“According to My Righteousness”

Last week at faculty devotions we read through Psalm 18 for the purpose of a kind of a fortiori application. If David being hunted and surrounded by betrayal relied on God in such and such a way, surely we in our slightly less difficult and dangerous lives at school can do so as well.

A little ways into the text, we ran into the series of verses that cannot help but make us, particularly as Protestants, slightly uncomfortable or uncertain:

The Lord 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 judgments were before me,
And I did not put away His statutes from me.
I was also blameless before 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 sight.

— Psalm 18:18-24

If you have spent enough time in the Psalms, you have probably been struck by statements of this sort at some point. David claims that God has rescued and aided him as a reward for his righteousness.

This seems strange. We are generally accustomed to think nothing of our own righteousness, to regard it as filthy rags and judge ourselves purely as “dirty rotten sinners” who, rather than deserving God to repay us by saving us from great dangers, deserve nothing whatsoever beyond death and hell. Indeed, even later in the Psalms, Psalm 130 (which perhaps maybe even David could have written though there is no superscript) says, “If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?”1

So what is David saying?

We could be tempted to suggest that “David’s” righteousness is simply the righteousness he has as a justified man in Christ, the alien righteousness outside of himself, that is, Christ’s righteousness received by faith. This perfect righteousness would surely be an excellent ground for any possible work of salvation God might perform, whether from physical enemies or from spiritual death and hell.

Unfortunately, the verses almost seem to go out of their way to rule out this interpretation. David doesn’t just refer to his righteousness: he describes it in detail with respect to his own intentions and actions. He elaborates by referring to the cleanness of his hands, saying he has kept the ways of the Lord, never put away God’s statutes, kept himself from iniquity, etc. These are his own actions and attitudes: the righteousness David is referring is clearly in David, and not alien or extrinsic.

Therefore in some respect David claims he was rewarded with favor in battlefield salvation because of how he himself acted righteously. How are we to understand this?

There remain basically two possibilities for how David’s acts could make him righteous here.

1. This could be the moral righteousness of his person, i.e. his possession of virtues and good works.

2. This could be the judicial righteousness/justice2 of his cause, i.e. his innocence and legal right over and against unjust persecution from Saul.

Now, of these, the second is probably the most easily palatable, and the first the more difficult to swallow, but in fact, here as in many things, making the right distinctions allows us to work with either safely. Let us take the easier case first.

The simplest way to account for David’s righteousness here and in similar passages is through the justice of his cause. Regardless of David’s general status before God as a sinner, he is not under attack because of any wrong he has done. Instead, Saul attacks him without cause. It is not true absolutely speaking by the time of Psalm 18 that David has never done anything wrong in his life, but he certainly has never done anything wrong to Saul. Nor has he broken any Israelite laws or even violated God’s laws in visible ways Saul or anyone ruler could justly punish him for.

In such a case, it was perfectly reasonable for David to plead his innocence to God in vigorous terms. He had done nothing to deserve a manhunt from Saul. He was innocent, with clean hands. There was never a time when he had personally sinned against Saul or clearly rebelled against the Torah.

This brings us to a key distinction that we often gloss over in Sunday school. It is not rare to teach our children the reality that we are all sinners, that all sin is in a certain respect infinitely wicked, and that we therefore deserve nothing better than death and hell. This is true, but to strictly deserve something is always from someone. Our infinite guilt and infinite liability is entirely between ourselves and God. Other human beings are not entitled or qualified to punish us for any and every sin or sinful condition.

Instead, justice at human hands is limited in scope. Ordinarily, people aren’t authorized to punish anything and everything, but only tangible offenses against certain persons. In that realm it is possible for us to be genuinely and truly innocent with respect to someone’s area of responsibility. Perhaps I, out of gluttony and selfishness, seriously considered stealing a cookie from the cookie jar. This may indeed incur guilt before God, but this does not mean I deserve any punishment at all from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Should he come hunting for me, I can genuinely protest my innocence of any and all charges that would justify his attack. I can say with a straight face that I don’t deserve whatever he may do to me, not because I am so pure that I deserve better than death and hell before God, but because I am entirely innocent of any wrongdoing in his own realm.

This explanation, then, is entirely adequate to handle many of the texts in the Psalms in which David proclaims his righteousness and God rewarding it. God protects people from being punished for crimes they did not commit. David committed no crimes against Saul. Therefore God protected David from being punished by Saul. David was innocent of the crime, so God spared him from doing the time.

That said, there may be more going on in Psalm 18. So we must turn to the second possible explanation of David’s righteousness.

We might think, looking back over the text, that even the justice of David’s cause is not a complete explanation for what all he says about himself. He does not merely claim clean hands, after all. Instead, he speaks of keeping God’s ways, not departing from Him, being blameless, and keeping himself from iniquity. While it is not impossible to suggest all this is about his innocence of any just reason for Saul to persecute him, it seems to suggest something more. The phrasing implies something deeper than outward acts, but also character and devotion.

But, as we already noted above, no man can stand truly innocent before God. How can David, whom we know well to be imperfect, make claims based on his own cleanness and righteousness, his devotion to God and His law?

