qal perfect] what is evil [ra’, singular] in Your sight,
So that You are justified when You speak
And blameless when You judge.

Behold, I was brought forth in guilt [‘avon, singular],
And in sin [chet, singular] my mother conceived me.
Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being,
And in secret You will make wisdom known to me.

Psalm 51:1-6 (NASB)

The only “sin” word which occurs in the plural number in this passage is “wrongdoings,” in verses 1 and 3, in both verses the plural of the Hebrew pesha. In other translations, this word is translated “transgression,” “transgressions,” “trespass” or “trespasses.” It denotes discrete acts of rebellion, discrete acts of “crossing the line” or violating the limit drawn by God (“transgressing” the limit). David says only two things about these discrete acts of wrongdoing in this psalm: In verse 1, he asks God to blot out his record of these acts. Then, in verse 3, he says he is aware of, knows about, these acts, then immediately contrasts and compares them to the singular concept of sin (chatta’ah) which he says is “ever before me.”

On the other hand, the singular concept ‘avon, which NASB here translates “guilt” but some other translations render as “iniquity,” is something into which I was born (v. 5), and for which the remedy is to be cleansed of it by God (v. 2). This word may actually be translated as either “iniquity”–the evil internal state of an habitual evildoer–or the guilt associated with that state, or even, in some contexts, the punishment resulting from it. Many commentators believe ‘avon to be derived from the verb ‘avah–to bend or twist–which appears to fit well the “bent” and “twisted” moral state that leads to evil. This also appears to fit with the majority of its many occurrences in Scripture.

To give just a few examples, nations and peoples have been swept away because of their ‘avon, singular–not their sinful acts, their aggravated natural sinfulness. (Genesis 15:16). The engraved gold plate, “Holy to the LORD,” on the forehead of the High Priest bears the ‘avon, singular, of the “holy things”–which, as inanimate objects, have themselves committed no sinful acts but merely in some way bear the sinfulness of the people. (Exodus 28:38). God visits the ‘avon, singular, of the fathers on the third and fourth generations of those who hate him–not the discrete sins (plural) of the fathers, but the consequences of their hatred of God (which is iniquity, ‘avon) (Exodus 34:7; Jeremiah 14:20; Jeremiah 32:18). When God judges the people (plural) of Israel for their own “iniquity” and the “iniquities” of their fathers (Leviticus 26:39), he will restore them when they confess their “iniquity” (singular) and the “iniquity” (singular) of their fathers (Leviticus 26:40).

The other “sin” word in verses 2, and 3, chatta’ah, is the most commonly-used noun expressing the concept of sin, and it is also in the singular in both verses. Chet, “a sin, an offense,” in verse 6, is also in the singular. Both chatta’ah and chet are derived from the primary verbal root chata, a verbal form of which is in verse 4.

“Sin” as a verb (chata), sin as an act, is in the context of the singular “evil” (ra’) in verse 4. The underlying meaning of chata is to miss a goal, miss the mark, miss the way, make a mistake, err. This primary range of meanings, and those of the related nouns chatta’ah and chet, is similar to the range of meanings of the related nouns of the New Testament Greek verb/noun pair hamartanō/ hamartia discussed in a previous post. There is a sense expressed in both languages in which missing any moral or ethical target (no matter who sets it), or losing one’s way in these matters, becomes an offense, and, therefore, missing a divinely-set target becomes a sin. And that condition of having missed the mark, or having made an error, is a singular condition–it does not become many separate states of being in error when the mark is missed repeatedly. So, instead of using the plurals in verses 2, 3 and 4, the Psalmist uses the singulars–not speaking of his “sins” or “offenses,” but of his singular “sin.”

And, with that, we reach verse 6. What God desires is truth in my inner person, and, when that truth is present, he will give me wisdom. This wisdom certainly appears to be the same inner knowledge of, and agreement with, God’s desires that is promised in Psalm 37.

How the Two Keys are Related to Each Other

The keys to Psalm 37:3-7 and Psalm 51:1-6 are related to each other by way of God’s desires, which he promises to place in us individually as we delight in our friendship with him. It is the knowledge of God’s will speaking within us that makes us able to distinguish situations in which we have transgressed that will from situations in which we have merely offended against human rules or expectations, permitting us to truly repent. As the relationship grows, instead of recognizing that we have transgressed God’s desires after the fact, we will increasingly recognize the right way before the temptation comes, “trust God and do good.” This is the growth God wants to see, re-creating us in the image of his Son.

NEXT (for now): God’s Working with Us is Not About Our Present, Temporary Happiness or Comfort

See, also, Dan Foster, The Church Needs Shame to Function–and That’s a Shame.