Establish the righteous!
[Psalms 7]
This week my car was in trouble, so I drove a church car and went to close hamburger shop. And I met a member of our church. Upon meeting, the church member asked me, 'Have you seen a fight here a while ago?' I said ‘No.’ It turned out that, in an argument with the church member and others, he probably spit on the other person's face. So how angry would that person be? So the other person brought his friend and started arguing with our church member again. So I apologized to the other person as 'I am sorry'. However, one of the other people looked at the church car I was riding, looked at the church name and said to the church member, 'How can anyone who goes to the church do that?' I was really troubled. God's glory was covered by the controversy of our church members and the unscrupulous misbehavior of spitting on the other person's face. As a senior pastor, I felt responsible and I asked myself, 'How should I do the ministry?' Then I meditated on the words of Psalms 7 in the Bible and then meditated on the prayer of the psalmist who said, “establish the righteous” in verse 9. In the midst of that, I was challenged to pray to God and devote myself to establish the righteous.
At the church revival meeting, the guest speaker pastor preached about Abraham, who wanted to save Lot before Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed, humbly asked God if 50, 45, 40, 30, 20, or 10 righteous people were in Sodom and Gomorrah, would He still destroy it. When I was listening the pastor’s sermon, I thought that we shouldn't be destroyed because there aren’t 10 righteous people in our church. And I was challenged to make every effort to build a soul as righteous and establish him or her. Of course, there can be greed of numbers in my heart, but I thought that the Lord would add the believers to our church. So at first, I thought about committing myself to teach, encourage, and pray to live a righteous life by feeding each soul in our church with the Word of God. I remembered having a conversation with the guest speaker pastor in a car. The pastor told me about “cheap grace.” It seemed like so many Christians who received faith as the gift of God's grace and received Jesus as their Savior and Lord and were justified, weren’t living a righteous life. If justification by God’s grace is the head of the coin, then the back side of the coin is living the righteous life. But we aren’t fulfilling our responsibility and we say that we live by God’s grace. This is truly cheap grace. The sad reality, however, is that we pastors prefer this “cheap grace”. As the gap between faith and life is getting wider, it seems that the proclamation of the word in the pulpit and the obedience of the word after coming down from the pulpit is lacking. As a result, it seems that the Christianity has fallen where such hired pastors who don’t resemble Jesus are dominating.
What should we do? We should ask God with one heart, ‘Establish the righteous!’ Then how does God establish the righteous? Based on Psalms 7, I want to think about how God raises the righteous. By doing so and as we learn together how God raises the righteous, I hope and pray that we all can live the righteous life before God and people.
First, God establishes the righteous through an unrighteous situation. In other words, our God establishes the righteous through even unjust situation.
The situation in which the psalmist David faced was an unjust situation. If he had a wrong sin (?), he went in the name of God and defeated Goliath, the Philistine general. But when the people who were saying, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands,” King Saul looked at David with jealousy eyes and tried to kill David (1 Sam. 18:7, 9). So David was running away from King Saul in this unjust situation. However, God's amazing providence was that He proved David's innocence or purity even in the midst of this unjust situation. Look at the Bible Psalm 7:3-5: “O LORD my God, if I have done this, If there is injustice in my hands, If I have rewarded evil to my friend, Or have plundered him who without cause was my adversary, Let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it; And let him trample my life down to the ground And lay my glory in the dust. Selah.” David said,'If I have sin, or if I have sinned against a friend or an enemy, I am fine with dying.' David's “righteousness” and “integrity” were shining even under his really unjust situation (v. 8).
Living in this unrighteous world, righteous Christians can face many unjust things. We can be defrauded, framed, and go through a lot of painful thing. Then, like David, we should give glory to God by taking that unjust or unrighteous situation as an opportunity to manifest “my righteousness” and “my integrity” (v. 8). We must manifest our innocence or purity before God and man. I hope and pray that we all become truly righteous Christians who can manifest righteousness and integrity even in unjust or unrighteous situation rather than complaining and grumbling about it.
Second, God establishes the righteous through prayer.
David prayed to God in his unjust situation. And his prayer was upright prayer. It was upright prayer in the midst of unrighteous situation. What an amazing providence of God? In this way, God makes the righteous to pray uprightly in unrighteous situations in establishing the righteous. After all, God raises upright man of prayer through unrighteous situations. We can think of three things about the righteous David's upright prayer:
(1) Trust
In the midst of unjust situation, David didn’t rely on his own strength but prayed to God by entrusting himself to the power and will of God [(Park); “O Lord my God, in You I have taken refuge” (v. 1)]. Those who can do so can be assured that God will surely save them (Park). In rather unjust circumstances, David looked only to the Lord and relied only Him. And he made God his shield (v. 10).
(2) Pure life.
When we look at Psalms 7:3-5, we see David praying to God with in mind that he didn’t kill King Saul even though he was able to do so when both King Saul and David were inside the cave (1 Sam. 24:1-15). As we see David praying while revealing his innocence, we learn to pray to God for or on the basis of our pure life. Why should we pray to God in a pure life? The reason is because our God is the righteous God who tries the hearts and minds (Ps. 7:9).
(3) God’s justice.
In the words of Psalms 7:6-16, David appealed to God based on God's justice (esp. vv. 6, 8, 11). This is the prayer of hope based on God’s justice (Park). Like David, who cried out to a righteous judge God who has indignation every day (v. 11) for Him to save him from the unjust situation, we too must cry out to righteous and just God.
God makes righteous to pray uprightly through unrighteous or unjust situations. Those who don’t live a righteous life will be dishonest in words and deeds, rather than offering upright prayers to God in unrighteous or unjust situation. But God's righteousness will be revealed through our lives and the situations we face through our upright prayer. Therefore, we must pray more uprightly to God in unrighteous situations.
Third and last, God establishes righteous through judgment.
God, who has indignation every day (v. 11), brings destruction to the wicked and salvation to the righteous through sudden destruction of sinners whose sins are many and who don’t repent (v. 12). It is because the wicked conceived mischief (secret work to count others) and travails with wickedness (v. 14). Because the wicked keeps conceiving sins, God is forced to reveal His justice. Eventually, God establishes the righteous by judging the sinners by making His arrows fiery shafts (v. 13). God’s judgment is that God saves the righteous “according to my righteousness and my integrity that is in me” and destroys the wicked (v. 8).
.
Our holy and just God manifests His righteousness by judging injustice. He is the God who fulfills the work of salvation by judging unrighteous people and wicked people in saving His righteous who are in an unrighteous and unjust situation. Therefore, we must trust in our God and pray to Him. We must offer upright prayer to God. And we should expect our salvation through God's judgement on the wicked. Eventually, God will manifest our righteousness and integrity. And God will establishes us righteous.
With desire to live a righteous life uprightly and faithfully as one who is justified,
James Kim
(Struggling with unrighteous thoughts and sins of my lips)