Here we have some profitable distinctions to employ. First, it must be acknowledged that God only receives us into His fatherly favor on account of an alien righteousness, namely Christ’s. Our own righteousness in this life, even when at its best and enlivened by the Holy Spirit, cannot possibly hold up before God. We are God’s children solely for Christ’s sake by faith, regardless of how much righteousness is within us.

That said, even children in an unshakable and inalienable relationship of love with their parents can still experience pleasure and displeasure depending on their character and how they generally behave.

The same applies between us and God.

We may belong the household of God through faith alone, based purely on the external righteousness we have from Christ, but we also do have a righteousness righteousness of our own within ourselves, granted in sanctification. This righteousness is real but imperfect, indeed often painfully defective. Because of its ineradicable defects, it could never be the grounds on which we stand safely in God’s saving favor. Yet because of God’s mercy in Christ, God forgives itself sins and accepts this righteousness as the obedience of sons. This much I discussed not long ago with the help of Hooker and Zanchi, if you’d like to refer back to it. What I did not cover at that point, though, is how God also crowns and rewards even such righteousness in this life, while chastising and exercising painful discipline on its lack and imperfections.

To put it simply, heartfelt obedience does please God. Disobedience does not. And He sends rewards and punishments accordingly in this life, even while our next life remains unalterably secured by Christ’s perfect righteousness.

This is not to say there is a strict system of merit and desserts going on here. David could never just obey enough so that God would owe him a rescue from Saul. Even so, he could obey God sincerely enough that it would make sense for him to ask for God’s aid. In a more low and contemporary register, we might translate things to say it would be reasonable for David to pray, “God, I have been trying hard to obey You and have never given up or decided to run away from You. You see that I really want to please You. So please rescue me!” Then, once God saved him, David might really sensibly say, “I kept on trusting in God and sticking to His ways and refusing to turn away from Him, and God saw this! He rewarded me by rescuing me from Saul!”

The point, once again, is not that David did these things perfectly. The imperfections are covered in love and grace, something God can “afford” to do on account of Christ’s righteousness and death. Once those imperfections are covered, David is, in the end, not unlike a child asking his father to help him with a big ask or for a special privilege, pointing out how he’s been trying hard and doing his chores. The father might chuckle and observe to himself how many blemishes are really in the poor kid’s record, but this is no obstacle to his love or even to the kid’s argument. He might just say, “Yes; you’ve earned it.” At the same time, there will be no question of any ultimate debts or obligations here. No one can be fooled into believing the kid strictly deserves for his father to do this favor, when everything he has came from his parents to begin with, and indeed his own behavior has never been perfect. There is a certain freedom and flexibility here, allowing love, grace, mercy, and discretion on the father’s side, while nonetheless allowing the kid to point to his completed chore chart without saying it counts for nothing.

There is much more that could be said on this topic. Indeed, there are controversies galore, and some of what I said is such that not everyone will agree with it, and some people who haven’t done the reading might even think it’s not Reformed.3 Nonetheless, I wanted to at least sketch out what I have done above for two reasons:

1. I’ve found these distinctions simply useful for parsing biblical language and understanding how it relates to key doctrines. I like to be able to read the Bible without flinching while I also recite confessions without flinching, and learning about the topics I’ve discussed here has helped me with that.

2. To focus especially on the justice of a cause, there is a certain room for encouragement here. To know that we can invoke God for the justice of our causes even when we are imperfect is liberating. To return to the original discussion of faculty devotions, we as teachers praying for our students and school can say to God, “Lord, help us as we minister to these children, for we are doing what is right. We are obeying Your precepts and doing Your will. Aid us because we are on the right side!” We do not need to fret overmuch about our own sins, negligences, and ignorances, for we can sweep all of these aside to beg God to uphold a righteous cause and a blameless mission that we know is good and just regardless of how good we are ourselves.

To end, I want to quote an extremely cut and abbreviated excerpt from Calvin’s commentary on this Psalm, in which he makes these same two points, but better (though perhaps harder to read). If you want to read the entire passage unmutilated, go here.

If God rendered to David a just recompense... does it not seem... that he is so in proportion as each of them has deserved? I answer, When the Scripture uses the word reward... it is not to show that God owes us any thing... [H]e does it in such a manner, as to show that all men are indebted to him... The reason is... because, forgiving the blemishes... which cleave to our works, he imputes to us for righteousness that which he might justly reject... [T]he recompense... proceeds not from our merit, but from his free and undeserved grace.

We ought... to attend to the special reason why David... speaks of God rewarding him according to his righteousness. He does not presumptuously thrust himself into the presence of God... as the ground of his justification; but... wishing to defend and acquit himself from the false... calumnies of his enemies, he makes God himself the judge of his cause. [H]e presents and defends himself before the judgment-seat of God against his enemies... [T]he question is not concerning the whole course of his life, but only respecting one certain cause... [H]e had acted uprightly... in this matter... [I]t would be absurd to draw from this the inference that God is merciful to men according as he judges them to be worthy of his favor. [T]he object in view is only to show the goodness of a particular cause... In short, David concludes from the effect... that his cause was approved of by God....