This article is part of the Tough Passages series.
Listen to the Passages
The Apparently “Self-Righteous” Passages in Psalms
A number of psalms include professions of innocence, and these professions are not casual but prominent in the songs. The allegedly innocent party is the particular worshiper (Psalms 7; 17; 26), the king (Psalm 18), and the whole community (Psalm 44). These passages can strike the reader as silly (“I am a victim of circumstance!”), as self-deceiving (contrary to Prov. 20:9; Eccles. 7:20, 29), as portraying an unattainable level of perfection, or as something more sinister—a kind of repulsive bombast and self-promotion (e.g., Luke 18:9–14).1
A better approach is to begin with the meaning of such words as “righteous” in the Psalter. When applied to members of Israel, the terms “righteous” and “righteousness” can be used in several ways.2 First, the terms can be applied to the whole people, who have the covenantal revelation of the righteous Creator (Hab. 1:13), as opposed to the Gentiles, who do not. Second, it can be applied to those members of the people who embrace the covenant from the heart, who have sincere faith and seek to please the Lord in their conduct and character (Deut. 6:25; 24:13; Isa. 1:21, 26; 5:7; Hab. 2:4; Zeph. 2:3; Mal. 3:3). This second usage appears often in the Psalms (e.g., Pss. 7:8; 37:16–17), which also make clear that these “righteous” are people who readily confess their sins (Ps. 32:11). A third usage is for persons among the faithful who are especially noteworthy for their healthy role in the community and are therefore worthy of honor and imitation (a good king, Ps. 18:20, 24; ordinary folk, Pss. 37:30; 112:3–4, 6, 9). And finally, the words can be applied to the innocent party in a dispute (e.g., Gen. 38:26; 44:16 [“clear” = “make righteous”]; Ex. 23:7; Deut. 25:1) and hardly claims moral perfection.
We can also find the complementary phenomenon with negative terms, such as “wicked,” “sinner,” and “fool.” These words can denote those who are not God’s people, the unfaithful within Israel, or those whose impiety leads to distinctively evil behavior.
We discern which sense is present in a given text by way of the contrasts in view. As C. S. Lewis put it, “The best clue is to ask oneself in each instance what is the implied opposite.”3 Further, different psalms focus on different oppositions. For example, some of these are individual laments, well suited for a worshiping congregation with a member under threat from “enemies” using false accusations to harm the faithful person (Psalms 7; 17; 26). In these cases “we need therefore by no means assume that the Psalmists are deceived or lying when they assert that, as against their particular enemies at some particular moment, they are completely in the right.”4 To use these psalms in such instances allows the congregation to rally around its unjustly accused brethren and also reinforces its commitment to love the virtues and hate the vices depicted in these texts and to honor those who display these virtues.
Psalm 18, by contrast, is especially about the ideal for the Davidic kingship. A congregation could use it to foster the community’s shared yearning that its king would embody these ideals, which would lead to prayer that the current king would indeed embody them. Christians profess that Jesus, as the ultimate heir of David, does in fact embody the ideals and is therefore worthy of admiration and imitation (John 13:15–16; 1 Cor. 11:1; Eph. 5:1; 1 Thess. 1:6; Phil. 2:5).
It bears repeating: to use these psalms well requires careful and bold pastoral leadership. Self-identification as an innocent sufferer is neither healthy nor invited!
Psalm 7
O Lord my God, if I have done this,
if there is wrong in my hands,
if I have repaid my friend with evil
or plundered my enemy without cause,
let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it,
and let him trample my life to the ground
and lay my glory in the dust. (Ps. 7:3–5)
Psalm 7 is an individual lament from David. The title refers to an otherwise unknown incident in the life of David on which a man of Benjamin (the tribe of Saul) said some “words”; from the content of the psalm we may infer that these words were slanderous. Hence the situation shows us how to understand the claims of innocence here (Ps. 7:3–4, 8): the innocence is relative to the accusations being made, rather than absolute. Hence this psalm provides a vehicle by which people may call to God for help when they are unfairly criticized or persecuted.
The first movement of the psalm professes the singer’s innocence: the person singing this in good faith claims not to have betrayed the trust that should bind the people of God together.
Observe how the general expression in Psalm 7:3 (“wrong in my hands”) finds closer clarification in verse 4 (“repaid my friend with evil,” “plundered my enemy without cause”). That is, the specific wrongdoing in view concerns the social connections between the fellow members of God’s people. The Sinai covenant established Israel as (ideally, anyhow) God’s new humanity, whose relationships are to show forth true humanness for all the Gentiles to see. Hence often in both the Psalms and the Prophets the sins denounced are “social,” for the ethic assumed throughout the Bible prizes a peaceful and loving community.
This psalm is suited only for those cases in which the danger stems from the malice of the persecutors, not from the wrongdoing of the person in trouble. Thus verse 5 offers a prayer of self-malediction: “If I am guilty of the things of which I am accused, then let my enemy succeed.” A person who cannot make the claim of verses 3–4 in good faith ought not sing this! Hence this serves as an implicit warning that those who commit the evils listed here ought, rather than using this psalm to ask for God’s help, to begin with confession of sin (i.e., a different song, such as Psalm 6).
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Psalm 17
You have tried my heart, you have visited me by night,
you have tested me, and you will find nothing;
I have purposed that my mouth will not transgress.
With regard to the works of man, by the word of your lips
I have avoided the ways of the violent.
