I Deserve It
The Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands He has recompensed me. Psalm 18:20 NASB
According to – I don’t know many who could have written these words:
The Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness;
According to the cleanness of my hands He has recompensed me.
For I have kept the ways of the Lord,
And have not wickedly departed from my God.
For all His ordinances were before me,
And I did not put away His statutes from me.
I was also blameless with Him,
And I kept myself from my iniquity.
Therefore the Lord has recompensed me according to my righteousness,
According to the cleanness of my hands in His eyes. (Psalm 18:20-24)
Frankly, I’m surprised that David wrote them. He seems an unlikely candidate to make these claims. But since he did write these words, and I believe he thought them to be true, perhaps I’m the one who doesn’t understand him. Either that or I’m so far removed from righteousness that I can’t comprehend David’s view at all.
David and I have a lot in common. No, I was never anointed a king. But I did have an emotionally distant family like him. I had a few brothers. I thought I was on the right path for God in my early years. I made some terrible mistakes, encountered some significant bumps. Like him. No, I didn’t have someone chasing me for a decade, except that nemesis called “self.” David and I share good accomplishments and bad things that nearly destroyed us. We have children that we failed and other family disasters. We both experienced some modicum of power, and I’m afraid, were tempted to misuse it. I can identify with David’s pleas for forgiveness, his anger at his enemies, and his deep trust in God. But I’m sorry to say, I just don’t get the “I deserve it” attitude in this psalm. Perhaps I’m too much of an ex-Lutheran. Or maybe David had a way to forget all those mistakes and I don’t. All I know is that “blameless” is not a word that I could apply to myself. So how does David get away with it?
The issue for me is the participle, ךְּ־ (k). It’s just a single letter attached to something else, in this case, attached to ṣedeq, “righteousness.” As a participle, it has a very wide range of meanings: “as, when, about, with, among, like,” and “according to.” I had hoped to find some alternative reading that would mitigate the audacity of David’s claim, but I can’t find one. No matter how I read it, David claims to be in conformity with God’s ethical and moral commands. Maybe the only solution to this offense is to pretend that David wrote this (in the words of Professor Flusser) “when he was stupid.” Maybe he just hadn’t lived long enough. If that’s the case, then I can see how David might have written this—and later been completely embarrassed by it. There were times in my youth (not many, mind you) when I might have said such naïve things, times when I felt myself completely devoted to God. But you can’t control the things life does to you, and when they happen, you do things that cause you to do other things, until at last, you realize that you cannot be the man you once thought yourself to be. Maybe David was like that. The end of his glorious beginning reads more like a script from The Godfather than it does from De Imitatione Christi.
This brings me to the real question. If this audacious claim is included in the Bible, what can I learn about me from it? Maybe David asked the same thing as he looked back over his career as a poet. What have I learned from all that happened since I claimed to be wholly devoted to God?
I feel afraid to answer. Maybe David felt the same way.
Topical Index: k, according to, ṣedeq, righteousness, Psalm 18-20-24
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