Psalms
Psalm 40 has distinctive features worth tracing in its own structure, not simply another psalm of deliverance. Its already-and-not-yet character is easy to miss, a failure that runs through a good deal of theology more broadly, not only casual reading. Verse 11’s confidence that God’s grace and truth will continually preserve us closes the series on exactly that note.
Psalm 37 can sound, on a surface reading, like a promise of immediate prosperity for the righteous and immediate judgment for the wicked. It teaches nothing of the kind, once the whole psalm is read together rather than in isolated verses. Faith here, like everywhere else in Scripture, is already real and not yet fully vindicated.
Verses 21 and 24 sharpen the contrast already built up across the first twenty verses, the wicked borrowing without repaying against the righteous who give freely. Christ alone perfectly exemplifies the life of faith this psalm only gestures toward. His faith, not our own imitation of it, is what actually becomes ours, laying up the true riches of the kingdom of heaven.
Verses 12-20 describe how the wicked actually live and what the Lord intends to do about it, a real threat taken seriously rather than dismissed. Christ’s silence before Pilate in John 19 embodies exactly the trust these verses call for. Psalm 37 functions, in its own way, as an Old Testament Galatians, arguing for freedom against a works-based anxiety.
Psalm 37 works on both a theological and a psychological level, addressing real anxiety about the wicked’s apparent success as much as doctrine. Faith itself is the psalm’s real subject across verses 3-11, not merely patience. Christ’s own faith, lived out perfectly, is what these verses actually describe before they ever describe ours.
The acrostic structure and careful parallelism of verse 1 reward a second look, more crafted than a first reading suggests. Verses 3-4’s call to delight in the Lord sits at the heart of the psalm’s whole argument. Christ’s own sacrifice for the wicked, not merely their eventual defeat, is what finally answers the psalm’s concern with evildoers.
Psalm 37’s length and its flat, didactic tone make it a harder psalm to love than most, two real hurdles worth naming up front. Its acrostic structure, and its place within wisdom literature, are not decoration but part of how it makes its case against Jewish dogmatism about prosperity. Read alongside Psalm 73, it coalesces finally in Christ, not in a formula about the righteous and the wicked.
Luther found real comfort in this psalm’s own account of justification by faith alone, a debt this sermon traces directly. The Calvinist and Lutheran readings diverge at points worth naming, even while agreeing on the doctrine’s core. Verses 8-11 turn from doctrine to practice: how the justified person is actually meant to live.
Verse 6’s reference to ‘the floods of great waters’ points past Noah’s flood to a final judgment still to come. David and Noah share the same posture of confession before that judgment, not presumption. Verse 7’s hiding place is nothing less than being hidden from that coming judgment in Christ, who is himself in God.
David reaches for three distinct terms to name his offense against God, each one naming a different dimension of the same sin. Verse 3’s description of wasted, groaning silence shows what it costs to withhold that confession. The Lord’s forgiveness in verse 5 reaches further than sin alone; he forgives the guilt attached to it as well.