My steps have held fast to your paths;
my feet have not slipped. (Ps. 17:3-5)
Like Psalm 7, this psalm provides a prayer for supporting members of the faithful who face persecution in the form of false accusations.
Professions of innocence such as we find here, and in Psalms 7; 17; 26, can trouble sensitive Christians. C. S. Lewis wisely observes an important distinction “between the conviction that one is in the right [about the particular issue of the accusations] and the conviction that one is ‘righteous.’”5 Lewis, however, was not sure that the psalmists themselves always preserve this distinction. I certainly support Lewis’s spiritual concern to protect Christians against self-righteousness, but I do not think he has seen the particular psalms in the proper light. First, Lewis himself rightly saw that the Psalms are songs for worship,6 but he did not consistently apply that observation in his discussions. Since they are songs, they are used under the pastoral guidance of the personnel who choose them, each one in the spiritual context of all the others.
A pastorally wise form of prayer for such circumstances must both caution the faithful to be sure they really are innocent and also warn the unfaithful of what awaits them unless they repent — and this song does just that. Further, in professing innocence it reinforces the feelings of approval for the kind of social relationships for which God called Israel from the start.
Indeed, by the way this psalm closes, it equips the faithful to trust God in their trials, ready to await their own eternal reward for their full and final vindication (and hence it strengthens them to resist the temptation to forfeit that vindication by turning to unfaithfulness).
Psalm 26
I do not sit with men of falsehood,
nor do I consort with hypocrites.
I hate the assembly of evildoers,
and I will not sit with the wicked.
I wash my hands in innocence
and go around your altar, O LORD,
proclaiming thanksgiving aloud,
and telling all your wondrous deeds.
O LORD, I love the habitation of your house
and the place where your glory dwells. (Ps. 26:4–8)
Some have taken the claims of innocence here as a kind of self-righteous boasting, but, as already argued on Psalm 7 and Psalm 17, this is a mistake. First, the mention of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness (Ps. 26:3), a clear echo of Exodus 34:6, shows that divine grace is the foundation for holy living. Second, the references to worship in God’s house (Ps. 26:6–8) indicate that the covenantal means of grace, with their focus on atonement and forgiveness, are in view. And third, singing this psalm serves to enable worshipers more and more to like and embrace the ideal of faithful covenant membership—but it does not make achieving that ideal a precondition for true worship.
Like Psalm 7 and Psalm 17, this psalm has worshipers singing to profess integrity in their lives; like the case for those psalms, it would be an easy mistake to suppose that this is self-righteous braggadocio. Pastoral wisdom would have been called for on the part of the priests arranging and leading the worship.
But also like Psalm 7 and Psalm 17, one crucial function of singing a song like this one is to set the virtues as the ideal toward which the faithful will more readily give themselves the more honestly they sing the words. The integrity that it praises covers both observable deeds and one’s invisible inner life, actions and feelings.
A similar situation faces Christians as they read, say, 1 John, with its various terms for genuine believers (those who keep God’s word, abide in God, have been born of God, etc.), and its variety of expressions for what they do (walk as Jesus walked, confess their sins, love their brethren, listen to the apostles, etc.).7 Extensive discussions have pondered what these assertions in 1 John mean, but certainly they do not claim sinless perfection, as 1 John 1:9; 2:1 make clear. Better is the idea that the statements using the present form of the verb describe the prevailing practices of the faithful—as over against particular lapses, for which the aorist would be normal. Nevertheless, I think that, in view of the disputative context (a group of false teachers have left; 1 John 2:18–19), the author’s goals recognize that those who remain true to the apostles must be regrounded in their identity. They must learn to say, “This is what we do.”
It would probably be going too far to see the violations of the approved way of life in the Psalms and in 1 John as disqualifications for membership; rather, the grace of God sets a person on the path of faithfulness by equipping him or her with the proper likes and dislikes. The affirmations of positive virtues enable the congregation to feel their own approval of those virtues, and the denunciations of vices enable them to feel their own disapproval of those vices.
This is the life Christians admire, this is the kind of people we want to be. This is our graciously given identity, and as a body we support and nourish in one another the aspiration to be good as we simultaneously create a safe environment for those who are not yet very good at being good.
Notes:
- A helpful resource is Gert Kwakkel, ‘According to My Righteousness’: Upright Behaviour as Grounds for Deliverance in Psalms 7, 17, 18, 26 and 44 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
- I leave out “righteousness” as “deserving” (Deut. 9:4–6) as having no bearing on this discussion.
- C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1967), 43.
- C.S. Lewis, Reflection on the Psalms,18. Unfortunately Lewis, lacking the kind of social analysis given here (and not following his own principle about the Psalms as hymnody), attributes a kind of self-righteousness not simply to abuse of these psalms but even to the psalms themselves.
- Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 17.
- “What must be said, however, is that the Psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, nor even sermons.” Kirkpatrick, Book of Psalms , 1:2.
- I have given an analysis of some of the literary and linguistic features in C. John Collins, “What the Reader Wants and the Translator Can Give: 1 John as a Test Case,” in Translating Truth (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 77–111, esp. 94–105.
This article by C. John Collins and is adapted from ESV Expository Commentary: Psalms–Song of Solomon (Volume 5).
C. John Collins (PhD, University of Liverpool) is professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. He has been a research engineer, church-planter, and teacher. He was the Old Testament Chairman for the English Standard Version Bible and is author of The God of Miracles, Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?, and Genesis 1–4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary. He and his wife have two grown children.
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