Psalm 7: Judge Not?

Psalm 7 is a psalm of judgment. David extols the righteous judgment of the Lord, even inviting the Lord’s judgment upon his own life.  David doesn’t fear the judgment of the Lord because he knows that the Lord’s justice is not retributive but restorative.  For many today, we fear any talk of God as a judge because of the images of an angry, arbitrary God that it conjures up.  But what would it look like for us to recover a proper understanding of the judgment of God?  I want to focus on a couple of this psalm’s important perspectives.

First, the Lord is a judge who is able to actually bring about justice through his wisdom, power, and holiness (v. 11).  The people of Israel actually wanted God to judge the world because they were often oppressed, at the mercy of violent imperial forces.  They were certain, because of God’s promises to their ancestors, that when God enacted his judgment, their righteousness would be vindicated and their oppressors would be condemned.

Second, David gives us an important paradigm as he begins his request for judgment with himself.  He invites the Lord:

3 O LORD my God, if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands, 4 if I have repaid my ally with harm or plundered my foe without cause, 5 then let the enemy pursue and overtake me, trample my life to the ground, and lay my soul in the dust.

Judgment should always begin with us.  This is the heart of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7.  He tells his disciples:

Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2 For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 3 Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

The Scriptures do not try to deter us from the notion of judgment altogether.  They simply declare over and over again that judgment belongs to God alone and thus when we judge others, especially their motivations, we are in a sense playing God.  The psalms invite a deep and searching self-examination.  They place us face to face with God and in his presence our souls are laid bare.  The psalms constantly invoke the Lord to judge and they invite us to do the same.  Jesus’ warnings against judgment do not remove the promise that the Lord will judge the earth from the equation, rather they beckon us to recognize our proper place is not in the judgment seat but rather in the place of the one being judged and finding God just and merciful.

For meditation:

-Pray to the Lord asking him to judge your heart and motivations.  Confess.  Know that you are forgiven.  Ask that the Spirit of God would reshape your heart towards his justice and holiness.