THE GOD OF MY RIGHTEOUSNESS

A call to God for deliverance from present trouble is how the psalmist opens this psalm. “Hear me”, he pleads; that is, hear and answer me. His plea is based on two facts: on the Name of God given here, and on His past acts.

He appeals to God as “God of my righteousness”. It is only here in the Scriptures that God is so addressed. Another beautiful title of God is found in Psalm 59. 10, “the God of my mercy”. David calls this God of righteousness his, for the righteousness that he has, he has in Him, and the righteousness that he looks for, he looks for from Him. Similarly, what righteousness we have, we have in Christ. The believer stands pardoned through grace and richly robed in Christ’s merits. One with Christ, he appears as free from guilt as God’s own Son.

Since God is the Source of the psalmist’s righteousness, He may be expected to vindicate it by answering prayer by deliverance. It is as if the psalmist was saying, “Thou who maintainest my right and my cause, asserting my righteousness against the slanders of my enemies …”. He who feels that all good in himself comes only from God may be quite sure that, sooner or later, and by some means or other, God will witness to His work. To the psalmist, nothing was so incredible that God should not take care of what He had planted.

His appeal to God as the God of righteousness implies the justice of David’s cause, and shows that he asks nothing inconsistent with God’s holiness. The same rule should govern our prayers—we should not ask God to deny Himself.

The second ground for his appeal relates to God’s acts in the past. Many of the prayers of the great men of the Bible are prayers which remind God of what He has done in the past, and believe that He can do the same again. So here, past mercies become the pledge of present and future blessing. The mercy of deliverance which the psalmist asks for here is no new favour; it is because he has experienced it before that he dares to ask it now. “Thou hast set me at large”, v. 1 R.V., he says, namely, liberated me, set me free. That was “when I was in distress”, he says, “Now do it again, Lord; be merciful unto me”. What God has done in the past, we are assured that He is perfectly able to do again; cf. Rom. 8. 31-39.