A restaurant in Keene Valley, New York, sits at the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, one of the most beautiful landscapes in the United States. Gordon Ramsey has probably never visited, nor is it featured in any culinary publication. It is not the sort of place folks reserve for their grandest occasions. Yet it may be the finest restaurant in the world, at least in my humble estimation.
The Noon Mark Diner is in a lovely place, and restaurant-goers are treated to excellent food in a tranquil atmosphere, but for neither of these reasons is this restaurant the substance of my culinary dreams. Rather, it is because after our annual family hiking excursions when I was tired, cold, and particularly hungry, we returned to civilization through the entryway of the Noon Mark. Following a week of food chosen for its weight instead of its flavor, humble dishes served to weary travelers seem like great decadence. Knowing that the Noon Mark lay at the end of the trail gave us energy in abundance. Every footfall felt softer, packs seemed lighter, and soreness dissipated because what was to come was so luxuriously comforting. Considering the coming banquet motivated our effort to endure the hardships we had to overcome.
In part 1 of our look at Psalm 37, we observed with David the discord sown in the Christian heart after beholding the prosperous unrighteous and their oppression and violence against the people of God. The psalmist does not conceal this dissonance but lays bare his temptation to bitterness and anger. The sojourner then turns his attention to the far-off yet certain end of the enemies of Yahweh. This conscious mental pivot serves to warn and encourage his wayward heart, though in pondering the end of the wicked, the psalmist only halfway comprehends the justice of the King; further consideration of divine judgment toward the righteous completes his meditation. By focusing on the glorious inheritance to come, the wedding supper of the Lamb awaiting the righteous, David encourages his heart and ours to endure for the joy that is set before us in the Righteous One (Heb 12:2). In what follows, we will consider holy justice toward the redeemed as well as the faithful call to patient trust in the Lord.
Thus, the first question before us is this: What awaits the righteous? What has God in store for his elect? In contrast with the unbelievers, who will be “cut off,” the righteous will not be forsaken (Ps 37:28). Indeed, they are “preserved forever,” never abandoned, exalted, and, in words reminiscent of Jeremiah 29:11, “There is a future for the man of peace” (Ps 37:37; see also vv. 28, 33, 34). The theme of justice also captures the vindication of the righteous, the divine stamp of approval on them. Indeed, on the day of judgment, the Lord promises to “bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday” (Ps 37:6). Instructive words are found there: The righteousness of the people of God must be brought forward, presupposing that today it is hidden from view. For the wicked and righteous alike, what present circumstance may conceal, patient justice will make plain.
Perhaps you have wondered what exactly the day of the Lord will be like, what it will feel like, look like, and sound like when Christ returns in his glory. The words of verse 6 give us part of the picture, even as they point us to a corresponding text in Matthew 13. In this passage, Christ is explaining the parable of the weeds, which he told earlier in the chapter. In the parable, a farmer sowed good seed in his field, but in the middle of the night, an enemy “came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away” (Matt 13:25). The servants then ask their master what should be done, and his answer is that they ought to let both grow together until harvest, at which point the wheat will be separated and stored while the weeds will be gathered and burned (Matt 13:24–30). Jesus then teaches the meaning of his parable to his disciples, saying that the good seed are “sons of the kingdom,” while weeds represent “sons of the evil one” (Matt 13:38). The harvest, then, is the day of the Lord, on which “the Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather” the wicked and throw them “into the fiery furnace,” but “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt 13:41–43).
Both the judgment of the wicked and the vindication of the righteous will occur on that day; both the final execution of righteous justice and the glorious illumination of the righteousness of Christians will be revealed.
The glory of the risen righteous, clothed in the very righteousness of Christ himself, will be made manifest to the joy of the delivered and the terrified horror of the unrighteous. The whole of humanity will in an instant see and know true righteousness, and it will be blinding as only the brightest sun can image for us on this side of eternity. Thus, the justified, those today laboring under the oppression of the wicked, will rise vindicated from the ashes of this sin-cursed world to the praise of the One who purchased their righteousness by his blood, Christ the Lord.
Holding this truth in your open hands produces a great gospel humility in increasing degree, similar to the lowly sentiment of sixteenth-century English reformer John Bradford. As the story goes, while imprisoned by Mary I, Bradford observed another convict being led to the gallows, and remarked, “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.”1 Today, we more frequently hear this variation on Bradford: “There but for the grace of God go I,” reflecting the lowly state of the redeemed heart that knows it has been ransomed from the wrath of God by sovereign grace alone. We may often be tempted to grow angry at injustice in the world, particularly when its temporal benefits pass us by, and lob foolish accusations at our God. This is a double wickedness, for it neglects both the immeasurable greatness of the inheritance of the saints and turns a blind eye toward the reality that but for the mercy of God, my name and yours would be accounted among the perishing.
What separates David, what separates me from the wicked in Psalm 37? The close of the psalm gives us the answer:
The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD;
he is their stronghold in the time of trouble.
The LORD helps them and delivers them;
he delivers them from the wicked and saves them,
because they take refuge in him. (Ps 37:39–40)
We cannot read the psalm and miss the gospel. Salvation is the Lord’s to grant. It is not ours to earn, but God rescues, God saves. And why? Not because we have proven ourselves worthy of such a glorious inheritance but out of sheer mercy.
David now holds these truths in his hands, open and bare before his eye. Today, the wicked may thrive at the expense of the righteous, while on that great day to come, the justice of God will “roll down like waters” to the praise of his mercy toward us and the praise of his justice toward his enemies (Amos 5:24; Westminster Confession of Faith 3). The beating heart of the psalm, however, focuses on an application of these two themes. Because both are true, David spends much of his time on the concluding call: Christians are therefore to wait humbly on the Lord.
Let us remind ourselves again of where the psalm began: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers!” (Ps 37:1). The opening verse presupposes both that the wicked are mistaken objects of our envy and that Christians will be tempted to anger both at their prosperity and ultimately at God himself, who has not given us what we think we deserve. What is the biblical antidote to the anger of man, which does not produce the “righteousness of God,” and burning discontent, which “tends only to evil” (Jas 1:20; Ps 37:8, respectively)? It is first to remind your heart of the future judgment. But it is also this: “Wait for the Lord and keep his way” (Ps 37:34). How, then, should a Christian consider waiting on the Lord? Are we simply called to lives of quiet passivity, rocking our days away on our front porches looking for the clouds to split? I think not. Waiting entails preparation in other areas of life, after all. A young woman waiting for the day of her wedding arranges for the ceremony. Couples waiting for the arrival of a baby tidy up a space for a crib. A hunter yearning for the falling acorns of September spends the summer months in target practice, so that when the longed-for day arrives, he is confident in his equipment and ability.
The preparation of the godly is now set before us. How ought the Christian to wait with eager expectation for the fulfillment of the promise often made that we will be reunited with our Maker? We are to “trust in the Lord, and do good” (Ps 37:3). Christians are to “delight” themselves “in the Lord,” committing their “way to the Lord,” while rejecting their fallen impulse to “anger” and “wrath” (Ps 37:4, 5, 8). The righteous are to yield their youthful lack of knowledge to the wisdom of the experienced: “I have been young, and now am old,” David says, “yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread” (Ps 37:25). They are to observe the faithful and seek to imitate their way of life—“Mark the blameless and behold the upright”—conforming themselves to the examples of faithful forebearers (Ps 37:37). The land of our sojournings is full of snares and languishing valleys, but we are not traversing a landscape never before trodden. Our great Shepherd has gone before us, as have those called into his service.
It is not for us to devise new methods of following Christ as trailblazers in undiscovered ground but as a boy sees the destination from the shoulders of his father. So from the shoulders of the saints of every age, we gaze on the Celestial City to our abounding encouragement. Though we may suffer—indeed, though it is “granted” to us “for the sake of Christ” not only to believe “but also suffer for his sake”—we are to “count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus” (Phil 1:29; 3:8). It is true that the many benefits the wicked possess are alluring. The human race is often drawn to the prosperity and power offered by worldly wisdom, but surely the testimony of the psalmist is true: “Better is the little that the righteous has than the abundance of many wicked” (Ps 37:16).
We must sit here staring at this reality. It will do us no good as an idea that simply passes, and then we return to our intoxicating and mindless entertainment, to our pursuits of promotion, earthly wealth, and the like. We will grow impatient in waiting and bitter if we do not chase this further. Is the inheritance of the saints superior to the inheritance of the world? Is Christ better?
Maybe you have had a craving. You may be sitting at work or in the car and all you can think of is a good hamburger. Would it do any good to have anything else? Or is a craving only satisfied by the thing that is craved?
What, then, should our hearts crave? What is it that will satisfy the longings of our hearts? Will money, fame, or power? Will any of these cheap imitations satiate the heart that beats within you? Your own experience testifies to the contrary: None of these things, nothing the world can provide, will ever be enough. To this day the clearest example of this for me has to be an interview Tom Brady gave after he won his third Super Bowl. The question was simple: Which of these championship rings is your favorite? Brady, whose legacy will likely endure as long as football itself, grinned and replied, “The next one.” My heart, your heart, craves just one thing above all other things, something that no earthly wealth, power, or prestige could ever even begin to satisfy. We were made to be with God. Such is the testimony of Scripture.
Consider the state wherein man was created: Eden had plentiful food, Adam and his wife were not yet prone to disease, their union was marked by blessedness rather than selfishness. All of this is true, and yet it was not paradise for any of those reasons. Neither would heaven be heaven if it were simply a place where we were free to enjoy all manner of natural delights, where we watch college football every day, have steak for dinner every night, and enjoy a bank account that is never low on funds. Eden was paradise for the same reason that heaven will be. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Rev 21:1–3). Everything else follows this chief glory: the famed verses so dear to us speaking of our tears being wiped away, the eradication of death itself. All those blessings are subordinate to this: We will be with God.
This is the story arc of just about every TV drama. Surrounding whatever other action there may be, the central storyline is romance, a sort of “will they, won’t they finally get together”? The grand drama of the creation, fall, redemption, and restoration of mankind is the archetype, the original after which our most compelling stories are patterned: How will God and man finally come together?
Notice, the holy city descends, “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2). This is the church, the beautiful, spotless bride of Christ, washed by Christ, sanctified by Christ, “holy and without blemish” through the atonement of Christ (Eph 5:26–27). How do I know that you were made to crave and ultimately to be satisfied by the Lord himself, to dwell with him forever? Because you are part of the bride, and the bride is meant for only one thing, the groom.
Perhaps this is a familiar concept to you. But whether you are young or old, Psalm 37 is in your Bible for this reason: because even the king of Israel, the man after the heart of Yahweh, struggled with envy and with selfish anger. I began this last section discussing things the Christian ought to do, but let us keep the distinction between the law and the gospel in our minds. The law is good, but it is not the gospel. By obedience to the law, we may be sanctified, but we are not justified. We may be made more like Christ by obedience to it, but we are not declared righteous in Christ through it. Do not close your computer or switch off your phone imagining that it is up to you to wait on the Lord, or else. Instead, wait on the Lord because our salvation is from him. The Lord rescues us, declares those as righteous who to Jesus have fled. Run the race knowing that the one who calls is faithful, and he “will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 1:8). Though we stumble, we will not be lost, for our hands are held by our great Father, and he will never “forsake his saints” (Ps 37:28).
Note
- Locating the precise origin of this statement is difficult, as it does not appear in any of the surviving writings of Bradford. Subsequent historical records attribute this saying (albeit in different form) to Bradford, first in a sermon preached by Job Orton, “The Christian’s Triumph over Death” (London, 1752), 14, https://books.google.com/books?id=sjU3AAAAMAAJ&q=%22he+humbly%22#v=snippet&q=%22he%20humbly%22&f=false.
©Seth Adams. All Rights Reserved.
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Seth Adams
Seth Adams is a graduate of Westminster Seminary California, an honorably discharged naval officer, and now, the Campus Minister of Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) at North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota. His wife and three young children enjoy sanctifying one another, cheering when we all sit still during family worship, and looking for pheasants along the road during car rides.
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